American women writers from colonial times to the present (4 volume set)

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Second Edition

VOLUME 1 A-D Editor Ta r y n B e n b o w - P f a l z g r a f

Taryn Benbow-Pfalzgraf, Editor Glynis Benbow-Niemier, Associate Editor Kristin G. Hart, Project Coordinator Laura Standley Berger, Joann Cerrito, Dave Collins, Steve Cusack, Nicolet V. Elert, Miranda Ferrara, Jamie FitzGerald, Laura S. Kryhoski, Margaret Mazurkiewicz, Michael J. Tyrkus St. James Press Staff Peter M. Gareffa, Managing Editor, St. James Press Mary Beth Trimper, Composition Manager Dorothy Maki, Manufacturing Manager Wendy Blurton, Senior Buyer Cynthia Baldwin, Product Design Manager Martha Schiebold, Art Director Ronald D. Montgomery, Data Entry Manager Gwendolyn S. Tucker, Project Administrator

While every effort has been made to ensure the reliability of the information presented in this publication, St. James Press does not guarantee the accuracy of the data contained herein. St. James Press accepts no payment for listing; and inclusion of any organization, agency, institution, publication, service, or individual does not imply endorsement of the editors or publisher. Errors brought to the attention of the publisher and verified to the satisfaction of the publisher will be corrected in future editions. This publication is a creative work fully protected by all applicable copyright laws, as well as by misappropriation, trade secret, unfair competition, and other applicable laws. The authors and editors of this work have added value to the underlying factual material herein through one or more of the following: unique and original selection, coordination, expression, arrangement, and classification of the information. All rights to this publication will be vigorously defended. Copyright © 2000 St. James Press 27500 Drake Rd. Farmington Hills, MI 48331 All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data American women writers : from colonial times to the present : a critical reference guide / editor: Taryn Benbow-Pfalzgraf. -- 2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-55862-429-5 (set) — ISBN 1-55862-430-9 (vol.1) — ISBN 1-55862-431-7 (vol.2) — ISBN 1-55862-432-5 (vol.3) — ISBN 1-55862-433-3 (vol.4) 1. American literature-Women authors-Bio-bibliography Dictionaries. 2. Women authors, American-Biography Dictionaries. 3. American literature-Women authors Dictionaries. I. Benbow-Pfalzgraf, Taryn PS147.A42 1999 810.9’9287’03—dc21 [B]

Printed in the United States of America St. James Press is an imprint of Gale Group Gale Group and Design is a trademark used herein under license 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

99-43293 CIP

EDITOR’S NOTE American Women Writers, Second Edition is an important resource for many reasons, the least of which is to disseminate information about hundreds of women writers who have been routinely overlooked. A veritable treasure trove of knowledge, the women profiled in this series have literally changed the world, from Margaret Sanger’s quest for reproductive freedom to Jane Addams and Hull House, from Sylvia Earle and Rachel Carson’s environmental concerns, to the aching beauty of poems by Olga Broumas, Emily Dickinson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, Sara Teasdale, Lorrie Moore, and many others. There are writers who are immensely entertaining (M.F.K. Fisher, Jean Craighead George, Sue Grafton, Helen MacInnes, Terry McMillan, C. L. Moore, Barbara Neely, Danielle Steel), some who wish to instruct on faith (Dorothy Day, Mary Baker Eddy, Catherine Marshall, Anne Morrow Lindbergh), others who revisit the past to educate us (Gwendolyn Brooks, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Paula Allen Gunn, Carolyn Heilbrun, Mary Johnston, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Mary White Ovington, Sherley Ann Williams, Mourning Dove), and still more who wish to shock us from complacency of one kind or another (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lillian Hellman, Shirley Jackson, Harriet Jacobs, Shirley Jackson, Carson McCullers, A.G. Mojtabai, Bharati Mukherjee, Carry A. Nation, Flannery O’Connor, Anne Sexton, Phillis Wheatley, and more). The women filling these pages have nothing and everything in common; they are female, yes, but view their lives and worth in vastly different manners. There is no census of ethnicity, class, age, or sexuality—the prerequisites for inclusion had only to do with a body of work, the written word in all its forms, and the unfortunate limits of time and space. Yes, there are omissions, none by choice: some were overlooked in favor of others (by a voting selection process), others were assigned and the material never received. In the end, it is the ongoing bane of publishing: there will never be enough time nor space to capture all—for there will (hopefully) always be new women writers coming to the fore, and newly discovered manuscripts to test our conceptions of life from a woman’s eye. Yet American Women Writers is just what it’s title implies, a series of books recounting the life and works of American women from Colonial days to the present. Some writers produced far more than others, yet each woman contributed writing worthy of historical note, to be brought to the forefront of scholarship for new generations to read. Last but never least, thanks to Peter Gareffa for this opportunity; to Kristin Hart for her continual support and great attitude; to my associate editor Glynis Benbow-Niemier; to my editorial and research staff (Jocelyn Prucha, Diane Murphy, and Lori Prucha), and to the beloveds: Jordyn, Wylie, Foley, Hadley, and John.

v

FOREWORD In a memorandum to contributors, Lina Mainiero, the founding editor of American Women Writers described the project she envisioned in 1978: Written wholly by women critics, this reference work is designed as a four-volume survey of American women writers from colonial days to the present. . . Most entries will be on women who have written what is traditionally defined as literature. But AWW will also include entries on writers in other fields. . . I see AWW as a precious opportunity for women—those who write it and those who read it— to integrate at a more self- conscious level a variety of reading experience. The result was a document of its time, a period when feminism was associated with building sisterhood and raising consciousness. Even a commercial publishing venture might take on the trappings of a consciousness raising session in which readers and writers met. The idea now seems naive, but the ideal is worth remembering. In 1978 Mainiero was neither young nor revolutionary. She was hesitant about pushing too far; she was content to let traditional definitions stand. But the very inclusion of Rachel Carson and Margaret Mead, Betty Smith and Ursula LeGuin, Rebecca Harding Davis and Phillis Wheatley, Gertrude Stein and Dorothy Parker in a reference work entitled simply and profoundly American Women Writers spoke eloquently. Without ever referring explicitly to ‘‘canon revision,’’ these four volumes contributed to the process. Having the books on the shelves testified to the existence of hundreds of women who had written across the centuries. Including those whose work was perceived to be ‘‘literary’’ alongside those whose work was not, prefigured debates that continue today both inside and outside of the academy. Mainiero was especially concerned that contributors not aim their entries at the academic specialist. The ‘‘putative reader’’ was a college senior, who was conversant with literary history and criticism, feminism, and the humanities. This emphasis provoked criticism, because it was expressed during the heyday of academic feminism. American Women Writers appeared the same year as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar published The Madwoman in the Attic, their influential study of 19th-century English women writers. Nina Baym’s American Women Writers and Women’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America had appeared the year before. In retrospect, however, the reader Mainiero targeted is precisely the young woman she hoped would join the consciousness session organized by her elders, a woman who would not become an academic, but who would find in women’s writing the ‘‘necessary bread’’ to sustain her in living her life. Ideals and realities clashed in a project that was clearly intended to make money, but declined to pay honoraria to individual contributors. Instead, the publisher promised to contribute a percentage of any profits to ‘‘women’s causes.’’ The desire to reach the common reader was one reason the volumes were published without a scholarly overview. The decision not to address an academic audience meant the entries contained no critical jargon, but it also meant no authorities checked facts. In fairness, few facts were known about many of the women in the book. Numerous articles profiled women about whom no one had written. One way to gauge the success of feminist scholarship over the past two decades would be to compare the bibliographies of women in this edition with those in the original edition. What we know now about women’s writing in the United States is more than we realized there was to know two decades ago. Let me use my contributions as examples. I wrote entries on Gwendolyn Brooks, Frances Watkins Harper, Nella Larsen, and Anne Spencer. These black women lived and worked across almost two centuries. Harper, an abolitionist and women’s rights advocate, had been the most popular African American poet of the mid-19th century. Larsen and Spencer published fiction and poetry, respectively, during the Harlem Renaissance. Of Brooks, I concluded, ‘‘by any reckoning, hers is one of the major voices of 20th-century American poetry.’’ Yet no biographies existed for any of them. All of the information in print on Harper referred to a single source. Twenty years later, scholars have explored Harper’s life in depth; digging through the archives, Frances Smith Foster discovered three lost novels and a treasure trove of poems. In search of the women of the Harlem Renaissance, scholars have unearthed much more information concerning Larsen and Spencer. Now the subject of a biography by Thadious Davis, Larsen and her novels—Passing in particular—have become key texts in the formulation of feminist theory and queer theory. Ironically, though Spencer’s oeuvre was the most slender, she was the only one of these writers to have been the subject of a book: J. Lee Greene’s Time’s Unfading Garden, a biographical and critical treatment of the poet along with a selection of her poems. Brooks has begun to receive her due in five biographical and critical studies. As scholars have continued their work, readers have found a valuable reference tool in American Women Writers. The fourth and final volume of the original edition appeared in 1982. Soon afterward, Langdon Lynne Faust edited an abridged version, including a two-volume edition in paperback. In part because the original edition concentrated on writers before 1960, a supplement, edited by Carol Hurd Green and Mary G. Mason, was published in 1993. The writers included were more diverse than ever, as a more inclusive understanding of ‘‘American’’ grew. Fostering that understanding has been a priority of this project since the beginning. That new editions continue to be published confirms the existence of a need that these volumes fill. The explosion of feminist scholarship has enriched each subsequent edition of American Women Writers. In this venue at least, the gap between academic specialist and common reader has narrowed. One development that no one would have predicted is the re-emergence of the literary society, a common feature in 19th-century American life. The name has changed; it is now more often called the reading group. But the membership remains mostly female. Such groups have grown up in every segment of American society. Indeed, ‘‘Oprah’s Book Club’’ is a macrocosm of a widespread local phenomenon. I hope and suspect members of reading groups, as well as the undergraduates who remain its putative readers, will find this new edition of American Women Writers a resource that can be put to everyday use. CHERYL A. WALL Professor of English Rutgers University

vii

BOARD OF ADVISORS Roger Blackwell Bailey, Ph.D. Professor of English San Antonio College Alanna K. Brown, Ph.D. Professor of English Montana State University Pattie Cowell Professor of English Colorado State University Barbara Grier President and CEO Naiad Press, Inc. Jessica Grim Reference Librarian Oberlin College Library

Kathleen Bonann Marshall Assistant Director, Center for the Writing Arts Northwestern University Margaret (Maggie) McFadden Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies Editor, National Women’s Studies Association Journal Appalachian State University Kit Reed Novelist, Teaching at Wesleyan University

Carolyn G. Heilbrun Avalon Professor in the Humanities, Emerita Columbia University

Cheryl A. Wall Professor of English Rutgers University

Marlene Manoff Associate Head/Collection Manager Humanities Library Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Barbara A. White Professor Emeritus of Women’s Studies University of New Hampshire

ix

BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS Aarons, Victoria Allegra Goodman Alice Hoffman Faye Kellerman Lesléa Newman Tillie Olsen Francine Prose Adams, Barbara Aimee Semple McPherson Adams, Pauline Marion Marsh Todd Alldredge, Betty J. Katherine Mayo Katharine Pearson Woods Allen, Carol Alice Childress Allen, Suzanne Martha Moore Avery Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren Anna McKenney Dorsey Ella Loraine Dorsey Susan Blanchard Elder Caroline Gordon Laura Z. Hobson Lillian Smith Alonso, Helena Julia Álvarez Sandra Cisneros Achy Obejas Anderson, Celia Catlett Beverly Cleary Marguerite Henry Florence Crannell Means Cornelia Meigs Anderson, Eileen M. Phyllis Chesler Anderson, Kathryn Murphy Beth Henley Marsha Norman Anderson, Maggie Jane Cooper Anderson, Nancy G. Dorothy Scarborough Lella Warren

Antler, Joyce Lynne Sharon Schwartz Armeny, Susan Mary Sewall Gardner Lillian D. Wald Armitage, Shelley Ina Donna Coolbrith Anne Ellis Assendelft, Nick Lisa Alther Anne Bernays E. M. Broner Marilyn Hacker Joy Harjo Maureen Howard Florence Howe Susanne K. Langer Meridel Le Sueur Bach, Peggy Evelyn Scott Bakerman, Jane S. Vera Caspary Ursula Reilly Curtiss Dorothea Canfield Fisher Lois Gould Elisabeth Sanxay Holding Emma Lathen Ruth Doan MacDougall Margaret Millar Toni Morrison May Sarton Elizabeth Savage Susan Fromberg Schaeffer Gene Stratton-Porter Mary Sture-Vasa Dorothy Uhnak Jessamyn West Bannan, Helen M. Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Elizabeth Bacon Custer Elaine Goodale Eastman Helen Hunt Jackson Mary Harris Jones Kathryn Anderson McLean Franc Johnson Newcomb Anna Moore Shaw Elizabeth G. Stern xi

BOARD OF CONTRIBUTORS

Banner, Lois W. Harriet Hubbard Ayer

Barr, Marleen S. Deborah Norris Logan

Benet, Sydonie Janet Flanner Mary McCarthy Josephine Miles Edna St. Vincent Millay Virginia Ramey Mollenkott Linda Pastan Katherine Paterson Marilyn Sachs Elizabeth Spencer Ruth Stone Michele Wallace Mae West Sherley Anne Williams

Baruch, Elaine Hoffman Susan Sontag Diana Trilling

Berke, Jacqueline Harriet Stratemeyer Adams Eleanor Hodgman Porter

Bauer, Denise Lucille Clifton Alicia Ostriker Alix Kates Shulman

Berry, Linda S. Georgia Douglas Johnson

Barbour, Paula L. Jane Auer Bowles Barbuto, Domenica Anne Warner French Amanda Theodocia Jones Barnhart, Jacqueline Baker Sarah Bayliss Royce Elinore Pruitt Stewart

Baytop, Adrianne Margaret Walker Phillis Wheatley Beasley, Maurine Mary E. Clemmer Ames Emily Edson Briggs Kate Field Beecher, Maureen Ursenbach Susa Young Gates Bell, Alice Paula Fox Belli, Angela Frances Winwar Ben-Merre, Diana Helen McCloy Benardete, Jane Harriot Stanton Blatch Abby Morton Diaz Mary Abigail Dodge Amanda Minnie Douglas Malvina Hoffman Elizabeth Palmer Peabody Lydia Huntley Sigourney Sophie Swett Benbow-Niemier, Glynis Jane Kenyon Lorine Niedecker Jean Valentine xii

AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Berube, Linda Susan Griffin Alice Hoffman Maxine W. Kumin Valerie Miner Grace Paley May Swenson Beyer, Janet M. Erma Bombeck Ellen Goodman Lois Gould Doris Grumbach Nicole Hollander Biancarosa, Gina Erica Jong Bienstock, Beverly Gray Anita Loos Shirley MacLaine Cornelia Otis Skinner Thyra Samter Winslow Biguenet, John Valerie Martin Bird, Christiane Rosamond Neal DuJardin Josephine Lawrence Harper Lee Harriet Stone Lothrop Alice Duer Miller Bittker, Anne S. Mary Margaret McBride


Blair, Karen J. Jane Cunningham Croly Ella Giles Ruddy Blicksilver, Edith Leslie Marmon Silko Bloom, Lynn Z. Natalie Stark Crouter Bloom, Steven F. Wendy Wasserstein Bloom, Susan P. Natalie Babbitt Eloise Greenfield Boisvert, Nancy L. Judith Rossner Bonazoli, Robert Kit Reed Bordin, Ruth Elizabeth Margaret Chandler Mary Rice Livermore Anna H. Shaw Boyd, Karen Leslie Patricia Highsmith Nora Roberts Boyd, Lois A. Paula Marie Cooey Boyd, Zohara Sophia Robbins Little Josephine Pollard Martha Remick Mary Jane Windle Brahm, Laura Judy Grahn Mary Oliver Breitsprecher, Nancy Zona Gale Bremer, Sidney H. Lucy Monroe Elia Wilkinson Peattie Eunice Tietjens Edith Franklin Wyatt Brett, Sally Inglis Clark Fletcher Bernice Kelly Harris Edith Summers Kelley Ida Tarbell Broner, E. M. Anne Bernays


Brooker-Gross, Susan R. Ellen Churchill Semple Brookes, Kimberly Hayden Barbara Deming Brostoff, Anita Gladys Schmitt Brown, Alanna Kathleen Mourning Dove Brown, Dorothy H. Rose Falls Bres Elma Godchaux Margaret Landon Mary Lasswell Mary Ashley Townsend Jeannette Hadermann Walworth Brown, Fahamisha Patricia Jayne Cortez Carolyn M. Rodgers Ntozake Shange Brown, Lois Octavia E. Butler Terry McMillan Brown, Lynda W. Caroline Whiting Hentz Octavia Walton Le Vert Anne Newport Royall Jennette Reid Tandy Bryer, Marjorie Michele Wallace Buchanan, Harriette Cuttino Corra May Harris Helen Kendrick Johnson Agnes C. Laut Blair Rice Niles Marie Conway Oemler Josephine Pinckney Lizette Woodworth Reese Mary Howard Schoolcraft Bucknall, Barbara J. Pearl S. Buck Ursula K. Le Guin Phyllis McGinley Hannah Whittal Smith Evangeline Walton Burger, Mary Diane DiPrima Burns, Lois Mary Hunter Austin xiii


Burns, Melissa Anne Bernays E. M. Broner Mary McCarthy Helen Hennessy Vendler

Challinor, Joan R. Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams

Butery, Karen Ann Karen Horney

Chew, Martha Mary Henderson Eastman Sallie Rochester Ford Maria Jane McIntosh

Butler, Francelia Harriet Taylor Upton Byers, Inzer Annie Heloise Abel Mary Sheldon Barnes Mary Louise Booth Catherine Drinker Bowen Carrie Chapman Catt Frances Manwaring Caulkins Margaret Antoinette Clapp Margaret L. Coit Angelina Grimké Sarah Moore Grimké Louise Kellogg Adrienne Koch Martha Nash Lamb Alma Lutz Nellie Neilson Martha Laurens Ramsay Constance Lindsay Skinner Margaret Bayard Smith Byington, Juliet Susan Brownmiller Lorna Dee Cervantes Alice Childress Rosalyn Drexler Eloise Greenfield Catharine A. MacKinnon Kate Millett Andrea Nye Susan Sontag Campbell, Mary B. Carolyn Forché Carl, Lisa Nikki Giovanni Mary Lee Settle Carlin, Sandra Louella Oettinger Parsons Carnes, Valerie Janet Flanner Carroll, Linda A. Jean Craighead George xiv


Chase, Evelyn Hyman Mary Ellen Chase

Chou, Jerome Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Cathy Song Eudora Welty Kate Wilhelm Christensen, Lois E. Louise Smith Clappe Clark, Susan L. Mignon G. Eberhart Doris Grumbach Mary R. Higham Mabel Seeley Cleveland, Carol Patricia Highsmith Cohn, Amy L. Lois Lowry Cohn, Jan Mary Roberts Rinehart Coleman, Linda S. Mollie Dorsey Sanford Condit, Rebecca C. Ai Jayne Cortez Joan Didion Frances FitzGerald Paula Fox Sandra M. Gilbert Ellen Gilchrist Marita Golden Mary Catherine Gordon Lois Gould Joanne Greenberg Beth Henley Pauline Kael Alison Lurie Marge Piercy Rosemary Radford Ruether Linda Ty-Casper Dorothy Uhnak Ann Belford Ulanov


Cook, Martha E. Virginia Hamilton Annie Fellows Johnston George Madden Martin Katherine Bonner McDowell Mary Murfree Cook, Sylvia Olive Tilford Dargan Grace Lumpkin Coultrap-McQuin, Susan Eliza Leslie Catharine Arnold Williams Cowell, Pattie Bathsheba Bowers Martha Wadsworth Brewster Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker Anna Young Smith Annis Boudinot Stockton Lydia Fish Willis Anna Green Winslow Cox, Virginia Erica Jong Crabbe, Katharyn F. Jane Andrews Carolyn Sherwin Bailey Katherine Lee Bates Margery Williams Bianco Claire Huchet Bishop Rebecca Sophia Clarke Clara F. Guernsey Lucy Ellen Guernsey Theodora Kroeber Elizabeth Foreman Lewis Ella Farman Pratt Susan Ridley Sedgwick Monica Shannon Eva March Tappan Louisa Huggins Tuthill Elizabeth Gray Vining Eliza Orne White Crumpacker, Laurie Sarah Prince Gill Cutler, Evelyn S. Rose O’Neill Dame, Enid Edna St. Vincent Millay Darney, Virginia Maude Howe Elliott Laura Howe Richards


Dash, Irene Carolyn G. Heilbrun Davidson, Cathy N. E. M. Broner Laura Jean Libbey Tabitha Tenney Davis, Barbara Kerr Ellen Moers Davis, Thadious M. Anna Julia Cooper Mollie Moore Davis Shirley Graham Mary Spring Walker Rhoda E. White Deegan, Mary Jo Edith Abbott Emily Greene Balch Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge Helen Merrell Lynd Marion Talbott DeMarr, Mary Jean Charlotte Armstrong Sarah T. Bolton Gwen Bristow Doris Miles Disney Janet Ayer Fairbank Rachel Lyman Field Alice Tisdale Hobart Agnes Newton Keith Alice Hegan Rice Mari Sandoz Anya Seton Ruth Suckow Elswyth Thane Agnes Sligh Turnbull Carolyn Wells Demetrakopoulos, Stephanie Mary Daly Mary Esther Harding June K. Singer Ann Belford Ulanov Deming, Caren J. Gertrude Berg Elaine Sterne Carrington Agnes E. Nixon Irna Phillips xv


Denler, Heidi Hartwig Alice French Tina Howe Kristin Hunter-Lattany Alice McDermott Anne Tyler Denniston, Dorothy L. Paule Marshall DeRoche, Celeste Beverly Cleary Natalie Zemon Davis Rachel Blau DuPlessis Sylvia A. Earle Louise Erdrich Gail Godwin Katharine Graham Carolyn G. Heilbrun Linda Hogan Nicole Hollander Barbara C. Jordan Nancy Mairs Maria Mitchell Robin Morgan Gloria Naylor Anne Firor Scott Joan Wallach Scott Vida Dutton Scudder Jane P. Tompkins Dorothy West Dixon, Janette Goff Judy Blume Erma Bombeck Betty Friedan Barbara Tuchman Helen Hennessy Vendler Dobbs, Jeannine Hildegarde Flanner Hazel Hall Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck Leonora von Stosch Speyer Jean Starr Untermeyer Marya Zaturenska Domina, Lynn Dorothy Allison Susan B. Anthony Rita Dove Anne Lamott Denise Levertov Sojourner Truth xvi


Donnelly, Daria Sarah Appleton-Weber Joy Harjo Naomi Shihab Nye Linda Pastan Donovan, Josephine Annie Adams Fields Louise Imogen Guiney Sarah Orne Jewett Lucy Larcom Celia Laighton Thaxter Dooley, Dale A. Ai Alexis DeVeaux Dorenkamp, Angela Mary Catherine Gordon Dorenkamp, Monica Kathy Acker Alicia Ostriker Dykeman, Amy Kate W. Hamilton Cecilia Viets Jamison Adeline Trafton Knox Eliasberg, Ann Pringle Annie Brown Leslie Josephine Preston Peabody Dorothy Thompson Victoria Woodhull Estess, Sybil Maxine W. Kumin Etheridge, Billie W. Abigail Smith Adams Mercy Otis Warren Evans, Elizabeth Josephine Jacobsen Helen MacInnes Frances Newman Margaret Junkin Preston Anne Tyler Eudora Welty Ewell, Barbara C. Sarah McLean Greene Fannie Heaslip Lea Eliza Jane Poitevent Nicholson Eliza Phillips Pugh Faust, Langdon Frances Willard


Ferguson, Mary Anne Lisa Alther Sally Benson Doris Betts Tess Slesinger Finger, Mary E. Josephine Herbst Madeleine L’Engle Fiore, Jullie Ann Annie Dillard Fish, Virginia K. Frances R. Donovan Annie Marion MacLean Fitch, Noel R. Sylvia Beach Fleche, Anne Adrienne Kennedy Fleenor, Juliann E. Catharine Esther Beecher Caroline Chesebrough Susan Hale Emily Chubbuck Judson Margaret Sanger Ann Winterbotham Stephens Flint, Joyce Margaret Craven Florence, Barbara Moench Lella Secor Fowler, Lois Eleanor Flexner Frances Dana Gage Ida Husted Harper Julia McNair Wright Franklin, Phyllis Judith Sargent Murray Elsie Clews Parsons Jean Stafford Frazer, Winifred Dorothy Day Voltairine de Cleyre Emma Goldman Freiberg, Karen Kate Wilhelm Freibert, Lucy Georgiana Bruce Kirby Jessica N. MacDonald Marianne Dwight Orvis


Friedman, Ellen Anna Hempstead Branch Bettina Liebowitz Knapp Dilys Bennett Laing Fuchs, Miriam Beulah Marie Dix Maude McVeigh Hutchins Gabbard, Lucina P. Mary Coyle Chase Clare Boothe Luce Galanter, Margit Barbara Tuchman Gallo, Rose Adrienne Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald Garson, Helen S. Jacqueline Susann Sophie Kerr Underwood Gartner, Carol B. Carman Dee Barnes Laura Benét Mary Putnam Jacobi Kate Jordan Myra Kelly Gaskill, Gayle Isabella MacDonald Alden Beatrice J. Chute Marchette Chute Mathilde Eiker Sarah Barnwell Elliott Jean Kerr Gensler, Kinereth Sandra M. Gilbert Gentilella, Dacia Paula Gunn Allen Gerson, Risa Susanna Anthony E. L. Konigsburg Eliza Buckminster Lee Gibbons, Christina Tischler Mary Palmer Tyler Gibbons, Sheila J. Mary McGrory Gilbert, Melissa Kesler Gloria Steinem Giles, Jane Elizabeth Elkins Sanders Catharine Maria Sedgwick xvii


Ginsberg, Elaine K. Amelia Jenks Bloomer Maria Susanna Cummins Hannah Webster Foster Mary Jane Hawes Holmes Betty Smith E. D. E. N. Southworth Gironda, Suzanne Michelle Cliff Jill Johnston Meridel Le Sueur Gladstein, Mimi R. Ayn Rand Gleason, Phyllis S. Alice Adams Alison Lurie Goldman, Maureen Esther Edwards Burr Hannah Flagg Gould Hannah Sawyer Lee

Griffith, Susan Nicholasa Mohr Grim, Jessica Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Lucy R. Lippard Eileen Myles Rosmarie Waldrop Groben, Anne R. Ella Wheeler Wilcox Grove, Shari Linda Hogan Hall, Joan Wylie Ruth McEnery Stuart Eudora Welty Halpern, Faye Joanne Greenberg Maureen Howard

Grant, Mary H. Florence Howe Hall Julia Ward Howe

Hamblen, Abigail Ann Eleanor Hallowell Abbott Temple Bailey Amelia E. Barr Clara L. Root Burnham Elizabeth Jane Coatsworth Margaret Campbell Deland Mary E. Wilkins Freeman Honoré McCue Morrow Louise Redfield Peattie Lucy Fitch Perkins Margaret E. Sangster Elsie Singmaster Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard Nelia Gardner White Ola Elizabeth Winslow

Green, Carol Hurd Eve Merriam

Hamblen, Vicki Lynn Helen M. Winslow

Greene, Dana Sophia Hume Martha Shepard Lippincott Lucretia Mott Sara Vickers Oberholtzer

Hannay, Margaret P. Marabel Morgan

Gottfried, Erika Rose Pesotta Gottlieb, Phyllis Lucy Hooper Lucy Jones Hooper Graham, Theodora R. Louise Bogan Grace Elizabeth King Josephine Miles Harriet Monroe

Greyson, Laura Hannah Arendt Grider, Sylvia Ann Linda Dégh Grierson, Beth Rita Mae Brown Alma Routsong xviii


Hardesty, Nancy Antoinette Brown Blackwell Hannah Chaplin Conant Sarah Ewing Hall Phoebe Worrall Palmer Elizabeth Payson Prentiss Elizabeth Cady Stanton Emma Willard Hardy, Willene S. Katharine Fullerton Gerould


Harlan, Judith Sue Grafton Shere Hite Diane Johnson Sarah Winnemucca Naomi Wolf Harris, Miriam Kalman, Ph.D Jean Houston Claire Myers Owens Florida Scott-Maxwell Harvey, Mary E. Mari Evans Sally Miller Gearhart Marita Golden Kristin Hunter-Lattany Healey, Claire H. D. Amy Lowell Heilbrun, Carolyn G. A. G. Mojtabai Helbig, Alethea K. Carol Ryrie Brink Eleanor Estes Lucretia Peabody Hale Irene Hunt Madeleine L’Engle Myra Cohn Livingston Emily Cheney Neville Ruth Sawyer Kate Seredy Caroline Dale Snedeker Zilpha Keatley Snyder Elizabeth George Speare Anne Terry White Ella Young Henderson, Kathy Linda J. Barnes Joan Didion Martha Grimes Susan Minot


Hill, Vicki Lynn Bessie Breuer Mary Cruger Helen Hamilton Gardener Ursula N. Gestefeld Marie Howland Ellen Warner Kirk Theresa S. Malkiel Myra Page Martha W. Tyler Marie Van Vorst Mary Heaton Vorse Bessie McGinnis Van Vorst Hobbs, Glenda Harriette Simpson Arnow Hoeveler, Diane Long Mathilde Franziska Giesler Anneke Phoebe Cary Mary Andrews Denison Alice Bradley Haven Eleanor Mercein Kelly Juliette Magill Kinzie Marya Mannes Jessica Mitford Frances Crosby Van Alstyne Babette Deutsch Holbrook, Amy Alice McDermott Holdstein, Deborah H. Harriet Livermore Vienna G. Morrell Ramsay Dora Knowlton Ranous Itti Kinney Reno Mae West Holly, Marcia Margaret Culkin Banning

Hepps, Marcia María Irene Fornés Tina Howe Megan Terry

Hornstein, Jacqueline Jenny Fenno Sarah Symmes Fiske Susannah Johnson Hastings Elizabeth Mixer Sarah Parsons Moorhead Sarah Wentworth Morton Sarah Osborn Sarah Porter Eunice Smith Jane Turell Elizabeth White

Hill, Holly Mina Kirstein Curtiss

Horton, Beverly Harriet Jacobs

Henning, Wendy J. Marie Manning

xix


Howard, Lillie Fannie Cook Alice Walker Howze, Jo Mary McLeod Bethune Hoyle, Karen Nelson Virginia Lee Burton Natalie Savage Carlson Marguerite Lofft de Angeli Jean Lee Latham

Jones, Judith P. Phyllis Chesler Eleanor Clark Elizabeth Gould Davis Gayl Jones Kafatou, Sarah Ellen Bryant Voigt Kahn, Mariam Ruth Benedict Margaret Mead

Hudspeth, Cheryl K. Rodello Hunter

Kaledin, Eugenia Carolyn Kizer Elizabeth Spencer

Hughson, Lois Mary Ritter Beard Barbara Tuchman

Karp, Sheema Hamdani Adrienne Rich

Humez, Jean McMahon Rebecca Cox Jackson Hunter, Edith F. Sophia Lyon Fahs Irvin, Helen Deiss Antoinette Doolittle Anna White Johnson, Claudia D. Olive Logan Clara Morris Johnson, Lee Ann Mary Hallock Foote Johnson, Robin Marianne Moore Jones, Allison A. Maxine W. Kumin Rhoda Lerman Lois Lowry Paule Marshall Terry McMillan A. G. Mojtabai Katherine M. Rogers Susan Fromberg Schaeffer Ntozake Shange Jones, Anne Hudson Kate C. Hurd-Mead Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Esther Pohl Lovejoy Gail Sheehy xx


Kaufman, Janet E. Eliza Frances Andrews Mary Miller Chesnut Kate Cumming Sarah Ellis Dorsey Rebecca Latimer Felton Constance Cary Harrison Sarah Stone Holmes Mary Ann Webster Loughborough Judith Brockenbrough McGuire Elizabeth Avery Meriwether Phoebe Yates Pember Sara Rice Pryor Sallie A. Brock Putnam Eliza M. Ripley Cornelia Phillips Spencer Susie King Taylor Katharine Prescott Wormeley Kavo, Rose F. Sue Petigru Bowen Jane C. Campbell Juliet Lewis Campbell Jane McManus Cazneau Jane Dunbar Chaplin Ella Rodman Church Jane Hardin Cross Keeney, William María Irene Fornés Tina Howe Keeshen, Kathleen Kearney Marguerite Higgins Ada Louise Huxtable Miriam Ottenberg



Kelleghan, Fiona Marion Zimmer Bradley Suzy McKee Charnas Anne McCaffrey Vonda N. McIntyre Andre Norton Kit Reed Elizabeth Ann Scarborough Sheri S. Tepper Connie Willis

Koengeter, L. W. Ann Eliza Schuyler Bleecker Maria Gowen Brooks Hannah Mather Crocker Margaretta V. Faugeres Rose Wilder Lane Adah Isaacs Menken

Kenschaft, Lori Martha Ballard Barbara Ehrenreich Charlotte Perkins Gilman Frances Kellor Carson McCullers Ann Lane Petry Ida B. Wells-Barnett

Kolmerten, Carol A. Frances Wright

Kern, Donna Casella Frances Fuller Victor Kern, Edith Ann Landers Kessler, Carol Farley Elizabeth Stuart Phelps King, Margaret J. Clara Jessup Bloomfield-Moore Peg Bracken Judith Crist Maureen Daly Pauline Kael Elizabeth Linington Madalyn Murray O’Hair Emily Post Mary Wilson Sherwood Amy Vanderbilt Kish, Dorothy Rebecca Harding Davis Klein, Kathleen Gregory Susan Griffin Ruth McKenney Anne Nichols Bella Cohen Spewak Megan Terry Klein, Michael Jean Valentine Knapp, Bettina L. Anaïs Nin

Kohlstedt, Sally Gregory Anna Botsford Comstock Almira Lincoln Phelps

Kondelik, Marlene Mary Shipman Andrews Koon, Helene Marian Anderson Ruth Gordon Anna Mowatt Ritchie Elizabeth Robins Catherine Turney S. S. B. K. Wood Koppes, Phyllis Bixlir Frances Hodgson Burnett Kouidis, Virginia M. Mina Loy Krieg, Joann Peck Charlotte Mary Sanford Barnes Susan Fenimore Cooper Mary Baker Eddy Kroll, Diane E. Jean Fritz Katherine Paterson Krouse, Agate Nesaule Rhoda Lerman Kuenhold, Sandra Leta Stetter Hollingworth Kuznets, Lois R. Esther Forbes Lois Lenski Lamping, Marilyn Hallie Quinn Brown Pauline Hopkins Maria W. Stewart Fannie Barrier Williams Langhals, Patricia Florence Wheelock Ayscough Alice Bacon Dorothy Borg xxi


Langsam, Miriam Z. Margaret Bourke-White Laska, Vera Marcia Gluck Davenport Elisabeth Elliot

Ludwig, Linda Kathryn Cavarly Hulme Margaret Mitchell MacDonald, Maureen Katherine Bolton Black

Lauter, Estella Diane Wakoski

MacKay, Kathryn L. Maurine Whipple

Levy, Ilise Alice Hamilton Jane Jacobs

MacPike, Loralee Emily Kimbrough Maxine Hong Kingston Mary Jane Ward

Lewandowska, M. L. Marilyn Hacker Lewis, Janette Seaton Carrie Jacobs Bond Joanne Greenberg Lewis, Sharon A. Marita Bonner Lezburg, Amy K. Ilka Chase Linden-Ward, Blanche Andrea Dworkin Marilyn French Robin Morgan Loeb, Helen Inez Haynes Irwin Lohman, Judith S. Crystal Eastman Londré, Felicia Hardison Agnes de Mille Edith Ellis Anne Crawford Flexner Harriet Ford Rose Franken Ketti Frings Dorothy Kuhns Heyward Jeannette Augustus Marks Frances Aymar Mathews Adelaide Matthews Marguerite Merington Lillian Mortimer Martha Morton Josefina Niggli Charlotte Blair Parker Lillian Ross Lillie West Rida Johnson Young Lord, Charlotte V. Sidney Cowell Bateman xxii


Madsen, Carol Cornwall Louisa Greene Richards Emmeline Woodward Wells Maida, Patricia D. Lillian O’Donnell Mainiero, Lina Willa Sibert Cather Maio, Kathleen L. Anna Katharine Green Mary R. Platt Hatch Lenore Glen Offord Metta Fuller Victor Mallett, Daryl F. Leigh Brackett Jane E. Brody Carolyn Chute Emma Lathen Ursula K. Le Guin Reeve Lindbergh Bobbie Ann Mason Rachel Pollack Anne Rice Kristine Kathryn Rusch Joanna Russ Jessica Amanda Salmonson Lee Smith Margaret Truman Marchino, Lois Rita Mae Brown Marcus, Lisa bell hooks Sherley Anne Williams Margolis, Tina Eva LeGallienne Marie, Jacquelyn Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni


Marks, Elaine Germaine Brée Marshall, Kathleen Bonann Susan H. Bergman Elizabeth Hardwick Linda Kaufman Kerber Bette Bao Lord Lorrie Moore Sara Paretsky Elaine Showalter Mona Van Duyn Edith Wharton Martinez, Elizabeth Coonrod Sandra Benítez Rosa Guy Demetria Martínez Cherríe Moraga Judith Ortiz Cofer Esmeralda Santiago Helena María Viramontes Masel-Walters, Lynne Alice Stone Blackwell Mary Ware Dennett Miriam Follin Leslie Inez Haynes Irwin Mason, Mary Grimley Betty Friedan Carolyn G. Heilbrun Nancy Gardner Prince Mason, Sarah E. Pauline Kael Masteller, Jean Carwile Annie Nathan Meyer Elizabeth Seifert Masters, Joellen Gayl Jones Masters, Jollen Susan Fromberg Schaeffer Matherne, Beverly M. Alice Gerstenberg


McCarthy, Joanne Kay Boyle Maeve Brennan Mary Maguire Colum Hedda Hopper Betty MacDonald Kathleen Thompson Norris McCay, Mary A. Rosellen Brown Louise Erdrich Kaye Gibbons Ellen Gilchrist Patricia Highsmith Barbara Kingsolver Bobbie Ann Mason Brenda Marie Osbey Anne Rice Helen Yglesias McClure, Charlotte S. Gertrude Atherton McColgan, Kristin Dorothea Lynde Dix McCrea, Joan M. Katharine Coman McDannell, M. Colleen Katherine Eleanor Conway Pearl Richards Craigie Amanda Smith Frances Fisher Tiernan Ellen Gould White McFadden-Gerber, Margaret Sally Carrighar Annie Dillard Wilma Dykeman Fannie Hardy Eckstorm Josephine Winslow Johnson Harriet M. Miller Louise Dickinson Rich

May, Jill P. Ann Nolan Clark Ingri Mortenson d’Aulaire Maud Fuller Petersham Marilyn Sachs

McGovern, Edythe M. Margaret Wise Brown Rachel Crothers Susan Glaspell Lorraine Hansberry Sophie Treadwell Charlotte Zolotow

Mayer, Elsie F. Anne Morrow Lindbergh

McKay, Mary A. Lee Smith xxiii


McLennan, Karen Harriette Simpson Arnow Toni Cade Bambara Mary Daly Louise Glück Virginia Johnson-Masters Audre Lorde Patricia Meyer Spacks McQuin, Susan Coultrap Sarah Ann Evans Medeiros, Kimbally A. Sandra Harding Eleanor Munro Anne Truitt Anne Waldman Menger, Lucy Ruth Shick Montgomery Jane Roberts Susy Smith Mercier, Cathryn M. Yoshiko Uchida Cynthia Voigt Miller, James A. Margaret Randall Miller, Marlene M. Elizabeth Bishop Kelly Cherry Elizabeth Cook-Lynn M. F. K. Fisher June Jordan Mitchell, Nora Olga Broumas Louise Glück Sharon Olds Mitchell, Sally Francesca Alexander Helen Dore Boylston Margaret Mayo Cora Baggerly Older Mary Green Pike Rose Porter Molly Elliot Seawell Mary Ella Waller Moe, Phyllis Abbie Farwell Brown Helen Stuart Campbell Eliza Cabot Follen Emily Huntington Miller Sarah Chauncey Woolsey xxiv


Mollenkott, Virginia Ramey Grace Livingston Hill-Lutz Sarah Smith Martyn Marjorie Hope Nicolson Rosemond Tuve Montenegro, David Linda Ty-Casper Morris, Linda A. Marietta Holley Frances Berry Whitcher Mortimer, Gail Katherine Anne Porter Mossberg, Barbara A. Clarke Sylvia Plath Genevieve Taggard Moynihan, Ruth Barnes Abigail Scott Duniway Murphy, Maureen Mary E. McGrath Blake Helena Lefroy Caperton Kathleen Coyle Blanche McManus Mansfield Mary L. Meaney Asenath Hatch Nicholson Florence J. O’Connor Jessie Fremont O’Donnell Katharine A. O’Keeffe Clara M. Thompson Murphy, Miriam B. Sarah E. Carmichael Martha Spence Heywood Murphy, Paula C. Maya Angelou Eleanor Taylor Bland Nora Ephron Barbara Kingsolver Barbara Neely Mussell, Kay Phyllis A. Whitney Nance, Guin A. Gail Godwin Nancy Hale Virginia M. Satir Elizabeth Spencer Clara M. Thompson Neils, Patricia Langhals Emily Hahn Charlotte Y. Salisbury Mary Clabaugh Wright


Neville, Tam Lin Ruth Stone Newman, Anne Julia Mood Peterkin Elizabeth Sewell Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy Nichols, Kathleen L. Miriam Coles Harris Ellen Peck Harriet Waters Preston Anne Sexton Nix, E. M. Gail Godwin Nochimson, Martha Carry A. Nation Martha Harrison Robinson Norman, Marion Lucretia Maria Davidson Margaret Miller Davidson O’Connor, Christine Martha Ostenso O’Loughlin, James Tillie Olsen Ockerstrom, Lolly Mona Van Duyn Pannill, Linda Isadora Duncan Parker, Alice Ada Jack Carver Edith Hamilton Passty, Jeanette Nyda Isabella Oliver Sharp Sarah Pogson Smith Sukey Vickery Watson Payne, Alma J. Louisa May Alcott Pelzer, Linda C. Patricia Cornwell Martha Gellhorn Anita Shreve Penn, Patricia E. Del Martin Annie Smith Peck Penn, Shana Lucy S. Dawidowicz Perez-Guntin, Amiris Julia de Burgos


Peterson, Margaret Emily Dickinson Janet Lewis Pettis, Joyce Zora Neale Hurston Philips, Elizabeth Sarah Helen Whitman Phillips, Elizabeth Elizabeth Ellet Annie Somers Gilchrist Estelle Robinson Lewis Frances Sargent Osgood Caroline Ticknor Mabel Loomis Todd Piercy, Josephine K. Anne Dudley Bradstreet Pogel, Nancy Constance Mayfield Rourke Poland, Helene Dwyer Julia Henrietta Gulliver Susanne K. Langer Pool, Gail Cynthia Ozick Dawn Powell Pouncey, Lorene Vassar Miller Marguerite Young Preston, Caroline Annie Trumbull Slosson Pringle, Mary Beth Léonie Fuller Adams Charlotte Perkins Gilman Puk, Francine Shapiro Elizabeth Akers Allen Victoria Lincoln Dorothy Parker Frances Gray Patton xxv


Radtke, Barbara Anne Mary Daly Rosemary Radford Ruether Ratigan, Virginia Kaib Isabella Marshall Graham Mary Agnes Tincker Raugust, Karen Kathy Acker Natalie Angier Nevada Barr Ann Beattie Blanche McCrary Boyd Sandra Brown Edna Buchanan Amy Clampitt Nancy F. Cott Elizabeth Daly Dorothy Salisbury Davis Elizabeth Drew Carolyn Forché Jean Garrigue Kaye Gibbons Doris Kearns Goodwin Jorie Graham Jane Hamilton Lyn Hejinian Laurie R. King Ray, Sandra Rosa Guy Mildred Pitts Walter Nancy Willard Rayson, Ann Adelle Davis Ann Lane Petry

xxvi


Rhodes, Nelson Margaret Wise Brown Alexis DeVeaux Ann Douglas Susan Griffin Lillian Hellman Zenna Henderson Jill Johnston Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Madeleine L’Engle Harper Lee Anne Morrow Lindbergh Shirley MacLaine Nancy Mairs Del Martin Marsha Norman Rochelle Owens Sylvia Plath Ayn Rand Hannah Whittal Smith Gertrude Stein Megan Terry Phyllis A. Whitney Richardson, Susan B. Mitsuye Yamada Hisaye Yamamoto Richmond, Velma Bourgeois Anne Fremantle Frances Parkinson Keyes Ruth Painter Randall Agnes Repplier Richter, Heddy A. Elizabeth Frances Corbett Olive Higgins Prouty Roberts, Audrey Caroline M. Stansbury Kirkland

Reardon, Joan Julia Child

Roberts, Bette B. Lydia Maria Child

Reisman, Jessica Hortense Calisher Angela Yvonne Davis Rachel Hadas Anne Moody Ann Rule Cynthia Voigt Alice Walker Kate Wilhelm

Roberts, Elizabeth Fannie W. Rankin Maggie Roberts Harriet Winslow Sewall Eliza Ann Youmans

Reuman, Ann E. Janice Mirikitani

Rogers, Katharine M. Lillian Hellman

Roca, Ana Julia Álvarez Gloria Anzaldúa Achy Obejas


Rosenberg, Julia Emma Manley Embury Mary E. Moore Hewitt Rebecca Rush Caroline Warren Thayer Rosinsky, Natalie McCaffrey Anne McCaffrey Judith Merril C. L. Moore Rowe, Anne Maya Angelou Elizabeth Madox Roberts Constance Fenimore Woolson Rudnick, Lois P. Mabel Dodge Luhan Rushin, Kate Audre Lorde Ryan, Rosalie Tutela Jane Starkweather Locke Salo, Alice Bell Marjorie Hill Allee Mabel Leigh Hunt Elizabeth Yates Sandberg, Elisabeth Carolyn Chute Ruth Seid Scanzoni, Letha Anita Bryant Virginia Ramey Mollenkott Schiavoni, Andrew Rochelle Owens Susan Sontag Schleuning, Neala Yount Meridel Le Sueur Schoen, Carol B. Hannah Adams Rebekah Bettelheim Kohut Emma Lazarus Penina Moise Ruth Seid


Schoenbach, Lisi Germaine Brée Schofield, Ann Helen Marot Schull, Elinor Adela Rogers St. Johns Schwartz, Helen J. Mary Antin Hortense Calisher Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer Margaret Thompson Janvier Margaret Woods Lawrence Tillie Olsen Grace Paley Schweik, Joanne L. Marilyn French Isabella Gardner Vivian Gornick Hettie Jones Gloria Steinem Scura, Dorothy M. Mary Johnston Seaton, Beverly Florence Merriam Bailey Gladys Hasty Carroll Mary Hartwell Catherwood Nellie Blanchan Doubleday Mateel Howe Farnham Margaret Flint Helen Morgenthau Fox Mary Griffith Susan Huntington Louisa Yeomans King Elizabeth L. Lawrence Alice Lounsberry Helen Reimensnyder Martin Sarah Edgarton Mayo Josephine Clifford McCrackin Helen Matthews Nitsch Frances Dana Parsons Grace Richmond Gladys Bagg Taber Anna Bartlett Warner Susan Bogert Warner Mary Stanbery Watts Adeline D. T. Whitney Kate Douglass Wiggin Laura Ingalls Wilder Louise Beebe Wilder Mabel Osgood Wright xxvii


Secrest, Rose V. C. Andrews Mary Higgins Clark June Doman Katherine V. Forrest Nancy Freedman Carolyn G. Hart Joyce Maynard Sharon McCrumb Bharati Mukherjee Frances Perkins Belva Plain Patricia Polacco Sylvia F. Porter Pamela Sargent Shaffer-Koros, Carole M. Willystine Goodsell Helen Hazlett Ruth Putnam Shakir, Evelyn Ednah Littlehale Cheney Abigail May Alcott Nieriker Sharistanian, Janet Florence Howe Elizabeth Janeway Helen Waite Papashvily Katherine M. Rogers Shelton, Pamela Rita Mae Brown Nikki Giovanni Harriet Jacobs Sherman, Sarah Way Sarah Knowles Bolton Alice Brown Rose Terry Cooke Gertrude Battles Lane Louise Chandler Moulton Mary Alicia Owen

xxviii


Shostak, Elizabeth Bette Bao Lord Jayne Anne Phillips Kate Simon Shur, Cherri L. Marianne Wiggins Shute, Carolyn Judy Blume Mildred Delois Taylor Siefert, Susan E. Ariel Durant Fannie Merritt Farmer Skaggs, Peggy Helen Keller Catherine Marshall Sladics, Devra M. Lilian Jackson Braun Gwendolyn Brooks Tess Gallagher Doris Grumbach Sonia Sanchez Dana Stabenow Wendy Wasserstein Sylvia Watanabe Jade Snow Wong Charlotte Zolotow Slaughter, Jane Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Smelstor, Marjorie Fanny Kemble

Shinn, Thelma J. Margaret Ayer Barnes Frances Courtenay Baylor Barnum Kate Chopin Martha Finley Lucy Smith French Shirley Ann Grau Mary Dana Shindler Harriet Prescott Spofford

Smethurst, James Maya Angelou Marilyn Hacker Maxine Hong Kingston Sonia Sanchez Alice Walker Margaret Walker

Shortreed, Vivian H. Elizabeth Oakes Smith Jane Grey Swisshelm

Smith, Martha Nell Toi Derricotte


Smith, Susan Sutton Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz Jane Goodwin Austin Delia Salter Bacon Sarah G. Bagley Mary Edwards Bryan Maria Weston Chapman Adelaide Crapsey Caroline Healey Dall Eliza Ann Dupuy Harriet Farley Eliza Rotch Farrar Margaret Fuller Caroline Howard Gilman Caroline Gilman Jervey Elizabeth Dodge Kinney Sara Jane Lippincott Harriet Hanson Robinson Phoebe Atwood Taylor Mary Hawes Terhune Jean Webster Sneller, Jo Leslie Rosemary Sprague Snipes, Katherine Clara Barton Laura Jackson Carson McCullers Snyder, Carrie Ana Castillo Julia Child Jane Cooper Mari Evans María Irene Fornés Shirley Ann Grau Bertha Harris Erica Jong Sandra McPherson Valerie Miner Alma Routsong Anya Seton Gail Sheehy Leslie Marmon Silko Zilpha Keatley Snyder Cathy Song Danielle Steel Mildred Pitts Walter Sonnenschein, Dana Rosalyn Drexler Jorie Graham Sandra McPherson


Sparks, Leah J. Sanora Babb Carman Dee Barnes Doris Betts Germaine Brée Olga Broumas Octavia E. Butler Rachel Carson Kim Chernin Phyllis Chesler Marilyn Chin Michelle Cliff Judith Crist Toi Derricotte Diane DiPrima Andrea Dworkin Suzette Haden Elgin Carol Emshwiller Marjorie Garber Sally Miller Gearhart Donna Haraway Lillian Hellman Susan Isaacs Molly Ivins Shirley Jackson Gerda Lerner Del Martin Alice Notley Martha Craven Nussbaum Flannery O’Connor Joyce Carol Oates Camille Paglia Margaret Randall Harriet Beecher Stowe Lois-Ann Yamanaka Spencer, Linda Jayne Anne Phillips Eleanor Roosevelt Judith Rossner Sprague, Rosemary Sara Teasdale Sproat, Elaine Lola Ridge Stackhouse, Amy D. Edith Maud Eaton Lorine Niedecker Staley, Ann Jane Hirshfield Stanbrough, Jane Elizabeth Manning Hawthorne Hildegarde Hawthorne Rose Hawthorne Lathrop xxix


Stanford, Ann Sanora Babb Sarah Kemble Knight May Swenson Staples, Katherine G. M. Flanders Louisa Park Hall Caroline E. Rush Alma Sioux Scarberry Stauffer, Helen Bess Streeter Aldrich Bertha Muzzy Sinclair Dorothy Swain Thomas Steele, Karen B. Elizabeth W. Latimer Mary Lowell Putnam Stein, Karen F. Paulina Wright Davis Alice Dunbar-Nelson Abbie Huston Evans Phebe Coffin Hanaford Elinor Hoyt Wylie Stein, Rachel Toni Cade Bambara Stepanski, Lisa Ann Beattie Stetson, Erlene Gwendolyn B. Bennett Stevenson, Deanna Olga Broumas Stiller, Nikki Helaine Newstead Stinson, Peggy Jane Addams Agnes Smedley Ella Winter Anzia Yezierska Stoddard, Karen M. Dorothy Daniels Summers, Shauna Joan Didion Anne Tyler Swan, Susan Jamaica Kincaid xxx


Swartz, Mark Djuna Barnes bell hooks Susan Howe Ann Lauterbach Cynthia Ozick Swidler, Arlene Anderson Sarah N. Brownson Katherine Kurz Burton Aline Murray Kilmer Sister Mary Madeleva Helen Constance White Sylvander, Carolyn Wedin Martha Griffith Browne Jessie Redmon Fauset Frances Noyes Hart Helen Hull Mary Britton Miller Mary White Ovington Laura M. Towne Szymanski, Karen Anne C. Lynch Botta Eliza Woodson Farnham Talamantez, Inés Ella Cara Deloria Tebbe, Jennifer L. Georgette Meyer Chapelle Elisabeth May Craig Rheta Childe Dorr Elizabeth Drew Barbara Ehrenreich Frances FitzGerald Anne O’Hare McCormick Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman Anna Louise Strong Terris, Virginia R. Alice Henry Sarah Bryan Piatt Jessie B. Rittenhouse Lillian Whiting Thiébaux, Marcelle Faith Baldwin Cuthrell Julia Ripley Dorr Ellen Glasgow Anne Green Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Thomas, Gwendolyn A. Henrietta Buckmaster Charlotte L. Forten Pauli Murray


Thompson, Ann Rosemary Radford Ruether Thompson, Dorothea Mosley Mary Cunningham Logan Ruth Bryan Owen Irma von Starkloff Rombauer Caroline White Soule Thornton, Emma S. Marion Marsh Todd Tipps, Lisa Bertha Harris Tobin, Jean Hilda Morley Adrienne Rich Ruth Whitman Townsend, Janis Mildred Aldrich Gertrude Stein Alice B. Toklas Treckel, Paula A. Alice Morse Earle Gerda Lerner Emily Smith Putnam Lucy Maynard Salmon Eliza Snow Smith Fanny Stenhouse Narcissa Prestiss Whitman Ann Eliza Young Turner, Alberta Katherine Garrison Chapin Ruth Herschberger Barbara Howes Muriel Rukeyser Uffen, Ellen Serlen Fannie Hurst Uphaus, Suzanne Henning Ann Chidester Eleanor Carroll Chilton Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn Pamela Frankau Maureen Howard Marge Piercy Vasquez, Pamela Judith Ortiz Cofer


Vogrin, Valerie Alice Adams Annie Dillard Jamaica Kincaid Maxine Hong Kingston Carole Maso Toni Morrison Sharon Olds Grace Paley Ann Patchett Amy Tan Wahlstrom, Billie J. Alice Cary Anna Peyre Dinnies Betty Friedan Zenna Henderson Andre Norton Joanna Russ Waldron, Karen E. Kim Chernin Walker, Cynthia L. Shirley Barker Taylor Caldwell Edna Ferber Eleanor Gates Caroline Pafford Miller Myrtle Reed Florence Barrett Willoughby Wall, Cheryl A. Gwendolyn Brooks Frances Ellen Watkins Harper Nella Larsen Gloria Naylor Anne Spencer Ward, Jean M. Elizabeth Blackwell Ella Rhoads Higginson Bethenia Owens-Adair Welch, Barbara A. Alice James Werden, Frieda L. Dorothy Dodds Baker Kate Millett Bernice Love Wiggins West, Martha Ullman Rosellen Brown Lynne Sharon Schwartz xxxi


White, Barbara A. Lillie Devereux Blake Sarah Josepha Hale Sara Willis Parton Marilla M. Ricker Caroline Slade

Yee, Carole Zonis Leane Zugsmith

White, Evelyn C. Angela Yvonne Davis

Yongue, Patricia Lee Zoë Akins Anne Douglas Sedgwick Helen Hennessy Vendler

Williams, Donna Glee Diane Wakoski Williams, Lynn F. Marion Zimmer Bradley Joanna Russ Wolff, Ellen Harriet E. Adams Wilson Jade Snow Wong Wolfson, Rose Klara Goldzieher Roman Wollons, Roberta Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg Woodward, Angela Natalie Babbitt Ellen Goodman Elizabeth Gray Vining Diane Wakoski Wright, Catherine Morris Mary Mapes Dodge Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne Gloria Anzaldúa Ana Castillo Lorna Dee Cervantes Sandra Cisneros Cherríe Moraga Helena María Viramontes

xxxii


Yglesias, Helen Amy Tan

Young, Melanie Harriette Fanning Read Caroline H. Woods Zajdel, Melody M. Caresse Crosby Zilboorg, Caroline Elise Justine Bayard Ann Douglas Maud Wilder Goodwin Sarah Sprague Jacobs Charlotte A. Jerauld Mary Elizabeth Lee Dolley Madison Louisa Cheves McCord Maria G. Milward Agnes Woods Mitchell Mrs. H. J. Moore Martha Read Catherine Ware Warfield Amelia Coppuck Welby Zimmerman, Karen Marcia Muller

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS Abbott, Edith Abbott, Eleanor Hallowell Abel, Annie Heloise Acker, Kathy Adams, Abigail Smith Adams, Alice Adams, Hannah Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams, Léonie Fuller Adams, Louisa Catherine Johnson Addams, Jane Adisa, Giamba See Lorde, Audre Agassiz, Elizabeth Cabot Cary Ai Akins, Zoë Alcott, Louisa May Alden, Isabella MacDonald Aldon, Adair See Meigs, Cornelia Aldrich, Bess Streeter Aldrich, Mildred Alexander, Francesca Allee, Marjorie Hill Allen, Elizabeth Akers Allen, Paula Gunn Allison, Dorothy Alther, Lisa Álvarez, Julia Ames, Mary E. Clemmer Anderson, Marian Andrew, Joseph Maree See Bonner, Marita Andrews, Eliza Frances Andrews, Jane Andrews, Mary Shipman Andrews, V. C. Angelou, Maya Angier, Natalie Anneke, Mathilde Franziska Giesler Anpetu Waśte See Deloria, Ella Cara Anthony, Susan B. Anthony, Susanna Antin, Mary Anzaldúa, Gloria Appleton-Weber, Sarah Appleton, Sarah See Appleton-Weber, Sarah Appleton, Victor, II See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Arendt, Hannah Armstrong, Charlotte Arnow, Harriette Simpson Ashley, Ellen See Seifert, Elizabeth Atherton, Gertrude Atom, Ann See Walworth, Jeannette Hadermann

Auerbach, Hilda See Morley, Hilda Austin, Jane Goodwin Austin, Mary Hunter Avery, Martha Moore Ayer, Harriet Hubbard Ayscough, Florence Wheelock Babb, Sanora Babbitt, Natalie Bacon, Alice Bacon, Delia Salter Bagley, Sarah G. Bailey, Temple Bailey, Carolyn Sherwin Bailey, Florence Merriam Baker, Dorothy Dodds Balch, Emily Greene Ballard, Martha Bambara, Toni Cade Banning, Margaret Culkin Barker, Shirley Barnard, A. M. See Alcott, Louisa May Barnes, Carman Dee Barnes, Charlotte Mary Sanford Barnes, Djuna Barnes, Linda J. Barnes, Margaret Ayer Barnes, Mary Sheldon Barnum, Frances Courtenay Baylor Barr, Amelia E. Barr, Nevada Barton, Clara Barton, May Hollis See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Bateman, Sidney Cowell Bates, Katherine Lee Bayard, Elise Justine Beach, Sylvia Beard, Mary Ritter Beattie, Ann Beebe, Mary Blair See Niles, Blair Rice Beecher, Catharine Esther Benedict, Ruth Benét, Laura Benítez, Sandra Bennett, Gwendolyn B. Benson, Sally Berg, Gertrude Bergman, Susan H. Bernays, Anne Berne, Victoria See Fisher, M. F. K. Bethune, Mary McLeod xxxiii

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF WRITERS

Betts, Doris Bianco, Margery Williams Bishop, Claire Huchet Bishop, Elizabeth Black, Katherine Bolton Blackwell, Alice Stone Blackwell, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Elizabeth Blaisdell, Anne See Linington, Elizabeth Blake, Lillie Devereux Blake, Mary E. McGrath Bland, Eleanor Taylor Blatch, Harriot Stanton Bleecker, Ann Eliza Schuyler Bloomer, Amelia Jenks Bloomfield-Moore, Clara Jessup Blume, Judy Bly, Nellie See Seaman, Elizabeth Cochrane Bogan, Louise Bolton, Isabel See Miller, Mary Britton Bolton, Sarah T. Bolton, Sarah Knowles Bombeck, Erma Bond, Carrie Jacobs Bonner, Marita Booth, Mary Louise Borg, Dorothy Botta, Anne C. Lynch Bourke-White, Margaret Bowen, Catherine Drinker Bowen, Sue Petigru Bower, B. M. See Sinclair, Bertha Muzzy Bowers, Bathsheba Bowles, Jane Auer Boyd, Blanche McCrary Boyd, Nancy See Millay, Edna St. Vincent Boyle, Kay Boylston, Helen Dore Bracken, Peg Brackett, Leigh Bradley, Marion Zimmer Bradstreet, Anne Dudley Branch, Anna Hempstead Braun, Lilian Jackson Breckinridge, Sophonisba Preston Brée, Germaine Brennan, Maeve Brent, Linda See Jacobs, Harriet Bres, Rose Falls Breuer, Bessie Brewster, Martha Wadsworth Briggs, Emily Edson Brink, Carol Ryrie Bristow, Gwen Brody, Jane E. xxxiv


Broner, E. M. Brooks, Gwendolyn Brooks, Maria Gowen Broumas, Olga Brown, Abbie Farwell Brown, Alice Brown, Hallie Quinn Brown, Margaret Wise Brown, Nancy See Leslie, Annie Brown Brown, Rita Mae Brown, Rosellen Brown, Sandra Browne, Martha Griffith Brownmiller, Susan Brownson, Sarah N. Bryan, Mary Edwards Bryant, Anita Buchanan, Edna Buck, Pearl S. Buckmaster, Henrietta Burke, Fielding See Dargan, Olive Tilford Burnett, Frances Hodgson Burnham, Clara L. Root Burr, Esther Edwards Burton, Katherine Kurz Burton, Virginia Lee Butler, Octavia E. Cabeza de Baca, Fabiola Cade, Toni See Bambara, Toni Cade Caldwell, Taylor Calhoun, Lucy See Monroe, Lucy Calisher, Hortense Campbell, Helen Stuart Campbell, Jane C. Campbell, Juliet Lewis Caperton, Helena Lefroy Carlson, Natalie Savage Carmichael, Sarah E. Carrighar, Sally Carrington, Elaine Sterne Carroll, Gladys Hasty Carson, Rachel Carver, Ada Jack Cary, Alice Cary, Phoebe Caspary, Vera Castillo, Ana Cather, Willa Sibert Catherwood, Mary Hartwell Catt, Carrie Chapman Caulkins, Frances Manwaring Cazneau, Jane McManus Cervantes, Lorna Dee Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung


Chandler, Elizabeth Margaret Chapelle, Georgette Meyer Chapin, Katherine Garrison Chaplin, Jane Dunbar Chapman, Lee See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Chapman, Maria Weston Charnas, Suzy McKee Chase, Ilka Chase, Mary Coyle Chase, Mary Ellen Chehia See Shaw, Anna Moore Cheney, Ednah Littlehale Chernin, Kim Cherry, Kelly Chesebrough, Caroline Chesler, Phyllis Chesnut, Mary Miller Chidester, Ann Child, Julia Child, Lydia Maria Childress, Alice Chilton, Eleanor Carroll Chin, Marilyn Chopin, Kate Church, Ella Rodman Chute, Beatrice J. Chute, Carolyn Chute, Marchette Cisneros, Sandra Clampitt, Amy Clapp, Margaret Antoinette Clappe, Louise Smith Clark, Ann Nolan Clark, Eleanor Clark, Mary Higgins Clarke, Rebecca Sophia Cleary, Beverly Cleghorn, Sarah Norcliffe Cliff, Michelle Clifton, Lucille Coatsworth, Elizabeth Jane Coit, Margaret L. Colum, Mary Maguire Coman, Katharine Comstock, Anna Botsford Conant, Hannah Chaplin Conway, Katherine Eleanor Cooey, Paula Marie Cook, Fannie Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth Cooke, Rose Terry Coolbrith, Ina Donna Coolidge, Susan See Woolsey, Sarah Chauncey Cooper, Anna Julia Cooper, Jane


Cooper, Susan Fenimore Corbett, Elizabeth Frances Cornwell, Patricia Cortez, Jayne Cott, Nancy F. Coyle, Kathleen Craig, Elisabeth May Craig, Kit See Reed, Kit Craigie, Pearl Richards Crapsey, Adelaide Craven, Margaret Crist, Judith Crocker, Hannah Mather Croly, Jane Cunningham Crosby, Caresse Cross, Amanda See Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Cross, Jane Hardin Crothers, Rachel Crouter, Natalie Stark Crowe, F. J. See Johnston, Jill Cruger, Mary Cumming, Kate Cummins, Maria Susanna Curtiss, Mina Kirstein Curtiss, Ursula Reilly Custer, Elizabeth Bacon Cuthrell, Faith Baldwin Dahlgren, Madeleine Vinton Dall, Caroline Healey Daly, Elizabeth Daly, Mary Daly, Maureen Daniels, Dorothy Dargan, Olive Tilford d’Aulaire, Ingri Mortenson Davenport, Marcia Gluck Davidson, Lucretia Maria Davidson, Margaret Miller Davis, Adelle Davis, Angela Yvonne Davis, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Elizabeth Gould Davis, Mollie Moore Davis, Natalie Zemon Davis, Paulina Wright Davis, Rebecca Harding Dawidowicz, Lucy S. Day, Dorothy de Angeli, Marguerite Lofft de Mille, Agnes de Burgos, Julia de Mondragon, Margaret Randall See Randall, Margaret de Cleyre, Voltairine Dégh, Linda xxxv


Deland, Margaret Campbell del Occidente, Maria See Brooks, Maria Gowen Deloria, Ella Cara Deming, Barbara Denison, Mary Andrews Dennett, Mary Ware Derricotte, Toi Deutsch, Babette DeVeaux, Alexis Dexter, John See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Diaz, Abby Morton Dickinson, Emily Didion, Joan Dillard, Annie Dinnies, Anna Peyre DiPrima, Diane Disney, Doris Miles Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee Dix, Beulah Marie Dix, Dorothea Lynde Dix, Dorothy See Gilmer, Elizabeth Meriwether Dixon, Franklin W. See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Dodge, Mary Abigail Dodge, Mary Mapes Doman, June Domini, Rey See Lorde, Audre Dominic, R. B. See Lathen, Emma Donovan, Frances R. Doolittle, Antoinette D(oolittle), H(ilda) Dorr, Julia Ripley Dorr, Rheta Childe Dorsett, Danielle See Daniels, Dorothy Dorsey, Anna McKenney Dorsey, Ella Loraine Dorsey, Sarah Ellis Doubleday, Nellie Blanchan Douglas, Amanda Minnie Douglas, Ann Dove, Rita Drew, Elizabeth Drexler, Rosalyn Drinker, Elizabeth Sandwith DuBois, Shirley Graham See Graham, Shirley DuJardin, Rosamond Neal Dunbar-Nelson, Alice Duncan, Isadora Duniway, Abigail Scott Dunlap, Jane See Davis, Adelle DuPlessis, Rachel Blau Dupuy, Eliza Ann Durant, Ariel Dworkin, Andrea Dykeman, Wilma xxxvi


Earle, Alice Morse Earle, Sylvia A. Eastman, Crystal Eastman, Elaine Goodale Eastman, Mary Henderson Eaton, Edith Maud Eberhart, Mignon G. Eberhart, Sheri S. See Tepper, Sheri S. Eckstorm, Fannie Hardy Eddy, Mary Baker Egan, Lesley See Linington, Elizabeth Ehrenreich, Barbara Eiker, Mathilde Elder, Susan Blanchard Elgin, Suzette Haden Ellet, Elizabeth Elliot, Elisabeth Elliott, Maude Howe Elliott, Sarah Barnwell Ellis, Anne Ellis, Edith Embury, Emma Manley Emshwiller, Carol Ephron, Nora Erdrich, Louise Estes, Eleanor Evans, Abbie Huston Evans, Mari Evans, Sarah Ann Evermay, March See Eiker, Mathilde Fahs, Sophia Lyon Fairbank, Janet Ayer Fairfield, A. M. See Alcott, Louisa May Farley, Harriet Farmer, Fannie Merritt Farnham, Eliza Woodson Farnham, Mateel Howe Farquharson, Martha See Finley, Martha Farrar, Eliza Rotch Faugeres, Margaretta V. Fauset, Jessie Redmon Felton, Rebecca Latimer Fenno, Jenny Ferber, Edna Field, Kate Field, Rachel Lyman Fields, Annie Adams Finley, Martha Fisher, Dorothea Canfield Fisher, M. F. K. Fiske, Sarah Symmes Fitzgerald, Zelda Sayre FitzGerald, Frances Flanders, G. M.


Flanner, Hildegarde Flanner, Janet Fletcher, Inglis Clark Flexner, Anne Crawford Flexner, Eleanor Flint, Margaret Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley Follen, Eliza Cabot Foote, Mary Hallock Forbes, Esther Forché, Carolyn Ford, Harriet Ford, Sallie Rochester Forester, Fanny See Judson, Emily Chubbuck Fornés, María Irene Forrest, Katherine V. Forten, Charlotte L. Foster, Hannah Webster Fox, Helen Morgenthau Fox, Paula Frankau, Pamela Franken, Rose Freedman, Nancy Freeman, Mary E. Wilkins Fremantle, Anne French, Alice French, Anne Warner French, Lucy Smith French, Marilyn Friedan, Betty Frings, Ketti Fritz, Jean Fuller, Margaret Gage, Frances Dana Gale, Zona Gallagher, Tess Garber, Marjorie Gardener, Helen Hamilton Gardner, Isabella Gardner, Mariam See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Gardner, Mary Sewall Garrigue, Jean Gates, Eleanor Gates, Susa Young Gearhart, Sally Miller Gellhorn, Martha Genêt See Flanner, Janet George, Jean Craighead Gerould, Katharine Fullerton Gerstenberg, Alice Gestefeld, Ursula N. Gibbons, Kaye Gilbert, Fabiola Cabeza de Baca See Cabeza de Baca, Fabiola


Gilbert, Sandra M. Gilchrist, Annie Somers Gilchrist, Ellen Gill, Sarah Prince Gilman, Caroline Howard Gilman, Charlotte Perkins Gilmer, Elizabeth Meriwether Giovanni, Nikki Glasgow, Ellen Glaspell, Susan Glück, Louise Godchaux, Elma Godwin, Gail Golden, Marita Goldman, Emma Goodman, Allegra Goodman, Ellen Goodsell, Willystine Goodwin, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Maud Wilder Gordon, Caroline Gordon, Mary Catherine Gordon, Ruth Gornick, Vivian Gottschalk, Laura Riding See Jackson, Laura Gould, Hannah Flagg Gould, Lois Grafton, Sue Graham, Isabella Marshall Graham, Jorie Graham, Katharine Graham, Shirley Grahn, Judy Grant, Margaret See Franken, Rose Grau, Shirley Ann Graves, Valerie See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Gray, Angela See Daniels, Dorothy Green, Anna Katharine Green, Anne Green, Olive See Reed, Myrtle Greenberg, Joanne Greene, Sarah McLean Greenfield, Eloise Greenwood, Grace See Lippincott, Sara Jane Griffin, Susan Griffith, Mary Grimes, Martha Grimké, Angelina Grimké, Sarah Moore Gruenberg, Sidonie Matzner Grumbach, Doris Guernsey, Clara F. Guernsey, Lucy Ellen Guiney, Louise Imogen xxxvii


Gulliver, Julia Henrietta Guy, Rosa H. D. See D(oolittle), H(ilda) Hacker, Marilyn Hadas, Rachel Hahn, Emily Hale, Lucretia Peabody Hale, Nancy Hale, Sarah Josepha Hale, Susan Hall, Florence Howe Hall, Hazel Hall, Louisa Park Hall, Sarah Ewing Hamilton, Alice Hamilton, Edith Hamilton, Gail See Dodge, Mary Abigail Hamilton, Jane Hamilton, Kate W. Hamilton, Virginia Hanaford, Phebe Coffin Hansberry, Lorraine Haraway, Donna Harding, Mary Esther Harding, Sandra Hardwick, Elizabeth Harjo, Joy Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Ida Husted Harris, Bernice Kelly Harris, Bertha Harris, Corra May Harris, Miriam Coles Harrison, Constance Cary Hart, Carolyn G. Hart, Frances Noyes Hasbrouck, Lydia Sayer Hastings, Susannah Johnson Hatch, Mary R. Platt Haven, Alice Bradley Hawthorne, Elizabeth Manning Hawthorne, Hildegarde Hazlett, Helen Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Hejinian, Lyn Hellman, Lillian Henderson, Zenna Henissart, Martha See Lathen, Emma Henley, Beth Henry, Alice Henry, Marguerite Hentz, Caroline Whiting Herbst, Josephine Herschberger, Ruth xxxviii


Hewitt, Mary E. Moore Heyward, Dorothy Kuhns Heywood, Martha Spence Higgins, Marguerite Higginson, Ella Rhoads Higham, Mary R. Highet, Helen MacInnes See MacInnes, Helen Highsmith, Patricia Hill-Lutz, Grace Livingston Hirshfield, Jane Hite, Shere Hobart, Alice Tisdale Hobson, Laura Z. Hoffman, Alice Hoffman, Malvina Hogan, Linda Holding, Elisabeth Sanxay Hollander, Nicole Holley, Marietta Hollingworth, Leta Stetter Holm, Saxe See Jackson, Helen Hunt Holmes, Mary Jane Hawes Holmes, Sarah Stone hooks, bell Hooper, Lucy Jones Hooper, Lucy Hope, Laura Lee See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Hopkins, Pauline Hopper, Hedda Horlak, E. E. See Tepper, Sheri S. Horney, Karen Houston, Jean Howard, Maureen Howe, Florence Howe, Julia Ward Howe, Susan Howe, Tina Howes, Barbara Howland, Marie Hull, Helen Hulme, Kathryn Cavarly Hume, Sophia Humishuma See Mourning Dove Hunt, Irene Hunt, Mabel Leigh Hunter, Rodello Hunter-Lattany, Kristin Huntington, Susan Hurd-Mead, Kate C. Hurst, Fannie Hurston, Zora Neale Hutchins, Maude McVeigh Huxtable, Ada Louise Hyde, Shelley See Reed, Kit


Ireland, Jane See Norris, Kathleen Thompson Irwin, Inez Haynes Isaacs, Susan Ives, Morgan See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Ivins, Molly Jackson, Helen Hunt Jackson, Laura Jackson, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Shirley Jackson, Ward See Braun, Lilian Jackson Jacobi, Mary Putnam Jacobs, Harriet Jacobs, Jane Jacobs, Sarah Sprague Jacobsen, Josephine James, Alice Jamison, Cecilia Viets Janeway, Elizabeth Janvier, Margaret Thompson Jerauld, Charlotte A. Jervey, Caroline Gilman Jewett, Sarah Orne Johnson, Diane Johnson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Helen Kendrick Johnson, Josephine Winslow Johnson-Masters, Virginia Johnston, Annie Fellows Johnston, Jill Johnston, Mary Jones, Amanda Theodocia Jones, Edith See Wharton, Edith Jones, Gayl Jones, Hettie Jones, Mary Harris Jong, Erica Jordan, Barbara C. Jordan, June Jordan, Kate Jordan, Laura See Brown, Sandra Judson, Emily Chubbuck Kael, Pauline Kavanaugh, Cynthia See Daniels, Dorothy Keene, Carolyn See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Keith, Agnes Newton Keller, Helen Kellerman, Faye Kelley, Edith Summers Kellogg, Louise Kellor, Frances Kelly, Eleanor Mercein Kelly, Myra Kemble, Fanny


Kennedy, Adrienne Kenyon, Jane Kerber, Linda Kaufman Kerr, Jean Keyes, Frances Parkinson Kilmer, Aline Murray Kimbrough, Emily Kincaid, Jamaica King, Grace Elizabeth King, Laurie R. King, Louisa Yeomans Kingsolver, Barbara Kingston, Maxine Hong Kinney, Elizabeth Dodge Kinzie, Juliette Magill Kirby, Georgiana Bruce Kirk, Ellen Warner Kirkland, Caroline M. Stansbury Kizer, Carolyn Knapp, Bettina Liebowitz Knight, Sarah Kemble Knox, Adeline Trafton Koch, Adrienne Kohut, Rebekah Bettelheim Konigsburg, E. L. Kroeber, Theodora Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth Kumin, Maxine W. Laing, Dilys Bennett Lamb, Martha Nash Lamott, Anne Landers, Ann Landon, Margaret Lane, Gertrude Battles Lane, Rose Wilder Langdon, Mary See Pike, Mary Green Langer, Susanne K. Larcom, Lucy Larsen, Nella Lasswell, Mary Latham, Jean Lee Lathen, Emma Lathrop, Rose Hawthorne Latimer, Elizabeth W. Latsis, Mary Jane See Lathen, Emma Laut, Agnes C. Lauterbach, Ann Lawrence, Elizabeth L. Lawrence, Josephine Lawrence, Margaret Woods Lazarus, Emma Le Guin, Ursula K. Le Sueur, Meridel Le Vert, Octavia Walton xxxix


Lea, Fannie Heaslip Lee, Eliza Buckminster Lee, Hannah Sawyer Lee, Harper Lee, Marion See Comstock, Anna Botsford Lee, Mary Elizabeth LeGallienne, Eva L’Engle, Madeleine Lenski, Lois Lerman, Rhoda Lerner, Gerda Leslie, Annie Brown Leslie, Eliza Leslie, Miriam Follin Levertov, Denise Lewis, Elizabeth Foreman Lewis, Estelle Robinson Lewis, Janet Libbey, Laura Jean Lincoln, Victoria Lindbergh, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Reeve Linington, Elizabeth Lippard, Lucy R. Lippincott, Martha Shepard Lippincott, Sara Jane Little, Sophia Robbins Livermore, Harriet Livermore, Mary Rice Livingston, Myra Cohn Locke, Jane Starkweather Logan, Deborah Norris Logan, Mary Cunningham Logan, Olive Loos, Anita Lord, Bette Bao Lorde, Audre Lothrop, Amy See Warner, Anna Bartlett Lothrop, Harriet Stone Loughborough, Mary Ann Webster Lounsberry, Alice Lovejoy, Esther Pohl Lowell, Amy Lowry, Lois Loy, Mina Lucas, Victoria See Plath, Sylvia Luce, Clare Boothe Luhan, Mabel Dodge Lumpkin, Grace Lurie, Alison Lutz, Alma Lynd, Helen Merrell MacDonald, Betty MacDonald, Jessica N. xl


Macdonald, Marcia See Hill-Lutz, Grace Livingston MacDougall, Ruth Doan MacInnes, Helen MacKinnon, Catharine A. MacLaine, Shirley MacLean, Annie Marion Macumber, Marie S. See Sandoz, Mari Madeleva, Sister Mary Madison, Dolley Mairs, Nancy Malkiel, Theresa S. Mannes, Marya Manning, Marie Mansfield, Blanche McManus March, Anne See Woolson, Constance Fenimore Marks, Jeannette Augustus Marot, Helen Marshall, Catherine Marshall, Gertrude Helen See Fahs, Sophia Lyon Marshall, Paule Martin, Del Martin, George Madden Martin, Helen Reimensnyder Martin, Valerie Martínez, Demetria Martyn, Sarah Smith Maso, Carole Mason, Bobbie Ann Mathews, Frances Aymar Matthews, Adelaide May, Sophie See Clarke, Rebecca Sophia Maynard, Joyce Mayo, Katherine Mayo, Margaret Mayo, Sarah Edgarton McBride, Mary Margaret McCaffrey, Anne McCarthy, Mary McCloy, Helen McCord, Louisa Cheves McCormick, Anne O’Hare McCrackin, Josephine Clifford McCrumb, Sharon McCullers, Carson McDermott, Alice McDowell, Katherine Bonner McGinley, Phyllis McGrory, Mary McGuire, Judith Brockenbrough McIntosh, Maria Jane McIntyre, Vonda N. McKenney, Ruth McLean, Kathryn Anderson McMillan, Terry McPherson, Aimee Semple


McPherson, Sandra Mead, Kate C. See Hurd-Mead, Kate C. Mead, Margaret Meaney, Mary L. Means, Florence Crannell Meigs, Cornelia Meloney, Franken See Franken, Rose Menken, Adah Isaacs Merington, Marguerite Meriwether, Elizabeth Avery Merriam, Eve Merril, Judith Meyer, Annie Nathan Meyer, June See Jordan, June M. Miles, Josephine Millar, Margaret Millay, Edna St. Vincent Miller, Alice Duer Miller, Caroline Pafford Miller, Emily Huntington Miller, Harriet M. Miller, Isabel See Routsong, Alma Miller, Mary Britton Miller, Vassar Millett, Kate Milward, Maria G. Miner, Valerie Minot, Susan Mirikitani, Janice Mitchell, Agnes Woods Mitchell, Margaret Mitchell, Maria Mitford, Jessica Mixer, Elizabeth Moers, Ellen Mohr, Nicholasa Moise, Penina Mojtabai, A. G. Mollenkott, Virginia Ramey Monroe, Harriet Monroe, Lucy Montgomery, Ruth Shick Moody, Anne Moore, C. L. Moore, Lorrie Moore, Marianne Moore, Mary Evelyn See Davis, Mollie Moore Moore, Mollie E. See Davis, Mollie Moore Moore, Mrs. H. J. Moorhead, Sarah Parsons Moraga, Cherríe Morgan, Claire See Highsmith, Patricia Morgan, Marabel Morgan, Robin Morley, Hilda


Morris, Clara Morrison, Toni Morrow, Honoré McCue Mortimer, Lillian Morton, Martha Morton, Sarah Wentworth Mother Goose See Walworth, Jeannette Hadermann Mott, Lucretia Moulton, Louise Chandler Mourning Dove Mukherjee, Bharati Muller, Marcia Munro, Eleanor Murfree, Mary Murray, Judith Sargent Murray, Pauli Myles, Eileen Nation, Carry A. Naylor, Gloria Neely, Barbara Neilson, Nellie Neville, Emily Cheney Newcomb, Franc Johnson Newman, Frances Newman, Lesléa Newstead, Helaine Nichols, Anne Nicholson, Asenath Hatch Nicholson, Eliza Jane Poitevent Nicolson, Marjorie Hope Niedecker, Lorine Nieriker, Abigail May Alcott Niggli, Josefina Niles, Blair Rice Nin, Anaïs Nitsch, Helen Matthews Nixon, Agnes E. Norman, Marsha Norris, Kathleen Thompson Norton, Alice See Norton, Andre Norton, Andre Norton, Katherine LaForge See Reed, Myrtle Notley, Alice Nussbaum, Martha Craven Nye, Andrea Nye, Naomi Shihab Oates, Joyce Carol Obejas, Achy Oberholtzer, Sara Vickers O’Connor, Flannery O’Connor, Florence J. O’Donnell, Jessie Fremont O’Donnell, Lillian Oemler, Marie Conway xli


Offord, Lenore Glen O’Hair, Madalyn Murray O’Hara, Mary See Sture-Vasa, Mary O’Keeffe, Katharine A. O’Neill, Egan See Linington, Elizabeth Older, Cora Baggerly Olds, Sharon Oliphant, B. J. See Tepper, Sheri S. Oliver, Mary Olsen, Tillie O’Neill, Rose Orde, A. J. See Tepper, Sheri S. Ortiz Cofer, Judith Orvis, Marianne Dwight Osbey, Brenda Marie Osborn, Sarah Osgood, Frances Sargent Ostenso, Martha Ostriker, Alicia Ottenberg, Miriam Ovington, Mary White Owen, Catherine See Nitsch, Helen Matthews Owen, Mary Alicia Owen, Ruth Bryan Owens, Claire Myers Owens-Adair, Bethenia Owens, Rochelle Ozick, Cynthia Page, Myra Paglia, Camille Paley, Grace Palmer, Phoebe Worrall Papashvily, Helen Waite Paretsky, Sara Parker, Charlotte Blair Parker, Dorothy Parrish, Mary Frances See Fisher, M. F. K. Parsons, Elsie Clews Parsons, Frances Dana Parsons, Louella Oettinger Parton, Sara Willis Pastan, Linda Patchett, Ann Paterson, Katherine Patton, Frances Gray Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Josephine Preston Peattie, Elia Wilkinson Peattie, Louise Redfield Peck, Annie Smith Peck, Ellen Pember, Phoebe Yates Penfeather, Anabel See Cooper, Susan Fenimore Percy, Florence See Allen, Elizabeth Akers xlii


Perkins, Frances Perkins, Lucy Fitch Pesotta, Rose Peterkin, Julia Mood Peters, Sandra See Plath, Sylvia Petersham, Maud Fuller Petry, Ann Lane Phelps, Almira Lincoln Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart Phillips, Irna Phillips, Jayne Anne Piatt, Sarah Bryan Piercy, Marge Pike, Mary Green Pinckney, Josephine Pine, Cuyler See Peck, Ellen Plain, Belva Plath, Sylvia Polacco, Patricia Pollack, Rachel Pollard, Josephine Porter, Eleanor Hodgman Porter, Katherine Anne Porter, Rose Porter, Sarah Porter, Sylvia F. Post, Emily Powell, Dawn Pratt, Ella Farman Prentiss, Elizabeth Payson Preston, Harriet Waters Preston, Margaret Junkin Prince, Nancy Gardner Prose, Francine Prouty, Olive Higgins Pryor, Sara Rice Pugh, Eliza Phillips Putnam, Emily Smith Putnam, Mary Lowell Putnam, Ruth Putnam, Sallie A. Brock Raimond, C. E. See Robins, Elizabeth Rampling, Anne See Rice, Anne Ramsay, Martha Laurens Ramsay, Vienna G. Morrell Rand, Ayn Randall, Margaret Randall, Ruth Painter Rankin, Fannie W. Ranous, Dora Knowlton Rawlings, Marjorie Kinnan Read, Harriette Fanning Read, Martha Reed, Kit


Reed, Myrtle Reese, Lizette Woodworth Remick, Martha Reno, Itti Kinney Repplier, Agnes Rice, Alice Hegan Rice, Anne Rich, Adrienne Rich, Barbara See Jackson, Laura Rich, Louise Dickinson Richards, Laura Howe Richards, Louisa Greene Richmond, Grace Ricker, Marilla M. Ridge, Lola Riding, Laura See Jackson, Laura Rinehart, Mary Roberts Ripley, Eliza M. Ritchie, Anna Mowatt Rittenhouse, Jessie B. Rivers, Alfrida See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Rivers, Pearl See Nicholson, Eliza Jane Poitevent Robb, J. D. See Roberts, Nora Roberts, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Jane Roberts, Maggie Roberts, Nora Robins, Elizabeth Robinson, Harriet Hanson Robinson, Martha Harrison Rodgers, Carolyn M. Rogers, Katherine M. Roman, Klara Goldzieher Rombauer, Irma von Starkloff Roosevelt, Eleanor Roquelaure, A. N. See Rice, Anne Ross, Helaine See Daniels, Dorothy Ross, Lillian Rossner, Judith Rourke, Constance Mayfield Routsong, Alma Royall, Anne Newport Royce, Sarah Bayliss Ruddy, Ella Giles Ruether, Rosemary Radford Rukeyser, Muriel Rule, Ann Rusch, Kristine Kathryn Rush, Caroline E. Rush, Rebecca Russ, Joanna Ryan, Rachel See Brown, Sandra Sachs, Marilyn St. Johns, Adela Rogers


St. Claire, Erin See Brown, Sandra Salisbury, Charlotte Y. Salmon, Lucy Maynard Salmonson, Jessica Amanda Sanchez, Sonia Sanders, Elizabeth Elkins Sandoz, Mari Sanford, Mollie Dorsey Sanger, Margaret Sangster, Margaret E. Santiago, Esmeralda Sargent, Pamela Sarton, May Satir, Virginia M. Savage, Elizabeth Sawyer, Ruth Scarberry, Alma Sioux Scarborough, Dorothy Scarborough, Elizabeth Ann Schaeffer, Susan Fromberg Schmitt, Gladys Schofield, Sandy See Rusch, Kristine Kathryn Schoolcraft, Mary Howard Schwartz, Lynne Sharon Scott, Anne Firor Scott, Evelyn Scott, Joan Wallach Scott, Julia See Owen, Mary Alicia Scott-Maxwell, Florida Scudder, Vida Dutton Seaman, Elizabeth Cochrane Seawell, Molly Elliot Secor, Lella Sedges, John See Buck, Pearl S. Sedgwick, Anne Douglas Sedgwick, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Susan Ridley Seeley, Mabel Seid, Ruth Seifert, Elizabeth Semple, Ellen Churchill Seredy, Kate Seton, Anya Settle, Mary Lee Sewall, Harriet Winslow Sewell, Elizabeth Sexton, Anne Shange, Ntozake Shannon, Dell See Linington, Elizabeth Shannon, Monica Sharon, Rose See Merril, Judith Sharp, Isabella Oliver Shaw, Anna Moore Shaw, Anna H. Sheehy, Gail xliii


Sheldon, Ann See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Sherwood, Mary Wilson Shindler, Mary Dana Showalter, Elaine Shreve, Anita Shulman, Alix Kates Sidlosky, Carolyn See Forché, Carolyn Sigourney, Lydia Huntley Silko, Leslie Marmon Simon, Kate Sinclair, Bertha Muzzy Sinclair, Jo See Seid, Ruth Singer, June K. Singleton, Anne See Benedict, Ruth Singmaster, Elsie Skinner, Constance Lindsay Skinner, Cornelia Otis Slade, Caroline Slesinger, Tess Slosson, Annie Trumbull Smedley, Agnes Smith, Amanda Smith, Anna Young Smith, Betty Smith, Eliza Snow Smith, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Eunice Smith, Hannah Whittal Smith, Lee Smith, Lillian Smith, Lula Carson See McCullers, Carson Smith, Margaret Bayard Smith, Rosamond See Oates, Joyce Carol Smith, Sarah Pogson Smith, Susy Snedeker, Caroline Dale Snyder, Zilpha Keatley Solwoska, Mara See French, Marilyn Somers, Suzanne See Daniels, Dorothy Song, Cathy Sontag, Susan Sorel, Julia See Drexler, Rosalyn Soule, Caroline White Southworth, E. D. E. N. Souza, E. See Scott, Evelyn Spacks, Patricia Meyer Speare, Elizabeth George Spencer, Anne Spencer, Cornelia Phillips Spencer, Elizabeth Spewak, Bella Cohen Speyer, Leonora von Stosch Spofford, Harriet Prescott Sprague, Rosemary Stabenow, Dana xliv


Stack, Andy See Rule, Ann Stafford, Jean Stanton, Elizabeth Cady Steel, Danielle Stein, Gertrude Steinem, Gloria Stenhouse, Fanny Stephens, Ann Winterbotham Stephens, Margaret Dean See Aldrich, Bess Streeter Steptoe, Lydia See Barnes, Djuna Stern, Elizabeth G. Stewart, Elinore Pruitt Stewart, Maria W. Stockton, Annis Boudinot Stoddard, Elizabeth Barstow Stone, Ruth Story, Sydney A. See Pike, Mary Green Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stratton-Porter, Gene Strong, Anna Louise Stuart, Ruth McEnery Sture-Vasa, Mary Suckow, Ruth Sui Sin Far See Eaton, Edith Maud Susann, Jacqueline Swenson, May Swett, Sophie Swisshelm, Jane Grey Taber, Gladys Bagg Taggard, Genevieve Talbott, Marion Tan, Amy Tandy, Jennette Reid Tappan, Eva March Tarbell, Ida Taylor, Mildred Delois Taylor, Phoebe Atwood Taylor, Susie King Teasdale, Sara Tenney, Tabitha Tepper, Sheri S. Terhune, Mary Hawes Terry, Megan Thane, Elswyth Thanet, Octave See French, Alice Thaxter, Celia Laighton Thayer, Caroline Warren Thayer, Geraldine See Daniels, Dorothy Thomas, Dorothy Swain Thompson, Clara M. (b. c. 1830s) Thompson, Clara M. (1893-1958) Thompson, Dorothy Thorndyke, Helen Louise See Adams, Harriet Stratemeyer Ticknor, Caroline


Tiernan, Frances Fisher Tietjens, Eunice Tilton, Alice See Taylor, Phoebe Atwood Tincker, Mary Agnes Todd, Mabel Loomis Todd, Marion Marsh Toklas, Alice B. Tompkins, Jane P. Towne, Laura M. Townsend, Mary Ashley Treadwell, Sophie Trilling, Diana Troubetzkoy, Amélie Rives Truitt, Anne Truman, Margaret Truth, Sojourner Tuchman, Barbara Turell, Jane Turnbull, Agnes Sligh Turney, Catherine Tuthill, Louisa Huggins Tuve, Rosemond Ty-Casper, Linda Tyler, Anne Tyler, Martha W. Tyler, Mary Palmer Uchida, Yoshiko Uhnak, Dorothy Ulanov, Ann Belford Underwood, Sophie Kerr Untermeyer, Jean Starr Upton, Harriet Taylor Valentine, Jean Valentine, Jo See Armstrong, Charlotte Van Alstyne, Frances Crosby Vandegrift, Margaret See Janvier, Margaret Thompson Vanderbilt, Amy Van Duyn, Mona Van Vorst, Bessie McGinnis Van Vorst, Marie Vendler, Helen Hennessy Victor, Frances Fuller Victor, Metta Fuller Vining, Elizabeth Gray Viramontes, Helena María Voigt, Cynthia Voigt, Ellen Bryant Vorse, Mary Heaton Wakoski, Diane Wald, Lillian D. Waldman, Anne Waldrop, Rosmarie Walker, Alice


Walker, Margaret Walker, Mary Spring Wallace, Michele Waller, Mary Ella Walter, Mildred Pitts Walton, Evangeline Walworth, Jeannette Hadermann Ward, Mary Jane Warfield, Catherine Ware Warner, Anna Bartlett Warner, Susan Bogert Warren, Lella Warren, Mercy Otis Wasserstein, Wendy Watanabe, Sylvia Watson, Sukey Vickery Watts, Mary Stanbery Weber, Sarah Appleton See Appleton-Weber, Sarah Webster, Jean Weeks, Helen C. See Campbell, Helen Stuart Welby, Amelia Coppuck Wells, Carolyn Wells, Emmeline Woodward Wells, John J. See Bradley, Marion Zimmer Wells-Barnett, Ida B. Welty, Eudora West, Dorothy West, Jessamyn West, Lillie West, Mae Wetherall, Elizabeth See Warner, Susan Bogert Wharton, Edith Wheatley, Phillis Wheaton, Campbell See Campbell, Helen Stuart Whipple, Maurine Whitcher, Frances Berry White, Anna White, Anne Terry White, Eliza Orne White, Elizabeth White, Ellen Gould White, Helen Constance White, Nelia Gardner White, Rhoda E. Whiting, Lillian Whitman, Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, Ruth Whitman, Sarah Helen Whitney, Adeline D. T. Whitney, Phyllis A. Wiggin, Kate Douglass Wiggins, Bernice Love Wiggins, Marianne Wilcox, Ella Wheeler Wilder, Laura Ingalls xlv


Wilder, Louise Beebe Wilhelm, Kate Willard, Emma Willard, Frances Willard, Nancy Williams, Catharine Arnold Williams, Fannie Barrier Williams, Sherley Anne Willis, Connie Willis, Lydia Fish Willoughby, Florence Barrett Wilson, Harriet E. Adams Windle, Mary Jane Winnemucca, Sarah Winslow, Anna Green Winslow, Helen M. Winslow, Ola Elizabeth Winslow, Thyra Samter Winter, Ella Winwar, Frances Wolf, Naomi Wong, Jade Snow Wood, Ann See Douglas, Ann Wood, S. S. B. K. Woodhull, Victoria Woods, Caroline H.

xlvi


Woods, Katharine Pearson Woolsey, Sarah Chauncey Woolson, Constance Fenimore Wormeley, Katharine Prescott Wright, Frances Wright, Julia McNair Wright, Mabel Osgood Wright, Mary Clabaugh Wyatt, Edith Franklin Wylie, Elinor Hoyt Yamada, Mitsuye Yamamoto, Hisaye Yamanaka, Lois-Ann Yates, Elizabeth Yezierska, Anzia Yglesias, Helen Youmans, Eliza Ann Young, Ann Eliza Young, Ella Young, Marguerite Young, Rida Johnson Zaturenska, Marya Zolotow, Charlotte Zugsmith, Leane

ABBREVIATIONS A style of all or nothing (initials or complete title) has been employed in this new edition; partial abbreviations have been purged, to limit confusion. In cases where two well-known periodicals have the same initials, only one has the initials and the other is always spelled out in its entirety (i.e. NR is New Republic, and National Review is spelled out).

KR

Kirkus Reviews

LATBR

Los Angeles Times Book Review

LJ

Library Journal

APR

American Poetry Review

MTCW

Major Twentieth–Century Writers

CA

Contemporary Authors

NAW

Notable American Women

CAAS

Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series

NAW:MP

Notable American Women: The Modern Period

CANR

Contemporary Authors New Revision Series

NBAW

Notable Black American Women

CB

Current Biography

NR

New Republic

CBY

Current Biography Yearbook NYRB

New York Review of Books

NYT

New York Times

NYTM

New York Times Magazine

NYTBR

New York Times Book Review

CLAJ

College Literary Association Journal

CLC

Contemporary Literary Criticism

CLHUS

Cambridge Literary History of the United States

CLR

Children’s Literature Review

CN

Contemporary Novelists

PMLA

Publication of the Modern Language Association

CP

Contemporary Poets

PW

Publishers Weekly

CPW

Contemporary Popular Writers

SATA

Something About the Author

CWD

Contemporary Women Dramatists

SL

School Librarian

CWP

Contemporary Women Poets

TLS

[London] Times Literary Supplement

DAB

Dictionary of American Biography TCCW

Twentieth–Century Children’s Writers

WP

Washington Post

WPBW

Washington Post Book World

VV

Village Voice

DLB

Dictionary of Literary Biography

DLBY

Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook

DAI

Dissertation Abstracts International

FC

Feminist Companion

FW

Feminist Writers

WRB

Women’s Review of Books

GLB

Gay & Lesbian Biography

WWAW

Who’s Who of American Women xlvii

A ABBOTT, Edith Born 26 September 1876, Grand Island, Nebraska; died 28 July 1957, Grand Island, Nebraska Daughter of Othman Ali and Elizabeth Abbott Edith Abbott was the first woman dean of a graduate school in an American university and, simultaneously, the first dean of the first school of social work in the nation. A dedicated social reformer and scientist, Abbott’s significant contributions are often overshadowed by the fame and writings of her close friends and colleagues at Hull House in Chicago: Jane Addams, Sophonisba Breckinridge, and her sister, Grace Abbott. Born into a well-established family that had moved to the Nebraska frontier just prior to her birth, Abbott was encouraged to be independent and intellectual. She graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1901 and, frustrated with the lack of career opportunities in Nebraska, moved to Illinois where she began her studies at the University of Chicago. After receiving her Ph.D. in political economy in 1907, Abbott became an industrious and illustrious faculty member of the University of Chicago. When the School of Social Services Administration was founded in 1920, she was appointed dean. Always interested in women’s rights, Abbott fought for high positions for women, laying a foundation for the female control and domination in social work that has continued until today. Abbott, her sister Grace, and Sophonisba Breckinridge were major leaders in the formation of public policy affecting women, children, industrial relations, and immigration. Furthermore, they helped establish the profession of social work as an academic occupation, raising its prestige and power as a source of social change. Unfortunately, their tradition of sound research and political advocacy on behalf of the underprivileged, especially women, has lost much of its momentum among conservative social workers of today. Abbott’s first book, Women in Industry: A Study in American Economic History (1909), is a massive, comprehensive study of women’s work in the marketplace. Evolving out of earlier work done with Breckinridge on census statistics dealing with the employment of women, it developed a complex and thorough analysis of women in various industrial areas, including factories, cotton mills, and the clothing and printing industries. The book records not only historical antecedents of women’s industrial labor but also 1909 public opinion. It is an invaluable history of the early labor movements and occupational structures, as well as the more specialized topic of women and industry. Abbott coauthored The Delinquent Child and the Home with Breckinridge in 1912. It elaborates in a systematic and documented fashion the problems of urban youth. Abbott and Breckinridge again collaborated when they wrote Truancy and Non-Attendance in the Chicago Schools: A Study of the Social Aspects of the

Compulsory Education and Child Labor Legislation of Illinois (1917). Highly committed to the need for education until age sixteen, the authors examine the many factors leading to school absence, such as poverty, mental and physical defects, lack of knowledge of immigrant parents and children, and delinquency. Documenting the existence and extent of missed school days and the historical development of compulsory education, remedies are suggested. The authors’ arguments are still timely and the controversy still lively. The Tenements of Chicago, 1908-1935 (1936), is a massive study of housing conditions and poverty in Chicago. The book, a result of 25 years of study, is based on house-to-house canvassing in 151 city blocks, including visits to 18,225 apartments. The problems Abbott and Breckinridge noted, such as lack of enforcement of housing regulations, too few city inspectors, high rents for substandard housing, large numbers of unemployed suffering from the social stresses of broken families, ill health, and lack of education, are as relevant today as they were over 40 years ago. The documentation of these problems provides an excellent basis for their understanding today. Abbott’s vision of social work as an aggressive, policymaking, and controversial profession is clearly specified in Social Welfare and Professional Education (1931). Partially written during the Great Depression, it advocates government-sponsored, guaranteed employment, centralized and organized through public agencies. Abbott was a talented, conscientious scholar, educator, and social reformer who was overshadowed during her life by her association with famous and more charismatic figures. Today she remains little known outside of the field of social work, but her writings are a witness and a tribute to her talents and contributions. OTHER WORKS: The Real Jail Problem (1915). The One Hundred and One County Jails of Illinois and Why They Ought to Be Abolished (1916). Immigration: Selected Documents and Case Records (1924). Historical Aspects of the Immigration Problem (1926). Some American Pioneers in Social Welfare (1937). Public Assistance (1940). From Relief to Social Security: The Development of the New Public Welfare Services (1941). Twenty-One Years of University Education for Social Service, 1920-1941 (1942). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Chambers, C. A., Seedtime of Reform: American Social Service and Social Action, 1918-1933 (1963). Costin, L. B., ‘‘Edith Abbott and the Chicago Influence on Social Work Education’’ in Social Service Review (March 1983). Costin, L. B., Two Sisters for Social Justice: A Biography of Grace and Edith Abbott (1983). Other references: Survey Graphic (June 1936). ANB (1999). —MARY JO DEEGAN

1

ABBOTT

ABBOTT, Eleanor Hallowell Born 22 September 1872, Cambridge, Massachusetts; died 4 June 1958, Portsmouth, New Hampshire Daughter of Edward and Clara Davis Abbott; married Fordyce Coburn, 1908 The youngest child in her family, Eleanor Hallowell Abbott grew up surrounded by literary and religious luminaries. Her father’s father was Jacob Abbott, author of many books for young people, including the famous Rollo series. The family was friendly with Longfellow, Lowell, and the like; the atmosphere of the home was decidedly religious and scholarly. Abbott’s father, a Congregational clergyman, left his church to be ordained an Episcopal priest; he was also editor of The Outlook for many years. Abbott attended private schools in Cambridge, took special courses at Radcliffe, and later was a secretary and teacher of English at Lowell State Normal School. She wrote poetry and short stories for some time, with no success. Just as she was at the point of giving up, Harper’s Magazine accepted two long poems, and she won three of the short-story prizes offered by Collier’s and The Delineator.


In spite of critical strictures, Abbott’s fiction is interesting, for it reveals a personality resolutely turning away from the harshness of her New England mental and emotional legacy. In its determined gaiety and its triumphant euphoria it is like a backlash to the ponderous, doomsounding religiosity of her grandfather Jacob Abbott and his ancestors. Certainly it was popular in its day, and perhaps no more naive than the so-called ‘‘romances’’ that fill the racks of modern drugstores.

OTHER WORKS: Molly Make-Believe (1910). The Sick-A-Bed Lady, and Other Stories (1911). White Linen Nurse (1913). Little Eve Edgarton (1914). Indiscreet Letter (1915). Stingy Receiver (1917). Ne’er-Do-Much (1918). Old-Dad (1919). Rainy Week (1921). Fairy Prince, and Other Stories (1922). Silver Moon (1923). Love and the Ladies (1928). But Once a Year (1928). Minister Who Kicked the Cat (1932). Being Little in Cambridge When Everyone Else Was Big (1936).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works:Notable Boston Authors, M. Flagg, ed. (1965). Other references: Boston Transcript (15 Oct. 1913, 1 Dec. 1928). NYT (12 Oct. 1913, 3 Jan. 1937). Springfield Republican (11 Oct. 1936). TLS (31 May 1928).

In 1908, shortly before her fortune turned, she married Dr. Fordyce Coburn, who encouraged her literary efforts. The marriage, which took her to Wilton, New Hampshire, was a happy one, though childless. Until the writing of her autobiography, Abbott published 14 books and about 75 magazine stories. Judging from her own account, as a child she had been nervous and excitable, and her fiction gives evidence that she never lost the intensity of feeling which seems to have been her chief characteristic. Her writing is unblushingly romantic, and although unpleasant occurrences do take place in her fiction—people do suffer—over the whole is a sheen of unreality; each novel and story has a happy ending. Her principal characters are young girls (much, one suspects, like Abbott herself): audacious, high-strung, terribly talkative, and full of unsettling demands. Her male characters are usually quiet, strong, sturdy, and inured to patient suffering. Abbott’s unique style gives the effect of breathlessness, as of a child trying to describe some deeply felt experience. Apparently aiming for spontaneity and originality, she too often falls into distressing triviality and banality; occasionally the reader feels that Abbott is lapsing into baby talk. Sometimes she seems almost manic in her hectic gaiety; imagery is often startling, and always vivid. Though critics spoke of Abbott’s work as ‘‘charming,’’ they found the charm often forced, and emphasized the improbability and unreality of plot and characters. One reviewer summed up the matter succinctly: ‘‘Miss Abbott has an original and sprightly method—but she overdoes it. Her apparent dislike of the conventional and tame lead her to exaggerate her own virtues into sensationalism.’’

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—ABIGAIL ANN HAMBLEN

ABEL, Annie Heloise Born 18 February 1873, Fernhurst, Sussex, England; died 14 March 1947, Aberdeen, Washington Daughter of George and Amelia Anne Hogben Abel; married George Cockburn Henderson, 1922 Annie Abel’s family emigrated to Salina, Kansas, in 1884, and she went on to attain literary prominence as an authority on American Indian history. Her master’s thesis was ‘‘Indian Reservations in Kansas and the Extinguishment of their Title (1902).’’ Her doctoral dissertation, ‘‘The History of Events Resulting in Indian Consolidation West of the Mississippi,’’ won the American Historical Association’s Justin Winsor Prize in 1906 and was published in the Annual Report of that year. Abel’s major work was the three-volume study, The Slaveholding Indians, the first of which was The American Indian as Slaveholder and Secessionist: An Omitted Chapter in the Diplomatic History of the Confederacy (1915). In Abel’s view, though there was slaveholding among Indian tribes, only the Choctaw and Chickasaw were drawn to the Confederacy because of concerns about slavery. The South, out of its own needs, notably strategic concern for territorial solidarity, offered a number of concessions. Most significant perhaps were Confederate


guarantees of criminal and civil rights. The South also offered to give Indians control of their own trade, but that offer was later rescinded. Through General Albert Pike, the Confederacy made its approaches to the Western tribes, and his wartime disaffection with the Confederacy over its betrayal of promises to the Indians would prove costly to the South. Despite Southern concessions, Abel noted, the Indians ‘‘actually fought on both sides and for the same motives and impulses as whites.’’ In her view, it was the failure of the U.S. government to provide the promised protection for the Southern Indians which led them to ally with the Confederacy. From first to last, she maintained, military conditions and events determined political ones. In the next two volumes, The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War (1919) and The American Indian Under Reconstruction (1925), Abel traced the tragic consequences of Indian involvement in the sectional strife. The alliance with the Confederacy proved ‘‘most unstable’’ as the relatively few well-intentioned men in Richmond were ‘‘checkmated’’ by the men west of the Mississippi. After General Pike lost his command, white abuses proliferated and the ‘‘grossest corruption’’ ensued. The North showed no concern for Indian rights whatsoever and the Unionist mishandling of refugee problems and military operations proved especially costly. But the final tragedy still awaited the Indians in the Reconstruction era. With the new 1866 boundary settlements, Indians found their boundaries had ceased to be ‘‘interdicted lines.’’ First the non-Southern civilized tribes, then the uncivilized tribes and white settlers breeched the lines, and finally, the Indians could not withstand railroad pressures. The Reconstruction treaties, Abel concluded, ‘‘really meant not amnesty but confiscation of rights.’’ Her work also included ‘‘Proposals for an Indian State, 1778-1878,’’ a study published in the 1907 Annual Report of the American Historical Association. In it Abel traced the history of the idea of an Indian state from Jefferson’s time to the idea’s final demise with the admission of Oklahoma as a state. She also investigated problems of early-19th-century westward expansion. This work involved primarily the editing of letters and journals. Throughout her work Abel proves to be both an effective researcher and a perceptive scholar who wrote sympathetically about problems the Indians encountered. Although she occasionally wrote in a paternalistic or romantic tone, she is essentially an objective historian. Her English background, she noted, freed her from sectional attachments in dealing with Civil War issues. And she could likewise appraise with detachment the conflict between Indian claims and American expansionist urges. Her work is marked with a sense of the tragedy that befell the Indians, but this sense did not obscure her judgement. If, in her final view, the fate of the Indians was determined by white greed and power, she also recognized the part which the Indians’ ‘‘inability to learn from experience’’ played in the final outcome. The breadth of her research and her capacity for informed, detached judgement gave her work its strength and power.

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OTHER WORKS: Brief Guide to Points of Historical Interest in Baltimore City (1908). Proposals for an Indian State, 1778-1878 (1909). The Official Correspondence of James S. Calhoun (ed. by Abel, 1915). A New Lewis and Clark Map (1916). A Sidelight on Anglo-American Relations 1839-1858 (ed. by Abel with F. J. Klingsberg, 1927). Chardon’s Journal at Fort Clark, 1834-39 (ed. by Abel, 1932). Tabeau’s Narrative of Loisel’s Expedition to the Upper Missouri (ed. by Abel, 1939).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Notable American Women, 1607-1950, E. T. James et al., eds. (article by F. Prucha, 1971). Other references: AHR (July 1947). ANB (1999).Mississippi Valley Historical Review (March 1916, March 1920). Yale University Obituary Record of Graduates (1946-47). —INZER BYERS

ACKER, Kathy Born 18 April 1947, New York, New York Daughter of Donald and Claire Weill Lehman; married Robert Acker, 1966 (divorced); Peter Gordon, 1976 (divorced) Often referred to as a punk and, later, a postmodern writer, Kathy Acker is actively involved in the construction of new myths by which to live. Like many of the artists and writers who have influenced her work, she does not draw easy distinctions between life and art, sometimes consciously making up contradicting stories about her past. In this way, Acker becomes as much of a literary construct as any of her characters. The daughter of wealthy Jewish parents who disowned her, Acker grew up in Manhattan where she wrote poetry from an early age and read voraciously. She was so attached to her books she sometimes performed ceremonies in which she married them. She received a B.A. from the University of California, San Diego in 1968, having transferred there from Brandeis two years earlier. She also completed two years of graduate work at New York University and City University of New York, studying English, classics, and philosophy. After Blood and Guts in High School (1984) sold well in England, she moved to London for several years, finding it more supportive of writers than New York. Subsequently, she moved to San Francisco, where she taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. Acker’s influences are many and include photographers, filmmakers, and artists. Having grown up in New York’s postBeat art world, it is those writers and poets who had the strongest influence on the early shaping of her sensibility. The explorations of memory and the ‘‘madeness’’ of language through formal styles such as repetition, used in the work of Black Mountain

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poets like Charles Olson, Jerry Rothenberg, and David Antin, and Beats like Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, appear in much of Acker’s writing. Her first privately published book, Politics (1972), came out of her experience working in sex shows on 42nd Street—something of a ‘‘test’’ of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Since then Acker’s work has always had an important political edge. Because labels tend to diffuse that edge, she rejects words like ‘‘experimental’’ to describe her work. Even so, Acker is an experimental writer, in what has become the conventional understanding of the term. She is perhaps best known, and least understood, for her extensive formal use of plagiarism. To call attention to the already appropriated status of their images and to her refusal or inability to partake in similar, patriarchally determined productions, Acker literally copies from a number of mostly Western, classic literary texts (Freud, Genet, de Sade, Cervantes, Twain). Not a response to a Barthian understanding of the diminished possibilities of literature in its postmodern state of exhaustion, instead Acker’s ‘‘plagiarism’’ critiques and rewrites Western cultural myths in ways that consciously disclaim any pretension to originality or mastery. In this respect it can also be recognized as a survival strategy in a world where master narratives of freedom and truth have been exposed as such, leaving these appropriated acts the only ones available. Although often criticized by feminists for the violent and pornographic elements of her novels, Acker is clearly involved in a project to explore the conditions of living in a society that depends on the economic and sexual dependence of some of its members, including women. Her main characters, who are often on some sort of quest, are always outside of the mainstream; they are would-be pirates, cyborgs, or sex-show workers. In this sense, Acker’s feminist sensibility is evident in most of her writing. Her most explicitly feminist novel is probably Don Quixote (1986), in which Acker refigures the title character as a contemporary woman on a search for love. The obstacles she encounters are historical, mythical, and literary patriarchal figures (Christ, Machiavelli, Richard Nixon). Acker carries out the examinations of power structures and relations on both thematic and formal levels. Her writing occasionally resembles that of Gertrude Stein in its careful and consistent attention to the material qualities of language and the possibilities they provide. Like Stein too, Acker connects these with the materiality of the body, going a step further and, as Ellen G. Friedman notes, locating the body itself as a potential ‘‘site of revolution.’’ In Empire of the Senseless (1988) she looks to tattoos, a material writing on the body, as a possibility of controlling the means of sign production and self-representation. Pussy, King of the Pirates (1995) drew upon the same themes evident throughout Acker’s previous body of work. Inspired by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, the book incorporates references ranging from Antigone to Newt Gingrich, features a chameleon like-first-person narrator, and includes graphic descriptions of menstruation, incest, and sex. The New York Times

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Book Review noted that, in Pussy, Acker ‘‘engages in some of her favorite pastimes: decoding language, debunking culture, deconstructing (if that’s the right word) gender (that’s not the right word).’’ Publishers Weekly wrote of Pussy: ‘‘Acker writes a deliberately affectless, deadpan prose, rendering both the absurd and the disturbing. . .with a declarative nonchalance. Like Acker’s other work, this campy and enigmatic novel is self-consciously provocative as she detonates her battery of literary and sexual references in order to illuminate themes of masochism and rebellion—but it’s also often funny and invariably intelligent.’’ When an interviewer in 1996 asked Acker why she writes so many sex scenes, often graphic enough to be nearly pornographic, she said, ‘‘I’m sure my privileged background has something to do with it, and the fact that my first jobs were in the sex industry. I think I see the world through a sexual lens, like Genet. The idea that you exist to please men—that is almost relentlessly my subject.’’ In 1997 Acker published Bodies of Work, a series of essays on topics ranging from fine arts, language, and literature to gender, politics, and postmodernism. In her preface she advises her audience to avoid reading the essays in the book. Since fiction allows more freedom than this form, she says, she questions this volume’s content. Yet reviewers called the essays—the structure of which range from conventional to pure description—compelling. OTHER WORKS: I Don’t Expect You’ll Do the Same, by Clay Fear (1974). I Dreamt I Became a Nymphomaniac! Imagining (1974). The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec (1975). The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by the Black Tarantula (1975). Persian Poems (1978). New York City in 1979 (1981). Great Expectations (1982). Hello, I’m Erica Jong (1982). Algeria: A Series of Invocations because Nothing Else Works (1984). Literal Madness: Kathy Goes to Haiti; My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini; Florida (1988). In Memoriam to Identity (1990). Hannibal Lecter, My Father (1991). Portrait of the Eye: Three Novels (reprint, 1992). My Mother: Demonology (1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dick, L., ‘‘Feminism, Writing, Postmodernism,’’ in From My Guy to Sci-fi: Genre and Women’s Writing in the Postmodern World, H. Carr, ed. (1989). Hulley, K., ‘‘Transgressing Genre: Kathy Acker’s Intertext,’’ in Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction, P. O’Donnell and R. Davis, eds. (1989). McCaffery, L., ‘‘The Artists of Hell: Kathy Acker and ‘Punk’ Aesthetics,’’ in Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction, E. G. Friedman and M. Fuchs, eds. (1989). Reference Works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature (1991). Other references: Booklist (15 Dec. 1997). NYTBR (3 Mar. 1996). PW (16 Oct. 1995, 11 Dec. 1995). Review of Contemporary Fiction 9 (Fall 1989). —MONICA DORENKAMP, UPDATED BY KAREN RAUGUST


ADAMS

ADAMS, Abigail Smith

and vivid sense of life suffer from her grandson’s well-meant editing.

Born 11 November 1744, Weymouth, Massachusetts; died 28 October 1818, Quincy, Massachusetts Daughter of William and Elizabeth Quincy Smith; married John Adams, 1764; children: five

The Book of Abigail and John (1975, eds. L. H. Butterfield et al.) is limited to what its editors consider the best letters of John and Abigail, spanning the years of their courtship in 1762 and her arrival in London in 1784. In them, Adams’ affectionate nature is expressed freely. Her loneliness and pride in herself and in her husband is described, too: ‘‘I miss my partner, and find myself uneaquuil [sic] to the cares which fall upon me; . . . I hope in time to have the Reputation of being as good a Farmeress as my partner has of being a good Statesman.’’

Abigail Adams grew up as part of three tightly knit families: that of her parents, where she acquired her Puritan faith, humor, and skills in home and business management; that of her maternal grandparents, where she learned social poise and a love of politics; and that of her paternal uncle, whose wife may have been Adams’ model as a letter writer. Adams’ formal education was virtually nonexistent, due to her poor health. Fortunately, however, she was surrounded by literate adults who guided her studies that ranged from Plato, Locke, and Burke, to the Bible. She and John Adams were married by her father in Weymouth. In the first eight years of marriage, Adams bore five children: Abigail, John Quincy, Susanna (died at fourteen months), Charles, and Thomas Boylston. In 1784, Adams and her daughter joined her husband and grandfather in Europe. Horrified at first by the pleasure-seeking life of Paris, she later grew more understanding and even learned to love the theater, though she wrote: ‘‘I do not feel myself captivated either with the Manners or politicks [sic] of Europe.’’ John became vice-president in 1789 and president in 1797, but Adams’ health began to fail in 1790, and she returned to Quincy where she spent most of her time during John’s years as president. She did go to Washington to open the White House, but her increasingly poor health forced her back to Quincy shortly before John completed his presidency. She died in Quincy on 28 October 1818. Adams’ claim to literary fame rests upon the hundreds of letters picturing her times in warmly human terms. John was her favorite correspondent, but she wrote extensively to her large family and to a wide circle beyond, including such intellectuals as Mercy Otis Warren and Thomas Jefferson. In New Letters of Abigail Adams (1947), editor Stewart Mitchell printed her correspondence to her older sister, Mary Cranch. To Mary more than anyone else, Adams wrote of ‘‘women’s concerns’’—smallpox and fevers, incompetent servants, inflation, poor food, bad weather, and the deplorable state the White House was in when she arrived to become its first mistress. Mitchell’s publication corrects the bowdlerized portrait of Adams rendered by her Victorian grandson, Charles Francis Adams. His Letters of Mrs. Adams, the Wife of John Adams (2 vols., 1840-41) and Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife Abigail Adams During the Revolution (1876) not only censor her passionate declarations of love to John, but also delete much from her personal accounts of pregnancies and childbirth, the dysentery epidemic of 1775, and smallpox inoculations. Adams’ personality

Adams never hesitated to address herself to political matters. Two issues which drew strong reaction from her were slavery and women’s rights. Writing to John in 1774, she wished ‘‘most sincerely there was not a slave in the province.’’ Concerning women’s rights, Adams wrote early in 1776 the letter for which she is most famous: ‘‘[A]nd by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous to them than your ancestors.’’ Undaunted by John’s reply denying her petition and charging her with being ‘‘saucy,’’ she retorted, ‘‘I can not say that I think you very generous to the Ladies, for whilst you are proclaiming peace and good will to Men, Emancipating all Nations, you insist upon retaining absolute power over Wives.’’ Never dull, always animated, Adams’ letters are more like conversations than compositions. Her style is easy, natural, and very oral in manner. Her spelling is phonetic, underscoring the verbal nature of her writing, and her punctuation follows natural pauses rather than written conventions. Her letters tell us how it felt to live through the American Revolution and what it was like to be a New England Puritan in Europe in the late-18th century. More than that, however, they help us understand the creative force we call the ‘‘Puritan ethic.’’ Adams has long been credited with a unique place in history as wife of the second president and mother of the sixth, but she also deserves attention as a literary and historic figure in her own right.

OTHER WORKS: Adams Family Correspondence (eds., L. H. Butterfield et al., 4 vols. 1963-1973).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: American First Ladies: Their Lives and Legacy (1996). Bobbe, D., Abigail Adams, the Second First Lady (1929). Bradford, G., Portraits of American Women (1919). Gordon, L., From Lady Washington to Mrs. Cleveland (1889). Ketcham, R. L., ‘‘The Puritan Ethic in the Revolutionary Era: Abigail Adams and Thomas Jefferson,’’ in ‘‘Remember the Ladies:’’ New Perspectives on Women in American History, George, C. V. R., ed. (1975). Hole, J. and E. Levine, ‘‘The Adams Letters of Abigail & John Adams—Historical Precedent: Nineteenth Century Feminists,’’ in Issues in Feminism: An Introduction to Women’s

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Studies (1995). Minningerode, M., Some American Ladies: Seven Informal Biographies (1926). Richards, L. E. Abigail Adams and Her Times (1936). Shepherd, J., The Adams Chronicles: Four Generations of Greatness (1975). Stone, I., Those Who Love (1965). Whitney, J., Abigail Adams (1949). Other references: ScribM (Jan. 1930). Biography of the First Ladies of the United States (Phoenix Multimedia, 1998). —BILLIE W. ETHERIDGE

ADAMS, Alice Born 14 August 1926, Fredericksburg, Virginia; died 27 May 1999 Daughter of Nicholson Barney and Agatha Erskine Boyd Adams; married Mark Linenthal, Jr., 1946 (divorced 1958); children: Peter Adams Linenthal The only child of Nicholson, a Spanish professor, and Agatha Adams, a ‘‘failed’’ writer, Alice Adams wrote poetry as a child hoping that if she were a writer, her mother would ‘‘like’’ her. Raised in a ‘‘semi-intellectual atmosphere’’ that was ‘‘materially comfortable but emotionally unsatisfying,’’ Adams graduated from high school at the age of fifteen and from Radcliffe College in 1946. Her recurring themes of change, economic independence, and survival, which can often be paralleled to events in her life, earn her both praise and criticism. At the end of a writing course at Radcliffe, Adams’ professor advised her to ‘‘get married and forget’’ writing. Following his prescription, she married within a year, spending the next 12 years in the expected 1950s domestic role. For the first year she lived in Paris where her husband studied at the Sorbonne (the setting of her first published story, ‘‘Winter Rain,’’ 1959). In 1948 the couple moved to California and after the birth of her son, Adams found little time for writing. Adams’ first novel, Careless Love, appeared in 1966. It satirizes the 1960s San Francisco dating scene in a remotely autobiographical tale about a newly divorced woman. Often widowed or divorced, Adams’ characters not only survive changes but transcend them, ultimately gaining economic independence and experiencing growth—and this gain becomes an integral part of Adams’ plots. Having been disinherited by her father when he left their family home to her stepmother, and having spent the years following her divorce in constant struggle with ‘‘part-time secretarial jobs’’ Adams has had firsthand knowledge of the importance of economic independence. In the novels following Careless Love, Adams’ maturity and focus as a writer become increasingly evident in the complexity of her female protagonists. Usually well-educated, upper-middle class female visual artists who are enacting a journey to womanhood, the characters are often developed through the use of parenthetical comments by an omniscient narrator. In Adams’ second novel, Families and Survivors (1975), Louisa Calloway undergoes many changes before finding happiness in a second marriage and realizing her talent as a painter. In Listening to Billie

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(1978) Eliza Quarles attains a sense of freedom as a poet; in Rich Rewards (1980) Daphne Matthiesen earns respect as a self-supporting interior decorator; in Superior Women (1985) Megan Greene, a financially successful publisher, cosponsors a temporary haven for Atlanta’s homeless women. Second Chances (1988) again explores Adams’ trademark themes while examining ‘‘people’s changing expectations of aging.’’ In Caroline’s Daughters (1991) the vicissitudes of the five daughters’ lives ‘‘intrude’’ into Caroline’s long-awaited contented space, but Caroline endures and survives. Adams’ stories appeared in numerous periodicals, including the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and Paris Review, and she published several short-story collections. Beautiful Girl (1979) contains her first O. Henry award-winning story ‘‘A Gift of Grass.’’ The women in the stories in To See You Again (1982) abide by an Adams’ ‘‘code’’: ‘‘She behaves well, even under emotional stress. She does not make scenes, does not cry in public, rarely cries alone.’’ In Return Trips (1985) as women recall or revisit people who ‘‘shaped their lives’’ they recognize the irreversible and continuing effects of past events. The stories in After You’ve Gone (1989) are about loss: some characters are devastated by it; most recover from it, and some are even freed by it. Seeing marriage as ‘‘primarily concerned with propers,’’ Adams lived in San Francisco with interior designer Robert McNie beginning in 1964, and she taught at the University of California at Davis as well as at Berkeley and Stanford. The 1982 recipient of the O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achievement, Adams has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and in all but one edition of Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards from 1971 to 1989. In the 1990s Adams continued her prolific output, producing a book approximately every two years. In A Southern Exposure (1995) Adams travels back to her native South and back in time— 1939—to create one of her characteristic group novels. A Connecticut family, the Bairds, flee their former lives, settling in North Carolina. How they change as a result of their move is somewhat secondary to the social satire Adams has set up, as the Yankees, the outsiders, observe the mores of the prewar, pre-Civil Rights South. Almost Perfect (1993) and Medicine Men (1997) are set on more familiar ground. Novels of manners, they continue Adams’ examination of the affluent, well-educated milieu of San Francisco, focusing on the negotiation of power between men and women. Almost Perfect’s Stella Blake initially believes she’s found a dream relationship, her instability and going-nowhere career buoyed by her alliance with the successful, charismatic Richard Fallon. The balance shifts dramatically, however, as Richard experiences a precipitous descent and Stella’s fortunes rise both professionally and emotionally; she not only survives her relationship with him, but heals old emotional wounds. The cards are initially stacked in favor of the men of Medicine Men as well. When Molly Bonner, the protagonist, is diagnosed as having a brain tumor she feels compelled to rely on the expertise of her arrogant physicians and her bossy new


doctor—lover. The novel portrays the passivity, infantalization, and entrapment of a patient overwhelmed by the medical establishment. It also reveals that the conduct expected of a good patient—well-behaved, uncomplaining, compliant—is not much different from that expected of a well woman in Adams’ world. Adams remained devoted to the short story. She edited the Best American Short Stories in 1991 and continued to write and publish widely in this form. Another collection, The Last Lovely City appeared in 1999. Though her characters continue in large part to be from a privileged, protected class, her stories edged into a darker, melancholy realm as the characters are made vulnerable by age, dealing with the disquieting inevitabilities of loss, diminished beauty, illness, and death. In light of these changes and the precariousness of romantic attachments, friendships are portrayed with increasing significance; the old friend especially is someone to be treasured. OTHER WORKS: Mexico: Some Travels and Some Travelers There (1990). ‘‘A Very Nice Dog,’’ in Southwest Review (Spring 1997). After the War (2000). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Buffington, R., ‘‘Comedy, Human; Variety, Southern,’’ in Sewanee Review (Summer 1996). Karamcheti, I., ‘‘Troubled in Paradise,’’ in WRB (1 Sept.1997). Other references: BL (19 Aug.1995). CA 81-84 (1979). CANR 26 (1989). CBY (1989). CLC 46 (1988). DLBY (1986).KR (15 Dec. 1988). MTCW (1991). NYT 27 May 1999. NYTBR (May 1988, Apr. 1991, Oct. 1995, Apr. 1997). Time (27 May 1999). World Literature Today (Spring 1994). —PHYLLIS S. GLEASON, UPDATED BY VALERIE VOGRIN

ADAMS, Hannah Born 2 October 1755, Medfield, Massachusetts; died 15 December 1831, Brookline, Massachusetts Daughter of Thomas and Eleanor Clark Adams The second of five children, Hannah Adams was considered too frail to attend public school and was educated at home. Discovering she was unable to support herself at needlework, Adams undertook a literary career. Although excessively modest and timid, she was the first and for many years the only woman permitted to use the Boston Atheneum. Her learning was prodigious, and while her books were successful, poor business arrangements limited the income she derived from them. The research into religious sects that Adams had begun for her own edification became, in 1784, her first published volume, the Alphabetical Compendium of the Various Sects Which Have Appeared from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Present Day. In its objectivity, it represented a major improvement over

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existing works on the subject, and although it contains some misinformation due to inaccurate sources, the scope of its coverage is impressive. Edited and retitled for later editions, it includes a dictionary listing of the separate Christian sects, a survey of the beliefs of non-Christian groups, and a geographical breakdown of world religions. For her Summary History of New England (1799), Adams undertook serious primary research, delving into state archives and old newspapers, causing serious injury to her eyesight. The material, which covers events from the sailing of the Mayflower through the adoption of the Federal Constitution, is presented in a clear, straightforward manner with occasional attempts to recreate particularly affecting scenes such as the farewell of the Pilgrims from Holland. The Abridgement of the History of New England for the Use of Young People (1807) involved a protracted controversy with Dr. Jedidiah Morse over unfair competition, eventually resolved in Adams’ favor. In revising her History, Adams edited it for greater smoothness and clarity, but simplified neither the language nor the thought. She added a paragraph at the end of each chapter to point up the moral lesson to be learned from the event. While working on the Abridgement, Adams published The Truth and Excellence of the Christian Religion Exhibited (1804), surveying the support which laymen had given to their religion since the 17th century. Divided into two parts, it first presents brief biographies of 60 men, showing how their lives exemplified the Christian spirit. The second part provides excerpts listed under various kinds of ‘‘Evidence in Favor of Revealed Religion.’’ Most of the material was drawn from the writings of those covered in the first section, but it also includes selections by the Marchioness de Dillery, Hannah More, and a Mrs. West. Adams’ The History of the Jews from the Destruction of Jerusalem to the Present Time (1812) represented one of the first attempts to relate their story sympathetically, a story which Adams described as a ‘‘tedious succession of oppression and persecution.’’ Written to encourage efforts to convert the Jews, her discussion of the early period stresses its substantiation of ‘‘our Savior’s prediction’’ of their fate. Not completely free from bias, Adams nevertheless carefully recorded the confiscatory taxes, the mass murders, and the expulsions suffered by the Jews. Adams was probably the first professional woman writer in America, pursuing her career despite the knowledge that the ‘‘penalties and discouragements attending authors in general fall upon women with double weight.’’ Although most discussions of Adams adopt her own designation of herself as a ‘‘compiler,’’ she was, in fact, a fine historian whose meticulous research included examination of primary materials when available, extraordinarily wide reading of secondary sources, and a remarkable objectivity. Her histories are no longer relevant, but her contributions to historiography deserve attention. OTHER WORKS: A Narrative of the Controversy Between the Rev. Jedidiah Morse, D.D., and the Author (1814). A Concise Account of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the

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Jews (1816). Letters on the Gospels (1824). Memoir of Hannah Adams (ed. by J. Tuckerman, 1832). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brooks, V. W., The Flowering of New England (1936). Other references: The Dedham Historical Register (July 1896). The New England Galaxy (Spring 1971). New England Magazine (May 1894). ANR (1999). —CAROL B. SCHOEN

ADAMS, Harriet Stratemeyer Born 3 December 1892, Newark, New Jersey; died 1981 Wrote under: Victor Appleton II, May Hollis Barton, Franklin W. Dixon, Laura Lee Hope, Carolyn Keene, Ann Sheldon, Helen Louise Thorndyke Daugther of Edward and Magdalene Van Camp Stratemeyer; married Russell Vroom Adams, 1915; children: two daughters Better known under a variety of pen names, Harriet Stratemeyer Adams may well be the most prolific woman writer of all time. Author of the perennially popular Nancy Drew mysteries for young girls and the equally popular Hardy Boys and Tom Swift, Jr., series for young boys, she also wrote numerous volumes in the Bobbsey Twins, Honey Bunch, and Dana Girls series. All of these, along with the famous Rover boys, were originated by her father who founded the Stratemeyer Syndicate in 1901. A ‘‘writing factory’’ located in Maplewood, New Jersey, it still turns out the most successful series books ever written for American youngsters roughly eight to 14 years of age. The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series alone sell 16,000,000 copies a year. When he died in 1930, Stratemeyer left to his daughters, Harriet and Edna, the job of keeping up the 17 sets of series then in print. Edna remained in the business for 12 years; Harriet remained a senior partner well into her 80s, working with three junior partners to update earlier titles to create new volumes. Adams herself wrote nearly 200 volumes, including most of the titles in the Nancy Drew series, along with rewrites of the first three originated by her father: the young sleuth’s blue roadster with running boards had to be replaced, as well as outdated hair styles and various dialects which the modern reader would find offensive. Characters produced by the Stratemeyer Factory are either good or bad because, Adams maintained, mixed characters don’t interest children. Plots are spun according to a strict formula guaranteed to satisfy adolescent fantasy: action and suspense packed into 20 cliffhanging chapters. Only eighteen years of age, Nancy Drew is omniscient and omnipotent, solving mysteries that baffle adults, professional detectives, and the well-intentioned police who, however hard they try, are never as quick-thinking and fast-acting as Nancy.

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A 1914 graduate of Wellesley College, an English major with deep interests in religion, music, science, and archeology (her favorite Nancy Drew, The Clue in the Crossword Cipher, is based on ‘‘astounding’’ archeological discoveries and deductions among the Inca ruins), Adams was an active alumna and a 1978 winner of the Alumnae Achievement Award. Wellesley’s motto, ‘‘Non Ministrari Sed Ministrare’’ (not to be ministered unto but to minister), had been Adams’s own guiding principle and the lesson she hoped to teach young readers who gathered in schools and libraries all over the country to hear her speak. ‘‘Don’t be a gimme, gimme kind of person,’’ she told them in an amusingly loose translation of the Latin, ‘‘Do something yourself to help other people.’’ Adams traveled widely (South America, Hawaii, Africa, the Orient), using the foreign settings to provide ‘‘authentic backgrounds’’ for her stories, especially for the Nancy Drews. Indeed, Nancy—whom she regarded as ‘‘a third lovely daughter’’ (in addition to her two real-life daughters)— was rarely out of Adams’ thoughts when she took a trip. Adams’ books have been translated into more than a dozen languages and, although considered nonliterary, are now staples in most children’s libraries. In late 1977 the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series were adapted for television (Nancy Drew films had been made in the 1930s), although Adams did not write the scripts. She did, however, require the television programs to observe the same high standards as the books: no profanity, no sex (as a concession to the new morality, however, Nancy’s boyfriend Ned is now allowed to give her a quick goodbye hug and kiss), no extreme violence (a villain’s moderately heavy blow on the head which temporarily renders Nancy unconscious is not considered ‘‘extreme’’), no racism, and no ‘‘religious confrontations.’’ Adams received public recognition in the late 1970s such as the 1978 Certificate of Appreciation from the New Jersey Congress of Parents and Teachers and, in the same year, honorary doctorate degrees from Kean and Upsala Colleges in New Jersey. To encourage more serious study and writing of children’s books, Adams endowed a chair at Wellesley to be known as the Harriet Stratemeyer Adams Professor in Juvenile Literature. Continuing to work nearly to the end of her life, Adams died in 1981. OTHER WORKS: As Victor Appleton II, The Tom Swift, Jr., Series (21 titles, 1935-1972). Including: Tom Swift and His Planet Stone (1935), Tom Swift and His Giant Robot (1954), Tom Swift and the Spectromarine Selector (1960), Tom Swift and the Visitor from Planet X (1972). As May Hollis Barton, The Barton Books for Girls Series (15 titles, 1931-1950). Including: Sallie’s Test of Skill (1931), Virginia’s Ventures (1932). As Franklin W. Dixon, The Hardy Boys Series (20 titles, 1934-1973). Including: The Mark on the Door (1934), The Clue in the Embers (1955), The Mystery of the Aztec Warrior (1964), The Mystery at Devil’s Paw (1973). As Laura Lee Hope, The Bobbsey Twins Series (15 titles, 1940-1967). Including: The Bobbsey Twins in the Land of Cotton


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(1940). The Bobbsey Twins on a Bicycle Trip (1955). The Bobbsey Twins and the Cedar Camp Mystery (1967). As Carolyn Keene, The Dana Girls Series (32 titles, 1934-1978). Including: By the Light of the Study Lamp (1934), Secret of the Swiss Chalet (1958), The Phantom Surfer (1968), The Curious Coronation (1976), Mountain Peak Mystery (1978). The Nancy Drew Mystery Series (56 titles, 1930-1978). Including: Secret of the Old Clock (1930), The Hidden Staircase (1959), The Mystery of the Fire Dragon (1961), The Mysterious Mannequin (1970), The Nancy Drew Cookbook: Clues to Good Cooking (1973), The Mystery of Crocodile Island (1978). As Ann Sheldon, The Linda Craig Series (4 titles, 1960-1966). Including: Linda Craig and the Mystery in Mexico (1964). As Helen Louise Thorndyke, The Honey Bunch Series (7 titles, 1945-1955). Including: Her First Trip to a Lighthouse (1949), Her First Trip to Reindeer Farm (1953).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Berryman, M. A., ‘‘Harriet Stratemeyer Adams & the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories: Feminist Gender Tales 1930-1990, The Construction and Destruction of a Heroine,’’ (thesis, 1990). Keene, C., ‘‘Nancy Drew’’ in The Great Detectives, Penzler, O., ed. (1978). Prager, A., Rascals at Large, or, The Clue in the Old Nostalgia (1971). Reference works: ANB (1999). CA (1968). Other references: Boston Globe (6 Jan. 1976). Family Circle (Aug. 1978). NYT (27 March 1977). NYHT (14 April 1946). People (14 May 1977). TV Guide (25 June 1977). WSJ (15 Jan. 1975). The Secret of Nancy Drew (film, 1982). —JACQUELINE BERKE

ADAMS, Léonie Fuller Born 9 December 1899, Brooklyn, New York; died 27 January 1988 Daughter of Charles F. and Henrietta Rozier Adams; married William Troy, 1933 Léonie Fuller Adams’ father taught her to be an agnostic and to love poetry. From her mother, she inherited a sense of mystery, primitivism, and faith that led eventually to her joining the Roman Catholic church. Her early life, she felt, was lonely, although she tended to develop deep, mystical relationships with school friends. Both teachers and parents encouraged Adams to write; by a fairly early age she had composed a great deal of poetry. At Barnard College, from which she graduated in 1922, Adams continued her study of composition and poetry. Friends and professors praised her writing and one, Marian Smith, passed on some of Adams’ poems to Louis Untermeyer, who arranged to have them published. For a time after graduation, Adams lived and wrote in New York City and, in 1928 she received a two-year Guggenheim fellowship for study in Europe. She then taught in various capacities at several American colleges and universities,

including New York University (1930-32, 1951-52), Bennington (1935-37, 1942-45), and Columbia (1947-68). She also received a Fulbright Fellowship for teaching in France (1955-56) and from 1948-49 was a consultant to the Library of Congress. She has served on numerous boards and councils for the arts and has received several awards for her writing. Adams’ first book of poetry, Those Not Elect (1925), contains poems from her undergraduate days at Barnard. For the most part, they optimistically celebrate natural mysteries and joyous life. Most critics see reflected in these poems and in Adams’ later work her interest in the Elizabethan and the metaphysical poets. High Falcon (1929, reprinted in 1983) Adams’ second volume, reveals her special connection with Louise Bogan, with whom she later shared the Bollingen Prize (1954). Her focus on natural imagery is especially sharp in High Falcon and has been fruitfully compared to poetry of the metaphysics. Poems: A Selection, appeared in 1954 (reprinted in 1959) and was described by Wallace Fowlie in Commonweal as ‘‘a work of modest proportions but one of high significance in the history of American letters.’’ Poems contains both a sampling from earlier volumes as well as new poems as rich and full as her earlier work. In 1940, Adams had written in Fred B. Millett’s Contemporary American Authors, ‘‘I have been silent a long time because I am now grappling with the limitations of the lyric.’’ Poems: A Selection, published 14 years later, proved that in the struggle, Adams—and her readers—eventually won. OTHER WORKS: Midsummer (1929). This Measure (1933). Lyrics of François Villon (edited and translated by Adams, 1933). Her Lullaby (1947). Léonie Adams Reading Her Poems (audio recording, 1947). Léonie Adams Reading Her Poems in the Recording Laboratory (audio recording, 1949). Léonie Adams Reading Her Poems in the Coolidge Auditorium (audio recording, 1949). Léonie Adams Reading Her Poems in New York City (audio recording, 1951). Enjoyment of Poetry: Survival of the Lyric (audio recording, 1963). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bogan, L., Achievement in American Poetry (1950). Bonacci, B. B., ‘‘Image and Idea in the Poetry of Léonie Adams’’ (dissertation, 1977). Gregory, H., and M. Zaturenska, A History of American Poetry, 1900-1940 (1969). Ruihley, G. R., ed., An Anthology of Great U.S. Women Poets, 1850-1990: Temples and Palaces (1997). Tuthill, S., ed., Laurels: Eight Women Poets (1998). Untermeyer, L., Modern American Poetry (1962). Reference works: Modern American Literature (1960-1969). Other references: CW (26 Nov. 1954). Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (March 1930). Kresh, P., ed., Allen Tate, Léonie Adams, Yvor Winters, Oscar Williams, and Langston Hughes Reading Their Poems (audio recording, 1970). Muriel Rukeyser, Howard Baker, Léonie Adams, [and] Janet Baker Reading Their Own Poems (audiocassette, 1969). —MARY BETH PRINGLE

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ADAMS

ADAMS, Louisa Catherine Johnson Born 12 February 1775, London, England; died 15 May 1852, Washington, D.C. Daughter of Joshua and Catherine Nuth Johnson; married John Quincy Adams, 1797 Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams was the second daughter of an Englishwoman and a Maryland merchant residing in London. During the American Revolution, Adams’ father, strongly proAmerican, moved to Nantes, France, where Adams became bilingual, a great asset in the diplomatic world in which she later moved. In 1783 the family returned to London and the Johnson home became a meeting place for many Americans in London. It was there that John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) met, courted, and married her in 1797. Much of the Adams’ life was spent in Europe at John Quincy’s diplomatic posts: Prussia (1797-1801), Russia (1809-1814), and Great Britain (1815-1817). John Quincy was also a U.S. senator, secretary of state, president, and member of the House of Representatives. Throughout her marriage Adams played a secondary role to her husband’s career, and her writings express the anger and frustration her subordinate role engendered. Although Adams wrote a number of works, only one has been published. Her unpublished writings can be read only on the microfilm edition of the Adams Papers. The first of Adams’ autobiographical works, Record of a Life or My Story (1825), is a detailed account of her childhood, courtship, and experiences in Prussia. Written for her children, the story is episodic and strongly stresses the idyllic quality of her childhood. Highly dramatic episodes are recounted in the greatest detail, and Adams is always at the center of attention. The description of her courtship emphasizes her feelings of inadequacy as the future wife of John Quincy Adams. Her extreme sensitivity to events and people, especially to her father, are most evident in these recollections. Ill health and struggles with her husband’s small salary made her life at the Prussian court difficult and she sorely missed the domestic warmth she had known as a child. Despite her extraordinary memory and talent for description, this is essentially a family memoir. Even events at the court are written about from a personal point of view; the wider world of politics and history are not included. In 1836 Adams wrote a dramatic and compelling history of a trip she and her seven-year-old son took in 1815. The Narrative of a Journey from St. Petersburg to Paris 1815, was published in 1903 by Scribner’s Magazine. Adams followed the route of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow through a countryside still recovering from the ravages of war, and as she approached Paris, Napoleon returned from exile, plunging all of France into further turmoil. Had it not been for Adams’ cool head and great courage, both she and her son might well have been killed. She wrote of the trip with great intensity and the narrative includes vivid descriptions of people and places; the self-centeredness of her other writings is absent here. Of all Adams’ works this is the one most deserving of a modern publication.

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Adams’ third memoir is The Adventures of a Nobody began in 1840. The title of this work aptly sums up her feelings about herself. The long narrative, in part diary entries, records her married life until 1812. Adams appears here as an appendage to her family who isn’t even in control of the domestic arrangements; all decisions concerning the upbringing of the children were being made by John Quincy. In sharp contrast to the picture she gives of her father, her husband is depicted as a cold and distant man. The details of life within the Adams family and at the Russian court are fascinating, but are unfortunately marred by a querulous tone. Adams seems to be trying to erase emotionally distressing episodes from her memory by sheer repetition. Adams kept a remarkable diary during the years 1818 to 1821 for her aged father-in-law, whom she dearly loved. During this time John Adams resided in Massachusetts, while Adams herself was in the midst of the Washington political and social scene. Her comments show her to have been a keen observer and possessor of a very sharp wit. The endless ‘‘visitings,’’ the importance of protocol, and the boredom of women’s restricted lives in the 19th century are vividly portrayed in this diary and Adams’ underused talents are never more in evidence. In spite of poor health during this period, she carried out her extensive social duties and coped as best she could with a very difficult family. Adams’ poems in both French and English are derivative and attract the reader by the sensitive feelings they portray rather than by originality of form or content. Several plays, written for family amusement, and a few prose compositions complete her works. None are of more than family interest. Adams lived, by her own admission, a tormented and frustrated life. She fiercely resented the self-absorbed, remote man with whom she lived, while at the same time admiring him for his patriotism. She thought herself a failure as a mother and a wife. She wrote, like so many other women in the 19th century, to relieve feelings too pressing to contain. Her position in the Adams family is absolutely crucial in understanding the succeeding generations of Adamses. Very little has been written about her and what was usually glosses over her life with platitudes. Adams deserves an honest and comprehensive biography. OTHER WORKS: Diary (22 Oct. 1812-15 Feb. 1814, The Adams Papers, Reel #264). Diary (24 Jan. 1819-25 Mar. 1819, Reel #264). Diary (19 Jul. 1821-19 Aug. 1821, Reel #266). Diary (17 Aug. 1821-27 Sept. 1821, Reel #267). Diary (12 Apr. 1843-28 Aug. 1843, Reel #270). Poems, dramatic compositions, prose reflections, a commonplace book, translations of poems and a prose composition can be found in The Adams Papers, Reels #264, 268, 270-74. BIBLIOGRAPHY: American First Ladies: Their Lives and Legacy (1996). Klapthor, M. B., Maryland’s First Ladies of the White House: Mrs. J. Quincy Adams (1825-1829), Mrs. Zachary Taylor (1849-1850) (1987). Minnergerode, M., Some American Ladies: Seven Informal Biographies (1926). Whitton, M. O., First First


ADDAMS

Ladies 1789-1865: A Study of the Lives of the Early Presidents (1926). Other references: ANB (1999). Biography of the First Ladies of the United States (film,1998). Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (April 1974). Louisa Catherine Johnson Adams: The Ambiguous Adventure of ‘a woman who was’ (dissertation, 1992). Louisa Katherine Johnson Adams: The Price of Ambition (1982). —JOAN R. CHALLINOR

ADDAMS, Jane Born 6 September 1860, Cedarville, Illinois; died 21 May 1935, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of John and Sarah Weber Addams Jane Addams attended Rockford Female Seminary, and, for one year, Woman’s Medical College in Philadelphia. She never married; the closest emotional ties over her lifetime were to her father and to a few women friends. Addams’ name is most often associated with Hull House, the renowned settlement she founded in 1889 in the immigrant slums of Chicago. Her experiences there formed the basis for her efforts, carried out on a local, national, and international scale, for social reform. She devoted herself to such causes as child labor legislation, women’s suffrage, educational reform, and world peace. She helped found the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and served as its president until her death. In 1931, she was co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Addams wrote ten books, countless articles, and lectured extensively. This presented to a wide audience her conviction that citizens of the new urban-industrial age must move beyond individualism toward a new social ethic. By the time she died in 1935, Addams had become one of the best known and most respected women of her time. Her first book, Democracy and Social Ethics (1902), is a perceptive analysis of the new industrial American society peopled by masses of immigrants and urban poor. In six essays adapted from earlier articles and lectures, Addams suggests that changes in industrial and household relations, in politics, education and organized charity, and in ways of understanding the role of women will be necessary if true democracy is to be extended successfully into the new age. Her view that women’s political and social roles should be expanded so women could become caretakers of the well-being and morality not just of their families, but of society at large, is typical of the viewpoint known as social feminism. Newer Ideals of Peace (1907) continues and expands Addams’ analysis, suggesting that as a social ethic of morality is put into practice, the need for war will disappear. The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909), Addams’ own favorite among her books, and A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil (1912), a study of

prostitution, are pioneering contributions to the field of urban sociology. Addams’ best known work is Twenty Years at Hull-House, with Autobiographical Notes (1910), the classic autobiography she published at age fifty. The book describes Hull House and its cultural, educational, political, and humanitarian activities, but its broader focus is the education of Addams herself. She was indebted to the thought or moral example of such diverse figures as John Ruskin, Abraham Lincoln, Leo Tolstoy, her friend John Dewey, and to the founders of the settlement house in London, known as Toynbee Hall. But she also learned from the ideas and problems of her immigrant neighbors, for she viewed Hull House not as a charitable mission to the downtrodden but as a forum where diverse nationalities and social classes could interact for the betterment of all. Like all autobiographies, Twenty Years at Hull-House is selective and stylized in its presentation of events. Addams writes lucidly and sometimes movingly, enlivening her narrative with anecdotal accounts of the people and situations she met in her Hull House work. She adopts the persona of a seeker rather than dispenser of enlightenment, but she writes with moral earnestness and naive optimism that justice and peace will be made to prevail. During the next two decades, Addams passed for a time beyond liberal social reform to positions which many regarded as radical and even seditious. She was a pacifist during World War I, an internationalist in the isolationist 1920s, a supporter of civil liberties when the prevailing mood was suppressive of dissent. Addams discusses her peace efforts, and the condemnation and self-doubt she suffered because of her unpopular views in Peace and Bread in Time of War (1922), and in The Second Twenty Years at Hull-House, September 1909 to September 1929, with a Record of a Growing World Consciousness (1930). The latter book is a disjointed but still interesting account of Addams’ continuing reform activities and of her view of the postwar years. It includes one of Addams’ favorite pieces: an analysis of a rumor (spread widely in 1913), that a devil baby resided at Hull House. Even before her death, Addams had become a legendary figure. Unfortunately, the image of her which survives is that of the do-gooder Saint Jane, the lady in long skirts who helped the poor. But Addams was a social reformer of far-ranging breadth and influence, a gifted writer, and a first-rate intellect. She was not so much an original thinker as a perceptive observer of the society around her, and an able synthesizer and popularizer of the ideas of the leading social theorists of her time. Addams’ work and writing helped make possible the liberal reforms of the Progressive Era and of the New Deal and helped arouse the social conscience of two generations of Americans. OTHER WORKS: The Women at The Hague (with E. Balch and A. Hamilton, 1915). The Long Road of Woman’s Memory (1916). The Excellent Becomes the Permanent (1932). My Friend, Julia Lathrop (1935). Jane Addams: A Centennial Reader (ed. E. C. Johnson, 1960). The Social Thought of Jane Addams (ed. C.

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AGASSIZ


Lasch, 1965). The Social Thought of Jane Addams 1997). Twenty Years at Hull-House, with Autobiographical Notes(1999).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brown, V., ‘‘Advocate for Democracy: Jane Addams & The Pullman Strike,’’ in The Pullman Strike & the Crisis of the 1890s: Essays on Labor & Politics (1999). Bryan, M. L. McCree et al, eds., The Jane Addams Papers: A Comprehensive Guide (1996). Commager, H. S., foreword to Jane Addams’ Twenty Years at Hull-House (1961 ed.). Conway, J., ‘‘Jane Addams: An American Heroine,’’ in Daedalus 93 (Spring 1964). Conway, J., ‘‘Women Reformers and American Culture, 1870-1930,’’ in JSocHis 5 (Winter 1971-72). Conway, J. K., ed., ‘‘Jane Addams,’’ in Written by Herself: Autobiographies of American Women (1992). Curti, M., ‘‘Jane Addams on Human Nature,’’ in JHI 22 (April-June 1961). Davis, A. F., American Heroine, The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (1973). Diliberto, G., A Useful Woman: The Early Life of Jane Addams (1999). Harvey, B. C., Jane Addams: Nobel Prize Winner and Founder of Hull House (1999). Farrell, J. C., Beloved Lady: A History of Jane Addams’ Ideas on Reform and Peace (1967). Lasch, C., The New Radicalism in America (1899-1963), The Intellectual as a Social Type (1965). Lasch, C., introduction to Jane Addams’ The Social Thought of Jane Addams (1965). Levine, D., Jane Addams and the Liberal Tradition (1971). Linn, J. W., Jane Addams, A Biography (1935). Scott, A. F., introduction to Jane Addams’ Democracy and Social Ethics (1964 ed.). Stebnor, E. J., The Women of Hull House: A Study of Spirituality, Vocation and Friendship (1997). Other references: Commentary (July 1961). American Women of Achievement Video Collection (video, 1995). Jane Addams: A Pilgrim’s Progress (video, 1997). Website: www2swathmore.edu/peace/exhibits/ addams.index/html (1997). —PEGGY STINSON

ADISA, Giamba See LORDE, Audre

AGASSIZ, Elizabeth Cabot Cary Born 5 December 1822, Boston, Massachusetts; died 27 June 1907, Arlington, Massachusetts Wrote under: Actinea, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Mrs. Louis Agassiz Daughter of Thomas Graves and Mary Ann Cushing Perkins Cary; married Louis Agassiz, 1850 Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz grew up in Boston, close to her Perkins, Cabot, and Gardiner relatives. She moved in Cambridge

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society, and, after marriage, assumed the care of her husband’s three children from a previous marriage. Eight days after Louis’ death in 1873, one of Agassiz’s daughters-in-law died, and Agassiz again became foster mother to three boys, the youngest just three years old. To guarantee a regular income, Agassiz opened the Agassiz School in 1855, thus providing the opportunity for teenage girls to acquire a high school education comparable to that of their brothers. In 1878-79 Agassiz was one of seven women approached by Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Gilman about a program of higher education for women. When the Harvard Annex became the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women in 1882, Agassiz became its president. She also played a key role in convincing a committee of the Massachusetts legislature to charter the new college. Subsequently, she was the first president of Radcliffe (1893-99), and its honorary president from 1899 to 1903. Agassiz joined her husband on scientific expeditions, becoming their scribe. She never claimed to be a natural scientist, but she developed a remarkable ability to present ‘‘second-hand knowledge accurately and with. . .animation and authority.’’ A First Lesson in Natural History (1859), published under the pseudonym of ‘‘Actinea,’’ went through nine printings by 1899. Agassiz’s achievement is more remarkable because she succeeds in making the structure and beauty of such creatures as sea anemones, corals, and starfish clear and vivid without the color photographs that would aid a modern teacher. Agassiz joined her husband on the Thayer Expedition to Brazil (April 1865-August 1866) and kept a journal of the trip. Parts of it appeared in Atlantic Monthly and then in A Journey in Brazil (1867, written with her husband). William James, who had accompanied the expedition was ‘‘agreeably disappointed’’ in the work. According to L. H. Tharp, ‘‘[James] had feared there would be too many descriptions of sunsets, but read the whole of it with interest’’ and found Agassiz had ‘‘varied the contents very skillfully. . .to entertain and interest the reader.’’ For almost 10 years after her husband’s death, Agassiz worked on Louis Agassiz, His Life and Correspondence (1885). A modern biographer of Agassiz considers it ‘‘much more than the usual Victorian ‘Life and Letters’ written by a devoted relative. She brought to this study of her husband the perception and insight she evidenced in the years of their marriage.’’ In Agassiz’s preface she expresses the hope that ‘‘the story of an intellectual life, which was marked by such rare coherence and unity of aim, might have a wider interest and usefulness,’’ and it does. William James felt it gave ‘‘a beautiful picture of an energetic nature impassioned in one pursuit.’’ To this day, the book remains interesting and readable. OTHER WORKS: Seaside Studies in Natural History (with Alexander Agassiz, 1865). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Agassiz G. R., ed., Letters and Recollections of Alexander Agassiz (1913). Lurie, E., Louis Agassiz: A Life in


AI

Science (1960). Paton, L. A., Elizabeth Cary Agassiz: A Biography (1919). Reed, E. W., American Women in Science Before the Civil War (1992). Tharp, L. H., Adventurous Alliance: The Story of the Agassiz Family of Boston (1959). Other references: Notable American Women, 1607-1950, E. T. James et al., eds. (article by H. Hawkins, 1971). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH

AI Born Florence Anthony, 21 October 1947, Albany, Texas Also written under: Florence Haynes, Pelorhanke Ai Ogawa Married Lawrence Kearney, circa 1975 (divorced) Ai is a narrative poet. Her work is intense, her writing efficient and vivid. Her poems reveal an intimacy between emotions and values that traditionally have been viewed as oppositional: love and hate are enmeshed, tenderness and violence interconnected. The characters who speak through Ai’s poetry are as varied as the American, multiracial, multicultural society from which they, and she, emerged. All voices—of men, women, teenagers, children; of black, white, red, yellow, brown; famous and anonymous, infamous and obscure—are heard at equal volume. Each speaks of the effort and desire to assert one’s will, to make an impact, to understand pain. Their voices are clear and even-toned, yet their messages are wrenching and sometimes shocking. Ai grew up in the Southwest and in San Francisco. She earned a B.A. in English/Oriental studies from the University of Arizona in 1969. While an undergraduate, she met the poet Galway Kinnell, who became a mentor for her, the ‘‘most important literary relationship of my life.’’ Through Kinnell, she went to the University of California at Irvine, where she completed an M.F.A. in 1971. She taught subsequently at the State University of New York at Binghamton, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Wayne State University. She received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship in 1975. Her first book of poems, Cruelty (1973), established her as a new, strong voice in contemporary poetry. Cruelty projects rugged images of sexuality, death, sensuality, and blood, and challenges the stereotype of ‘‘women’s poetry.’’ Noted Alice Walker, ‘‘If you want nice poems to ‘like,’ this [ Cruelty ] is not your book.’’ Ai’s Killing Floor (1979) won the 1978 Lamont Poetry Selection Award for the best second book by an American poet. The poems in this collection intensify the themes of sexuality and violence introduced in Cruelty and expand Ai’s cast of characters to include public figures from history and popular culture. After winning the Lamont Prize, Ai moved to New York to ‘‘actually. . .enter the world of poetry.’’ Since her move, she published Sin (1986) and Fate (1991), both books of poetry. The settings of

the later poems also moved from the rural, smalltown world of her first two books into the urban arena. In Sin, which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and Fate, Ai creates the voices, the ‘‘secret souls,’’ of public figures such as Robert and John F. Kennedy, (Sin) and Mary Jo Kopechne (Fate). Still, the voices of anonymous Americans are also heard. The persona poems in Sin and Fate are longer, detailed portraits rather than the snapshots found in her earlier volumes. In ‘‘On Being 1/2 Japanese, 1/8 Choctaw, 1/4 Black and 1/16 Irish’’ (1978) and ‘‘Arrival’’ (1991), Ai discusses her multiracial heritage, her struggle to forge an identity, the importance of her ‘‘true’’ name (Ai means ‘‘love’’ in Japanese), and her development as a narrative poet. (Given the name Florence Anthony at birth, she has also used the names Florence Haynes and Pelorhanke Ai Ogawa; she learned from her mother in 1973 that her father’s surname was Ogawa.) Ai’s passion for poetry pervades her autobiographical works. As she has explained, ‘‘I wanted to write poetry with a capital P’’ and she continues to do so. Her latest works, including 1999’s Vice: New and Selected Poems, presents a collection of 58 monologues from four of Ai’s earlier books—Cruelty, Sin, Fate, and Killing Floor—along with 17 new poems. From the past are notable contributions capturing disturbing realities in the lives and deaths of such notables as James Dean, Jimmy Hoffa, Lenny Bruce, and J. Edgar Hoover. Ai’s new subjects rise from more recent news headlines (O. J. Simpson, David Koresh, Jon-Benet Ramsey, and Monica Lewinsky) and from behind the headlines, including the agony of the police officer who commits suicide before being able to accept a medal for rescuing victims of the Oklahoma City bombing. Ai’s desire to examine conflicting moral values is alive and well and on display in this volume. Successfully continuing in her quest to push the envelope of reader emotions, Ai offers yet another glimpse into worlds of human angst, edged with empathy, which moved one reviewer to observe Vice as ‘‘rewarding, but not for the squeamish.’’ Authored by the ‘‘foremost poet of urban terror,’’ this mini anthology reminds one of the poet’s explosive earlier works and offers shades of things to come. OTHER WORKS: ‘‘Nothing But Color’’ (1981). ‘‘Ai’’ (1988). Greed (1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1980). CLC (1975, 1980). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Belles Lettres (Spring 1991). Chicago Review (Spring 1979). LJ (15 Apr. 1999). Ms. (June 1974). NYTBR (17 Feb. 1974, 8 July 1979, 8 June 1986). Poetry (Jan. 1987, Nov. 1991). PW (29 Mar. 1999). Virginia Quarterly Review (Summer 1991). Web site: http://www.wwnorton.com/ catalog/fall98/vice.htm. —DALE A. DOOLEY, UPDATED BY REBECCA C. CONDIT

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AKINS


AKINS, Zoë

for two straight years at the Empire Theater and on the road, and by 1936 an English theater company was taking it on tour.

Born 30 October 1886, Humansville, Illinois; died 29 October 1958, Los Angeles, California Daughter of Thomas J. and Elizabeth Green Akins; married Hugo C. Rumbold, 1932

It would be interesting to know precisely what it was Willa Cather detected in the not-so-good poems of a not-so-good actress that suggested playwriting potential. Whatever it was, Akins never completely realized her potential as a dramatist of stature. Except for a thorough dissertation by Ronald Mielech, Akins has received almost no scholarly attention.

Zoë Akins grew up and went to school in Illinois and Missouri, but none of her original plays give prominence to the Midwest. Most deal with the sometimes decadent middle and upper classes in New York, where she lived for twenty years. Akins early expressed a strong interest in the theater and especially in acting. When she left St. Louis and went to New York in 1909, however, with romantic dreams of going on stage and with the determination and pluck for which she was always admired, she encountered her first defeat. She was told she had no acting talent. She decided at this point to stay in New York and write plays. This decision seems to have been implemented at least in part by the advice of a soon-to-be-important novelist and lifelong correspondent and friend, Willa Cather. During the time Akins was submitting her poetry to the then prestigious McClure’s magazine and Cather was its managing editor. Cather, a drama critic in her own right, rejected Akins’ poems but told her, prophetically and shrewdly enough, that she should write for the stage. Cather must have perceived something extraordinary in Akins ’ poems and letters, for she encouraged a friendship with Akins almost immediately. This was unusual, since McClure’s rather aloof and shy managing editor had already begun her practice of eschewing personal contact with all but a very special few of the literary hopefuls who approached her. Although Akins ’ first published book was a volume of poetry, Interpretations (1911), and although she eventually wrote a novel, Forever Young (1941), she is best known for her original dramas, comedies, screenplays, and adaptations. She began to generate attention in 1916 with her vers libre drama, The Magical City. She went on to write Déclassée (1919), perhaps the best original play of that year. Akins ’ high comedies like Papa (1913) and Greatness; A Comedy (1921) demonstrated continued sophistication and even greatness; but she later turned her art to the more popular situation-type comedies which, on the whole, do not possess the dramatic quality of her early original work. Her sharp wit and sense of irony, especially, were quite lost in the shift from high to situation comedy. While she herself never really achieved the popular or critical success she often deserved for her original plays which she produced steadily after 1919, Akins finally earned a measure of fame for her adaptations and screenplays, like Edith Wharton’s The Old Maid (1935) and Edna Ferber’s Showboat (1931). Akins won the 1935 Pulitzer Prize for drama for The Old Maid. Her award initially aroused vigorous controversy over the appropriateness of granting the drama prize for an adaptation rather than for an original work. Eventually, though, the ‘‘discovery’’ that a precedent had already been established silenced her opponents. Both a critical and popular success, The Old Maid ran

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While it is true that Akins’ writing is uneven and occasionally suffers from what Mielech calls ‘‘romantic excesses’’ associated with postwar American drama, and while many of her otherwise attractive protagonists periodically engage in a rhetoric that is uncharacteristic or platitudinous, much of her excellence has gone unappreciated. Some of her efforts at characterization have been misconstrued as overindulgence or a lapse in realism. Akins’ significance, it seems, lies in her extremely sharp and sympathetic understanding of human foibles in general and of female folly and frustration in particular. In a play like Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting (1921), for example, Akins insightfully portrays the all too common situation of a woman, Edith, blindly committed to fidelity to a confused husband who psychologically abuses her, and who manipulates and keeps her with him largely through the guilt he—as well as society—stirs up in her. When she finally rejects his ‘‘open marriage’’ ideas and leaves him, she flees to another, kinder man who ‘‘keeps’’ her sexually and financially, but whom she refuses to marry because she will not get a divorce. Although the play is recognized for its unorthodox focus on a troubled quest for personal freedom, it is more powerful for its quiet repudiation of women’s considerable dependence on men and for its unhappy admission that women like Edith—most women for that matter— find the world ‘‘unsafe’’ when their traditional sources of security are taken from them. Neither Edith’s initial decision to remain true to her adulterous husband nor her later decision to live with Greenough in the face of society’s censure is completely admirable. According to Akins her keen irony underscores Edith’s appalling lack of personal identity and purposiveness, and the reader experiences her horror in realizing she cannot expect men or children to provide meaning and identity for her. In general, Akins’ plays—whether serious dramas or high comedies—emphasize the distortions in values, attitudes, and manners which society promulgates. She is simultaneously both amused and disturbed by the often pathetic efforts of her dramatic characters to extricate themselves from the web of social behavior patterns and thinking they cannot really understand. Akins is probably not a great playwright, but she is surely worthy of more notice and exposure than she has been receiving. If she cannot be applauded for consistent dramatic excellence, she can be appreciated for her exceptional insights into human nature and society, and for her enterprising, delightful sense of humor. OTHER WORKS: Such a Charming Young Man (1916). Did it Really Happen? (1917). Cake Upon the Waters (1919). FootLoose (dramatization by Akins, 1920). The Varying Shore (1921).


ALCOTT

The Texas Nightingale (first produced 1922). A Royal Fandango (1923). The Moon-Flower (dramatization by Akins, 1924). First Love (dramatization by Akins, 1926). Pardon My Glove (1926). The Crown Prince (dramatization by Akins, 1927). Thou Desperate Pilot (1927). The Furies (1928). The Love Duel (1929). The Greeks Had a Word for It (1930). O Evening Star (1935). The Little Miracle (1936). The Hills Grow Smaller (1937). I Am Different (1938). The Happy Days (dramatization by Akins from Les Jours Heureux by Claude-André Puget, 1942). Mrs. January and Mr. Ex (1944). The Human Element by W. Somerset Maugham (dramatization by Akins, n.d.). Bradley, J., ‘‘Zoë Atkins & The Age of Excess: Broadway Melodrama in the 1920s’’ in Modern American Drama: the Female Canon (1990). Demastes, W. W., ed., American Playwrights 1880-1945: A Research and Production Scrapbook (1995). Mielech, R.A., ‘‘The Plays of Zoë Akins Rumbold’’ (Dissertation, Ohio State University, 1974). Other references: American Mercury (May 1928). SatRL (11 May 1935). WLB (June 1935). —PATRICIA LEE YONGUE

ALCOTT, Louisa May Born 29 Nov. 1832, Germantown, Pennsylvania; died 6 March 1888, Boston, Massachusetts Also wrote under: L.M.A., A. M. Barnard, Flora Fairfield, A.M. Daughter of Amos B. and Abba May Alcott Although regarded during much of the 20th century only as the author of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott had a manyfaceted personality. She was the daughter of Amos Bronson Alcott, the high priest of transcendentalism, friend and admirer of Emerson and Thoreau. She was the pseudonymous author of sensational and sentimental potboilers, as well as the realistic recorder of her brief career as a Civil War nurse, and she was the world-known author of delightful accounts of family life. Personally, she was a ‘‘child of duty’’ supporting her family, and an early advocate of woman suffrage, prison reform, and emancipation. Although the early years of Alcott’s life were marked by poverty and uncertainty, as her father sought to establish his ‘‘perfect school,’’ they were rewarding years. She had little institutionalized education but her father taught her under his advanced educational theories. She knew and learned from Emerson, Thoreau, and the many books which she read from an early age. Her love of drama gave her an awareness of the melodramatic and sensational in everyday life. Her attempts to augment the family income by teaching, sewing, working as a servant, and acting as a companion provided raw material for her own creative works. In 1855 the first book published under Alcott’s own name, Flower Fables, was dedicated to Emerson’s daughter, Ellen. Earlier she had contributed poems under the pseudonym Flora

Fairfield, and scattered throughout her later career were ‘‘necessity tales,’’ sometimes lurid and sensational, which were also published under pseudonyms. With Hospital Sketches (1863) and Little Women (1868), followed by a series of titles between 1870 and 1886, Alcott became an institution, a center of public attention. In addition to these well-known volumes, she wrote on contemporary problems such as suffrage, temperance, prison reform, and child labor. Driven by the demands of her public, Alcott wrote until ill health made her unable to continue. Worn out by personal tragedy, family responsibility, and sickness, she died within hours of the death of her father. Although Alcott is most commonly associated with the juvenile series beginning with Little Women, she wrote in a variety of genres. Her first published book, Flower Fables, represents the charming, imaginative fantasies written for young children. A combination of colorful prose and delicate poetry, it not only peopled the child’s world with fairies, elves, and small animals, but taught lessons of compassion, patience, duty, honor, and above all, the power of love, in terms a child could understand. The scholar can detect the influence of transcendentalism in the importance given to all living things, but for the child reader the fairy songs and the enchanted world from which they come are enough. Alcott continued to please her young audience in stories included in Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag (4 vols., 1872-78), and Lulu’s Library (3 vols., 1886-89). Not until the publication of Leona Rostenberg’s ‘‘Some Anonymous and Pseudonymous Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott’’ in 1943 did Alcott’s public become aware of her many contributions under various pen names to the body of sensational fiction appearing in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, The Flag of Our Union, and other periodicals. Four of these stories (‘‘Behind a Mask,’’ ‘‘Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,’’ ‘‘The Mysterious Key,’’ and ‘‘The Abbot’s Ghost’’) were made available to the general reader in Madeleine Stern’s Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott (1975). The title story retains its appeal for the modern reader of gothics. In it, Jean Muir, an aging but fascinating actress, has been spurned by the man she loves and finds revenge as well as security in her plot to ruin the entire Coventry family. This brooding, passionate woman, deeply aware of her sexual power, was perhaps the strongest and best developed of many skillfully drawn characters peopling Alcott’s escapist literature. Madeleine Stern proves Alcott was a very conscious artist, producing these ‘‘thrillers’’ for a definite audience, while writing for economic reasons. There is no doubt of the influence of her own experiences on another group of Alcott’s works. The earliest published book based almost completely on her life was Hospital Sketches (1863), and its critical reception convinced its author that success lay in portraying real life rather than in flights of fancy. The experiences of ‘‘Tribulation Periwinkle’’ not only reflect the realities of Alcott’s nursing career but also rank with Whitman’s poetic record in its picturing of suffering, gallantly borne, and the compassion of those who served as nurses.

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ALCOTT

Throughout her career, Alcott produced poems, essays, and stories which were obviously autobiographical. ‘‘Thoreau’s Flute’’ (1863) reflected her hours spent at Walden Pond; ‘‘Transcendental Wild Oats’’ (1873) provided a frank, humorous-pathetic account of the family’s abortive Utopia; while ‘‘Ralph Waldo Emerson’’ (1882) paid tribute to the guardian angel of the Alcott family. In 1867 Alcott initiated a new genre when she rather reluctantly agreed to write a girls’ book. The result was Little Women, which succeeded largely because, as Alcott said, ‘‘We really lived most of it.’’ Using experience as her starting point, she created a gallery of characters that entered American literature. Little Women was an instant success, with multiple editions and translations in more than 30 languages. The simple everyday events and small crises of Jo, Meg, Beth, and Amy, and the warmth of the family life provided by ‘‘Marmee’’ and Mr. March, along with the friendship of Laurie, Mr. Laurence, and the sharp-tongued Aunt March have influenced every generation since 1868. Although Jo’s marriage to Professor Bhaer disappointed many readers who hoped she would marry Laurie and disapproved of his eventual marriage to Amy, the Bhaer family soon developed its own personality. In Little Men (1871) and Jo’s Boys (1886), Alcott not only gave Jo two boys of her own but provided a whole school of boys and girls of all ages, races, and levels of wealth, who were loved and educated on the estate bequeathed by Aunt March. The freedom of the learning environment is reminiscent of Amos Bronson Alcott’s avant-garde philosophy; the lessons of love and duty taught to the March girls are transmitted to all. The readers’ interest in the destinies of the 12 boys who lived at Plumfield led Alcott to write Jo’s Boys, set 10 years later than Little Men. Interest continued far longer than Alcott could ever have imagined with a television series based on Little Men running in 1999. Although the destinies of all the characters who peopled Little Men are traced in Jo’s Boys, the changes which 15 years brought in the author herself are evident in the ending of the book. Despite the pleas of young readers, Dan’s imprisonment as the result of killing a man, even by accident, shuts him off from marrying Bess, the exquisite daughter of Amy and Laurie. Nan, Meg’s daughter, defends her position as a new woman and pursues her career as a doctor, while Bess becomes an artist and Josie an actress, before they become wives. Lesser known but equally delightful are Eight Cousins (1875) and Rose in Bloom (1876), which trace the adventures of Rose and her seven cousins, adding more memorable portraits to Alcott’s gallery and providing the author with many opportunities to comment upon the silliness of Victorian society’s values and customs. In Under the Lilacs (1878), Ben and his remarkable performing dog, Sancho, join Bab and Betty in a series of happy adventures on Miss Celia’s estate, The Lilacs. In this children’s world and in that of Jack and Jill (1880), many lessons are learned by the characters and by the readers who follow the everyday crises and joys so realistically presented.

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The critical reception of Alcott’s works during her life ranged widely but was generally favorable. There were few reviews of Flower Fables, but Hospital Sketches was praised for its ‘‘fluent and sparkling style.’’ Little Women securely established its author in the favor of critics, who saw it as giving pleasure to young and adult readers. An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870) was particularly well received, but the other six volumes of the series became more and more identified with a juvenile audience. The death of Alcott produced many personal tributes but no critical evaluation until the appearance in 1889 of Edna Cheney’s Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters and Journals. As a personal friend, Cheney stressed the autobiographical nature of Alcott’s best work and the effect her sense of duty had upon what might have been a greater career. This biography was influential in shaping the criticism which followed. In 1909 the first biography written in the 20th century, Belle Moses’ Louisa May Alcott, Dreamer and Worker, appeared. Moses’ examination of known details of publication provided the first attempt at scholarly examination of Alcott. Jessie Bonstelle and Marian DeForest collected Little Women Letters from the House of Alcott in 1914, providing important primary sources. Not until the 1930s, however, did an important body of Alcott scholarship appear. Louisa May Alcott: A Bibliography (1932) was compiled by Lucile Gulliver, and it made information available on all editions of American, English, and foreign origin. A Newbery Medal was awarded in 1933 to Cornelia L. Meigs for The Story of the Author of Little Women: Invincible Louisa, which provided background valuable to an understanding of Alcott’s works. In 1936 Katherine S. Anthony’s psychoanalytical study, Louisa May Alcott, aroused controversy but went beyond the usual interpretation of Alcott as a writer for children. Leona Rostenberg’s ‘‘Some Anonymous and Pseudonymous Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott’’ provided knowledge of the sensational fiction written under a variety of pen names. Madeleine Stern followed with a number of articles presenting other facets of Alcott; she climaxed her studies with Louisa May Alcott, a sound critical biography in 1950 (a second edition in 1971 made available a bibliography of 274 items). The 1968 centennial celebration of the first edition of Little Women was marked by the important publication of Louisa May Alcott: A Centennial for Little Women, by Judith C. Ullom. Cornelia Meigs’s biography was reprinted with a new introduction. She also introduced a Centennial Edition of Little Women and edited Glimpses of Louisa: A Centennial Sampling of the Best Short Stories by Louisa May Alcott. Her critical overview presents an excellent final judgement of this writer whose potential sociohistorical worth has not yet been fully explored. In Meigs’ opinion, Alcott’s strength lay in her honesty, awareness of the danger of overmoralizing, and in her ability to present a story with a distinctive pattern and an atmosphere in which the common life, its joy or pain or despair, attains a true splendor. OTHER WORKS: Moods (1865). Morning-Glories, and Other Stories (1868). Kitty’s Class Day (1868). Aunt Kipp (1868).


ALDEN

Psyche’s Art (1868). Three Proverb Women, or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy (1868). My Boys: Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag, I (1872). ShawlStraps: Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag, II (1872). Work: A Story of Experience (1873). Cupid and Chow-Chow: Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag, III (1874). Silver Pitchers; and Independence, a Centennial Love Story (1876). A Modern Mephistopheles (1877). My Girls: Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag, IV (1878). Proverb Stories (1882). An OldFashioned Thanksgiving: Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag, V (1882). A Garland for Girls (1888). Recollections of My Childhood’s Days (1890). Comic Tragedies Written by Jo and Meg and Acted by the Little Women (1893). The Poetry of Louise May Alcott (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Anthony, K. S., Louisa May Alcott (1936). Auerbach, N., Communities of Women (1978). Bedell, M., The Alcotts: Biography of a Family (1980). Bonstelle, J., and M. DeForest, eds., Little Women Letters from the House of Alcott (1914). Cheney, E., Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters and Journals (1889). Clark, B. L., and Albergheni, J., eds., Little Women and The Feminist Imagination: Criticism, Controversy, Personal Essays (1999). Elbert, S., A Hunger for Home: Louisa May Alcott and Little Women (1984). Gulliver, L., Louisa May Alcott: A Bibliography (1932). Keyser, E. L., Little Women: A Family Romance (1999). MacDonald, R. K., Louisa May Alcott (1983). Meigs, C. L., The Story of the Author of Little Women: Invincible Louisa (1933). Myerson, J. et al eds., The Journals of Louise May Alcott (1989, reprinted 1997). Moses, B., Louisa May Alcott, Dreamer and Worker: A Story of Achievement (1909). Papashvily, H. W., Louisa May Alcott (1965). Peare, C. O., Louisa May Alcott: Her Life (1954). Saxton, M., Louisa May: A Modern Biography of Louisa May Alcott (1977). Stern, M. B., Louisa May Alcott (1950). Stern, M., Lousie May Alcott: From Blood and Thunder to Hearth and Home (1998). Ullom, J. C., Louisa May Alcott: A Centennial for Little Women (1969). Reference works: Bibliography of American Literature (1955). NAW (1970). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Literature Review (Winter 1973). Bibliographical Society of America Papers (2nd Quarter, 1943). New England Quarterly (June 1943, Dec. 1949). NYTM (Dec. 1964). —ALMA J. PAYNE

ALDEN, Isabella MacDonald Born 3 November 1841, Rochester, New York; died 5 August 1930, Palo Alto, California Wrote under: Pansy Daughter of Isaac and Myra Spafford MacDonald; married Gustavus R. Alden, 1866; children: Raymond The sixth of seven children born to a well-educated merchant, Isabella MacDonald Alden was tutored by her father, who required from her a daily journal of criticism and stories. While a

pupil and teacher at the Oneida seminary, she won a Christian tract society’s contest with her didactic novel, Helen Lester, published in 1866 under ‘‘Pansy,’’ a childhood pet name given by her father. That same year she became the wife of Gustavus R. Alden, a Presbyterian minister. In 1874, a year after the birth of their only child, Raymond, she began to edit Pansy, a popular Sunday-school weekly. Alden wrote more than 120 books emphasizing private religious commitment, Bible study, and a moral duty to improve the lives of the poor. She wrote and edited several Presbyterian publications, taught and directed Sunday schools, and occasionally lectured on temperance. She served as a teacher and organizer of the Chautauqua movement from its founding in 1874. One of her best novels, Four Girls at Chautauqua (1876), not only promoted the summer resort of Christian education, but introduced the four female characters whom Alden developed in a series of novels closing with Four Mothers at Chautauqua (1913). Alden’s most popular novel, Ester Reid (1870), portrays an earnest young woman committing her life and good manners to Christ, to Sunday school, and to social progress as three facets of one work. Sequels expanded the application of Christian principles of prayer and social service among middle class urban women. Alden consciously aimed at making religion attractive through realistic female characters who improve the personalities around them with good intentions, prayer, and persistent effort. Mrs. Solomon Smith Looking On (1882), an extended complaint against dull-witted or fashionably bored church members, emphasizes that women are called to moral duty, a responsibility superior to that of men. Alden never explores a domestic clash of values, however, and her men support their wives’ efforts from a distance. Alden’s popular series on the life of Christ culminates in Yesterday Framed in Today (1898), which places the events of Jesus’ life in a modern city. Thoughtful readers are asked to recognize themselves as one prominent character, who abandons ambitions to join the rabble following the new master, or as another, who plots against him with influence and intellect. Though Alden’s books in English and several translations sold more than 100,000 copies annually, they were rarely reviewed, especially in the 1870s and 1880s, when she was doing her most original work. The little critical attention they received resigned them to Sunday school use. Whether The Nation condemned the ‘‘goodiness’’ and ‘‘uncomfortable amount of religious slang’’ in Ruth Erskine’s Crosses (1879), or The Chautauquan praised the ‘‘wholesome homeliness’’ of Why They Couldn’t (1896), each reviewer overlooked Alden’s fictional development of the strong American female personality. Her heroines repeatedly overcame male patronizing with courteous intensity and worked great changes by persistent and thoughtful attention to the effects of small detail. Though they may overprize the work ethic, Alden’s books are valuable records of cultural values and domestic artifacts. When things went wrong, Alden once claimed, she righted them in a book; this theory accounts for both the weakness and the strength of her realistic portrayals of good women.

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OTHER WORKS: Tip Lewis and His Lamp (1867). Julia Reid: Listening and Led (1872). The King’s Daughter (1873). The Chautauqua Girls at Home (1878). Links in Rebecca’s Life (1878). A New Graft on the Family Tree (1880). Next Things (1880). Mrs. Harry Harper’s Awakening (1881). Ester Reid Yet Speaking (1883). Judge Burnham’s Daughters (1888). The Prince of Peace: or, The Beautiful Life of Jesus Christ (1890). Ruth Erskine’s Son (1907). An Interrupted Night (1929). Memories of Yesterdays (completed by G. L. Hill; 1931). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hill, G. L., foreword to Isabella MacDonald Alden’s An Interrupted Night (1929). Logan, M. S., The Part Taken by Women in American History (1912). Reference works: American Women, F. E. Willard and M. A. Livermore (1897). National Cyclopedia of Amerian Biography (1892 et seq.). NAB, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: NYT (6 Aug. 1930, 7 Aug. 1930). —GAYLE GASKILL

ALDON, Adair See MEIGS, Cornelia

ALDRICH, Bess Streeter Born 17 February 1881, Cedar Falls, Iowa; died 3 August 1954, Lincoln, Nebraska Also wrote under: Margaret Dean Stephens Daughter of James Wareham and Mary Anderson Streeter; married Charles Aldrich, 1907 Bess Streeter Aldrich’s parents emigrated to frontier Iowa in the 1850s. The family’s experiences there became the basis for Aldrich’s most successful novels. After graduating from Iowa State Teachers’ College in Cedar Falls in 1901, she wrote articles for teachers’ magazines and stories for primary school children. When her husband died suddenly from a heart attack in 1925, Aldrich was the sole supporter of her children, and she began writing professionally. In 1930 Aldrich became book editor of the Christian Herald. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Literature in 1935 from the University of Nebraska, and she was elected to the Nebraska Hall of Fame in 1973. The Rim of the Prairie (1925), Aldrich’s first novel, is a contemporary story of Nancy, a farm girl living near a small town remarkably similar to Elmwood, Nebraska. Through the recollections of the old people, Aunt Biney and Uncle Jud Moore, Aldrich recounts details of settling in this part of the country, as civilization and modern farming overtake the wild prairie. The author’s knowledge and love of nature, her descriptions of the rolling hills

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and the flowers of the prairie are well expressed here, as in all of her books. A Lantern in Her Hand (1928) is a much better work, perhaps because several actual events from her family history form its basis. The character of Abbie Deal, who moves from Illinois to Iowa in 1854, then marries and homesteads with her husband in Nebraska, is based on her mother. In spite of sorrow, hardship, and lack of opportunity to develop her talents, Abbie has a happy life. The ‘‘lantern in her hand’’ has lighted her children’s way. The novel, perhaps Aldrich’s best book, was immensely popular and a bestseller for years. Later works are sometimes variations of its theme, setting, and events. Aldrich’s work is romantic, optimistic, and ‘‘wholesome.’’ Her stories usually end happily, her romances join those people who should be joined; some of them are sentimental. Nevertheless, they display certain strengths—characterization is often excellent, as are her descriptions of nature. The background is always the Midwest, and she describes it precisely and accurately. Although Aldrich is most noted for her stories of the settling of the Midwest, her short stories give fine details of middle class family life in the small towns of the 1920s and 1930s. Her stories and articles were published in many of the leading periodicals. Aldrich’s style is not mannered or dated; neither is it remarkably original. The careful attention Aldrich gives to details— dates, clothing styles, food, customs—are strong points, creating a realistic background. The hardships of settling the frontier and of country living, such as the back-breaking labor, particularly for the women, the lack of refinements, the inconvenient kitchens, the bare and ugly houses, are details such as Hamlin Garland often gives. But whereas Garland points out the hopelessness of the unremitting hard labor in fighting poverty, dirt, and squalor, Aldrich affirms life, and her characters find, usually, some reason for happiness, be it through love or belief in honor and duty. OTHER WORKS: Mother Mason (1924). The Cutters (1926). A White Bird Flying (1931). Miss Bishop (1933). Spring Came on Forever (1935). The Man Who Caught the Weather (1936). Song of Years (1939). The Drum Goes Dead (1941). The Lieutenant’s Lady (1942). Journey into Christmas, and Other Stories (1949). The Bess Streeter Aldrich Reader (1950). A Bess Streeter Aldrich Treasury (ed. R. S. Aldrich, 1959). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Aldrich, R., A Bess Streeter Aldrich Treasury (1959). Marble, A. R., A Daughter of Pioneers: Bess Streeter Aldrich and Her Books (n.d.). Martin, A., Bess Streeter Aldrich (1992). Meier, A. M., ‘‘Bess Streeter Aldrich: Her Life and Works’’ (Master’s thesis, Kearney State College, 1968). Peterson, C. M., Bess Streeter Aldrich: The Dreams Are All Real (1995). Reinke, M. F., Bess Streeter Aldrich: A Pictoiral History, 1881-1925 (1986). Thomas, J., Bess Streeter Aldrich: Conflict Between Home and Career in A Lantern in Her Hand, A White Bird Flying, and Miss Bishop (1994). Williams, B.C., Bess Streeter Aldrich, Novelist (n.d.). Other references: Appleton’s Book Chat (1 Feb. 1930, 21 Nov. 1931). WLB (April 1929). Women Writers of the Great


ALEXANDER

Plains, #1: Willa Cather, Mari Sandoz and Bess Streeter Aldrich (video, 1985).

American opinion towards entrance into World War I and her assistance to soldiers and refugees, Aldrich was awarded the Legion of Honor by the French government in 1922.

—HELEN STAUFFER

ALDRICH, Mildred

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Stein, G. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1932). Mellow, J. R., Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company (1973). —JANIS TOWNSEND

Born 16 November 1853, Providence, Rhode Island; died 19 February 1928, Huiry, France Wrote under: H. Quinn Daughter of Edwin and Lucy Ayers Baker Aldrich For 12 years, Mildred Aldrich was secretary to the manager of the Boston Home Journal and a contributor under the pseudonym ‘‘H. Quinn.’’ She also edited The Mahogany Tree, a journal of ideas, and during 1892 and 1893, submitted three substantial pieces on theater to Arena. She joined the Boston Journal in 1894, and moved the following year to the Boston Herald. There she further strengthened her already strong reputation for astute dramatic criticism. Sometime around the turn of the century, but before 1904, Aldrich moved to Paris, where she represented several American theatrical producers and wrote for American magazines. When she was sixty-one, in 1914, she retired to the French countryside. Her hilltop home, La Creste, afforded a view of the site of the Battle of the Marne. From La Creste, Aldrich wrote four firsthand accounts of life in wartime France. A Hilltop on the Marne (1915), her most successful book, first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. It treats the progress of the battle, and the spirit and commitment of both soldiers and villagers. The work’s strength derives from the compression of events and Aldrich’s expanding understanding, which the reader shares. On the Edge of the War Zone (1917) covers the period 16 September 1914 to 28 March 1917, and is more diffuse in its approach; of special interest are Aldrich’s reports on gas warfare and descriptions of soldiers’ wartime entertainments. The Peak of the Load (1918) deals with ‘‘the waiting months on the hilltop from the entrance of the stars and stripes to the second victory on the Marne.’’ In the following year, 1919, came When Johnny Comes Marching Home, in which Aldrich describes how ‘‘the countryside settled down’’ after the armistice. She also produced two other wartime books.

ALEXANDER, Francesca Born as Esther Frances Alexander, 27 February 1837, Boston, Massachusetts; died 21 January 1917, Florence, Italy Daughter of Frances and Lucia Gray Swett Alexander Francesca Alexander was the daughter of a portrait painter who was a member of the Boston intellectual and cultural elite. After moving to Florence in 1853, the family became hosts to many eminent visitors including Sarah Orne Jewett and James Russell Lowell (who wrote a sonnet to Francesca). Alexander was educated at home, and principally by herself; in art, for example, she was not given lessons so that her talent might develop in its own direction. Nor was she allowed to play freely with other children or to read uncensored books. Her mother, who died at the age of 102, dominated Alexander throughout her entire life. Alexander first sold her drawings to earn money for works of charity. She began to set down the life stories of the Italian peasants who served as her models, and also to collect from them the traditional songs and legends of their villages. Inspired by medieval manuscripts, Alexander created a large folio volume of traditional songs with her own English translations, embellished by pen-and-ink drawings and elaborate full-page illustrations.

Told in a French Garden, August, 1914 (1916) is Aldrich’s sole work of fiction. By a ‘‘strange irony of Fate,’’ nine people find themselves in provincial France in the darkest days of the war. To raise their spirits, they follow Boccaccio’s example in The Decameron, and each relates a story following the day’s dinner. Prologues and epilogues frame the stories and reveal the conflicts in value displayed by the participants.

The aging John Ruskin, visiting Italy in 1882, was entranced by Alexander’s art, her charity, and her religious faith; he bought her work and arranged for its publication, praised her in his lectures, and wrote to her reams of the sort of precious letter with which Ruskin favored young women. Alexander’s major work was edited by Ruskin and published in ten parts in 1884-85 as Roadside Songs of Tuscany. In this version the book is as much Ruskin’s as Alexander’s; he added introductions, moral homilies, footnotes, and quotations from Alexander’s letters about the people who modeled for the illustrations. Improved photographic processes made possible a new edition, in 1897, entitled Tuscan Songs, which reproduces the integrated text and illustration of Alexander’s manuscript and omits the Ruskin material. The verse is poor-people’s poetry: obvious, simple, repetitive. Alexander was sincerely interested in folklore and oral tradition, and respected the piety which often represented Christ as a character in a contemporary village drama.

Aldrich also wrote the foreword to The Letters of Thomasina Atkins (W.A.A.C.) on Active Service (1918). This volume recounts Atkins’ experiences in the British Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps stationed ‘‘somewhere in France.’’ For her help in swaying

The Story of Ida (1883) is a narration of the rather commonplace, unhappy love experience of a young woman who posed for Alexander. Though Alexander tried to reproduce reality without exaggeration or sentimentality, Ida’s piety, her submission, and

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her long decline give the book a texture indistinguishable from religious tracts. Christ’s Folk in the Apennine (1888) was put together by Ruskin, who selected passages from Alexander’s letters that told stories about her peasant acquaintances. After her sight had failed too much for drawing, Alexander published one book independent of Ruskin: The Hidden Servants (1900), a collection of longer traditional legends retold in English verse. The style is not so simple as her prose; archaic diction, commonplace imagery, and the extra words required to fill out conventional meters create rather tedious poetry. Alexander is remembered primarily because of the letters Ruskin wrote to her, and Ruskin scholars now consider his infatuation with Alexander to have been one of the embarrassing symptoms of the great mind in its decline. Alexander’s one important work is, however, of value for preserving verbally and pictorially details of folklore and rural life from a time now gone. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Alexander, C. G., Francesca Alexandra, A ‘‘Hidden Servant’’ (1927). Alexander, F. Francesca Alexander: Drawings from Roadside Songs of Tuscany (1981). Ruskin, J., ‘‘Francesca’s Book’’ in Works, Cook, E. T., and A. Wedderburn, eds. (Vol. 32, 1907). Swett, L. G., John Ruskin’s Letters to Francesca and Memoirs of the Alexanders (1931). Other references: Dial (16 March 1898). The Magazine of Art (1895). —SALLY MITCHELL

ALLEE, Marjorie Hill Born 2 June 1890, Carthage, Indiana; died 30 April 1945, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of William and Anna Elliott Hill; married Warder Clyde Allee, 1912 Marjorie Hill Allee grew up on an Indiana farm in a community of Quakers whose ancestors had migrated northward from the Carolinas to escape the environment of slavery. At the age of eighteen, having completed high school and two years at Earlham College, Allee taught all eight grades in the one-room school which she had attended as a child. The following year she enrolled at the University of Chicago, determined to become a writer. Allee’s apprentice work includes the publication of numerous articles, reviews, and stories, as well as collaboration with her husband on Jungle Island (1925), a nonfiction book for children which describes the plants and animals on Barro Colorado Island in the Panama Canal. Between 1929 and 1945 Allee published 14 novels for older juvenile readers. Her characters are usually young women just beginning to confront the personal discords and social problems of adult life. Working from memoirs and personal histories, Allee wrote six novels depicting Quaker families caught in the turmoil of

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changing values during the mid-19th century. These novels portray a vivid picture of American life between 1840 and 1875, and they present a multifaceted view of slavery. Allee presents both ideological and personal conflicts with clarity, restraint, and impartiality. Three of Allee’s historical books recount the struggles of widow Charity Lankester and her eight daughters to earn their own living after freeing their slaves and selling their estate. While daughter Judith nurses a neighbor’s child and slowly masters a few homemaking skills (Judith Lankester, 1930), her older sister Catherine teaches in a one-room school, outwitting unruly boys, nurturing neglected girls, rescuing a former slave from an angry mob, and establishing a home in a tiny cabin (A House of Her Own, 1934). In Susanna and Tristram (1929), orphaned sixteen-year-old Susanna Coffin assumes responsibility for her younger brother. She becomes a ‘‘conductor’’ on the Underground Railroad, meeting escaping slaves at the boat and driving them northward. In reaction against the dormitory dance-drink-drive formula for the college novel, Allee wrote The Great Tradition (1937). Much of this novel takes place in a biology laboratory, and it depicts young women engaged in serious study and research at the University of Chicago. The Great Tradition and The House (1944) explore the problems of harmonious relations between individuals of differing ages, social backgrounds, and races. The House received an award from the Child Study Association for the honesty and courage with which it faces the problems of young people. Two of Allee’s novels take place in settings of unusual interest to the naturalist. Jane’s Island (1931), a Newberry honor book, describes the unspoiled beauty of Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where scientists study marine biology with inadequate equipment but disciplined dedication. Ann’s Surprising Summer (1933) takes place in the dune country of northern Indiana, where biologists strive to preserve a portion of the dunes as a natural habitat. Allee’s female characters demonstrate a deep sensitivity to the needs of others, and are unusually competent and resourceful in solving practical problems. They are not restricted to traditional activities and roles. OTHER WORKS: The Road to Carolina (1932). Off to Philadelphia (1936). The Little American Girl (1938). Runaway Linda (1939). The Camp at Westlands (1941). Winter’s Mischief (1942). Smoke Jumper (1945). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: The Junior Book of Authors, S. J. Kunitz, and H. Haycraft, eds. (1951). Other references: Horn Book (May 1946). Illinois Libraries (Dec. 1938). —ALICE BELL SALO


ALLEN

ALLEN, Elizabeth (Ann Chase) Akers

and poetic grace is evidenced in the pat rhymes and similarity of structure and meter throughout her canon.

Born 19 October 1832, Strong, Maine; died 7 August 1911, Tuckahoe, New York Wrote under: Elizabeth Akers, Florence Percy Daughter of John and Mary Barton Chase; married Marshall Taylor, 1851 (divorced); (Benjamin) Paul Akers, 1860; E. M. Allen, 1865

Allen is at her best when she manages to dissociate herself from her personas. Then her poetic narratives, light verse, and fables are well handled metrically and display a felicity of expression not found in the bulk of her work. Many of these poems are worthy of collection for their artistic illumination of the plight of the 19th-century woman.

Elizabeth Akers Allen was the daughter of a carpenter and circuit preacher. ‘‘Feeling unwelcome at home’’ after her mother’s death and father’s remarriage, she sought independence at the age of thirteen through a job in a bookbindery and later as a teacher. In 1856 she became an assistant editor for the Portland Transcript and published verse and essays in various magazines. It was during this time that she was ‘‘forced to divorce her husband [Marshall Taylor] or starve,’’ since he was legally entitled to her earnings and had already misappropriated payment due her. Her first volume of poetry Forest Buds From the Woods of Maine (1856) was well received. After her second marriage, to Paul Akers, her many volumes of poetry dating from 1866 to 1902 were published under the name Elizabeth Akers. The poem that assures Allen of immortality is ‘‘Rock Me to Sleep,’’ which appeared in the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post in May 1860 under her pseudonym. It caught the popular imagination and was set to music by 30 different composers; it was also issued as an illustrated Christmas giftbook and incorporated into novels, plays, and various collections. Until Allen reprinted it in her Poems (1866) and The Sunset Song, and Other Verses (1902), her sole remuneration was the $5 she had received from the newspaper. Unfortunately, authorship of the poem was contested by Alexander M. W. Ball, a New Jersey legislator, who presented sufficient evidence and witnesses to raise serious questions about the poem’s authorship. The poem, which ‘‘during the Civil War. . . was printed on leaflets and scattered by thousands in the army,’’ is a plaintive cry to a departed mother for relief and solace. The first stanza displays the intensity of the verses which received public acclaim: Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight, Make me a child again just for to-night! Mother, come back from the echoless shore, Take me again to your heart as of yore; Kiss from my forehead the furrows of care, Smooth the few silver threads out of my hair; Over my slumbers your loving watch keep;— Rock me to sleep, mother,—rock me to sleep! Most of Allen’s poetry is flawed by sentimentality and a rigid metrical arrangement that often degenerates into a singsong bathos. One narrative voice permeates most of her work, which is best described by a contemporary as ‘‘sweet, sad sick-room poetry.’’ The lamentations on death and effusive responses to nature contain little philosophical import or melodic composition. Her concept of the poet as one ‘‘who pours the wine of his life for bread’’ evidently prompted her to try to wring her own most heartfelt emotions for literary use. However, the lack of control

OTHER WORKS: Queen Catherine’s Rose (1885). The Silver Bridge (1886). The Triangular Society (1886). ‘‘Gold Nails’’ to Hang Memories On (1890). The High-Top Sweeting (1891). The Proud Lady of Stavoren (1897). The Ballad of the Bronx (1901). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cary, R., ‘‘The Misted Prism: Paul Akers and Elizabeth Akers Allen,’’ in CLQ 7 (1966). Leavenworth, E. W., ed., Who Wrote ‘‘Rock Me To Sleep’’? (1870). Morse, O. A., A Vindication of the Claim of Alexander M. W. Ball (1867). Reference works: A Woman of the Century, F. E. Willard and M. A. Livermore (1893). Other references: Colophon (4 Oct. 1933). Northern Monthly (March 1868). —FRANCINE SHAPIRO PUK

ALLEN, Paula Gunn Born Paula Marie Francis, 24 October 1939, Albuquerque, New Mexico Married (divorced); children: two A Native American of Laguna Pueblo and Sioux heritage, Paula Gunn Allen was raised in Cubero, New Mexico, a Spanish land-grant town 50 miles west of Albuquerque, abutting the Laguna Reservation. Allen’s mother is of Laguna Pueblo and Sioux heritage and her father was Lebanese-American. The writings of her mother’s uncle, John Gunn, an anthropologist and researcher of Native American cultures, was a major source of information for Allen’s writings. Her sister is poet Carol Lee Sanchez and her cousin is writer Leslie Marmon Silko, both of whom were reared in her community. After attending mission schools in rural Cubero, San Fidel, and a convent school in Albuquerque, Allen went on to receive her B.A. in English from the University of Oregon (1966). After college, she married, had two children, and subsequently divorced. She returned to school and in 1968 received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, also from the University of Oregon. Allen returned to New Mexico and in 1975 received a Ph.D. in American Studies and Native American Studies from the University of New Mexico. She was a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA in 1981-82. Between 1986 and 1990 she was professor of Ethnic Studies and

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Native American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. Subsequently, Allen has been a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. Three components central to Native American culture are the individual, the land, and the spiritual world; the way in which they are woven together forms the fabric of life for the community and the basis for Allen’s work. She encourages her reader to see the multiplicity present in all things. Nature is welcomed and accepted in all forms. Spirits are continually present and the individual aware of the power present in the world and prepared to ‘‘walk in balance’’ can move down a path toward spiritual exploration and knowledge. Allen has written numerous books of poetry, many of which explore the issue of the relationship between the individual and a ‘‘mythic space’’ or the spiritual realm. Even as she continues to explore these issues through her poems, they also permeate her work as a novelist exploring the depths of the individual; as an essayist and editor looking at feminist and historical perspectives; and as an anthologist of Native American tales and myths looking at the works from an anthropological feminist standpoint. Allen’s novel, The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (1983, reprinted 1995), introduces a recurrent theme, depicting a Native American woman struggling both to discover her own place in a world bent on judging her behavior and restricting her options and to integrate her sense of herself as a modern woman with the power of ancient spiritual beliefs. The vital healing process and reeducation emerging at the end of the novel reappear in the form of theoretical, feminist historical essays in the nonfiction collection The Sacred Hoop (1986, expanded 1992). Here Allen strikingly reconstructs the gynocratic and gynocentric visions of the world as captured in the stories and religions of Native Americans, examining the traditional and sacred teachings centered within the sacred hoop of life in which everything has a place and role. Asserting that many of the orally transmitted tales have been influenced by the encroaching Anglo-American patriarchal system of politics and religion, Allen presents the tales in their original gynocentric forms. Allen’s strong commitment to textual restoration also appears in essays exploring the incompatibilities between femalecentered traditions and those espoused by individuals raised in patriarchal societies; the differences between the European monotheistic and individualist model of society and the communitybased, multitheistic Native American model; and the impact of writing and thinking from a position of ‘‘tribal-feminism’’ and ‘‘feminist-tribalism’’ that respects the separate natures of men and women while stressing the need for both sexes to work in balance with each other. Spider Woman’s Granddaughters (1989) explores 100 years of the strong and vital tradition of Native American women in a collection including traditional tales, biographical writings, and short stories. Allen feels these are the stories of ‘‘women at war’’ who have become captives in their own lands. The major figures include ‘‘Sacred Woman,’’ ‘‘Grand-mother Spider,’’ and ‘‘Yellow Corn Woman’’ who appear repeatedly, under various names,

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throughout Native American traditional songs and writings. The stories capture the resistance and continuing hope enduring in Native American cultures that continues to be spoken and written about by the women of the culture. Grandmothers of the Light: A Medicine Woman’s Sourcebook (1991) continues the discussion of mythic stories that incorporate a polytheistic female-based belief structure with its concepts of duty to the larger group, balance in all things, and connections to the earth. Substantiating her assertions with extensive research in the belief structures of many Native American cultures, Allen stresses the applicability of these stories to the present day, and the necessity of these beliefs in a modern world that has not only become estranged from the earth, the source of all things, but destroys it as well. As a writer, Allen believes it is her responsibility to bring forth the visions existing within herself as poet, essayist, novelist, activist, teacher, woman, lesbian, and Laguna Pueblo-Sioux. Her work makes a major contribution to the female strength, and the tribal and native female resistance and hope of Native American cultures. As Allen re-remembers the past of Native American cultures and history, she embodies her hope that her readers and the Native communities will ‘‘walk in balance’’ with the surrounding world. OTHER WORKS: The Blind Lion (1974). Coyote’s Daylight Trip (1978). A Cannon Between My Knees (1981). Shadow Country (1981). Star Child: Poems (1981). Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs (editor, 1983). Judy Grahn: Gathering the Tribe (1983). Wyrds (1987). Skins and Bones: Poems 1979-1987 (1988). Women’s Friendship: A Collection of Short Stories (1991). Voice of the Turtle: A Century of American Indian Fiction (editor, 1995). As Long as the River Flows: The Stories of Nine Native Americans (1996). Life is a Fatal Disease: Collected Poems, 1962-1995 (1997). Off the Reservation: Reflections on Boundary-Busting Border-Crossing Canons (1998). Contributor to many anthologies, including: Talking Leaves: Contemporary Native American Short Stories (1991); A Circle of Nations: Voices and Visions of American Indians (1993); No More Masks! An Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets, Newly Revised and Expanded (1993); From Different Shores: Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America (1994); Growing Up Gay/Growing Up Lesbian: A Literary Anthology (1994); Issues in Feminism: An Introduction to Women’s Studies (1995); The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (1996); Classics in Lesbian Studies (1997); The Other Within Us: Feminist Explorations of Women and Aging (1997); Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature (1997); Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing about American Indians (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Balassi, W., This Is About Vision: Interviews with Southwestern Writers (1990). Bloom, H., ed., Native American Women Writers (1998). Bruchac, J., Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets (1987). Coltelli, L., Winged


ALLISON

Words: American Indian Writers Speak (1992). Donovan, K. M., Feminist Readings of Native American Literature: Coming to Voice (1998). Fleck, R. F., ed., Critical Perspectives on Native American Fiction (1997). Hanson, E. I., Paula Gunn Allen (1990). Keating, A., Women Reading Women Writing: Self-invention in Paula Gunn Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde (1996). Lang, N. H., Through Landscape Toward Story/Through Story Toward Landscape: A Study of Four Native American Women Poets (dissertation, 1991). Rothblum, E. D., ed., Classics in Lesbian Studies (1997). Ruoff, A. L. B., American Indian Literatures (1990). Stauffer, H. W., and S. Rosowski, eds., Women and Western American Literature (1982). Swann, B. and A. Krupat, eds., I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers (1987). Swann, B. and A. Krupat, eds., Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature (1987). Reference works: Benet’s (1991). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). 20th Century Western Writers (1991). Other references: American Anthropologist (Sept 1990). American Book Review (Dec 1992, Dec. 1993). American Indian Quarterly (Spring 1983, Spring 1991, Spring 1992). Journal of Homosexuality (1999). NDQ (interview, Spring 1989). MELUS (interview, Summer 1983). —DACIA GENTILELLA

ALLISON, Dorothy Born 11 April 1949, Greenville, South Carolina Daughter of Ruth Gibson Allison; children: Wolf Michael When Dorothy Allison was born in 1949, her mother, Ruth Gibson Allison, was only 15 years old. In addition, she was poor and unmarried. This early experience of dramatic poverty would influence much of her work. Eventually, Allison’s mother married a man who was not Allison’s father; this stepfather abused her sexually for several years, until Allison described the experience to another relative. When Ruth Allison learned of these events, the abuse stopped, although she remained married to this husband. This experience of abuse would also inform much of Allison’s writing. After high school, Allison attended Florida Presbyterian College, currently known as Eckerd College; she earned her B.A. in 1971. She was introduced to feminism during her college years, an experience she credits with validating her life and feelings. She later earned an M.A. from the progressive New School for Social Research in New York City. She currently lives in California. Unlike many writers who have come of age during the last generation, Allison did not serve an apprenticeship in a creative writing program; she did not begin to consider herself a serious writer until after she earned her master’s degree. She has been nominated for a National Book Award and has won a Lambda Literary award.

Allison is most well known for her novel Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), a book with many autobiographical overtones, although Allison asserts it is not simply an autobiography under another label. Yet much of the plot and many of the details do resemble Allison’s life. The protagonist is a young girl named Ruth Anne Boatwright, known by her nickname, Bone. Bone is illegitimate, her family is exceptionally poor, and she suffers sexual abuse by her mother’s current husband, Daddy Glen, whom her mother had married in part to relieve her family of its poverty. Despite the fact that her mother denies this abuse until she can no longer ignore it, Bone achieves some security in her family’s community of women, especially with her Aunt Raylene, who had once engaged in a sexual relationship with another woman. While much of Bone’s experience is marked by a sense of desperation, she nevertheless is also characterized by the grit of a survivor. Bastard Out of Carolina was both a critical and a popular success, although some readers found it too blunt in its descriptions of poverty and abuse. Allison’s writing is consistently direct and never sentimental. Regardless of a reader’s aesthetic preferences, some of Allison’s scenes are painful to read, but this is precisely her goal. She has stated that individuals of her background and experience have too often been the objects of writing by others; her goal, on the other hand, is to tell her own story rather than be told about, to present her life and the lives of people like her as fully as possible. Like many fiction writers, she claims stories create what meaning one can find in life. In addition to Bastard Out of Carolina, Allison has published poetry, short stories, and essays, as well as a second novel. Her collection of stories, Trash (1988), received more attention than books published by small presses often do. These stories are characterized by many of the same themes as her longer fiction. More recently, Allison has published a collection of essays and a memoir, both of which address issues similar to those she raises in her fiction. Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature (1993), is provocative both in terms of the ideas it addresses and the style with which it addresses them. Her language, and her style in general, is easily accessible; her consistent choice to be direct precludes any option to participate in jargon that would exclude some of her intended audience. Although Allison is clearly a feminist, she does not avoid some of the current tensions within the mainstream feminist movement, including class differences and the implications that accompany them. Nor does she shy away from open acknowledgment of sexuality, sexual preference, and desire, even (or especially) when such a direct style may make some readers uncomfortable. She is no more willing, in other words, to tone her story down for middle-class feminists than she would be for conservative men. Allison’s recent book, Cavedweller (1997), is her second novel. Cavedweller is less obviously autobiographical. Critics have found this novel somewhat less stunning than her first, but that is perhaps inevitable. For the foreseeable future, Allison is likely to remain known most as the author of Bastard Out of Carolina, which was turned into a controversial film by Anjelica Huston.

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ALTHER


OTHER WORKS: The Women Who Hate Me (1983). The Women Who Hate Me: Poetry, 1980-1990 (1991). Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (1995). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CANR (1998). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —LYNN DOMINA

ALTHER, Lisa Born Elisabeth Greene Reed, 23 July 1944, Kingsport, Tennessee Daughter of John S. and Alice Greene Reed; married Richard P. Alther, 1966 (divorced); children: Sara Though she was born and grew up in the South, Lisa Alther has spent all of her adult life in the North. She graduated from Wellesley College, married in 1966, and has lived for many years on the edge of a small town in Vermont. Alther has taught Southern fiction at St. Michael’s College in Winooski, Vermont. She identifies herself as a Southern writer, however, because of the influence of storytelling in her home and her early exposure by her English-teacher mother to the works of Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, and Carson McCullers. From her father, a surgeon, she acquired an interest in science, which was reflected in her earliest publications about the environment and her continuing use of scientific metaphors. Her first two novels are set in her native South; the second two in New England. All of them reflect smalltown life and deal with problems of community. Alther has said she had over 200 rejection slips before her first fiction publication, Kinflicks (1976). The novel was so financially successful Alther has been able to write in her preferred manner, taking several months between multiple drafts and a year between books. Though widely admired for her comic tone, Alther is a serious writer who has focused on the ironies involved in the search for meaning by characters trying to avoid stereotypical, inherited responses to the hostile forces of 20th-century life. Kinflicks deals with the 1960s generation’s agonized conflicts over sex, religion, education, and the war in Vietnam. In half the chapters, Ginny Babcock recapitulates her youthful rebellion against her parents’ life pattern and goals and savagely rejects religious rationalizations of their greed, racism, and class prejudices. Adolescent sexual initiation rites furnish ironic views of the older generation’s hypocrisy about sex, and Ginny’s search for alternatives includes experiments with backseat petting, heterosexual and homosexual monogamy, and lesbian communes. In alternate chapters, Alther uses a third person narrator to show Ginny’s return home at twenty-seven to the bedside of her dying mother and their reconciliation when Ginny realizes her mother had deliberately played the stereotypical mother role in order to meet her children’s need for meaning. Mrs. Babcock’s self-awareness frees Ginny from guilt and the necessity of role playing. Kinflicks has been very popular; in the 1990s it was in print. As

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with all of Alther’s books, it was highly praised and also strongly condemned. Most critics praised it for its verbal wit and for the irony with which the sexual escapades target stereotypes, male sexual conquest, and adult sanctimoniousness; many recognized it as serious social criticism. Very few mentioned the serious mother-daughter plot or perceived the female bildungsroman structure of the book. In Original Sins (1981) Alther juggles the stories of five protagonists who find their small-town Southern environment pernicious. Whereas Kinflicks is picaresque in its emphasis on the journey away, Original Sins focuses on home and its limitations. But as ‘‘the Five’’ mature, their self-awareness, like that of Mrs. Babcock, offers more hope for them than for their parents. Critics agreed the two female characters’ sexual experiences are the most vivid aspects of this book. In Other Women (1984), Alther again juxtaposes the lives of two women, a confused nurse who has experimented sexually as had Ginny Babcock in her search for meaning, and an older woman psychotherapist, whose counsel stems from her own tragic experiences. The book is unusual in focusing equally on patient and therapist and offers their relationship as a model of feminist therapy, nonhierarchical and eventuating in friendship. Though friendship between two women that blossoms into love is central to Bedrock (1990), the focus really is on a town in Vermont to which one of them flees in her search for meaning. The 20-year romantic friendship between the two women in Bedrock is loosely based on the friendship between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. We see all the hypocrisy and self-delusion of less than admirable characters, but the tone— sometimes almost farcical—is accepting and hopeful. Clea Shawn loses her romantic illusions about a small town, remodels a decaying house, and finds happiness when she recognizes that her long friendship with Elka is the basis of a lesbian relationship. Five Minutes in Heaven (1995) follows its main character from childhood in Tennessee to adulthood in New York City and Paris. Along the way, Jude has a number of relationships that force her to come to terms with her sexuality. First, she has an attraction to her best friend, Molly. After Molly dies and Jude tries to sort out her feelings about her emerging lesbianism, she begins a relationship and falls in love with a gay man. After losing Sandy, Jude has a passionate love affair with a married woman. After moving to Paris, she finally finds comfort in her sexuality. Alther explains why she wrote Five Minutes in Heaven: ‘‘Three of my best friends died violent deaths—one when we were teenagers, and the other two when we were in our forties. Five Minutes in Heaven, an extended meditation on ‘graveyard love’ (the kind of love that lasts until you’re both dead and buried in the graveyard), is my memorial to them.’’ The book, Alther says, ‘‘is an extended meditation on love in all its phases—the longing for it, the contentment of its fulfillment, the pain of its loss, the memories of it that can shape a person’s life.’’ Though Alther’s books are lauded for her wit and humor, Five Minutes in Heaven is much more serious and rarely gives the reader a reason to laugh. Alther’s works trace the experiences of her generation and continue to be popular. Though critical acceptance of Bedrock


was somewhat grudging, her work is now being seriously considered by critics and scholars. Alther’s books have been worldwide bestsellers and have been translated into 17 languages including French, German, Dutch, Japanese, and Spanish. Her novella Birdman and the Dancer (1993), is an adult fairy tale based on monotypes by French artist Françoise Gilot. It has been published only in Denmark, the Netherlands, and Germany. Many of Alther’s reviews and articles have been published in the New York Times, Art and Antiques, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Natural History, New Society, and the Guardian. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Abel, E., et al., eds., The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development (1983). Prenshaw, P., ed., Women Writers of the Contemporary South (1984). Todd, J., ed., Gender and Literary Voice (1980). Reference works: CA (1977). CLC (1977, 1987). CANR (1984, 1990). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). Other references: Appalachia/America (1980). Arizona Quarterly (Winter 1982). Booklist (1 Mar. 1995). DIA (1988). Frontiers 4 (1979). PW (27 Feb. 1995). —MARY ANNE FERGUSON, UPDATED BY NICK ASSENDELFT

ÁLVAREZ, Julia Born 27 March 1950, New York, New York Julia Álvarez’s family fled the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic in 1960, when she was ten years old. They went to live in New York City, where Álvarez’s grandfather had worked as the Dominican cultural attaché to the United Nations. By the time she attended Connecticut College, Álvarez was already receiving prizes for her poetry. She transferred to Middlebury College in Vermont, where she graduated summa cum laude in 1971 and was awarded the college’s creative writing prize. In 1975 she received a Master’s degree in creative writing from Syracuse University. She has taught writing to students of all levels and all ages, from young children to senior citizens. In 1996 she received a Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, from the City University of New York, John Jay College. She is currently a full professor in the English Department at Middlebury and a frequent scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. It was the emotional upheaval caused by leaving her homeland and her language behind which led Álvarez to become a writer. Of her childhood in the Dominican Republic she states: ‘‘The power of stories was all around me.’’ Álvarez was a reluctant student, who seized every opportunity to play hooky from the Carol Morgan School that she attended with her three sisters, but who relished furtively reading The Thousand and One Nights under the bedskirts or hearing legends and stories told by her elders, from the aunts and uncles in her extensive family to the domestic servants who worked for them.

ÁLVAREZ

With the move to the U.S., Álvarez began to realize the power of language in giving one a sense of place and belonging. As an adolescent at the Abbott School, a boarding school north of Boston, Álvarez says she ‘‘landed in the English language.’’ The process of assimilation took her away, however, from the Spanish of her youth. Writing novels and poetry that center on the immigrant experience is a way for Álvarez to reclaim her cultural identity. Her first book-length work of fiction, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), was awarded the Pen Oakland/Josephine Miles award. This collection of interconnected short stories centers around the character of Yolanda García, the third child in a Dominican family that has fled their homeland and resettled in New York City. Yolanda and her three sisters, Carla, Sandra and Sofia, struggle to be accepted in their new country. As the title reveals, this story is one of assimilation and the loss that assimilation inevitably entails. Arranged in reverse chronology, the grown-up García girls at the beginning of the work have already lost their accents, but like many immigrants, they have also come to realize the importance of holding fast to the ties that bind them to Caribbean culture and to the country they were born in. As the stories work their way backward to the girls’ childhood in the Dominican Republic, they become increasingly assured and powerful. Donna Rifkind, in a review for the New York Times Book Review, said that Álvarez has ‘‘beautifully captured the threshold experience of the new immigrant, where the past is not yet a memory and the future remains an anxious dream.’’ In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), Álvarez’s second novel, takes place in the Dominican Republic during Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s brutal 31-year regime. The novel weaves historical fact with fiction to tell the story of the coming of age of four sisters: Minerva, Patria Mercedes, Dedé and María Teresa (‘‘Mate’’). Known throughout Latin America by their code name, ‘‘Las Mariposas,’’ the butterflies, Minerva, Patria, and María Teresa Mirabal, were murdered by Trujillo’s henchmen in 1960 on the way home from visiting their husbands in jail. The novel traces the transformation of these ordinary girls into extraordinary young women, revolutionaries who lose their lives in their country’s struggle for democracy. As In the Time of the Butterflies opens, Dedé, the one sister who survives, is preparing to be interviewed by a DominicanAmerican novelist who is writing a book about the Mirabal sisters and the events leading up to their murders. Using first-person narratives, Álvarez gives each of the sisters a turn to tell her story. The youngest, Mate, confides her secrets—mostly the giggly, romantic variety—to a diary. The voice of Patria, the pious sister who as a young girl dreams of becoming a nun, is at times almost prayer-like, as if her words were meant for the Virgin Mary’s ears or for a hushed confessional. Minerva speaks with authority and insight, like the lawyer she studies to become (only to be prevented from practicing by a direct order from Trujillo himself). Dedé’s story, however, alternates between the first and third person. She is the one who survives to tell and retell her sisters’ story, living out her years in their childhood home, which has been turned into a museum where the curious flock like pilgrims to see the relics of

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the Mirabal sisters, martyrs to the cause of democracy, brought to life again by Dedé’s words and by Álvarez’s own skillful writing.

with the poets Alice and Phoebe Cary, to the Utica Morning Herald and the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican.

In Álvarez’s third novel, Yo! (1997), she continues the exploration of multiple narrators that is a hallmark of her fiction. Yo, Spanish for ‘‘I,’’ is also short for Yolanda, but the Yolanda of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents is now a thirty-fiveyear-old free spirit who has been waylaid from her early promise as a scholar by hippie boyfriends and bad decisions. Seen only in this novel from without, by family, friends, and others, she is still ‘‘caught between two cultures’’ but manages finally to find a place for herself as a happily married and successful writer.

After her marriage to a minister ended, Ames began a ‘‘Woman’s Letter from Washington,’’ for the New York Independent. The column continued from 1866 until her death. She also wrote for the Brooklyn Daily Union and for the Cincinnati Commercial. Her literary output from 1870 on included two novels, A Memorial to Alice and Phoebe Cary (1873), two volumes based on her columns, and a book of poetry. A year before she died, she married Edmund Hudson, a Washington journalist.

Before turning to fiction, Álvarez focused on poetry. She received the American Academy of Poetry Prize in 1974 and a 1987-88 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Grant. She has published three collections of poetry: Housekeeping Book (hand printed in 1984), Homecoming (first published in 1984, with a revised, expanded edition appearing in 1996), and The Other Side/ El Otro Lado (1995). Álvarez’s poetry and essays have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Hispanic magazine, the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and the Washington Post Magazine. Álvarez has also written nonfiction. Something to Declare, a collection of her essays, deals with many of the themes she treats in her fiction and poetry: the immigrant experience, the politics of language, the importance of retaining cultural identity. Inasmuch as they treat becoming and living as a writer, however, the essays in Something to Declare also explore new territory. They are particularly revealing in that they illustrate just how much of Álvarez’s creative work parallels her own life history: ‘‘There is no such thing as straight-up fiction,’’ Álvarez declares. ‘‘In spite of our caution and precaution, bits of our lives will get into what we write.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY: American Book Review (Aug. 1992). CLC (1996). Hispanic Journal (Spring 1993). Nation (7 Nov. 1994). New England Review (Summer 1993). NYTBR (6 Oct. 1991). PW (16 Dec. 1996). WRB (May 1995). —HELENA ALONSA AND ANA ROCA

AMES, Mary E. Clemmer Born 6 May 1831, Utica, New York; died 18 August 1884, Washington, D.C. Wrote under: M.C.A., Mary Clemmer, Mary Clemmer Ames Daughter of Abraham and Margaret Kneale Clemmer; married Daniel Ames, 1851; Edmund Hudson, 1883 The oldest of seven children, Mary E. Clemmer Ames moved with her family to Westfield, Massachusetts, where she attended the Westfield Academy. Her career began in 1859, when she sent letters from New York City, where she was living temporarily

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Ames’ literary significance stems mainly from her column in the influential weekly, the Independent. It made her one of the best known of a group of post-Civil War women Washington correspondents, known as ‘‘literary ladies.’’ Avoiding social news, she concentrated on political issues, defending the freed Black and civil rights, and sharply criticizing the excesses of Gilded-Age politics. She moved in the same social circles as leading politicians and used them as news sources. In spite of her participation in the masculine worlds of both politics and journalism, Ames repeatedly told her readers that she modestly shrank from public notice and preferred the domestic scene to the political arena. Asserting her career had been the product of financial necessity, she justified it morally on the grounds that women journalists had a spiritual duty to purify politics, even if their efforts brought them unwelcome personal attention. She did not appear publicly to support woman suffrage, although she did advocate it. Considering suffrage less important than economic gains, she wrote: ‘‘Women can live nobly without voting; but they cannot live without bread.’’ Ames’ weekly columns bore the hallmark of popular Victorian literature—excessive sentiment, self-conscious moralizing, and verbosity. Still, they provided an intriguing picture of a woman standing apart from the seamy side of politics and pinpointing politicians guilty of drunkenness and corruption. The books based on her columns—Outlines of Men, Women and Things (1873) and Ten Years in Washington (1873)—emphasized people and places rather than politics. Part guidebook to the capital, Ten Years in Washington, a subscription book reprinted three times, was crammed with historical lore. Outlines included descriptions of scenic spots, biographical sketches of literary and theatrical figures, and, more importantly, several essays dealing with relations between the sexes. Ames urged men to subscribe to the ‘‘pure’’ moral standards of women and exhorted women to educate themselves. Her most successful work of nonfiction, A Memorial to Alice and Phoebe Cary, a gushing tribute to the women who had befriended her, drew critical acclaim in a sentimental era. Making a virtue of what was obviously a handicap to a Washington correspondent—her sex—she contended that her womanhood gave her the right to comment on political issues to promote reform. Trading on the Victorian mystique that women possessed a higher moral sense than men, she showed that a facile woman writer could make a place for herself by pointing a finger of righteous scorn and indignation at the men who ran the country.


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OTHER WORKS: Victoire (1864). Eirene, or, A Woman’s Right (1871). His Two Wives (1875). Memorial Sketch of Elizabeth Emerson Atwater (1879). Poems of Life and Nature (1883). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Beasley, M. H., The First Women Washington Correspondents (George Washington University Studies No. 4, 1976). Beasley, M. H., and S. Silver, Women in Media: A Documentary Source Book (1977). Hudson, E., An American Woman’s Life and Work: A Memorial of Mary Clemmer (1886). Whiting, L., ‘‘Mary Clemmer,’’ in Our Famous Women (1884). Other references: Arthur’s Home Magazine (Dec. 1884). The Cottage Hearth (Feb. 1875). The Independent (28 Aug. 1884). —MAURINE BEASLEY

ANDERSON, Marian

became the first black diva at the Metropolitan Opera, singing Ulrica in The Masked Ball (1955). In 1957 Anderson published her autobiography, My Lord What a Morning. Her writing style is not vivid, but she gives a clear picture of herself as a simple, deeply religious woman who feels a strong obligation to use her talent for others’ benefit. She writes of her career in personal terms, omitting many of the honors that have accrued to her. They are many—over three dozen honorary degrees from American universities, the Bok Award (1940), the Finnish decoration (1940), the Swedish Litteris et Artibus medal (1952), the Japanese Yokusho Medal (1953), the Gimbel Award (1958), and the U.S. Institute of Arts and Sciences’ gold medal (1958). She became a delegate to the Thirteenth General Assembly of the United Nations (1958) and, in 1963, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor an American civilian can attain. In 1965 Anderson retired from singing and to live quietly in Danbury, Connecticut. She died in 1993.

Born 17 February 1902, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 1993 Daughter of John Berkeley and Anna Anderson; married Orpheus H. Fisher, 1943

OTHER WORKS: Essay featured in Written By Herself: Autobiography of American Women: An Anthology (1992).

Marian Anderson was the eldest of three daughters. The unusual quality of her voice was noted by the time she was six years old. She began singing in the choir of the Union Baptist Church near her home, and her remarkable range permitted her to substitute for absent sopranos, mezzos, or altos with equal ease. Eventually, her voice developed into a rich contralto, with a particularly beautiful middle register.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Formica, R., Black Americans of Achievement: A Teachers Guide (1992). Kostman, S., Twentieth Century Women of Achievement (1976). Perry, S., Things from the Heart: Marian Anderson’s Story (1981). Richardson, B., and W. A. Fahey, Great Black Americans (1976). Roosevelt, F. W., Doers and Dowagers (1975). Smallwood, D., Profiles of Great African Americans (1998). Smaridge, N., Trailblazers in American Arts (1971). Spivey, L., Singing Heart: A Story Based on the Life of Marian Anderson. Topplin, E. A., Biographical History of Blacks in America since 1528 (1971). Vehanan, K., Marian Anderson: A Portrait (1941). Ware, S., Letter to the World: Seven Women Who Shaped the American Century (1998). Other references: AH (Feb. 1977). American Women of Achievement Video Collection (video, 1995). Marian Anderson (video, 1998). Marian Anderson Rare and Unpublished Recordings, 1936-1952 (audio, 1998).

Her father died when she was very young, and before she was fifteen, she began to take singing engagements to help support the family. She was unable to enroll at the Philadelphia Academy of Music, but the black community subscribed funds for her to study with noted voice teacher Giuseppe Boghetti, who gave her the only formal coaching she ever received. For several years she toured in the eastern and southern United States, performing mostly for church groups. In 1925 Boghetti entered her name in a national competition held in New York; she sang at the Lewisohn Stadium and won first prize out of 300 entrants. That was the beginning of her career. In 1930 she studied in Europe, and the following year began to concertize there. A Scandinavian tour brought favorable recognition, and by 1932 she was in demand in all the European capitals. Toscanini called hers ‘‘The voice that comes once in a hundred years!’’ Her U.S. tour in 1936 was a triumph, but it was the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) who made her name familiar in every American household. In 1939 Anderson was scheduled to sing at Constitution Hall, owned by the DAR in Washington, but the organization decreed that no black singer could appear there. Eleanor Roosevelt resigned in protest, and newspapers carried the story across the country. When Anderson was asked to sing at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday that year, 15,000 people gathered before the steps, and the incident marked a turning point for black artists. Anderson married in 1943, but she continued to concertize all over the world. She

—HELENE KOON

ANDREW, Joseph Maree See BONNER, Marita

ANDREWS, Eliza Frances Born 10 August 1840, Washington, Georgia; died 21 January 1931, Rome, Georgia Wrote under: Elzey Hay Daughter of Garnett and Annulet Ball Andrews Eliza Frances Andrews was born at Haywood, the plantation home of her parents. The family was moderately wealthy by

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Southern standards, owning about 200 slaves. Andrews attended the Washington Seminary for Girls and graduated in the first class from the LaGrange Female College in 1857. When Georgia seceded from the Union in January 1861, Andrews’ father achieved notoriety for his uncompromising opposition to secession and his subsequent refusal to support the new Confederacy. Although he permitted three of his sons to join the Confederate army, he did not tolerate the secessionist views of his daughters, which led to many family arguments. In December 1864, Andrews began her diary, published as The War-time Journal of a Georgia Girl (1908), with an account of a trip to visit her sister near Albany, Georgia. Andrews and a younger sister had to travel over rough, partially destroyed roads, with the ever-present fear of ambush by Sherman’s men. Once at their sister’s, however, the two girls enjoyed a round of visits and parties, strangely gay for a time of political and military disintegration. Andrews’ fine eye for detail gives the reader a fascinating portrait of social life in the rural Confederacy. Occasionally she lapses into girlish concerns, reporting all the compliments she received on her appearance, but her natural skepticism always rescues her and the diary from silliness. In March 1865 Andrews returned to Washington, Georgia, to witness the fall of the Confederacy. There she met Jefferson Davis on his flight from his pursuers. After her father’s death in 1873, Andrews began teaching school. She served as principal of the Girl’s High School in Yazoo City, Mississippi, later became principal of a girl’s seminary in Washington, Georgia, and from 1885 to 1896 taught French and literature at the Wesleyan Female College in Macon, Georgia. Andrews then returned home to Washington to teach botany in the public high school. After her retirement from teaching, she published two textbooks on botany. Andrews’ literary career began in 1865 with an article on Reconstruction in Georgia published in the New York World. A second article on women’s life and fashions appeared in Godey’s Lady’s Book the following year. Her first novel, A Family Secret (1876), quickly became a bestseller. This mystery, set in the immediate postwar south, revolves around the romance between Audley Malvern and Ruth Harfleur and their attempts to discover the secret of Ruth’s parents and the unusual ring she wears. It is filled with such typical 19th-century literary conventions as a ghost in a graveyard, mistaken identities, and a last chapter entitled ‘‘Everybody Gets Married and Lives Happy Forever After.’’ A Family Secret is of interest to the modern reader for its strong statements on the position of women. Audley’s sister, Julia Malvern, an unsuccessful teacher, writer, and clerk, concludes that marriage for money is the only way out of her financial dilemma. She is not happy about this, however: ‘‘Marrying for money never makes people better, but it leaves us so poor in our own estimation, so mean in spirit, so hollow, so empty, and, after all, so unsatisfied, that sometimes I almost doubt whether it pays.’’ A few pages later she exclaims, ‘‘Oh, the slavery it is to be a woman and not a fool!’’

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Two other novels, A Mere Adventurer (1879) and Prince Hal; or, the Romance of a Rich Young Man (1882), were equally successful with readers. OTHER WORKS: Botany All the Year Round; a Practical Textbook for Schools (1893). Seven Great Battles of the Army of Northern Virginia: A Program of Study and Entertainment (1906). A Practical Course in Botany, With Especial Reference to Its Bearings on Agriculture, Economics, and Sanitation (1911). The War-time Journals of a Georgia Girl, 1864-1865 (reissued, 1997). The papers of Eliza Frances Andrews are in the Garnett Andrews Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina Library, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Coulter, E. M., Travels in the Confederate States (1948). Hart, B. S., Introduction to Georgia Writers (1929). King, S. B., Jr., ed., Wartime Journal of a Georgia Girl (1960 ed.). Tardy, M. T., ed., The Living Female Writers of the South (1872). Reference works: NAW 1607-1950 (1971). A Woman of the Century, F. E. Willard and M. A. Livermore (1893). Other references: NYT (23 Jan. 1931). —JANET E. KAUFMAN

ANDREWS, Jane Born 1 December 1833, Newburyport, Massachusetts; died 15 July 1887, Newburyport, Massachusetts Daughter of John and Margaret Demmon Rand Andrews Jane Andrews was born and raised in the midst of the vigorous nationalism of mid-19th century New England. She inherited from her family a spirit of intellectual concern and benevolence which, taken together with a broad outlook, led her to become one of the earliest proponents of internationalism in education. Andrews’ school friends at the Newbury Massachusetts Putnam Free School and the State Normal School at West Newton, Massachusetts, included a sister-in-law of education reformer Horace Mann. Mann persuaded Andrews that she would find the kind of education she wanted at his new college, Antioch, where, subsequently, she was the first student to register. However, the onset of a neurological disorder described as ‘‘spinal affection’’ cut short her education in the middle of the first year and left her an invalid for the next six years. Nonetheless, Mann’s influence reinforced her commitment to believing in one’s responsibility to society, a commitment that influenced the direction of the teaching and writing she practiced during the remainder of her life. In 1860, sufficiently recovered from her illness to work, Andrews founded a primary school in her home. This school, characterized by advanced educational methods including experiments, plays, games, and stories, was extremely successful and continued to be Andrews’ focus for the next 25 years. In her school she cultivated observation, individual responsibility, and


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creative expression in the hope of molding responsible citizens for life in a society where all people were equal. Andrews’ first book, Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball That Floats in the Air (1861), grew out of stories she created to supplement the geography lessons in her school. Each story focuses on a little girl in a different culture and emphasizes that although the external circumstances of life are very different for each child, each is happy and is one of God’s family. The same motive held for the sequel, Each and All: Seven Little Sisters Prove Their Sisterhood (1877) and for a historical counterpart, Ten Boys Who Lived on the Road From Long Ago to Now (1886), which traces ‘‘our race from its Aryan sources to the present.’’ Through these books, all of which emphasize the kinship of children throughout the world, Andrews hoped to offset the effect of books like Peter Parley’s, in which children from other lands were characteristically made to look strange and unlike the children for whom the books were intended. The books also provided an alternative morality to that of the McGuffey readers which depicted virtue as being of personal rather than of social concern. The Stories Mother Nature Told Her Children (1889) emphasizes the wonder of nature, and although Andrews tends at times to humanize nature and to moralize (‘‘Mother Nature. . . is she to whom God has given the care of the earth. . . just as he has given to your mother the care of her family of boys and girls’’), the stories in this volume and those collected in Only a Year and What It Brought (1888) and The Stories of My Four Friends (1900) reflect her close observation of nature and her excitement at its processes. OTHER WORKS: Geographical Plays for Young Folks at Home and School (1880). The Child’s Health Primer (1885). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Green, N. K., A Forgotten Chapter in American Education: Jane Andrews of Newburyport (1961). Hopkins, L. P., foreword to Jane Andrews’ Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball That Floats in the Air (1897 ed.). Spofford, H. P., A Little Book of Friends (1916). Other references: EngElemR (May 1936).

most of her married life in Syracuse, New York, spending her summers in the family’s wilderness camp in Quebec, which provided the setting for much of her fiction. Her only son, Paul Shipman Andrews, became dean of the College of Law of Syracuse University. Andrews’ first published story, ‘‘Crowned with Glory and Honor’’ (1902), appeared in Scribner’s Magazine, and it was in the short story genre that she was to achieve distinction. From 1902 until 1929 her many stories appeared, chiefly in Scribner’s, but also in other leading journals. Most of these stories were later published in book form, in such collections as The Militants (1907), The Eternal Masculine (1913), and The Eternal Feminine (1916). Some of her best known stories, such as The Perfect Tribute (1906), appeared first in Scribner’s and were later published as separate books. She also wrote novels, notably The Marshal (1912), a historical novel set in Napoleonic times; a book of World War I poetry, Crosses of War (1918); and a biography of Florence Nightingale, A Lost Commander (1929). However, it is her short tales which are of interest to the literary historian. Andrews’ bestselling book The Perfect Tribute, illustrates the qualities of her writing that accounted for her popularity with her contemporaries but which have resulted in her obscurity today. This fictional account of Abraham Lincoln’s disappointment over the reception of his Gettysburg Address was the first of several Lincoln stories written by Andrews. The tale is embellished with Andrews’ own ‘‘historical facts’’ and is a sentimental tale of Lincoln’s aid to a dying young Confederate soldier, through whom Lincoln learns of the true greatness of his speech. Bathos, didacticism, and superpatriotism characterize this story, whose hero, Captain Blair, is virtually interchangeable with the young, handsome, perfect heroes of many of Andrews’ other works. Yet, the author’s instinct for drama, her sincerity, and her vivid description of Lincoln caused contemporary critics to overlook the story’s faults. The book went into many printings, eventually selling more than 600,000 copies. It has been often anthologized, and its version of Lincoln has been read by thousands of American schoolchildren.

Born 2 April 1860, Mobile, Alabama; died 2 August 1936, Syracuse, New York Daughter of Jacob Shaw and Ann Louise Gold Johns Shipman; married William Shankland Andrews, 1884; children: Paul Shipman Andrews

In addition to her successful Lincoln tales, Andrews wrote a variety of stories which exemplify the types of magazine fiction popular with the American reader of the early 1900s. Whereas the stories varied in content from love stories to adventure yarns to patriotic war tales, they shared the common traits of superficiality, sentimentality, and melodrama—along with the ability to entertain the reader. The best of them were her outdoor stories, many of which appeared in two collections, Bob and the Guides (1906), written for and about young boys, and The Eternal Masculine, for adults. These stories of hunting, fishing, and camping adventures have a vitality which stems from Andrews’ own love of the outdoors; in them, melodrama is kept to a minimum.

Mary Shipman Andrews, a popular fiction writer of the early 20th century, was raised and educated in Lexington, Kentucky, the oldest child of an Episcopalian minister. Her husband was a lawyer who later became a distinguished judge. Andrews lived

Although most of Andrews’ fiction features male protagonists and takes place in the so-called masculine worlds of the courtroom, the battlefield, and the wilderness, she wrote several stories from a woman’s point of view. Most of them are collected

—KATHARYN F. CRABBE

ANDREWS, Mary (Raymond) Shipman

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in The Eternal Feminine, and vary in quality from the simplistic title story to the moving ‘‘A Play to the Gallery.’’ In her last years, Andrews realized that the audience for her type of writing was declining and tried, unsuccessfully, to develop a more modern approach. In themselves the stories have little appeal for the modern reader; their interest lies primarily in their reflection of popular literary taste of the early 20th century.

OTHER WORKS: Vive L’Empereur (1902). A Kidnapped Colony (1903). A Good Samaritan (1906). The Enchanted Forest (1909). Counsel Assigned (1912). August First (with R. I. Murray, 1915). Three Things (1915). Old Glory (1916). Joy in the Morning (1919). His Soul Goes Marching On (1922). Pontifex Maximus (1925). White Satin Dress (1930).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hopkins, J. G. E., The Scribner Treasury (1953). Reference works: The Junior Book of Authors, S. J. Kunitz, and H. Haycraft, eds. (1934). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Twentieth Century Authors, S. J. Kunitz, and H. Haycraft, eds. (1942). Other references: Newsweek (17 Oct. 1936). NYT (3 Aug. 1936). —MARLENE KONDELIK

ANDREWS, V(irginia) C(leo) Born 6 June 1924, Portsmouth, Virginia; died 19 December 1986, Virginia Beach, Virginia Wrote under: V. C. Andrews Daughter of Lillian Lilnora (Parker) and William Henry Andrews V. C. Andrews’ series of horror/gothic novels made her a worldwide bestselling author over her seven-year writing career. Catering mainly to adolescent females, Andrews’ stories deal with young, frustrated, imprisoned, desperate characters who manage to overcome their tragic situations and obtain revenge against their oppressors. The novels tend to revolve around forbidden love (particularly incest), rape, and child abuse. Their popularity has been attributed to Andrews’ ability to capture the feelings of adolescents who simultaneously feel the helplessness of childhood and the negative side of adulthood. Andrews spent almost her entire childhood in Portsmouth, Virginia, with a brief sojourn in Rochester, New York. The youngest of three children and the only daughter, Andrews secured her first library card and the opportunity to take art classes at the local junior college at the age of seven. She later completed a correspondence course in art over four years, going on to become a successful commercial artist and selling every piece she painted.

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Andrews was confined at home partly due to an accident she had as a teenager. She fell down the stairs at school, causing back pain and spinal spurs, and it was years before the problem was accepted and treated by physicians. She spent her teenage years on crutches and her adult life in a wheelchair because walking was so painful. Giving up her dream of becoming an actress, she turned to writing so that she could become many different characters in her imagination. For seven years Andrews stayed up late writing, either by sitting up in bed with a typewriter, or standing to write while wearing a back brace. By writing obsessively, sometimes as many as 40 pages a night, Andrews produced 9 books and 20 short stories. She marketed them all but sold only a fictional piece for a confessional magazine. Andrews’ big break came in 1979 when Pocket Books encouraged her to edit and then resubmit her 290,000-word novel, The Obsessed. After she had trimmed it down to 98 pages, she was then asked to expand the novel by making it more sexually explicit and grotesque. Renamed Flowers in the Attic, the novel became a bestseller in two weeks. Detailing the lives of four children, Cathy, Chris, Carrie, and Cory Dollanganger, who must live hidden away in an attic, the novel was classified as horror. All the children are products of incest, and their mother imprisons them because their grandfather might learn of their existence and cut her out of his will. Incest between the older son and daughter is also hinted at. Andrews immediately began a sequel, and in 1980 Flowers in the Attic was released as a hardcover and its sequel, Petals on the Wind, was released as a paperback. Both appeared on the bestseller lists that year, selling over seven million copies in two years. Andrews’ advances surged from $7,500 to $35,000 to $75,000 for the third book in the series, If There Be Thorns, published in 1981. Again within two weeks, Andrews’ third novel appeared on the bestseller lists. In 1982 Andrews took a break from the Dollanganger series to write My Sweet Audrina. Despite its status as a stand-alone novel, it made sales comparable to those of her first three books, perhaps because of name recognition. My Sweet Audrina deals with a girl’s bizarre childhood in which she is forced by her family to forego her own identity for that of her dead sister. In 1984 Andrews completed the saga of the Dollangangers with Seeds of Yesterday. She went on to begin another saga, this one concerning the Casteel family of West Virginia. Heaven (1985) was followed by Dark Angel (1986), which went to number one on the best sellers chart two days after its release. Andrews was declared the top bestselling author by the American Booksellers Association. Andrews died of breast cancer in 1986, but her name continues to be placed on the covers of new family sagas. Shortly before her death, Andrews stated that she had written down 63 synopses of novels she planned to write. Four books published after 1986 may have been completed by Andrew Neiderman, who continues to publish novels under her name.


ANGELOU

OTHER WORKS: Garden of Shadows (1987). Fallen Hearts (1988). Gates of Paradise (1989). Web of Dreams (1990). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Huntley, E. D., V. C. Andrews: A Critical Companion (1996). Winter, D., Faces of Fear (1985). Reference works: CA 97-100 (1981). CANR 21 (1987). Other references: LAT (obituary, 21 Dec. 1986). NYT (obituary, 21 Dec. 1986). —ROSE SECREST

ANGELOU, Maya Born Marguerite Johnson, 4 April 1928, St. Louis, Missouri Daughter of Bailey and Vivian Baxter Johnson; married Tosh Angelou (divorced); Paul Du Feu, 1973 Upon the breakup of her parents’ marriage, Angelou and her older brother were sent to live with their paternal grandmother, Annie Henderson, in Stamps, Arkansas. She lived there until her graduation with honors from Lafayette County Training School in 1940. Angelou then moved to San Francisco to live with her mother. In 1944, after graduation from Mission High School, she gave birth to a son, Guy, the product of an affair with a neighbor’s son. As a teenager Angelou studied dance and drama in San Francisco. In the 1950s she performed in nightclubs in San Francisco and New York, and appeared in Porgy and Bess as part of a 22-country tour of Europe and Africa. In 1966, Angelou joined the Theatre of Being in Hollywood, and by 1970 she was a writer-in-residence at the University of Kansas and lecturer at Yale University. In this year she published the first of her autobiographical works. Angelou’s first autobiographical novel, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), is an account of her childhood in Stamps, a year in St. Louis when at the age of seven she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend, her return to Stamps, and finally a move to San Francisco. The novel records the growth of Angelou from an awkward, insecure young girl to a teenage mother. Although essentially a novel of affirmation and hope, I Know Why excellently portrays Angelou’s plight. ‘‘If growing up is painful for the Southern black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat.’’ Against the insecurity stemming from blackness, however, Angelou counters the security provided by her grandmother’s general store and her grandmother’s hope of salvation as promised by her church. In these two settings—store and church—are placed some of the graphic images which are the real strength of this book, and it is here that some of Angelou’s fine humorous scenes appear. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings has been cited as a significant work in the black autobiographical tradition. It has received numerous honors, been reprinted many times, and stayed on the New York Times paperback nonfiction bestseller list for over two years. It is generally considered Angelou’s best work.

Gather Together in My Name (1974) is the second of Angelou’s autobiographical novels, and continues the story of her search for meaning and security in an unstable world. Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976) is the third autobiographical novel, and it traces Angelou’s rise to prominence as a performer. Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’Fore I Diiie (1971) is a collection of 39 poems, divided into two parts: one group gentle and personal, the other much more militant. Though this poetry collection, her first, received less critical attention than her novels, it was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Angelou’s career as poet, writer of autobiographical narratives, dramatist, and teacher continued in the 1980s and 1990s in much the same energetic vein as her earlier career. Appointed to a lifetime chair as Z. Smith Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University in 1981, Angelou has since published more autobiographical narratives, volumes of poetry, and a book-length poem for children entitled Life Doesn’t Frighten Me (1993). She has also authored the screenplay for a television drama and hosted and written a series of documentaries, Maya Angelou: A Journey of the Heart. During the 1993 inaugural ceremony of President Clinton, Angelou read her celebratory poem. The Heart of a Woman (1981), Angelou’s fourth autobiographical narrative, describes her beginnings as a serious writer and her involvement with the Harlem Writers Guild. It also traces her career as a performer during the period of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1950s and 1960s and her move to Egypt with her husband, a South African revolutionary. Becoming increasingly active politically, she shifted away from the pacifist politics of Martin Luther King towards the nationalist philosophy of Malcolm X. Much of the book is concerned with the question of gender roles in her relationships to her son, Guy Johnson (born 1944), and to her husband. The book ends with the breakup of her marriage and her decision to take a job at the University of Ghana. Angelou’s fourth collection of poetry, Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing? (1983), consists primarily of short lyrics marking personal and broader social losses. The poems often strike a muted ‘‘blues’’ tone, describing the effects of racism and disappointed, betrayed, or faded love. A number of poems as well as the title—taken from the song ‘‘John Henry’’—invoke the culture and history of African Americans in the South. All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986) continues the story of Angelou’s life in Ghana, describing her search for and encounters with an African heritage as well as with the patriarchal aspects of postcolonial African society and her difficulties in raising her son. Concluding the book with a description of African oral memory of the slave trade and its losses, Angelou reaffirms her African inheritance as she returns to the United States. Now Sheba Sings the Song (1987), a single long poem illustrated by Tom Feeling, is an answer to the biblical Song of Solomon, praising the beauty of all women from the woman’s point of view. The moods of Angelou’s fifth collection of poetry, I Shall Not Be Moved (1990), vary considerably from poem to

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poem. Some are celebratory chronicling personal and general African American survival in the face of racism and the decay of urban America; others are elegiac. A number reflect the legacy of colonialism and the international slave trade and what she sees as continuing American neocolonialism. As elsewhere, Angelou seeks to establish the continuity of African American culture and the struggles for freedom on the part of black women from slavery to the present, most notably in ‘‘Our Grandmothers.’’ While Angelou’s poetry and prose writings are arguably uneven, her autobiographical narrative, viewed in its entirety, forms a moving chronicle of a black woman’s very personal engagement with the great movements and moments of African American history since the 1940s. It is also perhaps the most important modern extension of the tradition of African American autobiography that reaches back to the 18th century. Collections of short autobiographical essays still are a staple of Angelou’s art. Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now (1993) discusses in 24 pieces her faith and spirituality as they relate to death of loved ones, her personal style, racism, and pregnancy. In it she inspires her readers with her sense that life is a neverending adventure. The sister volume to this work Even the Stars Look Lonesome (1997) examines the mixed blessings of success in 20 brief commentaries. It is intellectually provocative and presented with humor and humility. Angelou’s writing for children, which was prompted by children’s responses to her appearance on Sesame Street, resulted in My Painted House, My Friendly Chicken, and Me (1994) and Kofi and His Magic (1996). The first is the story of a young Ndebele girl’s favorite things in her South African village; the second is about a seven-year-old West African boy who uses the magic of closing his eyes and opening his mind to move from place to place. Both works combine photographs of Africa with the stories and show Angelou’s propensity for incorporating vivid visual images with her work. Her interest in images has led her to become involved with various media projects. The most important of these was her first film directing experience with Down in the Delta (1998). This film, about a Chicago-based African American family moving back to the strength and security of their ancestral home in Mississippi, gave Angelou an opportunity to focus on presenting her familiar themes of self-sacrifice and love in a new way. Other undertakings she participated in included writing for Oprah Winfrey, writing poetry for and appearing in John Singleton’s film Poetic Justice (1993) as well as appearing as the master quilter in Jocelyn Moorhouse’s movie How to Make an American Quilt (1995). Angelou’s work reflects her interest in the inexhaustible capacity of African Americans and human beings in general to survive injustice, hardship, and defeat and to go on with renewed hope and love. She infuses a needy world with this positive message in as many forms and to as many age groups and types of people as she can. As a result, she remains one of America’s leading African American female spokespersons.

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OTHER WORKS: Georgia, Georgia (1972). Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well (1975). And Still I Rise (1978). Lessons in Living (1993). The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (1994). Phenomenal Woman: Four Poems for Women (1995). A Brave and Startling Truth (1995). Plays: Cabaret for Freedom (1960), The Least of These (1966), Gettin’ Up Stayed on my Mind (1967), Ajax (1974). Screenplays: Georgia, Georgia (1972), All Day Long (1974). The papers of Maya Angelou are housed in the Z. Smith Reynolds Library of Wake Forest University. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Davis, T. and T. Harris, eds., Afro-American Writers After 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers (1985). Elliott, J. M., ed., Conversations with Maya Angelou (1989). Evans, M., ed., Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation (1984). Gates, H. L., ed., Reading Black, Reading Feminist (1990). McPherson, D., Order Out of Chaos: The Autobiographical Works of Maya Angelou (1990). Tate, C., ed., Black Women Writers at Work (1983). Thompson, K., Black Women in America (1993). Weixlmann, J., ed., Belief vs. Theory in Black American Literary Criticism (1986). Reference works: ANR (1998). CA (Online, 1999). CANR (1987). CB (1974, 1994). FC (1990). Modern American Women Writers (1991). NBAW (1992). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: America (7 Feb. 1976). Atlantic Monthly (Sept. 1990). Black American Literature Forum (1988). Booklist (1 Oct. 1994, 1 Mar. 1997, Aug. 1997). Ebony (Feb. 1982). Kansas Quarterly (1975). Massachusetts Review (1989). Maclean’s (9 Oct.1995). America (7 Feb. 1976). National Review (29 Nov. 1993). NR (23 Aug.1993). NYT (15 Nov. 1998, 25 Dec. 1998). NYTBR (24 March 1972). Poetry (June 1976). PW (27 Sept. 1993, 4 Aug. 1997). SR (30 Oct. 1976). SHR (1973). Writer’s Digest (Jan. 1997). —ANNE ROWE, UPDATED BY JAMES SMETHURST AND PAULA C. MURPHY

ANGIER, Natalie Born 1958, Bronx, New York Married Rick Weiss; children: Katherine Natalie Angier is a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer for the New York Times and the author of three books about scientists and scientific discovery. She is known for making complicated subjects understandable and interesting to the lay reader, often adding her own personal slant. Bronx, New York-born Angier was one of four brothers and sisters in a working-class family. She first attended the University of Michigan and then Barnard, where her work in literature, physics, and astronomy foreshadowed her future multidisciplinary interests. She received her B.A. degree in 1978 and embarked on


ANNEKE

two years of graduate studies in medieval literature before accepting her first writing job as a technical writer at Texas Instruments.

ever, we need good interpreters, and Natalie Angier is one who is constitutionally incapable of writing a boring sentence.’’

In 1980 she became a researcher at Discover, a magazine being launched by Time Inc., where she was soon promoted to writer and began specializing in evolutionary biology. Angier left Discover for a brief tenure at a women’s magazine before becoming Time’s science writer from 1984 to 1990.

Angier’s latest book, Woman: An Intimate Geography (1999), is a feminist work that tears down many tenets of evolutionary psychology dealing with male-female relationships and is supplemented by Angier’s personal experiences. Sharon Begley of Newsweek called the book ‘‘a treasure chest of did-you-knows.’’

When the New York Times’ molecular biology writer retired in 1990, Angier assumed that position and, within a year, had won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for science reporting. She has also received a science journalism award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Lewis Thomas Award.

In Discover, Polly Shulman wrote, ‘‘[Woman] combines lyrical descriptions of the female body with a spirited defense of science done right.’’ She added, ‘‘Linguistic puritans who believe that the only scientifically valid description is a dry one will find plenty of lush, metaphoric language to cringe at, but they will have a harder time finding flaws in the reasoning.’’ Schulman echoes the views of other critics who find Angier’s writing style occasionally over the top, although they consistently praise her scientific arguments.

Angier’s first book, Natural Obsessions: The Search for the Oncogene (1988), examines the work of two teams of molecular biologists competing to be first to isolate the gene for retinoblastoma, a juvenile eye cancer. Angier’s approach, analogous to that of an anthropologist, resulted in a book as much about the scientists’ personal traits, good and bad, as it was about the discovery itself. Reviewer Anthony Van Niel, M.D., writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, took issue with her fast-paced portrayal of science, which ignores the painstaking tedium so much a part of the discipline, as well as with her definition of success in the world of science. ‘‘The significance of cancer-fighting discoveries tends to get lost here amid soul-searching, petty rivalries and tentative experiments,’’ he wrote. He continued, however, by saying, ‘‘She does a superb job of educating the reader in the basics of molecular biology pertinent to oncogenes (a formidable task!), so that it is easy to follow the sequence of investigations and share in the highs and lows of difficult experiments. What she seems to enjoy even more is populating the laboratory with an assortment of the most uncommon characters. All have a story, perhaps only remotely related to their work, that serves to make them human.’’ Angier’s second book, The Beauty of the Beastly: New Views on the Nature of Life (1995), is a collection of essays, many of which first appeared in the New York Times, offered there in a revised and more personal form. She offers an evolutionary view of subjects, including parental and sexual behavior of various species, among other issues. One primary theme, which appears throughout much of her writing, is that the ugly can be beautiful, and vice versa. A reviewer for Publishers Weekly wrote, ‘‘Not afraid to anthropomorphize, she even sees molecules as characters in little plays; the decadence of orchids, she says, would make Oscar Wilde wilt. . . .From cockroaches to cheetahs, DNA to elephant dung, Angier gives us intimate and dramatic portraits of nature that readers will find rewarding.’’ The New York Times Book Review praised Angier’s knowledge of science and her ability to put forth new theories rather than simply summarize others. ‘‘Graphic description and colorful simile, traditional tools of natural history popularizers, are not found wanting. . . . But the touch of urbane irony, the ever-present smile in the fold of the phrase—these are rare gifts that shine with unaccustomed splendor in this most engaging writer. More than

Marilyn Yalom, on the other hand, is one of the many observers who enjoy Angier’s way with prose. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Yalom found Angier’s ‘‘flights into poetic rapture’’ to be one of the book’s strengths, adding, ‘‘The book is a rollicking celebration of womanhood.’’ In Publishers Weekly, Ann Darby wrote of Angier, ‘‘Tackling unusual, sometimes even repugnant topics in vivid, playful and acrobatic prose, she has developed a style and an approach to stories that are distinctly hers. Gifted with a voracious and wide-ranging curiosity, she is always on the watch for exotic and sometimes whimsical subjects.’’ In interviews, Angier has commented on her tendency to personalize the topics about which she writes, noting that she approaches her subject ’’idiosyncratically, with my biases, impressions and desires flapping out like the tongue of an untucked blouse.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY: Other references: Discover (May 1999). Newsweek (12 Apr. 1999). New England Journal of Medicine (6 Apr. 1989). NYTBR (10 Jul. 1988, 18 June 1995, 8 Apr. 1999). PW (22 Apr. 1988, 8 May 1995, 22 Mar. 1999). —KAREN RAUGUST

ANNEKE, Mathilde Franziska Giesler Born 3 April 1817, Lerchenhausen, Westphalia; died 25 November 1884, Milwaukee, Wisconsin Also wrote under: Mathilde Franziska Daughter of Karl and Elizabeth Hulswitt Giesler; married Alfred von Tabouillet, 1836; Fritz Anneke, 1847 The oldest of 12 children, Mathilde Franziska Giesler Anneke received a strict Roman Catholic education. Her marriage, at age nineteen, to a loose-living and autocratic French wine merchant ended soon in divorce. Anneke spent the next 10 years writing and

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ANTHONY

translating poetry, and writing a drama and two prayer books for Catholic women. Anneke’s second marriage was to a discharged Prussian artillery officer with revolutionary ideals. During the political activity of 1848, Anneke published Neue Kölnische Zeitung, a revolutionary journal, and Deutsche Frauen Zeitung, the first women’s publication in western Europe. Both journals were quickly suppressed, the first because it advocated the rights of the people over the aristocracy, and the second because it championed the social emancipation and equality of women. Fritz Anneke led a force of soldiers in the German Palatinate during the Revolution of 1848, and Anneke rode by his side into battle. After defeat, however, the two fled Germany and eventually settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1849.


Home Cemetery simply reads: ‘‘We have never bent the knee before false Gods; / We have never cowered in strong weather.’’ OTHER WORKS: Deutsche Frauenzeitung (1852-1855). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Heinzen, H. M. et al, ‘‘Biographical Notes in Commemoration of Fritz Anneke and M.F. Anneke’’ (manuscript in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 2 vols. 1940). Krueger, L., ‘‘Madame Anneke: An Early Wisconsin Journalist,’’ in WMH 21 (1937). Reference works: National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: Milwaukee Historical Messenger (1967). —DIANE LONG HOEVELER

Anneke’s first writings, published under the name Mathilde Franziska, reveal her strict Catholic upbringing. Her poems in Heimatsgruss (1840) display the dreams and longings of a woman reared in an oppressive atmosphere. Anneke left the Catholic church after her divorce in 1839, but it was not until 1847, the year of her marriage and her father’s death, that she became a freethinker. That year saw the publication of her pamphlet Das Weib in Konflikt mit den sozialen Verhältnissen (‘‘Women in Conflict with Social Conditions’’), a pamphlet advocating suffrage for women. After settling in Milwaukee with her husband and their six children, Anneke founded Deutsche Frauenzeitung, a feminist journal published monthly at a press that utilized women as printers. In an effort to sabotage the journal, a German typographical union formed and demanded that printing firms fire any women who worked as printers and compositors. Although Anneke attempted to fight the union, she and her husband decided to move east, settling in Newark, New Jersey, where she published her journal weekly for two-and-a-half years. Anneke also furthered the issue of women’s rights by public speaking. She addressed more than 500 Milwaukeeans in 1850, and spoke at the woman’s rights convention held in New York in 1853. After separating from her husband in 1861, Anneke spent the Civil War years in Switzerland with a friend, Mary Booth, to whom she dedicated one of her best known poems, ‘‘The Last Song.’’ Anneke returned to Milwaukee in 1865 as a correspondent for German newspapers, but she quickly dedicated herself again to women’s activities by cofounding with Cecilia Kapp and Amalia von Ende the Töchter Institut in 1865. Anneke not only acted as principal, she also taught courses in every area of the curriculum—social problems, economics, and languages. Anneke remained active in suffrage activities by helping to found the Wisconsin woman suffrage association in 1869. Two years before her death in 1884 she saw her drama, Othone, oder die Tempelweihe (1844, The Dedication of the Temple), performed at the Milwaukee Stadt Theater. Her headstone in Forest

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ANPETU WAŚTE See DELORIA, Ella Cara

ANTHONY, Susan B(rownell) Born 15 February 1820, Adams, Massachusetts; died 13 March 1906, Rochester, New York Daughter of Lucy (Read) and Daniel Anthony Susan B. Anthony was the daughter of a Quaker father and Baptist mother. She received a thoroughly Quaker education, which influenced her belief in equality between men and women as well as her interest in other social issues. She began her professional life as a schoolteacher, discovering firsthand the effects of disproportionate wages. In 1849 she decided to quit teaching and returned to her family’s farm. Although she is strongly linked with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the two women did not meet until 1850, two years after the famous Seneca Falls convention during which Stanton introduced a woman suffrage amendment. From the moment of their meeting, however, the women were friends and colleagues. Anthony had already been drawn to other reform movements, especially temperance and abolition, in part because her family’s household was frequently populated by noted agitators such as Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. One of the most dramatic moments in her conversion to the women’s rights movement, in fact, came through her participation in other reform work; in 1852 she was prohibited from speaking, by virtue of her sex, at a temperance meeting. Her response was to form the Woman’s New York State Temperance Society. Within another year, she had committed herself wholeheartedly to women’s rights, especially suffrage, and this cause was to occupy her for the rest of her life. As a reformer, she was frequently held up to parody and scorn. She was ridiculed because of her physical appearance, her dress—she adopted for a time the ‘‘Bloomer’’ outfit—and her


status as an unmarried woman. In part because of this response, she did not enjoy appearing on stage as a public speaker, but she remained relentless in her work for justice. During the decade preceding and during the Civil War, Anthony became increasingly committed to abolition; beginning in 1856, she served as a New York agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society. Contemporary critics frequently cite her for failing to wholeheartedly support the 14th amendment to the Constitution, providing black men the right to vote, though she had supported the 13th, which abolished slavery. Anthony’s goal, however, was universal suffrage, and she was severely disappointed a suffrage amendment would pass that did not include women. She did argue that if achievement of the right to vote should be staggered among various groups, white women should receive it before black men, because white women of the time tended to be more highly educated than black men. She also predicted antagonism to woman suffrage would grow if more men were allowed to vote and that black male suffrage would be a roadblock rather than a step on the way to woman suffrage. Through the funding of George Francis Train, Anthony helped to establish the suffrage newspaper Revolution. Its first issue was published in January 1868. Anthony was listed as publisher, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Parker Pillsbury serving as editors. Unfortunately for Anthony’s enduring reputation, the paper strongly opposed the 14th amendment because it did not include women. The amendment, in other words, was not radical enough, and the paper supported additional radical ideas, especially as they related to issues of gender, such as equal pay for men and women, better education for girls, more professional options for women, and easier access to divorce. The paper quickly ran into financial difficulties, however, especially after Train withdrew his support. By 1870 the paper had acquired $10,000 of debt, which Anthony retained in selling the paper to Laura Curtis Bullard. In 1869 Anthony and Stanton had formed the National Woman Suffrage Association. Later that year, other suffragists who opposed some of the tactics and philosophies of Anthony and Stanton formed the American Woman Suffrage Association; the two groups would not reunite for 20 years. To urge the suffrage issue forward, Anthony voted illegally in the 1872 presidential election. She was arrested and pronounced guilty in a highly questionable decision by a judge who refused to acknowledge the role of the jury. Anthony refused to pay her fine but was prohibited from carrying the case to the Supreme Court, which she had hoped would exonerate her. Anthony’s primary publication is the History of Woman Suffrage (1881-1902), which she coauthored with Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage. The complete edition of this work continues to function as a crucial historical document for scholars working in this area. In 1892 Anthony moved in with her sister in Rochester, New York, where she remained for the rest of her life, though she remained active in local, state, and national politics. By the time of her death in 1906, she had become more of a national heroine than an object of ridicule. In her will she named the suffrage movement

ANTHONY

as heir to her savings of $10,000. She is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York.

OTHER WORKS: The personal papers of Susan B. Anthony are housed in a number of institutions, including the Library of Congress, Radcliffe College, and the Susan B. Anthony Memorial in Rochester, New York

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Anthony, K. S., Susan B. Anthony: Her Personal History and Her Era (1954). Barry, K., Susan B. Anthony (1988). Dorr, P. C., Susan B. Anthony, The Woman Who Changed the Mind of a Nation (1928). DuBois, E. C., Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of the Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848-1869 (1978). DuBois, E. C., ed., Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches (1981). Harper, I. H., The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (3 vols., 1898-1908). Lutz, A., Susan B. Anthony (1959). Reference works: Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography (1888). DAB (1929, 1957). NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —LYNN DOMINA

ANTHONY, Susanna Born 25 October 1726, Newport, Rhode Island; died 23 June 1791, Newport, Rhode Island Daughter of Isaac and Mercy Chamberlin Anthony Susanna Anthony was the sixth of seven daughters in a goldsmith’s family. Her life was devoted to God. She left Newport only during the revolutionary war, when she taught school in the countryside, and for brief periods of time to regain her health. Anthony’s only writings are published excerpts from her diaries and her personal correspondence, both published posthumously by prominent figures in the Congregationalist church in the hope that her thorough commitment to Christ would inspire piety in others. The noted Samuel Hopkins, D.D., found ‘‘a remarkable example of devotion’’ in Anthony’s writings, which consist mainly of self-examination of her ‘‘sinful’’ nature and pleas to God to forgive her for her sins. Although Anthony’s writing is not sophisticated, her philosophical arguments are—if not formidable—precocious, especially in view of her lack of schooling. Permeated with religious fervor, her work tends toward the monotonous and didactic, appealing to emotion rather than intellect. Before Anthony had committed herself to religion, however, she tried to arrive at the truth in a rational manner. It is in these questioning passages of her

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diary that her writing is most interesting and most intellectual. In attempting to discern the benefits of a religious life, Anthony postulated a dialogue between her soul and an objector. The soul argued for a religious life; the objector warned that if she were to choose a strictly holy life, she would be disdained by society. The soul concluded the discussion, stating, ‘‘I value the approbation of the most high God before the esteem of poor mortals.’’ Anthony’s choice of a devoutly religious life involved more than simply embracing the Christian faith with renewed ardor; it required a break with her parents’ religion, for they were Quakers and she was about to be baptized in the Congregationalist church. In her diaries, Anthony has recorded her agitation over telling her parents of her choice and employed logical arguments in support of the Congregationalist faith to assuage her feelings of guilt. Her parents, however, were quite content to let Anthony make up her own mind and she broke with the Quakers at the age of fifteen. Her intellectual dialogue was written when she was seventeen, a time at which her arguments for religion were rational and appeal to the intellect, while her arguments for abandoning religion and embracing society appeal to the emotions. Once Anthony had accepted religion as a way of life, her writing became less intellectual, consisting mainly of exhortations to God to keep her from sinning and castigations of herself for not being truly faithful to God, despite her devout behavior and reputation for piety. In publishing her memoirs, Reverend Hopkins stated that Anthony’s writings were proof of the truth of the Christian religion. Anthony’s letters, however, give a better insight into her life than do the diaries, for they contain comments on daily living, and explore her relationships with her friends. They are less self-concerned than the diaries, and clearly less self-conscious. Anthony’s writing is neither elegant nor profound, but it serves a greater purpose than merely exemplifying Christianity in its most devout aspect; it illustrates graphically the role of religion in the life of a single woman in 18th-century New England.

OTHER WORKS: The Life and Character of Miss Susanna Anthony, who died in Newport (R.I.) June 23, MDCCXCI, in the sixty-fifth year of her age consisting chiefly in Extracts from Her Writings, with some Brief Observations on them (ed. S. Hopkins, 1769). Familiar Letters, written by Mrs. Sarah Osborn, and Miss Susanna Anthony, late of Newport, Rhode-Island (1807). Memoirs of Miss Susanna Anthony consisting chiefly in extracts from her writings and observations respecting them (ed. E. Pond, 1844).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors (1858-1871). American Biographical Dictionary (1857). —RISA GERSON

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ANTIN, Mary Born 1881, Polotzk, Russia; died 15 May 1949, Suffern, New York Daughter of Israel and Esther Weltman Antin; married Amadeus William Grabau, 1901 Mary Antin’s father, frustrated by czarist restrictions and Jewish orthodoxy, immigrated to Boston in 1891. Antin’s education progressed spectacularly in America and her teachers encouraged the prodigy; her family, despite worsening poverty, supported her continued education at the Girls’ Latin School. As a member of the Natural History Club, she met and later married geologist Amadeus William Grabau, a descendant of Lutheran pastors. Moving to New York in 1901 Antin attended Teachers College, Columbia and Barnard (1901-1904), though without taking a degree. In these years Antin was introduced to transcendentalism, liberal Jewish thought, and sympathy with women’s issues. In The Promised Land (1912, reissued 1997), first serialized in the Atlantic Monthly, Antin argued against the growing clamor for restrictive immigration laws (which she later explicitly opposed in her polemical essay, ‘‘They Who Knock at Our Gates,’’ 1914). Praising American democracy and its institutions as conducive to individual development and expression, Antin characterized her assimilation as a journey from medieval to modern thought. She included material from her girlhood narrative, From Polotzk to Boston (1899, reissued 1986), which was based on letters to her Russian uncle. Describing conditions in Russia, the passage to America, and subsequent acculturation, Antin speaks to a gentile, native-born American audience, while reproducing her childhood emotions and psychology. Successful as a chronicler, she often fails to acknowledge or adequately analyze the problems of marginality evidenced in her autobiography. Though speaking for past generations as well as contemporary fellow immigrants, Antin views the act of narration as a ‘‘release’’ from her ‘‘clinging past.’’ She deals with the disintegration of family life, threats to moral education and religious integrity in slum conditions, and assimilation; but such problems are drowned in her paean to American opportunities. With some self-irony, Antin depicts her girlhood rejection of Judaism for Americanism, but concludes she values the ‘‘living seed’’ of her religion when freed from its ‘‘prickly husk’’ of orthodoxy. Antin’s work, though not presenting incisive social criticism, provides a sensitive and idealistic chronicle of immigrant experience in the early 20th century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Handlin, O., foreword to M. Antin’s The Promised Land (1969). Lindenberg, K., ‘‘The Effects of Gender on the Americanization of Jewish Immigrants: A Case Study of Mary


ANZALDÚA

Antin’’ (honors thesis, 1995). Salz, E., ‘‘The Letters of Mary Antin: A Life Divided’’ (thesis, 1995). Reference works: Dictionary of American Biography, National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1892 et seq.). NAW 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: The Independent (22 Aug. 1912). NYT (14 Apr. 1912, 18 May 1949). Outlook (June 1912). Yale Review (Oct. 1912).

Racism,’’ contains several earlier pieces, an unfortunate indicator the problems identified in Bridge persist. More recent essays focus on new forms of racism and the appropriation of discourse on difference. Anzaldúa’s introduction addresses the continuing marginalization of women of color and the silencing of their voices, and her essay, ‘‘En rapport, in Opposition: Cobrando cuentas a las nuestras’’ contributes to the significant debate on colorism and cross-racial hostility.

—HELEN J. SCHWARTZ

The first six essays on Borderlands/La Frontera introduce the concept of mestizaje, or hybridity, and inscribe a serpentine movement through different kinds of mestizaje of races, genders, languages, and the mind/body dichotomy. These mestizajes break down dualisms in the production of a third thing that is neither the one nor the other but something else: the mestiza, Chicano language, the lesbian and gay, the animal soul, the writing that ‘‘makes face.’’

ANZALDÚA, Gloria Born 26 September 1942, Jesus Maria of the Valley, Texas Daughter of Urbano and Amalia García Anzaldúa Gloria Anzaldúa , a seventh-generation American, grew up in the Río Grande Valley of South Texas. In the hardship of fieldwork, Anzaldúa found a love and respect for the land and the people who work it. She received her B.A. from Pan American University (1969) and an M.A. in English and Education from the University of Texas at Austin (1972). She has done further study at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Anzaldúa has been a contributing editor of the journal Sinister Wisdom since 1984. As a working-class Chicana lesbian, Anzaldúa experiences multiple sources of oppression; her writing traces the complex interrelations among them in texts that blend poetry and theory, analysis and visceral engagement, Spanish and English. Besides her collections of essays and poems, Borderlands: La Frontera— The New Mestiza (1987; second edition forthcoming October 1999), Anzaldúa has edited two anthologies of writing by U.S. women of color, both of which commonly appear as required reading on Women’s Studies syllabi. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), is coedited with Cherríe Moraga. The book grew out of the experiences of women of color active in the women’s movement who were politicized by the need to develop a feminist analysis of all structures of domination, including race, class, culture, and sexual practice as well as gender. Besides calling attention to the absence of gender and sexuality in Ethnic Studies research paradigms, Bridge has also played a crucial role in the shift of white feminist theory from an exclusive focus on gender oppression and ‘‘sexual difference’’ to differences among and within women. In ‘‘Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers,’’ Anzaldúa writes of the need for women of color to legitimize the voice that emerges from their specific experiences, rather than imitating dominant literary models. ‘‘La Prieta’’ (the dark girl or woman) foreshadows Borderlands in its focus on her relationship to the dark, Indian part of her self and the place of the indigenous in her culture and her sexuality. In 1990, Anzaldúa edited Making Face/Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creating and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color, intended ‘‘to continue where This Bridge Called My Back left off.’’ The first section, ‘‘Still Trembles Our Rage in the Face of

‘‘Homeland’’ relates the history of the border between the U.S. and Mexico. Problematizing the concept of ‘‘home’’ in the second essay, Anzaldúa records her rebellion against her culture’s betrayal of women and rejection of the Indian side of Mexican cultural identity. To remain within the safe boundaries of ‘‘home’’ required the repression of her gender, her dark-skinned self, and her lesbian identity. Paradoxically, she must leave home to find home. In her next two essays, Anzaldúa formulates her project as self-writing subject: to create a new home, a new mythology, a new mestiza culture, to ‘‘fashion my own gods out of my entrails.’’ Firstly, ‘‘How to Tame a Wild Tongue’’ recounts both Anzaldúa’s refusal to remain silent and the ways in which her language is not ‘‘appropriate’’ according to dominant norms. The language of the border transgresses the boundaries between Spanish and English, high and low decorum, insider and outsider speech, forming another kind of homeland. Using the Nahuatl notion of writing as creating face, heart, and soul, Anzaldúa elaborates the notion that it is only through the body that the soul can be transformed. In her last essay, Anzaldúa defines ‘‘mestiza’’ or ‘‘border’’ consciousness: not relativism or pluralism, not repositioning of the subject as Other or Different in binary relationship to the Same or Dominant, but rather the ‘‘tolerance for contradictions.’’ The new mestiza is the site or point of confluence of conflicting subject positions. Images in Anzaldúa’s poetry in Borderlands show the mestiza consciousness ‘‘in the flesh.’’ In ‘‘Letting Go,’’ the female subject—part fish, part woman, is produced through the transgression of body’s borders. The mestiza survivors of the nuclear holocaust have newly evolved double eyelids that give them the power to ‘‘look at the sun with naked eyes’’ in ‘‘No se raje, Chicanita,’’ and the border crossing between the ‘‘alien’’ and the ‘‘human’’ occurs in ‘‘Interface.’’ Up to now Anzaldúa’s Borderlands has been her most powerful published work. With minor exceptions, this difficult to classify and quite bold work that uses the metaphor of the borderlands well, has received very favorable reviews by its critics. The text as a whole is rich, quite potent at times, and thought-provoking to the point of posing an intellectual and

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emotional challenge to the reader, to revise, re-identify with, rethink concepts of race, sexuality and relationships, to better understand language itself, myths and religion, sexuality, ethnicity and cultures. At the same time, it is accessible even if at times the style appears somewhat unpolished from an academic point of view and can use some editing. This is also her particular imaginative rhetoric, her eclectic way of communicating, of writing and crossing the borders of genre, her way of deconstructing cultural systems and visions, giving the us the readers a stronger taste of her authenticity and her perspectives as we connect with her multiple voices documenting her own experiences as: a woman, a Chicana of indigenous and multilingual roots, and as a lesbian writer—all selves struggling and redefining her selves and her roles in an antagonistic culture in a postcolonial era. Her borders, our borders are clearly not just geographic, but are spiritual while ever-present whenever cultures, races, different economic classes and languages inhabit the same environments and come into natural contact. Anchoring the sense of fragmented identity in the specific historical experience of the borderlands, Anzaldúa’s writing makes a crucial contribution to the development of theories of gender, diversity and subjectivity. Her books are read widely and are pretty standard readings in Women’s Studies and Chicana/o Studies courses. Anzaldúa’s Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color (Aunt Lute Books, 1990), won the Lambda Literary Best Small Book Press Award. Anzaldúa has also received many other awards and recognitions, such as the NEA Fiction Award, the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award for Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras the 1991 Lesbian Rights Award, and the Sapho Award of Distinction. She was also a Rockefeller Visiting Scholar in 1991 while at the University of Arizona. Today she continues teaching, giving invited lectures, and writing about culture, politics and interconnectedness. OTHER WORKS: Prietita and the Ghost Woman: Prietita y la Llorona (1986). Friends from the Other Side (also as Friends from the Other Side/Side/Amigos del otro lado, 1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Calderón, H., et al., eds., Criticism in the Borderlands, Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology (1991). Garcia, M., and E. McCracken, eds., Rearticulations: The Practice of Chicano Cultural Studies (1994). Gómez Hernández, A., ‘‘Gloria Anzaldúa: Enfrentando el desafío’’ in Cuadernos americanos (1996). González, A., et al., eds., Mujer y literatura mexicana y chicana: Culturas en contacto (1990). Sims, N., ed., Literary Journalism in the Twentieth Century (1990). Trimmer, J., and T. Warnock, eds., Understanding Others: Cultural and Cross-Cultural Studies and the Teaching of Literature (1992). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies (1993). Gender and Society (Sept. 1992). Matrix (May 1988).

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Third Woman (1989). Trivia (Spring 1989). Women and Language (1989). —YVONNE YARBRO-BEJARANO, UPDATED BY ANA ROCA

APPLETON, Sarah See APPLETON-WEBER, Sarah

APPLETON, Victor, II See ADAMS, Harriet Stratemeyer

APPLETON-WEBER, Sarah Born 14 April 1930, New York, New York Also writes under: Sarah Appleton Daughter of William C. and Ellen S. Merriman Appleton; married Joseph G. Weber, 1965; children: Elizabeth, David Sarah Appleton-Weber is a poet, scholar, and translator whose work is unified by a transforming movement into poetry, plant and animal life, and evolutionary forms. Preparation for this work has involved the study of poetry and sacred history, analogy and symbolism, and the natural sciences, as well as training in cosmic forms through making a new edition and translation of Teilhard de Chardin’s Le Phénoméne humain. Appleton-Weber’s poetry (published under the name Sarah Appleton) is marked by the ‘‘utter attentiveness, heart delicacy’’ with which we need to listen to and read the ‘‘book of the Earth.’’ Her first sequence of poems, A Plenitude We Cry For (1972), written in the rhetoric of a small horse chestnut tree outside her window in Northampton, Massachusetts, records the transformations of the tree and her own life through a season’s growth. Ladder of the World’s Joy (1977) was born from the energy and joy of reading Teilhard de Chardin’s Le Phénoméne humain, recording the stages, as she read, of human cosmic birth and transformation. After completing Ladder of the World’s Joy, AppletonWeber returned to Teilhard’s book, translating it word by word, to discover the secret of its energy. Out of this came a third sequence of poems, Book of My Hunger, Book of the Earth (unpublished; though many portions have appeared in poetry journals). This is an autobiographical sequence reflecting the work of the poet and the voice of the earth, the precariousness of ever bringing a work together, and the continuity of the call and the grace to do so. In


ARENDT

her writing, Appleton-Weber explores the transforming correspondence between herself as a woman and poet—barren, fecund, nurturing, evolving—and the earth. Appleton-Weber was raised in a small hunting lodge in rural Rhode Island, where her life was nurtured by the pond, woods, and living things around her. She was educated at the Old Field School and received her B.A. from Vassar College (1952). She studied fiction writing at Vassar and spent a semester at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, leaving to join Dorothy Day at the Catholic Worker’s Maryfarm in Newburgh, New York. At the same time she began her growth as a poet under the guidance of Elizabeth Sewell. In 1953 she was received into the Roman Catholic church. She studied analogy and symbolism at Fordham University with William Lynch, S.J. (1955-56) and worked at a children’s shelter, then at the magazines Thought and Jubilee. Appleton-Weber received her M.A. (1957) and Ph.D. (1961) from Ohio State University and wrote her dissertation on medicinal liturgy and the relationship between sacred history and poetic form, as a way of integrating Christianity and her work of poetry. This study was published as Theology and Poetry in the Middle English Lyric (1969). She taught for three years at Smith College and from 1965-68 she was poetry editor of Literature East and West. Along with poetry readings and workshops at colleges and universities, Appleton-Weber has read poetry on tree walks sponsored by the Academy of American Poets in the New York area. Appleton-Weber has received grants and fellowships from Smith College (1964), the John Anson Kitteredge Educational Fund (1968-70), and the Creative Arts Public Service Program (1975-76). She was a Bunting Institute Fellow at Radcliffe College (1970-72) and has had residencies at Yaddo and Blue Mountain Center. In France from 1981-83 Appleton-Weber studied Chardin’s essays, correspondence, journal, and earlier texts of Le Phénoméne humain. On her return to the U.S. she began a new edition and translation of the work for an American publisher, to make the coherence and synthesis of the book available to readers, and also as a deeper training and tuning to the movements of cosmic evolutionary forms. OTHER WORKS: Contributor to anthologies and periodicals, including: Literature and the West (June 1966); Hand Book (1978); studia mystica (Fall 1979); Teilhard Perspective (Dec. 1985, Dec. 1987); ‘‘Le Christ universal et l’evolution selon Teilhard de Chardin’’ (Dec. 1990, Dec. 1991). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Appleton, S., Poetry Reading, 5 Feb. 1981, Hamilton College (recording, 1981). Commonweal (24 June 1977). Modern Philology (May 1971). NYTBR (11 Nov. 1973). North American Review (Spring 1977). Review of English Studies (Aug. 1971). —DARIA DONNELLY

ARENDT, Hannah Born 14 October 1906, Hanover, Germany; died 4 December 1975 Daughter of Paul and Martha Cohn Arendt; married Heinrich Bleucher, 1940 The only child of nonreligious, German-Jewish parents, Hannah Arendt received her formal education in Germany. She studied philosophy under Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg and took her doctorate in 1928, after completing a dissertation on St. Augustine. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, she fled to France then emigrated to the United States. Arendt made her greatest mark on the American academic community; an innovative and forceful political theorist, she taught at various universities across the country. Arendt’s best known work, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951, 1958), deals with the rise of totalitarianism in Germany and Russia. It offers a description of the fundamental structure of a totalitarian regime and presents an account of social and political conditions—such as the growth of imperialism and anti-Semitism— on which they were built. Above all, Arendt attributed the success of totalitarian movements to what she termed ‘‘organized loneliness.’’ Loneliness, for Arendt, is not merely solitude; it is a condition in which individuals have lost contact with the world as well as with one another. Worldless people do not understand themselves as belonging to the world because they no longer have the ability to add anything of their own to that world. Without a world shared between them, such people lack a ‘‘common sense’’— they cannot differentiate between reality and fiction—and are easily manipulated by the logic of totalitarian ideology. To Arendt, the rise of Nazism and Stalinism epitomized the crisis of the modern age. She treated totalitarianism as a radically new form of government, a form that was the outgrowth of experiences peculiar to modernity. Such experiences must be countered by a ‘‘new political principle’’ capable of upholding human dignity. In The Human Condition (1958), Arendt drew a picture of the classical polis, arguing that Periclean Athens made a sharp distinction between the public and the private realms: the private realm of the household was dominated by necessity, whereas human beings could be free in public. The separation of these two spheres signified to Arendt that certain activities thrive on concealment, while others demand a public audience. Delineating three basic modes of human activity—labor, work, and action— she suggested that only the last is a truly political activity. (In Between Past and Future, 1954, she held that ‘‘the raison d’être of politics is freedom, and its field of experience is action.’’) Only action is free, for it is the ‘‘spontaneous beginning of something new,’’ the capacity to initiate. In contrast, neither work nor labor belong in the public realm. Work—the creation of durable objects as opposed to articles of consumption—is dominated by a politically destructive meansends mentality. Labor—the ceaseless process in which we engage in order to insure our physical survival—is an activity to which we are driven by necessity. Arendt criticized the modern state that, in

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its preoccupation with matters such as the allocation of economic goods, gives public status to labor. This failure to distinguish between public and private has permitted the political sphere to be conquered by the forces of necessity and has deprived citizens of a public realm in which action is possible. Action requires an audience, for only through the presence—and the memory—of other people can individuals leave their personal marks in the world. To Arendt, only by appearing in the world in this manner can human beings guarantee the reality of their identities as separate and unique individuals. Thus human dignity is secured through the creation and maintenance of a public space. In On Revolution (1963), Arendt analyzed the character of revolutionary movements of the modern age. She was attracted to the American Revolution because she believed it had to do not just with liberation from oppression but with the foundation of political freedom. Limited government, Arendt insisted, was not the aim of the American founders: in order to forge a unity between 13 separate states, they had to create new power. In guaranteeing the space in which action could take place, the Constitution became the ‘‘foundation of freedom.’’ Arendt considered it unfortunate that revolutionary thought of the 19th and 20th centuries addressed the French Revolution rather than the American. The French Revolution was dominated by the need to alleviate mass poverty; it failed because no true political entity can be built where the citizenry lives in such destitution. While applauding the American Revolution as a political movement, Arendt deplored modern revolutions focusing on the amelioration of social ills rather than on the creation of a public realm. Although the concept of action plays a major role in Arendt’s work, she does not ignore the relationship between thought and action. Toward the end of her life, Arendt turned her attention increasingly to the phenomenon of thought. The New Yorker sent her to Jerusalem in 1961 to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Her report, which appeared first as a series of articles and then as Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), aroused considerable and bitter controversy. Arendt shocked her readers by asserting that while Eichmann’s behavior had been monstrous, his character was not. What struck Arendt most about the Nazi war criminal was his banality. The Life of the Mind (1977), suggests that Eichmann’s ability to commit monstrous crimes was related to his lack of thought. The capacity to judge between good and evil, in other words, is related to thought. In Thinking, the first volume of this two-part posthumously published work, Arendt maintained a distinction between reason and intellect, thinking and knowing. It is through thinking that human beings attempt to satisfy their quest for meaning. To some, Arendt was an elitist who cared little about the suffering masses around the world. To others, her sensitive writings on political action and the public arena, authority, tradition, violence, and truth provide insight into some of the most perplexing dilemmas of the modern era. It is in the nature of political theory to challenge old ways of thinking and to force its audience to think about political things from a new perspective. In

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the spirit of this tradition, Arendt may be controversial and frustrating, but she is never dull.

OTHER WORKS: Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin (1930). Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (1947). Men in Dark Times (1968). On Violence (1969). Crises of the Republic (1969). Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman (1974).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barnouw, D., Visible Spaces: Hannah Arendt and the German-Jewish Experience (1990). Benhabib, S., The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (1996). Bergen, B. J., The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt and ‘‘The Final Solution’’ (1998). Bowen-Moore, P., Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy of Natality (1989). Burks, V. C., A Speculative History of Freedom: Thoughts Inspired by a Reading of Hannah Arendt’s Theory (dissertation, 1994). Canovan, M., Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (1992). Canovan, M., The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (1977). Clarke, J. P., Hannah Arendt: Revisioning a Politics of Action Through a Politics of Judgement (dissertation, 1993). Corvo, A., The World In-between: Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy of Education (dissertation, 1989). Curtis, K., Our Sense of the Real: Aesthetic Experience and Arendtian Politics (1999). Disch, L. J., Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy (1994, 1996). Dossa, S., The Public Realm and the Public Self: The Political Theory of Hannah Arendt (1989). Ettinger, E., Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger (1995). Felder, D. G., The 100 Most Influential Women of All Time: A Ranking Past and Present (1996). Gottsegen, M. G., The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (1994). Hansen, P. B., Hannah Arendt: Politics, History and Citizenship (1993). Hinchman, L. P. and S. Hinchman, eds., Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays (1994). Honig, B., ed., Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (1995). Kateb, G., Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (1984). Kielmansegg, P. et al, eds., Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Emigres and American Political Thought After World War II (1997). Kuracina, S. J., Hannah Arendt’s Phenomenology of Politics (dissertation, 1983). Lloyd, M. J., Liberalism and Republicanism and the Thought of Hannah Arendt (dissertation, 1993). May, D., Hannah Arendt (1986). May, L. and J. Kohn, eds., Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later (1996). McGowan, J., Hannah Arendt: An Introduction (1998). McGowan, J. P. and C. J. Calhoun, eds., Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics (1997). Nordquist, J., Hannah Arendt (1989). Nordquist, J., Hannah Arendt (II): A Bibliography (1997). Parekh, B. C., Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy (1981). Passerin d’Entreves, M., The Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt (1994). Pateman, C. and M. L. Shanley, eds., Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory (1991). Ring, J., The Political Consequences of Thinking: Gender and Judaism in the Work of Hannah Arendt (1997). StoneMediatore, S. R., Hannah Arendt, Experience, and Political Thinking: Storytelling as Critical Praxis (1997). Villa, D. R., Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (1999). Washington, J., Hannah Arendt’s Conception of


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the Political Realm (dissertation, 1978). Waterman, R. D., Political Action: Dialogues with Hannah Arendt (dissertation, 1983). Watson, D., Arendt (1992). Young-Bruehl, E., Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (1982). Other references: NR (15 June 1963). NYTBR (19 May 1963, 28 May 1978). Political Theory 5 (May 1977). Review of Politics (Jan. 1953). Prins, B., Hannah Arendt: Totalitarianism, Domination, and Personal Responsibility (video, 1988). The Holocaust: Judgment in Jerusalem (video, 1987, 1998). —LAURA GREYSON

ARMSTRONG, Charlotte Born 2 May 1905, Vulcan, Michigan; died 18 July 1969, Glendale, California Also wrote under: Jo Valentine Daughter of Frank Hall and Clara Pascoe Armstrong; married Jack Lewi, 1928 Having begun as poet (several poems appeared in the New Yorker) and playwright (two plays ran briefly on Broadway), Charlotte Armstrong soon turned to writing suspense novels, her first three being conventional detective stories. The detective, MacDougal (‘‘Mac’’) Duff is a former history professor who has discovered he prefers real-life puzzles to academic ones. In Lay On, Mac Duff! (1942), and in The Case of the Weird Sisters (1943), he is the conventional outsider who solves other people’s mysteries and then moves on. In The Innocent Flower (1945), however, he becomes involved with a divorcee and her six children; with his commitment to them, Armstrong’s use of him ends. A number of Armstrong’s stories are inverted mysteries in which the identity of the criminal is revealed early. In other novels, suspense is created by a race against time. Sometimes, terror is evoked when an innocent person is trapped in an enclosed space with several people, at least one of whom poses a threat. The Case of the Weird Sisters, a Mac Duff mystery, falls into this group, as does The Albatross (1957), in which, ironically, the threatening characters are invited into the home of the victims. Other variants are The Girl with a Secret (1959), The Witch’s House (1963), and The Turret Room (1965). Another novel of particular interest is A Little Less Than Kind (1963), the Hamlet story reset in contemporary California. Using the Shakespearean situation, Armstrong examines motivations and relationships, and although her dénouement is quite different from Shakespeare’s, it develops logically from the situation and characters. A Dram of Poison (1956), despite its serious central situation, is a comic novel, with an unlikely set of characters uniting in a common purpose and discovering in the process much that is admirable in each other.

Along with family relationships, Armstrong was especially interested in children and old people. A recurring motif in her work is that of an innocent child thought to be responsible for a death. Concern over the impact of the accusation on the child leads others to seek out the truth, and an adult murderer is unmasked (The Innocent Flower, 1945, and The Mark of the Hand, 1963). Another recurrent theme in Armstrong’s novels is that of our responsibility toward one another. Characters are shown involving themselves in others’ problems because they know that if they do not help, no one else will. The title character in The One-Faced Girl (1963) defines ‘‘good guys’’ as those who ‘‘don’t want other people hurt. They feel it, themselves. So if any one is in pain or trouble, then they not only want to help, they are obliged. They just about have to.’’ This concept underlies much of Armstrong’s fiction; combined with her skill in handling complex plots and her interest in motivation and character, it helps to account for the consistent popularity her work has had. Armstrong’s novels have attracted filmmakers of three nations. The Case of the Three Weird Sisters was filmed by British National Films in 1948. Warner Brothers made The Unsuspected (1946) in 1947, and Twentieth Century-Fox filmed Mischief (1950) in 1952, under the title Don’t Bother to Knock. The latter is noteworthy for Marilyn Monroe’s portrayal of a deranged babysitter. More recently, French writer-director Claude Chabrol based his La Rupture (1970) on Armstrong’s The Balloon Man (1968).

OTHER WORKS: Ring Around Elizabeth, a Comedy in Three Acts (1942). The Chocolate Cobweb (1948). The Black-Eyed Stranger (1951). Catch-As-Catch-Can (1952). The Trouble in Thor (1953). The Better to Eat You (1954). Walk Out on Death (1954). The Dream Walker (1955). Murder’s Nest (1955). Alibi for Murder (1956). Duo: The Girl with a Secret and Incident at a Corner (1959). The Seventeen Widows of Sans Souci (1959). Something Blue (1959). The Mark of the Hand and Then Came Two Women (1963). Dream of Fair Woman (1966). The Gift Shop (1966). I See You (1966). Lemon in the Basket (1967). Seven Seats to the Moon (1969). The Protégé (1970). The Charlotte Armstrong Reader (ed. A. Cromie, 1970). The Charlotte Armstrong Treasury (ed. A. Cromie, 1972). The Charlotte Armstrong Festival (ed. A. Cromie, 1975).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cromie, A., preface to The Charlotte Armstrong Festival (1975). Cromie, A., preface to The Charlotte Armstrong Reader (1970). Cromie, A., preface to The Charlotte Armstrong Treasury (1972). Other references: NYHTB (13 Sept. 1959). NYTBR (25 June 1950, 15 July 1951, 28 March 1954, 16 Jan. 1955, 5 Aug. 1956, 10 Nov. 1957, 12 April 1959, 10 Nov. 1963, 11 April 1965, 7 May 1967, 29 Oct. 1967). —MARY JEAN DEMARR

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ARNOW, Harriette (Louisa) Simpson Born 7 July 1908, Wayne County, Kentucky; died 22 March 1986, Ann Arbor, Michigan Also wrote under: H. Arnow, Harriette Simpson, H. L. Simpson Daughter of Elias and Mollie Jane Denney Simpson; married Harold Arnow, 1939; children: Marcella, Thomas Harriette Simpson Arnow’s best fiction is rooted in Kentucky, her native ground. With both parents being descendants of original Kentucky settlers, Arnow grew up hearing family stories dating from the American Revolution. These kindled her desire to write fiction, and tell stories herself. She attended Berea College for two years, taught school for a year, then studied at the University of Louisville, where she received a B.S. degree in 1930. In an act her family viewed as scandalous, Arnow quit her job in 1934 and moved to a furnished room in downtown Cincinnati near the city library, resolving to read ‘‘the great novels’’ and to write. She supported herself with odd jobs and worked for the Federal Writers’ Project. After her marriage to newspaperman Harold Arnow, she moved with him to a farm in southern Kentucky. They later settled in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1950. Arnow received national attention in 1935 with two short stories published in little magazines. Both demonstrate her skill at characterization and at depicting shocking violence. In 1936, she published the novel Mountain Path. It is based on Arnow’s experience of boarding with a hill family in a remote Kentucky hollow and teaching in a one-room schoolhouse; her year there was her first prolonged stay with the people who were to become the primary subjects of her fiction. The novel received appreciative reviews from such respected critics as Alfred Kazin, who decried Arnow’s inclusion of Kentucky fiction’s stock material— a mountain feud—but praised the novel’s most notable accomplishments: its realistic, uncondescending portraits of the hill poor and its ‘‘intimate revelation and occasional power.’’ Although in this novel, as in her subsequent ones, Arnow accurately—at times excessively—documents hill customs and dialect, her primary concern is moral choice and responsibility. ‘‘The Washerwoman’s Day,’’ published in Southern Review (Winter, 1936), is Arnow’s best and most anthologized short story. She movingly depicts the self-righteousness and the arrogance church members feel toward the ‘‘poor white trash’’ who violate their notions of decency. This story anticipates Arnow’s fuller treatment of narrow piousness in Hunter’s Horn (1949) and The Dollmaker (1954). Hunter’s Horn, Arnow’s second novel, was a critically acclaimed bestseller. The story of a hill farmer’s obsessive chase after an elusive red fox, the book dramatizes the cost of a compulsion as maniacal and as mythic as Ahab’s stalking of Moby Dick. Its riveting subplot centers on the fox hunter’s daughter, Suse, who yearns to escape mountain provinciality and impoverishment. The inability of her father to defy ingrained community values causes her to be bound to a life that will ‘‘break

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her to the plow.’’ Compelling characters and fluid prose, described by Malcolm Cowley as ‘‘poetry of earth,’’ make this novel exceptional. Arnow’s third novel, The Dollmaker, is a masterwork. Another bestseller, it earned critical accolades, coming in second to Faulkner’s The Fable for the National Book Award. Gertie Nevels, the hulking heroine who tries to preserve her integrity and her family’s unity after their migration from the Kentucky hills to a wartime housing project in Detroit, is Arnow’s most arresting character. Arnow’s chronicle of Gertie grappling with religious and social prejudice, labor strikes, economic insecurity, family strife, and her own faintheartedness is a profound rendering of hope, disappointment, and anguish. A novel rich on many levels, The Dollmaker mirrors Gertie’s struggle in its primary symbol, the cherrywood man Gertie carves. The novel won Arnow the Friends of American Literature Award and was voted best novel of the year in the Saturday Review’s national critics’ poll. Paramount Pictures bought the film rights and Jane Fonda played Gertie in a made-for-television movie in 1983. Two social histories were the result of 20 years of research on the settlers in southern Kentucky and northern Tennessee from 1780 to 1803. Seedtime on the Cumberland (1960), which won an Award of Merit from the American Association of State and Local History and a citation from the Tennessee Historical Commission, celebrates the settlers’ resourcefulness in conquering a hostile environment—getting food, clothing, and shelter, and struggling to hold the land against Indians and governments. A companion piece, Flowering of the Cumberland (1963) focuses on the activities requiring social intercourse and an exchange of goods and services—language, education, household life, agriculture, industry, and trade. Besides demonstrating a command of several fields of learning, these volumes, containing vivid reenactments of the settlers’ everyday crises, are often as gripping as Arnow’s best fiction. Arnow’s more recent novels, The Weedkiller’s Daughter (1970) and The Kentucky Trace: A Novel of the American Revolution (1974), lack the full-bodied characters and the narrative drive that propel her earlier novels. The former has a new setting— suburbia—and the latter a different time from that of her distinguished fiction. Although Arnow’s work enjoyed a reassessment in the 1980s, it has still not achieved the stature her talent merits. Too often writers whose work is firmly rooted in one locale are relegated to a minor status by the term ‘‘regional,’’ which can suggest a limited appeal. Arnow’s regional association can be doubly damaging to her reputation. Since Kentucky is often excluded from ‘‘southern’’ literature, and ‘‘Appalachian’’ literature has only recently become a separate category, Arnow’s books are frequently not on lists of fiction demarcated by region. Far outdistancing other writers treating hill people from the southern Appalachian region, Arnow is the first and only American novelist to describe them with fidelity and justice and to place them in a setting authentic to the last detail. But Arnow does more than evoke an area no other writer has captured. Like Twain and


Faulkner, she creates a private world whose inhabitants face dilemmas reaching beyond geographical boundaries. Her best fiction depicts the conflict between an individual conscience and society—whether it be family, community, or the wider world. If Arnow’s novels at times need streamlining, they contain worlds as palpable and as real as the reader’s own. If her hardy combatants fail to achieve their goals, they nonetheless take responsibility for the outcome of their lives, and endure. By the 1990s Arnow had been called a regionalist, an Appalachian writer, naturalist, realist, and transcendentalist—yet she resisted categorization. As she commented in an interview, she thought of ‘‘Appalachia’’ as a chain of mountains and didn’t like the appellation, ‘‘woman writer.’’ (‘‘Well, what’s so unusual about a woman writer?’’ she has said. ‘‘They’ve been around since Sappho and before.’’) Additionally, she wasn’t concerned ‘‘about posterity.’’ Nonetheless, she realized her place in American literature with The Dollmaker which was reprinted in 1999, while critical attention since the 1970s had influenced the reprinting of another of her five published novels, Hunter’s Horn (reprinted 1997), as well as her three nonfiction works. Her short stories and essays remain uncollected. In her later years, Arnow led writing workshops at the Hindman Settlement School Writers Workshop in Kentucky (1978-85) and other sites and was invited as a speaker on several occasions. From the interviews conducted in her later years, we learn about Arnow’s writing process. She always wanted to be a poet and ‘‘wasted a lot of time,’’ as she puts it, imitating the style of Robert Browning and John Milton. Unable to write poetry, she turned to Milton’s prose: ‘‘Reading (him) was like watching an incoming tide on a rocky beach. . . The whole sea carrying the burden of the tide, came crashing near me. So did Milton’s sentences.’’ Besides Milton, Arnow also admired Thomas Hardy and Mark Twain, and among her contemporaries Wilma Dykeman, Jim Wayne Miller, David H. Looff, and James Still. One of her concerns in her writing was that she was often ‘‘afflicted by too many words, like my characters.’’ As an example, she cited that it took 13 years to write Hunter’s Horn and 17 rewritings of the first chapter in order to hone ‘‘a style not exactly bleak, but not wordy, a narrative with no adverbs and few adjectives, a style ‘of self.’’’

ATHERTON

Frontiers, Mountain Life and Work, Nation, Wilson Library Bulletin, Writer’s Digest. Unpublished novels, short stories, journal, drafts of published works, and correspondence are in the Special Collection at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ballard, S. L., Harriette Simpson Arnow’s Central Novel: Hunter’s Horn (dissertation, 1987). Brooks, C., Approaches to Literature (1939). Chung, H. K., ed., Harriette Simpson Arnow: Critical Essays on Her Work (1995). Chung, H. K., ‘‘Harriette Simpson Arnow’s Authorial Testimony: Toward of The Dollmaker’’ in Critique (Spring 1995). Eckley, W., H. Arnow (1974). Groover, K. K., The Wilderness Within: American Women Writers and Spiritual Quest (dissertation, 1996). Haines, C. H., To Sing Her Own Song: The Literary Work of Harriette Simpson Arnow (dissertation, 1993). Hobbs, G., ‘‘Harriette Arnow’s Literary Journey: From the Parish to the World’’ (dissertation, 1975). Hobbs, G. ‘‘Harriette Arnow’s Kentucky Novels: Beyond Local Color,’’ in KCN, (Fall 1976). Hobbs, G., ‘‘Starting Out in the Thirties: Harriette Arnow’s Literary Genesis’’ in Literature at the Barricades: The American Writer in the 1930s (1982). Oates, J. C., afterword to Arnow’s The Dollmaker (1972). Turner, M. B., Agrarianism and Loss: the Kentucky Novels of Harriette Simpson Arnow (dissertation, 1997). Reference works: Bulletin of Bibliography (March 1989). CA. DLB. Other references: MELUS (interview, Summer 1982). MQR (Spring 1990). Nation (31 Jan. 1976). NYHTB (6 Sept. 1936). Harriette Simpson Arnow, 1908-1986 (video, 1987). —GLENDA HOBBS, UPDATED BY KAREN MCLENNAN

ASHLEY, Ellen See SEIFERT, Elizabeth

ATHERTON, Gertrude (Franklin Horn)

Most of Arnow’s critical attention still focuses on The Dollmaker and the complexity of Gertie Nevels. In a critical text edited by Haeja K. Chung (Critique Spring 1995), Arnow’s short stories, a journal, her social histories, and her other novels, including the unpublished ‘‘Between the Flowers,’’ are thoroughly examined.

Born 30 October 1857, San Francisco, California; died 15 June 1948, San Francisco, California Also wrote under: Asmodeus, Frank Lin Daughter of Thomas and Gertrude Franklin Horn; married George H. Bowen Atherton, 1876, children: two

OTHER WORKS: Old Burnside (1977, reprint 1996). Short stories include: ‘‘Marigolds and Mules’’ in Kosmos (Feb.-March 1935), ‘‘A Mess of Pork’’ in The New Talent (Oct.Dec. 1935), ‘‘The Two Hunters’’ in Esquire (Jul. 1942), ‘‘Love?’’ in Twigs (Fall 1971), ‘‘Fra Lippi and Me’’ in Georgia Review (Winter 1979); articles and essays in Appalachian Heritage,

The daughter of a Yankee businessman from California and a Southern belle, Gertrude Atherton spent the first 30 years of her life in and around San Francisco, a city whose history and destiny she utilized as subject and background for her favorite character, a new Western woman. She sporadically attended private schools, eloped at seventeen with a suitor of her mother’s, bore two children, and rebelled against the conventions of domestic life.

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Only after the death of her husband did she begin her serious writing career in New York in 1888. Atherton’s first significant novel was Patience Sparhawk and Her Times (1897), published in London where her novels at first attracted more critical attention than in the U.S. This novel introduced the new Western woman, who in three subsequent novels symbolized the evolution of Western civilization at the turn of the century. In Patience Sparhawk and Her Times, Atherton offered an ironic appraisal of American self-reliance and society in the 1890s from the point of view of an aspiring Western woman. Through her characterization of the heroine as an idealistic, self-reliant, but passionate woman, born into lowly, isolated circumstances in California, Atherton narrated a romantic-realistic and psychological version of the 19th century argument over the effect of heredity and environment on the development of the individual. In American Wives and English Husbands (1898), Atherton’s independent-spirited heroine, Lee Tarleton, proud of her Creole heritage and aristocratic California upbringing, is confronted with the ‘‘solid fact’’ of English tradition and convention, personified by Cecil Maundrell, scion of a landed English family, whom she marries and who expects her to become his second self. Their marriage tests the past and present values of the two civilizations in regard to the relationship between man and woman and to the perpetuation of the race. In this novel and also in The Doomswoman (1893), The Californians (1898), and Ancestors (1907), Atherton penetrated the facade of civilization that organizes the basic relationship between man and woman and between individuals and nature. She displayed a continually ironic stance toward the argument on heredity and environment by labeling as a ‘‘fool’s paradise’’ an individual’s excessive and illusory dependence on either inherited characteristics or a given environment as a path to happiness. Her independent and self-conflicted heroine challenges the assumption that a woman unthinkingly accepts a passive, procreative function as a definition of herself and of the relationship between herself and nature and between herself and civilization. Atherton enacted her criticism of Howells’ ‘‘dull’’ realism by a call for originality and imagination in American literature. From Hippolyte Taine, she borrowed the technique of lifting a type of character out of the commonplace conditions to which he or she was apparently doomed and transferring him or her to an environment, replete with change and opportunity, where latent potentialities could be developed. From her first novel to her last, Atherton’s genius lay in her ability to tell an exciting story about a character or characters worthy of attention as they confronted the environmental and psychological circumstances of their lives, the ‘‘fool’s paradise’’ which they could or could not manage. She believed an author was obligated to extend the knowledge of readers beyond their provincial existence. Not always successful in style and form according to current critical tastes, Atherton nonetheless told stories in the form of the novel according to the logic of sometimes invisible patterns of cause-and-effect and yesterday-today and expected her readers to apprehend and participate in them.

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OTHER WORKS: What Dreams May Come (1888). Hermia Suydam (1889). Los Cerritos, A Romance of the Modern Time (1890). A Question of Time (1891). Before the Gringo Came (1894, enlarged in The Splendid Idle Forties, 1902). A Whirl Asunder (1895). His Fortunate Grace (1897). A Daughter of the Vine (1899). Senator North (1900). The Aristocrats (1901). The Conqueror (1902). A Few of Hamilton’s Letters (1903). Mrs. Pendleton’s Four-in-Hand (1903). Rulers of Kings (1904). The Bell in the Fog, and Other Stories (1905). The Traveling Thirds (1905). Rezánov (1906). The Gorgeous Isle (1908). Tower of Ivory (1910). Julia France and Her Times (1912). Perch of the Devil (1914). California, an Intimate History (1914). Mrs. Balfame (1916). Life in the War Zone (1916). The Living Present (1917). The White Morning (1918). The Avalanche (1919). Transplanted (1919). The Sisters-in-Law (1921). Sleeping Fires (1922). Black Oxen (1923). The Crystal Cup (1925). The Immortal Marriage (1927). The Jealous Gods (1928). Dido, Queen of Hearts (1929). The Sophisticates (1931). Adventures of a Novelist (1932, reprinted 1980). The Foghorn (1934). Golden Peacock (1936). Rezánov and Doña Concha (1937). Can Women Be Gentlemen? (1938). The House of Lee (1940). The Horn of Life (1942). Golden Gate Country (1945). My San Francisco (1946). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bradley, J., Valedictory Performances of Three American Women Novelists (dissertation, 1981). Bryant, B., Late California Writers (audio cassette, 1960, 1969). Christensen, L. E., Gertrude Atherton: The Novelist as Historian (audio cassette, 1982). Courtney, W. L., The Feminine Note in Fiction (1904). Dickey, F.A., Gertrude Atherton, Family, and Celebrated Friends (archive manuscript, 1981). Forman, H. J. ‘‘A Brilliant California Novelist: Gertrude Atherton’’ in California Historical Society Quarterly (March, 1961). Forrey, C. D., ‘‘Gertrude Atherton and the New Woman,’’ in CHSQ 55 (Fall 1976). Jackson, J. H., Gertrude Atherton (1940). Knight, G. C., The Strenuous Age in American Literature (1954). Leider, E. W., California’s Daughter: Gertrude Atherton and Her Times (1991). McClure, C. S., ‘‘Gertrude Atherton, 1857-1948,’’ in ALR 9 (Spring 1976). McClure, C. S., Gertrude Atherton (Boise State University Western Writers Series, 1976). Parker, G. T., William Dean Howells: Realism and Feminism (Harvard English Studies, 1973). Phillips, N. P.,‘‘The Woman’s Tournament: Men and Marriage in Six Novels by Gertrude Atherton’’ (thesis, 1981). Shumate, A., A San Francisco Scandal: The California of George Gordon, ’49er, Pioneer, and Builder of South Park in San Francisco (1976, 1994). Starr, K. Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915 (1973). Underwood, J. C., Literature and Insurgency (1914). Weir, S., ‘‘Gertrude Atherton: The Limits of Feminism,’’ in SJS 1 (1975). Other references: The American West (July 1974). The Bookman (July 1929). —CHARLOTTE S. MCCLURE

ATOM, Ann See WALWORTH, Jeannette Hadermann


AUERBACH, Hilda See MORLEY, Hilda

AUSTIN, Jane Goodwin Born 25 January 1831, Worcester, Massachusetts; died 30 March 1894, Roxbury, Massachusetts Daughter of Isaac and Elizabeth Hammatt Goodwin; married Loring Henry Austin, circa 1850 Austin’s father died during her childhood and her mother moved to Boston, where Austin was educated in private schools. When her own three children were grown, she wrote novels, as well as fiction for such periodicals as Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, Putnam’s, Lippincott’s, and the Galaxy. Austin lived for a short time (circa 1869) in Concord, where she knew Louisa May Alcott, Emerson, and the Hawthornes. Dora Darling; or, The Daughter of the Regiment (1864) is in many ways Austin’s most charming novel. Mrs. Darley, the mother of twelve-year-old Dora, sympathizes with the Union and hides a Union soldier even though she is dying. Dora’s ‘‘selfish and depraved’’ father and her brother support the Confederacy, and Dora is sent, after her mother’s death, to live with a cruel aunt. With the aid of an aged freedman, she escapes and joins the Union army as a vivandière. She is befriended by the soldier her mother had aided (who turns out to be her cousin from Massachusetts) and by the chaplain, who undertakes her education. Dora’s initiative and sterling character contrast sharply with the treachery of the villains in the novel. None of Austin’s novels involves more coincidences than Cipher (1869), on which Louisa May Alcott is supposed to have collaborated. It features bastardy and miscegenation, a doctor who poisons his wife, long-lost heirs, a poisoned Italian bracelet, a Spanish gypsy, voodoo, and more happenings that strain the reader’s credence. Inspired by William Bradford’s newly rediscovered history, Of Plymouth Plantation, printed in 1856, and by traditions handed down from her own Mayflower ancestors, Austin wrote several books about the Pilgrims: Standish of Standish (1889), Betty Alden (1891), A Nameless Nobleman (1881), David Alden’s Daughter (1892), and Dr. LeBaron and His Daughters (1890). In Standish of Standish, she is content to flesh out Bradford’s narrative with dialogue and characterization, making Myles Standish the hero and foreshadowing John Billington’s bad end by depicting the entire Billington family as coarse or troublesome. Standish’s two marriages are romanticized here and in the other books. ‘‘The Love Life of William Bradford,’’ in David Alden’s Daughter, is entirely fabricated and supported by fictitious documentation. Bradford’s one-sentence dismissal of Governor Carver’s wife—‘‘And his wife, being a weak woman, died within five or six weeks after him’’—becomes a tear-soaked 34-page saga, ‘‘The Wife of John Carver,’’ in David Alden’s Daughter.

AUSTIN

Giving prominence to Pilgrim mothers, Austin skillfully retells such stories as the wooing of Patricia Molines, the treachery of Oldhame and Lyford, and the ousting of Morton from Merry Mount. Details of geography, weaponry, dress, tableware, diet, and genealogy are carefully researched. The speech, particularly of those characters who are soldiers, sailors, or children, often seems unduly formal or literary. Although Austin’s works, like those of her friend Louisa May Alcott, show a decided split between edifying books for young people and sensational shockers, she signed her real name to all and seems always to delight in her story, whether contemporary or historical, probable or improbable. OTHER WORKS: Fairy Dreams; or, Wanderings in Elf-land (1859). Kinah’s Curse (1864). The Novice; or, Mother Church Thwarted (1865). The Tailor Boy (1865). Outpost (1866). The Shadow of Moloch Mountain (1870). Moonfolk (1874). Mrs. Beauchamp Brown (1880). The Desmond Hundred (1882). Nantucket Scraps (1882). It Never Did Run Smooth (1892). Queen Tempest (1892). The Twelve Great Diamonds (1892). The Cedar Swamp Mystery (1901). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Blanck, J., Bibliography of American Literature (1955). Cameron, K. W., Emerson, Thoreau and Concord in Early Newspapers (1958). Reference works: American Authors: 1600-1900 (1938). Dictionary of American Biography (1928). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH

AUSTIN, Mary Hunter Born 9 September 1868, Carlinville, Illinois; died 13 August 1934, Santa Fe, New Mexico Daughter of George and Savilla Graham Hunter; married Stafford Austin, 1891 Mary Hunter Austin was born into a family that had little understanding of her unusual talents. Her father died from a malarial infection contracted during the Civil War, and with his death, Austin lost her one source of literary encouragement. In 1888 Austin graduated from Blackborn College and the family filed homestead claims in the Tejon district of Joaquin Valley, California. This landscape and way of life were to form the most important influence on Austin’s writing. Her first important book was The Land of Little Rain (1903), a study which drew heavily upon her experiences with nature. The Land of Little Rain is a collection of essays dealing with the Southwest—its people and its religion. A lover of the land, Austin writes: ‘‘One must summer and winter with the land and wait its occasions.’’ Austin does not like the term ‘‘desert,’’ which to her

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indicates a land which will support no man. The desert is full of that which will support life, although it is up to man to find this support, and the white man has not been blessed with this facility. Much of the collection is taken up with the struggle between life and death. It is not the land alone that interests Austin, but the people who inhabit it as well. Austin’s style reflects an intimacy with the earth itself. She uses Indian names to describe nature, and her descriptions are lyrical with an instinct for the precise word to convey natural phenomena. The Flock (1906) deals with the history of sheep-raising in the Southwest. Austin introduces into the work the allegorical idea of man being like sheep in possessing the instincts of the social ‘‘flock mind.’’ Of the flock mind Austin observes, ‘‘I cannot say very well what it is, except that it is less than the sum of all their intelligences.’’ Ecology is one of the major concerns of this work, and Austin is sympathetic to a land brutally abused by humans in their attempts to survive. Austin also wrote on the feminist concerns of the day, and her novels reflect the problems women face in both marriage and career. A Woman of Genius (1912) contains both semiautobiographical material and Austin’s strongest statement on the feminist choice between career and marriage. It has been compared favorably with Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street. Critic Edward Wagenknecht believes the work covers ‘‘everything that is important in woman’s rebellion against man, for on its deepest level the book is a study of creative power, of its connection with sexual power, and of the conflict between art and love.’’ The childhood background of its heroine, Olivia Lattimore, is obviously based on Austin’s own childhood. Olivia triumphs over hardship through her genius and becomes a success on the New York stage. The crisis of the novel is Olivia’s decision whether to marry and fulfill the conventions or to follow her genius. When her lover telegrams ‘‘Will you marry me?’’ Olivia can only reply, ‘‘If you marry my work.’’ He cannot accept this situation and marries another woman. Olivia faces a breakdown and eventually marries a playwright she has known for some time. She expects a good marriage between people of similar interests, but one lacking in the excitement of her early love. Earth Horizon (1932) chronicles the life of Austin and is written in third person, as was Austin’s style in nonfiction writing. The book describes the life of a gifted woman in a conventional world, and Austin makes a convincing case for the oppression of women through the examples of prejudice she personally experienced. Austin reports mystical experiences with God and nature that made her feel there was a particular pattern to her existence, a pattern which would make its shape known to her over the years. She concludes her story, ‘‘It is not that we work upon the Cosmos, but it works in us.’’ The feminist bias of the work is particularly strong in her observations on marriage. She works from knowledge of both her mother’s attitude toward marriage and her own unhappy experience. She deals with the struggle of women for equality in the Midwest of her own time, and speaks frankly of the instinctual sexual desire in women. The book also portrays Austin’s love for the Southwest, and her feelings that she had to come into a mystical rapport with the region before she could

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write about it. Her love for the Indian people and her efforts to preserve their life and culture are given an important place in her history. OTHER WORKS: Isidro (1905). Santa Lucia (1908). Lost Borders (1909). The Basket Woman, A Book of Fanciful Tales for Children (1910). Outland (1910). The Arrow Maker (1911). Christ in Italy (1912). Fire (1912). The Green Bough (1913). The Lovely Lady (1913). California, Land of the Sun (1914). Love and the Soul Maker (1914). The Ford (1917). The Trail Book (1918). The Young Woman Citizen (1918). No. 26 Jayne St. (1920). The American Rhythm (1923). The Land of Journey’s Ending (1924). Everyman’s Genius (1925). The Man Jesus (1925). The Children Sing in the Far West (1928). Taos Pueblo (1930). Starry Adventure (1931). Experiences Facing Death (1931). Indian Pottery of the Rio Grande (1934). Can Prayer Be Answered? (1934). One Smoke Stories (1934). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brooks, V. W., The Confident Years: 1815-1915 (1932). Campbell, J. L., ‘‘From Self to Earth and Back Again in the Fiction of Mary Austin’’ (thesis, 1997). Carew-Miller, A., Telling the Truth About Herself: Mary Austin and the Autobiographical Voice of Feminist Theory (dissertation, 1994). Church, P. P., Wind’s Trail: The Early Life of Mary Austin (1990). Dickson, C. E., Nature and Nation: Mary Austin and Cultural Negotiations of the American West,1900-1914 (dissertation, 1996). Luhan, D., and A. C. Henderson, ‘‘Search for Revolutionary Change in the Desert Southwest’’ (thesis, 1998). Farrar, J. C., ed., The Literary Spotlight (1924). Fink, A., Mary, a Biography of Mary Austin (1983). Ford, T. W., ‘‘The American Rhythm: Mary Austin’s Poetic Principle,’’ in Western American Literature 5. Hart, T. J., Tender Horizons: The American Landscapes of Austin and Stein (dissertation, 1996). Hoyer, M. T., Dancing Ghosts: Native American and Christian Syncretism in Mary Austin’s Work (1998). Jones, L. A., Uncovering the Rest of Herstory in the Frontier Myth: Mary Austin, Mabel Graulich. Klimasmith, M. & E., eds., Exploring Lost Borders: Critical Essays on Mary Austin (1999). Kircher, C. L., Women in/on Nature: Mary Austin, Gretel Ehrlich, Terry Tempest Williams, and Ann Zwinger (dissertation, 1995, 1998). Langlois, K. S., A Search for Significance: Mary Austin, the New York Years (dissertation, 1987). Lanigan, E. F., Mary Austin: Song of a Maverick (1989). Lyday, J. W., Mary Austin: The Southwest Works (1968). Milowski, C. P., Revisioning the American Frontier: Mary Hallock Foote, Mary Austin, Willa Cather, and the Western Narrative (dissertation, 1996). Nelson, B. J. D., Mary Austin’s Domestic Wildness: An Ecocritical Investigation of Animals (dissertation, 1997). Pearce, T. M., Mary Hunter Austin (1965). Stineman, E.,Mary Hunter Austin: An American Woman of Letters (dissertation, 1989 1987). Van Doren, C., in Contemporary American Novelists (1931). Wagenknecht, E., in Cavalcade of the American Novel (1952). Webster, B., ‘‘Owens Valley’s Mary Austin’’ in Album (Oct. 1992). White, W. A., The Autobiography (1946). Wynn, D., A Critical Study of the Writings of Mary Hunter Austin (abridged dissertation; 1941). —LOIS BURNS


AYER

AVERY, Martha Moore

OTHER WORKS: The papers of Martha Moore Avery are collected at Xavier College, Sydney, Nova Scotia.

Born 6 April 1851, Steuben, Maine; died 8 August 1929, Medford, Massachusetts Daughter of Albion King Paris and Katherine Leighton Moore; married Millard Filmore Avery, 1880 (died 1890) After her mother’s death in 1864, Martha Moore Avery, the fourth of eight children, lived with her grandfather, Samuel Moore, a Maine politician, instead of with her father, a house builder. She attended the village school and a private girls’ school. In 1880 she joined the Unitarian church where she met her husband. When her husband left home to become a traveling salesman in 1886, she and her daughter moved to Boston. Her husband died in 1890. In Boston, influenced mainly by Dr. Charles D. Sherman, ‘‘a Master in Cosmic Law,’’ Avery became much involved with political ideas and movements. In 1891 she joined the Socialist Labor Party, quickly attaining some importance in its ranks. During the 1890s, Avery became associated with another socialist, David Goldstein, a cigarmaker born in England. She founded the Karl Marx Class in 1898 (which in 1901 became the Boston School of Political Economy) with Goldstein as secretary. However, both Avery and Goldstein became increasingly disenchanted with socialism and, simultaneously, drawn to Catholicism. After her daughter’s conversion to Catholicism and entrance into the Congrégation de Notre Dame, as Sister St. Mary Martha in 1900, as a result of the girl’s Quebec convent education, Avery herself became a Catholic in 1904, totally renouncing Marxism. Goldstein converted a year later. However, even before their conversions, they collaborated on Socialism: The Nation of Fatherless Children (1903), a critical exposition of the social and moral implications of socialism. Although the tone is strident in its Catholic bias, the content of the book reflects Avery’s and Goldstein’s intimate knowledge of the history and tactics of socialism. The authors’ use of quotations from Marx and Engels, followed by refutations, works effectively. They take a strong stand against many socialist credos; in particular, they charge that the result of irresponsible sexual unions would be homeless children who would become wards of the state. The result of Avery’s second collaboration with Goldstein, Bolshevism: Its Cure (1919), is dedicated to the Knights of Columbus; it launches not only an assault against socialism but also a campaign for Catholicism and patriotism. Working from the teachings of Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical Rerum Novarum, the authors elaborate on the basic differences between Marxism and Catholicism; advocate support of trade unions and collective bargaining; and try to promote reform, but reform through faith in God and love of country rather than through socialism. Avery turned more and more toward political activism. She and Goldstein took to the streets using the very tactics of the socialists. They founded the Catholic Truth Guild, a lay apostolate that preached Catholicism from auto vans, first in New England and then in other parts of the country. Avery was an active apostle on the streets of Boston until only a few days before her death.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Carrigan, D. O., ‘‘A Forgotten Yankee Marxist,’’ in NEQ (March 1969). Carrigan, D. O., ‘‘M. M. Avery: Crusader for Social Justice,’’ in Cath-HistRev (April 1968). Goldstein, D., Autobiography of a Campaigner for Christ (1936). Reference works: James, E. T. et all, eds., Notable American Women, 1607-1950 (article by J. P. Shenton, 1971). —SUZANNE ALLEN

AYER, Harriet Hubbard Born 27 June 1849, Chicago, Illinois; died 23 November 1903, New York, New York Daughter of Henry George and Juliet Smith Hubbard; married Herbert Copeland Ayer, 1865 (divorced) Businesswoman, journalist, and popular writer of beauty manuals, Harriet Hubbard Ayer was born to a prominent Chicago family, the third of four children. Considered shy and sickly as a child, minimally educated at a Catholic convent, married at sixteen to the conventional son of a Chicago industrialist, she astonished her society by developing within a few years into one of the city’s leading hostesses, renowned for her beauty and for her individuality in flaunting conventions by, for example, inviting actors to her home. Largely self-taught, she early displayed a driving will, a creative personality, and a flair for the dramatic that would enable her later to triumph over a series of severe reversals. In the early 1880s, left in financial straits by the bankruptcy of her husband and angered by his drinking and infidelities, Ayer defied Victorian conventions by divorcing her husband and, following the example of the many self-made men she had known in Chicago society, establishing her own New York City business, a cosmetic firm. Her chief product was a cream whose formula, she contended, she had bought from a Parisian chemist whose grandfather had originally invented it for the famed Napoleonic beauty, Juliet Récamier. Largely because of her advertising genius in connecting her products with glamourous French traditions of beauty, with her own socialite background, and with stage favorites like Lily Langtry who endorsed her products, for a time her company flourished. Of mercurial temperament, Ayer was subject to periodic emotional disorders—a condition which led to a probable morphine addiction. In the early 1890s disagreements with family members and especially with a vindictive male business associate were climaxed by her involuntary commitment for 14 months to a mental institution. Although her business and personal life were in

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shambles, in 1895 she persuaded the editor of the New York World to hire her to write a weekly column of beauty advice. Before long she also joined the reportorial staff, covering murder trials as well as writing exposés of city life, with a primary focus on women. In her books and columns on beauty, Ayer preached a protofeminist doctrine of attention to health, exercise, and mental discipline as the key to beauty. In an age of feminism and increasing freedom for women, she defined beauty as accessible to any woman who took proper care of her body. Responding to her own psychological difficulties and to the tenets of the 19th century natural health movement, she criticized tight-lacing and other artificial aids to beauty and often rejected the use of the commercial products she once had marketed. She wrote that she was ‘‘known world over as a physical culture crank.’’ As a professional woman she wore shortened skirts, masculine suits, and was a member of the Rainy Daisy moderate-dress reform group in New York City. She identified with the working women to whom her columns in the mass circulation World were directed. Yet Ayer never joined the suffrage movement. She protested that she was not really a dress reformer; she counselled women to wear corsets; and she advocated that older women use cosmetics to disguise their age, thereby furthering modern America’s fixation with youth as the epitome of beauty. She cautioned against tanned skin and vigorous exercise for women which might produce well-developed muscles. ‘‘The beautiful arm,’’ she wrote, should be ‘‘round, white, and plump,’’ and ‘‘should taper gently to the hand with an adorable curve at the small delicate wrist.’’ Ayer consistently advocated the conservative position that beauty was a woman’s greatest power. She argued that wives needed to pay attention to their looks to keep their husbands and working women to advance in their jobs. These attitudes were the ultimate rationale behind her columns on beauty. Ayer is an example both of the widespread influence of feminism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and of the enduring power of traditional attitudes about women, even among articulate, successful women who had experienced substantial discrimination in their own lives. Her life was unexpectedly cut short in 1903, when she died of pneumonia after a brief illness.

OTHER WORKS: Harriet Hubbard Ayer’s Book: A Complete and Authentic Treatise on the Law of Health and Beauty (1899). Woman’s Guide to Health and Beauty (1904).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ayer, M., and I. Taves, The Three Lives of Harriet Hubbard Ayer (1957). Bird, C., Enterprising Women (1976). Hamilton, H., ‘‘Harriet Hubbard Ayer’’ (ms., Chicago Historical Society, n.d.). Kirkland, C., Chicago Yesterdays (1919). Terhune, A., To the Best of My Memory (1930). —LOIS W. BANNER

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AYSCOUGH, Florence Wheelock Born 1878, Shanghai, China; died 24 April 1942, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of Thomas Reed and Edith Haswell Clark Wheelock; married Harley Farnsworth MacNair, 1935 Florence Wheelock Ayscough lived with her parents in China until she was nine years old, and then made her first trip to America to attend school in Boston. Subsequently she returned to China, delved into a study of China’s history and civilization and learned the Chinese language. One of Ayscough’s earliest publications, Fir-Flower Tablets (1921), is a translation of the Chinese poetry she so much admired. The polished translation was done with the help of her cherished friend, Amy Lowell. Friendly Books on Far Cathay (1921) is basically a compiled bibliography for young students but it also includes a brief summary of Chinese history. Most of Ayscough’s later writings were similarly devoted to young readers. A Chinese Mirror: Being Reflections of the Reality Behind Appearance (1925), gives an informal and easy-to-read description of China’s topography, social life, and customs. More specifically, it discusses the significance and symbolism of the Yellow and Yangtze rivers; of Tien Shan, the Great Mountain; and of the Purple Forbidden City. In addition to these descriptions, which may seem exotic to young American readers, Ayscough also describes such common sights as the gardens, city walls, and moats. One of Ayscough’s most thoroughly reviewed books is Chinese Women, Yesterday and Today (1937). Here she contrasts the women of old China with those of the 1930s. Again she gives an informal and charming description of Chinese culture; her intent, she explains, is to create for American readers a sense of identification and appreciation for peoples of other lands. Another important work is Firecracker Land: Pictures of the Chinese World for Young Readers (1932), in which Ayscough shares her personal experiences of China as well as the wealth of information that she has acquired. She expresses the hope that by telling of China’s great traditions and modern way of life she would cultivate a feeling of friendship between China and America. After Ayscough’s death, letters of tribute and other memorabilia were compiled in The Incomparable Lady, edited lovingly by Harley Farnsworth MacNair. OTHER WORKS: Liu, Sung Fu: Catalogue of Chinese Paintings Ancient and Modern by Famous Masters (1915). The Autobiography of a Chinese Dog Edited by His Missus (1927). Tu Fu, the Autobiography of a Chinese Poet, A.D. 712-770 (edited and translated by Ayscough, 1929-1934). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Damon, S. F., Amy Lowell. MacNair, H. F., The Incomparable Lady (1946). —PATRICIA LANGHALS

B BABB, Sanora Born 21 April 1907, Leavenworth, Kansas Writes under: Sylvester Davis Daughter of Walter and Jennie Parks Babb; married James W. Howe, 1949 During Sanora Babb’s early years, her family lived in Oklahoma, where Babb spent much time among the Oto tribe. Her father was at various times a farmer, baker, baseball player, and professional gambler. After Babb’s early years, the family led a nomadic life among the small towns and farms of Oklahoma, Kansas, and eastern Colorado. Babb attended the University of Kansas and Garden City (Kansas) Junior College. From 1925 to 1929 she worked on smalltown newspapers and a farm journal. After moving to California in 1929, Babb held various writing jobs and began publishing short stories. During the Depression, she hitchhiked across the country, lived for a while in Harlem, and traveled in Europe. After returning to California, she wrote articles about the dust-bowl families who were arriving in great numbers, and helped set up camps in the fields for them. Babb’s experiences with the migratory workers provided the substance of her first novel, Whose Names Are Unknown, written in 1939. She describes the uprooted farmers who became a cheap source of labor for the large industrialized farms. Women, too, bore the brunt of suffering; Babb describes half-starved women giving birth to dead infants on the floors of tents. Drawing on these same experiences with migrant workers in the Depression decades later, Babb wrote The Dark Earth and Other Stories from the Great Depression (1987). Babb’s second novel, The Lost Traveler (1958, reissued 1995), tells the tale of a smalltime gambler. Des Tannehill, based in part on Babb’s father, disdains working for others and tries to maintain his fierce independence through gambling. His choice of a trade prevents his family from being respected members of the community, a matter quite important to them. The story ends with the disintegration of a close family. An Owl on Every Post (1970, reissued 1994) is a memoir of Babb’s family and their relocation from smalltown Oklahoma to rural eastern Colorado. Told from a child’s perspective, the book recounts the family’s loss of nearly everything they owned and captures life on the Great Plains in the early 20th century. Cry of the Tinamou (1997) is a collection of 14 stories, some of which were previously published in magazines as diverse as the Saturday Evening Post and Seventeen. The tales are set in the West with strong female protagonists and characters of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Babb’s recent work, Told in the Seed: Poems (1998), is her first published collection of poetry. Her poems and short stories have appeared in many anthologies, including CrossSection of

American Literature (1945, 1948) and American Childhoods (1987). ‘‘The Wild Flower’’ and ‘‘The Santa Ana’’ appeared in Best American Short Stories (1950, 1960). Babb received a Borestone Mountain Poetry Award in 1967 and served as the editor of the Clipper from 1940 to 1941 and the California Quarterly from 1951 to 1952. Prominent in all Babb’s writing is a respect and love for all people and their differing needs. She is sympathetic to their problems, regardless of racial and cultural backgrounds; her main characters are those who are in some way prevented from reaching their full potential. She is critical of any relationship that subordinates one person to another, including a marriage in which the husband dominates the family. It is the oldest daughter in her first two published books who represents this critical view. A recurring image of freedom is the great bowl of the sky, always luring those who love independence away from life-stifling relationships. Consistent with Babb’s regard for all life is her regard for art. Her books are carefully wrought, written with simplicity and directness. They give a detailed picture of some vanishing ways of life and may be read as historical as well as literary documents. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Saroyan, W., Letters to Sonora Babb (1932, 1941). Reference works: CA (1975). Other references: London Sunday Times (28 Nov. 1971). LAT (31 Mar. 1958). Madison (Wisconsin) Capital Times (22 Apr. 1971). NYHT (23 Mar. 1958). NYT (20 Mar. 1958). PW (22 Sept. 1997). TLS (9 May 1958, 12 Nov. 1971). —ANN STANFORD, UPDATED BY LEAH J. SPARKS

BABBITT, Natalie Born 28 July 1932, Dayton, Ohio Daughter of Ralph Z. and Genevieve Converse Moore; married Samuel F. Babbitt, 1954; children: Christopher, Thomas, Lucy Despite its intimacy, all of Natalie Babbitt’s work for young readers has a dramatic scope and is celebratory in nature. Her verbal pageantry, often accompanied by prologues and epilogues, imparts a sense of theatricality. The roots of theater go back to her earlier history. In high school, Babbitt coauthored a musical comedy; at Smith College, she began her studies as a theater major, although she soon changed her major to art, claiming she was a ‘‘wooden actress.’’ That Babbitt should venture into drawing as well as writing is consistent with her life history. Her mother, an amateur artist,

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encouraged Babbitt’s early painting efforts. Babbitt began her career illustrating books written by her husband, Sam. Eventually, he became too busy with his job as a president of Kirkland College to work with her, and she moved into illustrating her own works and then to writing longer prose. Even when her books provide no visuals, her imagistic language creates the landscape and brings substance and believability to the characters. Her settings have the majesty and sweep of the air, the sea, the forest, the woods; her characters have the dignity of individuals and the power of archetypes. The ritualistic quality inherent in place and person pervades her work; a mythic lyricism serves both to quiet and excite the reader. With her mastery of tone and mood, Babbitt’s stories resonate beyond their particulars to embrace the universal and to speak of broad truths. In her well-loved Tuck Everlasting (1975) the highly credible eleven-year-old Winnie faces ultimate questions about the meaning of life and death, and the novel speaks poignantly about the place of death in the life cycle. The book’s gentle and poetic wisdom places it among the classics in children’s literature. Despite the importance of her themes, Babbitt infuses her work with genuine levity, and her wry, humorous perspective attracts younger readers. Her early The Search for Delicious (1969), Kneeknock Rise (1970), a Newbery honor book, and The Something (1970) are the stages for her homey tales with levels of meaning beyond their apparent lightheartedness. Twice, in The Devil’s Storybook (1976) and The Devil’s Other Storybook (1987), Babbitt claims the devil as her protagonist. He is a comic earthbound fellow victimized by his mischievous pranks as he plots against others. Babbitt’s restrained satire renders him an endearing character. Babbitt enjoys providing her readers with characters outside the mainstream of children’s literature. In Eyes of the Amaryllis (1977) Jenny’s Gran, an irascible woman who has not made loving her easy, must grow in ways more expected of her young granddaughter. Reality and illusion crash up against one another along the stormy shoreline of the novel to challenge the readers’ belief in things they cannot explain. Her quirky Herbert Rowbarge (1982), Babbitt’s personal favorite, does not have an appealing character with whom young readers can identify. Even as a child, Herbert is distant and inaccessible. The novel’s philosophic truth about sense and self, and loss of self, remains more ambiguous, less tangible, though no less wise than her other writings. Although Babbitt’s canon has wide appeal to adults as well as children, the characters and theme of Herbert Rowbarge presume adult experience. Publishers Weekly proclaimed it ‘‘her crowning achievement.’’ In 1989 Babbitt returned to her painterly antecedents and produced her first full-color picture book since The Something (1970), Nellie: A Cat on Her Own. She says she ran out of ideas for longer works around this time, and she went on to publish another picture book in 1994, Bub: Or the Very Best Thing. The story of a king and queen’s search for the best thing for their child, Bub is set in medieval times, and Babbitt painstakingly hand-sewed costumes for her models in order to achieve the precision she wanted

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for her illustrations. The book took her four years to complete. After Bub, Babbitt became absorbed in smaller projects, such as composing acrostics for the children’s magazine, Horn Book. She also wrote another picture book published in 1999, Ouch! This adaptation of a story from Grimms’ fairytales was illustrated by Fred Marcellino. OTHER WORKS: The Forty-Ninth Magician (with S. Babbitt, 1966). Dick Foote and the Shark (1967). Phoebe’s Revolt (1968). Goody Hall (1971). Curlicues (1980). Illustrator for V. Worth titles: Small Poems (1972). More Small Poems (1976). Still More Small Poems (1978). Small Poems Again (1986). All the Small Poems and Fourteen More (1987). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Harrison, B. and G. Maguire, eds., Innocence and Experience: Essays and Conversations on Children’s Literature (1987). Haviland, V., ed., Children and Literature (1973). Silvey, A., ed., Children’s Books and Their Creators (1995). Ward, M. E., et al., Authors of Books for Young People (1990). Reference works: CA (1975). CANR (1987). CLR (1976). DLB (1986). SATA (1987). TCCW (1989). Other references: Horn Book (Nov./Dec. 1984, March/April 1986, Sept./Oct. 1988, Nov./Dec. 1989, Nov./Dec. 1990). NYTBR (14 Mar. 1999). PW (21 Feb. 1994). —SUSAN P. BLOOM, UPDATED BY ANGELA WOODWARD

BACON, Alice (Mabel) Born 26 February 1858, New Haven, Connecticut; died 1 May 1918, New Haven, Connecticut Daughter of Leonard and Catherine Bacon Alice Bacon wrote almost exclusively about Japan. This special interest began when she was only fourteen years old, when her father took under his guardianship one of a pioneering group of five young girls sent by the Japanese government to be educated in the U.S. Bacon soon became best friends with her adopted sister. In 1883 Bacon began teaching at Hampton Institute. In 1888 she was invited to teach at the Peeresses’ School in Tokyo, conducted by the Imperial Household Department for daughters of the nobility. While residing in Japan, she spent most of her time in Japanese society, experiencing many aspects of Japanese life rarely seen by Western visitors. In 1889 Bacon returned to her work at Hampton, where she concerned herself with the status of the black man. She founded the Dixie Hospital to provide nursing education and better medical care for the community, and expressed her views on racial


problems in an article entitled ‘‘The Negro and the Atlanta Exposition.’’ Japanese Girls and Women (1891) is based upon Bacon’s many years of living in Japan. She felt the book was needed because, ‘‘While Japan as a whole has been closely studied, and while much and varied information has been gathered about the country and its people, one half of the population has been left entirely unnoticed, passed over with brief mention, or altogether misunderstood.’’ The information she gathered and the observations she made were not those of a casual superficial traveler, but are based upon the intimate friendships she developed with many native Japanese women. Bacon became acquainted with people of all classes and carefully noted the similarities and differences in their ideas and customs. Her first chapter deals with childhood and tells of the various ceremonies and traditions connected with infancy and child rearing. The author tells how children are dressed and treated, and particularly emphasizes their training in ‘‘good manners.’’ In another chapter, Bacon discusses the formal education of a Japanese girl. The reader learns of the high value placed upon education in general, as well as the details of the instruction which virtually all girls receive. In later chapters Bacon treats such topics as marriage, divorce, motherhood, old age, court life, ‘‘samurai’’ and ‘‘peasant’’ women, city life, and domestic service. The reader learns the details of arranged marriages and the standards of ‘‘a beautiful and accomplished maiden.’’ One also learns how after marriage, a young upper-class woman becomes almost a servant to her mother-in-law. The life of a countryman’s wife offers an interesting contrast to the life of the upper-class woman. Although the peasant woman undoubtedly works harder and grows older earlier, she is freer and more independent than her city sister. In discussing elderly women, Bacon emphasizes the respect given to the aged. She explains that an elderly woman proudly dresses as such and does not try to make herself appear younger. An aged mother is treated with love and tenderness and never regarded as a burden. When times are hard, children deprive themselves in order to give extra to their parents. Court life is the center of Japan’s finest drama, music, art, and literature. Similarly the city lies at the center of popular folk culture, and Bacon describes the various festivals of the common people. One of the most interesting occupations to be found in the city is that of the geisha. The Geisha ya are establishments where little girls are taken to be taught dance and song, the etiquette of entertaining guests, and ‘‘whatever else goes to make a girl charming to the opposite sex.’’ Sometimes geisha will leave the dancing in the teahouses to become the concubine of some wealthy Japanese or foreigner. Although Japanese Girls and Women is Bacon’s major work, she also published a collection of letters related to her experiences teaching in Tokyo (A Japanese Interior, 1893), and a collection of stories (In the Land of the Gods: Some Stories of Japan, 1905). Both books provide a rare insight into Japanese daily life.

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OTHER WORKS: Human Bullets, a Soldier’s Story of Port Arthur (1907). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Baldwin, T. W., Bacon Genealogy: Michael Bacon of Dedham, 1640, and His Descendants (1915). Peabody, F. G., Education for Life: The Story of Hampton Institute (1918). Reference works: DAB. NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: Independent (30 Jan. 1896). New Haven Journal Courier (3 May 1918). New Haven Register (3 May 1918). Southern Workman (March 1926). —PATRICIA LANGHALS

BACON, Delia Salter Born 2 February 1811, Tallmadge, Ohio Territory; died 2 September 1859, Hartford, Connecticut Daughter of David and Alice Parks Bacon Daughter of Congregationalist missionaries, Delia Salter Bacon was born in a model community her father had established in the wilderness. Bankrupt in 1812, he returned to Connecticut and died in 1817, leaving his wife and seven children. After one year (1825-26) at Catharine Beecher’s Hartford school, where she was a classmate and literary rival of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Baker taught (1826-32) at schools in Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York. In 1833 she began a series of classes in the home of her brother Leonard, pastor of the First Church (Congregational) in New Haven. Her ‘‘Historical Lessons’’ proved successful in New Haven, New York, Albany, Boston, and Cambridge. Bacon’s eloquence and charm brought large audiences to her literary and historical surveys thirty years before female lecturers became common, and won her friends and admirers such as Elizabeth Peabody and Caroline W. H. Dall. The first fruit of Bacon’s intense literary ambition, Tales of the Puritans (1831) consists of three stories, ‘‘The Regicides,’’ ‘‘The Fair Pilgrim,’’ and ‘‘Castine.’’ All are based on historical events in 17th-century New England. ‘‘The Regicides,’’ about the escape to New England of Puritan judges who had sentenced Charles I, is the most effective. In 1832 Bacon’s sentimental romance ‘‘Love’s Martyr’’ was published in the Philadelphia Sunday Courier. It won first prize and was chosen over five stories by Poe. Based on the scalping of Jane McCrea by the Indians in 1776, the story, like those in Tales of the Puritans, makes a beautiful, romantic heroine the center of the action. Beginning in 1845, Bacon became more and more absorbed in her belief that the plays attributed to Shakespeare had been written by Sir Walter Raleigh or Francis Bacon, or by a group headed by these men. Family and friends, including Eliza Ware Rotch Farrar, attempted to dissuade her from this pursuit. But Charles Butler, a New York lawyer, gave her the ‘‘first fellowship on record to an American woman for advanced study abroad’’ (Hopkins), and she sailed for England in May 1853 to do research.

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In England she became increasingly isolated, obsessed with her theory and her attempts to publish it. In May 1856 Bacon appealed in despair to Elizabeth Peabody’s brother-in-law, Nathaniel Hawthorne, American consul at Liverpool. He could not believe in her theory, but he not only became her unpaid literary agent, secured English and American publishers for her book, wrote its preface, but spent over $1,100 of his own money on printing and editorial costs. The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded (1857) was ignored or ridiculed by contemporary reviewers, but Bacon was followed by numerous ‘‘Baconians,’’ and she is blamed for stirring up ‘‘the biggest mares’ nest in the history of the English-speaking world.’’ In 1858, completely insane, she was brought back to America from England to die at the Hartford Retreat for the Insane. OTHER WORKS: The Bride of Fort Edward: A Dialogue (1839). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Altick, R. D., ‘‘Delia Bacon,’’ in Ohio Authors and Their Books (1962). Bacon, T., Delia Bacon: A Biographical Sketch (1888). Beecher, C., Truth Stranger Than Fiction (1850). Dall, C. W. H., What We Really Know about Shakespeare (1886). Emerson, R. W., The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks (1960). Farrar, E. W. R., Recollections of Seventy Years (1866). Hopkins, V. C., Prodigal Puritan; a Life of Delia Bacon (1959) Pares, M., A Pioneer: In Memory of Delia Bacon, 2 Feb. 1811 to 2 Sept. 1859 (1959). Reference works: American Authors 1600-1900 (1938). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH

BAGLEY, Sarah G. Born circa 1820 in Meredith, New Hampshire; death date unknown Sarah G. Bagley received a common school education and, if her sketch, ‘‘Tales of Factory Life, No. 1’’ is autobiographical, she may have been in domestic service before arriving in Lowell, Massachusetts. She may also have taught school. She worked at the Hamilton Manufacturing Company for over six years and for two years at the Middlesex Factory. For four of the years she worked in the mills, she conducted a free evening class for her fellow workers. She joined an ‘‘Improvement Circle’’ held in a Lowell Universalist church and contributed articles to the Lowell Offering, edited by Harriet Farley. When she became critical of the deteriorating working conditions and low wages in the mills, her articles were rejected. In a speech before 2,000 workingmen at an 1845 Independence Day rally in Woburn, Massachusetts, Bagley attacked the Offering, and later called Farley a ‘‘mouthpiece of the corporations.’’ The popularity of the Offering declined after these attacks, and it ceased publication late in 1845. Bagley helped to found and became the first president of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, and when the Voice of Industry, a labor weekly, moved to Lowell in October 1845, she

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became one of its three-person publishing committee. While editing the Voice of Industry and contributing to its pages, Bagley also ‘‘organized branches of the Female Labor Reform Association in other mill towns.’’ She gathered more than 2,000 signatures on petitions to the Massachusetts legislature that described the adverse effects of mill conditions on the health and minds of the workers and called for laws limiting the working day to 10 hours. The petition of the mill workers was rejected. In 1847 Bagley became the Lowell agent for The Covenant, a Baltimore monthly devoted to ‘‘Odd Fellowship and General Literature.’’ Bagley’s writings fall into two distinct groups: her early, genteel contributions to the Lowell Offering and her later militant articles in the Voice of Industry. She wrote ‘‘Pleasures of Factory Life’’ for the Offering (Dec. 1840), describing the joys of conversation, contemplation, plants, the power to assist one’s family, opportunities to meet new people from different parts of the country. Two short tales also written for the Offering, ‘‘Tales of Factory Life, No. 1’’ (1841) and ‘‘Tales of Factory Life, No. 2: The Orphan Sisters’’ (1841), present the stories of ‘‘Sarah T.’’ and ‘‘Catherine Bagley,’’ who are able to improve themselves and assist their needy families by working in the mills. The first story makes it plain the factory girl’s lot is far superior to that of the hired girl. In her reported speeches and writings as a labor organizer and editor, Bagley claimed the authority of 10 years’ experience in the mills, and the reported success of her speeches probably depended in part on their ring of sincerity and conviction. OTHER WORKS: Selections of Bagley’s work can be found in: History of the Labor Movement in the United States (P.S. Foner, ed., 1947). The Lowell Offering: Writings by New England Mill Women (ed. B. Eisler, 1977). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Eisler, B., ed., The Lowell Offering: Writings by New England Mill Women (1977). Foner, P. S., The Factory Girls (1977). Foner, P. S., History of the Labor Movement in the United States (1947). Josephson, H., The Golden Threads: New England’s Mill Girls and Magnates (1949). Lunardini, C. A., Women’s Rights (1996). Selden, B., The Mill Girls: Lucy Larcom, Harriet Hanson Robinson, Sarah G. Bagley (1983). Stern, M. B., We, the Women: Career Firsts of Nineteenth Century America (1963). Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH

BAILEY, Carolyn Sherwin Born 1875 in Hoosick Falls, New York; died 24 December 1961, Concord, Massachusetts Daughter of Charles H. and Emma F. Blanchard Bailey; married Eben C. Hill, 1936 Carolyn Sherwin Bailey was educated at home by her mother, herself a teacher and writer of children’s books, and at


Lansingburg Academy, near Albany, New York. After graduating from Teachers’ College, Columbia, Bailey studied at the Montessori School in Rome. Returning to New York City, she began a career of writing, editing, teaching, and traveling. At the age of nineteen, Bailey began publishing poetry and short fiction in St. Nicholas and Youth’s Companion. Her early books were collections of short stories and poems that grew out of her work at the Warren Goddard House in New York. Bailey later dismissed these early works as ‘‘sentimental,’’ but one collection, For the Children’s Hour (1906), remained in print for more than 40 years. Bailey also began writing nonfiction at an early age: such books as Boys Make-at-Home Things (1912) and Boy Heroes in Making America (1919) demonstrate her predilection for combining instruction and entertainment in books for children. This duality of purpose is particularly apparent in Bailey’s works on Americana. In the years between 1935 and 1944, Bailey wrote four books about early American arts and handcrafts: Children of the Handcrafts (1935), Tops and Whistles, Stories of Early American Toys and Children (1937), Homespun Playdays (1940), and Pioneer Art in America (1944). Some critics consider these to be her greatest achievement. In preparing these books, Bailey used original research into ‘‘genealogical records, personal letters and diaries, rare village and county records, and. . .old maps.’’ Though the life of those early times is perhaps romanticized, Bailey has a keen eye for detail. She creates a feeling of immediacy and evokes a sensitive appreciation for the achievements of the artists and artisans whose stories she tells. Important as the books on American art were in establishing her reputation, Bailey is best known for a quite different work. The book that graces nearly every children’s library is Bailey’s 1947 Newbery award-winner, Miss Hickory (1946). The book’s greatest strength is Miss Hickory herself, an acerbic, ironic New England spinster whose body is a twig of applewood and whose head is a hickory nut. Bailey’s use of detail in evoking the New Hampshire countryside is so powerful, however, that her descriptions of Temple Mountain, the apple orchard, and the old place very nearly bring them alive. OTHER WORKS: Daily Program of Gift and Occupation Work (1904). Peter Newell’s Mother Goose (1905). The Jungle Primer (1906). Firelight Stories (1907). Stories and Rhymes for a Child (1909). Girls Make-at-Home Things (1912). The Children’s Book of Games and Parties (1913). For the Story Teller (1913). Every Child’s Folk Songs and Games (1914). Montessori Children (1915). Everyday Play for Children (1916). Letting in the Gang (1916). Stories Children Need (ed. by Bailey, 1916). Stories for Sunday Telling (1916). Boys and Girls of Colonial Days (1917). The Way of the Gate (with Sheath, Hodges, and Tweedy, 1917). Once Upon a Time Animal Stories (1918). The Outdoor Story Book (1918). Stories for Every Holiday (1918). Tell Me Another Story (1918). What to Do for Uncle Sam (1918). Broad Stripes and Bright Stars (1919). Everyday Stories (1919). Folk Tales and Fables (1919). Hero Stories (1919). Legends from Many Lands (1919). Stories of Great Adventures (1919). The Enchanted Bugle and Other Stories (1920). Wonder Stories (1920). Merry Tales for

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Children (ed. by Bailey, 1921). The Torch of Courage (1921). Flint, The Story of a Trail (1922). Bailey’s In-and Out-Door Playgames (1923). Friendly Tales (1923). Reading Time Stories (1923). Surprise Stories (1923). When Grandfather Was a Boy (1923). All the Year Playgames (1924). Boys and Girls of Pioneer Days (1924). In the Animal World (1924). Lincoln Time Stories (1924). Little Men and Women Stories (1924). Stories from an Indian Cave (1924). The Wonderful Tree and Golden Day Stories (1925). Boys and Girls of Discovery Days (1926). The Wonderful Window (1926). Untold History Stories (1927). Boys and Girls of Today (1928). Forest, Field and Stream Stories (1928). Sixty Games and Pastimes for All Occasions (1928). Boys and Girls of Modern Days (1929). Garden, Orchard and Meadow Stories (1929). Read Aloud Stories (1929). The Wonderful Days (1929). Plays for the Children’s Hour (1931). Stories Children Want (ed. by Bailey, 1931). Our Friends at the Zoo (1934). Tell Me a Birthday Story (1935). From Moccasins to Wings (1938). L’il Hannibal (1938). Country Stop (1942). The Little Rabbit Who Wanted Red Wings (1945). Merry Christmas Book (1948). Old Man Rabbit’s Dinner Party (1949). Enchanted Village (1950). A Candle for Your Cake (1952). Finnegan II (1953). The Little Red Schoolhouse (1957). Flickertail (1962). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bailey, C. S., ‘‘The Hundred Dresses’’ in A Newbery Christmas: Fourteen Stories of Christmas by Newbery Award-winning Authors (1998, 1991). Davis, D. R., Carolyn Sherwin Bailey, 1875-1961: Profile and Bibliography (1967). Miller, B. M., and E. W. Field, eds., Newbery Medal Books, 1922-1955 (1955). Reference works: Junior Book of Authors, S. J. Kunitz, and H. Haycraft, eds. (1951). Other references: NYT (25 Dec. 1961). PW (8 Jan. 1962). —KATHARYN F. CRABBE

BAILEY, Florence (Augusta) Merriam Born 8 August 1863, Locust Grove, New York; died 22 September 1948, Washington, D.C. Also wrote under: Florence Merriam Daughter of Clinton and Caroline Hart Merriam; married Vernon Bailey, 1899 Daughter of a Republican congressman, Florence Merriam Bailey grew up in a country home in northern New York. Interested in nature and particularly bird life at an early age, she began to publish papers about birds while still a student at Smith College. She married Vernon Bailey, a naturalist, in 1899. There were no children. Bailey and her husband traveled and worked together, writing about the natural history of the West. In 1931 she received the Brewster Medal of the American Ornithologists’ Union, and in 1933 the University of New Mexico awarded her an LL.D. Throughout her life Bailey published many papers about birds in such periodicals as Audubon Magazine, and her first book,

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Birds Through an Opera Glass (1889), is based on her early papers. It tells of her experiences as a bird watcher and gives some advice on how to recognize birds. It was quite popular, appearing in various editions throughout the 1890s, during the period when publishers were trying to satisfy the rising national passion for the outdoor life. Bird watching, plant identification, and rock study were popular pastimes of a new class of American amateurs. The outdoor life in all its healthy aspects, especially when associated with the American West, took the place in popular fancy of earlier nature study which was seen as an extension of religious piety or simply aesthetic appreciation. In 1902, after extensive travel with her husband in the West, Bailey published The Handbook of Birds of the Western United States, which remained the standard handbook in its field for about 25 years. A handsome book, organized by genus, this work is illustrated by the famous nature illustrator Louis Agassiz Fuertes. Perhaps her most significant work in ornithology, Birds of New Mexico (1928), was also illustrated by Fuertes. Bailey wrote about Western birds for some of her husband’s books, such as Wild Animals of Glacier National Park (1918), and also published Birds of the Santa Rita Mountains in Southern Arizona (1923) and Among the Birds in Grand Canyon Country (1939). While Bailey was not a professional ornithologist who made specific contributions to the science, she was a highly competent writer on birds for both popular and professional audiences. But Bailey’s career was not limited to ornithology. Her interest in social welfare and her love of nature and concern for the conditions of her fellow humans are especially revealed in a short book she wrote while in Utah in the summer of 1893. My Summer in a Mormon Village (1894) describes the town as ‘‘a haven of rest,’’ where she spent many delightful days listening to the reminiscences of the old pioneer Mormon women whom she characterized as good but suffering sisters. The intellectual poverty of their lives depressed her, although she knew they were not different in this respect from their female counterparts on back country farms. ‘‘I recalled with a shudder the statistics I had known about the number of farmers’ wives who go insane,’’ she wrote. Although, at the time she visited, polygamy had been outlawed, it was still practiced and taught in the area. She had a chance to observe the effects of polygamy on the women, and she felt these were almost always negative. Polygamy had brought great suffering to the women, yet most of them continued to believe in it. As she put it, ‘‘The spirit that is finest and best in woman—her power of selfsacrifice in the face of abstract right—has been used as a tool of torture, and it will be used successfully until education teaches her that there is a higher light for her to follow.’’ She was little more sympathetic when writing about other aspects of Mormon belief, presenting the prophets as some clever men who took advantage of the immigrant mentality for their own material and physical gain. Bailey belongs to the first generation of writers who wrote about the life sciences for the popular audience. Her graceful writing style and practical knowledge combined to bring the life

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sciences out of the 19th century parlors into the outdoors, creating an easy transition for many readers. OTHER WORKS: A-Birding on a Bronco (1896). Birds of Village and Field (1898). Cave Life in Kentucky (1933). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Stille, D. R., Extraordinary Women Scientists (1995). Reference works: Dictionary of American Biography, National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). —BEVERLY SEATON

BAILEY, (Irene) Temple Born circa 1869, Petersburg, Virginia; died 6 July 1953, Washington, D.C. Daughter of Milo Varnum and Emma Sprague Bailey Many of Temple Bailey’s short stories and essays appeared in magazines, and her novels came out at regular intervals for several decades. All of her writing was amazingly popular. Several years before her death it was estimated that 3,000,000 copies of her books had been sold. She was also one of the highestpaid writers in the world; for one serial she received $60,000 from McCall’s magazine, and from Cosmopolitan $325,000 for three serials and several short stories. Reasons for her popularity can be surmised from the comments of critics and reviewers: she gave her readers the relaxation and pleasure of entering a delightful world where everything comes out right for the good and the true. Bailey upholds all the conventional standards of morality, and dramatizes, over and over again, her thesis that the rewards of virtue are many, lavish, and sure. ‘‘She writes of life as she would like to have it, rather than life as it is,’’ says one critic, and another characterizes one of her novels as ‘‘high-flown romance with a bland disregard for realities.’’ It is tempting to speculate as to the cause of her absorption in a bright Never-Never Land. We might find it in the fact that she herself was, from her birth, protected from the grimmer aspects of life. She may on the other hand have been shrewd enough to recognize that the average schoolgirl and housewife hunger for glamour, romance, gaiety, and a satisfying solution to every problem. Setting herself to provide these, she found a goal for a long and lucrative career. A successful business woman, she retained her solid background of Presbyterianism and Republicanism. Reviews of her novels combine weak praise and outright disparagement, with certain words recurring many times: ‘‘wholesome,’’ ‘‘sweet,’’ ‘‘sentimental,’’ and, perhaps most devastating of all, ‘‘harmless’’ and ‘‘innocuous.’’ On the plus side, Bailey is credited with skill in characterization and in devising of plots. Most of her fiction is concerned with young love, but at times she


BAKER

wrote of children, or of lonely people. Her style is clear and smooth, and she was fond of describing nature, elegantly furnished rooms, and beautiful clothes. She is to be respected for her careful craftsmanship.

OTHER WORKS: Judy (1907). Glory of Youth (1913). Contrary Mary (1915). Mistress Anne (1917). Adventures in Girlhood (1917). The Tin Soldier (1919). The Trumpeter Swan (1920). The Gay Cockade (1921). The Dim Lantern (1923). Peacock Feathers (1924). The Holly Hedge (1925). The Blue Window (1926). Wallflowers (1927). Silver Slippers (1928). Burning Beauty (1929). Wild Wind (1930). So This is Christmas (1931). Little Girl Lost (1932). Enchanted Ground (1933). The Radiant Tree (1934). Fair As the Moon (1935). I’ve Been to London (1937). Tomorrow’s Promise (1938). The Blue Cloak (1941). The Pink Camellia (1942). Red Fruit (1945).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Notable Boston Authors, Flagg, M., ed. (1960). Other references: Newsweek (20 July 1953). NYT (8 July 1953). PW (24 June 1933). Time (20 July 1953). WLB (Sept. 1953). —ABIGAIL ANN HAMBLEN

BAKER, Dorothy Dodds Born 21 April 1907, Missoula, Montana; died 17 June 1968, Terra Bella, California Daughter of Raymond Branson and Alice Grady Dodds; married Howard Baker, 1930

and marries Amy North, a medical student and ‘‘a complicated woman, the kind who knows how to strip the nerves and kick the will around.’’ Characters similar to Amy recur in Baker’s work, but this is the type’s most vivid incarnation. When Young Man with a Horn (1938) was filmed (1950), scriptwriters turned most of the hero’s black friends white, including the singer Jo Jordan, played by Doris Day. Romance with Doris gives the film its happy ending. Amy North, played by Lauren Bacall, suffers from the self-conscious Freudianism sweeping Hollywood at that time. Trio (1943), Baker’s second novel, presents the conflict experienced by Janet Logan when a young man evoking heterosexual love enters her life. Hitherto, she’d had a long-standing relationship with a domineering woman professor, whom she assisted while doing graduate work. Reviewers faulted it as overworked and lacking in humanity. Nevertheless, it won the Commonwealth Club of California medal for literature. The novel was developed out of an earlier story ‘‘Romance’’ (Harper’s Bazaar, 1941), which achieves a compelling tension the longer novel lacks. Baker and her husband rewrote Trio as a stage play, which opened in Philadelphia in 1944. A run on Broadway was dogged by censorship that triggered industry-wide protest and also attracted many reviewers. Most found it moral to the point of moralizing (the lesbian villain is disgraced and shoots herself), but dull. The controversy over its forced closing outlived the play by several years. Cassandra at the Wedding (1962), Baker’s last novel, recalls Trio in its triangular conflict between a dominant woman, a compliant woman, and a man; but the failures of the earlier work are recouped in this recasting. In Cassandra, the dominant woman overcomes her dependency on her supportive twin sister; her suicide attempt is thwarted. The novel ends with a gesture, not a debacle. ‘‘The mastery of technique here,’’ said a New York Times reviewer, ‘‘is just about absolute.’’

Dorothy Dodds Baker is best remembered for her ability to describe the excitement of music, especially jazz. She grew up in California, studying violin until she went to college. While studying in Paris in 1930, she began writing Trio—published as her second novel—and met and married poet Howard Baker. She earned an M.A. in French at UCLA and taught languages in a private school until her first short story was published; then she began writing full-time. All her early stories portray women in career situations.

Baker published many excellent short stories. Her vivid, precise style and knack for capturing human gesture became her hallmark. Her characters are often bent on some singleminded obsession: classical music in ‘‘The Jazz Sonata’’ (Coronet, 1937), boxing in ‘‘Private Lesson’’ (Yale Review, 1940), and gambling in ‘‘Grasshopper’s Field Day’’ (Harper’s, 1941). Though she received a National Institute of Letters Fellowship in 1964, Baker published little after Cassandra.

In 1937, Baker won a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship to complete Young Man with a Horn. This widely acclaimed novel follows the career of jazz musician Rick Martin, from the time he first cuts school in order to practice piano at an abandoned Los Angeles mission, till he dies at the peak of his fame in a quack ‘‘drying-out’’ hospital in New York.

OTHER WORKS: ‘‘Keeley Street Blues’’ in O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories (1939). Our Gifted Son (1948). The Ninth Day (with H. Baker, 1967).

The hero overcomes his racial prejudice in order to learn from black musicians who befriend him. In New York he meets

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Rule, J., Lesbian Images (1975). Other references: NYT (18 June 1968). —FRIEDA L. WERDEN

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BALCH

BALCH, Emily Greene Born 8 January 1867, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts; died 9 January 1961, Cambridge, Massachusetts Daughter of Francis Vergnies and Ellen Maria Noyes Balch Emily Greene Balch is one of the two American women (Jane Addams was the other recipient in 1931) to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (in 1946), yet her life and writings remain relatively obscure. Graduating in 1889 from Bryn Mawr in its first matriculated class, Balch was given its highest honor, the Bryn Mawr Fellowship for European Study. Her subsequent training in Europe, which brought her in contact with Emile Levasseur in Paris, resulted in a technical treatise on relief for the poor in France. Returning in 1890, Balch became one of the early social workers and two years later, with Vida Scudder and Helena Dudley, founded one of the first settlement houses, Denison House in Boston. Further European training in Germany in 1895 was concluded with Balch’s attendance at the International Socialist Workers’ and Trade Union Congress in London. Katherine Coman, a well-known economist and historian, returned to the U.S. on the same ship with Balch and offered her an academic position at Wellesley College, which Balch accepted. From 1897 until 1918, Balch was an outstanding member of the Wellesley faculty, working in the newly formed discipline of sociology as well as in economics. Around 1905 she undertook a Slavic journey which resulted in her major research book, Our Slavic Fellow Citizens. During these years she was an active supporter of many social reforms and changes, but from 1915 until her death, Balch’s most radical and absorbing social concern was pacifism. Balch’s first publication, Public Assistance of the Poor in France (1893), is a study of the historical development of care for the poor as well as an organizational study of the bureaucracy that administered the welfare programs. The types of services offered, the disabilities covered by the state programs, and the types of social pathologies found are all discussed. Combining cost with statistical and demographic information, the thesis was one of the earliest sociological studies of care for the poor and disabled. In 1895 Balch published a technical manuscript, Manual for Use in Cases of Juvenile Offenders and Other Minors in Massachusetts, that would be primarily of interest to historians of social welfare. In 1903 she published A Study of Conditions of City Life, a bibliography on urban areas. This extensive listing of writings on the city clearly anticipated much of the concern on the same topic which later emerged at the famous ‘‘Chicago School’’ of sociology. Balch’s most significant book was Our Slavic Fellow Citizens (1910). Convinced of the need to know her subject well, she ‘‘spent the greater part of the year 1905 in Austria-Hungary, studying emigration on the spot, and over a year in visiting Slavic colonies in the United States. . . . One autumn was spent as a boarder in the family of a Bohemian working man in New York City.’’ In this first major sociological work on immigration, she discusses the Slovenians, Croatians, Austrian Poles, and Ruthenians,

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and their ways of life in Europe and the United States. Accompanied by a variety of appendices with many statistical tables, the book is an outstanding example of early sociology. Predating and in many ways complementing the highly lauded volumes, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918-20) by W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, the lack of recognition received by this and other of Balch’s works on sociological topics is hard to explain. The remainder of Balch’s writings revolved around the topic of international peace, a particularly controversial subject immediately prior to and during World War I. In 1915 Balch, Jane Addams, and Alice Hamilton came to national prominence as delegates to the International Congress of Women at The Hague (which later evolved into the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom) and as members of peace envoys to countries around the world. Their joint publication of The Women at The Hague (1915) brought the meetings to worldwide attention and subsequently subjected the women to frequent personal ostracism and attack. Following a sabbatical from 1915 to 1917, when Balch gained national prominence as a pacifist, the Board of Trustees of Wellesley College failed to appoint her, terminating her academic career at fifty-two years of age after 20 years of service. Continuing her fight for a peaceful settlement to World War I, Balch edited Approaches to the Great Settlement (1918), a comprehensive volume containing major statements by various spokespersons and groups on ways to end the war. In 1919 the newly established Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (W.I.L.P.F.) elected Balch as international secretarytreasurer. This organization became the anchor for her future career as an international arbiter for peace. As a leader of a committee selected by the W.I.L.P.F., Balch edited and largely wrote Occupied Haiti (1927). The forcefulness and reasonableness of the committee’s arguments led to the adoption of their recommendations by President Hoover in 1930. In addition to these formal, abstract writings, Balch wrote a short book of verse, The Miracle of Living (1941), which provides an insight into some of her philosophy and the simplicity of her world view. Balch wrote voluminously in newsletters, academic journals, and popular magazines. Many of these writings are difficult to obtain and cover diverse topics. An excellent compilation of some of these works is available in Beyond Nationalism (1972), edited by Mercedes Randall, Balch’s biographer. Balch’s role as an academic, theorist, and international leader has yet to be systematically analyzed and evaluated. Nonetheless, recognition of her significance, work, and writings for world peace is evident in her status as a Nobel laureate. OTHER WORKS: The Papers of Emily Greene Balch, 1875-1961 (microfilm archives in Wilmington, Delaware, 1988) BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cavanaugh, B., The Earth is My Home: A Comparison of Two Women Pacifists, Emily Greene Balch and Jeannette


BALLARD

Rankin (thesis, 1989). Kaufman, P.W., ‘‘The Simplest of New England Spinsters: Becoming Emily Greene Balch 1875-1961’’ in Women of the Commonwealth: Work, Family, and Social Change in Nineteenth-century Massachusetts (1996). Kenworthy, L.S., ‘‘Emily Greene Balch’’ in Living in the Light: Some Quaker Pioneers of the 20th Century (1984). Meinecke, M.F., Emily Greene Balch: An Overlooked Leader in the International Peace Movement and Her Travails for Peace from 1914 to 1929 (thesis, 1994). Hardy, G. J., American Women Civil Rights Activists: Biobibliographies of 68 Leaders, 1825-1992 (1993). Randall, M. M., Improper Bostonian: Emily Greene Balch (1964). Shane, M.P., Papers of Emily Greene Balch, 1875-1961: Guide to the Scholarly Resources Microfilm Edition (1988). Thomas, W. I., and Znaniecki, F., The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (2 vols., 1918-20). —MARY JO DEEGAN

BALLARD, Martha (Moore) Born 9 February 1735, Oxford, Massachusetts; died early June [before 9 June] 1812, Hallowell, Maine Daughter of Elijah and Doratha Larned Moore Ballard; married Ephriam Ballard, 1754; children: nine Little is known of Martha Ballard’s life before 1785, when she began writing the diary that would bring her into the historical record. Evidence suggests that she was a fairly typical goodwife. Although she came from a relatively educated family (her uncle was the first person from Oxford, Massachusetts, to graduate from college), her mother signed her name with a mark. Someone taught young Martha to write, but her spelling and orthography remained erratic even by the standards of her time. She had nine children, three of whom died in a diphtheria epidemic shortly before the seventh was born. Like other married women, she produced foods and textiles for neighborhood trade, nursed the sick, and attended births. A family story described her, during the pre-revolutionary tea boycotts, secretly preparing tea for a sick woman. Both she and her husband seem to have had little interest in revolutionary politics. In 1777 Ballard moved to Hallowell, Maine, and less than a year later acted as a midwife for the first time. At the time, childbirth was a social event. Ideally, a midwife arrived first and then three or more women gathered to assist—but of course things didn’t always go as planned. Hallowell, unlike Oxford, was near the frontier of European settlement, so after her move Ballard was one of the older women in the community. Her youngest child was eight, and her daughters were old enough to do the cooking, laundry, and weaving in her absence, so she was somewhat freed from the responsibilities of running a home. It was not surprising, therefore, that her younger neighbors called on her to help them with their births. Within a few years, Ballard was widely recognized as a midwife, and between 1778 and 1812 she would deliver 998 babies. Her success rates were impressive: only 14 babies

(including those with congenital defects) were stillborn, no women died at birth, and only five women died of infection afterward (often during epidemics). Ballard began her diary to record births, midwifery payments, and other economic activities—peas planted, cloth taken off the loom, and the gifts of food and home-produced goods that sustained a barter economy. Her early entries were short and noted little except the weather and the day’s production and exchanges. As the years went by, she wrote more, creating a remarkable record of her life: the days she did laundry or planted flax, braved river-crossings or blizzards or unpredictable horses to get to a woman in labor, treated a child’s illness or tried to help her neighbors survive a scarlet fever epidemic, testified in a rape trial or witnessed the aftermath of a murder/suicide, or coped with her husband’s imprisonment for debt or her grown son’s rages. Ballard’s writing remained remarkably matter-of-fact. Few adjectives interfered with her account of tasks accomplished and actions taken. In the early years she might punctuate her descriptions of especially stressful events with acknowledgments of a merciful divine Providence. Later she was more likely to intersperse expressions of exhaustion or helplessness. In both eras, however, the drama of her writing is to be found in its understatement and unremitting dailiness. Like most diarists, Ballard is widely known only because one historian took an interest in her writing and made it accessible to a larger audience. Many scholars have used Ballard’s diary in their studies of New England farm life, and some have quoted it at length. For the most part, however, they dismissed it as an exhausting account of the trivial details of domestic work. In her prize-winning book A Midwife’s Tale (1990), Laurel Thatcher Ulrich showed that Ballard’s concerns were not trivial at all, but the warp and woof of life in her time. Ulrich excerpted selections from the diary, and the full diary was published for the first time two years later. Ballard’s life was in many ways typical for a woman of her time and place. She participated in a household and neighborhood economy in which almost everything people needed was produced locally. She had more medical and herbal knowledge than most of her (younger) neighbors, but there were plenty of other midwives/herbalists with similar expertise. She grew old and fought against her increasing dependence on her son and daughter-in-law. What made her remarkable is that she left a record of her experience.

OTHER WORKS: The Diary of Martha Ballard, 1785-1812 (1992).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Nash, C., The History of Augusta (1961). Ulrich, L., A Midwife’s Tale (1990). —LORI KENSCHAFT

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BAMBARA

BAMBARA, Toni Cade Born 25 March 1939, New York, New York; died 9 December 1995, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Wrote under: Toni Cade (prior to 1971) Daughter of Walter and Helen Brent HendersonCade II; children: Karma For Toni Cade Bambara, writing is one means of celebrating movements toward personal and political change. ‘‘The issue,’’ she has explained, ‘‘is salvation. I write to save our lives.’’ In her work as a writer of stories, a novel, essays, and film scripts, as well as a teacher and community organizer, Bambara transmits an African-American cultural heritage, records the strong communities and characters who struggle with the effects of racism, and envisions new and more humane conditions for our lives. Bambara began writing as a child, encouraged by her mother and inspired by visits to the Apollo Theater with her father. Listening to impassioned trade unionists, Pan-Africans, Father Divinists, Muslims, and Ida B. Wells supporters at Speakers Corner in Harlem, she learned the power of words to shape and share visions. Bambara earned a B.A. at Queens College and an M.A. at the City College of New York. She completed further graduate work in American Studies and studied commedia dell’arte, mime, linguistics, dance, and filmmaking at various institutions in Europe and the United States. Bambara’s early writing and editing redefined African American identities, particularly black women’s complex and varied selves, beyond the confines of racist and sexist stereotypes. The Black Woman (1970, as Toni Cade) is a groundbreaking anthology of essays, poems, and fiction that grapples with the intersections of race and gender in women’s lives. Tales and Stories for Black Folks (1971) offers children contemporary African American stories and black renditions of fairy tales reset in 20th-century America. The stories in Bambara’s first collection, Gorilla, My Love (1977), are primarily first-person vignettes of urban life narrated by an array of black girls and women in rhythmic, pointed, poetic, black-inflected language. Critics praised the depth and range of Bambara’s characters, and her nonpolemical emphasis on the strength of African American community in the face of racist patriarchal conditions. They also acclaimed Bambara’s language as sounding the musical improvisations of bop and the raptures of gospel throughout her stories. The collection Sea Birds Are Still Alive (1977) moves outward in scope to address other cultures, and focuses upon characters committed to more directly political struggles such as revolutions in Southeast Asia, and the civil rights and Black Power movements. Bambara’s novel, The Salt Eaters (1980), which won the American Book award from the Before Columbus Foundation, expands this vision of cultural and social transformation, portraying the intertwined lives of culture workers, political activists, and healers within a Southern community. The novel develops the interconnections between personal well being, spiritual growth, and political commitment. The Salt Eaters was highly

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praised by critics, particularly for its lyric and dreamlike experimental narration, which created complex webs of communal connections. Bambara’s interest in experimental narration led her into film work. She wrote historical scripts on figures such as Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, and activist Cecil B. Moore, as well as renditions of her own and others’ fictions. Bambara was also an active teacher and organizer. She taught and served as a consultant in a range of settings, from colleges and universities such as City College, Rutgers, Emory, and Spelman, to community centers, prisons, libraries, and museums. She conducted workshops on writing and community organizing and was an instructor at Scribe Video Center in Philadelphia, a media access facility, training community groups in the use of video as a tool for social change. ‘‘It’s a tremendous responsibility. . .to be a writer, an artist, a cultural worker,’’ said Bambara. In her later years, she focused on filmmaking and community organization in fulfilling what she saw as her most important role, ‘‘cultural worker.’’ She wrote, acted in, and directed television documentaries; taught filmmaking; and had three film adaptations made of her short stories. As a mentor she founded ‘‘Image Weavers, a collective of women media makers of color.’’ In a posthumous collection, Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations(1996), Toni Morrison, her friend and original editor at Random House, gathered the stories that reveal ‘‘the heart cling of her fiction.’’ ‘‘Going Critical’’ and ‘‘Baby’s Breath,’’ one narrated from the perspective of the parent and the other from that of the adult child, play out the disparate expectations that mar the possibilities for intimacy and understanding. Essays such as ‘‘Language and the Writer’’ express her desire ‘‘to change the world’’ through the medium of film by connecting with communities and advancing her activism. ‘‘How She Came By Her Name’’ is an interview with Louis Massiah, with whom she collaborated on some documentaries. Her last novel, titled Those Bones Are Not My Child was published in 1999. Bambara’s films, however, received little critical attention. OTHER WORKS: Black Utterances Today (editor, 1975). Zora (film, 1971). The Johnson Girls (film, 1972). Transactions (film, 1979). The Long Night (film, 1981). Epitaph for Willie (film, 1982). Tar Baby (film, 1984). Raymond’s Run (film, 1985). The Bombing of Osage (film, 1986). Cecil B. Moore: Master Tactician of Direct Action (film, 1987). More Than Property (film, n.d.). The KKK Boutique Ain’t Just Rednecks (n.d.). ‘‘Black Theater’’ (1969). ‘‘What It is I Think I’m Doing Anyhow’’ (1980). ‘‘Beauty is Just Care. . .Like Ugliness is Carelessness’’ (1981). ‘‘Thinking About My Mother’’ (1981). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Evans, M., ed., Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation (1984). Flora, J. M., and R. Bain, eds., Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook (1993). Pearlman, M., ed., American Women


Writing Fiction: Memory, Identity, Family, Space (1989). Tate, C., ed., Black Women Writers at Work (1983). Reference works: Black Writers (1989). CA (1978). CANR (1988). CLC (1981). DLB (1985). Encyclopedia of Black Women in America: Literature (1996). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). Other references: Booklist (15 Sept.1996). Callaloo (Spring 1996). KR (1996). Quarterly Black Review (1996). —RACHEL STEIN, UPDATED BY KAREN MCLENNAN

BANNING, Margaret Culkin Born 18 March 1891, Buffalo, Minnesota; died 4 January 1982 Daughter of William Edgar and Hannah Young Culkin; married Archibald Tanner Banning, 1914 (divorced); LeRoy Salsich, 1944; children: four (two died in early childhood) Raised in a Roman Catholic family, Margaret Culkin Banning spent most of her life in the Midwest. After graduation from Vassar College in 1912, she moved to Chicago, where she earned a certificate from the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy in 1913. Her first marriage ended in divorce. She gave birth to four children, two of whom died in early childhood. As a popular and financially successful writer, Banning raised her surviving two children alone. In the 1940s, most of Banning’s efforts reflected war issues and she devoted her talents primarily to nonfiction, offering studies of women’s participation in war and defense. Her novels reflect both a personal and a social history, as well as most of the major ethical and domestic issues which confront women. Her major characters are women. In her early novels, they face conflicts between marriage and career, social need and personal desire for birth control versus the church’s anticontraception stance, and the restrictions of the church on remarriage. From the mid-1940s on, her most frequent character is a middle-aged Catholic woman who, after an unhappy first marriage, successfully pursues a career and eventually marries her former lover. These circumstances offer Banning latitude to develop a variety of themes: women and work, divorce, fidelity, religious convictions, nature of love, sexuality, birth control, and two of her late favorites: difference of youth and age, and youth in different periods in history. In every novel, Banning explores serious social and personal issues, generally without moral judgements and from a perspective that suggests the complexities of those issues. In Spellbinders (1922), Banning presents another aspect of the theme: women’s participation in political affairs and its influence on sexual relations. The four ‘‘spellbinders’’ are women who undertake to organize other women to participate in politics. She portrays the conflicts of childbirth and Catholicism realistically and presents marriage primarily as an economic necessity

BARKER

for women. Since the 1950s, Banning has returned to earlier themes, investigating their many facets. The Will of Magda Townsend (1973) is a fictionalized autobiography in which all her earlier themes reappear and take on different meanings in the new context of youth in conflict with age. Banning’s fiction spans more than half a century. Taken together, her work presents an accurate picture of middle-class, white American women that serves as a social history. OTHER WORKS: This Marrying (1920). Half Loaves (1921). Country Club People (1923). A Handmaid of the Lord (1924). The Women of the Family (1926). Pressure (1927). Money of Her Own (1928). Prelude to Love (1929). Mixed Marriage (1930). The Town’s Too Small (1931). Path of True Love (1932). The Third Son (1933). The First Woman (1934). The Iron Will (1935). Letters to Susan (1936). You Haven’t Changed (1937). The Case for Chastity (1937). Too Young to Marry (1938). Enough to Live On (1939). Out in Society (1940). Salud: A South American Journal (1941). A Week in New York (1941). Letters from England (1942). Women for Defense (1942). Conduct Yourself Accordingly (1944). The Clever Sister (1947). Give Us Our Years (1949). Fallen Away (1951). A New Design for the Defense Decade (1951). The Dowry (1955). The Convert (1957). Echo Answers (1960). The Quality of Mercy (1963). The Vine and the Olive (1964). I Took My Love to the Country (1966). Mesabi (1969). Lifeboat Number Two (1971). The Splendid Torments (1976). Such Interesting People (1979) BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CB (1940). Twentieth Century Authors, First Supplement (1955). Other references: Margaret (1966). Margaret Culkin Banning (film, 1958). —MARCIA HOLLY

BARKER, Shirley Born 4 April 1911, Farmington, New Hampshire; died 18 November 1965, Penacook, New Hampshire A descendant of Massachusetts’s earliest settlers, Shirley Barker has spent most of her life in New England, the setting for nearly all of her novels. Educated at the University of New Hampshire, Radcliffe College, and the Pratt Institute, she has advanced degrees in English and library science. Her first book of poetry, The Dark Hills Under (1933), was selected for the Yale Younger Poets series. All of Barker’s novels are historical, and most of them are set in New Hampshire, where her family has lived since the 1670s. Peace My Daughters (1949) focuses on the Salem witch trials; Rivers Parting (1950) moves between an ancestral home in

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Nottingham and a newly established one in colonial New Hampshire; Fire and the Hammer (1953) involves Tory Quakers in revolutionary Bucks County, Pennsylvania; Tomorrow the New Moon (1955) traces the life of a Puritan minister and his cousins; Liza Bowe (1956) is set in Elizabethan England and is Barker’s only attempt at first person narrative; Swear by Apollo (1958) concerns a medical student who moves from revolutionary New Hampshire to the Hebrides; The Last Gentleman (1960) is the governor of New Hampshire during the American Revolution; Corner of the Moon (1961) is set in England at the time of the French Revolution; and Strange Wives (1963) traces the Jewish settlement of Newport, Rhode Island. Barker writes formula historical novels. The characters are subservient to the settings, which are rife with war, plagues, epidemics, spiritual crises, and historical personages such as Shakespeare and Washington. Almost every novel has an obligatory bastard, a smattering of occultism, and incipient madness. Although Barker varies the pattern, each novel contains a triangle—either the hero must choose between the undyingly faithful but commonplace woman and the exciting but capricious one (Rivers Parting, Tomorrow the New Moon, Swear by Apollo, Corner of the Moon) or the heroine must choose between the dull but dependable male and the dangerous, independent one (Peace My Daughters, Fire and the Hammer, Liza Bowe, The Last Gentleman, Strange Wives). The hero invariably chooses the faithful woman, but only after a little fling with the other, who usually turns up pregnant. After some harrowing moments while the hero wonders if the child is his and the faithful heroine threatens to reject him for fathering the child, the paternity is placed elsewhere and all is forgiven. In the other triangle, the heroine always chooses the dangerous man, who loves her but finds her too saucy and independent to make a good wife. Only after the heroine is subjected to Psyche-like trials of fidelity and endurance does the hero relent. Although Barker’s novels are not original, they are, as popular novels, a good indication of the moral attitudes still prevalent in the 1950s and early 1960s. Naughty girls are punished: they bear bastards, occasionally go mad, and never get their man. Good girls are rewarded for their morality and their fidelity. Men can have the naughty girls and marry the good girls providing they don’t father any bastards. Barker has reaffirmed that despite plagues, wars, and tyranny, a man’s life has always been more exciting. OTHER WORKS: A Land and a People (1952). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: TCA, First Supplement (1955). Other references: Newsweek (1 Jan. 1951). NYHTB (7 Jan. 1951). NYT (27 Feb. 1949, 22 Nov. 1953, 9 Jan. 1955, 24 Aug. 1958). SatRL (16 April 1949). —CYNTHIA L. WALKER

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BARNARD, A. M. See ALCOTT, Louisa May

BARNES, Carman Dee Born Carman Jackson, 20 November 1912, Chattanooga, Tennessee Daughter of James N. and Diantha Mills Jackson; married Hamilton F. Armstrong, 1945 (divorced) Carman Dee Barnes took her name from her first stepfather, Wellington Barnes. Her mother, Diantha Barnes, was well known in the South for her poetry and folklore. Educated at private schools, Barnes was forced to leave the Gardner School in New York City after the principal read her successful but scandalous first novel, Schoolgirl (1929), published when the author was sixteen. This was the end of Barnes’ formal education. With dramatist A. W. Pezet, Barnes adapted Schoolgirl for Broadway, where it opened on her eighteenth birthday. She also sold the film rights for a substantial sum. Schoolgirl had been an indictment of school practices, and thus Barnes was taken up in liberal circles as exemplifying a new realistic approach to American education. Based on Barnes’ experiences at a girls’ boarding school, Schoolgirl follows boy-crazy Naomi Bradshaw through her realistically described experiences with crushes, petting, and sexual experimentation. Sent away to school after she has tried to elope, Naomi matures from a spoiled, oversophisticated child to a slightly less spoiled, still cynical, but ‘‘sadder and wiser’’ young woman of almost sixteen. Language and technique are remarkable for a sixteen-year-old author, who combines sophistication with an air of innocence. Barnes’ occasional irony reveals she has so outdistanced Naomi she can no longer take her heroine seriously, but the book is mainly ‘‘honest narrative,’’ as a critic described it, portraying genuine emotions and real problems. The dramatization simplified and romanticized the plot, not only making the elopement partner and boyfriend at school one person, but having him still around at the end, anxious to marry Naomi. Brooks Atkinson’s New York Times review commented on the play’s ‘‘grim determination’’ to explain the younger generation sympathetically, no matter what the scandal. He complained that questions of right and wrong were left obscure. Beau Lover (1930) describes Gloria, a Southern girl searching for her ideal lover while determinedly remaining a virgin, no matter what the provocation. In this book, Barnes introduces the issue of a woman’s career versus marriage. She maintains women should not sacrifice themselves to men, but suggests the ideal man would be strong enough not to demand sacrifice. Barnes experiments with technique and point of view, telling the story as if Gloria were talking to herself in the second person. Critics complained of emotion without genuine impulse.


In 1945 Barnes became the second wife of Hamilton Fish Armstrong, writer on international politics and editor of the journal Foreign Affairs. Together they wrote A Passionate Victorian, a play about English actress Fanny Kemble. The next year, 1946, Barnes published Time Lay Asleep, a novel based on her family history and childhood. Radically different from her previous work, it begins with a prologue introducing Barnes’ concept that if one could remember one’s whole past plus the past of one’s ancestors, there might be ‘‘a way to cheat Fate of her toll of cause and effect.’’ Moving beyond the slick simplicity of earlier books, Barnes attempts, like Faulkner, to create settings with intertwined physical, psychological, and symbolic elements, and to integrate different timelines. All Barnes’ novels show her ability to mold materials from her own background into technically proficient, engaging novels with social implications. With four novels published before she was twenty-two, one regrets Barnes did not continue her development as a writer. OTHER WORKS: Mother, Be Careful! (1932). Young Woman (1934). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Warfel, H. R., ed., American Novelists of Today (1951). Web sites: Hamilton Fish Armstrong Papers, available online at http://infoshare.princeton.edu:2003/libraries/firestone/ rbsc/findi. Women Playwrights, 1900-1950, online at http:// www.geocities.com/Broadway/Alley/5379/1900Ba.html.

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Taken from a real-life incident in Kentucky (which was later to become William G. Simms’ novel, Beauchampe), Octavia Bragaldi employed the format of the enormously popular romantic plays and recast the events in 15th century Italy. It won immediate success, played in almost every city in the U.S., and was later produced in London and Liverpool. The play offered a superb leading role which Barnes acted herself to great praise. After her marriage to the popular actor, E. S. Conner, the couple appeared together in Octavia Bragaldi many times. Barnes published La Fitte, or, The Pirate of the Gulf in 1838. The Forest Princess (1844), a version of the Pocahontas and Captain John Smith story, capitalized on a current interest in Indian dramas. Toward the end of her career Barnes adapted two French melodramas, A Night of Expectations (1848) and Charlotte Corday (1851). The Captive (1850), which has come down in title only, may have been based on a monodrama entitled The Captive—A Scene in a Madhouse, which Barnes often performed in the early days of her acting career when she was appearing with her parents. In 1848 Barnes published a collection, Plays, Prose and Poetry, which included the popular Octavia Bragaldi. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Durang, C., The Philadelphia Stage: From the Year 1749 to the Year 1855 (1855). Ireland, J. N., Records of the New York Stage from 1750 to 1860 (1866-67). Kritzer, A.H., ed., Plays by Early American Women: 1775-1850 (1995). —JOANN PECK KRIEG

—CAROL B. GARTNER, UPDATED BY LEAH J. SPARKS

BARNES, Djuna BARNES, Charlotte Mary Sanford Born 1818; died 14 April 1863 Daughter of John and Mary Creenbill Barnes; married Edmond S. Connor, 1846 Charlotte Mary Sanford Barnes’ success as a woman dramatist in the early days of the American theater was second only to that of Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie. It was a success that can be seen as the by-product of her parents’ ambitions for her theatrical career. The daughter of the well known and much admired acting pair, Mr. and Mrs. John Barnes, Charlotte was introduced to the public by her parents in her early teens. Thereafter she played with them often but received notices of the type that usually referred to her acting as ‘‘uninteresting’’ and ‘‘tedious.’’ Her thorough training in the theater, however, brought her success as a playwright and her earliest attempt, the Last Days of Pompeii (1835), based on the novel by Bulwer Lytton, was followed two years later by the best of her plays, Octavia Bragaldi, or, The Confession.

Born 12 June 1892, Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York; died 19 June 1982, Doylestown, Pennsylvania Wrote under: ‘‘A Lady of Fashion,’’ Lydia Steptoe Daughter of Wald and Elizabeth Chappell Barnes Best known for her enigmatic and stylistically dazzling novel Nightwood (1936), Djuna Barnes is regarded as a totemic figure of literary modernism and a forceful if challenging poet of the female consciousness. Nightwood’s nonlinear form, its pessimistic outlook on love and redemption, and its abundance of disturbing images have frustrated some readers and critics, while others have found the same qualities to be the source of the novel’s uncommon emotional impact. T.S. Eliot was an early champion of Nightwood who celebrated its poetic language and appreciated its gloomy philosophy. He wrote in his 1937 introduction, ‘‘It seems to me that all of us, so far as we attach ourselves to created objects and surrender our wills to temporal ends, are eaten by the same worm.’’ Brought up in modest circumstances in Huntington, Long Island, and subjected to sexual abuse (possibly of an incestuous nature), Barnes went on to become a prominent figure in international literary circles, befriending James Joyce and artists such as

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Berenice Abbott, Marsden Hartley, and Marcel Duchamp, as well as Eliot. Because her life story includes so many colorful personalities, and because the traumas of her early life directly influenced most of her literary output, Barnes offers ripe material for literary biography. Phillip Herring wrote, ‘‘Djuna Barnes’ artistic genius, like that of many writers, normally required adversity to produce work of artistic merit.’’ Indeed, Robin Vote, the central character of Nightwood, is generally acknowledged to be a fictional version of Thelma Wood, the longtime love interest of Barnes. Like Wood, Vote inspires the obsessive devotion of men and women alike, apparently without trying, and she always leaves her admirers in a state of inconsolable grief, apparently without feeling any remorse herself. During writing and revision, Barnes continued to nurse the emotional wounds inflicted by Wood, and her bitter conclusions about love determine every relationship in the novel. In Nightwood the idea that love is a disguised form of delusion or narcissism gets articulated by Dr. Matthew O’Connor, a transvestite who spends most of his time in bed—and one of the oddest characters in all modern literature. The middle chapters of the novel are largely made up of the rambling monologues of this fictionalized version of the Irish-American abortionist and drug dealer, Dan Mahoney. Nightwood is far and away Barnes’ best known work as well as her most powerful and original, but over the course of her 45-year literary career, though far from prolific, she wrote a wide variety of work consistent with Nightwood’s satirical and doom-ridden character. These secondary works include Ryder (1928), an early novel loosely based on Barnes’ childhood; a group of one-act plays; and a series of interviews with the famous and nearly famous, which appeared in popular newspapers and magazines. Barnes undertook the interviews to supplement the small annuity she received from her friend and patron, Peggy Guggenheim. Her choice of subjects was typically eccentric and ambitious. In 1915 she dutifully transcribed the haunting words of the controversial radio evangelist Billy Sunday: ‘‘War has been the best thing for religion in the last century; it has filled the churches, it has brought men to their knees in the trenches.’’ Barnes also held conversations with James Joyce, boxer Jess Willard, and others, publishing the results in popular publications like McCall’s and the New York Press. Ryder fictionalizes members of Barnes’ own family, in particular her grandmother Zadel Barnes, a journalist and activist. Barnes illustrated Ladies Almanack herself and published it anonymously the same year as Ryder. A mock biography focusing on the lesbian exploits of Evangeline Musset, it ends with the heroine’s death, at age 99, and the ritualistic cremation of everything but her tongue. Herring writes that the work ‘‘rivals Joyce’s Finnegans Wake for both obscurity and bawdiness.’’ Barnes’ plays show the influence of Oscar Wilde, especially his revisionist biblical fable Salomé, as well as John Millington Synge. The idiosyncratic dialect of Synge’s Irish peasants made an uneasy pairing with Barnes’ penchant for satire. The incongruity was in all probability intentional. Mary O’Brian, mother of the

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title character in ‘‘Maggie of the Saints’’ (1917; published in the New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine), remarks, ‘‘If one lives long enough it is as good as being a child again.’’ A later play, The Antiphon (published in 1958 and premiered three years later), returned to the family themes of Ryder and transposed them to a setting reminiscent of Eliot’s The Family Reunion. Although her writing never achieved the same degree of renown enjoyed by some of her contemporaries, Barnes was considered a great beauty as well as an exceptional raconteur, and on those merits she did become fairly well known in her time. The passing of literary modernism and most of its central figures made her something of a living relic, a status she neither enjoyed nor encouraged. Paraphrasing Thomas Hobbes, she is recorded as saying, ‘‘Life is painful, nasty and short . . . in my case it has only been painful and nasty’’—a line which became the lengthy title of Hank O’Neal’s 1990 biography. Her reclusiveness only enhanced her reputation as a feminist maverick, and by the time of her death in 1982, the amount of reverence for Nightwood and curiosity about the raw material on which it was based showed no signs of subsiding. OTHER WORKS: The Book of Repulsive Women (1915). A Book (1923). Selected Works (1962). Creatures in the Alphabet (1982). Interviews (1985). At the Roots of the Stars (1995). BIBLIOGRAPHY: O’Neal, H., Life Is Painful, Nasty and Short . . . In My Case Only Painful and Nasty (1990). Herring, P., Djuna: The Life and Works of Djuna Barnes (1995). —MARK SWARTZ

BARNES, Linda J. Born 6 June 1949, Detroit, Michigan Daughter of Irving and Hilda Grodman Appleblatt; married Richard Allen Barnes, 1970; children: Samuel Best known for her mystery series featuring Carlotta Carlyle, Linda Barnes also wrote a previous series of four mystery novels starring Michael Spraggue. Her first Spraggue novel, Blood Will Have Blood, was published in 1982 (written under Linda J. Barnes). It introduced readers to the independently wealthy actor and amateur detective. Three more Spraggue books followed: Bitter Finish (1983), Dead Act, (1984) and Cities of the Dead (1986). Barnes ended the series because Spraggue was getting too depressing: since he was an amateur sleuth, and the only way to legitimately get him involved in a murder mystery was for the victim to be someone he knew. To keep him supplied with cases, everyone around him would eventually have to die. In addition, as the series continued, his involvement in the various cases was becoming more unbelievable. But the character was popular enough to spawn a made-for-television movie in 1984 loosely based on Blood Will Have Blood.


Barnes calls the Spraggue novels her apprentice work. She always wanted to write a detective novel with a female lead, but the powers that be in publishing, who said such a semitough character would never sell, deterred her. But Barnes was determined, and between the second and third Spraggue novels she created Carlotta Carlyle. The six-foot-one, redheaded ex-cop, who is a part-time Boston cab driver and licensed private detective, came to life in ‘‘Lucky Penny’’ (1985). Written in 1983, Barnes sold the short story to several magazines that folded before ever publishing her piece, which means she was never paid. After ‘‘Lucky Penny’’ was finally published in the New Black Mask (which folded after five issues), it immediately earned critical acclaim. Nominated for all the major mystery honors, it won the 1986 Anthony award. This success proved to Barnes and her editor that a female character wasn’t such a bad idea after all. A Trouble of Fools (1987), the first Carlotta novel, enjoyed the same success as its short-story predecessor. It was nominated for the Edgar and Shamus awards and won the 1988 American Mystery award. The Snake Tattoo (1989), Barnes’ second outing with Carlotta, was named outstanding book of 1990 by the London Times. Critics praise Carlotta’s character for her sense of humor and wry outlook on life. While Barnes’ plots are strong and intriguing, the true strength of the successful series is Carlotta, who has been described as memorable, and her strong supporting cast. The secondary characters in the novels are as interesting in their own right: Carlotta’s tenant, Roz, an eccentric artist; Carlotta’s sometimes boyfriend, Sam Gianelli, son of the local mob leader; and Paolina, her young sister (through the Big Sisters organization). It is Carlotta’s strong emotional relationship with Paolina that stands out in the series and has led to a frequent underlying theme in the books of a concern for children. Barnes was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. Her father was a mechanical engineer and her mother was a teacher and homemaker. When she was seventeen, Barnes won the National Council of Teachers of English Writing Award. She soon gave up writing, believing that something so easily mastered at such an age must not be worth much, so she decided to pursue acting. Barnes graduated from Boston University’s School of Fine and Applied Arts in 1971 with degrees in acting, English, and theater education. But when it came time to pursue her acting career, she opted to teach high school drama rather than starve in New York. While at Chelmsford High School in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, Barnes got back into writing when she penned a one-act play for the Massachusetts High School Drama Festival. This play, Wings, (1973) is still performed around the country. She wrote one other play, Prometheus, in 1974. Again unwilling to starve in New York, this time as a playwright, Barnes began writing mystery novels, never imagining they would be a series. Cold Case, her seventh novel in the Carlotta Carlyle series, was published in 1997. She says there will be at least one more because she tends to view the novels in sets of four and she intends to reevaluate the series after the eighth book. If she still has an interest in the character and feels she can make

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Carlotta grow, she’ll continue the series. Barnes currently resides near Boston with her husband and son. OTHER WORKS: Coyote (1990) Steel Guitar (1991) Snapshot (1993) Hardware (1995) Flashpoint (1999) BIBLIOGRAPHY: Book Review Digest 1996 (1997). CA (1997). Heising, W., Detecting Women 2 (1996). Swanson, J., and D. James, By A Woman’s Hand (1994). —KATHY HENDERSON

BARNES, Margaret Ayer Born 8 April 1886, Chicago, Illinois; died 26 October 1967, Cambridge, Massachusetts Daughter of Benjamin F. and Janet Hopkins Ayer; married Cecil Barnes, 1910; children: three sons. Descended on both sides from colonial English families who settled in America in the middle 1600s, Margaret Ayer Barnes attended the University School for Girls in Chicago and majored in English and philosophy at Bryn Mawr College, where she was influenced by the feminist president, M. Carey Thomas. While raising three sons, she appeared in performances of the Aldis Players in Lake Forest, Illinois, and of the North Shore Theater in Winnetka, Illinois. Her stories, published by the Pictorial Review, were later collected and published in book form as Prevailing Winds (1928). Barnes wrote three plays (two in collaboration with Edward Sheldon, a dramatist and personal friend) and five novels, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1931 for Years of Grace (1930). After the publication of her last novel, Wisdom’s Gate (1938), Barnes returned to writing occasional short stories and lecturing. Prevailing Winds shows evidence of the skills that would bring her critical acclaim, but the narrow focus that would cause her ultimate neglect by most literary critics can also be seen. From her theatrical experience she had learned to define character through conversations; her careful observations of character, however, were limited to the upper-middle-class society of Chicago in the first third of the 20th century. Distracted by the element of social history in Barnes’s fiction, many critics overlooked important underlying themes. Feminism, a major theme which grew out of her education at Bryn Mawr, appeared in early short stories through the portrayals of Martha Cavendish in ‘‘The Dinner Party’’ and of Kate Dalton in ‘‘Perpetual Care.’’ Both are women prominent in Chicago society who have chosen marriage and socially conventional lives, but each is confronted with a situation that leads her to question those choices and seek an opportunity to break with convention. Each resolves that the choice has come too late: Martha has learned to live in her thoughts and let the world go as it will; Kate in the end

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settles for memories to avoid upsetting her children by changing her life.

BARNES, Mary (Downing) Sheldon

Most of the women in Barnes’s novels follow the examples of these two women, but in each succeeding novel they seem less satisfied with the choice. In Years of Grace, which traces the life of Jane Ward Carver to the eve of the Great Depression, Jane abandons early adherence to the feminist principles instilled in her at Bryn Mawr and elects to fill the traditional roles of wife and mother. Already before her marriage, she had admitted she lacked the courage of her convictions: ‘‘She who thinks and runs away, lives to think another day. . . . I don’t act at all. . . . I just drift.’’ When she is offered an opportunity to defy convention and marry Jimmy Trent, she chooses to remain with her responsibilities. Only when her daughter Cicily breaks the pattern by divorcing her husband to marry Albert Lancaster, does Jane wonder if her ‘‘struggle to live with dignity and decency and decorum’’ had been a worthy goal.

Born 15 September 1850, Oswego, New York; died 27 August 1898, London, England Daughter of Edward Austin and Frances Bradford Stiles Sheldon; married Earl Barnes, 1885

Olivia Van Tyne Ottendorf in Westward Passage (1931) temporarily accepts her second chance at an artistic life with Nick Allen, but soon returns gratefully to her husband and the limited society she had known. She has been educated only for such a role, and the reader recognizes her, as the critic Lloyd C. Taylor, Jr., points out, as ‘‘a victim of an intricately structured social system that securely, if deceptively, deprives the woman of any training that does not contribute to the creation of the lady and the socialite.’’ In Within This Present (1933), Barnes explores Chicago society once again, this time through the character of Sally Sewall. From World War I through the Depression years, Sally struggles to maintain a failing marriage just as those around her struggle to preserve a disintegrating social structure. Barnes resolves her interest in feminist themes in her final novel, Wisdom’s Gate. She returns to the Carver family from Years of Grace and chronicles Cicily’s life after her marriage to Albert Lancaster. Cicily has broken the pattern of her past, and although she does not achieve greater fulfillment, she gains uncompromising clarity. The topics of divorce and adultery are examined objectively and honestly. While lacking the unity and scope of Barnes’s earlier novels, Wisdom’s Gate portrays a marriage based on the honesty of a woman who has the courage of her convictions. OTHER WORKS: Age of Innocence (1928). Jenny (with E. Shelton, 1929). Dishonored Lady (with E. Shelton, 1930). Edna His Wife (1935). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barnes, E. W., The Man Who Lived Twice: The Biography of Edward Sheldon (1956). Lawrence, M., The School of Femininity (1936). Stuckey, W. J., The Pulitzer Prize Novels: A Critical Backward Look (1966). Taylor, L. C., Jr., Margaret Ayer Barnes (1974). Wagenknecht, E. C., Chicago (1964). Other references: North American Review (Jan. 1934). —THELMA J. SHINN

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An educator and historian, Mary Sheldon Barnes made her major contribution as a pioneer in the use of the source method of teaching history. Her first book was the innovative Studies in General History (1885). In this pioneering work, Barnes dealt with the period 1000 B.C. to 476 A.D. Her primary purpose was to teach the reader how to develop critical ability and to demonstrate how the essence of a culture could best be apprehended by the use of its documents and its art. To achieve this, she offered extracts from historical sources; presentation of basic events and personalities; and use of illustrative extracts, including literary works, art, architecture, and philosophy. She provided questions to guide the student’s development in critical judgment, for she was concerned primarily with the student’s ‘‘self-learning.’’ In later editions Barnes expanded her scope to include first the barbarian age, then the empire of Charlemagne, and, in more condensed form, the history of Europe up to the late 19th century. For the Carolingian era, she provided illustrations not only of European but also of Islamic life and culture. As for the more modern history, she dealt rather briefly with the French Revolution and Napoleonic era, but gave a more comprehensive account of the spread of Prussian power. In 1891 Barnes and her husband applied the same source approach in their joint work, Studies in American History (1891). Studies in American History followed the same principles of ‘‘training the student to think for himself’’ and also to ‘‘enter into living sympathy with others.’’ (It was, however, designed for younger students than Studies in General History.) The author used primary accounts, arguing ‘‘the drama of life is in the sources.’’ Barnes laid out the basis of her method in Studies in Historical Method (1896). She was concerned not merely with the understanding of the past but with developing qualities of mind that would allow citizens to form ‘‘independent, unprejudiced judgments as to men’s actions, opinions, acts, and social processes’’ of their own day. In American history she did raise some contemporary issues, such as the problem of immigrant adjustment to America and how ‘‘to change them into Americans.’’ But on other issues such as woman suffrage she did not provide information; she only raised questions. As a proponent of the source method, Barnes made her impact both through the histories she wrote, the accompanying separate teachers’ and students’ manuals, and her works on historical methodology. Her major educational work, however, probably occurred through the histories themselves. Through her organization and format, as well as the questions and explanatory comments, she communicated directly to the student that the responsibility for learning was primarily one’s own. The results of mastery of her method, Barnes argued, would be felt not only in the classrooms but in judgements which the student as citizen


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would bring to bear on contemporary questions. She sought to promote informed inquiry into public issues and intelligent, critical judgments. With her works Barnes did play an important pioneering role in the methodology of history teaching. OTHER WORKS: Studies in Greek and Roman History; or Studies in General History from 1000 B.C. to 476 A.D. (1886). Aids for Teaching General History (1888). General History in the High School (circa 1889). Proposal for the Study of Local History (circa 1889). Studies in American History: Teacher’s Manual (1892). Autobiography of Edward Austin Sheldon (edited by Barnes, 1911). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: American Women (1897). Dictionary of American Biography. National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1892 et seq.). NAW 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: AH (Oct. 1948, Nov. 1948). Journal of Education (15 Sept. 1898). Sequoia (30 Sept. 1898). Wellesley College Magazine (Oct. 1898). —INZER BYERS

BARNUM, Frances Courtenay Baylor Born 20 January 1848, Fort Smith, Arkansas; died 19 October 1920, Winchester, Virginia Wrote under: Frances Courtenay Baylor Daughter of James and Sophie Baylor Dawson; married George Sherman Barnum, 1896 Frances Courtenay Baylor Barnum carried her mother’s maiden name from her teen years on and wrote under that name even after her marriage. Her father was an army officer, so her childhood years were spent in such army posts as San Antonio and New Orleans. Barnum was educated by her mother, and after the Civil War she moved to her mother’s family home in Winchester, Virginia. The following several years were spent in England and on the continent with her sister’s family, which provided the background for Barnum’s international novels. After they returned to Virginia, Barnum began publishing with a play, Petruchio Tamed, which was put out anonymously. Closely following were articles in such newspapers as the Louisville Courier-Journal, Boston Globe, New Orleans Times-Democrat, and the London Truth. Her poetry, though never collected independently, was well known, especially ‘‘Kind Words to Virginia’’ and ‘‘The Last Confederate.’’ Barnum’s fiction, mostly directed at young people, reflected the aristocratic attitudes of her mother. Her earliest novel, On Both Sides (1885), reflects the lives of the ‘‘best people’’ of England and America and reveals Barnum’s true gift of realistic portraiture. Her situations, however, are idealized, and plot is almost nonexistent in most of her fiction. Barnum is at her best when her not-always-gentle humor reveals social and individual character, as when John’s friends are

incredulous at his grief over his wife’s death: ‘‘There were men on the mountain who had lost four wives and had never dreamed of such a thing as letting the light affliction of the moment work permanent injury to such graver interests as pigs, and potatoes, and wheat. . . .’’ Unfortunately, these gems are lost in the often pedantic or sentimental ramblings. Worth preserving, however, are the memorable characters of much of Barnum’s fiction. The young Juan and Juanita charm children and adults alike as they find their way home to Mexico alone; Claudia Hyde reflects the strength and natural aristocracy a Southern lady could display after the war had ravaged her home and her homeland; Miss Nina Barrow exemplifies the way not to raise a child; the Withers reveal that progress up the ladder of fortune often leads to emptiness. Because of her humor and insight, Barnum’s fiction remains eminently readable. OTHER WORKS: Behind the Blue Ridge (1887). Juan and Juanita (1888). A Shocking Example, and Other Sketches (1889). Claudia Hyde (1894). Miss Nina Barrow (1897). The Ladder of Fortune (1899). A Georgian Bungalow (1900). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Gordon, C. A., Jr., Virginia Writers of Fugitive Verse. Reference works: American Authors 1600-1900 (1938). Library of Southern Literature (1909). A Woman of the Century, F. E. Willard, and M. A. Livermore (1893). —THELMA J. SHINN

BARR, Amelia E(dith Huddleston) Born 29 March 1831, Ulverton, Lancashire, England; died 10 March 1919, New York, New York Wrote under: Amelia E. Barr Daughter of William Henry and Mary Singleton Huddleston; married Robert Barr, 1850; children: six (three died young) Amelia E. Barr was the second daughter of a Methodist clergyman. The family moved several times during her childhood, and she attended various small private schools. When she was just sixteen she felt the need to help the family financially, and after two years of teaching she entered a normal school in Glasgow. Here she fell in love with a prosperous young merchant and married him. In 1853 her husband was forced to declare bankruptcy, and a little later, in an effort to establish himself again, brought his wife and growing family to the United States. After living in several cities, the Barrs settled in Galveston, Texas, which appeared to her to be the promised land, as she extolled it in several of her works. In 1867 her husband and three sons died of yellow fever, and in 1868, with the three surviving children, all daughters, Barr moved to New York City. For 19 months she was a governess in New

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Jersey, where she began her writing career. For the rest of her life she wrote steadily and became quite successful. Her industry was remarkable. It is said that at the end of her life she herself had lost count of how many books she had produced. The National Union Catalog lists more than 75 works. In addition, she contributed a large number of short stories and essays to such periodicals as the Christian Union, the Illustrated Christian Weekly, Harper’s Weekly, Harper’s Bazaar, Frank Leslie’s Magazine, and the Advance. Her verses alone netted her a $1,000 a year for 15 years and were reprinted widely in periodicals. Most amazing, perhaps, is her endurance. Up to the time of her death at eighty-eight she was writing fiction not perceptibly inferior to what she had done in her prime. Barr was a woman of firm character and decided opinions. An extremely religious person, from her earliest years she believed she had psychic powers and was convinced her dreams foretold the future. Later she became an ardent believer in reincarnation. Additionally, she had strong convictions about the position of women. Her views on this occur again and again in her autobiography, All the Days of My Life (1913). ‘‘All my life long,’’ she says, ‘‘I have been sensible of the injustice constantly done to women.’’ In one place she remarks caustically that to a man his children are much more valuable than his wife; the former are of his flesh, but the latter is not, and can easily be replaced. It was a matter of course that she would applaud the efforts of the suffragettes, for whom she had nothing but praise. She was genuinely interested in history, and many of her novels have carefully researched historical backgrounds. One reviewer praised her use of historical data: ‘‘Mrs. Barr is very skillful in correlating the interests of the past and present. Not only do the incidents presage the situation of today, but the characters blend in themselves the quaintness of the long ago and the universality of all peoples.’’ Another critic said that her fiction may be read for its historical data alone. In spite of her use of historical facts, however, Barr’s work was not destined to last—it is too floridly romantic, too sentimental. One critic called it ‘‘extremely superficial,’’ and Barr’s own theory of fiction seems to bear him out: ‘‘I have always found myself unable to make evil triumphant. Truly, in real life it is apparently so, but if fiction does not show us a better life than reality, what is the good of it?’’ Barr’s personality, high-strung and fanatical though it was, is of more interest than her writings. Her existence was one of exhausting labor, many trials, and many sorrows (of her six children, only three lived to grow up, and one of these was mentally unbalanced). Yet she retained an eager enthusiasm for living up to the very end. OTHER WORKS: Romances and Realities: Tales of Truth and Fancy (1876). The Young People of Shakespeare’s Dramas (1882). Cluny MacPherson; A Tale of Brotherly Love (1883). Scottish Sketches (1883). Jan Vedder’s Wife (1885). The Hallam Succession (1885). A Daughter of Fife (1886). The Bow of Orange

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Ribbon (1886). The Squire of Sandal-Side (1886). The Household of McNeil (1886). A Border Shepherdess (1887). Paul and Christina (1887). Christopher, and Other Stories (1887). In Spite of Himself (1888). Master of His Fate (1888). The Novels of Besant and Rice (1888). Remember the Alamo (1888). Between Two Loves (1889). Feet of Clay (1889). The Last of the McAllisters (1889). Friend Olivia (1889). The Beads of Tasmer (1890). The Household of McNeil (1890). She Loved a Sailor (1890). Woven of Love and Glory (1890). Sister to Esau (1891). Love for an Hour is Love Forever (1891). A Rose of a Hundred Leaves (1891). The Preacher’s Daughter (1892). Michael and Theodora (1892). Mrs. Barr’s Short Stories (1892). Girls of a Feather (1893). The Lone House (1893). A Singer from the Sea (1893). Bernicia (1895). The Flower of Gala Water (1893). A Knight of the Nets (1896). Winter Evening Tales (1896). The King’s Highway (1897). Prisoners of Consciences (1897). Stories of Life and Love (1897). Maids, Wives, and Bachelors (1898). I, Thou and the Other One (1899). Trinity Bells (1899). Was It Right to Forgive? (1899). The Maid of Maiden Lane (1900). Souls of Passage (1901). The Lion’s Whelp (1901). A Song of a Single Note (1902). The Black Shilling (1903). Thyra Varrick (1903). The Belle of Bowling Green (1904). Cecilia’s Lovers (1905). The Man Between (1906). The Heart of Jessy Laurie (1907). The Strawberry Handkerchief (1908). The Hands of Compulsion (1909). The House on Cherry Street (1909). A Reconstructed Marriage (1910). A Maid of Old New York (1911). Sheila Vedder (1911). Three Score and Ten: A Book for the Aged (1913). Playing with Fire (1914). The Measure of a Man (1915). The Winning of Lucia (1915). Profit & Loss (1916). Christine, A Fife Fisher Girl (1917). Joan (1917). An Orkney Maid (1918). The Paper Cap: A Story of Love and Labor (1918). Songs in the Common Chord (1919). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barr, A. E., All the Days of My Life (1913). Reference works: American Authors: 1600-1900, S. J. Kunitz and H. Haycraft, eds., (1938). Other references: Bookman (May 1920). Nation (14 Aug. 1913). NYT (12 March 1919). Review of Reviews (May 1919). —ABIGAIL ANN HAMBLEN

BARR, Nevada Born 1952, in Nevada Married and divorced Nevada Barr writes mysteries set in the unusual landscape of the National Park Service. Born in Nevada and raised in Susanville, California, 80 miles outside Reno, Barr received her B.A. from California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo and her M.A. from the University of California at Irvine. Her father was a pilot and her mother a pilot, mechanic, and carpenter. After her education ended, Barr pursued an acting career. She performed in the Classic Stage Company in New York City and


appeared in off-Broadway shows. She also acted in television commercials and in corporate and industrial films. In 1978, during her acting career, Barr became serious about writing fiction. Her husband at the time, also an actor, eventually decided to quit the theater for the park service, and Barr joined him, ending her 18year foray into acting. She assumed a position as a law enforcement ranger at Guadalupe Mountains National Park in Texas. She subsequently worked as a ranger at Michigan’s Isle Royale, Colorado’s Mesa Verde, and Mississippi’s Natchez Trace Parkway National Parks, among others. Many of these were later featured in her mysteries. She continued as a ranger long after she had become a successful novelist. Barr’s first published book, Bittersweet (1984), is not a mystery but a historical novel, one of several she wrote but the only one released. It is about a Pennsylvania woman in the 1870s who is accused of having an affair with a young girl. She leaves her town and meets an abused wife with whom she begins a relationship. The two move to Nevada and set up an independent but difficult life as innkeepers. Although some reviewers felt the characters were flat, most praised the historical details and unusual premise.

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In Firestorm (1996), Barr creates a locked-room mystery in which a crime occurs among a finite group of people. She creates this situation in the context of a forest fire in Northern California’s Lassen Volcanic National Park. Each of a group of rangers hides in a personal fireproof tent to escape the onslaught of fire. When the inferno passes after 12 minutes, one of the characters has been stabbed to death. Endangered Species (1997) takes place in Cumberland National Seashore off the coast of Georgia. ‘‘Barr possesses that rare combination of talents: she can write a beautiful sentence and create a first-rate mystery,’’ wrote Publishers Weekly. ‘‘[She] evokes the minimally developed island’s shimmering beauty while spinning an absorbing tale of danger and deceit that embraces a realistic description of conservation work and a diverse, engaging cast.’’ Barr’s next novel, Blind Descent (1998) is set in New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns and is emblematic of the power of the author’s descriptions of nature. In the New York Times Book Review, Marilyn Stasio commented on Anna’s claustrophobic excursion into an underground cave: ‘‘Barr’s descriptions of this Stygian underworld—so beautiful, so mysterious and so treacherous—have a stunning visceral quality, largely because of her heroine’s affinity with the natural world.’’

Nine years passed before the publication of Barr’s next book, Track of the Cat (1993), which marked the debut of her series protagonist, park ranger Anna Pigeon. The novel earned the Anthony and Agatha awards for best first mystery. Barr and Anna are similar in some ways—both are National Park Service rangers; both have a sister Molly (who becomes a beloved character in the series through her phone conversations with Anna), although Anna’s Molly is a New York psychiatrist while Barr’s sister is a pilot; and both are single women, with Anna losing her husband in an accident and Barr being divorced.

Anna visits New York in Barr’s 1999 novel, Liberty Falling. While supporting her hospitalized sister, Molly, and staying with a ranger friend at the Statue of Liberty, Anna is faced with a crime to solve. Like Barr’s other books, Liberty Falling is replete with vivid descriptions of a park ranger’s job and the surrounding environment, as well as a page-turning plot featuring a realistic female character.

Some reviewers cited Track of the Cat for its ‘‘overripe’’ language and uneven writing, but all praised it for its realistic, beautiful, and sometimes activist descriptions of nature. The New York Times Book Review noted, ‘‘Although her human characters could use some stuffing, Ms. Barr describes plant and animal life with a naturalist’s eye for detail and with an environmentalist’s fury at the destruction of the wilderness and its creatures.’’

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference Works: CA 161 (1998). Other references: National Parks (Sept./Oct. 1995); NYTBR (18 Apr. 1993, 17 Apr. 1994, 2 Apr. 1995, 13 Apr. 1997, 5 Apr. 1998); Outside (Apr. 1996); PW (6 July 1984, 4 Jan. 1993, 14 Feb. 1994, 30 Jan. 1995, 6 Jan. 1996, 5 Feb. 1996, 24 Mar. 1997, 2 Feb. 1998); Southern Living (1999).

Barr is known for her colorful secondary characters and exciting endings, and for allowing her readers to share the experiences and point of view of the strong yet vulnerable Anna. ‘‘Barr develops a complex, credible, and capable heroine who believes in truth and justice while remaining conscious of the ambiguities of human existence,’’ a Publishers Weekly reviewer wrote. Barr’s second Anna Pigeon book is A Superior Death (1994), which takes place at Isle Royale. Ill Wind (1995) takes Anna to Mesa Verde, where she assists FBI Agent Frederick Stanton in solving a crime in the park and with whom she starts to develop a relationship, marking the beginning of Barr’s increasing focus on human interaction. Anna is noted for being a three-dimensional character with human foibles; this is demonstrated in Ill Wind by her struggle with remembrances of her husband and her tendency to drink too much.

—KAREN RAUGUST

BARTON, Clara (Harlowe) Born Clarisse Harlowe Barton on 25 December 1821, North Oxford, Massachusetts; died 12 April 1912, Glen Echo, Maryland Daughter of Stephen and Sarah Stone Barton Best known as founder of the American Red Cross, Clara Barton had several careers in her long life. Extended periods of intense activity and endurance alternated with severe physical and emotional exhaustion. She taught school for 18 years, then became the first full-time woman clerk in the U.S. Patent Office.

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During the Civil War she became a living legend as the ‘‘Angel of the Battlefield.’’ In defiance of the military prejudice against female nurses on the battlefield, Barton gathered vital supplies on her own initiative and followed the troops. Survival of wounded men often depended not so much upon skilled doctors as upon immediate first aid, food, and shelter for the stricken. In long battles, the wounded might lie neglected on the ground for two or three days before evacuation to a hospital. Barton learned to make campfires in drenching rain, cook huge pots of gruel and coffee, go without sleep for days while she and a few helpers fed each soldier, bandaged his wounds, and protected him if possible from the elements. She was never a hospital nurse like her famous contemporaries Dorothea Dix and Florence Nightingale. She was on hand, however, in the most desperate situations with exactly what was needed most, such as kerosene lanterns for a distraught frontline doctor operating at night by the uncertain light of one candle. She was close to fifty years old when she first heard of the Geneva Convention and the International Red Cross. Isolationist America was one of the few modern nations that had not ratified the Geneva Treaty. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out, she joined the Red Cross in the rehabilitation of the ruined Alsatian city of Strasbourg. When Barton returned home she launched a long and frustrating campaign for the ratification of the Geneva Treaty, which occurred finally in 1882. The first president of the American Red Cross (organized in 1881), she acted in that capacity for 23 years and served not only in Cuba during the Spanish-American War but also during great floods, fires, famines, and hurricanes. She is credited with expanding the functions of the International Red Cross to serve after natural disasters as well as on the battlefield. Except in periods of acute depression and illness, Barton recorded her experiences in diaries that contain a vivid account of her life and times, and provide a rich source for subsequent biographers and historians. These diaries, as well as letters and other papers, are in the Library of Congress, and are widely quoted in published works. William E. Barton’s biography reprints many of her letters. One of the best introductions to her prose is the last 100 pages of Illustrious Americans: Clara Barton, written by Barton, but with commentaries that put each excerpt in the context of her thought and action at that time. They include passages from The Story of My Childhood (1907), a small volume intended for young people—the extent of Barton’s efforts at writing an autobiography. Barton’s other two books, objective histories of the Red Cross, lean heavily on her personal experiences in disaster situations, described as she lived through them and recorded them in her diaries. Although her actions are, no doubt, more important than her words, effective action often depended on her powers of persuasion and skill in diplomacy, both in speaking and in writing. Moreover, even now her accounts are moving documents about human suffering among the people history soon forgets: the common soldier quietly bleeding to death in the mud, the homeless family on the flooded bayou, the destitute blacks of the

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hurricane-swept Sea Islands, the ragged survivors who creep out of the ruins of war-gutted cities, the bloated and mangled corpses piled high on funeral pyres after a tidal wave in Galveston. Her style is occasionally sentimental, and perhaps offensive to some modern readers, as in her remarks about the Sea Islanders: ‘‘The tender memory of the childlike confidence and obedience of this ebony-faced population is something that time cannot efface. . . .’’ On occasion, she has a gift for understated pathos. Four Sea Island blacks whose wounds she had dressed in the Civil War approached her one day, ‘‘One by one they showed their scars. There was very little clothing to hide them—bullet wound and sabre stroke.’’ In formal exposition, such as the first part of the longer volume, The Red Cross in Peace and War, her style is sometimes ponderous. Yet it soon moves into more personal narrative and acquires more vitality, covering the same territory as A Story of the Red Cross (1904), with additional details and photographs, as well as the formal reports and correspondence, and some of Barton’s inspirational but undistinguished poetry. The diaries, however, expose an element in Barton not apparent in her published works. Outwardly, even to close friends and relatives, she seemed always calm, efficient, good-natured, blessed with humor and wit. Inwardly, when not engrossed in her work, she suffered from depression and feelings of uselessness. This personal melancholy haunted her even when she was most honored at home and abroad. The demands made by her idealism and zeal for service seem to approach the pathological, driving her beyond physical endurance, making the necessary recuperative period unhappy and fretful. The writings of Clara Barton will remain a primary source of information on the development of the American Red Cross. They will also provide a more personal insight into the motivations and style of one of the most dynamic women of the 19th century. OTHER WORKS: The Red Cross (1898; reprinted as The Red Cross in Peace and War). Papers, 1834-1918 (microfilm, 1986). The papers of Clara Barton are in the Library of Congress. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barton, W. E., The Life of Clara Barton (1922). Buckingham, C. E., Clara Barton, a Broad Humanity: Philanthropic Efforts on Behalf of the Armed Forces and Disaster Victims, 1860-1900 (1980, 1997). Burton, D. H., Clara Barton: In the Service of Humanity (1995). Downey, F., Disaster Fighters (1938). Dulles, F. R., The American Red Cross (1950). Epler, P. H., The Life of Clara Barton (1941). Marko, E., Clara Barton and the American Red Cross (1996). McCaslin, N., Angel of the Battlefield (1993). Oates, S. B., A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War (1995). Poor, S. R., Herstory (1990). Pryor, E. B., Clara Barton: Professional Angel (1988). Rogers, G. N., Clara Barton and Hightstown (1994). Ross, I., Angel of the Battlefield (1956). Welles, S., Illustrious Americans: Clara Barton (1966). Williams, B. C., Clara Barton, Daughter of Destiny (1941). Other references: American Women of Achievement Video Collection (video, 1995). Clara Barton (video, 1988). Clara


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Barton (video, 1995). Clara Barton: Eyewitness to the Civil War (video, 1997). Great Women in American History: Volume 1 (video, 1996). —KATHERINE SNIPES

BARTON, May Hollis See ADAMS, Harriet Stratemeyer

BATEMAN, Sidney (Frances) Cowell Born 29 March 1823, New Jersey; died 13 January 1881, London, England Daughter of Joseph and Frances Sheppard Witchett Cowell; married Hezekiah L. Bateman, 1839 The daughter of Joseph Cowell, English low comedian and well-known American-theater manager in the south and west, and of Frances Sheppard, Sidney Cowell Bateman was reared on a farm in Ohio and educated in Cincinnati. At the age of fourteen, she began her acting career in New Orleans. In St. Louis in 1839, she married Hezekiah Linthicum Bateman, actor and manager. In 1869 Bateman and her husband moved to London where they managed the Lyceum from 1871 until Mr. Bateman’s death. Henry Irving, whose distinguished career they helped launch, took over the management in 1878; and Bateman, having leased Sadler’s Wells, restored its prestige. To this theater she brought Joaquin Miller’s The Danites, the first all-American production in London. Self, written and produced by Bateman in St. Louis at the People’s Theater in 1856, is one of the first three ‘‘society’’ plays written by a woman for the American stage. During its run in New York at Burton’s Chambers Street Theater, a critic for the New York Times wrote: ‘‘Whether it will obtain a permanent place in the limited repertoire of the native drama admits of some doubt.’’ Later, the outstandingly creative performance of John E. Owens in the star role of John Unit, a true-blue Yankee banker, made a great success of the long and sometimes dull play. A social satire, Self employs local allusions, such as references to patent medicines, wildcat banks, slavery, daguerreotypes, and stereotyped characters, such as the New York merchant, the parvenus, and the faithful black servant. Melodrama, even farce, malapropisms, ‘‘tag’’ names, and a deus ex machina ending make this play less than great dramatic literature. Edgar Allan Poe, in the role of critic, spoke of its ‘‘lack of originality and inventiveness,’’ theatricality, dependence on opulent settings, and ‘‘almost burlesque upon the arrant conventionality of stage incidents.’’ The Golden Calf; or, Marriage à la Mode was published in 1857 by the St. Louis Republican Office. Because of Bateman’s

strong feeling for poetry, Geraldine; or, Love’s Victory, originally produced in Philadelphia in 1859 and at Wallack’s Theater, New York, is in blank verse. In 1865, with the alternate title changed to The Master Passion, it played the London Adelphi. Evangeline (1860), a dramatization of Longfellow’s poem, was written for Bateman’s daughter Kate. In 1871 Fanchette; or, The Will o’ the Wisp, adapted from Die Grille, a German version of George Sand’s La Petite Fadette, opened at the Theater Royal, Edinburgh, with Bateman’s daughter Isabel in the title role; later it played the Lyceum in London with Henry Irving in the cast. The Dead Secret (1877) was adapted by permission of Wilkie Collins. Sidney Cowell, niece of Bateman, wrote ‘‘in her youth [my aunt] was a delightful actress and a beautiful woman. She was gentle and retiring, but of very fair judgement and executive ability. She was always the power behind the throne in all the elaborate productions credited to her husband and daughter.’’ Clement Scott in The Drama of Yesterday and Today states that ‘‘Bateman thought his good wife was the best writer and judge of plays in existence. . . . She certainly was a very clever and charming woman.’’ She was much honored by the theatrical profession at her death.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hewitt, B., Theatre U.S.A.: 1665 to 1957 (1959). Hutton, L., Curiosities of the American Stage (1899). Meserve, W. J., An Outline History of American Drama (1965). Moses, A. J., Representative Plays by American Dramatists: From 1765 to the Present Day (1925). Scott, C., The Drama of Yesterday and Today (1899). Reference works: Dictionary of National Biography, L. Stephen, ed. Other references: London Academy 455. London Athenaeum 2779. —CHARLOTTE V. LORD

BATES, Katherine Lee Born 29 August 1859, Falmouth, Massachusetts; died 28 March 1929, Wellesley, Massachusetts Daughter of William and Cornelia Lee Bates Katherine Lee Bates, best known for her lyric poem ‘‘America the Beautiful,’’ attended Wellesley College and received her A.B. in 1880. After a year’s study at Oxford University, she was awarded an A.M. by Wellesley in 1881. After a brief career as a high school teacher, Bates joined the faculty of Wellesley, where she taught until her retirement in 1925. As an educator, she was a significant force in the movement toward liberalizing American pedagogy. In contrast to the philological approach that dominated literary study of the 1880s and 1890s, Bates’ approach was based on the assumption that the chief aim of a literature teacher should be ‘‘to awaken in the student a genuine love and enthusiasm for

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the higher forms of prose, and more especially for poetry.’’ She wanted her students to experience literature as dynamic, powerful, and relevant to all people. Her sprightly and anecdotal text, American Literature (1898), widely used as a high school and introductory college text, spread this philosophy, as did her anthology, Old English Ballads (1890), and the many other classics of English and American literature she edited, mostly for student use. Bates’ creative work, produced despite heavy teaching and administrative duties, comprises poetry, verse drama for children, and travel books. Those who defend her poetry describe it as characterized by grace and dignity and in the Longfellow tradition. Her detractors, on the other hand, point out that she shows a good eye for natural phenomena but tends toward a lush expansiveness rather than sparse, tightly controlled use of images and intellectual rigor. Bates’ juvenile fictions—Rose and Thorn, which won first prize in the 1889 juvenile fiction competition sponsored by the Congregational Publishing Society, and Hermit Island (1890)— are moralistic in intent, sentimental in outlook, and realistic in presentation. Though their moralizing makes them unsuited to modern taste, they have good pace and feature young heroes who are both educated and fun-loving, delighting in making puns and deploring them. The structure of the stories is comic romance, as is evident in Bates’ tendency to bring about rapid and complete conversions of antagonists in order to provide the necessary happy ending. In her travel books, both for adults and for children, and in her verse dramas for children, as in her fiction, Bates’ aim was always to combine instruction and enjoyment. A reviewer of In Sunny Spain (1913), which appeared in the Little Schoolmates series, wrote: ‘‘No child can read it without absorbing not only its spirit of patriotism and of gentle courtesy, but a really extraordinary amount of information regarding manners and customs of Spain.’’ Although Bates thought of herself as a poet and although her poetry was always her greatest love, her teaching and administrative duties kept her from devoting as much time and energy to it as she wished. Thus with the exception of her patriotic lyric, ‘‘America the Beautiful,’’ her poetry is unread, and her reputation rests on her achievements as an educator. OTHER WORKS: The Wedding Day Book (edited by Bates, 1881). The College Beautiful and Other Poems (1887). Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride (1889). Sunshine and Other Verses for Children (1890). English Religious Drama (1893). The Chap Book (ed. by Bates, 1896). Spanish Highways and Byways (1900). English History as Told by English Poets (ed. by Bates and K. Coman, 1902). From Gretna Green to Land’s End (1907). The Story of Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims (1909). America the Beautiful and Other Poems (1911). Sophie Jewett’s The Heart of a Boy (ed. by Bates, 1912). Shakespeare: Selective Bibliography and Biographical Notes (1913). Sophie Jewett’s Folk-Ballads of Southern Europe (ed. by Bates, 1913). Fairy Gold (1916). Sigurd Our Golden Collie and Other Comrades of the Road (1919).

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Yellow Clover (1922). Little Robin Stay-Behind and Other Plays in Verse for Children (1923). America the Dream (1930). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Burgess, D., Dream and Deed (1952). Converse, F., The Story of Wellesley (1915). Converse, F., Wellesley College: A Chronicle (1939). Other references: Boston Transcript (28 March 1929). SR (June 1952). —KATHARYN F. CRABBE

BAYARD, Elise Justine Born circa 1815, Fishkill, New York; died circa 1850 Wrote under: E. B.C., E. J. B. Daughter of Robert Bayard; married Fulton Cutting Evidently of French extraction, Elise Justine Bayard attained a brief local reputation through poems published in the New York Knickerbocker magazine. Little seemed to be known of her life, but she appeared a promising new writer to Sarah Josepha Hale, who included her in a section of comments on young authors in Woman’s Record (1853). Hale admired Bayard’s poems and implied that although there was no collection of Bayard’s works, her writing warranted one. Bayard’s poetry seems unremarkable today. She generally treats common subjects—mothers, children, lovers, time, history, death—but her techniques produce either standard, formal, even mechanical verse (as in ‘‘Funeral Chant for the Old Year,’’ reprinted in the Duyckincks’ Cyclopedia of American Literature), or startlingly raw efforts in simple rhymed couplets distributed in irregular stanzas (as in ‘‘Henri de la Roche Jacqueline,’’ one of her earliest poems, which appeared in the Knickerbocker in September 1834). The quantity of Bayard’s work is difficult to assess; much of it is apparently unsigned or merely initialed. She seems to have married early, for many poems almost definitely attributable to her are signed ‘‘E. B. C.’’ one of which is ‘‘Henri,’’ but because of its reference to the chevalier Bayard in stanza 1, we can guess its author with some safety. Other poems similar in subject—the romantic heroes and heroines of the past—are probably hers, as well, such as ‘‘Maria da Gloria’’ (Knickerbocker, September 1835) and ‘‘Napoleon’’ (Knickerbocker, Oct. 1837). Bayard also continued to use her maiden initials, however; for example, ‘‘Error,’’ a late poem published in the weekly Literary World (16 October 1847), is signed ‘‘E. J. Bayard.’’ The nature of the periodicals in which her only known works appear suggests why such a relatively minor figure should receive attention. A short and vague biography is included in the Duyckincks’ Cyclopedia probably because the Duyckinck brothers also edited Literary World (1847-53). The Knickerbocker


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(1833-65), a more significant magazine, similarly dedicated to literature and to the fine arts, must also have valued Bayard’s works, for it was one of the few magazines of the day to compensate writers. It published substantial critical essays as well as contemporary verse; for example, Thomas Cole was among its contributors of both poems and prose. And since the artistic circles of New York before the Civil War included few women (among them Susan Fenimore Cooper and Mary E. Field), Bayard’s presence seems worth noting. OTHER WORKS: Miscellaneous poems attributable to Elise Justine Bayard may be found in the Knickerbocker (1834-1850) and Literary World (1847-1855). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Cyclopedia of American Literature, E. A. and G. L. Duyckinck (1875). Woman’s Record, S. J. Hale (1853). —CAROLINE ZILBOORG

BEACH, Sylvia Born 14 March 1887, Baltimore, Maryland; died 6 October 1962, Paris, France Daughter of Sylvester Woodbridge and Eleanor Orbison Beach The second of three daughters born to a long line of ministers and missionaries, Sylvia Beach was reared in the First Presbyterian parsonage of Bridgeton, New Jersey. From 1902 to 1905, while she was a teenager, the family lived in Paris, where her father was an associate pastor of the American Church. She attended school briefly in Lausanne, but was largely self-taught. After her family settled permanently in Princeton, Beach made several extended trips to Spain, Italy, and France without her parents. In 1919 she returned to Paris to stay. On 19 November of that year she opened her bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, at No. 8 rue Dupuytren. Here she assembled the best in English and American literature. She established herself with the aid of Adrienne Monnier, owner of a bookshop and lending library frequented by André Gide, Paul Valéry, Valery Larbaud, LéonPaul Fargue, Jules Romains, and other eminent French writers. Beach and Adrienne Monnier were devoted friends; for many years they shared an apartment on the rue de l’Odéon. Shakespeare and Company, the first American bookshop in Paris, soon became the center of French and Anglo-American literary activities on the continent as Americans gravitated in increasing numbers to Paris. Early patrons of the lending library included Stephen Vincent Benét, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Archibald MacLeish, Robert McAlmon, James Joyce, Thornton Wilder, and Ernest Hemingway. The bookshop moved to its permanent address at No. 12 rue de l’Odéon, across the street from

Adrienne’s bookshop, in the summer of 1921. On this quiet little street, says Cyril Connelly, the bookshop was ‘‘hidden like a cache of dynamite in a solemn crypt.’’ Beach published for the first time the complete edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the first copy of which she delivered to Joyce on his birthday, 2 February 1922. Her intercession with the printer allowed Joyce to write a third of the novel on the page proofs. She promoted the book, mailed it all over the world, and arranged for copies to be smuggled from Canada into the United States. She named 16 June ‘‘Bloomsday’’ in honor of Leopold Bloom, the hero of Ulysses, whose life on that date is presented in the novel. In May 1930 she issued the 11th and her final edition of Ulysses. After the novel was cleared by the U.S. court of Judge John M. Woolsey, it was published by Random House in 1934. She also published Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach (1927) and Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (1929), a collection of critical articles on Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, edited and introduced by Beach. Although her fame is often associated with her publication of Joyce’s work, Beach’s genius lay in her ability to stimulate the interaction among the American, English, and French writers of Paris between the wars. With a sense of the genuine in literature and a devotion to literary talent, this young New Jersey minister’s daughter became the hub of Parisian literary activity. And she maintained her own identity in a crowd of dominant personalities. Her bookshop and lending library was a post office, bank, and meeting center for the great and soon-to-be-great artists of the 20th century. She encouraged them to write critical articles, influenced their reading, found them publishers, translators, rooms, and benefactors. She helped organize the English and French little magazines, in which the most distinguished writers of this century got their start, and distributed the magazines in her shop. In her rooms T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, André Gide, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Spender, Paul Valéry, and numerous others read their works. Beach occasionally translated the work of her French friends into English and of her English-speaking friends into French. She and Adrienne Monnier were the first to translate T. S. Eliot’s ‘‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’’ Although her bookshop was closed by the Nazis in December of 1941, she refused to leave Paris, for she was as much a Parisienne as an American. She was interned for six months in a detention camp at Vittel. After the war she did not reopen the bookshop; she did, however, continue her literary activities, writing, speaking, and lending books from her rue de l’Odéon apartment. In 1950 she received the Denyse Clairouin Award for her translation of Henri Michaux’s Barbarian in Asia. In 1959 she helped organize and contributed most of the materials for an outstanding exhibition of the Paris 1920s. The exhibition was shown in Paris and London. For her contribution to the exchange of literature between America and France, she was awarded the Doctor of Letters by the University of Buffalo (1959) and the French Legion of Honor (1938). When Beach died alone of a heart attack in 1962, Archibald MacLeish declared, ‘‘She is not alone, then or ever. She had that Company around her.’’

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OTHER WORKS: Beowulf (translated by Beach and Monnier, 1948). Shakespeare and Company (1959, reissued 1991). Writers of the Left Bank (cassette tape, 1962). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bryher, The Heart to Artemis: A Writer’s Memoirs (1962). Fitch, N. R., An American Bookshop in Paris: The Influence of Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company on American Literature (dissertation, 1970). Fitch, N. R., Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties (1983, 1985). Ford, H., Published in Paris (1975). Hemingway, E., A Moveable Feast (1963). Hoffman, A., ‘‘Private Presses and Literary Patrons as Symbols of Modernism: A Study of Contact Editions, Three Mountains Press and Shakespeare and Company’’ (thesis, 1998). Hutchinson, A. S., ‘‘Nancy Cunard and Sylvia Beach: Contrasting Expatriates’’ (thesis, 1987). Joyce, J., James Joyce to Sylvia Beach, 1921-1940 (1987, 1990). Monnier, A., Rue de l’Odéon (1960). Monnier, A., The Very Rich Hours (translated by R. McDougall, 1976). Parker, A.T., ‘‘The Unveiling of a Genius: Sylvia Beach and James Joyce’’ (thesis, 1990). Rogers, W. G., Ladies Bountiful (1968). Van Gessel, N. H., Recasting the Midwives of Modernism: Autobiographies of American Expatriate Women Publishers and Editors (dissertation, 1996). Wright, C. M., ‘‘Novel Women: Literary Expatriates of the 1920s’’ (thesis, 1988). Other references: Mercure de France (Aug.-Sept. 1963). —NOEL R. FITCH

BEARD, Mary Ritter Born 5 August 1876, Indianapolis, Indiana; died 14 August 1958, Phoenix, Arizona Daughter of Eli Foster and Marassa Lockwood Ritter; married Charles Austin Beard, 1900 Educated at DePauw University, then a rather conservative Methodist institution, Mary Ritter Beard received her Ph.D. in 1897. She spent her early married years in England in the circle around Ruskin Hall, a center for new economic thought, then moved to New York City and studied at Columbia University, where her husband, the most vital intellectual influence in her life, was to join the faculty. Beard’s earliest books, American Citizenship (1914, in collaboration with her husband), Woman’s Work in Municipalities (1915), and A Short History of the American Labor Movement (1920), reflect her lifelong interests: labor, sociology, and women’s studies. The books she wrote with her husband in the 1920s and 1930s, both the school texts and the enormously successful fourvolume The Rise of American Civilization (1927-1942), were highly influential. The first two volumes of The Rise of American Civilization were the product of two decades of progressive intellectual attack on the formalism of 19th-century American historical writing, which tended to see American institutions in an

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ideal, abstract way. The particular economic interpretation of the Revolution which pitted agrarian democrats against capitalist aristocrats, and the view of the Civil War as a second revolution, were widely accepted until after World War II, when Charles A. Beard came under attack for viewing earlier American history from the perspective of the progressive fight for reform against an entrenched capitalism. Indeed, the Beards modified their economic determinism in the 1940s and gave greater play to the force of ideas and ideals than they had before. But their most significant contribution was their salutory reminder that ideals do not exist outside of social contexts. While the great collaborative effort with her husband has now largely entered the realm of intellectual history, Beard’s pioneering work in women’s studies, notably in On Understanding Women (1931) and Woman as Force in History (1946), remains generative today. Encouraged by the nascent field of anthropology, which was producing work showing women as the originator of agriculture and the domestic arts, Beard studied social realities as disparate as women’s legal status in England and women’s contribution to Pythagorean philosophy in ancient Greece, in order to discover their true status and achievement. Such a vision was obscured, she argued, not only by male bias and social mythology, but by feminists who themselves promulgated a false view of women as a subject sex. The fullest and most important treatment of these views appears in Woman as Force in History. The questions she raises there remain with us, but her answers are sometimes problematic. While her argument against the idea of ‘‘equality’’ as the touchstone for woman’s relation to man points out the difficulties it engenders, the argument remains inconclusive. Nor does the book resolve a contradiction in her view of women’s contribution. While Beard sometimes seems to be saying women are a peculiarly civilizing force, at other times she seems to be saying only that they have been more of a force both for good and for bad than we have realized. Still, the book leaves us two important lines of thought: one is the definition of woman’s just role. Beard believed that the early imitation of men by feminists was in part a function of the individualism of 19thcentury America, and that as society moved toward more collectivist forms, alternatives for women would emerge. The other line of thought is that history is not simply the account of the politician, the banker, and the general. Until history describes events on the level of domestic economy and family relationship as well, woman’s true force, Beard believes, will not be understood, nor will the true causes and effects of history. OTHER WORKS: A History of the United States (with C. A. Beard, 1921). The American Labor Movement: A Short History (1931). America Through Women’s Eyes (edited by Beard, 1933). A Changing Political Economy as it Affects Women (1934). Laughing Their Way (ed. by Beard with M. B. Bruere, 1934). The Making of American Civilization (with C. A. Beard, 1937). America in Mid Passage (Vol. 3, The Rise of American Civilization, with C. A. Beard, 1939). The American Spirit: A Study of the Idea of Civilization in the United States (Vol. 4, The Rise of American Civilization, with C. A. Beard, 1942). A Basic History of the United States (with C. A. Beard, 1944). The Force of


BEATTIE

Women in Japanese History (1953). The Making of Charles A. Beard (1955).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Carroll, B. A., ‘‘Mary Beard’s Woman as a Force in History: A Critique’’ in Liberating Women’s History, Theoretical and Critical Essays (1976). Cott, N. F., ed., A Woman Making History: Mary Ritter Beard Through Her Letters (1991). Hofstadter, R., The Progressive Historians (1968). Lane, A. J., Mary Ritter Beard: A Sourcebook (1997, 1999). Steadman, B. J., ‘‘Woman’s Role in History: An Examination of the Life and Thought of Mary Ritter Beard with Special Consideration of her Theory of Woman’s Contribution to the Human Past’’ (thesis, 1981). Trigg, M. K., Four American Feminists, 1910-1940: Inez Haynes Irwin, Mary Ritter Beard, Doris Stevens, and Lorine Pruette (dissertation, 1989). Turoff, B. K., Mary Beard as a Force in History (1979). Turoff, B. K., ‘‘An Introduction to Mary Beard: Feminist and Historian’’ (thesis, 1978). Other references: NR (1946). NYT (27 Dec. 1931). PSQ (Sept. 1927). World Center for Women’s Archives [1913-1934] (microfilm, 1987). —LOIS HUGHSON

BEATTIE, Ann Born 8 September 1947, Washington, D.C. Daughter of James A. and Charlotte Crosby Beattie; married David Gates, 1973 (divorced); Lincoln Perry, 1988 Novelist and short story writer Ann Beattie has earned her critical reputation as a storyteller of the 1960s generation. While her work includes both a children’s book, Spectacles (1985), and a collection of essays in art criticism, Alex Katz (1987), her primary preoccupation is with fictional characters who came of age during the turbulent 1960s and are struggling with that legacy. Beattie’s spare and direct prose style, which has been linked to the social realism tradition of Hemingway and John Updike, is marked by pop culture references, quotidian details, spiritually lost characters, and deliberately open endings. Although generally praised as a skillful writer, she has been faulted for the apparent lack of purpose in her characters’ lives. Beattie notes that ‘‘If I knew what it was that was missing [in her characters’ lives], I’d certainly write about it. I’d write for Hallmark cards.’’ A self-described ‘‘artsy little thing’’ and only child of a housewife and a federal government administrator, Beattie grew up in suburban Washington, D.C. In 1968, while a student at American University (B.A., 1969), she was invited to serve as one of several student guest editors for Mademoiselle magazine. Beattie completed an M.A. in English at the University of Connecticut at Storrs (1970) and remained there until 1972 to do

further study in English literature. In 1973 she married musician and fellow graduate student David Gates. From 1975-77 Beattie was visiting writer and lecturer at the University of Virginia, and in 1977-78 she was the Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard University. While still a graduate student, Beattie began submitting her short stories for publication. In April 1974 the New Yorker accepted ‘‘A Platonic Relationship,’’ her 20th submission. Her first collection of 19 stories, Distortions, and her first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter, both appeared in 1976. The novel, which she claims to have written in three weeks, is perhaps her best known work. Its main characters float through the book, incapable of decisive action that would change their unrewarding lives. Charles, mired in a dull job, longs to reestablish his broken relationship with Laura who left him to marry someone else. He is surrounded by his mentally unbalanced mother, by Sam, his best friend and Phi Beta Kappa graduate who cannot afford law school and so must settle for selling men’s jackets, and by Pete, his wellmeaning but tactless stepfather. The novel became a film entitled Head Over Heels (1979), with Beattie playing a minor role as a waitress. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in 1977, Beattie moved to Redding, Connecticut, and became a full-time writer. She published Secrets and Surprises, a collection of 15 stories in 1979. The idea for her next novel, Falling in Place (1980), came to her while she was contemplating a peach tree outside her Redding home. It chronicles a disconnected and disintegrating suburban Connecticut family. At the end of the novel, the family faces a crisis when John Joel, their ten-year-old son, accidentally shoots his sister with a gun belonging to his only friend. The novel received a literature award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1980. Beattie’s marriage to Gates ended in May 1982. She later told Kim Hubbard of People magazine, that ‘‘Getting divorced affected everything, my writing included. It affected the way I walked the dog. I did not recover from it quickly.’’ The Burning House,, 16 short stories published in 1982, was seen as evidence of Beattie’s growing artistic maturity and confirmation of the fact that the short story seemed the form that best suited her talents. After her divorce, Beattie lived in New York City until 1984 when she moved to Vermont for the summer and wrote her second novel, Love Always (1985), which chronicles the life of Lucy Spenser, editor of the humorous magazine Country Daze. It was followed in 1986 by Where You’ll Find Me and Other Stories. Beattie met her second husband, painter Lincoln Perry, in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she had moved following her brief sojourn in Vermont. He provided her with the title to her fourth novel, Picturing Will (1989), the story of five-year-old Will and his mother who moves him from Charlottesville to New York City to pursue her photography career, her boyfriend Mel, and Will’s ne’er-do-well father. Unlike many of her previous works, this novel took Beattie three years to complete and was ‘‘the single hardest thing I’ve ever worked on.’’ What Was Mine, another collection of short stories, appeared in 1991. It received

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praise for its ‘‘honest introspection’’ and ‘‘greater sympathy and tenderness.’’ While she continues to remain reticent about offering answers in her fiction to life’s most puzzling questions, in these stories Beattie again demonstrates her remarkable ability to recreate the anxiety and angst inherent in white, middle class 20th-century America.

BEECHER, Catharine Esther

Another You (1995) features an emotionally distant, middle-aged New England professor in a humdrum marriage. The book received largely negative notices, with critics pointing out that the main character’s boredom permeated the book and that the labeling and naming of pop culture icons, for which Beattie is known, was not enough to drive the story or characterization. The novel features a secondary narrative involving the revelation, through letters, of a story from the past. It was embraced by Publishers Weekly, however, which wrote, ‘‘Successfully avoiding the one-note, affectless deadpan to which her work was in danger of succumbing, Beattie provides plenty of dramatic tension in this absorbing narrative of a man emotionally distanced from his life.’’

Sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catharine Esther Beecher was an educator and writer who attempted to expand the domestic power of women. Following the death of her mother, Beecher, age sixteen and the eldest of 13 children, assumed the family and household responsibilities.

The novel My Life, Starring Dara Falcon (1997) departed from earlier Beattie works in structure and tone. Yale Review’s Lorin Stein wrote, ‘‘Not only is it her most difficult novel, it is her most intriguing: a tissue of autobiography spun by a woman whose life eludes her.’’ With Park City: New and Selected Stories (1998) Beattie returned to her preferred medium. The title contained 36 short stories, eight of which were new. The new pieces returned to many of the themes of her earlier writing, with the addition of the comic sensibility on view in her last two novels. ‘‘All of what Beattie does well is here on brilliant display,’’ wrote Lorrie Moore in the New York Times Book Review. ‘‘The theatrical ensemble act of her characters; the cultural paraphernalia as historical record; the not quite grown up grown-ups playing house; the charming, boyish men with their knifelike utterances.’’ OTHER WORKS: Flesh and Blood: Photographers’ Images of Their Own Families (includes an essay by Beattie, 1992). Convergences (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Murphy, C., Ann Beattie (1986). Reference works: CA 81-84 (1979). CANR 53 (1997). CLC 8 (1978), 13 (1980), 18 (1981), 40 (1986), 63 (1991). DLBY (1982). CBY (1985). FC (1990). Other references: America (12 Oct. 1991). Entertainment Weekly (29 Sept. 1995, 20 June 1997). NYRB (15 Aug. 1991, 5 Nov. 1998). NYTBR (26 May 1991, 24 Sept. 1995, 11 May 1997, 28 June 1998). People (5 Feb. 1990, 2 Oct. 1995). PW (28 Sept. 1992, 31 July 1995). Time (25 Sept. 1995), Yale Review (Oct. 1997, July 1998). —LISA STEPANSKI, UPDATED BY KAREN RAUGUST

BEEBE, Mary Blair See NILES, Blair Rice

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Born 6 September 1800, East Hampton, New York; died 12 May 1878, Elvira, New York Daughter of Lyman and Roxanne Foote Beecher

After the death of her fiancé, Alexander Metcalf Fisher, Beecher established the Hartford Female Seminary in May 1823 with the money inherited from him. She also organized the Western Female Institute in Cincinnati (1832-1837) and the Ladies’ Society for Promoting Education in the West, and helped to establish three female colleges (in Burlington, Iowa, in Quincy, Illinois, and in Milwaukee, Wisconsin). Although Beecher left the Hartford Female Seminary in 1831, it was considered one of the most significant advances made in early-19th-century education for women. It marked Beecher’s first attempt to redefine a new relationship with American culture for herself and for other women. The author of over 30 books, Beecher expanded the sentimental view of women as saintly and moral creatures, complements of their immoral and competitive mates. She maintained that the American woman had difficult and peculiar duties which derived mainly from the crudeness and disorder of an expanding nation. She asserted in Letters on Health and Happiness (1855) that ‘‘it is obvious that Providence designed that the chief responsibility of sustaining the family state, in all its sacred and varied relations and duties, should rest mainly on the female sex.’’ Beecher’s most popular volumes were A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841) and Domestic Receipts (1846). The former had three editions and 17 printings between 1841 and 1856, while the latter had ten editions and 17 printings. They were published for the use of young wives and reflect both the need for practical advice and the social milieu of mid-19th-century America. In The Elements of Mental and Moral Philosophy (1831), Beecher asserted that woman was the moral guardian of her culture. Common sense must be used to determine morality, and personal conscience must dominate over doctrine. This position moved theology to social grounds and placed Beecher in direct conflict with her father, the Reverend Lyman Beecher, a Calvinist. The major characteristic of Beecher’s Christianity, however, was passivity, not social activity. She spoke against active abolitionism, asserting in An Essay on Slavery (1837) that ‘‘Christianity is a system of persuasion, tending, by kind and gentle influence, to make men willing to leave their sins.’’ Beecher maintained women had a proper place, a proper sphere, and that place was out of politics and within the home, influencing men through quiet, proper petition and through the education of their children. One of Beecher’s concerns was the ill health of American women. She described reported symptoms of female invalidism in Woman Suffrage and Woman’s Profession (1871), frequently


using the term ‘‘delicate.’’ She surveys women in various American cities, listing such symptoms as sick headaches, pelvic disorder, consumption, dyspepsia, asthma, bronchitis, liver disorder, palsy, scrofula, and chills, adding with alarming frequency: ‘‘Do not know one perfectly healthy woman in the place.’’ Because of Beecher’s conviction that the illness of American women was both symptom and cause of the disorder in American society, she wrote The American Woman’s Home (1869) with her sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, as coauthor. The home and the guardian of its healthful state, woman, was intertwined in Beecher’s mind with the state of American society. Thus she elevated the importance of women’s health and role to national importance. She asserted that women, like men who must be trained for professions, must be fully trained for their roles in the classroom and the family. Her religious language was a conscious attempt to invoke religious sanction of her assertion of the importance of woman’s role in the home. She perceived ‘‘the family state as the earthly illustration of the heavenly kingdom, and in it woman is its chief minister.’’ In this haven of secularized religion, the home, Beecher demanded better ventilation, the introduction of green plants, dress reform, proper food, and the avoidance of too much ‘‘intellectual taxation.’’ She and her sister provided many practical suggestions for yards and gardens, for infant care, for earth closets (commodes), for everything necessary for the maintenance of the home. As might be expected, Beecher was an avid opponent of woman’s suffrage, attempting instead to expand the woman’s base of domestic power. Although she advocated democracy, she did not feel it led to women’s active participation in politics and to furthering social change. Instead she asserted there was a social order based on age, health, and the most important distinction, gender; thus there was still hierarchy in the American democracy. Beecher is a transitional figure whose writings influenced women to move from a state of subordination to one in which they attempted to secure a greater role in their changing, shifting society. She was confronted by a competitive society in which men aggressively sought wealth and position, and she perceived this activity as unworthy of women. Women, unlike men, could effect change only by influence and passivity. Aggression and force were male prerogatives. Beecher’s solution was to create a quiet eye of the storm and to call it the ‘‘American Home.’’ There women could rule supreme and men could return for moral refreshment and rest. In this quiet haven, the American Home, Beecher placed her sentimentalized version of the American woman. She herself never married. OTHER WORKS: Suggestions Respecting Improvements in Education (1829). Arithmetic Simplified (1832). Primary Geography (1833). The Lyceum Arithmetic (1835). An Essay on the Education of Female Teachers (1835). Lectures on the Difficulty of Religion (1836). The Moral Instructor (1838). Letters to Persons Who Are Engaged in Domestic Service (1842). The Duty of American Women to Their Country (1845). Truths Stranger Than Fiction (1850). The True Remedy for the Wrongs of Women

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(1852). Physiology and Calisthenics (1856). Common Sense Applied to Religion (1857). Calisthenic Exercises (1860). An Appeal to the People (1860). Religious Training of Children in the School (1864). Principles of Domestic Science (with H. B. Stowe, 1870). Work for All, and Other Tales (1871). Woman’s Profession as Mother and Educator (1872). Miss B.’s Housekeeper and Healthkeeper (1873). The New Housekeeper’s Manual (1873). Educational Reminiscences and Suggestions (1874). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bruland, E. B., Great Debates: Ethical Reasoning and Social Change in Antebellum America: the Exchange Between Angelina Grimke and Catherine Beecher (1990, 1991). Cross, B. M., The Educated Woman in America (1965). Douglas, A., The Feminization of American Culture (1977). Grimke, A. E., Letters to Catherine E. Beecher: In Reply to an Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, Addressed to A. E. Grimke (1978, 1883). Harveson, E. M., Catharine E. Beecher (1932). Lindley, S. H.,Woman’s Profession in the Life and Thought of Catherine Beecher: A Study of Religion and Reform (1974). Sklar, K. K., Household Divinity: A Life of Catherine Beecher, (dissertation, 1969). Sklar, K. K., Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (1973). Woody, T., A History of Women’s Education in the United States (1966). Other references: AQ (Summer 1966). Civil War History (June 1971). —JULIANN E. FLEENOR

BENEDICT, Ruth (Fulton) Born 5 June 1887, New York, New York; died 17 September 1948, New York, New York Wrote under: Ruth Benedict, Anne Singleton Daughter of Frederick Samuel and Beatrice J. Shattuck Fulton; married Stanley Rossiter Benedict, 1914 Ruth Benedict’s father, a surgeon and cancer researcher, died before she was two, leaving her mother to bring up Benedict and her younger sister on their maternal grandparents’ farm in central New York. An attack of measles when she was a child left Benedict partially deaf, an infirmity from which she suffered personally and professionally throughout her life. Her father’s premature death and her mother’s fits of weeping traumatized her childhood, so that her mother came to personify fear and confusion, while the memory of her father’s translucent dead face became a symbol of calmness and beauty. Thus she yearned for the serenity of the world of death. As a child, she often played at being dead in a grave she built herself in the hay. This conflict of having to live in one world, while longing for the other, made her fabricate a world in which she kept to herself everything that mattered most. An outstanding student, Benedict won a scholarship to Vassar College, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1909. After graduation, she worked for charities and taught in girls’ schools.

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When she married, she discovered a woman’s power in her love for her husband and her desire to bear children, and she lived with a new ‘‘zest for life’’; but she soon became disillusioned, especially when the longed-for children never came. Her sense of loneliness and meaninglessness returned, and when her desire for a job of her own met with her husband’s discouragement, she slowly withdrew from him. In 1919 Benedict enrolled in the New School for Social Research where she studied anthropology under Elsie Clews Parsons and Alexander Goldenweiser. From there she went to Columbia and received her doctorate under Franz Boas in 1923, a time when cultural traits and their diffusion, rather than individuals, were the interest of anthropological study.

another. Benedict’s comparison of cultures and her application of clinical terms to them results in her realization that abnormality in any culture is simply an individual deviation from that culture’s norms. Thus cultures cannot be compared on an ethical basis but only on the relativity of their integrating principles.

Benedict started her teaching career in 1922 as an assistant to Boas in his undergraduate class at Barnard and began teaching at Columbia the following year. Her first anthropological interest was in American Indian religion, and her dissertation, The Concept of the Guardian Spirit in North America, was published in 1923. In it, Benedict deals with the variety of disparate cultural elements that are found juxtaposed within one culture—already forecasting her later concern with the integrating principles of the ‘‘rags and tatters’’ that make up culture. Her first fieldwork, done in 1922, was among the Serrano Indians of southern California. During the summers of 1924 and 1925, she collected folklore among the Pueblo Indians of Zuni and Cochiti, and the following summer among their neighbors, the Pima. Her partial deafness and extreme shyness made teaching an ordeal for her, and while doing fieldwork, she had to rely entirely on English-speaking informants and interpreters.

The war years brought a shift in her interests away from American Indians to one in humanism. In 1940 Benedict published Race: Science and Politics, a popular, relatively unacademic book, in which she presents theories and philosophies of race along with her own point of view on the subject of racism. She feels racism is a form of crude provincialism, and in order to understand it, one must first understand persecution as a whole, with all its economic and social causes. The Races of Mankind, written with Gene Weltfish, was published in 1943 and sold millions of copies. Translated into film and cartoon forms, it has proved to be one of the most popular educational materials on racial differences based on anthropological data.

Throughout these early years of anthropological apprenticeship, Benedict remained a sensitive and solitary person, expressing her inner battles with loneliness and the painful relationship with her husband in verse, some of which she published in Poetry and Nation under the pseudonym of Anne Singleton. In 1930 she and husband Stanley separated, and at that time Boas appointed her assistant professor at Columbia. Soon thereafter, her depressions lifted, the need for Anne Singleton faded, and slowly the separate lives she led became fused together in her work. In 1934 Patterns of Culture, her most famous book, was published. It has since been translated into 14 languages and is still regarded as one of the best introductions to anthropology. Combining problems of psychology and the individual with those of anthropology and culture, she evolved a theory stating that culture was not only the condition within which personality developed, but was itself a ‘‘personality writ large.’’ All culture, she postulated, is structured into patterns which impose a harmony upon the disparate components of life; for any one culture there is a dominant pattern, an overriding cultural temperament. Influenced by her reading of Nietzsche, and taking her data from her own work and that done by Boas and Reo Fortune, she compared three cultures and applied psychological terms to them. The Zuni of New Mexico she labeled as Apollonian in their sobriety, moderation, and self-possession. The Kwakiutl of Vancouver Island she saw as Dionysian in their commitment to a life of intoxicated frenzy and self-annihilation. They had paranoid delusions of grandeur, whereas the Dobu of Melanesia had a schizophrenic fear of their environment and a morbid suspicion of one

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In 1935, Benedict published two volumes of Zuni Mythology, a collection of her most massive fieldwork. It includes texts gathered by her and earlier fieldworkers, as well as a careful comparison of these texts. She concerns herself with themes in Zuni folklore, the relationship of these themes to the culture, and the literary problems of the Zuni narrator.

From 1943 to 1945, Benedict worked in Washington in the Office of War Information, concentrating on Romania, Thailand, and Japan. This led to her pioneering work with literate informants from urban centers and a new shift in anthropology to the analysis of complex modern societies. Benedict’s most gracefully and cogently written book is The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946). It expresses the final harmony of her two selves, the anthropologist concerned with the integrity of pattern, and the humanist who knows the suffering of the human spirit when it is trapped and limited. Based on an intensive analysis of interviews and literary material, it concerns itself with themes in Japanese culture, stressing primarily those that have to do with reciprocal relations between people. She deals with the hierarchical organization of Japanese life, portrays the structure of obligations to emperor, family, and self, and examines the strong sense of shame so dominant in the culture. The underlying humanist message of the book is that the only way Japan could be reintegrated into the world is by using the favorable Japanese patterns of culture as the building blocks rather than by imposing European values from without. The book had a tremendous impact in the U.S. In 1947, following its great success, the Office of Naval Research gave Columbia University an extensive grant to establish under Benedict’s direction a program of ‘‘Research in Contemporary Cultures,’’ the most ambitious program of anthropological research the U.S. had yet seen. In 1948, when she was 61, Columbia finally named Benedict a full professor. In the fall of that year she died of a coronary thrombosis. After Boas’s death, six years prior to her own, Benedict was the leading American anthropologist as well as the first American woman to become a prominent social scientist and leader in her profession. Her great contribution was her integration of the idea of patterns, which she slowly pieced together in


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her own life and applied to her work. In so doing, she gave her profession a theoretical orientation at a time when science for the first time was trying to deal with total cultures. Benedict’s critics accuse her of never having written a full ethnography and of having done fieldwork, either among people living in disintegrating cultures, or among literate informants from cultures far away. Some have criticized her patterns as overly simplistic. However, her deafness, shyness, and childhood traumas that cut her personal life off from others were probably not only responsible for her anthropological weaknesses, but are possibly what gave her both the ability to view cultures at a distance and the tolerance for deviance that led to her very great contributions. OTHER WORKS: Tales of the Cochiti Indians (1931). Rumanian Culture and Behavior (1946). Thai Culture and Behavior (1946). An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict (edited by M. Mead, 1959). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mead, M., ed., An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict (1959). Mead, M., Ruth Benedict (1974). Modell, J. S., A Biographical Study of Ruth Fulton Benedict (dissertation, 1980). Reference works: National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1892 et seq.). NAW 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: AA (1949, 1957). Minzokugaku Kenkyu (Japanese Journal of Ethnology, 1949). Ruth Fulton Benedict: A Memorial (Viking Fund, 1949). —MARIAM KAHN

BENÉT, Laura Born 13 June 1884, Brooklyn, New York; died 17 February 1979, New York, New York Daughter of James and Frances Rose Benét The oldest child of an army family, Laura Benét moved often, from Brooklyn, New York, to Springfield, Massachusetts, to Washington, D.C., and other posts. She went to private schools, including the Emma Willard School in Troy, and graduated from Vassar College in 1907. At first working at a settlement house, Benét was also employed as a placement worker for the Children’s Aid Society in New York, a sanitary inspector for the Red Cross in Georgia during World War I, and an editorial assistant for the book pages of the New York Evening Post, the New York Evening Sun, and the New York Times. A freelance writer since 1930, she published 28 books, mostly biographies and fiction primarily intended for young people. The Boy Shelley (1937), one of nine of Benét’s books that had remained in print into the 1980s, was her favorite. Benét never married, although she said she was in love twice but ‘‘lost out.’’ After her father’s death, she remained with her

mother, a close companion whose death devastated her. Completion of Come Slowly, Eden (1942), a novel about Emily Dickinson, saved her from a nervous breakdown. After that, she lived alone in New York City. Benét received a medal from the National Poetry Center in 1936, had her poems recorded at the Library of Congress in 1958, and in 1967 received an honorary degree from Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. In 1978, the Empire State Chapter of the National Society of Arts and Letters gave her special recognition. Benét’s six slim books of poetry are only a small part of her output, but she considered herself a poet first. In Fairy Bread (1921), the poems are lyrical, light, and fanciful; several, like the riddle-poem ‘‘Circles,’’ accurately reflect a child’s world. Touches of her later depth and versatility appear, as in ‘‘The Dragon’s Grandmother,’’ with its thoughtfully realistic portrait of an old woman. In Noah’s Dove (1929) there are wryly amusing animal portraits, humanistic insights into ordinary events, and striking images, like church bells described as ‘‘hypodermics pricking the dulled stuff of thought.’’ Impressionism and understated humor continue in Basket for a Fair (1934), but formal aspects like rhyme seem forced, and the personal note is missing. Benét’s sharpest insights again occur in animal poems, where sly amusement toughens the rhymes. The poems in Is Morning Sure? (1947) are more solid, yet still characteristically delicate. Benét considered In Love with Time (1959), a Wake-Brook Foundation Award Book, the best example of her work. Many poems have a personal base, and some comment directly on her career and role as a woman. Two particularly effective poems are blank verse portraits of Benét’s grandmothers, with acute commentary on their ways of life. Bridge of a Single Hair (1974), published when Benét was 90, has quiet and simple poems that range widely, linking everyday life with deeper meanings and emotions, and otherworldly presences. There are still disturbing off-rhymes and inconsistent rhythms, but most of the poems transcend them with an evocative strangeness or strong lyrical statement. Benét also wrote full-length biographies of Poe, Stanley, and others. Although originally published as books for young people, Benét rightly felt they can be enjoyed by anyone. Except for occasional preciousness and sentimentality, these full-length works contain a wealth of specific detail, sharp characterization, and lively dramatized incident. Reviewers commented on the thorough research and skillful writing, one calling Thackeray: Of the Great Heart and Humorous Pen (1947) an ‘‘astonishingly satisfying book’’ with character analysis and descriptions ‘‘so detailed. . .that the reader feels that he would recognize Thackeray at any party.’’ Benét first wrote about Emily Dickinson in the novel Come Slowly, Eden (1942), a well-researched and imaginative recreation of Dickinson’s love affairs. The Mystery of Emily Dickinson (1974) was a response to her publisher’s request for a documented biography. Benét also wrote six collections of short biographies, of which Famous American Poets (1950) was best received. They are good for reference or quick but sympathetic characterizations.

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When William Rose, Stephen Vincent and I Were Young (1976) is a visit with Benét and her brothers during their childhood. She vividly recreates characters and incidents ranging from their nurse’s objection to her ‘‘Spanish eyes’’ to the serious illnesses of brothers William, eighteen months younger, and Stephen, born 12 years later. Benét has the gift of fantasy. As a New York Times reviewer wrote of the stories in Goods and Chattels (1930), ‘‘she has a child’s imagination and a child’s faith along with an adult’s comprehension of human happiness and misery.’’ These qualities keep biographies and novels engrossing and moving, and make her poetry worth repeated reading. Benét herself knew her limits. ‘‘I am a good poet,’’ she said, ‘‘not a great one like my brothers.’’ She wrote of her grandmother words that can be applied to herself: ‘‘It was a grief to her that she had talent /Yet never that rare jewel known as genius.’’ Benét had a life of considerable accomplishment and modest recognition, but personally and professionally lived in the shadows of two famous brothers. OTHER WORKS: The Hidden Valley (1938). Enchanting Jenny Lind (1939). Roxana Rampant (1940). Young Edgar Allan Poe (1941). Caleb’s Luck (1942). Washington Irving, Explorer of American Legend (1944). Barnum’s First Circus and Other Stories (1949). Coleridge, Poet of Wild Enchantment (1952). Stanley, Invincible Explorer (1955). Famous American Humorists (1959). In Love with Time (1959). Famous Poets for Young People (1964). Horseshoe Nails (1965). Famous English and American Essayists (1966). Famous Storytellers for Young People (1968). Famous New England Authors (1970). The papers of Laura Benét are at the Lockwood Memorial Library, State University of New York at Buffalo, and in the Brooklyn College Manuscripts Collection. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Modern Maturity (Feb.-March 1978). Vassar Quarterly (Winter 1977). —CAROL B. GARTNER

BENÍTEZ, Sandra (Ables) Born 26 March 1941, Washington D.C. Daughter of James Q. and Marta A. Benítez Ables; married James F. Kondrick, 1980; children: Christopher, Jonathan Sandra Benítez may be little known because she only began writing at age thirty-nine. She did not participate in a national writer’s workshop; her stories just came out at one point in her life as she reached back to her varied childhood experiences. She is of Puerto Rican descent through her mother and Midwestern descent through her father. She was born in Washington, D.C., where her father worked as a diplomat, then grew up in Mexico, El Salvador, Puerto Rico, and Missouri. She now lives in Edina, Minnesota. In

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1994 she won the Minnesota Book award for her first novel, A Place Where the Sea Remembers (1994), which is based in a small village on the Mexican coast. Three years later she published her second novel, Bitter Grounds (1997), which spans three generations of women’s lives in El Salvador. Reviewers note Benítez’s talent in describing the lives and telling the stories of native people and small-town life in Mexico and El Salvador. Chicana novelist Denise Chávez said the world of Benítez’ first novel is ‘‘poignant, passionate, bittersweet. There are no small lives. Her characters are magnificent, merciful, soul-rooted creatures clinging to the shore.’’ The Boston Sunday Globe called the novel ‘‘tender and gripping.’’ Cuban-American writer Cristina García added that A Place Where the Sea Remembers is a quietly stunning book that leaves soft tracks in the heart.’’ The first novel weaves several characters’ lives through the possibilities of work and life in a small coastal village. Love and anger, on the order of a Gabriel García Márquez story, influence the decisions of three principal characters, while each moves through the aspirations and disillusionments of their limited options. Candelario Marroquín is filled with pride and respect for his role when he is promoted to salad maker at the tourist-stop restaurant where he works. He feels he can finally provide well for his wife and the family they have always desired; since they have been unable to have their own child, they plan to adopt the baby his wife’s younger sister will have. She was raped and now wants to leave the baby behind in good hands and go to the U.S., where she can earn good money. When Candelario is fired because of his boss’ own error and embarrassment, he returns home to discover that his wife is now pregnant. He will have to return to a life of fishing and selling each day’s catch to the restaurants in order to provide for his family. He and his wife know he cannot provide for two children. A quarrel ensues between the sisters, triggering a series of events that affect the lives of many members of their village. The lyrical quality of this short (160-page) novel is reminiscent of Latin American literature of the 1950s and 1960s. Benítez writes only in English, but the essence of her stories is Latin American. She aptly paints descriptions of peasants, small-town life, and a people’s rootedness to their land and their region, whether coastal Mexico or the small country of El Salvador. In her second novel, she contrasts the lives of wealthy women with their maids, but it is the servant women and their families whose portraits come alive, as well as their connection to their land. The 1930s’ uprising and the revolution of the 1970s are only the backdrop to this story of the people. New Mexican writer Demetria Martínez called Benítez’s second novel ‘‘a beautiful story and a major contribution to the literature of the Americas.’’ Isabel Allende found it ‘‘a story of passion, politics, death, and love written with suspense; a country’s tragic story seen by four strong women. This is the kind of book that fills your dreams for weeks.’’ And Chris Bohjalian, a reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, found Bitter Grounds ‘‘like a recipe for a novel by Laura Esquivel, the rhythms reminiscent of Sandra Cisneros. Ms. Benítez certainly merits placement beside some of the mesmerizing new literature with its roots in Latin America.’’ Her 445-page second


novel is an epic that celebrates the Salvadoran people of the 20th century in their history, their land, and their beauty. While Benítez seems difficult to categorize ethnically, she is truly a Latina writer: she writes in English and her themes are often of women’s issues and Latin American origin. She has said that being an avid reader in her childhood helped lead her to story writing, and she seems to be collecting her Latin American experiences to share with a North American audience. Benítez has written several short stories, which have appeared in various anthologies, including Do You Know Me Now?, edited by Elizabeth Rosenberg (1992), and Speaking in Tongues, edited by Carolyn Holbrook-Montgomery (1993). Her awards and honors include the Loft Mentor award for fiction, 1987; Loft-McKnight award for fiction, 1988; Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant for literature, 1989; Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship for fiction, 1991; Minnesota Hispanic Heritage Month award, 1992; Loft-McKnight award of Distinction for prose, 1993; Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers award, 1993; and Minnesota Book award for fiction, 1994. Benítez is also a teacher of creative writing. OTHER WORKS: Women’s Voices from the Borderlands (ed. by Lillian Castillo-Speed,1995). BIBLIOGRAPHY: CA 144; WRB15 (June 1998); PW (19 July 1993). Other references: Boston Globe (19 Dec. 1993). Gac-Artigas, P., ed., Reflexiones: 60 Essays on Spanish American Women Writers (1999). NYTBR (31 Oct. 1993). WPBW (5 Sept. 1993). Web page: [email protected] —ELIZABETH COONROD MARTINEZ

BENNETT, Gwendolyn B. Born 8 July 1902, Giddings, Texas; died 1891

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poems utilize a blues-spiritual format; they are chant-songs— rhythmic and repetitious. Musical instruments in her poems are the piano and the banjo, of African origins. Almost all of Bennett’s poems are imagistic word paintings: ‘‘Brushes and paints are all I have / To speak the music in my soul . . . / A copper jar beside a pale green bowl.’’ Similarly, ‘‘Heritage’’ simulates an etching: ‘‘I want to see lithe Negro girls / Etched dark against the sky / While sunset lingers.’’ Bennett’s run-on lines simulate a brush-stroke-on-canvas effect: ‘‘I want to see the slim palm-trees, / Pulling at the clouds.’’ ‘‘Sonnet-2’’ is evocative of a watercolor: ‘‘. . .flowers bathed by rain / . . .patterns traced upon the sea.’’ Bennett creates a luminous dream world as in ‘‘Fantasy’’: ‘‘A slim-necked peacock. . . / In a garden of lavender hues.’’ Her poems are terse, compact, and vivid. The militant 20-line ‘‘Hatred’’ is the best example: ‘‘I shall hate you / Like a dart of singing steel.’’ It has all the collective sensory elements of Bennett’s poems. ‘‘To a Dark Girl’’ is openly sensual, inviting an appreciation of the female body: ‘‘I love you for your brownness / And the rounded darkness of your breast.’’ Bennett saw beauty and mystery in blackness, celebrating a glorious black present based on an idealized African past, symbolized by the female: ‘‘Something of old forgotten queens / Lurks in the lithe abandon of your walk.’’ In ‘‘Song’’ she comes close to romanticizing the primitive: ‘‘. . .heads thrown back in irreverent mirth.’’ But ‘‘Song’’ is never sentimental or maudlin; it penetrates the mask of minstrelsy: ‘‘Abandon tells you / That I sing the heart of a race;’’ to arrive at the essence: ‘‘While sadness whispers / That I am the cry of the soul.’’ Of strong, independent voice and reflective mind, Bennett has to be considered vis-à-vis the development of a methodology explaining the philosophical and artistic meaning of similarly oriented poetry in defining the Harlem Renaissance and its mythic reverberations. Her poetry suggests that she is aware of psychosocial and political relevance, and historical realities, both as determinants and as results of her work. She has a richly mature voice that goes beyond that of a mere cultist. Her dispassionate poetic intellect gives her protest poems resonance, depth, and complexity.

Gwendolyn B. Bennett’s writing career spans the years 1922 to 1934. Although she studied at Columbia University and in France, Bennett graduated from Pratt Institute, then taught watercolor and design at Howard University. Author of ‘‘The Ebony Flute,’’ a literary column in Opportunity, and also a frequent contributor to Crisis and The Messenger, Bennett has no collected volume of her verse. Her poems, dealing with nature, love, race, death, and romance, vary in length from six lines to her 39-line free verse ‘‘Song.’’ Although she is overly identified with her often anthologized lyric, ‘‘To a Dark Girl,’’ she wrote ballads, sonnets, and protest poetry. Her poems—whether racial, expressionistic, or impressionistic—are characterized by a heavy reliance on visual imagery.

OTHER WORKS: Selections of Bennett’s work can be found in: The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922). The New Negro (1925). Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1926 (1926). Caroling Dusk (1927). Ebony and Topaz (1927). Anthology of American Negro Literature (1929). American Negro Poetry (1963). An Introduction to Black Literature in America from 1746 to the Present (1969). Afro-American Literature (1970). The Poetry of the Negro, 1946-1970 (1970). The Poetry of Black America (1973). Black and Unknown Bards (n.d.). The Sleeper Wakes: Harlem Renaissance Stories by Women (1993). Women, Men, and the Great War: An Anthology of Stories (1995). The Soul of a Woman (1998).

Bennett’s racial poems reflect an African tradition: ‘‘I want to hear the chanting / Around a heathen fire.’’ Significantly, these

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Beckner, C., 100 African-Americans Who Shaped American History (1995). Eleazer, R. B., ed., Singers in the

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Dawn: A Brief Supplement to the Study of American Literature (1934). Govan, S. Y., Gwendolyn Bennett: Portrait of an Artist Lost (dissertation, 1989). Lewis, D. L., The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader (1995). —ERLENE STETSON

BENSON, Sally Born 3 September 1900, St. Louis, Missouri; died 21 July 1972, Woodland Hills, California Daughter of Alonzo Redway and Anna Prophater Smith; married Reynolds Benson, 1919 (divorced) After Sally Benson’s family had moved to New York, she attended the Horace Mann School, started working at seventeen, married at nineteen, had a daughter, and later divorced her husband. She wrote newspaper interviews and movie reviews and in 1929 contributed the first of her 108 stories to the New Yorker. Benson also edited a volume of myths, wrote mystery reviews for the New Yorker and more than 20 screenplays. People are Fascinating (1936) includes almost all the stories Benson had published in the New Yorker and four from American Mercury. ‘‘The Overcoat’’ and ‘‘Suite 2049’’ were O. Henry prize stories for 1935 and 1936. The title story offers an ironic perspective on the volume: a woman dramatist reads drama into mundane lives. Benson reveals the mediocrity of self-deluded and self-indulgent characters but is compassionate about their attempts to deal with their own mediocrity, with poverty and aging, with meaningless lives. In Emily (1938) Benson writes somewhat longer stories that allow for character development and elicit compassion for those caught in dilemmas, particularly those of growing up. ‘‘Professional Housewife’’ scathingly reveals the emptiness of the role, as well as that of a door-to-door salesman. When scattered in the New Yorker these stories seem witty; in this collection they seem depressing. Despite libraries’ classification, Junior Miss (1941) is not a children’s book. Each story humorously shows a young girl’s attempt to learn about herself and the world; collectively, the stories reveal the human condition. Benson’s light touch does not hide the seriousness of Judy’s problems and the inadequacies of most adult strategies for coping with them. The dramatization by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields (1942) achieved success by hardening the delicacy gained by Benson’s stream-of-consciousness technique; it has the ‘‘rounded ends’’ and ‘‘climaxes’’ Benson disliked, and creates a popular stereotype. Readers of the stories will perceive Junior Miss as a rare account of female rites of passage. Benson’s Meet Me in St. Louis (1942) is a collection of 12 stories published in the New Yorker as ‘‘5135 Kensington.’’ They deal with family life and are based on the diaries of Benson’s sister at the time of the World’s Fair in St. Louis at the turn of the century. Benson has ironically used her family name of Smith for

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this obviously autobiographical work in which she appears as Tootie, age six. The collection focuses on an older sister and her determinedly sophisticated friends. It was made into a popular movie starring Judy Garland. Benson published Women and Children FIRST in 1943. The title originally proposed for the volume, ‘‘Danger: Women at Work,’’ accurately describes the focus on women frittering away their lives, manipulating each other and men. The stories centering around male central characters are equally bleak in their portrayal of human selfishness and pettiness. The book exposes a society which fosters useless lives by its role expectations. Benson’s stories are ‘‘slices of life’’ in which characters, through stream-of-consciousness or dialogue, reveal foolish pretenses; swift narration and irony preclude sentimentality but sometimes result in cruel revelations. Cumulatively her women are stereotypes of frivolous, stupid, and wasteful upper-middleclass New Yorkers. But Benson also described the male selfdeception and use of power that compel women to utilize manipulative strategies. Her portraits of young girls reveal the anguish of their socialization. OTHER WORKS: Stories of the Gods and Heroes (1940). Shadow of a Doubt (1943). Experiment Perilous (1944). National Velvet (1944). Anna and the King of Siam (1946). Come to the Stable (1949). No Man of Her Own (1950). Conspirator (1950). The Belle of New York (1952). The Farmer Takes a Wife (1953). Seventeen by B. Tarkington (dramatization by Benson, 1954). The Young and the Beautiful by F. S. Fitzgerald (dramatization by Benson, 1956). The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1960). Bus Stop (1961). Summer Magic (1962). Viva Las Vegas (1963). Signpost to Murder (1963). The Singing Nun (1966). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ferguson, M.A., ed., Images of Women in Literature (1991). Writers and Writing (22 July 1972). NYT (22 July 1972). —MARY ANNE FERGUSON

BERG, Gertrude Born 3 October 1899, New York, New York; died 14 September 1966, New York, New York Daughter of Jacob and Diana Goldstein Edelstein; married Lewis W. Berg, 1918 A second-generation American raised in New York City, Gertrude Berg drew observations of Jewish family life from her own childhood as well as from exhaustive research into urban Jewish folkways. Berg attended New York City public schools and took extension courses in playwriting at Columbia University from 1916 to 1918. She spent her childhood summers in the Catskill Mountains of New York, where she wrote and performed sketches to amuse the guests at her father’s hotel. For three years after her marriage, Berg lived on a sugar plantation in Louisiana,


spending most of her time reading and writing. She began writing for radio after her return to New York. Berg’s first attempt at a radio series was Effie and Laura (1927), a story about two worldly young women who worked in a five-and-ten and talked about everything from economics to the meaning of life. Berg’s first success was The Rise of the Goldbergs (1929-1931), renamed The Goldbergs in 1931. Over the years, The Goldbergs included over two hundred characters, though only five characters sustained the series. The central character, Molly Goldberg (played by Berg), was a powerful and benevolent Jewish mother absorbed with finding sensible solutions for her family’s problems. She was an amalgam of characteristics drawn from Berg’s mother, grandmother, and various hotel guests. Her humor, derived from malapropisms and Yiddish dialect, was lovingly authentic and never patronizing or condescending. The Goldberg children, Rosalie and Sammy, typified firstgeneration Americans trying to make sense of their dual heritage. Though always devoted to their parents, Sammy and Rosie also were dedicated to modernizing them and to correcting their pronunciation. Their zeal was seldom appreciated by the elder Goldbergs. Berg wrote five 12-and-a-half-minute scripts per week. Each week’s scripts worked toward a climax designed to arouse enough curiosity on Friday to make listeners tune in on the following Monday. In addition to its durable humor, The Goldbergs is noted for its realism. The program eschewed sound ‘‘effects’’ in favor of real eggs frying or real water running in the studio. Programs requiring sounds too complicated for the studio were broadcast from appropriate external locations. When Sammy was called to active duty in World War II, his departure was broadcast from Pennsylvania Station. The troop train he boarded was genuine, as was his departure for duty. Such use of events from the actors’ lives contributed realism of the highest dramatic value. Except for a few brief interruptions, The Goldbergs remained on the air until 1950, through more than 5,000 scripts. Then the show moved to television, where some three million viewers assured the success of the program for nearly 10 years. Berg wrote several versions of The Goldbergs for various media: a book, The Rise of the Goldbergs (1931), a play, Me and Molly (1948), and a film, Molly (1950), written with N. Richard Nash. Throughout her works, Berg asserts the importance of domestic life for both men and women. To Molly Goldberg ‘‘a home, full of hearts and faces dat’s yours and you is deirs’’ is paramount. Her husband also acknowledges his need for marriage: ‘‘You got right, Molly. I vouldn’t be notting but a shadow; I vouldn’t be a real man. I can’t even picture to mineself dat I should be a single man.’’ The Goldberg family adjusts to changing times, but its integrity as a family never falters. Though The Goldbergs is ethnic comedy at its finest, the program’s warmth and authenticity give it universal appeal. Molly and Me (1961), a memoir written with Berg’s son Cherney, is a straightforward account of the people important in Berg’s life and, ultimately, in her writings. The book reveals Berg’s penchant for glib generalizations about people and

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events. The most interesting characters are men—waiters, guests, storekeepers, relatives. Though the women characters generally are less sympathetically drawn, their strength and power are unmistakable. Berg’s works, however, pose two major problems for critics. Almost every story Berg wrote is about the Goldbergs, and the Goldbergs are Berg’s family. Accordingly, the distinction between Berg and Molly is elusive. A second problem compounds the first, namely, that Berg’s writing relies heavily on the actor’s skill in bringing characters to life. The realization of Molly’s character, for example, depends upon Berg’s performance as much as upon Berg’s writings. Therefore, the greatness of Berg’s achievement cannot rest solely upon the strength of her writing. The ultimate critical and commercial success of Molly and her family is the result of Berg’s command of the total creative process—from writing, to production, to performance. OTHER WORKS: House of Glass (radio drama, 1935). Make a Wish (film, released 1937). Kate Hopkins (radio drama, 1941-1942). The Molly Goldberg Cookbook (1955). ‘‘Let God Worry a Little Bit’’ in From the Wise Women of Israel: Folklore and Memoirs (1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barnouw, E., A Tower in Babel: A History of Broadcasting in the United States to 1933 (1966). Barnouw, E., The Golden Web: A History of Broadcasting in the United States 1933-1953 (1968). Edmondson, M. and D. Rounds, From Mary Noble to Mary Hartman: The Complete Soap Opera Book (1976). O’Dell, C., Women Pioneers in Television: Biographies of Fifteen Industry Leaders (1997). Weber, D., ‘‘The Jewish-American World of Gertrude Berg: The Goldergs on Radio and Television, 1930-1950’’ in Talking Back: Images of Jewish Women in American Popular Culture (1998). Weber, D. ‘‘Memory and Repression in Early Ethnic Television: The Example of Gertrude Berg and the Goldbergs’’ in The Other Fifties: Interrogating Midcentury American Icons (1997). Reference works: CBY (1960). National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1892 et seq.). Other references: Commentary (April 1956). NYT (15 Feb. 1959, 15 Sept. 1966). Newsweek (11 April 1949). SR (26 May 1956). Time (26 April 1943, 26 Sept. 1949, 8 March 1948). Theatre Arts (Spring 1948, Spring 1951). —CAREN J. DEMING

BERGMAN, Susan H. Born5 May 1957, Bloomington, Indiana Daughter of Donald and Nancy Pricket Heche; married Judson Bergman, 1979; children: Elliot, Elise (Elizabeth), Natalie, Bennet In two different years, the Pushcart Prize (Best of Small Presses) essay award went to Susan Bergman for her short pieces

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destined to be parts of a longer one: these short essays, chapters in fact, were ‘‘Anonymity,’’ honored in 1991-92, and ‘‘Estivation,’’ honored in 1993-94. These are not the only awards Bergman has won for her writing: her work was included among Best American Essays in both 1987 and 1992 as a winner of Tri-Quarterly’s essay prize in 1990; moreover, her poems were recognized by the American Academy of Poets (1987-88) and Discovery/The Nation Contest (where she was a finalist in 1990). The two Pushcart Prize essays evolved into Anonymity: The Secret Life of An American Family (1994), where Bergman reveals in memoir form the shattering experience her family suffered when, upon the death of Susan’s father, Donald Heche, at the age of forty-five, they learned he was one of the earliest victims of the AIDS epidemic that swept homosexual communities between 1983 and 1989. Anonymity is not a long book, but its power is deeply felt by reader and author alike. Bergman has a mature style and serenity that is comforting given the plain awful facts of her story. And her technique of weaving past and present events together with paragraphs of self-discovery and personal revelation produces an authentic poetic formula of presentation— where the reader is carried along the narrative by the pace and choice of words Bergman uses to tell her truths. She is a born teller of stories. She writes: ‘‘At first no one believed me and I knew it. On Sunday nights until I was at least ten (not every week) my parents spanked me for my week’s worth of lies, until I cried so hard I would lose my breath. Eventually I learned how to simulate breath loss so they’d stop before the welts rose. I practiced on the gullible until, satisfied that even skeptics would not doubt, I told the one about my father’s performance at Carnegie Hall.’’ And later, as she removes the layers of untruth: ‘‘You must understand that lying is a temporal invisibility.’’ Bergman’s memoir shook the very foundations of America’s love affair with ‘‘the family.’’ In a review for Christian Century, Suzanna Ruta addressed what it meant from the outside to acknowledge ‘‘the family of a father who died of AIDS. . . .A strict disciplinarian, church organist, head of a fundamentalist family in which love was expressed, he led a double life of cruising and promiscuity.’’ Each reader or reviewer confronts the same horror and must likely draw the same conclusion: that behind the statistics and the labels, behind the name-calling and the blame, lie real people (often children) whose lives are changed forever. We learn from Bergman herself in Anonymity that she wished to attend a college where her artistic and writing skills could be honed and developed. She hoped for Cornell University. Her parents insisted on a Christian college, however, so her B.A. degree (1979) is from Wheaton College in Illinois. Later, as her choices were less bound by parental restrictions, Bergman earned M.A. (1988) and Ph.D. (1992) degrees in English from Northwestern University. She has managed for several decades to juggle motherhood (four children), a successful career as a writer, and service as a teacher. She was visiting writer at her alma mater, Wheaton College, in 1997-98; at Notre Dame University in 1996; and conducted personal writing workshops for the Ragdale Foundation and River Oaks Arts in Illinois. Her poems have been published since 1985 in such widely known periodicals as Prairie

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Schooner, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, and Indiana Review. She speaks frankly and regularly about writing and about AIDS, not always at the same time but always with the same courtesy and attention to her audience’s need to understand. In an interview with Richard Ford, broadcast by National Public Radio in 1998, Bergman talked about her dedication to writing, its importance to her life. Ford praised her work for its clarity, its integrity, its subtle yet strong grip on what really matters about language—its power to communicate. Bergman is on the board of directors of the Modern Poetry Association, and a contributing editor for Books and Culture and North American Review. She has written and developed liturgical materials—textual, visual, and musical—for church performance. Her meditation on the life and death of Saint Perpetua, ‘‘Called by Name,’’ appears in a volume of essays, A Tremor of Bliss (1994), celebrating the way that ‘‘the idea and the ideal of sanctity, as it has been lived in certain lives over the centuries, persist in our significantly secular time.’’ Bergman says: ‘‘I cling to the promises that if we seek God we will find him, that if we knock the door will be opened. In these words lie powerful incentives to an active life of faith.’’ OTHER WORKS: Buried Life (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Anthem (National Public Radio, Oct. 1998). NYTBR (1994). —KATHLEEN BONANN MARSHALL

BERNAYS, Anne Born 14 September 1930, New York, New York Daughter of Edward L. and Dorothy Fleischman Bernays; married Justin Kaplan, 1954; children: Susanna, Hester, Polly Born into a prominent family, Anne Bernays was a grandniece of Freud and the younger of two daughters of the founding father of the public relations field. Bernays was raised in the Sherry Netherlands Hotel during the Depression, which, she was told, ‘‘was happening to poor people.’’ She attended the Brearley School in New York City, then Wellesley for two years, transferring to Barnard where for the first time, she made friends outside a limited social circle. In 1953 Bernays worked as an editor of Discovery for Vance Bourjaily. In 1954 she married critic Justin Kaplan and left publishing in 1957 to give birth to the first of her three daughters. The same year, she started writing and completed 10 short stories. In 1959 Bernays moved with her family to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she has taught fiction workshops, written novels, and worked as a part-time editor for David Godine. Bernays’ first novel, Short Pleasure (1962), tells the story of an heiress who runs away from her wedding but claims she was


kidnapped and stuffed into a car trunk. Bernays uses the story, based on a newspaper item, to illustrate the extravagant lengths to which a ‘‘poor little rich girl’’ will go to escape the confines of her family. One of Bernays’ best books, Growing Up Rich (1975), deals again with the need to escape the family—this time, however, without having the characters resort to tales of dramatic kidnapping or to suicide, as in The New York Ride (1965). In Growing Up Rich, Bernays accurately records the characteristics of the rich and the trappings of their wealth. The narrator, another ‘‘poor little rich girl,’’ cannot, as Bernays herself could not, make friends in her private school. The pudgy schoolgirl who lacks self-assurance is confused by her divided loyalties—to her natural father, a Christian, and her stepfather, a Jew; to her German parents and her Russian guardians. When disaster strikes, she is sent to live with the same Russian Jews who were formerly held in contempt by her family. In her new home, her makeshift bedroom is a converted porch without heat, and she goes to public, not private school. She becomes a debutante in a new sense of the word as she enters a more public, less private society. Growing Up Rich is written with wit, sophistication, and a sense of pain and poignancy, holding up to ridicule the false values of upper class society. With Growing Up Rich, Bernays hits her stride as a social satirist; she maintains the pace in The School Room (1979). In a central episode, children in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, private school, spying on their teachers through a crack in a wall, catch them in a compromising situation. Multiple plots and the contrasting positions of children either thrust out of, or secure in, their families are deftly handled. Bernays’ humor brings levity to the pain of adolescence. These books ensured Bernays’ reputation; she is one of few writers to deal with mother/daughter relationships, showing that the child belongs to the nurturing, and not necessarily the natural, parent. Parents in her novels are often weak: mothers are too intrusive, evasive, or too busy with their own concerns; nor can fathers help their sons. Bernays writes about children and about women who are both professionals and involved family members. Bernays’ wit, her acute ear for dialogue, her compassion for the adolescent, her ability to handle intricate plots, and her awareness of the life of the mind as well as her knowledge of the domestic scene make her work mature, womanly, and literate. Bernays has explored in her fiction the culture of social privilege in America. From New York City’s high society (The New York Ride and Growing Up Rich) to the cloistered environment of an exclusive Cambridge boarding school (The School Book, 1980), Bernays has exposed with humor and poignancy these often hermetic institutions of privilege. In two novels in the 1980s, Bernays turned her attention to issues concerning professional women. The Address Book (1983) features a successful, middle-aged editor at a Boston publishing house who is offered a new job with a top New York firm. As Alicia Baer—wife, mother, professional woman—struggles with the decision to move on in her career or to remain with her family, she is confronted by her own fears of loneliness and death, as well as by her repressed ambition and sexuality. Submerged elements of her inner life

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become personified as mysterious old acquaintances who make claims upon her. The Address Book successfully portrays the conflict between Alicia’s genuine love of and attachment to her family and her longings to escape the personal restrictions it imposes upon her. Professor Romeo (1989) deals with sexual harassment on the college campus. Assuming a male voice, Bernays tells the story of compulsive sexual exploitation from the point of view of the perpetrator, psychology professor Jake Barker, and reveals the profound emptiness looming behind Barker’s accomplished facade. Finally called to account for his unethical behavior, Barker faces his dismissal from Harvard, and the professional demise it represents, with bewildered incomprehension. A shallow man from beginning to end, he shows no sign of reform or redemption. In 1990 Bernays took another direction, publishing a creative writing manual for students with Pamela Painter. Composed of 83 lessons in 12 sections, each addressing a facet of fiction writing, What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers avoids theoretical and technical jargon, focusing instead on practical exercises, revision, and the study of great authors. The next year, 1991, Bernays joined the faculty at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts. With her husband, Kaplan, she jointly holds the Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters. Bernays and Kaplan collaborated on The Language of Names in 1997, which provides scholarly information about names in an easily accessible style. The authors discuss the importance of names as ‘‘cultural universals’’ used throughout history and provide a wealth of trivia about names from literature, history, films, racial and ethnic groups, and the business world. In addition to pursuing her own writing career, Bernays is busy on behalf of other writers. She is a founding and active member of PEN New England, a regional offshoot of the national anticensorship and writer advocacy organization. She is chair of the Fine Arts Work Center, which funds writers and visual artists for a year’s stay in Provincetown; she also serves on the board of the National Writers Union. OTHER WORKS: Prudence, Indeed (1966). The First to Know (1974). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1967). CANR (1982, 1999). SATA (1983). Other references: Boston Magazine (Dec. 1975). College Composition and Communication (Feb. 1992). Hudson Review (Autumn 1984). NYT (19 July 1989). NYTBR (13 Nov. 1983, 23 July 1989). Ploughshares (Spring 1976). —E. M. BRONER, UPDATED BY MELISSA BURNS AND NICK ASSENDELFT

BERNE, Victoria See FISHER, M. F. K.

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BETHUNE, Mary McLeod Born 10 July 1875, near Mayesville, South Carolina; died 18 May 1955, Daytona, Florida Daughter of Samuel and Patsy McLeod; married Albertus Bethune, 1898 Born to former slaves, Mary McLeod Bethune realized early the importance of education in improving the quality of life. Upon graduating from Mayesville Institute, she attended Scotia Seminary in Concord, North Carolina, and pursued further studies at Moody Institute in Chicago. Two black women, Emma Wilson, Bethune’s first teacher, and Lucy Laney, her first principal and employer, inspired her by giving her an educational opportunity and by serving as models in opening schools for blacks. Moreover, the teachers at Scotia taught her about the evils of discrimination. Following these examples, Bethune devoted her life to offering others educational opportunities and to combating ‘‘color, caste and class distinctions.’’ After marrying, Bethune taught in mission schools in the South, and in 1904 she opened the Daytona Educational and Industrial School for Training Negro Girls; in 1923 the school merged with Cookman Institute and became Bethune-Cookman College, and Bethune remained head of the school until 1942. It was as an educator and founder of a school that Bethune first achieved recognition, but she refused to confine her talent and effort to one institution or to one group of people—she became a national and international leader in the cause of equality, peace, and brotherhood. In 1920 she was elected to the Executive Board of the National Urban League. In ‘‘The Problems of the City Dweller’’ (Opportunity, 3 Feb. 1925), Bethune pointed out the discrepancy between the El Dorado of the ‘‘country lad’s dreams’’ and the economic, social, and educational oppression found in urban centers. She urged the Urban League to focus attention on the problems of the city dweller, calling equally for the ‘‘breaking down of racial barriers’’ and for the aiding of immigrants. Bethune served as vice president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and formed the National Council of Negro Women. She was also president of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and urged scholars and researchers to discover, interpret, and disseminate the truth ‘‘in the field of Negro life.’’ She reminded them that the ‘‘social usefulness of scholarship and its findings depends upon its translation into the common tongue.’’ Focusing upon this same theme in a 1939 speech, ‘‘The Adaptation of the History of the Negro to the Capacity of the Child’’ (Journal of Negro History, Jan. 1939), she pointed out that children must have ‘‘a true picture of races’’ because ‘‘peace is based on international understanding and good will.’’ Bethune’s talent, energy, and resources were drawn upon by two U.S. presidents. President Hoover invited her to the White House Conference on Child Health and Protection and to the President’s Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership. Under Franklin D. Roosevelt she served as Director of the

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Division of Negro Affairs in the National Youth Administration and as a representative to the San Francisco Conference to draw up a permanent charter for the United Nations. At that conference she helped draft a statement calling for a World Bill of Rights and urging nations ‘‘to face what is one of the most serious problems of the 20th century—the question of race and color.’’ Throughout her career Bethune asserted her belief in the promise of the American dream, pointed out the discrepancy between the ideal and reality, and sought to extend the promise to all groups. Moreover, her travels and living through two world wars made her aware of America’s role in the world and of the ties that bind all people. In ‘‘Certain Unalienable Rights,’’ she brings these realizations together, asserting that the black American’s desire for equality was rooted in the American principles of democracy and that the black Americans who were angry were analogous to the Boston Tea Party patriots. To Bethune these black Americans were among the ‘‘depressed and repressed masses all over the world’’ who were ‘‘swelling to the breaking point against the walls of the ghettoes.’’ She concluded that America and the world had two alternatives in reacting to the cry for equality: to act ‘‘in keeping with American ideals’’ or to ‘‘mimic Hitler.’’ Bethune’s leadership in education and in the cause of ‘‘Peace, Progress, Brotherhood and Love’’ brought her national and international acclaim, as attested by the numerous honors and awards she received, including the Spingarn Medal, the Drexel Award, the Thomas Jefferson Award, the Honor Merit of Haiti Award, and the Star of Africa Award from Liberia. In 1974 a memorial to her was erected in Washington, D.C. Although she published rarely, and never in volume form, Bethune’s essays appeared in Opportunity and in the Journal of Negro History. To reach a more popular audience, she turned to Ebony with ‘‘My Secret Talks with Franklin D. Roosevelt’’ (April 1949) and ‘‘My Last Will and Testament’’ (10 August 1955). OTHER WORKS: Mary McLeod Bethune, Her Own Words of Inspiration (1975, reprinted1990). Mary McLeod Bethune Papers, 1923-1942 (microfilm, 1976). Mary McLeod Bethune Papers, Bethune Foundation Collection, Part 2: Correspondence Files, 1914-1955 (1997). ‘‘My Last Will and Testament’’ in Can I Get a Witness? Prophetic Religious Voices of African American Women: An Anthology (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ashby, R. and D. G. Ohrn, eds., Herstory: Women Who Changed the World (1995). Blackwell, B. G., The Advocacies and Ideological Commitments of a Black Educator: Mary McLeod Bethune, 1875-1955 (dissertation, 1978). Boehm, R., A Guide to the Microfilm Edition of Mary McLeod Bethune Papers: The Bethune-Cookman College Collection, 1922-1955 (1995). Brawley, B., Negro Builders and Heroes (1937). David, S. I., Women Builders (1931). Embree, E. R., Thirteen Against the Odds (1944). Felder, D. G., The 100 Most Influential Women of All Time: A Ranking Past and Present (1996). Greenfield, E., Mary McLeod Bethune (1977). Hall, J. B., ‘‘Segregation and the Politics of Race: Mary McLeod Bethune and the National Youth


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Administration, 1935-1943’’ (thesis, 1996). Hanson, J. A., The Ties that Bind: Mary McLeod Bethune and the Political Mobilization of African-American Women (dissertation, 1997). Hardy, G. J., American Women Civil Rights Activists: Biobibliographies of 68 Leaders, 1825-1992 (1993). Holt, R., Mary McLeod Bethune: A Biography (1964). McCluskey, A. T., Mary McLeod Bethune and the Education of Black Girls in the South, 1904-1923 (dissertation, 1991). Newsome, C. G., Mary McLeod Bethune in Religious Perspective (dissertation, 1982). Peare, C. O., Mary McLeod Bethune (1951). Poole, B. A., Mary McLeod Bethune (1994). Reynolds, M. D., Women Champions of Human Rights: Eleven U.S. Leaders of the Twentieth Century (1991). Russell, D., Black Genius and the American Experience (1998). Skorapa, O. L., Feminist Theory and the Educational Endeavor of Mary McLeod Bethune (dissertation, 1989). Seller, M., ed., Women Educators in the United States, 1820-1993: A Biobibliographical Sourcebook (1994). Smallwood, D., Profiles of Great African Americans (1998). Young, J. A., A Study of the Educational Philosophies of Three Pioneer Black Women and their Contributions to American Education (dissertation, 1993, 1987). Other references: JNH (1975). Light in the Southern Sky (video, 1994). Mary McLeod Bethune as Shaper of Social Reality (audiocassette, 1986). Mary McLeod Bethune: Educator (video, 1997). Mary McLeod Bethune: Political & Social Development at Home and Abroad (video, 1996). Mary McLeod Bethune: The Spirit of a Champion (video, 1996). Portraits: The Americans (video, 1997). Southern Workman (March 1912). The Story of Mary McLeod Bethune from Cotton Fields to the White House (video, 1990). —JO HOWZE

BETTS, Doris Born 4 June 1932, Statesville, North Carolina Daughter of William E. and Mary Ellen Freeze Elmore Waugh; married Lowry M. Betts, 1952; children: Doris, David, Erskine Since winning a Mademoiselle college fiction contest in 1953, Doris Betts has published nine novels and three volumes of short stories. She has been a journalist at several North Carolina newspapers and a professor at a number of colleges in North Carolina and Indiana. Betts has also been active in her town of Sanford, North Carolina, and is the Alumni Distinguished Professor of English at the nearby University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has won several literary awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction in 1958-59 and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Medal of Merit in 1989. The Gentle Insurrection, and Other Stories (1954), though published when the author was twenty-two, shows mature understanding of human powers and limitations. In the title story, the daughter of a sharecropper, out of both fear and family loyalty,

rejects her chance to escape with a lover; other stories show characters coping with handicaps, poverty, aging, and racial discrimination. There is no sentimentality; a chain gang, murder, maternal rejection, patriarchal ruthlessness, bitter sexual frustration are dispassionately presented. Betts’ characteristic use of interior monologue for ironic self-revelation, her concern for morality and religion, her use of animal symbols, and her humor are all already apparent. Betts’ second book of short stories, The Astronomer, and Other Stories (1966), is actually a novella whose central character, a widower, tries to fill his life by pursuing astronomy but finds he cannot fill the emptiness without involvement with other people. Betts’ increased control of her medium is evident in the economy with which several lives are simultaneously revealed. In the other stories in this collection, Betts succinctly portrays people who deal with life the best they can but not always effectively. It is unfortunate Betts yielded to writing novels, because it is in her short stories that she succeeds in catching whole lives quickly. Tall Houses in Winter (1957), Betts’ first novel, is overplotted and melodramatic, and only somewhat redeemed by convincing character portrayal. The Scarlet Thread (1964), a historical novel, is noteworthy primarily for its vivid scenes and biblical symbolism. The River to Pickle Beach (1972) skillfully uses symbols of nature to make this novel a powerful affirmation of life. With Beasts of the Southern Wild, and Other Stories (1973), for which Betts was a 1974 National Book award finalist, and Heading West (1981), is a collection of seven stories representing both a culmination of her previous work and a new departure. More comic, more fantastic, these stories are nonetheless as revelatory of ordinary people as Betts’ other fiction. Using animal images and female central consciousnesses, Betts creates a world in which awareness of mortality heightens experience. Betts’ characters, often grotesque, gain dignity from confronting loneliness, family and racial tensions, aging, and death. She achieves rare authenticity about women through detailing graphically with the birth process, the emotional effects of abortion, hysterectomy, and childlessness. Betts’ discussions of the aesthetics of writing reflect her award-winning teaching. Between 1954 and 1973 Betts produced three volumes of short stories and three novels, all focused on her native North Carolina. She has always been well received in her region: each novel won the Sir Walter Raleigh award for the best fiction of its year by a North Carolinian. The aforementioned Beasts of the Southern Wild and Other Stories (1973), broadened her reputation; it was widely reviewed, and one of the stories, ‘‘The Ugliest Pilgrim,’’ was filmed for the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) as Violet, with Betts writing the screenplay. In Heading West (1981), a Book-of-the-Month selection, the author’s wider scope is paralleled by that of her female epic hero, Nancy Finch, an unmarried librarian in a small North Carolina town desperate to escape her dull life. Maintaining the comic voice evident in many of her short stories, Betts makes her story of Nancy’s journey to the Grand Canyon a mock epic. The Grand Canyon parallels

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Melville’s white whale as a symbol of the American quest for meaning, which Betts locates, finally, in the American dream of family. Instead of Melville’s mad hero, Betts’ protagonist is the victim of a mad kidnapper who introduces himself with the words ‘‘Call me Dwight,’’ echoing Melville’s ‘‘Call me Ishmael.’’ Nancy’s vocation as librarian gives Betts ample opportunity for other literary parallels and allusions; the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress, Paradise Lost, proverbs, fairytales, and popular songs furnish opportunities for irony and also deepen the universality of Nancy’s predicament and ambivalence. Betts subverts the myth of the ‘‘imperial hero,’’ a loner who ruthlessly prevails over all obstacles. Like Odysseus, Nancy returns home to complete her spiritual journey before heading west for good. Through irony and the witty inner voice of her protagonist, Betts makes Nancy’s adventures credible and the characters convincing. Using the form of a suspenseful mystery story in which the good guys win, Betts has solved the dilemma of writers in a democracy of how to make a serious work accessible to many levels of readers. A published excerpt from a novel in progress, Souls Raised from the Dead, makes it clear Betts has mastered the novel form as well as she had already mastered that of the short story. Betts remained busy throughout the rest of the 1980s and early 1990s with both her teaching and writing. She contributed articles, poems, short fiction, and literary reviews to various magazines; her short stories were also anthologized in various local and national works, including Best American Short Stories and A New Southern Reader. Souls Raised from the Dead (1994) was Betts’ first novel in over a decade and received overwhelmingly favorable reviews. Set in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the novel’s protagonist is 12-year-old Mary Grace Thompson, whose mother abandoned Mary Grace and her highway patrolman father, Frank, three years before. Mary Grace has a minor riding accident early in the novel and the ensuing hospitalization leads to her diagnosis with chronic renal failure. Frank already has one damaged kidney due to a gunshot wound received while in the line of duty years earlier, and Mary Grace must therefore rely upon her mother Christine as the most likely donor. Christine is afraid of undergoing surgery, however, and so denies her kidney by pretending that Mary Grace will be fine without it. Mary Grace’s slow physical decline is mirrored in the spiritual decline of her family. Just as her kidneys cannot serve as an adequate filter for her body’s toxins, Mary Grace herself can no longer serve as a spiritual and emotional filter for her dysfunctional extended family. Betts, a Presbyterian elder and devout Christian, gives the child an ample share of the grace for which she is named, and shows her meeting her impending death with courage and conviction. A child’s death also figures in Betts’ next novel, The Sharp Teeth of Love (1997), whose characters include a ghost and a young runaway. Heroine Luna Stone leaves her fiancé midway through their trip to their prospective new home in California. She camps out in the Desolation Wilderness where the ill-fated Donner Party met its end and is soon haunted by the ghost of

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Tamsen Donner. Meanwhile, she meets 12-year-old Sam, who has run away from his would-be kidnappers, and another camper, newly deaf Paul Cowan. The group forms a makeshift family until Sam is kidnapped by his pursuers and Luna and Paul must go to his rescue. The Sharp Teeth of Love received a mixed reception from critics, who praised its appealing characters but generally agreed the various plotlines didn’t completely mesh. OTHER WORKS: Halfway Home and a Long Way to Go: The Report of the 1986 Commission on the Future of the South (1986). The papers of Doris Betts are housed at Boston University, in Boston, Massachusetts. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Carr, J., ed., Kite-Flying and Other Irrational Acts: Conversations with Twelve Southern Writers (1972). Dantzler, K. L. N., Writings of Religious Rebellion: Doris Betts’ Early Fiction (dissertation, 1989). Evans, E., Doris Betts (1997). Kimball, S. L. and L. V. Sandler, eds., The Home Truths of Doris Betts (1992). Prenshaw, P. W., ed., Women Writers of the Contemporary South (1984). Wilson, M. J., Southern, Female and Christian: A Comparative Study of Christian Orthodoxy in the Short Fiction of Flannery O’Connor and Doris Betts (dissertation, 1987). Reference works: CANR (1998). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Chapel Hill Weekly (3 May 1972). Christian Century (8 Oct. 1997). Critique (1975). PW (25 Apr. 1994). Red Clay Reader (1970). The Sanford (5 Dec. 1974). Southern Quarterly (Summer & Winter 1983). —MARY ANNE FERGUSON, UPDATED BY LEAH J. SPARKS

BIANCO, Margery Williams Born 22 July 1881, London, England; died 4 September 1944, New York, New York Also wrote under: Margery Bianco, Margery Williams Daughter of Robert and Florence Harper Williams; married Francesco Bianco, 1904 Margery Williams Bianco was born in London, where she early developed the interest for studying animals reflected in many of her books. Bianco’s father died when she was seven and two years later the remaining members of the family sailed for New York. From there they moved to a farm in Pennsylvania, where Bianco reveled in ‘‘berry picking, corn husking, coasting in winter—all the country things one had read about in St. Nicholas.’’ At seventeen, Bianco began to write and occasionally publish short stories. Her first novel, The Late Returning, appeared in 1902 and was followed by two more adult novels, The Price of Youth (1904) and The Bar (1906). A. C. Moore has described these early novels as ‘‘absorbing stories’’ of human loyalties and


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conflicts in which Bianco’s characteristic concern for ‘‘the mystery of nature’’ was already present. In 1922 Bianco published her first novel for children, The Velveteen Rabbit. This fantasy about a toy rabbit that becomes real through the power of love has long been acknowledged as a work of rare distinction. A tale of patient love, willing sacrifice, and bittersweet reward, it is reminiscent of Hans Christian Andersen’s literary fairy tales, which Bianco greatly admired. Her style, which is tender and yet humorous, is well suited to the story of the velveteen rabbit, and to the stories of toys and their people that followed it: Poor Cecco (1925), The Little Wooden Doll (1925), The Skin Horse (1927), and The Adventures of Andy (1927). Bianco’s success in these early children’s books was in her ability to create secondary realities—worlds and characters parallel to but different from our own. Her charming style and use of facts made animals into individuals. But Bianco’s later children’s books demonstrate that she was also able to draw upon realistic settings, and create realistic human characters. In Winterbound (1936), the four Ellis children spend a hard winter alone in a drafty Connecticut farmhouse. The two older sisters use good sense, good spirits, and good character to bring the family through a series of potential disasters. Bianco’s hand with characterization is so sure that not only are the Ellises all fully realized as individuals, but each member of the supporting cast is also clearly and memorably defined. Throughout Winterbound, Bianco’s love for the colors and the inhabitants of the countryside brings landscape, flora, and fauna into the fabric of her story. A frequent contributor to Horn Book magazine, Bianco brought high standards of criticism to her consideration of children’s books, and she was as demanding of herself as she was of others. She had a keen awareness of the role of literature in educating the imagination, and wrote that ‘‘Imagination is another word for the interpretation of life.’’ OTHER WORKS: Paris (1910). The Thing in the Woods (1913). The Apple Tree (1926). All About Pets (1929). The Candlestick (1929). The House That Grew Smaller (1931). A Street of Little Shops (1932). The Hurdy-Gurdy Man (1933). The Good Friends (1934). More About Animals (1934). Green Grows the Garden (1936). Tales from a Finnish Tupa (with J. C. Bowman, 1936). Rufus the Fox (1937). Other People’s Houses (1939). Franzi and Gizi (with G. Loeffler, 1941). Bright Morning (1942). The Fiveand-a-Half Club (1942). Penny and the White Horse (1942). Forward Commandos! (1944). Herbert’s Zoo (1949). The New Five-and-a-half Club (1951). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Moore and Miller, eds., Writing and Criticism: A Book for Margery Bianco (1951). Reference works: Junior Book of Authors, S. J. Kunitz, and H. Haycraft, eds. (1951). Other references: EngElemR (June 1935). Horn Book (May 1945). PW (23 Sept. 1944). Weekly Book Review (1 Oct. 1944). —KATHARYN F. CRABBE

BISHOP, Claire Huchet Born circa 1899, Brittany, France; died 11 March 1993 married Frank Bishop Born into a family and a culture where storytelling, particularly of traditional tales, was a normal part of life, Claire Huchet Bishop seems to have come naturally to her career as a children’s librarian and author. After studying at the Sorbonne, Bishop opened the first French children’s library, L’Heure Joyeuse, in the years following World War I. There, in a library sponsored by an American Committee headed by Mrs. Herbert Hoover, she began to tell stories to children. When she married pianist Frank Bishop and accompanied him to New York City in the 1930s, she took a position in the New York Public Library, where she was also invited to be a storyteller. Her first book, The Five Chinese Brothers (1938), was a written version of a tale she had told children on two continents. The Five Chinese Brothers, as befits a written version of an oral tale, has a simple, dramatic storyline; it makes extensive use of repetitions (‘‘Your Honor, will you allow me to go and bid my mother good-bye?’’ asks each of the brothers. ‘‘It is only fair,’’ the judge always replies); and it celebrates personal resourcefulness over social order. The Five Chinese Brothers has acquired the status of a modern classic. The same structural qualities of the traditional oral tale appear in The Man Who Lost His Head (1942), which is also a picture book. This droll tale is about a man who, waking one morning without his head, sets out to find it. He tries three alternative heads—a pumpkin, a parsnip, and a piece of wood— before he regains his own through the help of a young and ragged magician with a penchant for extraordinary words. Bishop’s other picture books include The Ferryman (1941), Augustus (1945), and Twenty-two Bears (1964). Bishop is best known for The Five Chinese, but her short novels for children are also major achievements. In such books as Pancakes-Paris (1947), Twenty and Ten (1952), All Alone (1953), and A Present from Petros (1961), Bishop manages to simultaneously evoke the uniqueness of various cultures and the universality of childhood. Pancakes-Paris, for example, is the story of Charles, a ten-year-old postwar Parisian who wants desperately to make crêpes for his mother for Mardi Gras. But he has no milk, no eggs, no oil—nothing. Although two American soldiers provide a happy ending, the reality of Charles’s life and its contrast with our own comes through. The humanitarian impulse, evident in the soldiers who bring packages of food and supplies to Charles’s family, is strong in Pancakes-Paris. A similar morality is at work in All Alone, the story of two young cowherds in the French Alps who, by example, persuade a village to give up rugged individualism and minding

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one’s own business for a sense of community and brotherhood. Here, as in all her novels, Bishop celebrates courage, caring, and acceptance of responsibility, both for self and for others. Accepting responsibility for others is a major theme in Twenty and Ten, the children’s novel most closely connected to Bishop’s writing for adults. It’s the story of 20 French fifthgraders who have been sent to a country house to wait out the occupation, and of the 10 Jewish children they hid from the Nazis. In this book Bishop has used the device of a children’s Christmas game called ‘‘The Flight into Egypt’’ to propose the oneness of Christians and Jews. This concern for religious harmony is also the force behind two later accomplishments: her noble foreword to an English edition of Jesus and Israel (Jésus et Israël) by the French historian Jules Isaac, and her own How Catholics Look at Jews (1974). The foreword to Jesus and Israel (1970) reveals Bishop’s commitment to the battle against anti-Semitism and her conviction that even Vatican Council II did not go far enough in trying to eradicate anti-Jewish prejudice in the teachings of the Roman Catholic church. The importance Bishop places on religion is reflected in her recreation of the life of Christ, Yeshu, Called Jesus (1966), and in her three saints’ lives, Christopher the Giant (1950), Bernard and His Dogs (1952), and Martin de Porres, Hero (1954), all written for children. These books also reveal her ability to speak candidly about defects in the Catholic church, as in Martin de Porres, Hero which contains several depictions of the dandyism and selfindulgence that characterized some religious houses in the 16th and 17th centuries. Bishop’s spare style and dry wit are admirable. She is most effective in creating a sense of place and an awareness of cultural differences in her novels and in echoing the oral tradition in her picture-story books. It is also in her fiction that she most successfully integrates moral themes into the fabric of the work.

OTHER WORKS: French Children’s Books for English Speaking Children (1938). The King’s Day (1940). France Alive (1947). Blue Spring Farm (1948). All Things Common (1950). The Big Loop (1955). Happy Christmas (ed. by Bishop, 1956). Toto’s Triumph (1957). French Roundabout (1960). Lafayette: FrenchAmerican Hero (1960). Here is France (1969). The Truffle Pig (1971). Johann Sebastian Bach (1972). Georgette (1974).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hopkins, L. B., Books are by People (1969). Schwartz, A. V., ‘‘On The Five Chinese Brothers,’’ in Interracial Books for Children Bulletin 3 (1977). Smaridge, N., Famous Modern Story Tellers for Young People (1969). Reference works: The Junior Book of Authors, S. J. Kunitz and H. Haycraft, eds, (1951). Other references: LJ (Oct. 1977). PW (10 May 1947). —KATHARYN F. CRABBE

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BISHOP, Elizabeth Born 8 February 1911, Worcester, Massachusetts; died 6 October 1979, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of Gertrude May Bulmer and William Thomas Bishop (the Bulmer family name was pronounced with a silent ‘‘l’’ and had the variant spelling of Boomer) When Elizabeth Bishop was eight months old, she lost her father to Bright’s disease after he had been ill off and on for six years. The death had a disastrous effect on her mother. Unable to cope with the tragedy, her mother became increasingly disoriented and was in and out of mental hospitals during Bishop’s early childhood. In 1916 she was permanently institutionalized and never saw her daughter again before she died in 1934. As an only child growing up, Bishop was continually aware that she did not provide her mother with sufficient consolation or sense of purpose to keep her from leaving yet again. The memory of what seemed to be maternal neglect and rejection stayed with Bishop all her life and surfaced in her poetry, a particularly clear instance being an unpublished draft of a poem called ‘‘A Drunkard,’’ where it is associated with the beginnings of her lifelong problem with alcoholism, her ‘‘abnormal thirst.’’ The uncertainty surrounding her mother’s condition was mitigated by the stable and loving relationship Bishop had with her maternal grandparents. After being widowed, Bishop’s mother had taken her daughter and returned home to live with them in Great Village, Nova Scotia, a tiny and close-knit community filled with relatives and neighbors. When Bishop was six years old, however, the warmth and liveliness of life in Great Village came to an end following the arrival of her father’s parents, the prosperous Bishops, whose wealth had been made from a successful contracting firm noted for building such landmarks as the Boston Public Library and Museum of Fine Arts. The Bishops were intent on taking their granddaughter back with them, and so she was returned, against her will, to her birthplace in Worcester, Massachusetts. The contrast between the cold and proper opulence of the Bishop home and her country existence in Nova Scotia could not have been greater. The sudden isolation and boredom were terrible experiences for a sensitive child who had already suffered more than her share of misfortune. She became ill with a number of severe ailments including bronchitis, asthma, and eczema, all of which plagued her for the rest of her life. Her miserable stay with the Bishops lasted only nine months, but it represented a profound turning point. Her famous poem ‘‘In the Waiting Room’’ recalls it as a fall from innocence into a painfully acute and alienating consciousness of time and self. Her health became so poor that the Bishops allowed her to be rescued by her aunt, Maud Bulmer Shepherdson, her mother’s older sister. In 1918 Bishop moved to Revere, Massachusetts, to live with Maud and her husband. Although she loved her aunt and was deeply grateful for her generosity, she continued to suffer


from the sense of having no rightful place or home of her own. During an interview with Elizabeth Spires in 1978 (published in Paris Review, Summer 1981), Bishop said, ‘‘. . .my relationship with my relatives—I was always a sort of guest, and I think I’ve always felt like that.’’ Before the age of fourteen Bishop had little formal education, but with the help of her aunt she developed her literary interests through independent reading. At fourteen she began attending high school and day school, and from 1927 to 1930 she went to Walnut Hill, a college prep boarding school in Natick, Massachusetts. In 1930 she entered Vassar College and became part of a group of gifted students that included Mary McCarthy, Eleanor Clark, and Muriel Rukeyser. During her senior year, she was introduced to poet Marianne Moore, who was forty-seven at the time. Moore befriended the young Bishop, and their relationship—as mentor and apprentice initially and then as colleagues— lasted through the years, despite the many travels and changes of residence that characterized Bishop’s nomadic life. A second key friendship with a fellow poet took shape when Bishop met Robert Lowell in 1947. As two up-and-coming writers, they established a relationship of peers. Both had just published highly acclaimed collections—North & South (1946) for Bishop and Lord Weary’s Castle for Lowell—and they sensed in each other a kinship that would develop into a mutually sustaining exchange of ideas, drafts, and advice. In 1951 Bishop embarked on a trip around South America. During a stop in Rio de Janeiro, she suffered a violent allergic reaction to the fruit of the cashew tree and had to abandon her plans and recover there. She was cared for by the friends she had been visiting, and with one of them, Lota Costellat de Macedos Soares, the friendship deepened into an intimate relationship. She ended up living with Soares in Brazil for 15 years. For much of that period she led a settled and happy existence, combining domesticity with creative production. Bishop’s second collection of poems was published with a reissuance of her first collection, and the combined volume, Poems: North & South—A Cold Spring (1955), won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956. Her third collection, Questions of Travel (1965), was followed by The Complete Poems (1969), which received the National Book award in 1970. After the tragic death of Soares in 1967, apparently by suicide, Bishop made arrangements to take up residence in the U.S. and spent the final decade of her life writing and teaching, primarily at Harvard University. In 1976 she became the first American and the first woman to receive the Books Abroad/ Neustadt International Prize for Literature. That same year saw the publication of the final collection to appear in her lifetime, Geography III, which won the National Book Critics Circle award in 1977. After her death in 1979, Bishop’s reputation continued to grow and she has come to be considered one of the preeminent poets of the 20th century. OTHER WORKS: Brazil (with the editors of Life, 1962). The Ballad of the Burglar of Babylon (1968). The Complete Poems, 1927-1979

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(1983). The Collected Prose (1984). One Art: Elizabeth Bishop (letters edited by Robert Giroux, 1994). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brown, A., ‘‘An Interview with Elizabeth Bishop,’’ in Shenandoah 17 (Winter 1966). CANR 61 (1998). CLC 32 (1985). DLB 5 (1980), 169 (1996). Goldensohn, L., Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poet (1991). Kalstone, D., Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell (1989). Millier, B. C., Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It (1993); ‘‘The Prodigal: Elizabeth Bishop and Alcohol,’’ in Contemporary Literature 39 (Spring 1998). Paton, P. M., ‘‘Landscape and Female Desire: Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Closet’ Tactics,’’ in Mosaic 31 (Sept. 1998). Showalter, E., ed., Modern American Women Writers (1991). —MARLENE M. MILLER

BLACK, Katherine Bolton Born 7 November 1903, Boston, Massachusetts; died 13 November 1962, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of Henry and Margaret Weed Bolton; married Joseph R. Black, 1928; children: four Katherine Bolton Black, daughter of a wealthy Boston businessman and a socialite mother, spent much of her early childhood abroad in the British and French countryside. The lovely scenery of rural Europe figured prominently in her early poetry and in By the Riverbank (1954). Black attended Miss Brody’s School for Girls, then Simmons College, from which she graduated with honors in 1924. Her marriage to Joseph Black, a lawyer, produced four children. Black began her writing career at Simmons, composing verse in which the recurring theme of ‘‘a Natural Paradise’’ figured heavily. Her first published poem, ‘‘The Greenest Pastures,’’ ran in the July 1930 issue of McCall’s. Her verse was subsequently published in miscellaneous ladies’ magazines, but was never collected in volume form. In 1942 Black’s first attempt at fiction, a long short story, ‘‘At the Village Gate,’’ was selected to run in the anthology, Best Short Stories of the Year: 1942. In this story a British naval officer falls in love with Jenny, who is obviously modeled after Black. On leave, he visits Jenny at her small-town New England home, only to find she is in love with another man. His despair at the discovery is moving, although the tone of the whole is sentimental. Black’s vivid descriptions of nature and the outdoors, however, are the saving grace of this otherwise very ordinary love story. Black continued to write verse and stories, but her household and wifely duties interfered with her writing. In 1949 her husband died, and Black turned to writing with a seriousness and energy not previously evident in her work. In the next few years she wrote

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her most highly acclaimed stories, ‘‘John, Forever Mine,’’ and ‘‘Another Hillside Vacation,’’ both solidly written, unsentimental looks at married life. Her first novel, By the Riverbank (1954), created little stir in the literary world, but one critic called it, ‘‘a thoughtful study of human jealousy and greed.’’ The book centers around a newlywed couple who have emigrated to England from France shortly before World War II. The tensions of living in a foreign land quickly create strong jealousies between the two young people, who are both aspiring writers. Sarah accuses her husband Stephen of involvement with the daughter of a neighboring farmer, and Stephen grows increasingly jealous as he realizes his wife’s creative talents are greater than his own. In By the Riverbank Black presents an interesting psychological study of a loving marriage that is nearly destroyed by jealousy. Black’s second novel, As the Crow Flies (1957), lacks the fine characterization found in her first novel. Here, Black tends to bog down in endless description of natural settings as she presents arguments in favor of ecological conservation. The story centers around a young girl growing up in New England, who witnesses the destruction of natural beauty around her: farms and waterways are destroyed as the metropolis of Boston spreads into the surrounding countryside. Although Black presents a convincing argument for conservation, the storyline is sacrificed to the novel’s message. Black’s work is characterized by poetic description and a keen eye for detail. Evidence of her early interest in poetry can be found in the graceful phrasing of her later prose works. Although not a major writer, Black deserves more recognition than she has hitherto received. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Good Housekeeping (13 May 1954). Life (March 1958). NYHTB (June 1954). NYT (16 May 1954, 23 May 1954). —MAUREEN MACDONALD

BLACKWELL, Alice Stone Born 14 September 1857, Orange, New Jersey; died 15 March 1950, Cambridge, Massachusetts Daughter of Henry Blackwell and Lucy Stone Alice Stone Blackwell was born into a unique family of reformers because the women were more distinguished than the men. Blackwell’s aunt, Elizabeth Blackwell, was the first woman in America to receive a medical degree; another aunt, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, was the first woman ordained as a minister by a recognized denomination in the U.S.; and her mother, Lucy Stone, was president of the country’s largest suffrage organization and publisher of its suffrage newspaper. The Blackwell family lived and worked for the cause of female equality. This made life difficult for Blackwell—shy,

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homely, and unsure, she was the only child of her demanding parents. In her youth, Blackwell had rebelled against the cause that demanded so much of her mother’s attention. But after graduation from Boston University, she gladly joined the suffrage ranks. For the next 35 years, she edited the Woman’s Journal, the longest running, widest circulating feminist newspaper. She solicited contributions, cajoled advertisers, and wrote copy. Her editorials, along with her numerous suffrage tracts and pamphlets, were coolly logical arguments for the enfranchisement of women. Those same arguments are found in the Woman’s Column, a fourpage collection of suffrage items also edited by Blackwell, sent weekly to 1,000 newspaper editors in the United States. Blackwell’s other contribution to suffragism was uniting the warring factions of the movement. The quarrel between the American Woman Suffrage Association, led by her parents, and the National Woman Suffrage Association of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had begun in 1870. The split was prompted by the problem of black versus woman suffrage. Although the problem had long been solved, the division remained. By 1890, personalities, not philosophies, separated the two factions. Blackwell, guided by her mother, brought them together in the National American Woman Suffrage Association. When Lucy Stone died in 1893, Blackwell took over the family business of suffrage and suffrage journalism. Her other reformist impulses, long suppressed in the atmosphere created by her parents, became visible. Blackwell put aside her causes long enough to write a laudatory biography of her mother. It was no doubt published to balance the bulk of suffrage history that Blackwell believed had been written by the Stanton-Anthony faction totally ignoring the contributions of the Blackwell family. Blackwell’s only brush with romance led her into another genre. In 1893, she met an Armenian theological student. She was entranced by him and his tales of the oppression of Armenia. When he died a few years later, Blackwell dedicated herself to his people, helping them find refuge in the U.S. She also translated the works of Armenian poets into English. A volume of these pieces, Armenian Poems, is heavily laced with patriotic outpourings. The offerings include ‘‘Let Us Live Armenians,’’ ‘‘Let Us Die Armenians,’’ ‘‘The Lament of Mother Armenia,’’ and ‘‘The Wandering Armenian to the Swallows.’’ Her interest in Armenian verse led Blackwell to translate poetry of other suppressed peoples. During her middle years, she published the verse of Russian, Yiddish, Hungarian, and Spanishspeaking writers. Although in the original these poems may have been inspired, the translations are not. This no doubt reflects the fact that Blackwell’s literary tastes and talents were extremely conventional. Blackwell’s support of socialism culminated the increasingly radical drift of her affiliations. Her first hesitant steps away from wholehearted adherence to suffragism had taken her to the Woman’s Christian Temperance Movement, the Anti-Vivisection Society, and the Woman’s Trade Union League. In later years she


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joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the American Peace Society, and the movement to save Sacco and Vanzetti. To the end of her life at the age of ninety-three, Blackwell’s concerns embraced America and Armenia, feminism and socialism.

OTHER WORKS: Songs of Russia (1906). Songs of Grief and Gladness (1906). The Yellow Ribbon Speaker (with A. H. Shaw and L. E. Anthony, 1909). The Little Grandmother of the Russian Revolution: Reminiscences and Letters of Catherine Breshkovsky (1917). A Hungarian Poet (1929). Some Spanish-American Poems (1929). Lucy Stone: Pioneer of Women’s Rights (1930). Growing Up in Boston’s Guilded Age: The Journal of Alice Stone Blackwell 1872-1874 (1991).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hays, E. R., Morning Star: A Biography of Lucy Stone (1961). Hays, E. R., Those Extraordinary Blackwells (1967). Howe, J. W., ed., Representative Women of New England (1904). Martin, J. L., Alice Stone Blackwell: Soldier and Strategist for Suffrage (1993). Rolka, G. M., 100 Women Who Shaped World History (1994). Reference works: Grolier Library of Women’s Biographies (1998). National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). —LYNNE MASEL-WALTERS

BLACKWELL, Antoinette Brown Born 20 May 1825, Henrietta, New York; died 5 November 1921, Elizabeth, New Jersey Daughter of Joseph and Abby Morse Brown; married Samuel Blackwell, 1856 Antoinette Brown Blackwell, the seventh of 10 children, grew up in a small town in New York. Valuing education, her parents sent her to the Monroe County Academy, where, with the exception of Greek, she quickly mastered the same subjects as the male students preparing for Dartmouth. The Brown family was deeply religious—Blackwell’s father was a Congregational deacon. At age nine, Blackwell publicly confessed her own religious faith and joined the Congregational church. In 1830 she attended Oberlin, the country’s only coed college. Despite parental objections, Blackwell persisted in following her brother into graduate study in theology. Her name was not listed among the students in the department, and she was denied a job teaching younger students to support herself. Although Blackwell completed her studies in 1850, she was not awarded a degree, and the faculty refused to arrange for her

ordination (belatedly she was granted the A.M. in 1878 and in honorary D.D. in 1908). Blackwell became a lecturer on abolition, temperance, and women’s rights. At Oberlin she had written an exegesis of 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 (‘‘Let your women keep silence in the churches. . .’’) and 1 Timothy 2:11-12 (‘‘I suffer not a woman to teach. . .’’), which the school’s president had published in the scholarly Oberlin Quarterly Review—followed by a counterargument by the school’s Bible professor. E. C. Stanton’s History of Woman Suffrage notes that at every early women’s rights convention ‘‘Antoinette Brown was called on as usual to meet the Bible argument.’’ Brown ‘‘made a logical argument on woman’s position in the Bible, claiming her complete equality with man, the simultaneous creation of the sexes, and their moral responsibilities as individual and imperative.’’ In 1853 Blackwell realized her dream of becoming the first woman ordained by a recognized denomination in this country. She became minister of First Congregational Church in Butler and Savannah, New York. Less than a year later, however, she was relieved of her duties ‘‘at her own request.’’ The difficulties of translating theology into the complexities of day-to-day interpersonal relationships got the better of her: she comforted a dying boy with God’s love rather than pressing him into a conversion experience through fear of hell; she refused to preach on infant damnation at the funeral of an illegitimate child. After Oberlin, Blackwell had tried to work in New York City at the Methodist Five Points Mission, but some there were offended by her outspoken feminism. In 1855 she returned to the city to work in the slums and prisons, because, as she said, ‘‘I pity the man or woman who does not choose to be identified with the cause of the oppressed.’’ She verbalized her social protest in Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, and the article series was later collected in Shadows of Our Social System (1856). For 18 years after her marriage in 1856, Blackwell rarely appeared on a public platform. She continued her writing, however, and completed two novels, A Market Woman (1870) and The Island Neighbors (1871). Unlike most fiction of the period, these are not moralistic in tone, but rather portray universal foibles. Blackwell also began to write a series for Lucy Stone’s Woman’s Journal on woman’s capacities and abilities to work, think, and learn, which were collected into The Sexes Throughout Nature (1875). In The Sexes Throughout Nature as well as in many other works, Blackwell wrestled to harmonize the new evolutionary hypothesis and its social implications, as expounded by Darwin and Spencer, with her own religious and social views. The Philosophy of Individuality (1893) represents her final attempt to write a cosmology reconciling mind and matter, revealing the ‘‘possible emergence of the Relative from the Absolute by the intervention of Beneficent and Rational Causation.’’ After her husband’s death in 1901, Blackwell helped to found All Souls’ Unitarian Church in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where she

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served as pastor emeritus from 1908 until her death. She continued faithfully to attend suffrage meetings, and on 2 November 1920, she became the only one of the original generation of women’s rights leaders to cast a vote under the 19th amendment.

OTHER WORKS: Studies in General Science (1869). The Physical Basis of Immortality (1876). Sex Injustice (1900). Sea Drift (1902). The Making of the Universe (1914). The Social Side of Mind and Action (1915). The papers of Antoinette Brown Blackwell are at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, and at the Library of Congress.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ashby, R. and D. G. Ohrn, Herstory: Women Who Changed the World (1995). Banwell, N., ‘‘Antoinette Brown Blackwell: An Individual Search for Religious Truth’’ (thesis, 1984). Cazden, E., Antoinette Brown Blackwell, A Biography (1983). Hays, E. R., Those Extraordinary Blackwells (1967). Kerr, L., Lady in the Pulpit (1951). Matthews, L. F., ‘‘Women in Ministry, 1853-1984’’ (thesis, 1985). Mermes, M. B., ‘‘Three Women of the Nineteenth Century: Studies in Transcendence— Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, Reverend Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Lucy Stone’’ (thesis, 1976). Siles, W. H., ed., Studies in Local History: Tall Tales, Folklore and Legend of Upstate New York (1986). Stanton, E. C. et al., History of Woman Suffrage (1881). Stone, L., Soul Mates: The Oberlin Correspondence of Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown, 1846-1850 (1983). Stone, L., Friends and Sisters: Letters Between Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown Blackwell, 1846-93 (1987). Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). A Woman of the Century, F. E. Willard and M. A. Livermore (1893). —NANCY HARDESTY

BLACKWELL, Elizabeth Born 3 February 1821, Counterslip, England; died 31 May 1910, Hastings, England Daughter of Samuel and Hannah Lane Blackwell Elizabeth Blackwell’s independence of thought, pioneer spirit, and reform interests were promoted in her parents’ home. She was the third daughter among nine children. When Blackwell was eleven, her father’s sugar refinery was lost by fire and the family sailed from England to settle first in New York City and later in New Jersey and Cincinnati, Ohio. Blackwell’s father was an active dissenter and lay preacher in the ‘‘Independent’’ church and was vitally concerned with social reform, the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, and temperance. Reformers such as William Lloyd Garrison were visitors to the Blackwell home and

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Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe were counted as friends in Ohio. In this liberal family atmosphere, the Blackwell daughters and sons received their education at home from private tutors. In 1847 Blackwell was refused admission to Harvard, Yale, Bowdoin, and medical schools in Philadelphia and New York City. Jefferson Medical College suggested she might attend classes disguised as a man, but Blackwell believed her moral crusade ‘‘must be pursued in the light of day, and with public sanction, in order to accomplish its end.’’ Finally, Geneva Medical College, an undistinguished rural school in New York, admitted Blackwell to study in November 1847. The 150 male students at Geneva had unanimously treated her application as a ‘‘joke’’ and Blackwell faced ridicule and discrimination in her classes. In the summer of 1848, however, she was given the opportunity to do work with patients at the Philadelphia Hospital of the Blockley Almshouse. There she treated typhus among Irish immigrants and became convinced of the need for sanitation and personal hygiene. Her convictions were recorded in her thesis, published in 1849 in the Buffalo Medical Journal and Monthly. In 1849, graduating at the head of her class, Blackwell became the first woman in America to earn a degree from a medical college. Eager to increase her medical knowledge, Blackwell set out for study in Europe after becoming a naturalized American citizen. In Paris she enrolled as a student midwife in La Maternité. There she contracted purulent ophthalmia and lost sight in one eye; all hopes of becoming a surgeon were dashed. During work in England, she began a lifelong friendship with Florence Nightingale and shared interests in sanitation and hygiene. In 1851 Blackwell returned to New York but faced serious difficulties in establishing a private practice. She turned to lectures and writing on good hygiene. ‘‘The Laws of Life, with Special Reference to the Physical Education of Girls,’’ published in 1852, drew a favorable response from Quakers. By 1853 Blackwell had a one-room dispensary in the tenement district of New York and in 1857 was renamed the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. Blackwell’s plans for a medical college for women were delayed by the Civil War, but in 1868 the Women’s Medical College was opened and Blackwell was appointed to the first chair of hygiene. Blackwell returned to England in 1869, leaving management of the infirmary and college to her sister. She resided there for the rest of her life with her adopted daughter. She established a successful practice in London and in 1871 helped found the National Health Society with the motto ‘‘Prevention is better than cure.’’ In 1875 she was awarded the chair of gynecology at the New Hospital and London School of Medicine for Women. Blackwell continued to write and lecture on moral reform. Her ‘‘Counsel to Parents on the Moral Education of Their Children’’ (1879) was rejected by 12 publishers as too controversial and had to be printed privately. In a plain and direct manner Blackwell argued that there was no physiological necessity for a double


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standard of morality, but Victorian England and America were shocked by her position.

BLAKE, Lillie Devereux

Blackwells’ attention focused on economic and social reform in her pamphlet Christian Socialism (1882). In this document she called for a more just distribution of income, improved efficiency in government, workers’ insurance, and the establishment of agrarian communities where women could play major roles.

Born 12 August 1833, Raleigh, North Carolina; died 30 December 1913, Englewood, New Jersey Also wrote under: Lillie Devereux Umsted Daughter of George and Sarah Johnson Devereux; married Frank Umsted, 1855; Grenfill Blake, 1866

Blackwell’s autobiography, Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women (1895), provides a vivid picture of the challenges she faced in her moral crusade. In the closing chapter she wrote of her ‘‘hope for the future: the study of human nature by women as well as men commences that new and hopeful era of the intelligent co-operation of the sexes through which alone real progress can be attained and secured.’’

For the first 25 years of Lillie Devereaux Blake’s writing career (1857-1882) she concentrated on fiction, publishing several novels and novellas and hundreds of short stories. After 1882, most of her published work took the form of essays and lectures on women’s rights.

OTHER WORKS: Essays in Medical Sociology (2 vols. 1892-1902). The Blackwell family papers are in the Library of Congress and the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. Letters from Elizabeth Blackwell to her friend Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon are in the Columbia University Library. Other letters and documents may be found in Fawcett Library, London; Sophia Smith Research Room, Smith College; Library of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York; Boston Public Library; New York Infirmary; Medical Library, St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London; Royal Free Medical School Library, London. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Fancourt, M., They Dared to Be Doctors: Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1965). Felder, D. G., The 100 Most Influential Women of All Time: A Ranking Past and Present (1996). Flexner, E., Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the U.S. (1975). Hays, E. R., Those Extraordinary Blackwells (1967). Lovejoy, E. P., Women Doctors of the World (1957). Morantz-Sanchez, R. ‘‘Feminist Theory and Historical Practice: Rereading Elizabeth Blackwell’’ in Feminists Revision History (1994). Robinson, V., Pathfinders in Medicine (1929). Ross, I., Child of Destiny; The Life Story of the First Woman Doctor (1949). Sahli, N. A., Elizabeth Blackwell, M.D., 1821-1910: A Biography (1982). Shearer, B. F. and Shearer, B. S., ed., Notable Women in the Life Sciences: A Biographical Dictionary (1996). Walsh, M. R., Doctors Wanted: No Women Need Apply: Sexual Barriers in the Medical Profession, 1835-1975 (1977). Weprin, J. G., ‘‘The Young Elizabeth Blackwell: Why She Became the First Woman to Graduate from an American Medical School’’ (thesis, 1992). Wilson, D. C., Lone Woman (1970). Wright, M., Elizabeth Blackwell of Bristol: The First Woman Doctor (1995). Other references: Elizabeth Blackwell: First Woman Doctor (video, 1997). —JEAN M. WARD

BLAISDELL, Anne See LININGTON, Elizabeth

Blake was born into a distinguished Southern family. When her father died in 1837, her mother moved to New Haven, Connecticut, where Blake attended a girls’ school and received private tutoring in the Yale undergraduate course. Mother and daughter were very close and remained so throughout their lives. When Blake debuted at age 17, she became renowned for her beauty and led a strenuous social life. In her writings she often refers to this period of her life, noting that she was taught to regard social success as the only worthwhile goal for a woman. ‘‘I was always a belle, flattered and fêted. I only wonder that I was not entirely ruined by an ordeal that would be pretty certain to turn the head of a fairly well-balanced man.’’ She portrays in her fiction many young women enfeebled by flattery, enforced idleness, and what she calls ‘‘false education.’’ In 1869 Blake became involved in the women’s rights movement, to which she devoted the rest of her life and most of her subsequent writings. From 1879 to 1890 she was president of the New York State Woman Suffrage Association and from 1886 to 1900 president of the New York City Woman Suffrage League. She was an excellent speaker, and her writings on women’s rights are remarkable for their wit and humor; they are often in the form of satire or parable. Blake ran for president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1900, but was forced to withdraw in favor of Susan B. Anthony’s choice, Carrie Chapman Catt. Blake’s philosophy and approach differed from Anthony’s in several respects. She was often true to her aristocratic background, expressing concern that suffrage workers be well-dressed, well-behaved ‘‘ladies,’’ and she inaugurated such events as the Pilgrim Mothers’ Dinners, held annually at the Waldorf-Astoria. More importantly, she believed suffrage was only one means of improving women’s status. As chair of NAWSA’s Committee on Legislative Advice, she advocated campaigning to secure legislation favorable to women and agitating for the appointment of women to new positions (e.g., school trustees, factory inspectors, physicians in mental hospitals, and police matrons). She was instrumental in achieving many of these gains in New York State. When Blake’s legislative committee was dissolved by NAWSA, she founded and became president of the National Legislative League. This organization carried on the legislative

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approach from 1900 until 1905, when illness prevented Blake from continuing her work. Although she avoids the worst excesses of the sentimental fiction of the times, Blake writes much to the general pattern. Spirited young women develop fatal fascinations for evil Lovelace types in her stories and may or may not be saved by their honorable suitors; young lovers are separated, reunited, and then part forever when they discover they are siblings. In Blake’s early writings, characters who espouse feminist sentiments are punished. For instance, in Southwold (1859), the protagonist, when rejected by a man she loves, becomes embittered and ‘‘bold and even unfeminine’’ in her opinions. She shocks other characters by not taking every word of the Bible literally and by claiming Christianity has harmed women’s status. The book ends with her suicide. Interestingly enough, Blake later was to espouse the opinions her protagonist had expressed. ‘‘Dogmatic theology, founded on masculine interpretation of the Bible,’’ was the subject of attack in her Woman’s Place To-Day (1883), a series of lectures delivered in response to a misogynist theologian. Blake was also one of the contributors to Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s controversial Woman’s Bible (1895). Blake’s last novel, Fettered for Life; or, Lord and Master (1874), is a feminist work in which wife abuse, unjust marriage laws, discrimination in employment, and lack of educational opportunities for women are illustrated and discussed by the characters. Female friendships are strong in the novel, and the ‘‘hero,’’ a successful reporter who frequently rescues the female characters, turns out to be a woman in disguise. When she adopted male attire, she found that ‘‘my limbs were free; I could move untrammelled, and my actions were free; I could go about unquestioned. No man insulted me, and when I asked for work, I was not offered outrage.’’ OTHER WORKS: Rockford; or, Sunshine and Storm (1863). Forced Vows; or, A Revengeful Woman’s Fate (1870). A Daring Experiment and Other Stories (1892). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Blake, K. D., and M. L. Wallace, Champion of Women: The Life of Lillie Devereaux Blake (1943). Stanton, E. C. et al., History of Woman Suffrage (1881). Reference works: NAW (1971). —BARBARA A. WHITE

BLAKE, Mary E(lizabeth) McGrath Born 1840, Dungarven, Ireland; died 1907, Boston, Massachusetts Wrote under: Marie of the Pilot, Mary Elizabeth McGrath Blake Daughter of Patrick and Mary Murphy McGrath; married John G. Blake, 1865; children: 11 Mary E. McGrath Blake’s parents emigrated to Quincy, Massachusetts, in about 1850. A marble worker and businessman,

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her father sent her to local schools and to Emerson’s Private School in Boston. Blake later studied music and modern languages at the Academy of the Sacred Heart in Manhattanville, New York. Before she married a Boston physician, she was a schoolteacher. The Blakes had eleven children. Blake’s poetry was widely published in Roman Catholic periodicals and in a number of Boston papers, including the Boston Gazette and the Boston Transcript. Her ‘‘Rambling Talks’’ were a regular feature in the Boston Journal. She was an ardent, sentimental Irish-American with conservative views about religion and American politics. Blake gained a local reputation as an occasional poet and she wrote poems to commemorate notable Bostonians such as Wendell Phillips, Admiral David Dixon Porter, and the Most Reverend John J. Williams, Archbishop of Boston. Blake also wrote poems to commemorate the Golden Jubilee of the Sisters of Charity and the 150th anniversary of the Charitable Irish Society. Oliver Wendell Holmes remarked of her lyrics, ‘‘You are one of the birds that must sing,’’ and Theodore Roosevelt was said to be an admirer of her work. Blake’s first book of poetry, Poems, was issued in 1882. Her themes range from Catholic devotion to nature and the seasons, but her most representative work celebrates family life. Several poems on the death of children depict the anxiety of the times about childhood mortality. Some poems reflect an ambivalent attitude toward women’s roles: ‘‘Simple Story’’ and ‘‘What the Wife’s Heart Said’’ urge women to be content serving their husbands and families, while ‘‘The Ballad of Elizabeth Zane’’ and ‘‘Isabella of Castille’’ clearly expresses admiration for spirited, independent women. Although conscientious about her obligations to home and family, Blake was an enthusiastic traveler who reminded her reader that a housewife must not stop to think of her responsibilities, or ‘‘the stay-at-home weight will be so overwhelming in proportion that she could not be propelled away by anything short of a catapult.’’ On the Wing, an account of her trip across America, serialized in the Boston Journal in 1882 and published in 1883, is a view of the American West through the eyes of a partisan New Englander. A Summer Holiday in Europe (1890), based on Blake’s five trips to Europe—three of them walking tours with her children—went into a third printing. Outside of her home and her work, Blake was active in the American Peace Society. Her pamphlet The Coming Reform: A Woman’s Word, which criticized ‘‘the absurdities of old fashioned militarism at home and abroad,’’ was widely circulated during the Spanish-American War.

OTHER WORKS: An Epic of Travel (1884). Poem: A Memorial of Wendell Phillips (1884). The Merry Months All (1885). Youth in Twelve Centuries (1886). Mexico: Picturesque, Political, Progressive (with M. F. Sullivan, 1888). Verses Along the Way


BLAND

(1890). A Memoir of Patrick McGrath 1812-1894 (1894). In the Harbour of Hope (1907). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Conway, K. E., ‘‘Mary Blake: Woman and Poet’’ in In the Harbour of Hope (1907). Cullen, J. B., Story of the Irish in Boston (1890). Other references: Boston Globe (7 Feb. 1907). PW (9 March 1907). —MAUREEN MURPHY

BLAND, Eleanor Taylor Born 31 December 1944, Boston Daughter of Leroy and Mildred Gershefski Taylor; married (divorced); Children: Kevin, Todd, two grandchildren Mystery writer Eleanor Taylor Bland is the author of a series of novels featuring the reported first African-American female police detective, Marti MacAlister. Bland’s works not only include the gritty detective work of her main character, but they also detail the personal life of this working woman and the problems she faces as trying to operate effectively in a traditionally male profession. Each of the novels delves into the dark secrets that lead to the murders of seemingly ordinary members of the community. They are filled with social comment and a grim look at the reality of the modern-day suburban/urban crime scene. Bland began her writing career after an early marriage at age fourteen to a sailor, rearing two children, and working various jobs with disabled and abused children. In 1972, after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, she pursued a college degree, which she completed in accounting and education. It was also at this time that she became determined to publish a book. The character of streetwise MacAlister was introduced in Dead Time (1992) as a recently widowed South Side Chicago police officer who moves with her children to suburban Lincoln Prairie, Illinois, and becomes a member of this small community’s police detective force. Investigating the mysterious flophouse murders of a wealthy, schizophrenic woman and a pair of potential witnesses leads her in search of some abandoned children who also saw the woman’s murder. The tense relationship of MacAlister with her white male partner and the plight of children in peril and the mentally ill are revealed by Bland in what critics called a ‘‘detached and often flat manner’’ and with ‘‘sensitivity and humor.’’ Bland’s next work Slow Burn (1993), continues the life of MacAlister with another social commentary surrounding the death of two medical workers killed in a clinic fire connected to a child pornography scheme. Issues of sexism, racism, and the ill treatment of children again are interlaced in the plot. This work was hailed for its strong and engaging character development, on the one hand, but panned for ‘‘overshadowing’’ the story with social issues.

Gone Quiet (1994) and Done Wrong (1995) reveal the more personal side of MacAlister’s sleuthing. In the first, she deals with the complexities of a scandal in a community held together by religion when she helps an old friend unravel the mysterious death of a Baptist deacon who is secretly a pedophile. The second novel finds MacAlister engaged in investigating the real circumstances and secrets surrounding the apparent suicide of her late Chicago police narcotics squad husband. Both works also explore the personal side of the main character’s life as she interacts with her children, her family, her friends, and the community and as she comes to grip with her loneliness as a widow. Critics found Bland’s writing low key and understated, but with keen insight and plenty of action. All of them agreed that the Marti MacAlister character was the cornerstone for all of Bland’s works. Two unrelated murder cases are linked together by another older case concerning the disappearance of a young abused girl in Keep Still (1996). This time Bland explores the evil that exists in a dysfunctional family as she exposes the realities of child abuse. Again the main character, Marti MacAlister, fascinates readers with her ability to seek justice and not lose her own humanity as she juggles her work with her personal relationships with her children and her new boyfriend. Called by Booklist’s Stuart W. Miller ‘‘her most sophisticated, complex and successful work yet,’’ See No Evil (1998) finds a psychopathic killer visiting the MacAlisters’ household and plotting to murder the entire family. At the same time, Marti and her partner struggle to solve the case of a young drug-addicted and abused girl’s murder, with Marti unaware of her family’s peril because of worrying about protecting her children and educating them about the real world. The counterpoints of the subplots of this novel heighten the suspense for the reader and established Bland as ‘‘one of today’s most talented mystery writers.’’ In Tell No Tales (1999), Marti finds herself newly married and in a new home. Her honeymoon is abruptly ended by the discovery of the dead body of an African-American woman who seems to have lost her life in the 1960s and the murder of a recluse in the basement of a building owned by his family. Marti and her partner, Vic, struggle with their own personal problems but eventually find a connection between the two murders. The complexity of the plot keeps the reader enthralled. In an article in the Chicago magazine, Bland said, ‘‘I want to write about things that matter.’’ She also stated, ‘‘. . .if you no longer look at the world exactly the way you looked at it before you read my book, that’s good enough.’’ As the life of Marti MacAlister continues to unfold, Bland achieves these goals. Her mysteries with a social conscience are engaging and enlightening. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA 166. Other works: Chicago (Feb. 1999). Booklist (1 June 1994, 1 June 1995, July 1996, 15 Dec. 1997, 1 Jan. 1999). Cogdill, O. H., ‘‘A Biography of Eleanor Taylor Bland,’’ in Sun-Sentinel South Florida (8 Apr. 1998, www.sun-sentinel.com/freetime/mysteries/ blandbio.htm, accessed April 7, 1998). LJ (Jan. 1998, Jan. 1999).

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PW (3 Feb. 1992, 14 June 1993, 13 June 1994, 15 May 1995, 27 May 1996, 22 Dec. 1997). —PAULA C. MURPHY

BLATCH, Harriot Stanton Born 20 January 1856, Seneca Falls, New York; died 20 November 1940, Greenwich, Connecticut Daughter of Henry Brewster and Elizabeth Cady Stanton; married William Henry Blatch, 1882 One of seven children of noted suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Harriot Stanton Blatch attended Vassar College. After a year in Europe (1880-81), she assisted her mother and Susan B. Anthony in preparing their History of Woman Suffrage. They had originally planned to deal only with the National Woman Suffrage Association, which the authors led, but Blatch urged inclusion of an account of the American Woman Suffrage Association. Her moderate treatment of this ‘‘Boston wing’’ of the movement appeared in Volume II of the History (1881) and contributed to ending the ‘‘internecine war’’ between the two leading groups in the suffrage movement. After marriage to William Henry Blatch, an English businessman, she lived 20 years in England where she knew such reformers as Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Ramsay MacDonald, G. B. Shaw, and Emmeline Pankhurst. She returned to the U.S. in 1902, and in 1907 organized the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women (later the Women’s Political Union), a group designed to draw nonprofessional women, especially women trade unionists, into the suffrage movement. This group increased the numbers and visibility of the suffragists. It organized the first suffrage parades (1910) so that ‘‘the enemy’’ could ‘‘see women marching in increasing numbers year by year out on the public avenues, holding high their banner, Votes for Women.’’ Blatch became convinced that the war which had broken out in Europe would advance the cause of equal rights for women. Her book, Mobilizing Woman-Power (1918), published with a laudatory introduction by Theodore Roosevelt, describes ‘‘German Kultur’’ as the enemy of freedom because it worships ‘‘efficiency, cramps originality and initiative’’ and is ‘‘unjust to women.’’ Always interested in the relation between economics and suffrage, Blatch notes that the war increased employment opportunities for women and consequently helped free them from ‘‘service for the love of service,’’ i.e., unpaid labor in the home. Payment, she felt, changes women’s status: with the ‘‘pay envelope’’ women are ‘‘welcome everywhere.’’ At the war’s end Blatch wrote A Woman’s Point of View: Some Roads to Peace (1920), which became a major contribution to ‘‘the library against all war.’’ She encouraged women to unite in preventing another such devastation and argued that just as women should be given a role in political decisionmaking, so too labor, formerly voiceless, should now be given a place in management.

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Blatch joined the Socialist Party in the 1920s and in 1924 endorsed Robert M. LaFollette’s presidential campaign. To the end of her life she was active in liberal causes. Her autobiography, Challenging Years (1940), gives a lively account of her political activities. Herein she notes that women ‘‘were the first group in history to be enfranchised before gaining their economic independence.’’ Because of her practical orientation and familiarity with the tactics employed by English suffrage leaders, she widened the appeal of the American suffrage movement in the early 20th century. OTHER TITLES: Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary and Reminiscences (ed. by Blatch with T. Stanton, 1922). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Flexner, E., A Century of Struggle (1959). Lutz, A., Created Equal (1940). Stanton, E. C., Eighty Years and More (1898). Reference works: Dictionary of American Biography, National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). —JANE BENARDETE

BLEECKER, Ann Eliza Schuyler Born October 1752, New York, New York; died 23 November 1783, Tomhanick, New York Daughter of Brandt and Margaret Van Wyck Schuyler; married John J. Bleecker, 1769; children: Margaretta Bleecker Faugeres Encouraged by her wealthy lawyer husband, Ann Eliza Schuyler Bleecker wrote steadily throughout her life, although much of her work was lost in manuscript. The couple settled in the wilderness at Tomhanick, where the sensitive Bleecker was subjected to Indian raids and the general isolation of the frontier. A series of disasters connected with General Burgoyne’s invasion in 1777 caused the deaths of her infant daughter, her mother, and her sister in rapid succession. Chronically depressed after these tragedies, she received an additional shock when her husband, active in the militia, was kidnapped by Tories in 1781 and by mere chance was rescued before being taken over the Canadian border. Bleecker’s declining physical and mental health was exacerbated by a disillusioning trip to war-ravaged New York after the peace in 1783, and she died in November. Her daughter, Margaretta Faugeres, prepared Bleecker’s work for posthumous publication in 1793. A narrative of sufferings undergone by captives during the French and Indian War, The History of Maria Kittle (1779), is presented as a ‘‘true history,’’ but the dramatic dialogue, psychological portraiture, and rounded plot of Bleecker’s version are possible only in fiction. Personifications and mythological references contrast strangely with events: ‘‘Ceres’’ presides over fields through which screaming Indians run, killing and tearing off scalps. The tomahawking of the pregnant Comelia, with details of


her cleft white forehead, the dead staring of her ‘‘fine azure eyes,’’ and the ripping out of her fetus and dashing it to pieces are unusually concrete, if grim, visualizations. Purple passages describe Maria’s sorrows as her abductors drag her to their allies in Montreal. The History has the virtue of its genuine and direct testimony of horror, unlike the sentimental and stylized fragment, Story of Henry and Ann. Bleecker’s poetry is derivative from earlier British authors, but purposely so in the neoclassical tradition. Of most value are her nature poems. ‘‘To Mr. Bleecker, on his passage to New York’’ is a long topographical piece in which Fancy takes a water journey down the Hudson, scenes of mountains and animals giving way to the first outcrops of civilization. Bleecker’s patriotic panegyric on the Hudson River valley shows great love of the land, the majesty of the natural setting, and the beauty of human life within it. ‘‘A Pastoral Dialogue’’ turns into a hymn to American industry and liberty, which are contrasted with the envy and barbarity of the British and Indians. Idealistic rural scenes of prosperity, static ‘‘word paintings’’ of peasants reliefed against a monumental and fertile landscape, are suddenly ablaze with the terrifyingly dynamic howls and murders of the attacking Indians. Desolation again brings stasis, but it is the unnatural silence of ashes and death. But the moral superiority of the sons of freedom revives their hope of victory. Not all Bleecker’s pastoral poetry is ideological; ‘‘Return to Tomhanick’’ is naturalistic, and ‘‘An Evening Prospect’’ displays a mystic and divine connection with nature, Wordsworthian in feeling if not in form. Poetic natural scenes are ubiquitous in her letters and prose, and her descriptions often evoke the idealistic landscape paintings of Cole or Doughty of the next century’s Hudson River School. The meditative narrative of Bleecker’s ‘‘Written in the Retreat from Burgoyne’’ shows an unresigned anguish over her daughter’s death, and her ‘‘naturally pensive’’ sensibility influenced her to write a number of elegies and thanatopses. In ‘‘A Prospect of Death,’’ death is a raging sea from which ‘‘Virtue’’ (on wings) may rescue her. The charnel-house imagery of ‘‘A Thought on Death’’ gives way to a more personal musing on her own dissolution in ‘‘Complaint,’’ ‘‘The Storm,’’ ‘‘Despondency,’’ and ‘‘Recollection.’’ But the inherent sprightliness of Bleecker’s imagination can be seen in many little ironic and satirical poems and passages. The best of these comic pieces is the mock journal in which Susan Ten Eyck’s fashionably frivolous day and neglect of her sister’s weighty letter is projected in Rape of the Lock style. Bleeker’s Letters, the remnants of her prolific correspondence, repeat the themes and motifs of her more formal work in a manner most likely to suit modern taste. In Bleecker’s work, there is a schizophrenic contrast between the idyllic Eden of her imagination, based upon love of nature, culture, intellect, and family, and the savage reality of treachery, war, death, isolation, anomy, and insanity that plagued her life. She could not adjust to the unfairness and incompletion of actual human existence. As a ‘‘good’’ woman of her era, she clung to the bulwarks of Divine Providence and family love for security and

BLOOMER

identity. These proved to be too feeble to counteract the harshness of fate. The struggle was not only against the outer world of frontier America but against the soul-destroying disillusionment of an inner nature too idealistic to accept sordid and savage reality: ‘‘Alas! the wilderness is within,’’ she wails. Her essential intellectual value resides in her biography. We read her work for the fascination of her personality and greater empathetic understanding of the trials undergone by the human and feminine spirit. OTHER WORKS: The Posthumous Works of Ann Eliza Bleecker (1793). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Faugeres, M., ‘‘Memoirs of Mrs. Ann Eliza Bleecker’’ in The Post-humous Works of A. E. Bleecker (1793). Griswold, R., The Female Poets of America (1848). Hendrickson, J., ‘‘Ann Eliza Bleecker: Her Life and Works’’ (Master’s thesis, Columbia Univ., 1935). Losche, L., The Early American Novel (1907). Munsell, J. The Annals of Albany (1855). Schuyler, G., Colonial New York (1885). Tyler, M., The Literary History of the American Revolution, 1763-1783 (1897). Reference works: Cyclopedia of American Literature (1855). DAB (1929). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). —L. W. KOENGETER

BLOOMER, Amelia Jenks Born 27 May 1818, Homer, New York; died 30 December 1894, Council Bluffs, Iowa Daughter of Ananias and Lucy Webb Jenks; married Dexter C. Bloomer, 1840 Amelia Jenks Bloomer’s parents were natives of Rhode Island. She received only a few years’ schooling at the district school in Courtland County, New York, but was evidently well enough educated to teach in another school when she was seventeen years old. Her husband, a lawyer and editor of the Seneca County Courier, encouraged her to contribute articles on social, political, and moral subjects to his paper. She also began to take an active part in the temperance movement, writing frequently for the Water Bucket, an organ of the temperance society of Seneca Falls, New York. She attended the first meeting on women’s rights held in Seneca Falls in 1848 but did not actively participate. In 1849 she began the publication of a periodical called Lily, writing on such subjects as temperance, education, unjust marriage laws, and woman suffrage. By 1853 Lily had a circulation of some 4,000 subscribers. It was the first newspaper owned, edited, and controlled by a woman and devoted solely to the interests of women. Through Lily she met Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. She also met Elizabeth Smith Miller, a cousin of Mrs. Stanton, who was the first to wear the short skirt and full Turkish trousers that came to be known as ‘‘bloomers.’’ Several of the women adopted the costume, finding it more comfortable, more

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sanitary, and better adapted to the active life they were leading than the corsets and voluminous skirts that were the fashion. They ceased wearing the costume only when they discovered their attire was distracting from the message of women’s rights. In 1852 Bloomer began lecturing on temperance and women’s rights, never speaking extemporaneously but always carefully writing out and delivering her speeches from manuscript. The following year her husband purchased an interest in the Western Home Visitor and the Bloomers moved to Mount Vernon, Ohio. She continued publishing Lily, served as assistant editor of the Western Home Visitor, a literary weekly with a fairly large circulation, and lectured occasionally. Early in 1855, when her husband decided to relocate in Council Bluffs, Iowa, it was necessary to cease publication of Lily, but she did not discontinue writing and speaking on behalf of temperance and women’s rights. She was instrumental in organizing the Iowa Woman’s State Suffrage Society and worked zealously for her church and community. As a writer Bloomer produced prose that was graceful, clear, and often infused with passion. Her early writings were devoted to temperance, imploring women to unite in that cause. Warning all those who supported it not to relax their vigilance, she wrote in one early essay: ‘‘Those who feel most secure will find to their dismay that the viper has only been crushed for a time, and will rise again upon his victim with a firmer and more deadly grasp than before.’’ In starting her journal she made it clear in her first editorial that ‘‘it is woman that speaks through Lily. . . .Like the beautiful flower from which it derives its name, we shall strive to make the Lily the emblem of ‘sweetness and purity’; and may heaven smile upon our attempt to advocate the great cause of Temperance reform!’’ Always a woman of strong opinions on almost every subject, she introduced herself to the readers of the Western Home Visitor by saying: ‘‘What I have been in the past, I expect to be in the future,—an uncompromising opponent of wrong and oppression in every form, and a sustainer of the right and the true, with whatever it may be connected.’’ The causes Bloomer advocated included employment and education for women. She considered the failure to educate women for meaningful occupations a serious ‘‘wrong’’ and insisted ‘‘parents do a great injustice to their daughters when they doom them to a life of idleness or, what is worse, to a life of frivolity and fashionable dissipation.’’ She considered, in fact, that the education of women might be a cure for some of the ills of the nation. Replying to an article on corruption in the state legislature, she demanded: ‘‘Where then shall the remedy for purifying and healing the nation be found? We answer, in the education and enfranchisement of woman! Loose the chains that bind her to the condition of a dependent, a slave to passion and the caprices of men. Open for her the doors of our colleges and universities and bid her enter. Hold up before her a pattern for womanly greatness and excellence and bid her to occupy the same positions held by her brothers.’’ Bloomer’s lecture on suffrage, written originally in 1852 and delivered and revised many times through the years, is perhaps

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one of the finest examples of the clear, forceful, and logical arguments presented in the cause. She ends this stirring speech by calling woman’s admission to the ballot box ‘‘the crowning right to which she is justly entitled’’ and states that ‘‘when woman shall be thus recognized as an equal partner with man in the universe of God—equal in rights and duties—then will she for the first time, in truth, become what her Creator designed her to be, a helpmeet for man. With her mind and body fully developed, imbued with a full sense of her responsibilities, and living in the conscientious discharge of each and all of them, she will be fitted to share with her brother in all of the duties of life; to aid and counsel him in his hours of trial; and to rejoice with him in the triumph of every good word and work.’’ It is indeed unfortunate Bloomer’s skill as a writer is overshadowed by the association of her name with a short-lived and ridiculed experiment in female attire.

OTHER WORKS: Life and Writings of Amelia Bloomer (ed. D. C. Bloomer; 1895).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography (1888). DAB (1929). A Woman of the Century (1893). —ELAINE K. GINSBERG

BLOOMFIELD-MOORE, Clara (Sophia) Jessup Born 16 February 1824, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 5 January 1899, London, England Wrote under: Clara Moore, Clara Jessup Moore, Clara Moreton, Mrs. H. O. Ward Daughter of Augustus Edward and Lydia Eager Mosley Jessup; married Bloomfield Haines Moore, 1842 Clara Jessup Bloomfield-Moore was raised in an atmosphere of good breeding, charity, and devotion to learning. She was educated at Westfield Academy and at Mrs. Merrick’s School in New Haven, Connecticut. After her marriage to a Philadelphia Quaker, she and her husband joined their efforts in civic and philanthropic causes. Her dedication to a life of social duty continued throughout her career, both in her writing and in her private pursuits; income from her publishing was always consigned to charities and related concerns. After her husband’s death, Bloomfield-Moore emigrated to London, where she maintained her ties to the literary world. In a climate of security, based on wealth, gracious living, and good works, writing was the natural pursuit of a society woman of leisure and position, a genteel way of living a useful life. With the


publication of several prize-winning stories and novellas written under pen names, Bloomfield-Moore found herself a public figure and a member of the Philadelphia literary circle. Following these successes, her Philadelphia home became a retreat and salon for the literary figures of the day. Her output of fiction and poetry spans a period of 40 years, featuring such titles as On Dangerous Ground: A Romance of American Society (1876), ‘‘The Estranged Hearts,’’ and ‘‘The Hasty Marriage.’’ These are now considered to be light, sentimental works of a topical and period-piece nature. Bloomfield-Moore’s observations, advice, rulings, and ideology in the field of etiquette had the greatest interest and the most enduring appeal. In 1873 she anonymously published an article entitled ‘‘Some Unsettled Points of Etiquette’’ in Lippincott’s Magazine. In this piece she posed the basic problem of American manners: the lack of a uniformly established or accepted code applicable to every region and reach of society, one which can be relied on as a standard of common courtesy. In this context, Bloomfield-Moore cited classic cases of the wide variations of custom between American cities, regions, and generations. The articulation of this perplexing difficulty is a key statement in the history of American sociability. Bloomfield-Moore’s own compilation, Sensible Etiquette of the Best Society (1878), was published under the pen name of Mrs. H. O. Ward. It soon became the most popular and authoritative text of manners after the reigning standard, Mary Elizabeth Sherwood’s Manners and Social Usages. Bloomfield-Moore’s handbook, written for the generation of the new rich in the postCivil War era, provides a fully detailed account—both real and ideal—of the rise to elegance and the aspiration (or pretension) to European manners. This book was one of many produced in a period of American social history influenced by European ‘‘civilized elegance.’’ The upwardly mobile classes looked to writers like Bloomfield-Moore to create the image, if not the reality, of good breeding appropriate to those entering society life for the first time. In Sensible Etiquette of the Best Society, Bloomfield-Moore was obviously of the ‘‘ethics-and-character’’ school of manners, believing, in contrast to more secular pragmatists like Mrs. Sherwood, that the fundamental purpose of manners is to create and sustain good moral character. Bloomfield-Moore extended this thesis on a decidedly religious set of values, attributing to etiquette the role of making possible a truly Christian civilization by encouraging a ‘‘spiritual existence’’ for the ‘‘happiness of our earthly home.’’ In a later work, Social Ethics and Society Duties: Through Education of Girls for Wives and Mothers and for Professions (1892), Bloomfield-Moore’s view of learning as necessary for the progress of women reinforces the image of a good society founded on an education in good behavior. OTHER WORKS: Tight Times; or, The Diamond Cross and Other Tales (1855). Miscellaneous Poems, Stories for Children, The Warden’s Tale, and Three Eras in a Life (1875). The Young

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Lady’s Friend (reissue of E. Farrar’s 1836 title, 1880). Gondaline’s Lesson. . . and Other Poems (1881). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Female Prose Writers of America (1852). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). A Woman of the Century (1893). Other references: Lippincott’s Magazine (March 1873). NYT (6 Jan. 1899). —MARGARET J. KING

BLUME, Judy Born 12 February 1938, Elizabeth, New Jersey Daughter of Rudolph and Esther Rosenfeld Sussman; married John Blume, 1959 (divorced); Thomas Kitchens, 1976 (divorced); George Cooper, 1987; children: Randy Lee, Lawrence Andrew. Best known for her realistic fiction for adolescents, Judy Blume is one of the most popular authors in the contemporary history of children’s books. She creates frank, straightforward stories that focus characteristically on the immediate social and emotional concerns of her mainly female characters. Her taboo-breaking books address topics like menstruation, wet dreams, and premarital sex, but Blume also writes of friendship, divorce, peer group approval, religion, and death. Blume’s books accurately, honestly, and with great earnestness capture the speech, emotions, and private thoughts of adolescents. Blume received a B.A. from New York University (1960). Her earliest books were the result of her participation in a graduate writing course. The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo (1969), a picture book, involves a second grader who feels neglected by his family until he lands a part in his school play. Iggie’s House (1970) deals with the impact of a black family moving into an all-white neighborhood. When both books met a cool reception from reviewers, Blume decided to write a book about adolescence based on her vivid memories of her own sixth grade experience. The resulting book, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (1970), explores a young girl’s private thoughts about the onset of menstruation, her acceptance by a new peer group, and her struggle to find a religion. Blume’s almost complete recall of how it felt to be young spoke directly to readers and the book was immediately successful. Although it stirred some controversy among parents, librarians, and teachers for its unflinchingly honest treatment of a topic like menstruation, the book made Blume’s reputation: hundreds of letters from preteen girls attested to the fact that they identified with Margaret. Blume’s books address subjects that children’s books tend to disregard, leading critics to label her an issue-oriented author, an author of ‘‘problem novels.’’ Despite her critics, Blume believes there is nothing one should not or cannot tell a child. ‘‘I don’t care about rules and regulations of writing for children,’’ Blume has commented. ‘‘My responsibility to be honest with my readers is

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my strongest motivation.’’ Many of Blume’s books are about coping with difficult situations. Told in the first person, they foster a strong sense of intimacy and immediacy, convincing the reader Blume writes the truth about what kids think and feel. Then Again, Maybe I Won’t (1971) deals with a twelve-year-old’s budding sexual identity; It’s Not the End of the World (1972) documents the effects of divorce on a preteen girl; in Deenie (1973) a seventh grader copes with scoliosis; while Blubber (1974) is the story of a fat girl who becomes the target of ridicule in her class. Forever (1975), a book consistently placed on censored lists, explicitly details the joy and frustration of a first sexual relationship; a young girl in Tiger Eyes (1981) struggles to overcome grief after her father’s violent death; and Just as Long as We’re Together (1987) depicts teenage girls grappling with friendship and other issues. Blume leavens the seriousness of her often heavy-handed ‘‘problem’’ books with humorous dialogue and wit, while her books for younger readers include humor in the broad, sometimes slapstick manner many kids find so appealing. Tales of A Fourth Grade Nothing (1972) and Superfudge (1980) relate the hilarious stories of ten-year-old Peter and the antics of his mischievous little brother Fudge. Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great (1972), a story of overcoming fears, delights with its funny verbal sparring and the outrageous lies children tell to impress each other. Fudgea-Mania (1990) features Peter as well as Sheila Tubman, otherwise known as ‘‘Sheila the Great.’’ While their families share a summer vacation house, Peter and Sheila have great fun being enemies. The popularity of the Fudge and Sheila books led to a television series on ABC (1994-96) and CBS (1997). Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing had sold more than six million copies by 1996, making it the third highest-selling children’s trade paperback. It also was staged by the Kennedy Center for a national tour beginning in 1998. In her career as an author of children’s books, Blume has achieved both unprecedented popularity and fierce criticism, primarily for the content of her books rather than their execution. Reviewers have commended her for her close observation of childhood, for the honesty and lack of condescension with which she writes, for her warm sense of humor, and for her courage in breaking taboos and convention. Her critics cite flawed character development, permissive attitudes, the use of issues as starting points for creative writing, uninhibited language, thin narrative, and a lack of social consciousness. Most agree, however, that she has made reading easy and agreeable for many children. Her ability to communicate with her audience has endeared her to a loyal readership, and she receives thousands of letters a month from them. The most moving of these are collected in Letters to Judy (1986). On her website (www.judyblume.com), Blume encourages readers and fans to leave her messages and offers information about her books and their creation. Blume has also written books for adults, some of whom may have first discovered her as children reading her books. Summer Sisters (1998) traces the friendship between dissimilar women during 20 summers, beginning when they are twelve-year-old girls, while Smart Women (1983) explores the complicated relationships among two divorced friends and their teenage daughters

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when one woman falls in love with her friend’s ex-husband. Wifey (1978) was Blume’s first novel for adults. The sensitive, often controversial themes of Blume’s children’s books have not dampened their popularity but have limited their use in the classroom and restricted their presence in some libraries. Criticism of her books has been softened by society’s greater openness to discussions about adolescent sexuality and peer relationships since her first books were published in the early 1970s. In 1996 Bloom received the American Library Association’s Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement. She remains an active spokesperson for the National Coalition Against Censorship, is the founder and trustee of the charitable and educational foundation Kids Fund, and is a board member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. By 1998 her books had been translated into 20 languages and had sold more than 65 million copies. OTHER WORKS: Freckle Juice (1971). Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself (1977). The Judy Blume Diary (1981). The Pain and the Great One (1984). The Judy Blume Memory Book (1988). Here’s To You, Rachel Robinson (1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Rees, D., ed., The Marble in the Water (1980). Smith, S. N., ‘‘Father Doesn’t Know Best Anymore: Realism and the Parent in the Junior Works of Judy Blume, E. L. Konigsburg, and Richard Peck’’ (thesis, 1981). Reference works: CA 29-32 (1978). CANR 13 (1984). CLC 12 (1980), 30 (1984). DLB 52 (1986). MTCW (1991). TCCW, 3rd ed. (1989). Other references: Elementary English (Sept. 1974). HB (Jan./ Feb. 1985). SL (May 1987). NYTBR (16 Nov. 1997, 19 July 1998). —CAROLYN SHUTE, UPDATED BY JANETTE GOFF DIXON

BLY, Nellie See SEAMAN, Elizabeth Cochrane

BOGAN, Louise Born 11 August 1897, Livermore Falls, Maine; died 4 February 1970, New York, New York Daughter of Daniel Joseph and Mary Shields Bogan; married Curt Alexander, 1916 (died 1920); Raymond Holden, 1925 (divorced 1937); children: one daughter Louise Bogan was educated at Mount St. Mary’s Academy in Manchester, New Hampshire, the Boston Girls’ Latin School, and for a year at Boston University. Her first husband, an army officer, died in 1920, shortly after the birth of their daughter, Bogan’s only child. Her second husband was a poet and, from 1929 to 1932, managing editor of the New Yorker; the couple was divorced in 1937. For most of Bogan’s adult life her home was New York City.


Reluctant to offer details about her personal life, Bogan valued privacy and close friendships. Published letters to Edmund Wilson, Rolfe Humphries, Morton Zabel, Theodore Roethke, May Sarton, and others reveal a warm, witty, spontaneous side of Bogan, not often evident in her poetry. They also refer to recoveries from nervous breakdowns in 1931 and 1933, as well as to the severe difficulties she experienced in the mid-1930s supporting herself by writing. Besides poetry, Bogan wrote some fiction and collaborated on translations from German and French. Two volumes of her criticism consist mainly of articles and reviews from Nation, Poetry, Scribner’s, Atlantic Monthly, and the New Yorker, for which she was a regular reviewer of poetry from March 1931 to December 1968. While Bogan advocated primarily formal poetry—in Eliot’s words, ‘‘verse as speech’’ and ‘‘verse as song’’—her critical judgment was far from orthodox. She opposed women’s attempts to imitate ‘‘a man’s rougher conduct’’ in life and art, observing that there were no authentic women Surrealists, since Surrealism’s ‘‘frequent harsh eroticism, its shock tactics, and its coarse way with language, comes hard to women writers, whose basic creative impulses usually involve tenderness and affection.’’ The younger women poets she praised were, in following Moore, ‘‘close but detached observers of the facts of nature,’’ able to ‘‘display a woman’s talent for dealing intensely and imaginatively with the concrete.’’ The qualities most frequently cited in Bogan’s poetry are those her friend Léonie Adams noted in a 1954 review of Collected Poems: firmness of outline, prosodic accomplishment in traditional metrics, purity of diction and tone, concision of phrase, and concentrated singleness of effect. Allen Tate, Ford Madox Ford, and Roethke compared her lyrics to those of the Elizabethan metaphysical mode. Abjuring free verse and experimental forms, Bogan worked in consciously controlled lyric form with a restraint and precision which contained passionate feeling. ‘‘Minor art,’’ she wrote, ‘‘needs to be hard, condensed and durable.’’ A few critics of her work have found that control scrupulous to the point of limitation and perhaps the result of unwillingness to reveal herself entirely. There is a clear distancing of poet from subject in the early works of Dark Summer (1929); and in all but a few poems Bogan objectifies responses to experience and ideas through the use of third person or of a persona. Bogan’s greatest skill lies in metric variation and in rendering descriptions in taut language whose sound values are brilliant yet seemingly effortless as in ‘‘Night,’’ ‘‘Song for the Last Act,’’ ‘‘Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral,’’ ‘‘Roman Fountain,’’ ‘‘After the Persian.’’ The subject matter of Bogan’s poetry includes love, loss, grief, mutability, the struggle of the free mind, marriage, and dream. There is no mention of the city or society; settings and imagery are drawn from nature—the country or sea, seasons and storms. Landscape and weather are sometimes menacing as in ‘‘The Flume,’’ where autumn can be a positive, glowing season of endings. There is tension between passion of mind and flesh in

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early poems such as ‘‘The Alchemist’’ and ‘‘Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom,’’ where the earth and love triumph over intellect. There is also a recurrent interest in women: struggling to maintain a free mind and independent being (‘‘Sonnet,’’ ‘‘The Romantic,’’ ‘‘For a Marriage,’’ ‘‘Betrothed’’); failing to imagine and risk (‘‘Women’’); breaking into fury and madness (‘‘The Sleeping Fury,’’ ‘‘Evening in the Sanitarium’’); experiencing love and surviving its endings (‘‘Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom,’’ ‘‘Fifteenth Farewell,’’ ‘‘My Voice Not Being Proud,’’ ‘‘Portrait’’). Adrienne Rich has justly called attention to ‘‘the sense of mask, of code, of body-mind division, of the ‘sleeping fury’ beneath the praised, severe, lyrical mode.’’ Bogan received many awards for her poetry, among them the Bollingen Prize in poetry (shared with Léonie Adams) for Collected Poems in 1955; the Academy of American Poets Award in 1959; and in 1967 one of five awards of the National Endowment for the Arts to ‘‘distinguished senior American writers.’’ She was a Fellow in American Letters at the Library of Congress in 1944, and from 1945 to 1946 held the Chair of Poetry. She was elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1952) and of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1968). OTHER WORKS: Body of this Death (1923). The Sleeping Fury (1937). Poems and New Poems (1941). Achievement in American Poetry, 1900-1950 (1951). Selected Criticism (1955). The Glass Bees by Ernst Juenger (trans. by Bogan, 1961). Elective Affinities by Goethe (trans. by Bogan, 1963). The Journal of Jules Renard (trans. by Bogan with E. Roget, 1964). The Golden Journey: Poems for Young People (ed. by Bogan with W. J. Smith, 1965). The Blue Estuaries: Poems, 1923-1968 (1968). A Poet’s Alphabet: Reflections on the Literary Art and Vocation (eds. R. Phelps and R. Limmer, 1970). The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe (trans. by Bogan, 1971). Novella by Goethe (trans. by Bogan, 1971). What the Woman Lived: Selected Letters of Louise Bogan, 1920-70 (ed. R. Limmer, 1973). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bowles, G. L., ‘‘Suppression and Expression in Poetry by American Women: Linda Bogan, Denise Levertov and Adrienne Rich’’ (dissertation, 1976). Couchman, J., ‘‘Linda Bogan: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Materials, 1915-1975: Parts I-II’’ in BB 33 (1976). Olson, E., ‘‘Linda Bogan and Léonie Adams’’ in ChiR 8 (Fall 1954). Perlmutter, E. P., ‘‘Doll’s Heart: The Girl in the Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Linda Bogan’’ in TCL 23 (May 1977). Ramsay, P., ‘‘Linda Bogan’’ in Iowa Review 1 (1970). Roethke, T., ‘‘The Poetry of Linda Bogan’’ in MAQR 67 (Aug. 1960). Smith, W. J., Linda Bogan: A Woman’s Words (1971). Woodard, D., This More Fragile Boundary: The Female Subject and the Romance Plot in the Texts of Millay, Wylie, Teasdale, Bogan (dissertation, 1993). —THEODORA R. GRAHAM

BOLTON, Isabel See MILLER, Mary Britton

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BOLTON, Sarah Knowles Born 15 September 1841, Farmington, Connecticut; died 21 February 1916, Cleveland, Ohio Also wrote under: Sarah Knowles Daughter of John Segar and Elizabeth Miller Knowles; married Charles Edward Bolton, 1866 Sarah Knowles Bolton traced her ancestry to the New England colonists. After her father’s death in 1852, she moved with her mother to an uncle’s house in Hartford, Connecticut. There Bolton met Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lydia Sigourney, both lasting influences. Bolton’s poetry appeared in Waverly Magazine when she was fifteen. Following her graduation from the Hartford Female Seminary in 1860, she taught in Natchez, Mississippi. The outbreak of the Civil War, however, sent her home to keep school in Meriden, Connecticut. Her first book, Orlean Lamar, and Other Poems (1864), published when she was twenty-three, received mixed reviews. Wellesley (1865), a novel about the Hungarian patriot Kossuth, was serialized in the Literary Recorder a year later. In 1866 Bolton and her husband settled in Cleveland, Ohio, where they became deeply involved in the Woman’s Temperance Crusade. As assistant corresponding secretary of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Bolton publicized the Union’s goals and wrote a history of the crusade for the centennial temperance volume. In 1874 she brought out a novel on the temperance theme entitled The Present Problem, but only 250 copies were sold. In 1873 Charles Bolton lost his real estate business in the financial panic. Their struggle to repay his debts spurred Bolton’s developing career as a journalist and author. From 1878 to 1881, she served as an editor of the Boston paper, The Congregationalist. While accompanying her husband on business trips to England in 1878 and 1881, she investigated women’s higher education and factory working conditions. In 1883 she presented her findings on British labor relations in an influential paper delivered before the American Social Science Foundation. Bolton published two other books of poetry, From Heart and Nature (1887, written with her son Charles Knowles Bolton), and The Inevitable, and Other Poems (1895). Her fiction includes Stories from Life (1886). The literary value of these works is obscured by their didacticism and sentimentality. Bolton’s real talents lay in journalism and reform, two fields which coalesced in her series of biographies for children. Collected under titles such as Famous Men of Science (1889), Lives of Poor Boys Who Became Famous (1885), and Lives of Girls Who Became Famous (1886; Bolton recognized that femininity was as great an obstacle as poverty), these studies were written in a straightforward, vigorous style. The books sold well in the U.S. and several were reprinted in England. Toward the end of her life, Bolton added animal welfare to a list of humanitarian interests which included labor relations, woman suffrage, temperance, and higher education. While Bolton’s

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books shed light on 19th- century reform movements and the rise of popular education, they are perhaps most valuable to students of women’s history. In Some Successful Women (1888), Famous Leaders Among Women (1895), and other collections, Bolton demonstrates that a woman can win self-respect and worldly fame through intelligence and hard work. Like the fictional Horatio Alger stories, these biographies stress the importance of education, discipline, and self-reliance. According to them, the rapidly changing modern world offers many opportunities for the selfmade woman, and stands to benefit from her humanizing influence. Yet Bolton’s work reveals the strain of reconciling traditional female roles with ambition and leadership. In presenting individual women as models, she carefully balances their ‘‘masculine’’ achievements with ‘‘feminine’’ qualities: self-sacrifice, piety, sympathy. Mary Livermore’s career, for example, ‘‘illustrates the work a woman may do in the world, and still retain the truest womanliness.’’ Helen Hunt Jackson will be remembered because ‘‘she forgot self and devoted her strength to the cause of others.’’ Bolton’s championship of intellectual training, economic independence, and assertive roles for women, however, is much more vigorous than her dutiful nods to the ‘‘cult of true womanhood.’’ Her deeper feelings about a woman’s proper role appear in her portrayal of male/female relations. While convention requires her repudiation of George Eliot’s unmarried living arrangement with George Henry Lewes, Bolton goes on to present a laudatory portrait of their relationship, noting especially Lewes’s support of Eliot’s career. Her study of the Brownings also stresses their equality and mutual respect: ‘‘Their marriage was an ideal one. Both had a grand purpose in life. Neither individual was merged in the other.’’ Bolton’s treatment of women who preferred to remain single is equally sympathetic. Bolton encouraged young women to take themselves—their minds and their ambitions—seriously. While she showed women could achieve success in fields such as medicine, literature, education, art, and politics, she also reassured her audience that ‘‘true’’ womanliness and professionalism were compatible. Men, she argued, preferred educated, independent women—it was a ‘‘libel’’ on the sex to think otherwise. Although Bolton’s skills as a publicist may have gained the upper hand, her optimistic vision bolstered feminine resolve. Her biographies of strong, fully realized women gave American girls crucial models on which to pattern their lives. OTHER WORKS: Facts and Songs for the People. Prepared Specially for Use in the Blaine and Logan Campaign (1884). How Success is Won (1885). Social Studies in England (1886). Famous American Authors (1887). Famous American Statesmen (1888). Ralph Waldo Emerson (1889). Famous English Authors of the Nineteenth-Century (1890). Famous European Artists (1890). Famous English Statesmen of Queen Victoria’s Reign (1891). Famous Types of Womanhood (1892). Famous Voyagers and Explorers (1893). Famous Leaders Among Men (1894). Nuggets; Or, Secrets of Great Success (with F. T. Wallace, 1895). Famous Givers and Their Gifts (1896). The Story of Douglas (1898). Every-day Living (1900). Our Devoted Friend the Dog (1902). Charles E. Bolton; A Memorial Sketch (1907). Sarah K. Bolton;


BOMBECK

Pages from an Intimate Autobiography, Edited by Her Son (1923). What to Read and How to Write (n.d.). Selections from the Journal or Diary of the Late Sarah Knowles Bolton, 1894-1915 (1936).

trust in God and live for the joy of the day but uncomplainingly accept life’s disappointments (‘‘When It Rains, Let It Rain’’). She was also a supporter of women’s rights. Her best known poem, ‘‘Paddle Your Own Canoe,’’ argues for a sturdy independence and self-trust.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bolton, C. K., The Boltons in Old and New England (1890). Reference works: National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1892 et seq.). A Woman of the Century, F. E. Willard and M. A. Livermore (1893).

In her lifetime, Bolton was much praised. Her fellow Hoosier writers Lew Wallace and James Whitcomb Riley thought highly of her work, and William Cullen Bryant included ‘‘Left on the Battlefield,’’ a trite and extremely sentimental poem, in his selection of the 50 finest war poems ever written. In 1941, a plaque honoring her was placed in the rotunda of the Indiana capitol building. Almost completely forgotten today, in her life and work Bolton epitomized the contradictions of an intelligent and thoughtful woman of the 19th-century Midwest who was a child of the frontier and a world traveler, who managed to hold concurrently both radical and conventional ideas, and who achieved success and fame while never being considered unwomanly.

—SARAH WAY SHERMAN

BOLTON, Sarah T(ittle Barrett) Born 18 December 1814, Newport, Kentucky; died 4 August 1893, Indianapolis, Indiana Daughter of Jonathan B. and Esther Pendleton Barrett; married Nathaniel Bolton, 1831 Sarah T. Bolton published her first poem at the age of fourteen and continued writing during most of her life. During her travels, including four trips to Europe, she was a voluminous letter writer, and she twice tried her hand at fiction (one novel was written when she was sixteen and then destroyed; in her last year, she returned to the form, beginning a religious novel). But her preferred form was verse, and it was as a poet that she achieved fame. Although she was versatile in her use of poetic forms and sometimes inventive in rhyming, her poetry today seems to be characterized by its sentimentality, triteness, and excesses of diction, while her rhythms often approach doggerel. A number of Bolton’s poems deal with places visited on her European travels (for example, ‘‘A Day at Ouchy, on Lake Leman,’’ ‘‘Leaving Switzerland,’’ and ‘‘To the Arve at Its Junction with the Rhone’’). She apotheosized such political and literary heroes as Charles George Gordon, the Girondists, veterans of the Mexican War, Edgar Allan Poe, Hawkeye Burdette (a contemporary comic writer), and John Howard Payne (writer of ‘‘Home Sweet Home’’). She also composed many poems to and about friends. Still other poems praised frontier life and pioneers. ‘‘Indiana,’’ which compares the state favorably to many storied places, was formerly extremely popular throughout that state. Bolton’s most interesting poems today, however, are those which reveal her awareness of injustice and her hatred of oppression. A number of poems touch on the need for political freedom; and she created many pathetic portraits of the poverty-stricken, especially children. She argued against capital punishment in ‘‘The Doomed Anarchists’’ and praised those such as Martin Luther who have had the courage to defy received opinion. Her most frequent tones are indignation (in the poems of social protest), sentimentality (in narrative poems), rhapsodic praise (in poems on places and on nature), and happy idealism (in poems on pioneers and Indiana, and in those in which she predicts the future). Bolton’s personal philosophy seems to have been to

OTHER WORKS: Poems (1865). The Life and Poems of Sarah Tittle Bolton (1880). Songs of a Life-Time (1892). Paddle Your Own Canoe and Other Poems (1897).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Downing, O. I., Indiana’s Poet of the Wildwood (1941). Wallace, L., ‘‘Sketch of Mrs. Sarah Tittle Bolton’’ in Paddle Your Own Canoe and Other Poems (1897). Reference works: American Women (1897). A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors (1858-1871). Dictionary of American Biography. National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: ‘‘The Life of Sarah T. Bolton’’ in The Life and Poems of Sarah T. Bolton (1880). Impressions of Indiana: Sarah T. Bolton. (audiocassette, 1993). —MARY JEAN DEMARR

BOMBECK, Erma (Louise) Born 21 February 1927, Dayton, Ohio; died 22 April 1996, San Francisco, California. Daughter of Erma and Cassius Fiste; married William Bombeck, 1949; children: Betsy, Andrew, Matthew. ‘‘Mostly I worry about surviving,’’ Erma Bombeck wrote in the introduction to one of her books. ‘‘Keeping up with the times in a world that changes daily. Knowing what to keep and what to discard. What to accept and what to protest. That is what this book is about. Surviving.’’ Bombeck taught her readers, mostly housewives, to survive boredom, frustration, and alienation through laughter, exaggeration, truth, parody, and sarcasm.

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The product of a secure, middle class family, Bombeck found her life changed in 1936 when her father died suddenly. Her young mother and nine-year-old Erma moved into one bedroom of her grandmother’s home. As a growing child, Bombeck interpreted her mother’s preoccupation with work and her later remarriage as desertion. She reconsidered as an adult, and the cruel self-centeredness of children recurs as a theme in her writing. Because she was a shy child, her mother enlisted her in tap-dancing lessons. Bombeck developed a stage presence and remained a local radio performer, singing and tapping, for almost eight years. Bombeck’s writing career began with a humor column for the junior high school newspaper. During high school she contributed to the newsletter at the department store where she worked. She started secretarial courses after high school and worked at the Dayton Herald as a copy girl. She studied at Ohio University in Athens until her money ran out, went back to work, and entered the University of Dayton, where William Bombeck was also a student. Upon graduation (1949) the Dayton Herald hired her as a reporter. Her marriage in 1949 and the subsequent plunge into suburban tract housing became the building blocks of her writing. Leaving her job to stay home with her children, Bombeck became aware of the people around her. In the 1950s a child-filled home in a suburban tract was advertised as the family dream. Bombeck knew the isolation that came with the mortgage and subsequently wrote about it. For many years her syndicated columns targeted child rearing, marriage, friends, cups of coffee, car pools, pets, holidays, and common worry. The house-bound housewives read and realized they were not alone. Although other female writers wrote humorously about being a housewife, Bombeck was the first to focus on middle class women living in the new suburbs. In 1963, Bombeck started a weekly column for the KetteringOakwood Times. Two years later, in 1965, she was offered two columns a week at the Dayton paper. Three weeks later her column was acquired by the Newsday syndicate. Through a much wider audience, Bombeck’s column flourished and she published a number of humorous books throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Beginning in 1979, Bombeck had been named annually to the list of 25 Most Influential Women in America by The World Almanac. She held 15 honorary doctorates, was a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, and was the first woman named to the American Academy of Humor Columnists. She was appointed to the President’s Advisory Committee for Women in 1978 and was grand marshal of the 1986 Rose Bowl Parade. By the 1990s Bombeck was writing her ‘‘At Wit’s End,’’ column and filling three television slots each week from the family’s Paradise Valley, Arizona, home. She had also served as a commentator on ABC’s Good Morning America for 11 years, beginning in 1975. As William Bombeck retired from his job as school teacher and administrator and her children became adults, the focus of her columns changed and Bombeck wrote of the working woman, grown children, retirement, and aging. Her commentaries astutely combined humor and poignancy.

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Although her writing focused on home-related activities, Bombeck actively supported various public causes and organizations. She campaigned for two years for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, and expressed some impatience with women who didn’t realize the precariousness of equality. A convert to Roman Catholicism when she was twenty-two, Bombeck had strong religious and political beliefs, but did not use her columns as a vehicle to promote them. She also lent her support to the Arizona Kidney Foundation, a cause rather close to home as she had suffered from kidney ailments herself, having been diagnosed with polycystic kidney syndrome when a young adult. Bombeck’s own health problems spurred her to try and help others. Her book of interviews with children surviving cancer, I Want to Grow Hair, I Want to Grow Up, I Want to Go to Boise (1989) received the American Cancer Society’s 1990 Medal of Honor. Bombeck first suffered kidney failure in 1993, only 15 months after undergoing a mastectomy for breast cancer. Despite her illness, she wrote three columns a week until 1994, then continued with two weekly columns, while completing two more books. She shared her health problems with her readers, but always with a sense of humor and a refusal to accept pity. Bombeck died in April 1996 in a San Francisco hospital from complications following a kidney transplant. Published after her death, Forever, Erma (1996) is a collection of Bombeck’s most popular columns and tributes from some of her many admirers, including contemporary columnists, loyal fans, people with whom she had worked tirelessly for public causes, friends, and family. During her career, Bombeck wrote more than 4,500 columns and 12 books, which were on bestseller lists for years. Appearing in 600 newspapers, she was indisputably the most widely syndicated humorist. Since her death, no humor columnist has been able to match her wide appeal. The size and homogeny of her early, loyal audience of homemakers contributed to her success. She reigned in their world of household chaos by making fun of herself as she battled the trials of daily life. Bombeck became a well-loved next door neighbor who understood and helped readers laugh about their own lives.

OTHER WORKS: At Wit’s End (1967). ‘‘Just Wait till You Have Children of Your Own!’’ (1971). I Lost Everything in the PostNatal Depression (1973). The Grass is Always Greener over the Septic Tank (1976). If Life is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits? (1978). Aunt Erma’s Cope Book (1979). Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession (1983). Family Ties That Bind. . .and Gag! (1987). When You Look Like Your Passport Photo It’s Time to Go Home (1991). A Marriage Made in Heaven—or, Too Tired for an Affair (1993). All I Know About Animal Behavior I Learned in Loehmann’s Dressing Room (1996).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Astor, D., ‘‘Is There a Successor to Erma Bombeck?’’ in Editor & Publisher (28 March 1998). Dressner, Z., ‘‘Domestic Comic Writers,’’ in Women’s Comic Visions (1991).


Edwards, S., Erma Bombeck: A Life in Humor (1997). Hubbard, K., ‘‘Remembering Erma’’ in People (28 April 1997). Walker, N., and Z. Dressner, Redressing the Balance (1989). Reference works: CA 21-24 (1977). CANR 12 (1984), 39 (1992). Celebrity Register (1990). MTCW (1991) WWAW (1991). —JANET M. BEYER, UPDATED BY JANETTE GOFF DIXON

BOND, Carrie Jacobs Born 11 August 1862, Janesville, Wisconsin; died 28 December 1946, Hollywood, California Daughter of Hannibal Cyrus and Mary Emogene Jacobs; married E. J. Smith, 1880; Frank Lewis Bond, 1889; children: one son Carrie Jacobs Bond’s kinship to John Howard Payne (a cousin on her grandmother Jacobs’ side), composer of ‘‘Home, Sweet Home,’’ provides the key to her life and work. In both, she exemplified the traditional, simple values extolled by the song. In 1889 Bond married Frank Lewis Bond, a physician, who took her to live in the mining town of Iron River, Michigan. Bond considered these the happiest years of her life. But Bond died in 1895 of injuries from a fall, leaving his wife to care for her son and herself. Without money, but with her usual courage and determination, Bond sold most of her possessions, except her piano, and moved herself and her son to Chicago. For a time she supported herself and her son by running a rooming house, painting china, and sewing. Bond gradually began to receive recognition and took over the publication and marketing of her songs. She established her own company in 1906, and eventually became the wealthiest woman songwriter in the country, owning several homes. She published her most successful song, ‘‘A Perfect Day,’’ in 1910. It was the pinnacle of Bond’s career, selling more than five million copies in 14 years. Bond was not trained as a singer, but she began singing her songs at events simply to have them heard. She half talked, half sang, in what she referred to as her ‘‘composer’s voice.’’ With the success of her songs came demands for her performance. She appeared before both Roosevelt and Harding at the White House, and once sang on the same program with Caruso. Bond’s later years brought both worldwide recognition and tragedy. She received many honors and awards, notably an honorary master’s of music degree from the University of Southern California in 1930 and the Forest Lawn Award for achievement in music. The latter established a scholarship at the University of Southern California School of Music in her name in 1945. Bond published about 170 songs, though she wrote as many as 400. Her first published collection, Seven Songs As Unpretentious As the Wild Rose (1901), is typical of the kind of song and verse she wrote throughout her life. Two of her most famous

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songs, ‘‘I Love You Truly’’ and ‘‘Just a Wearyin’ for You,’’ appeared in this collection. In addition to her songs and verse Bond wrote articles, children’s books, and an autobiography. Her memoir, The Roads of Melody (1927), details her early struggle against poor health and poverty, but attests to her optimistic spirit. In 1940, at the age of seventy-eight, Bond published The End of the Road, a miscellany of philosophy and verse. It is easy to dismiss Bond’s work, with its conventional symbols and artless sentiments, as naive and simplistic. Nevertheless, her writing remains a monument to a state of mind and feeling lost after World War I; for this reason, it is to be treasured. In her life and work Bond paid tribute to the power of the traditional homespun virtues—hard work, perseverance, and faith. Her success is a testimony to the efficacy of those ideals. OTHER WORKS: The Path o’ Life (1909). Tales of Little Cats (1918). Tales of Little Dogs (1921). A Perfect Day and Other Poems (1926). Little Monkey with the Sad Face (1930). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Smith, C. C., Corney’s Mission Inn (1993). Reference works: National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: American Magazine (Jan. 1924). Independent Woman (Nov. 1945). LAT (13 Aug. 1978). NYT (29 Dec. 1946). Just Folk: A Carrie Jacobs Bond Evening (video, 1979). —JANETTE SEATON LEWIS

BONNER, Marita Born 16 June 1898, Brookline, Massachusetts; died 6 December 1971, Chicago, Illinois Wrote under: Joseph Maree Andrew Daughter of Joseph and Mary Anne Bonner; married William A. Occomy, 1930; children: William, Jr.; Warwick, Marita Marita Bonner was among the foremost artists, educators, and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. She began her writing career as a student at Brookline High School where her contributions to the student magazine drew the attention of a faculty member who encouraged her to enroll at Radcliffe. There she majored in English and comparative literature and studied creative writing with the celebrated Professor Charles ‘‘Copey’’ Copeland. A lifelong student of music and German language and literature, Bonner received a B.A. from Radcliffe in 1922. She went on to publish a host of plays, essays, reviews, and short fiction, some of which received long-overdue publication in the prize-winning collection, Frye Street and Environs (1987), edited by Bonner’s daughter with Joyce Flynn. While residing in Boston, Washington D.C., and then Chicago, Bonner taught English, participated in a theater company, and

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was actively involved in an eminent literary ‘‘salon.’’ A regular contributor to the major journals of the Harlem Renaissance, Crisis and Opportunity magazines, Bonner won the 1925 Crisis Award for her essay, ‘‘On Being Young—a Woman—and Colored’’ and the 1927 Crisis Contest Award for four other works in three genres. She received honorable mention in the 1925 Opportunity Awards for her short story, ‘‘The Hands’’. Bonner’s heightened awareness of her role as a black woman artist surfaces in ‘‘On Being Young.’’ She boldly articulates the unenviable and taxing position of a relatively privileged black woman who is deeply concerned with the spiritual and political welfare of her ‘‘people,’’ particularly those who are socially and economically impoverished, less fortunate than herself. Bonner’s drama and short stories are marked by a diverse range of literary devices and strategies. Experimentally and thematically expansive, her fiction explores on one level the psychological states of black American women enduring the yoke of racial, sexual, and class oppression. On another level, her short fiction—commonly set in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s—treats the experiences of the historically disenfranchised black community engaged with the racist American society at large. Her bestknown play, The Purple Flower (1928), is a vexing allegorical portrayal of racism in America. In several of her stories, Bonner meticulously examines the problems of class and complexion within the black community; here, she is a thematic associate of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen. Also evident in Bonner’s work is her penetrating vision of the human condition, manifested through her symbolic thoroughfare, Frye Street. The quilt, by now a familiar icon of black women’s writing, most faithfully symbolizes the colorful and complex body of Bonner’s works. The quilt epitomizes as well her snugly interwoven place in the black women’s writing tradition. OTHER WORKS: Exit, an Illusion (1923). The Pot Maker: A Play to Be Read (1927). Short fiction in Opportunity (Aug. 1925, Dec. 1927, July 1933, Aug. 1933, Sept. 1933, July 1934, March 1936, July 1938, Jan. 1939) and in Crisis (Sept. 1926, May 1928, June 1939, Dec. 1939, March 1940, Feb. 1941). The papers of Marita Bonners are housed in the Radcliffe College Archives. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Abramson, D. E., Angelina Grimkél, Mary Burrill, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Marita Bonner: An Analysis of Their Plays (1985). Dana, M. W., ‘‘Working Women in Depression-Era Short Fiction: The Short Stories of Tess Slesinger, Dorothy Parker and Marita Bonner’’ (dissertation, 1999). Flynn, J. Marita Bonner Occomy (1987). Roses, L. E., and R. E. Randolph, Marita Bonner: In Search of Our Mothers’s Gardens (1987). Roses, L. E., Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Literary Biographies of 100 Black Women Writers 1900-1945 (1990). Reference works: DLB 51 (1987). Dictionary of the Harlem Renaissance (1984). Early Black American Playwrights and

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Dramatic Writers (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Black American Literary Forum (Spring/ Summer 1987). Saga (1985). —SHARON A. LEWIS

BOOTH, Mary Louise Born 19 April 1831, Millville, Long Island, New York; died 5 March 1889, New York, New York Daughter of William Chatfield and Nancy Monsell Booth Mary Louise Booth’s one major work, her History of the City of New York (1859), was the first complete history of the city from its Dutch origins to its Empire City status in the 1850s. In it, Booth stressed the impact of the Dutch on New York life, maintaining that the period of Dutch control, particularly the period of the ‘‘pacific rule of Stuyvesant,’’ produced the ‘‘marked individuality’’ which set New York apart from other eastern cities. She saw in ‘‘the broad and liberal nature of the first settlers’’ the foundation for the ‘‘extended view of men and things’’ which characterized the later city. As a 19th-century historian, Booth gave due attention to the political and military history of the city. She stressed the role of New York in the American Revolution, dealing with both political and social issues. She underscored the political leadership of revolutionary leaders and assessed the cost to the city of the long British occupancy. Perhaps Booth’s strongest contribution, however, lay in her stress on social and cultural developments. She gave attention both to the growth of slavery and to the underlying racial prejudice in the city. She cited the ‘‘despotic regulations’’ controlling the lives of the early-18th-century slaves and discussed at some length the tragic consequences of the alleged ‘‘Negro Plot of 1741.’’ That alleged conspiracy, she argued, belonged ‘‘in the foremost rank of popular delusions.’’ In tracing New York’s growth as an economic and financial center, Booth emphasized the city’s response both to newcomers and to new ideas. In New York, she noted, the original pioneer type did not entrench itself in isolated power but proved able to blend with other races and groups. In the tolerance for new ideas and persons she saw a major source of the city’s vitality. While appreciative of the position of eminence New York had attained by the 1850s, Booth also wrote with a degree of nostalgia. She regretted certain lost cultural values and warned that the city’s very individuality was in danger. She saw New York as being at a cultural crossroads in 1859. While the city had the potential to become ‘‘the Athens of America,’’ New Yorkers had to choose whether to stress economic and financial power or ‘‘the wealth of brains.’’ Booth’s other work was of a varied nature. She began writing early for educational and literary journals and newspapers. After the Civil War, she became editor of the newly inaugurated Harper’s Bazaar. She was also a prolific translator of books, her


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first work being The New and Complete Clock and Watchmakers’ Manual (1860). She was particularly interested in books about French history and French reactions to the American Civil War and Reconstruction. She also translated fairy tales, including those of Édouard Laboulaye. Although not a trained historian, Booth showed in her History of the City of New York that she had a sound historical perspective. While she was primarily a narrative historian, she sometimes gave a critical analysis of events. She had an easy fluent style and kept in balance local concerns and matters of general interest. In her view, New Yorkers lacked a true sense of history, valuing achievements but disregarding the process involved in attaining those goals. Booth’s broad-gauged work provided a solid basis for appreciation of the city’s past. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Boltin, S. K., Successful Women (1888). Spofford, H. P., Our Famous Women (1884). Spofford, H. P., A Little Book of Friends (1916). Reference works: Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography (1888). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Supplement to the Cyclopedia of American Literature (1865). —INZER BYERS

BORG, Dorothy Born 4 September 1902, Elberon, New Jersey; died 25 October 1993 Daughter of Sidney C. and Madeleine Beer Borg Dorothy Borg dedicated her life and career to the study and teaching of American-East Asian relations. After graduating from Wellesley College in 1923, she pursued more advanced studies and received her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1931. Her doctoral dissertation was published in 1947 under the title, American Policy and the Chinese Revolution, 1925-1928. Not only is it a work of great scholarship, but, unlike most dissertations, is enjoyable reading. Through personal consultation with such leading participants as Secretary of State Frank B. Kellogg, as well as through an examination of State Department documents and various unofficial publications, Borg produced a fascinating study. It is particularly noteworthy for its portrayal of the interrelated pressures and counterpressures of public opinion at home, the rising nationalism in China, and the national interests of other treaty powers. Borg masterfully shows how all of these factors complicated policy problems in Washington. The book received outstanding reviews by fellow scholars and was credited as having made an invaluable contribution to the field of diplomatic history. Unfortunately, however, the late 1940s and early 1950s, which encompassed the era of Cold War McCarthyism, was a controversial if not dangerous time for a scholar to be commenting on America’s policy toward China. China lobbyists were actively

denouncing many China specialists for their critical views of Chiang Kai-shek and the support given to him by the U.S. As China correspondent of the Institute of Public Relations, Borg, however, remained unintimidated. She published articles critical of Chiang Kai-shek’s corrupt and unpopular government in which she questioned America’s unconditional support. She explained how the student protests in Kuomintang China, which she observed, were ‘‘symptomatic of the unrest among all classes.’’ Their insistence that the civil war must stop was an important expression of popular opinion. Chiang Kai-shek’s power struggle against the communists was a losing battle, and for the U.S. to give financial assistance to him under these circumstances was useless and detrimental to future Sino-American relations. After the McCarthy furor had subsided, Borg went on to work with the East Asian Research Center at Harvard University, from 1959 to 1961. Then, in 1962, she became the senior research associate of American Far Eastern policy at Columbia University’s East Asian Institute. Borg’s next major work, The United States and the Far Eastern Crisis of 1933-1938: From the Manchurian Incident through the Initial Stage of the Undeclared Sino-Japanese War, was published in 1964. In analyzing the effects of Japan’s growing power on the interests and policies of the U.S. in East Asia. Borg points out how the Roosevelt administration worked very hard at doing nothing. Although there was a great deal of lofty rhetoric on international responsibilities, the U.S. acquiesced to Japanese expansion and was not willing to champion China’s independence. The major concern was not to antagonize Japan. Thus assistance to China was restricted to what the Japanese would not find objectionable. On the other hand, for fear of it appearing that the U.S. was condoning Japanese aggression, Franklin Roosevelt avoided taking positive steps to improve relations with Japan. The State Department Archives Borg examined reveal the attitudes of American officials toward the Chinese communists, and clearly illustrate many of the erroneous assumptions that account for much of America’s failure in China. Borg masterfully used documents and periodicals to recreate the environment in which America’s China policy was determined. By being craftsmanlike, fair-minded, and even-tempered, she was able to make another valuable contribution to our understanding of a most exasperating period in the history of American foreign policy. She concludes that policy decisions need to be better informed of the realities of the situation if they are to be creative and successful. For her outstanding scholarship, Borg received the Bancroft History Prize in 1965. Another of Borg’s publications of major significance is a work she edited along with Shupei Okamota entitled Pearl Harbor as History: Japanese-American Relations, 1931-1941 (1973). Some 24 scholars contributed essays that analyze culture, political process, and government structure as they related to Japanese-American relations during the 1930s. In this way the editors hoped to offer fresh answers to the questions concerning why the U.S. and Japan went to war in 1941. The organization of

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the volume includes an introduction and summary by Richard Leopold of discussions at a 1969 conference, and detailed essays analyzing the role of prime ministers, congresses, the president, private economic groups, financial defense bureaucracies, liberal and right-wing organizations, the press, and intellectuals. Borg’s own essay is a discourse on policymakers in Washington, analyzing various kinds of inevitable interrelationships and conflicts. The work has been praised for the new data made available on Japanese politics and diplomacy, and for its value as a guide to secondary and archival sources. In recognition for her lifelong dedication to U.S. foreign relations, Borg was awarded the Norman and Laura Graebner Award in 1986. She died in 1993 at the age of 91. BIBLIOGRAPHY: New Frontiers in American-East Asian Relations: Essays Presented to Dorothy Borg (1983). —PATRICIA LANGHALS

BOTTA, Anne C(harlotte) Lynch Born 11 November 1815, Bennington, Vermont; died 23 March 1891, New York, New York Wrote under: Anne Lynch Botta, Anne Lynch Daughter of Patrick and Charlotte Gray Lynch; married Vincenzo Botta, 1855 Anne C. Lynch Botta’s father, an Irish patriot who emigrated to America rather than swear allegiance to the British crown, died in 1819. Botta attended the Albany Female Seminary, one of the most progressive schools for women in the early-19th century. While at school, she received class honors and awards for her poetry. After teaching for a short time at the Seminary, Botta worked as a tutor and in 1845, she moved to New York City with her mother. There she wrote for the popular press, made her reputation as hostess to the literati, and taught young women in her home and at the Brooklyn Academy for Young Ladies. In 1850 Botta left New York and stayed in Washington, D.C., for four seasons, where she successfully petitioned Congress for the unpaid portion of her grandfather’s military pay and worked as Henry Clay’s private secretary. In 1855 she married an Italian Dante scholar then visiting in the U.S. and they made their home in New York City, where Botta continued her salon and her writing. Botta published three books and miscellaneous prose and verse in magazines and journals. The Rhode Island Book (1841), compiled during her residence in Providence, is an anthology of the writings of prominent citizens of the state from the time of Roger Williams to her own. Poems appeared in 1849 and went through three editions. Though Poe complimented poems like ‘‘The Ideal’’ and ‘‘The Ideal Found’’ for ‘‘vigor of rhythm. . .dignity and elevation of sentiment. . .and in energy of expression’’ in

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his Literati, most of Botta’s work is typical of the sentimental verse of the day. Many of the poems are dedicated to her mother and to friends, treating the themes of life’s battle and death in a sentimental, romanticized fashion. Botta’s most substantial work, the Handbook of Universal Literature (1860), was prepared for popular reading and attempted to give a unity to the history of literature that illustrated Botta’s holistic notion of the universe. Botta’s insights into the writing of contemporary American authors, many of them personal friends, are still interesting to students of American literature. The Handbook went through several editions and was a favorite college text through the end of the century. Miscellaneous poems and articles, often published anonymously, appeared in the Democratic Review, the Home Journal, Godey’s Lady’s Book, and Graham’s Magazine, as well as in gift annuals and albums. The most interesting of these is ‘‘The Diary of a Recluse,’’ an autobiographical narrative of Botta’s years as a tutor to the Gardiner family of Shelter Island, New York. One of the least sentimental of Botta’s published pieces, it chronicles her mental and emotional development and her attempts to understand it. As a hostess of one of the most exciting literary salons of the 19th century, Botta made her mark on her era and in America’s social history. Her passionate interest in people, her tact, her eagerness to serve all contributed to her success in drawing together artists, reformers, and statesmen for lively discussion and witty repartee. In the 1840s and 1850s, her salons were largely literary, a meeting place for notables like Edgar Allan Poe, Margaret Fuller, and William Cullen Bryant. After the war, when salons were becoming more social than intellectual, she maintained her standards and became especially popular with foreign visitors like Thackeray and Trollope. Botta’s salons provided the environment where art, intellect, and society could meet, and where individuals could enjoy stimulating conversation at its best. Botta’s work, however, indistinguishable from that of other sentimental women authors, can be classified as popular literature, and is now of interest primarily to literary and cultural historians. OTHER WORKS: ‘‘Diary of a Recluse’’ in The Gift (1843). Memoirs of Anne Charlotte Lynch Botta Written by Her Friends with Selections from Her Correspondence and from Her Writings in Prose and Poetry (ed. V. Botta, 1893). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Botta, V., ed., Memoirs of Anne C. Lynch Botta (1893). Dolan, A. M., ‘‘The Literary Salon in New York, 1830-1860’’ (dissertation, 1957). Fenton, M. B., ‘‘The Life and Letters of Anne Lynch Botta’’ (thesis, 1940). Hemstreet, C., Literary New York (1903). Sherwood, M. E., An Epistle to Posterity (1898). Walker, C., American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (1992). Reference works: American Women, F. E. Willard and M. A. Livermore (1897). Cyclopedia of American Literature, E. A. and


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G. L. Duyckinck, eds. (1855). Dictionary of American Biography, National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). A Supplement to Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors (1891). Other references: New York History (1942). —KAREN SZYMANSKI

BOURKE-WHITE, Margaret Born 14 June 1904, New York, New York; died 27 August 1971 Daughter of Joseph White and Minnie E. Bourke; married Everett Chapman, 1924; Erskine Caldwell, 1939 Margaret Bourke-White attended several universities before receiving her degree in biology from Cornell in 1927. The death of her father during her senior year forced her to earn her own way, so she did photo work for the Cornell Alumni News. After graduation she moved to Cleveland, Ohio, and began a professional career, not in biology, but in photography. She began to make a name for herself as an industrial photographer at a time when the U.S. was falling in love with the machine. She helped develop the techniques needed for dark/high intensity light situations such as those found in foundaries. In the spring of 1929 Henry Luce asked Bourke-White to work as an associate editor for the yet-unborn Fortune magazine. The magazine would serve as an ideal vehicle for Bourke-White’s adulation of machines and factories. In the early 1930s Bourke-White executed photo murals in RKO Radio City, took her first trip to Russia, and put together her first book, Eyes on Russia (1931). A 1934 Fortune assignment to photograph the effects of the Depression on Midwestern farmers led to Bourke-White’s awareness that people are more than figures useful for establishing relative size in photos. Her newfound social compassion led to a collaboration with Erskine Caldwell in documenting the plight of southern tenant farmers and sharecroppers, You Have Seen Their Faces (1937). This book represented a new form of journalism that integrated picture and word as well as being one of the earliest depictions of the Depression’s effects on human existence. In 1936 Bourke-White gave up her associate editorship at Fortune to become one of the four original photographers for the new Luce photographic magazine called Life. From the 1930s on, Bourke-White’s work was constantly before the public: she displayed her work in the 1930 exhibit ‘‘Men and Machine,’’ shot the first cover of Life, published photo-essays in dozens of magazines, filmed two moving pictures on Russia, and wrote several books. At the outbreak of World War II, Bourke-White, accredited as an official Air Force photographer, did work for the Air Force and Life simultaneously. She was in Russia when the Germans invaded, taking incredible risks to shoot pictures, develop them, and get them to America. She was in a ship torpedoed on the way to Africa, flew aerial missions, and was with General

George Patton when he opened Buchenwald. Her reputation was great, and Bourke-White, appreciative of the value of being slightly notorious, allowed myths about herself to spread. By 1957 after 21 years at Life, Bourke-White was forced to resign because of the crippling effects of Parkinson’s disease. Unable to use her camera, she wrote Portrait of Myself (1963), an autobiography that records her struggle against the disease. She was able to hold the disease at bay temporarily with constant exercising, but an accident that forced her into bed finally allowed the disease to overcome her indomitable spirit. While no theoretician, Bourke-White’s photo-essays exhibit clarity, warmth, and crispness. She believed fact and beauty were the keystones for good pictures, especially when the images captured the similarities between people. While initially almost exclusively a photographer, Bourke-White wrote the text of her later books in the same crisp, clear, warm style her pictures illustrate. OTHER WORKS: The Story of Steel (with D. Kulas, 1928). U.S.S.R. Photographs (1934). Freighters of Fortune (with N. Beasley, 1930). The Book of Sunnybank (with A. P. Terhune, 1934). The Terhune Omnibus (ed. M. J. Herzberg, 1937). North of the Danube (with E. Caldwell, 1939). Say, is This the U.S.A.? (with E. Caldwell, 1941). Shooting the Russian War (1942). They Called It ‘‘Purple Heart Valley’’ (1944). ‘‘Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly’’ (1946). Halfway to Freedom (1949). A Report of the American Jesuits (with J. LaFarge, 1956). The Photographs of Margaret Bourke-White (1973). Margaret Bourke-White: The Cleveland Years, 1927-1930 (1976). The Taste of War (1985). Margaret Bourke-White, 1904-1971: Photographs (1988). Double Exposure: The Story of Margaret Bourke-White (video, 1989). Power and Paper: Margaret Bourke-White, Modernity, and the Documentary Mode (1998). Margaret Bourke-White: Photographer (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ashby, R. and D. G. Ohrn, Herstory: Women Who Changed the World (1995). Brown, T. M., Margaret BourkeWhite: Photo-Journalist (1972). Callahan, S., ed., The Photographs of Margaret Bourke-White (1972). Daffron, C., Margaret Bourke-White (1988). Felder, D. G., The 100 Most Influential Women of All Time (1996). Flavell, M. K., You Have Seen Their Faces: Gisele Freund, Walter Benjamin and Margaret BourkeWhite as Headhunters of the Thirties (1994). Goldberg, V., Bourke-White (1988). Hood, R. E., ‘‘The Compleat BourkeWhite’’ in 12 at War (1967). Howard, W. L., Dear Kit, Dear Skinny: The Letters of Erskine Caldwell and Margaret BourkeWhite (1988). Kirkland, W. M. and F. Kirkland, ‘‘Margaret Bourke-White, Photographer of Steel,’’ in Girls Who Became Artists (1934). McEuen, M. A., Changing Eyes: American Culture and the Photographic Image, 1918-1941 (dissertation, 1991). Pollack, P., ‘‘Margaret Bourke-White: Roving Recorder’’ in The Picture History of Photography (1969). Raymond, M. T., ‘‘Girl with a Camera,’’ in Topflight Famous American Women (1946). Rolka, G. M., 100 Women Who Shaped World History (1994).

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Rubin, S.G., Margaret Bourke-White: Her Pictures Were Her Life (1999). Silverman, J., For the World to See: The Life of Margaret Bourke-White (1983). Tucker, A., ed., The Woman’s Eye (1973). Reference works: The Encyclopedia of Photography (1963). Other references: Life (10 Sept. 1971). NYT (26 Oct. 1930, 28 Aug. 1971, 10 Jan. 1971, 5 Sept. 1971, 12 Sept. 1971). —MIRIAM Z. LANGSAM

BOWEN, Catherine Drinker Born 1 January 1897, Haverford, Pennsylvania; died 1 November 1973, Haverford, Pennsylvania Daughter of Henry Sturgis and Aimee Beaux Drinker; married Ezra Bowen, 1919 Although Catherine Drinker Bowen began her career as a writer of fiction, including a novel, Rufus Starbuck’s Wife (1932), she early chose the role of biographer. It is in her biographical works that her major contributions as a writer lie. Music gave a central focus for Bowen’s early biographical works, Beloved Friend: The Story of Tchaikowsky and Nadejda von Meck (1937), and Free Artist: The Story of Anton and Nicholas Rubinstein (1939). The first work involved interweaving letters by the composer and his patron into a biographical narrative; the second portrayed the Rubinsteins’ interaction with the musical and political world of late tsarist Russia. In these works, Bowen revealed her skill in characterization. In the 1940s Bowen found a new biographical focus: men of law and their role in the development of free government. From this concern came three biographies. Yankee from Olympus: Justice Holmes and His Family (1944), is a three-generational study, reaching back for the ‘‘roots that permitted so splendid a flowering’’ in Holmes’s own life. In her portrait of Holmes as legal pioneer, judicial dissenter, and man of ideas and passion, Bowen impressively achieved her aim ‘‘to bring Justice Holmes out of legal terms into human terms.’’ In John Adams and the American Revolution (1950), Bowen concentrated on the lawyer as political leader. She stressed Adams’s commitment to British constitutional principles and his growing disillusionment with British practices. And she depicted with force and clarity his role in the colonies’ growth toward independence. With The Lion and the Throne: The Life and Times of Sir Edward Coke, 1552-1634 (1957), Bowen turned to the English roots of American constitutionalism. Her account centered on Coke’s transformation from chief prosecutor for the Crown to ardent champion of the House of Commons and the Petition of Right. Her portrait of this ‘‘difficult but impressive man’’ gives full due to the complexity of his nature and his role as jurist and legal authority. Bowen followed with Francis Bacon: The Temper of a Man (1963), a study of Coke’s great rival. Although this book was written as a biography, Bowen saw it as ‘‘essays of personal reflection’’ on a man and his thought.

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With Miracle at Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention, May to September, 1787 (1966), Bowen returned to the theme of emerging free government in America. She stressed not so much the intricacies of the debates themselves as the interactions of the men, the compromises achieved, and the factors that made the adoption of the Constitution both crucial and possible. Her last work was The Most Dangerous Man in America: Scenes from the Life of Benjamin Franklin (1974). In this account of five periods of Franklin’s life, Bowen traced his change from adherent to critic of Great Britain and explored the complexities of his personality and roles. The book is also a personal document, essays of personal reflection indicating her own affirmative response to this Enlightenment man. Bowen wrote several works on biographical writing itself, including Adventures of a Biographer (1959), a series of informal essays; and Biography: The Craft and the Calling (1968), a study of biographical problems and techniques. Bowen also wrote Friends and Fiddlers (1935), informal, anecdotal essays on chamber music by amateurs; and Family Portrait (1970), a history of the Drinker family. Bowen took the narrative approach to biography, focusing both on the individual personality and the age itself. The intricacies of personal development concerned her most, rather than the critical exploration of historical issues. In her early work, Bowen often utilized fictional devices, such as transposing letters and diary entries into conversation. With the Coke biography, however, she abandoned such techniques, relying henceforth on a skilled use of documents and mastery of detail to convey the sense of reality. As a biographer, Bowen revealed both a keen sense of the complexities of human nature and the problems of personal interactions. In her handling of historical eras, she is perceptive in judgement and makes graphic use of detail. Ultimately Bowen’s strength as a biographer resides in her vivid and dramatic portraiture and her sensitive conveyance of the spirit of an age.

OTHER WORKS: The Story of an Oak Tree (1924). A History of Lehigh University (1924). On Being a Biographer: An Address (1950). The Writing of Biography (1951). The Biographer Looks for News (1958). The Nature of the Artist (1961). The Historian (1963).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Luckham, W. R., ‘‘Passionate History: Catherine Drinker Bowen and the Narrative Biography’’ (thesis, 1992). ‘‘Yankee from Olympus: Justice Holmes and his Family’’ in Reader’s Digest Great Biographies (1987). Other references: AHR (Oct. 1957). Atlantic (July 1957). NR (29 May 1944, 2 Nov. 1974). NYT (18 June 1950, 23 June 1963, 20 Nov. 1966). SRL (11 June 1950). Catherine Drinker Bowen: Other People’s Lives (film, 1971). —INZER BYERS


BOWERS

BOWEN, Sue Petigru Born 1824, Charleston, South Carolina; died 1875 Also wrote under: Sue Petigru King Daughter of James L. Petigru; married Henry King Sue Petigru Bowen published her novels, all set in the deep South, just before the Civil War. Lily (1855), her longest novel, presents the tragic tale of the eponymously named young heroine who, orphaned at ten, becomes the richest heiress in her county. She is adopted by friends of her father, eventually grows to maturity, but falls in love with a weak man who loves her but cannot restrain his promiscuous appetites. The day before her wedding to the repentant Clarence Tracey, Lily is murdered by his mistress as she is trying on her bridal dress. A good part of the narrative is devoted to descriptions of Lily’s genteel Southern education—her French lessons, dance instruction, and needlework—and also to her fashionable clothes, parties, and picnics. Later works, such as Sylvia’s World; and Crimes Which the Law Does Not Reach (1859), also deal with the fashionable life. In the latter, rich, virtuous girls are contrasted with coquettes. Interesting here is the presentation of Southern social life at a rich resort and the portrait of Mrs. St. Clair, a former coquette who learns through hard experience that love lasts longer than admiration. In Sylvia’s World, a rash but virtuous young girl has her heart broken by trusting the wrong young man. He cares more for her fortune than for her. Bowen deals with the fashionable world of resorts and balls and with the maturation of young girls into womanhood. Her male characters are charming but weak and untrustworthy, and her novels have didactic rather than happy endings. The vision of young, trusting girls destroyed or embittered through their experiences with men haunts her novels. —ROSE F. KAVO

BOWER, B. M. See SINCLAIR, Bertha Muzzy

BOWERS, Bathsheba Born circa 1672, Massachusetts; died 1718, South Carolina Daughter of Benanuel and Elizabeth Dunster Bowers Noted for its eccentricity, Bathsheba Bowers’s life has attracted more attention than her writing. She was born to English Quakers who settled in Charlestown. Though they endured the Puritan persecution of Quakers themselves, the Bowers sent their daughters to Philadelphia to escape it. Bowers remained single all her life, building a small house, which became known as ‘‘Bathsheba’s Bower,’’ at the corner of Little Dock and Second Streets. Furnishing her home with books,

a table, and little else, she became a gardener, a vegetarian, and, according to her niece Ann Bolton, as much of a recluse ‘‘as if she had lived in a Cave under Ground or on the top of a high mountain.’’ Although Bowers was a Quaker by profession, Bolton’s diary reports that she was ‘‘so Wild in her Notions it was hard to find out of what religion she really was of. She read her Bible much but I think sometimes to no better purpose than to afford matter for dispute in w[hich] she was always positive.’’ Bowers eventually became a Quaker preacher, taking her ministry to South Carolina. Though records exist today for only a single volume, Bowers is said to have written a number of books: Bowers, in fact, spoke of her ‘‘Works’’ in the plural. Bowers’ extant volume, An Alarm Sounded to Prepare the Inhabitants of the World to Meet the Lord in the Way of His Judgments (1709), used the conventions of spiritual autobiography to trace her life as a seemingly endless series of fears to be overcome. Making an analogy between herself and Job, Bowers outlined a progression of divinely ordained tests which served to place her in a special relationship with God. One by one, Bowers conquered her terrors of death, of hell, of her own strong pride, of writing and publishing, of preaching, even of nudity. Her spiritual progress toward a kind of self-control dictated by God is presented in An Alarm as an example others may follow. Interestingly, Bowers perceived her most difficult task to be the struggle against her own ambition, her ‘‘chief evil’’ and ‘‘very potent Enemy.’’ Paradoxically, she viewed the publication of An Alarm as a triumph over this personal ambition. Though presenting her life to the public as an example for emulation may seem an act of pride, Bowers emphasized the ‘‘Scorn and Ridicule’’ her audacity would bring: ‘‘’tis best known to my self how long I labored under a reluctancy, and how very unwilling I was to appear in print at all; for it was, indeed, a secret terror to me to think of making a contemptible appearance in the world. . . . [But] now I can hear my Reputation called in question, without being stung to the heart.’’ Public response to An Alarm went unrecorded, but perhaps Bowers’s fears were close to the mark. She mentioned in her preface that she had met with ‘‘Repulses in [her] proceeding to Print,’’ which ‘‘made a very profound and ungrateful Impression upon [her]. . . .’’ Such ‘‘Repulses’’ may explain why An Alarm was finally printed in New York rather than in Bowers’s hometown, Philadelphia. Whatever the reaction of her contemporaries, readers today may be interested in Bowers’s use of a conventional spiritual autobiography for her own unconventional activities in writing, publishing, and preaching.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cowell, P., Women Poets in Pre-Revolutionary America, 1650-1775 (1979). Paige, L. R., History of Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1630-1877 (1877). Potts, W. J., ‘‘Bathsheba Bowers,’’ in PMHB 3 (1879). Watson, J. F., Annals of Philadelphia, and Pennsylvania, in the Olden Times. . . (1905). —PATTIE COWELL

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BOWLES, Jane Auer Born 22 February 1917, New York, New York; died 4 May 1973, Malaga, Spain Daughter of Sydney and Clair Stajer Auer; married Paul Bowles, 1938 After attending public schools in Long Island, Jane Bowles was tutored by a French professor in Switzerland. In 1935 she finished Le Phaeton Hypocrite, a novel in French which was never published and which has disappeared. After 1938 she and her husband lived in Central America, Europe, Mexico, and New York City. From 1947 they spent most of their time in Tangier, Morocco. Bowles finished her only novel, Two Serious Ladies in 1941, and from 1944 to 1953 was engaged in writing and revising her only full-length play, In the Summer House, ultimately produced in New York City in 1953 by the Playwrights’ Company. Most of the short stories which constitute the remainder of Bowles’s works were written during the 1940s. According to Paul Bowles, Jane became hypercritical of her writing in the 1950s. In 1957 she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage which deprived her of her ability to read and write. Her health worsened slowly, and she died in 1973, in Malaga, Spain. All of Bowles’ stories are about women and their attempts at independence; male characters are seldom important, even as blocking characters. When Bowles’ women characters cannot find themselves, it is other women who are holding them back. The essential Bowles plot presents a woman who sees to break away from tradition and find new adventures in the outside world, and a second woman—sister, companion, lover—who tries to keep her at home within the old habits of dependence. In Two Serious Ladies, (1943), Christina Goering tries to earn salvation by leaving her home and her female companion to challenge the hated outside world. There she takes up with a series of increasingly menacing male strangers, the last of whom abandons her. The second serious lady is Frieda Copperfield, who leaves her husband for a prostitute named Pacifica, who ultimately forces Frieda to share her with a young man. The promiscuity, bisexuality, and sadomasochism in this novel are seldom erotic, but tend instead to illustrate the hidden horror in human relationships, most of which consist of greedy individual truth-seekers bouncing their needs off each other. The menace inherent in human interdependence is also the subject of Bowles’ play, which concerns two mother/daughter pairs. Vivian Constable rejects her mother and attaches herself to Mrs. Cuevas, whose jealous daughter Molly murders Vivian. Mrs. Cuevas abandons Molly to get married, and when Mrs. Cuevas later returns to reestablish the old dependency, Molly chooses to go off with her own husband. Mrs. Cuevas threatens to tell Mrs. Constable about the murder, but it becomes clear that Mrs. Constable doesn’t really care. It is the relationship between sisters Bowles examines in her best short story, ‘‘Camp Cataract,’’ part of the collection Plain

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Pleasures (1966). Harriet leaves her sisters every year to stay at Camp Cataract, in hopes she can get used to the outside world and ultimately leave home permanently. Her sister Sadie tries to convince her that ‘‘you don’t grow rich in spirit by widening your circle but by tending your own.’’ When Sadie panics and comes after Harriet, Sadie realizes it is she who is going on that journey from home, not Harriet. Sadie is perhaps the only Bowles character who gets to the end of her search for herself, but the quest ends in her death. Rather than emerging free from her clinging sister, Harriet appears to exchange her for an aggressively dependent friend. Bowles introduced almost the same plot in overtly lesbian form in her unfinished story ‘‘Going to Massachusetts,’’ which appears with other fragments from Bowles’s notebooks in a posthumous collection called Feminine Wiles (1976). Through her constant resetting of these pairs of warring women, Bowles presents a full picture of the female psyche and the extremes to which the personality is driven by the pressures of modern society. Her representative woman tries to realize her potential within a world that tells her to be chaste, experienced, loyal to her family, supportive of her man, and independent. Bowles describes this fragmented world and its absurd expectations in a style which is eccentric, and sometimes almost surrealistic. Characters form attachments and abandon each other rapidly and unreasonably; they speak their minds to each other with a frankness which the reader does not expect in the middle-to upper-class world that Bowles portrays. These sudden twists force the reader to share in the sense of menace and confusion that the freedom-seeking Bowles heroine feels in her relationship to the world.

OTHER WORKS: Collected Works of Jane Bowles (1966). ‘‘A Day in the Open’’ in The Granta Book of the American Short Story (1992). The Collected Works of Jane Bowles: With a New Introduction (1989). ‘‘In the Summer House’’ in Plays by American Women, 1930-1960 (1994). My Sister’s Hand in Mine: The Collected Works of Jane Bowles (1966, reissued 1995). Out in the World: Selected Letters of Jane Bowles, 1935-1970 (1990). ‘‘Plain Pleasures’’ in Infinite Riches: Classic Stories by 20thcentury Women Writers (1993). ‘‘Senorita Cordoba’’ in The Graywolf Annual Two: Short Stories by Women (1986).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bowles, P., The Portable Paul and Jane Bowles (1994). Dillon, M., ‘‘Jane Bowles: Experiment as Character’’ in Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction (1989). Dillon, M., A Little Original Sin: The Life and Work of Jane Bowles (1981, 1998). Gentile, K. J, Speaking the Ineffable Name: The Novels of Emily Brontë, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Djuna Barnes, and Jane Bowles (dissertation, 1987). Knight, B., ed., Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart of Revolution (1996). Lacey, R. K., and F. Poole, eds., Mirrors on the Maghrib: Critical Reflections on Paul and Jane Bowles and Other American Writers in Morocco (1996). Maier, J. R., Desert Songs: Western Images of Morocco and Moroccan Images of the


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West (1996). Skerl, J., A Tawdry Place of Salvation: The Art of Jane Bowles (1997). Reference works: World Authors 1950-1970 (1975). Other references: Life (16 Dec. 1966). Mlle. (Dec. 1966). Novel (1968). SR (14 Jan. 1967). —PAULA L. BARBOUR

BOYD, Blanche McCrary Born 1945, Charleston, South Carolina married (divorced) Blanche McCrary Boyd is a novelist, essayist, and writer of short fiction. Her stories take place in the American South, where Boyd was born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina. Her fiction and nonfiction are known for their humor, but also deal with difficult themes such as drinking and mental instability. Boyd’s first book, Nerves (1973), for example, concerns a mother and daughter who are isolated emotionally from each other, even as the mother, Lena, loses her best friend to suicide and begins to go mad. Boyd’s works also feature female characters, often including the protagonist, who are in the midst of addressing their sexuality and dealing with their romantic desires for other women. Mourning the Death of Magic (1977), Boyd’s second book-length work of fiction, is about three characters dealing with the ramifications of the civil rights movement, one of whom is unable to come to terms with her own lesbianism. In 1981 Boyd published a collection of candid essays, many of which had been seen first in the Village Voice, dealing with her departure from and eventual return to the South. The book was called The Redneck Way of Knowledge: Down-Home Tales. The ‘‘contemplative and beer-soaked essays,’’ in the words of Library Journal, touch on her leaving Charleston for college at Duke University, her imperfect marriage in the suburbs of California, her life in a commune in Vermont during the 1960s, her relationships with female lovers in New York during the 1970s, and her mixed feelings toward her native South and her gradual acceptance of her heritage and past. A reviewer in Nation wrote that the book was ‘‘a redneck rubberneck tour of the Rockettes, Pope John Paul II at Yankee Stadium, stock car races, a Tough Man contest, the Ku Klux Klan shoot-up of those Commies in Greensboro, North Carolina, and the 1980 Democratic National Convention.’’ The magazine, which praised Boyd’s serious articles on violence and politics as ‘‘superb,’’ termed the more personal essays ‘‘bantamweight’’ and called the author ‘‘a bit of a lesbian tease.’’ After the publication of The Redneck Way of Knowledge, Boyd stopped drinking and lost the courage to write fiction again for nearly 10 years, during which time she effectively remained in hiding, as she later admitted. Eventually, the editor of the Voice

Literary Supplement encouraged her to submit some work, which she did. Three of her stories for the Voice became the first chapters of her novel The Revolution of Little Girls (1991). The book deals with a protagonist, Ellen Burns, who begins to understand and accept her lesbianism and Southern roots after years of drinking, enduring a poor marriage, getting mixed up in a series of love affairs, going through several career changes, and testing out different lifestyles. Michael Dorris, writing in the New York Times Book Review, said, ‘‘A mood of what might be called wise nostalgia permeates this brief novel’s nine chapters, most of which could easily stand on their own as short stories. . . . Just when we think we have identified a somber tone in The Revolution of Little Girls, however, the author springs a scene so funny that we laugh out loud.’’ A reviewer in Publishers Weekly added, ‘‘Ellen’s story is fascinating and spirited, but hard to grasp, and her experience becomes elusive.’’ Boyd revisited Ellen Burns in Terminal Velocity (1997), which focuses on Ellen’s four years during the 1970s when she was part of the lesbian-feminist movement and called herself Rain. The tale involves Rain’s nervous breakdown, eventually leading to electroshock treatments, and drug abuse. Andrea Barnet wrote in the New York Times Book Review, ‘‘As it crisscrosses the country, Boyd’s story moves from comic high jinks through seduction, betrayal and finally violence with a speed that at times feels dizzying.’’ While noting that the novel was difficult to read at some points but ended up with a redemption of sorts, Barnet continued, ‘‘[Boyd’s] is a voice that never wavers in its authority or its fierce sexual politics.’’ In addition to her books and her contributions to the Voice Literary Supplement, Boyd has written essays, reviews, and short stories for publications including Esquire, New York Times Magazine, and Premiere. She has also taught writing at several locations, including at Connecticut College. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1998). Other references: Christopher Street (20 Oct. 1991). Ms. (June 1982). NYTBR (30 June 1991, 24 Aug. 1997). PW (16 Apr. 1982, 15 Mar. 1991, 19 May 1997). Nation (19 June 1982). —KAREN RAUGUST

BOYD, Nancy See MILLAY, Edna St. Vincent

BOYLE, Kay Born 19 February 1902, St. Paul, Minnesota; died 27 December 1992, Mill Valley, California Daughter of Howard P. and Katharine Evans Boyle; married Richard Brault, 1922; Laurence Vail, 1931; Joseph Von

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Franckenstein, 1943; children: Sharon, Apple-Joan, Kathe, Clover, Faith, Ian Kay Boyle studied music and architecture before marrying a French engineering student and moving to his home in Brittany. The marriage had crumbled by 1926, but Boyle remained in Europe until after the fall of France in 1941. In 1946 she returned to Europe as a foreign correspondent for the New Yorker, while her third husband served with the War Department in occupied Germany. She later taught at various American universities and was professor of English at San Francisco State. She received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1934 and 1961, and the O. Henry Prize for best short story in 1935 (‘‘The White Horses of Vienna’’) and 1941 (‘‘Defeat’’). Boyle’s settings are frequently European. Her novel, Plagued by the Nightingale (1931) is loosely based upon a summer with her Breton relatives. At first, the novel was praised as a sensitive treatment of an American abroad, but today it has taken on new interest as the story of a young couple who decide not to have children (because of hereditary disease) and are bitterly opposed by their rigid, provincial family. Boyle’s acute awareness of European social and political conditions is revealed in ‘‘The White Horses of Vienna,’’ where swastika fires bloom at night on the Austrian mountains, prefiguring Nazi domination; the Lippizaners (the famed white stallions) symbolize a lost nobility; and a tamed fox foreshadows the savage future. Two of her finest novellas are The Crazy Hunter (1940) and The Bridegroom’s Body (1940). The former is a horse that is suddenly struck blind, but its young owner refuses to allow it to be destroyed. Boyle carefully works through the blindness-sight motif, interweaving it with complex relationships between a weak father, a strong-willed mother, and a budding daughter. The latter dwells on the fatal attraction and isolation of love. Fascinated by ‘‘the subtlety in human relations,’’ Boyle is often concerned with political issues, which she has always met fearlessly; for Boyle, ‘‘silence is not a position.’’ Her book The Smoking Mountain: Stories of Germany During the Occupation (1951) has been called ‘‘the finest interpretation of that place and time. . .written in English.’’ Though Boyle clearly does not sympathize with the Nazis, she exhibits compassion for a proud and defeated people. Perhaps her best-known novel is Generation without Farewell (1960), written from the viewpoint of a German journalist who identifies with the Americans and rejects his own countrymen, only to discover that he really belongs to neither world. Although Boyle began as a poet, her prose is far more skillful than her verse. Her novels, always technically well constructed, often contain brilliant passages. Her strongest prose form is the novella. Here she can create a single, sustained theme, and embroider and enrich upon it. Boyle, whose first book appeared in 1929, continued until her death to write with the same enthusiasm and dedication. Her publications after 1980 included two collections of stories, a volume of essays, a book of poems and a collected edition of her poems, and a translation. She also continued her work on books about Irish and German women, projects she had saved for her

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‘‘very old age.’’ An excerpt from the first book, the story of an Englishman’s insensitivity on Dublin’s ‘‘St. Stephen’s Green,’’ appeared in Atlantic (June 1980). A retrospective of Boyle’s work is emerging as her writing is introduced to a new generation; several novels have been reprinted in Modern Classics editions. Both Fifty Stories (1980, 1992) and Life Being the Best and Other Stories (1988) offer representative short fiction from five previous collections, stories both personal and political, shaped by her years in pre- and postwar Europe, blazing with anger and compassion. Most of the essays in Words That Must Somehow Be Said (1985) first appeared in magazines, from early book reviews in transition to the sharper political essays of the postwar and Vietnam era. In contrast, the poems in This Is Not a Letter and Other Poems (1985) represent her writing from the late 1960s to the 1980s. The mellowing in these poems (‘‘Dwell. . .on the courage of the dead’’) reflects a new acceptance of age, but never a surrender. In a sense, Boyle’s emphasis shifted from her initial concern with the word to a concern with the world, though both were always of great importance to her. She believed that ‘‘writers. . .must bear the full weight of moral responsibility.’’ Biographer Sandra Whipple Spanier argues that Boyle’s ‘‘reputation as a serious writer has suffered precisely because she has taken her writing so seriously,’’ often leading her to choose unpopular positions, although her passionate defense of human dignity seems better understood now in the light of history. Boyle finally achieved the recognition she should have received long ago. In the 1980s she was honored for her lifetime of writing, with grants and fellowships from the Before Columbus Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, and in 1989, its first year of awards to ‘‘writers who have made significant contributions to English-language literature,’’ a special award for outstanding literary achievement from the Lannan Foundation. Boyle said, ‘‘Camus demanded that the voices of all those who could speak must ring out above the clamor of a world, ring out in the doomed silence of the persecuted, and in this way make the destiny of other men less lonely than before.’’ Her life and writing were a testament to this ideal. She was at her best when writing about highly complex human beings caught in political, social or psychological turmoil, struggling to maintain identity and balance. Her outrage at the violation of human dignity was carefully muted, revealed rather than preached. She wrote with consummate skill and passionate sincerity, and is recognized as a major novella writer in American fiction.

OTHER WORKS: Short Stories (1929). Wedding Day, and Other Stories (1930). Landscape for Wyn Henderson (1931). Don Juan (by J. Delteil, translated by Boyle, 1931). Mr. Knife, Miss Fork (by R. Crevel, translated by Boyle, 1931). Devil in the Flesh


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(by R. Radiguet, translated by Boyle, 1932). A Statement (1932). Year Before Last (1932). The First Lover, and Other Stories (1933, (1991). Gentlemen, I Address You Privately (1933, 1991). My Next Bride (1934). The White Horses of Vienna, and Other Stories (1936). Death of a Man (1936, reprinted 1989). Monday Night (1938, 1977) A Glad Day (1938). The Youngest Camel (1939). Primer for Combat (1942). Avalanche (1944). American Citizen: Naturalized in Leadville, Colorado (1944). A Frenchman Must Die (1946). Thirty Stories (1946). 1939 (1948). His Human Majesty (1949). The Seagull on the Step (1955). Three Short Novels (1958). The Youngest Camel Reconsidered and Rewritten (1959). Breaking the Silence: Why a Mother Tells Her Son about the Nazi Era (1962). Collected Poems (1962). At Large (with H. Kubly (1963). Nothing Ever Breaks Except the Heart (1966). Pinky, the Cat Who Liked to Sleep (1966). The Autobiography of Emanuel Carnevali (editor, 1967). Being Geniuses Together: 1920-1930 (with R. McAlmon (1968). Pinky in Persia (1968). The Lost Dogs of Phnom Penh (1968). The Long Walk at San Francisco State, and Other Essays (1970). Testament for My Students, and Other Poems (1970). Enough of Dying! An Anthology of Peace Writings (editor, 1972). Underground Woman (1975). A Poem for February First 1975 (1975). Four Visions of America (with E. Jong, et al. (1977). Collected Poems of Kay Boyle (1991). Winter Night (1993). Most of Kay Boyle’s manuscripts and other papers are at the Morris Library of Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bell, E., Kay Boyle: A Study of the Short Fiction (1992). Clark, S., Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word (1991). Elkins, M. R. ed., Critical Essays on Kay Boyle (1997). Elkins, M., Metamorphosizing the Novel: Kay Boyle’s narrative Innovations (1993). Ford, H., Four Lives in Paris (1987). Gado, F., Kay Boyle: From the Aesthetics of Exile to the Polemics of Return (dissertation, 1968). Hamalian, L., D. H. Lawrence and Nine Women Writers (1996). Jackson, B. K., The Achievement of Kay Boyle (dissertation, 1968). Madden, C. F., ed., Talks with Authors (1968). Mellen, J., Kay Boyle: Author of Herself (1994). Moore, H. T., Age of the Modern and Other Literary Essays (1971). Smith, N.A., War, Gender, and Silence in the Works of Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, and Kay Boyle: ‘‘We Have Become Articulate’’ (dissertation, 1996). Spanier, S. W., Kay Boyle: Artist and Activist (1986). Thompson, J. C., A Re-Evaluation of Kay Boyle’s Wartime Novel Avalanche (dissertation, 1994). Tooker, D., and R. Hofheins, Fiction: Interviews with Northern California Novelists (1976). Yalom, M., ed., Women Writers of the West Coast: Speaking of Their Lives and Careers (1983). Reference works: CAAS (1984). CANR (1990). CLC (1990). DLB (1980, 1981, 1986). FC (1990). Great Women Writers: The Lives and Works of 135 of the World’s Most Important Women Writers, from Antiquity to the Present (1994). MTCW (1991). TCL (Fall 1988). Other references: CE (Nov. 1953). Criticism (1965). Kenyon Review (Spring 1960). NYT (10 July 1966). —JOANNE MCCARTHY

BOYLSTON, Helen Dore Born 4 April 1895, Portsmouth, New Hampshire; died 30 September 1984 Daughter of Joseph and Fannie Dore Boylston An only child, Helen Dore Boylston attended Portsmouth public schools and trained as a nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital. Two days after graduating, she joined the Harvard medical unit that had been formed to serve with the British Army. After the war, she missed the comradeship, intense effort, and mutual dependence of people upon one another when under pressure, and joined the Red Cross to work in Poland and Albania. This work, often in isolation and with little apparent effect, wasn’t satisfying. Returning to the U.S., Boylston taught nose and throat anaesthesia at Massachusetts General for two years. During this time Rose Wilder Lane read Boylston’s wartime diary and arranged for it to be published in the Atlantic Monthly. In the diary, Boylston wonders if the narrower, traditionally feminine world would have contented her if there had been no war: ‘‘I might even have married, as the final Great Adventure— which now seems to me a terrifying and impossible thing to do.’’ Coming into a small inheritance, she spent several years living in Europe. When her money was lost in the Depression, she returned again to nursing but, in the meantime, began trying to earn a living by writing. The short stories Boylston sold to the Atlantic and elsewhere are small narrative moments, with carefully controlled viewpoints and a detailed perception of the surface of reality. ‘‘Dawn’’ is about a girl’s first kiss; several others are told through the eyes of a dog, cat, or horse. Failing to discover any important adult subject matter, Boylston began to reproduce, for girls, the milieu she knew best. Sue Barton, Student Nurse, published in 1936, was the first of a series of seven in which Boylston intended to supply accurate information about a much-romanticized profession. Four ‘‘Carol’’ books in the early 1940s did the same for the stage; Boylston’s friend and neighbor, Eva LeGallienne, supplied her with the necessary background. The Sue Barton books are not written to formula; some are episodic while others answer a single dramatic question. Although the first is undoubtedly the best—longest, most careful in characterization, richest in detail—all are technically well above the level of series fiction. They also reflect the times in which they were written. In the early novels, Sue Barton is an acceptable 1930s career woman, who postpones marriage first to develop her own talents and then for financial reasons. In Visiting Nurse (1938) she does socially conscious work in the slums and in the next book (1939) creates her own job by persuading farm women to fund a rural nurse service. By 1949, however, she is the mother of three children under six, and wondering whether her training is wasted now in her role as wife and mother. The next book, Neighborhood Nurse (1949), insists that it is not and ends with a new pregnancy as answer to the problems of a restive wife, although in the final book, written in 1952, Boylston arranges for Sue’s husband to be stricken with tuberculosis so she can happily

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return to hospital work. She also makes a point of demonstrating that Sue’s children are not harmed by having a working mother. The Sue Barton books remain in print and the earlier ones, at least, are still much read by girls between eight and twelve. Like Boylston’s wartime diary, the books are full of cocoa-parties and female comradeship. Sue Barton, though technically an adult, is actually a big girl with whom preadolescents identify; she is jolly, frank, competent, mischievous, and rather timid about facing her superiors. The only thing she does with the man she loves is work with him, as friends, to bandage a burn or track down a typhoid carrier. The books are kept moving by minor crises in which Sue takes a bus downtown and is afraid she will get lost, must stay alone in the dark, is unsure of her ability to take on responsibility, has misunderstandings with her friends, or must deal with authority figures who are sometimes unfair or mistaken. In other words, Sue is confronted with the crises which loom large in the lives of preadolescents, rather than the actual social and emotional difficulties of the late teens and twenties. Sue solves most of her problems without adult—or male—help. Nursing is portrayed as woman’s ideal career because it is useful, caritative, and supervised. It is not glamorized, however: the books give brisk and bracing accounts about operations, dirty work, and insanity. Each book emphasizes supportive female friendship; several reach an emotional climax in the heroine’s relationship with some admirable older pioneer of nursing or public health. This conception, however, becomes more obviously artificial as the demands of mature womanhood are not met; Sue is neither so convincing nor so interesting as an adult as she is in the early books. OTHER WORKS: ‘‘Sister’’: The War Diary of a Nurse (1927). Sue Barton, Senior Nurse (1937). Sue Barton, Rural Nurse (1939). Sue Barton, Superintendent of Nurses (1940). Carol Goes Backstage (1941). Carol Plays Summer Stock (1942). Carol on Broadway (1944). Carol on Tour (1946). Sue Barton, Staff Nurse (1952). Clara Barton, Founder of the American Red Cross (1955). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Lane, R.W., Travels with Zenobia: Paris to Albania by Model T Ford: A Journal (1983). Reference works: CB (1942). The Junior Book of Authors (1951). Twentieth-Century Authors (1978). —SALLY MITCHELL

BRACKEN, Peg Born 25 February, circa 1918, Twin Falls, Idaho Daughter of John Lewis and Ruth McQuesten Bracken; married Parker Edwards, 1966 (second marriage) Peg Bracken grew up in St. Louis and graduated from Antioch College in 1940, where she was editor of The Antiochian magazine. Her writing career began with advertising copy and

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grew with short stories, light verse, a syndicated newspaper column, and articles on a wide range of ‘‘female’’ topics in periodicals such as Atlantic, McCall’s, Ladies’ Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, and the Saturday Evening Post. Known primarily as a humorist who appealed mainly to women, Bracken’s impact on popular culture deserves more attention and credit. A benevolent facetiousness and lively spirit of parody mark her tone. She provokes a new, more realistic perspective on sociability, especially with respect to the increasingly independent role of women as the major actors, instigators, and interpreters of social drama. Discoursing lightly but authoritatively on subjects such as housekeeping, childrearing, travel, the telephone, rites of passage, and the art of conversation, Bracken established herself as a popular social commentator on the practical matters of human relations. She wrote The I Hate to Cook Book (1960) for the harried cook who refuses to be tied to the kitchen, and The I Hate to Housekeep Book (1962) for the growing class of occasional housekeepers. I Try to Behave Myself (1964) was a bestselling manual on common sense manners. Bracken is an iconoclastic member of that overwhelmingly female elite of social arbiters led by Emily Post and Amy Vanderbilt. Her effort has been to challenge, soften, and humanize some of the more traditional aspects of etiquette in its stiffest interpretation of white gloves and calling cards. She arrives at a more informal, adaptable code based on good intentions and good character. In this interpretation, etiquette is granted a wider range and a more active role in everyday life, rather than a ritual to be reserved for rare occasions. This code, which Bracken calls the ‘‘intelligence of the heart,’’ accommodates the radical shifts in taste and class that have occurred since the beginning of the century and especially since the early 1960s. Bracken recommends a pragmatic, inventive approach to the problems of daily living, distinguishing between the letter of an older social law and the more enduring spirit of any sound etiquette system. She advocates a social interaction made humane and comfortable through the predictability that comes from shared understandings among people. The ‘‘new etiquette’’ acknowledges broadly based norms suited to a pluralist society in flux, where once-hard-and-fast distinctions of social status, age, sex, and education are now blurring and converging. Bracken seeks to resolve the conflict of old rules encountering new values without giving up the battle against the rising tide of barbarism in a steadily more crowded, uncaring, and competitive world. In this way, Bracken wrestles with unanswerable questions of contemporary living: what is ‘‘correct’’ (or appropriate) behavior, and how can it be defined, judged, and performed? How is the individual to manage a system of behavior which can only work if the majority understands and shares in it? In the exploration of these questions, Bracken’s role is that of a nonexpert, antihero housewife who tries to demonstrate that the


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individual temperament is the true measure of action. Individuals cannot and should not be forced into imposed patterns of do’s and don’ts. Ironically, however, Bracken has devised her own imperatives and prohibitions: e.g., ‘‘108 Transgressions’’ (based on Buddhist beliefs) and ‘‘13 Things Children Should Learn and the Sooner the Better.’’ Always a realist, Bracken’s concern is not with how people ought to behave but how they do and would like to. Ultimately, Bracken’s devotion is to the art of civilized living in a society which has left one set of standards behind and is badly in need of another. OTHER WORKS: Peg Bracken’s Appendix to The I Hate to Cook Book (1966). I Didn’t Come Here to Argue (1969). But I Wouldn’t Have Missed It for the World: The Pleasures of an Unseasoned Traveler (1973). The I Hate to Cook Almanack: A Book of Days (1976). The Compleat I Hate to Cook Book (1986). The I Still Hate to Cook Book (1967, reissued 1980). On Getting Old for the First Time (1997). A Window Over the Sink: A Mainly Affectionate Memoir (1981). BIBLIOGRAPHY: PW (25 May 1964). SR (5 Sept. 1964). WD (May 1970). —MARGARET J. KING

BRACKETT, Leigh (Douglass) Born 7 December 1915; died 1978 Married Edmond Moore Hamilton, 1946 Leigh Brackett is identified with the science fiction, fantasy, and mystery fields, but is less known for her work in films, which is also stellar. Her first science fiction story, ‘‘Martian Quest,’’ appeared in the pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction in 1940, launching a rash of stories in science fiction magazines throughout the decade, including appearances in Thrilling Wonder Stories and Planet Stories. She became known for her swashbuckling adventure stories, usually set on Mars. Unlike Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars series, there was no continuity in most of Brackett’s stories until she created Eric John Stark. The first Stark story appeared as a serial called ‘‘Queen of the Martian Catacombs’’ (1949), followed by ‘‘Black Amazon of Mars’’ (1951), both in Planet Stories. They were later expanded into books as The Secret of the Sinharat (1964) and People of the Talisman (1964), respectively, and collected in the Eric John Stark: Outlaw of Mars (1982) omnibus. Stark would eventually move on to Venus in ‘‘Enchantress of Venus’’ (1949) and then into the galaxy in The Ginger Star (1974), The Hounds of Skaith (1974), and The Reavers of Skaith (1976), the latter three becoming The Book of Skaith: The Adventures of Eric John Stark (1976). Many of the stories were also collected in The Coming of the Terrans (1967) and The Halfling and Other Stories (1973). Other

visits to Mars include ‘‘Shadow over Mars’’ (1944), published in book form under the same title in England in 1951, and renamed The Nemesis from Terra (1961) in the United States; and ‘‘Ark of Mars’’ (1953), renamed Alpha Centauri—or Die! (1963). What is arguably Brackett’s best story, ‘‘Sea-Kings of Mars’’ (1949), was renamed The Sword of Rhiannon (1953) in its book form and is loosely connected to ‘‘Sorcerer of Rhiannon’’ (1942). Brackett’s first novel was No Good from a Corpse (1944), a mystery, which was followed in that genre by other crime novels such as Stranger at Home (1946, ghostwritten with actor George Sanders); An Eye for an Eye (1957); The Tiger Among Us (1957), which was reprinted as Fear No Evil (1960) and as 13 West Street (1962); and Silent Partner (1969). In 1946 Brackett married fellow science fiction writer Edmond Hamilton. Critic John Clute contends that Brackett may have influenced Hamilton’s writing, which seems to improve noticeably after World War II. Brackett also collaborated with a young Ray Bradbury on a novelette, ‘‘Lorelei of the Red Mist,’’ in Planet Stories. In the 1950s Brackett penned science fiction novels like The Starmen (1952), renamed twice as The Galactic Breed (1955) and The Starmen of Llyrdis (1976); The Big Jump (1955); and The Long Tomorrow (1955), a postapocalyptic novel. Late in the decade she wrote a western novel, Rio Bravo (1959), and then the screenplay, which went on to become a hit film that year directed by Howard Hawks, starring John Wayne, Dean Martin, Angie Dickinson, Ricky Nelson, Walter Brennan, Ward Bond, and Claude Akins. This successful western was followed by another novel in the same genre, Follow the Free Wind (1963), a fictional account of James Pierson Beckwourth (1798-1866). Rio Bravo was later remade as Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), directed by John Carpenter, and spawned a sequel film, El Dorado (1967), also starring John Wayne, along with Robert Mitchum, James Caan, and Ed Asner. The screenplay was written by Brackett and directed by Hawks. It was not the only time Brackett would work with the legendary director; she also cowrote the screenplay for The Big Sleep (1946) with William Faulkner and Jules Furthman, based on the Raymond Chandler character Philip Marlowe and starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall; Hatari (1962), which starred Wayne and Red Buttons; and Hawks’ final film, Rio Lobo (1970), again with Wayne, Jennifer O’Neill, and Jack Elam. Brackett also penned the screenplay for The Long Goodbye (1973), Chandler’s penultimate novel, starring Elliott Gould and directed by Robert Altman, and a stinker called The Vampire’s Ghost (1945). In the 1970s, the last decade of her life, Brackett edited The Best of Planet Stories #1: Strange Adventures on Other Worlds (1974). She also worked on her last screenplay, The Empire Strikes Back (1980), second in the acclaimed Star Wars series, finished by Lawrence Kasdan, for which she received a posthumous Hugo award. She would also edit The Best of Edmond Hamilton (1977), the same year Hamilton edited The Best of Leigh Brackett, and the same year he passed away. The following year, Brackett was gone too, but her work continues to appear in print in

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anthologies, as well as in numerous re-releases of her film work on videocassette, laser disc, CD-ROM, and DVD. OTHER WORKS: The Jewel of Bas (1944). Works anthologized in: Dozois, G., ed., The Good Old Stuff: Adventure SF in the Grand Tradition (1998). Gorman, E. et al, eds., American Pulp (1997). Pronzini, B., and J. Adrian, eds., Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories (1995). Sargent, P., ed., Women of Wonder: The Classic Years—Science Fiction by Women from the 1940s to the 1970s (1995). Staicar, T., ed., The Feminine Eye: Science Fiction and the Women Who Write It (1982). Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays: Star Wars—A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi (1997). Weinberg, R. et al., eds., Tough Guys & Dangerous Dames (1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Arbur, R., Leigh Brackett, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Anne McCaffrey: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1982). Benson, G., Jr., Leigh Douglass Brackett and Edmond Hamilton: A Working Bibliography (1986). Carr, J. L., Leigh Brackett: American Writer (1986). Clute, J., and P. Nicholls, eds., The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993). Mallett, D. F., and R. Reginald, Reginald’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards: A Comprehensive Guide to the Awards and Their Winners, 2nd edition (1991), 3rd edition (1993). Reginald, R., Science Fiction & Fantasy Literature, 1975-1991: A Bibliography of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror Fiction Books and Nonfiction Monographs (1992). —DARYL F. MALLETT

BRADLEY, Marion Zimmer Born 3 July 1930, near Albany, New York; died 25 September 1999 Also writes under: Lee Chapman, John Dexter, Mariam Gardner, Valerie Graves, Morgan Ives, Alfrida Rivers, John J. Wells Daughter of Evelyn C. and Leslie Raymond Zimmer; married Robert A. Bradley 1949 (divorced); Walter Breen, 1964 (divorced); children: David, Patrick, Dorothy Marian Zimmer Bradley grew up on a farm in upper New York state, where she very early developed a love for reading and writing. Having won a National Merit Scholarship, she attended New York State College for Teachers (1946-48), but left to marry a fellow science fiction fan, Robert Bradley, many years her senior, and moved to Texas. She had begun writing as a teenager, and after her marriage and the birth of David began a prolific output, mostly romances, gothics, and fantasies, to help support her family and pay for her return to college. Beginning in 1952 she published under a number of pseudonyms. She used her own name, however, when she published (with Gene Damon) Checklist: A Complete, Cumulative Checklist of Lesbian, Variant, and

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Homosexual Fiction, in English, or available in English Translation, with Supplements of Related Material, for the Use of Collectors, Students, and Librarians in 1960, with supplements in 1961 and 1962, which foreshadowed her later openness about her own sexual orientation. Bradley graduated from Hardin-Simmons College in Abilene in 1964 and went on to do graduate work at Berkeley (1966-67). Divorced from Robert Bradley, she married Walter Breen, had two more children, and continued her writing career. She has continued to live in California, and, despite several strokes, acted as the doyenne of a productive group of younger fans and writers, continued to produce novels, and edited two series of anthologies, Greyhaven and Sword and Sorceress. In 1988 she began to publish and edit Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine, which encourages tales of ‘‘sword and sorcery,’’ the fantasy subgenre with which she is popularly associated. Bradley’s most popular series of novels, beginning with The Planet Savers and The Sword of Aldones in 1962, are set on Darkover, a snowy and forbidding planet originally settled by colonists from Earth. In the centuries following, the ‘‘lost’’ settlers have developed a patriarchal feudal society ruled by an aristocracy that holds power partly through hereditary psychic abilities. The planet’s rediscovery leads to interesting conflicts between Earth’s modern technology and Darkover conservatism. The Darkover novels are almost ideal illustrations of the ways in which attitudes toward women as writers and subjects of science fiction have changed. The earliest, designed to appeal to a young and almost entirely male audience, are essentially exotic adventure stories centered on white male heroes, with few female characters. But beginning with The Heritage of Hastur (1975), Bradley began to write more complex novels focused on personal relationships and politics rather than action, and gradually to shift from male to female protagonists. Acknowledging her own lesbianism, she began to explore sexual roles and show both male and female homosexuals in a positive light. Particularly influential has been her invention of the Free Amazons (or Renunciates) in The Shattered Chain (1976). These are women who in a malecentered world have freed themselves from a dependence on men. Their lives are not easy or trouble-free, but their community offers an alternative to Darkover’s oppressed women. A young adult series involving three princesses faced with dangerous quests and self-revelation began with Black Trillium (1990), coauthored with Andre Norton and Julian May; Bradley was sole author of the fourth in the series, Lady of the Trillium (1995). Bradley teamed up again with Norton and Mercedes Lackey to produce Tiger Burning Bright, about the women in three generations of a ruling house who must flee and travel in disguise when an evil emperor overthrows their city-state. The novel was not critically acclaimed, but the elements of feminism, magic, romance, and action-adventure are characteristic of Bradley’s writing. Ghostlight (1995), Witchlight (1996), Gravelight (1997), and Heartlight (1998) are departures from Bradley’s outer space settings; they feature Truth Jourdemayne, a researcher into the


paranormal, who finds herself drawn into mysteries involving occult phenomena. Bradley has written and edited at least 40 other novels and anthologies. Of particular interest to women are The Ruins of Isis (1979), an ambiguous depiction of a society in which women dominate men, and two historical novels. The Mists of Avalon (1983) became hugely popular and influential, skillfully retelling Arthurian legend from the point of view of Morgan Le Fay. Dramatizing the struggle between traditional Goddess-worship paganism and the spread of Christianity, Bradley presents a fascinating revision of the motivations and agonies of a familiar cast made new: Arthur, Merlin, Lancelot, Gwenhwyfar, Vivian. It is a powerfully feminist novel, depicting both the prosaic and the magical aspects of the lives of the women who provide the novel’s emotional punch. Avalon led to a resurgence of interest in the Matter of Britain in fantasy fiction, not omitting Bradley’s own later The Forest House (1994), a romance set in Roman Britain, and Lady of Avalon (1997). Bradley performed a similar transformation of myth in The Firebrand (1987), which tells the story of Kassandra against the backdrop of the Trojan War and, as in Avalon, of a matriarchal society overpowered by the patriarchal rule of the Greeks and their male pantheon.

OTHER WORKS: Selected: The Door Through Space (1961). I Am a Lesbian (1962). Seven from the Stars (1962). The Colors of Space (for children, 1963). The Bloody Sun (1964). The Brass Dragon (1969). Darkover Landfall (1972). The Jewel of Arwen (short stories, 1974). The Forbidden Tower (1977). Stormqueen (1978). The Endless Voyage (1979). House Between the Worlds (1981). Sharra’s Exile (1981). Hawkmistress (1982). Thendara House (1983). City of Sorcery (1984). The Best of Marian Zimmer Bradley (edited by M. Greenberg, 1985). Lythande (short stories, 1986). The Best of Marion Zimmer Bradley (1988). The Heirs Hammerfell (1989). Sword and Sorceress: An Anthology of Heroic Fiction (editor, 1992). Rediscovery (1993, with M. Lackey). The papers of Marian Zimmer Bradley are collected at Boston University.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Arbor, R., Leigh Brackett, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Anne McCaffrey: A Primary and Secondary Bibliography (1982). Arbor, R., Marion Zimmer Bradley (1986). Benson, G. and P. Stephensen-Payne, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Mistress of Magic: A Working Bibliography (1991). Merlin’s Daughters (1987). Breen, W., The Gemini Problem: A Study in Darkover (1975). Staicar, T., ed., The Feminine Eye: Science Fiction and the Women Who Write It (1982). Weedman, J. B., ed., Women Worldwalkers: New Dimensions of Science Fiction and Fantasy (1985). Wise, S., The Darkover Dilemma: Problems of the Darkover Series (1976). Reference works: CANR (1990). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Twentieth

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Century Science Fiction Writers (1991). St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers (1996). Other references: Interzone (1990). Science Fiction Studies (March 1980). —LYNN F. WILLIAMS, UPDATED BY FIONA KELLEGHAN

BRADSTREET, Anne Dudley Born 1612, Northampton, England; died 1672, Andover, Massachusetts Wrote under: A Gentlewoman in Those Parts; A Gentlewoman in New-England Daughter of Thomas and Dorothy Yorke Dudley; married Simon Bradstreet, 1628 Anne Bradstreet lived for 60 years, a long life for one who was in chronic ill health and who reared eight children. Her youth was spent in England in a particularly fortunate time. Though the queen had died, the times were still Elizabethan and it was still an era of exploration and expansion, of political and cultural growth. Bradstreet had the advantage of living in the household of the Earl of Lincoln, where her father was trusted steward and friend of the earl. Dudley, called by Bradstreet a ‘‘magazine of history,’’ believed in the education of his daughter. She had complete access to the excellent library of the earl. Here, too, she learned to know and love another protégé of the earl, Simon Bradstreet, whom she married two years before the Dudleys and the Bradstreets sailed on the Arbella for Massachusetts Bay in 1630. Bradstreet’s father was governor of Massachusetts, and her husband succeeded him after she had died. Bradstreet was the first British-American to have a volume of poetry published, and at a time when the Puritan woman’s place was in the home. Governor Winthrop, in 1645, was certain that the wife of the Governor of Hartford had lost her wits because she ‘‘gave herself wholly to reading and writing. . . if she had attended her household affairs and such as belong to women and not gone out of her way and calling to meddle in such things as are proper for men, whose minds are stronger, etc., she had kept her wits and might have improved them usefully and honorably in the place God had set her.’’ But Bradstreet did write poems which would not have seen the light of day had not an admiring brother-in-law, with family connivance, carried them off to England and had them published under the astonishing title of The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650). There have been several editions of her work, even into the 20th century. Three are most important: the original British edition of The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America; the second edition (Boston, 1678), with corrections by the author

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and the addition of her original lyrics; and the complete edition of her works, edited by John Harvard Ellis (1867), to which were added her prose pieces. As was becoming to a Puritan woman, Bradstreet’s first poetry was about biblical themes. Her models were Du Bartas’s Divine Weeks and Works (1605), a widely read account of the creation, and Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World (1614), a popular book that began with the creation and continued the history of mankind to show God’s divine purpose in human events. The long 174-page first poem in The Tenth Muse consists of quaternions of ‘‘The Foure Elements,’’ ‘‘The Foure Humors of Man’s Constitution,’’ ‘‘The Foure Ages of Man,’’ ‘‘The Foure Monarchies,’’ all written in closed couplets, all slavishly imitative of Du Bartas. Only in ‘‘Choler’’ is there any emotional content, as if the poet were angry at an injustice, perhaps against the treatment of Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams. Following the ‘‘four times four poems’’ is ‘‘ Dialogue between Old England and New, concerning the present troubles, Anno 1642,’’ which is original in content and bold in her political concern. Bradstreet was not pleased with her poems in print. She set about revising her first poetry, and she continued writing anew, this time with freedom and originality in thought and structure. The second (American) edition, with these changes and additions, appeared in 1678, six years after her death. It is upon these new poems that her reputation as a poet of excellence rests. They are free in subject matter, depending upon her own experiences, and are lyric in form. They compose religious meditations, domestic poems, love poems, and elegies upon lost members of her family. The most highly regarded poem of all is ‘‘Contemplations,’’ composed of 33 stanzas, skillfully wrought, each stanza an entity, yet all interrelated and all expressing the poet’s recognition of God in Nature, a subject so rare it didn’t find its fruition until the romantic period. An equally remarkable poem in the second edition is ‘‘The Flesh and the Spirit,’’ which S. E. Morison called ‘‘One of the best expressions in English literature of the conflict described by St. Paul in the eighth chapter of his Epistle to the Romans.’’ The Ellis edition shows still another facet of Bradstreet’s writing, her prose. There is a brief but moving autobiography, revealing the spiritual doubts of a good Puritan woman. Her ‘‘Meditations’’ were short prose pieces showing the influence of the aphoristic essays of Bacon, emblems similar to those of Quarles, and spiritual commentaries like the Psalms, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes.


1965). The Works of Anne Bradstreet (ed. J. Hensley, 1967). Poems of Anne Bradstreet (ed. R. Hutchinson, 1969). The papers of Anne Bradstreet are at Houghton Library at Harvard University. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Berryman, J., Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956). Daggett, J. E., ‘‘Another Eighteenth Instance of Anne Bradstreet’s Continuing Appeal’’ (Essex Institute Historical Collections, 3). Fuess, C. M., ‘‘Andover’s Anne Bradstreet, Puritan Poet,’’ in Andover Symbol of New England (1959). Irvin, W. J., ‘‘Allegory and Typology ‘Imbrace and Greet’ Anne Bradstreet’s ‘Contemplations,’’’ in EAL 10. Morison, S. E., Builders of the Bay Colony (1930). Phillips, E., ‘‘Women Among the Moderns Eminent for Poetry,’’ in Theatrum Poetarum (1675). Piercy, J. K., Anne Bradstreet (1965). Rosenfeld, A., ‘‘Anne Bradstreet’s ‘Contemplations’: Patterns of Form and Meaning,’’ in NEQ 43. Tyler, M. C., A History of American Literature During the Colonial Period (1897). Vancura, Z., ‘‘Baroque Prose in America,’’ Studies in English, Charles University (Prague), 4 (1935). Whicher, G. F., ed., Alas, All’s Vanity, or, A Leaf from the First American Edition of Several Poems by Anne Bradstreet (1678). White, M. W., Anne Bradstreet, The Tenth Muse (1971). —JOSEPHINE K. PIERCY

BRANCH, Anna Hempstead Born 18 March 1875, New London, Connecticut; died 8 September 1937, New London, Connecticut Daughter of John Locke and Mary L. Bolles Branch Anna Hempstead Branch, the younger of two children, was born at Hempstead House in New London, Connecticut, where her mother’s family, the Hempsteads, had lived since 1640. Her father was a New York lawyer; her mother wrote popular children’s stories and poems. Following Branch’s graduation from Smith College in 1897, she studied dramaturgy at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, training which is reflected in her numerous verse plays and dramatic monologues.

The estimate of Bradstreet’s later poetry has grown with the years. Moses Coit Tyler and John Harvard Ellis were two scholars who recognized her worth (in the 19th century). Conrad Aiken was the first to include her in his anthology of American literature; Samuel Eliot Morison, the distinguished historian, pronounced her the best American woman poet before Emily Dickinson.

Branch was connected with a number of philanthropic, social work, and art organizations, but most of her time was divided between the Christodora House, a lower east side settlement house, and Hempstead House, where she lived with her mother. At Christodora, Branch established and directed the activities of the Poet’s Guild, an association organized to bring poetry to the neighborhood, especially the children, but which also provided occasions for such poets as Edwin Arlington Robinson, Vachel Lindsay, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Sara Teasdale, Ridgely Torrence, Margaret Widdemer, and Branch herself to read and discuss poetry.

OTHER WORKS: The Works of Anne Bradstreet, in Prose and Verse (ed. J. Harvard, 1867). The Tenth Muse (ed. J. K. Piercy,

Branch’s poems have a variety of subjects and settings, but even those poems with apparently secular subjects are tinged with a religious and mystical apprehension. In Branch’s eclectic first

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volume, Heart of the Road (1901), many of the poems are ‘‘road’’ poems in which the road symbolizes transience. The dramatic monologue ‘‘The Keeper of the Halfway House,’’ for instance, depicts an ironically dependent relationship between the transient and the permanent. An innkeeper, a priestly figure who points ‘‘the way’’ to travelers, sits beside a vacant chair, knowing someone will come and fill it and then move on. As the transients rely on the innkeeper’s abiding presence, so does the innkeeper rely on the succession of travelers to fill his vacant chair. In the same volume Branch takes a hard look at the question of mortality and probes the nature of poetic inspiration. In this volume, the reader is struck by the haunting precision of some of Branch’s lines and by her ability to sustain a mood. Branch’s second volume, The Shoes That Danced (1905), contains a strange mixture of settings (e.g., fairyland, New York City, a monastery) and of characters (e.g., Watteau, shop girls, a Puritan minister). Although in sections of the volume Branch indulges in greeting card sentiments, the title verse drama is intriguing and suggestive. Along with some masterful poems expressing metaphysical doubt and some unexceptional reworkings of great Romantic poems (‘‘Selene’’ of Keats’s ‘‘Endymion’’ and ‘‘The Wedding Feast’’ of Coleridge’s ‘‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’’), Rose of the Wind (1910) contains Branch’s longest and most famous work, ‘‘Nimrod,’’ a Miltonic epic named after the Babylonian king. Although it was highly regarded by Branch’s contemporaries, the diction now seems strained and some of the imagery imitative. The interest of the epic centers on Branch’s curious depiction of language. The work reflects Branch’s private symbolism, her mystical apprehension of language. Branch’s most satisfying volume is Sonnets from a Lock Box (1929). In the title sequence of 38 sonnets, Branch sheds her personae and speaks in the first person. The sequence is distinguished from some of Branch’s earlier work by its directness of expression and originality. It moves from a portrayal of various types of entrapment and enslavement to a search for a means of escape. Branch seeks liberation in mystical systems, invoking alchemy, astrology, cabalistic symbolism, numerology, and ‘‘Holy Logic.’’ Yet Branch intimates that the problem and the solution are secondary to the poetry, the ‘‘music,’’ that they inspire. Branch’s posthumous volume, Last Poems (1944), edited by Ridgely Torrence, her longtime associate at Christodora House, contains some extreme expressions of the mystical preoccupations evident in ‘‘Nimrod’’ and Sonnets from a Lock Box. The most striking poems and the verse drama draw their metaphors from alchemy and numerology. Yet Branch employs these esoteric images in order to approach her final subject—the equation of language, words, and poetry with the Divine. Although Branch’s poetry is at times derivative and contains a large population of fairies, kings, clouds, shepherds, along with the archaic diction appropriate to such a poetic population. Branch had a genuine gift and an authentic voice. Her deepest subjects are language and what is to her its truest expression, poetry—‘‘the changeless reflection of the changing dream.’’ For Branch, words are divine manifestations that not only create, order and give meaning to reality, but that are the very stuff of life: ‘‘I say that

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words are men and when we spell / In alphabets we deal with living things.’’ In her time, Branch was compared to Robert Browning, Christina Rossetti, and the metaphysical poets. E. A. Robinson and other contemporaries regarded Branch as a major figure, repeatedly including her name in discussions of poets of the day. Although she was not as successful as were Blake and Yeats in universalizing a private mystical system, she holds a secure place among the minor poets of the United States. OTHER WORKS: A Christmas Miracle and God Bless this House (1925). Bubble Blower’s House (1926). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bolles, J. D., Father Was an Editor (1940). Cary, R., The Early Reception of E. A. Robinson: The First Twenty Years (1974). Widdemer, M., Golden Friends I Had (1964). Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). TCA (1942). Other references: NYT (9 Sept. 1937). —ELLEN FRIEDMAN

BRAUN, Lilian Jackson Born circa 1916, Massachusetts Also writes as: Ward Jackson Married Earl Bettinger, 1979 Lilian Jackson Braun’s The Cat Who. . . series has a loyal following of fans, and it is no wonder why to those who have enjoyed her mystery series over the years. Braun’s series follow the life changes and adventures of newspaperman Jim Qwilleran, affectionately known as Qwill to characters in the series and readers alike. Qwill is an amateur detective, and with the aid of his trusty companions, two Siamese cats named Koko and Yum Yum, he solves the most complex of murders. Braun’s first work was published when she was just sixteen and did not involve cats or murder mysteries at all. Instead, she sold articles on baseball, a secret love of hers, to Baseball magazine and the Sporting News under the pseudonym Ward Jackson, believing the sports writing field would accept a man more seriously than a woman. Braun had began reading and writing at the early age of three, inspired by her mother who wanted her to be able to correspond with her grandmother who lived far away. And in fact, though she was not actually writing, she composed her first poem at the age of two: ‘‘Mother Goose is up in the sky, and these are her feathers coming down in my eye.’’ As she has said herself, ‘‘Not bad for a two-year-old.’’ Braun began a career as an advertising copywriter, and her first ‘‘cat story’’ was a short story inspired by the unfortunate death of her Siamese named Koko, who fell from a 10-story window. Neighbors suspected foul play, and thus Braun wrote a short story, ‘‘The Sin of Madame Phloi,’’ to memorialize her beloved cat: ‘‘I was forty years old when my husband gave me a

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Siamese kitten for a birthday present. . . . I named him Koko, after a character in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado.’’ Braun wrote other cat short stories, many of which appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Her fictional writing career truly began in 1966 with the release of The Cat Who Could Read Backwards, in which Qwill, assisted only by Koko in this first novel, solves his first mystery. The first novel introduces Qwilleran, a former crime reporter in the city, who is down and out after a bitter divorce and a history of drinking. He finds a job as a features writer with a Midwestern newspaper, the Daily Fluxion, and in tandem with his job covering the local art beat, he solves the murder of an artist. Braun was immediately recognized as a promising new mystery writer and quickly followed her first novel with two more: The Cat Who Ate Danish Modern (1967), in which Yum Yum is rescued by Qwill after being abandoned, and The Cat Who Turned On and Off (1968). Bored with the lonely life of a writer, Braun soon began work writing columns for the Detroit Free Press on many of the hobbies that would become subjects for her fictional counterpart’s writings, including antiques, interior decorating, art, and food. She remained in this position for 30 years, and after an 18-year hiatus from The Cat Who. . . series, picked up her pen to begin again. In 1986 she released The Cat Who Saw Red, a manuscript she had written two decades before. This newest volume in the series proved that Braun’s work had lost none of its appeal. She earned a nomination for an Edgar award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1986. Braun went on to write many more mysteries starring Koko and Yum Yum and their companion, Qwill. There were 21 by early 1999, and a new one, The Cat Who Robbed the Bank, was due in 2000. Braun says that keeping the series fresh has never been a problem; she follows the changes in the lives of Qwill and the townsfolk of Pickax in Moose County, ‘‘400 miles north of everywhere,’’ evolving the characters with each new novel. Braun writes characters ‘‘like patchwork quilts of all the people I’ve known,’’ she says. Carol Barry wrote in the St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers, ‘‘Braun’s ability to introduce and sustain a strong cast of supporting characters keeps the reader eagerly awaiting the next book. . . . The murders are both surprising and shocking, but the dialogue, the local color, and the characters make up more of the story than the act of murder itself.’’ Braun herself says her twist to the mystery story is the uncanny knack of the two Siamese to uncover clues, ‘‘although it is a tongue-in-cheek theme, that is my premise: that cats are smarter than people, take it or leave it.’’ Her narration is always vivid, lending a feeling to the reader that they actually know the characters and the town of Pickax. Braun’s fans are not only loyal because of the stories of the unique detective work of Qwill and his cats, but also because Braun is able to capture their attention and keep it until the end of the story and even instill anticipation for the next installment. Braun lives with her husband, Earl Bettinger, and her two cats, Koko III and PittiSing, in the mountains of North Carolina near the town of Tryon, only promoting her books at nearby bookstores and cat shows. Braun commented in an article entitled

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‘‘Why Cats?’’: ‘‘As subjects for mysteries, cats are clever, funny, independent, subtle, wily, profound, inscrutable, and—yes— mysterious. And there are no two alike. But if you’re going to write about them, it helps to be part-cat.’’ And as friends know, and readers would agree, Braun must be part-cat to write so well about the felines as she does. OTHER WORKS: The Cat Who Played Brahms (1987). The Cat Who Played Post Office (1987). The Cat Who Knew Shakespeare (1988). The Cat Who Had Fourteen Tales (1988). The Cat Who Sniffed Glue (1988). The Cat Who Went Underground (1989). The Cat Who Talked to Ghosts (1990). The Cat Who Lived High (1990). The Cat Who Knew a Cardinal (1991). The Cat Who Wasn’t There (1992). The Cat Who Moved a Mountain (1992). The Cat Who Went into the Closet (1993). The Cat Who Came to Breakfast (1994). The Cat Who Blew the Whistle (1995). The Cat Who Said Cheese (1996). The Cat Who Tailed a Thief (1997). The Cat Who Sang for the Birds (1998). The Cat Who Saw Stars (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: ‘‘The Bumbler and the Silken Sleuths: ‘The Cat Who’ Mysteries of Lilian Jackson Braun,’’ in North Carolina Literary Review (1996). PW (19 Oct. 1998). Reference works: Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994). St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers (1996). CA Online (1999). —DEVRA M. SLADICS

BRECKINRIDGE, Sophonisba Preston Born 1 April 1866, Lexington, Kentucky; died 30 July 1948, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of William Campbell Preston and Issa Desha Breckinridge Born of a respected, intellectual family, Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge graduated from Wellesley College in 1888 but experienced a period of uncertainty characteristic of educated women at this time, who were seen as anomalies with few career opportunities available to them. Breckinridge taught high school in Washington, D.C. until 1894, when she returned to her father’s home and law office. By 1895, being the first woman to successfully pass Kentucky’s bar exams, Breckinridge decided to return to school because she could not obtain legal clients; thus began a lifelong career at the University of Chicago. In 1901 Breckinridge earned a Ph.D. in political science and a J.D. in 1904. Simultaneously she worked as an assistant dean of women, and as a faculty member, first in the department of Household Administration, and later in the Social Services Administration. In 1907 Breckinridge moved into Hull House, the social settlement, together with a graduate-school friend, Edith Abbott, and lived there intermittently until 1920. Casting off her previous academically safe style of research, Breckinridge plunged into socially involved observations and analyses. At age forty-one, she


turned her life and career fully to the study of social welfare and change. Women’s rights soon emerged as a central concern in her writing and everyday life. She became vice president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1911, and as a lawyer she helped draft bills regulating women’s wages and hours of employment. She was also an active member of the National Trade Women’s League, the Women’s League, the Women’s City Club of Chicago, the American Association of University Women, and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Breckinridge was a major force, along with Edith Abbott, in the founding of the Graduate School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. Training large numbers of students (by 1935, 1300 students had registered in the program), she helped shape the profession of social work through rigorous course work, the introduction of the case history method, and her concern with a holistic, political approach to the solution of social problems. In 1927 Breckinridge and Abbott helped found the distinguished professional journal Social Service Review, setting a high standard for scholarly studies of social problems and the profession of social work. Evidence of Breckinridge’s and Abbott’s close friendship and professional support abounds. They were not only members of the same faculty, coadministrators, and coresidents of Hull House for 13 years, but also coauthors and coeditors. In a world hostile to intelligent, assertive women, they established a strong personal network as unique then as it is today. The Modern Household (1912), coauthored by Breckinridge and Marion Talbot, Breckinridge’s colleague and supervisor at the University of Chicago, is an introductory text intended for housewives and college students to help them adapt to social changes affecting the home in modern society. The book covers a variety of topics ranging from the mundane care of the house to ethical concerns in consumerism and the community. Abbott and Breckinridge collaborated in writing Truancy and Non-attendance in the Chicago Schools: A Study of the Social Aspects of the Compulsory Education and Child Labor Legislation of Illinois (1917). Highly committed to the need for education until age sixteen, the authors examine the many factors leading to school absence, such as poverty, mental and physical defects, lack of knowledge of the immigrant parents and child, and delinquency. Documenting the existence and extent of missed school days and the historical development of compulsory education, remedies are suggested. Read today, the authors’ arguments are still timely and the controversy still lively. The continual conflict between young people who do not wish to be educated, and the state which demands they attend educational institutions, is as problematical today as it was 60 years ago. New Homes for Old (1921) is a fascinating account of difficulties encountered by immigrant women in American society. Chapters on altered family relationships, housecleaning, saving and spending money, and child care provide information on the dramatic changes in everyday life facing the foreign-born housewife. Organizations established to help mitigate the stress

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created by these situations are discussed, presenting a historical view of social services in this area. Both Breckinridge and Abbott, as founders in social work education, generated a remarkable series of six books (each authoring three), containing selected documents and case records on a variety of social problems. These texts helped establish the case work method of study and reporting in social work and provided a vivid account of individual lives as they were affected by social change, legislation, and public agencies. Public Welfare Administration in the United States (1927), Breckinridge’s first contribution to this series, notes early (1601) origins of legislation and institutions concerning the destitute and mentally ill. Subsequent changes and the resulting hodge-podge of control and disorder, a legacy to today’s welfare state, are noted in legal precedents and in statements made by leading authorities of the day in agency management and administration. In the revised edition (1938), the expanding but still chaotic role of the federal government is noted. Another volume in the series, Family Welfare Work (1924), presents problems or strains on the ‘‘modern’’ family: physical and mental illnesses; widowhood; the deserted family; unmarried mothers; industrial injuries; care of family members, especially the very young or old. Legislation and the difficulty of enforcing it for each of the above family problems is presented in document, case history form. Breckinridge’s Marriage and the Civic Rights of Women (1932) discusses the relationship between marital status and citizenship. A key legislation reviewed is the Cable Act of 1922: for the first time American women could retain their citizenship when marrying an alien. This book is an astute combination of law, social relations, and women’s rights. The terseness and clarity of the text, the comprehensive work done by women internationally, the case studies of foreign-born women in America, make this an early classic on the legal status of women and the social barriers they encountered in obtaining citizenship rights. Any student and scholar of women’s role in society from 1890 to 1933 will find Women in the Twentieth Century: A Study of Their Political, Social and Economic Activities (1933) a must on their reading lists. The growth of women’s participation in life outside the home emerged from women’s clubs, increased access to institutions for higher education, the suffrage movement, and concern with the political arena. Data is given on income and the distribution of women in various occupations, with a number of tables providing an invaluable baseline for assessing changes or stability in income, and distribution in occupations over time. Since this historical period is remarkable for its relatively high proportion of women professionals, the chapters discussing professional and near-professional women, women’s earnings, and women in business offer factual information that gives a uniquely comparative, historical base to issues still vital to women today. Detailed accounts of early women politicians and women’s voting behavior are also provided. This book in many ways is a handbook of women’s status from 1890 to 1933. The Tenements of Chicago, 1908-1935 (1936) is a massive study of housing conditions and poverty in Chicago. The book, a

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result of 25 years of research, is based on house-to-house canvassing in 151 city blocks, and visits to 18,225 apartments. As a result, Edith Abbott, the primary author, and Breckinridge, the secondary author, actually act as editors for a large number of studies done by their students over the years. The problems noted: lack of enforcement of housing regulations, too few city inspectors, high rents for substandard housing, and large numbers of unemployed people suffering from social stress such as broken families, ill health, and lack of education, are as relevant today as they were back then. The documentation of these problems provides an excellent historical base for understanding these same problems today. Breckinridge’s career is remarkable for its productivity, diversity, and quality. As a woman completely dedicated to social equality, her life was deeply enmeshed with those of the other women who were associated with Hull House: Jane Addams, Julia Lathrop, and Grace and Edith Abbott. Reading and evaluating Breckinridge’s writings, one must consider them products of her contacts with this group, with other intellectuals such as Marion Talbot, and with her students. At the same time, Breckinridge’s influence on others was overwhelming, as documented by her bibliography cards that occupy nearly an inch in the library card catalog at the University of Chicago. Her contributions to education and social reform attest to her success at being a dedicated and intelligent scholar and educator. OTHER WORKS: Administration of Justice in Kentucky (1901). Legal Tender (1903). The Child in the City (1912). The Delinquent Child and the Home (with E. Abbott, 1912). Madeline McDowell Breckinridge (1921). Social Work and the Courts (1934). The Illinois Poor Law and Its Administration (1939). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: DAB (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: SSR (Dec. 1948, March 1949, Sept. 1949). —MARY JO DEEGAN

BRÉE, Germaine Born 2 October 1907, Lasalle, France Daughter of Walter and Loïs Andrault Brée Teacher and critic of French language, literature, and culture, Germaine Brée was the first of six children born to her French Protestant mother and the third of eight children born to her British clergyman father. Both Brée’s parents were bilingual so she grew up fluent in both languages. She studied at the Jersey Ladies College on the island of Jersey (1917-22), the Ecole Normale at Nîmes (1922-26), the Faculty of Letters at the Sorbonne (1926-31), and Bryn Mawr College (1931-32). Brée began her teaching career at the Lycée of Oran in Algeria (1932-36) and then returned to Bryn Mawr, where she

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taught from 1936 to 1953. During World War II, Brée served in the French army as an ambulance driver in North Africa and as an intelligence officer in France. From 1953 to 1960 she was chairperson of the Department of French and head of the Romance Languages Department at New York University, and from 1960 to 1973 she was Vilas Professor of French and a permanent member of the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In 1973 she accepted a Kenan professorship in the humanities at Wake Forest University. Brée has received over two dozen honorary degrees and has lectured widely in the U.S., Europe, and Australia. She has been appointed to a large number of national academic and scholarly committees and was president of the Modern Language Association of America in 1975. Brée is the author of numerous books, major anthologies, innumerable articles, introductions, prefaces, and book reviews. Many of her doctoral students have become the leading teacher-scholars of their generation. What is most characteristic of Brée’s criticism is her suspicion that systems tend to mystify rather than clarify. Although she is well versed in all the ‘‘isms’’ that have informed 20th-century French culture, she does not expound a single truth. Rather, she invites her readers and students to remain open to the richness of competing discourses in literary studies. Her books on Proust (1950, 1966), Gide (1953), and Camus (1959) are exemplary introductory studies to the major texts of these writers. Brée always situates the literary text in its cultural context and gives particular attention to its intellectual and ethical preoccupations, but her emphasis is on the text as a literary construct, as a piece of fiction. She insists on the pleasures of reading, the sensuous aspect of literary discourse, and the intellectual reward found in discovering relationships between parts. Her book on Women Writers in France (1973) was one of the first attempts in English to trace the main lines of the feminist debate in France and the position of French women writers vis-à-vis the debate and their craft. Brée’s most impressive published work, Le XXe siècle II, 1920-1970 (1978), is a synthesis of the French cultural scene. It ranges from linguistics and the cinema to cybernetics and molecular biology. The volume is divided into five parts: history, politics, social climate, intellectual currents, and literary movements. The last part is the most original. Brée chooses two figures to illustrate each decade: for the 1940s she chooses Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus; for 1950-70 she chooses Marguerite Duras and Claude Simon. Very infrequently does an academic critic who is not explicitly feminist select women writers as part of the mainstream of contemporary literature. It is a sign of Brée’s commitment to her own point of view, as well as a sign of her sense of timing. As she did in her study of Camus and Sartre: Crisis and Commitment (1972), Brée reformulates contemporary problems by demystifying them. She is one of the rare literary critics who present both text and context; she views literature both as a game of words and as a human document. Brée is an outstanding representative of the humanist tradition in academic criticism and in teaching. By the beginning of the 1980s, Brée had established a firm position for herself in the field of French literature. She holds membership in nearly a dozen academic and writing associations,


including the Writer’s Guild and PEN, and received a National Book Award nomination for Camus and Sartre: Crisis and Commitment. Although retired since 1984 from her position as the Kenan Professor of Humanities at Wake Forest University, Brée has continued to make important contributions to this field. In 1983 she updated and revised her 1978 work, Literature Française, 1920-1970, published in English as Twentieth Century French Literature. This ‘‘nimble, if promiscuous, study of literary history,’’ as one critic called it, covers a vast amount of territory. Brée is at her strongest when speaking of the writers she knows well, such as Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, and Duras. In 1990, at the age of eighty-three, Brée published Le Monde Fabuleux de J. M. G. Le Clézio, a study of the French author and his works. Bettina Knapp commented: ‘‘Clarity and cogency, two of Germaine Brée’s many remarkable characteristics as a critic, serve her well in her latest volume. . . . The novels. . .are all explored by Brée in her typically scrupulous manner, underscoring their thematic significance, artistic value, and fascination for young and old.’’ Brée continued editing and penning forewords and introductions to scholarly volumes into the 1990s, as well as editing a series of translated French poetry books for Wake Forest University Press. As a critic whose reviews and critical essays remained in demand, Brée is in little danger of falling into obscurity. Her early contributions to the field, such as her works on Proust and Gide, are still considered among the most comprehensive and clearly written books on these much discussed authors. Truly a grande dame of French literary study, Brée has continued to provide the academic world with fresh work and to tackle new problems, for which the scholars in her field can be truly grateful. OTHER WORKS: Du temps perdu au temps retrouvé: Introduction à l’oeuvre de Marcel Proust (1950). Marcel Proust and Deliverance from Time (trans. by C. J. Richards and A. D. Truitt, 1956). André Gide, l’insaisissable Protée: Etude critique de l’oeuvre d’André Gide (1953). An Age of Fiction: The French Novel from Gide to Camus (with M. Guiton, 1957). Camus (1959). Contes et nouvelles: 1950-1960 (with Georges Markow-Totevy, 1961, revised edition published as Contes et nouvelles: 1950-1970). Gide (1963). Albert Camus (1964). Voix d’aujourd’hui (with Micheline Dufau, 1964). The World of Marcel Proust (1966). Essays in Honor of David Lyall Patrick (1971). Women Writers in France: Variations on a Theme (1973) BIBLIOGRAPHY: Lesage, L., and A.Yon, eds., Dictionnaire des critiques littéraires: Guide de la critique française du XXe siècle (1969). Marks, E., ‘‘Germaine Brée: A Partial Portrait,’’ in University Women (1979). Stambolian, G., ed., Twentieth Century French Fiction: Essays for Germaine Brée (1975). Wakeman, J., ed., World Authors (1975). Reference works: CA (1981, 1992). CANR (1981). Other references: NYT (31 July 1983, 9 Dec. 1984). NYTBR (5 Apr. 1959). ‘‘Retired Professor a Renaissance Woman,’’ Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service (1995). Poirot-Delpech, B., ‘‘Littérature française 1920-1970,’’ in Le Monde (30 June 1978).

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Virginia Quarterly Review (Winter 1984). World Literature Today (Autumn 1991). —ELAINE MARKS, UPDATED BY LISI SCHOENBACH AND LEAH J. SPARKS

BRENNAN, Maeve Born 1917, Dublin, Ireland Daughter of James Brennan and wife; married St. Clair McKelway The daughter of an Irish partisan, Maeve Brennan spent most of her early life in Dublin. In 1934 her family emigrated to America where, in the early 1940s, Brennan joined the staff of Harper’s Bazaar and then the New Yorker. She originated the ‘‘long-winded lady’’ column featured in the New Yorker’s ‘‘Talk of the Town,’’ and published most of her stories in the magazine. Her marriage to fellow staffer St. Clair McKelway lasted seven years. In 1973 Brennan received a literature award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Brennan’s first book, In and Out of Never-Never Land (1969), is a collection of stories published between 1953 and 1968. Outstanding tales include ‘‘The Eldest Child,’’ concerning the death of a newborn son and his parents’ separate grief; ‘‘Stories of Africa,’’ wherein a gentle Irish-woman nervously entertains an elderly bishop and both find themselves surprisingly comforted. The Long-Winded Lady (1969) includes 47 nonfiction vignettes from the New Yorker. Writing about the city she loves, however, Brennan confesses in her introduction that ‘‘if she has a title it is one held by many others, that of a traveler in residence.’’ Brennan’s third collection, Christmas Eve (1974), introduces waspish American critic Charles Runyon, a not-always-welcome guest at fashionable Herbert’s Retreat. Runyon, petty in a delightfully vicious sort of way, is at his best in a story such as ‘‘The Stone Hot-Water Bottle,’’ where his hostess faces a crisis of major proportions over which guest will use the heirloom which Runyon has appropriated for his personal comfort. While her ‘‘long-winded lady’’ sketches may endear her to the hearts of New Yorkers, Brennan’s real strength lies in her short stories: in the psychological complexity of her characters, and in her wit and careful detail. She has the power to move her reader by means of ordinary circumstances, to probe the inner fears of her characters, to illuminate their hearts. The ambivalence of love and the breakdown of communication are also frequent themes in Brennan’s work. She examines with precision those loveless marriages between two essentially good, decent people who grow apart without ever really knowing why. One does not actively dislike her characters—even the worst are only poor souls who set off on the wrong foot and were never able to get right again. Brennan’s best work is crystalline; the reader perceives a brilliant clarity until another facet is turned to the light, and then

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realizes he/she is looking not through the crystal but into it. Nothing is ever quite as simple as it appears to be; this is the essence of Brennan’s art. OTHER WORKS: The Springs of Affection (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Atlantic (Oct. 1969). NYTBR (23 Feb. 1969, 4 Aug. 1974). Time (1 July 1974). —JOANNE MCCARTHY

BRENT, Linda See JACOBS, Harriet

BRES, Rose Falls Born 1869, New Orleans, Louisiana; died 14 November 1927, Jacksonville, Florida Also wrote under: Rose C. Falls Daughter of Isaac W. and Rosetta Falls; married William A. Bres, 1902 Little is known about Rose Falls Bres’ childhood, which was apparently spent in New Orleans. In her early teens she lived in Paducah, Kentucky, where she worked for a newspaper and read law. Admitted to the bar in Kentucky (circa 1889), Bres found that such credentials did not transfer to Louisiana when she returned to New Orleans to practice law there. While waiting to be admitted to the Louisiana bar, Bres worked as a secretary and a journalist. Her first copyrighted work was ‘‘Cheniere Caminada, or The Wind of Death’’ (1893), a narrative account of a storm that killed 1607 persons in the Grand Isle area of Louisiana. During her almost 18 years of law practice in Louisiana, Bres was active in politics and journalism. She was also associate editor of the ERA, a woman’s publication. In 1907 Bres copyrighted three plays from New Orleans, one of which, ‘‘The Law and the Lady Down in Dixie,’’ reflects many of her experiences as a woman professional in 19th century Southern society and in politics. When Bres moved to New York City in 1910, she became a member of the National Women Lawyers Association and later national president (1925-27) and editor of their publication, The Women Lawyers’ Journal (1921-24). She served as counsel to the Lucy Stone League and was editor of a short-lived (due to World War I) magazine, Oyez!, published by women lawyers in 1916. Throughout her career, Bres worked for passage of uniform divorce and marriage laws and for women to have the right to use their own names. Labor laws, property rights, treatment of immigrants, and capital punishment laws were also major concerns of hers. The Law and the Woman (1917), dedicated to the Women’s Press Club of New York, was favorably reviewed by the New York

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Times: ‘‘As the first attempt to present in a single volume the status of women in the United States under the Federal and the State Laws, Mrs. Bres’ book has unique value and interest. . . . Her digest and discussion of the present legal status of women in this country is scholarly and readable and makes a worthwhile addition to feminist literature.’’ Bres’ ‘‘lost’’ Louisiana plays seem never to have been produced or published. The longest of the three, ‘‘The Law and the Lady Down in Dixie,’’ is a three-act melodrama of almost classic mode for the type, although the playwright uses a series of ironic touches which modernize the melodrama form. In the play, a politician expresses his fondness for the ladies and says they can always find him when they need him. But when questioned directly on whether he will support legislation to change the Civil Code of Louisiana ‘‘which has come down from Napoleon,’’ he declares, rather regretfully: ‘‘The time is not yet right for the ladies.’’ OTHER WORKS: ‘‘Turn of the Wheel: A Humorous One Act Sketch’’ (unpublished; 12 Jul. 1907). ‘‘A Fairy Tale: A One Act Sketch’’ (unpublished, 9 Aug. 1907). Maids, Wives and Widows: The Law of the Land and of the Various States as It Affects Women (1918). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bres, R. F., ‘‘Oyez! from Paducah,’’ in Everybody’s Magazine (Dec. 1916). Wilkins, Z. P., ‘‘Portias Undisguised,’’ in The Woman Citizen (Sept. 1924). Other references: Women Lawyers’ Journal 16 (1928). —DOROTHY H. BROWN

BREUER, Bessie Born 19 October 1893, Cleveland, Ohio; died 26 September 1975 Daughter of Samuel A. and Julia Bindley Freedman; married Mr. Breuer; Carl Kahler; Henry Varnum Poor, 1925 After graduating from the Missouri State University School of Journalism, Bessie Breuer worked for several years as a newspaper reporter, first for the St. Louis Times and subsequently for the New York Tribune, where she was editor of the women’s department and briefly, Sunday editor. After staff work for the American Red Cross publicity department, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Harper’s, she went to France where her friendships with Kay Boyle and Laurence Vail encouraged her to turn her attention toward fiction writing. She wrote for such periodicals as World’s Work, Pictorial Review (often in collaboration with Henry Ford), House Beautiful, Mademoiselle, and the New Yorker until the 1960s. She received second prize in the O. Henry Memorial Award for short fiction in 1944. In 1948, her only play, Sundown Beach, was produced by Elia Kazan at the Actor’s Studio in New York City. The play ran for seven performances after having been dismissed by the critics as an ‘‘emotional vaudeville.’’


Breuer’s early publications often centered on the significance and implications of postsuffrage feminism. One of these articles, ‘‘Feminism’s Awkward Age’’ (Harper’s, April 1925), a discussion of the difficulty the modern woman faces in attempting to integrate personal and sexual needs with vocational and political goals, provides an excellent introduction to concerns which were crucial in Breuer’s later fiction. She often concentrates on the fate of women who flounder in endless introspection, unsatisfying jobs, and painful relationships; women who lack either the consolations of a conventional identity or a mass movement in which to submerge themselves. In her autobiographical sketch for Twentieth Century Authors, Breuer describes her fictional priorities: ‘‘Somewhere Freud has said that psychologists have frank records of the male, but the female is shrouded and secreted and known to no man. That has been to me our great sin as writers, those of us who are women: that nowhere in our history as artists have we been the earth shakers because we dared not. So I try, oh, just a tiny bit, to write of what I truly see and have known; and not being a member of some powerful literary clan, am scolded for my lack of morality, or ignored.’’ Following these priorities, Breuer’s fiction is sexually explicit and unsparing in its delineation of her heroine’s confusion. These tendencies, as well as her experimental style, caused the critical reception to her novel to be frequently negative. Breuer’s first novel, Memory of Love (1934), is written in the voice of a married man as he remembers an affair he had years before with a woman separated from her husband. For the narrator, a man who prides himself on his sexual exploits, this woman is unexpectedly captivating. Alternating between equally intense moments of attraction and repulsion, the narrative recounts their passionate, tempestuous affair. Finally, the protagonist is forced to abandon this woman when his wealthy parents threaten to cut off his income unless he returns to his more socially prestigious wife. The novel seems to stand as Breuer’s commentary on the extreme vulnerability of the sexually active ‘‘new’’ woman. Breuer’s most successful novel, The Daughter (1938), is the story of a young woman, Katy, and her divorced mother. Living on an income provided by Katy’s prominent father (with the stipulation that no acknowledgment of the connection be made public), the two women drift from one second-rate resort to another. The mother enjoys a series of casual affairs while the daughter retreats more deeply into a carefully constructed aesthetic artifice of classical music and contemporary poetry. Most of the action takes place in a west coast Florida hotel where the daughter has her first affair. Lacking her mother’s resiliency, this purely physical involvement almost destroys her and she attempts suicide. In addition to its remarkable characterization of Katy, The Daughter is memorable because of Breuer’s repeated juxtaposition of the aimless resort world of her characters and the wider panorama of world events. If her characters do not care, Breuer seems to, and insistently reminds her readers of the sociopolitical background against which her novel is set. Only Katy has any sense of the significance of this wider world. The best she can do,

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however, is to fantasize that in a different place, with a different personality, she too could have been a Jane Addams or a La Pasionaria. Joanna Trask, the heroine of Breuer’s The Actress (1955), seems at first to be a continuation of the passive, introspective, and excessively vulnerable heroines typical of Breuer’s early fiction. But the novel traces Joanna’s gradual development, a process characterized by Breuer as a movement toward assuming responsibility for her own actions and control over her own fate. She becomes more active than acted upon and, for the first time in Breuer’s fiction, sexual experience is viewed as necessary and healthy. The novel ends with the optimistic assertion that Joanna will not only combine a career and a family, but do it well. Breuer’s fiction will strike the modern reader as unexpectedly contemporary, in part because of Breuer’s innovative narrative techniques and her interest in the relationship between woman’s sexual and social identities. Breuer is an often fascinating writer who deserves more serious attention than she has yet received. OTHER WORKS: The Bracelet of Wavia Lea and Other Stories (1947). Take Care of My Roses (1961). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Blake, F., The Strike in the American Novel (1972). Cormany, S., The Common Orchestra: The Role of the Artist in the Fiction of Bessie Breuer and Tess Slesinger (dissertation, 1993). Hill, V., Strategy and Breadth: The Socialist-Feminist in American Fiction (dissertation, 1979). Reference works: American Women, D. Howes, ed. (1939). TCA (1942). Other references: CW (24 Sept. 1948). NR (20 Sept. 1948). NY (18 Sept. 1948). Newsweek (20 Sept. 1948). SR (16 April 1938, 28 Dec. 1946, 17 Jan. 1949). Theatre Arts (Jan. 1949). WLB (Oct. 1938). —VICKI LYNN HILL

BREWSTER, Martha Wadsworth Born circa 1730s; died date unknown Married Oliver Brewster; children: Ruby, Wadsworth Martha Wadsworth Brewster is one of only four colonial women who published volumes of their verse before the Revolution. Materials for reconstructing the life of Brewster are meager: we know only what is included in the Poems on Divers Subjects (1757). Her acrostic verses name her family, husband Oliver, and children Ruby and Wadsworth, but they tell little more about them than Brewster’s concern for their spiritual development and good conduct. Brewster probably lived for most of her life in Lebanon, Connecticut. Beyond these sketchy details of family connection, Brewster’s life remains an enigma. Her 21 poems vary widely in theme and form: the more than 1100 lines include letters, farewells to friends

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who are moving, epithalamiums, eulogies, scriptural paraphrases, a love poem, a quaternion, a dream (in prose), and meditations. Conventional religious and family themes predominate, but other materials—the violence of military encounter, the schisms of the Great Awakening, the muted stirring of personal ambition—are treated as well. The untitled verse preface to Brewster’s Poems detailed the risks a literary woman undertook in colonial society: ‘‘Pardon her bold Attempt who has reveal’d / Her thoughts to View, more fit to be Conceal’d / Since thus to do was urged Vehemently, / Yet most no doubt will call it Vanity. . . .’’ The possibility of incurring blame for stepping outside customary women’s roles was clearly in Brewster’s thoughts. She opened her preface humbly, even defensively, protesting that her ‘‘Muse had but a single Aim, / My self and nearest Friends to Entertain. . . .’’ Recognizing the unusual nature of her ambition, Brewster asked only the opportunity to develop her literary skills. No recorded response to Brewster’s Poems documents the volume’s reception, but it appeared in two editions, one in New London, Connecticut (1757), and another in Boston (1758). Such reprinting suggests an audience beyond Brewster’s immediate circle of family and friends. Before the poems were published, however, they apparently attracted less favorable notice. Some of Brewster’s readers were sufficiently impressed by her work to doubt its authenticity. The headnote to her verse paraphrase of II Chronicles 6:16-18 notes that ‘‘It being falsly Reported that the Author borrowed her Poetry from Watts and others; the following Scripture was presented to her, to Translate into Verse, in a few Minutes Extempore, as a vindication from that Aspersion; which was accordingly Performed. . . .’’ Women poets in colonial America must have been considered rare indeed to excite such skepticism. But whatever the response from Brewster’s contemporaries, her Poems on Divers Subjects will interest readers today as a representative voice from the early history of American poetry. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cowell, P., Women Poets in Pre-Revolutionary America, 1650-1775 (1981). Silverman, K., Colonial American Poetry (1968). Watts, E. S., The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945 (1977). —PATTIE COWELL

BRIGGS, Emily (Pomona) Edson Born 14 September 1830, Burton, Ohio; died 3 July 1910, Washington, D.C. Wrote under: Olivia Daughter of Robert and Mary Polly Umberfield Edson; married John R. Briggs, Jr., circa 1854 During the Civil War, Emily Edson Briggs’s husband was a clerk in the U.S. Congress under John W. Forney, owner of the

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Washington Chronicle and Philadelphia Press. Forney asked her to write for the Philadelphia paper after he discovered she had written an anonymous letter on behalf of women government clerks. Under the pseudonym Olivia, Briggs wrote social news columns for the Philadelphia Press from 1866 to 1882. In 1882 she became the first president of the short-lived Woman’s National Press Association. By the 1880s, however, Briggs had given up journalism to become a well-known Washington hostess. In her old age she collected her favorite columns into a book, The Olivia Letters (1906). Briggs’s column established her as a leading ‘‘literary lady’’ of post-Civil War Washington, along with Mary Clemmer Ames, Sara Clarke Lippincott, and Mary Abigail Dodge. Unlike some of her contemporaries, however, Briggs restricted herself primarily to society news and issues affecting women. As a woman she felt she should not—or could not—compete with men. In a column on Charles Sumner, she explained: ‘‘This article is not written with the attempt to portray that which makes Charles Sumner the central figure of the American Senate. No woman possesses the gift to explore his mind. . . .’’ Given her pseudonym, ‘‘Olivia,’’ by a Philadelphia editor, Briggs always wrote under it, although she made no attempt to hide her true identity. Leaving the narration of actual events to male correspondents, Briggs explained that her aim was to ‘‘depict the delicate life currents and details.’’ To this end she composed ‘‘pen pictures’’ of leading political figures, made up lists of ‘‘matrimonial eligibles’’ among Capital bachelors, and covered the White House festivities. Equivocal on woman suffrage, Briggs nevertheless covered suffrage conventions in minute—if not always flattering—detail. Although she was one of the first women offered admittance to the congressional press gallery, she did not make use of the privilege. She felt that, as a woman, she was not really welcome there, and she gained news from her social contacts with political figures. Conscious of the changes wrought by the war on the Capital’s political atmosphere, Briggs expressed sympathy for freed blacks. Even in these more serious moments, however, she would ask wittily, ‘‘What business have they to be born? Isn’t it a crime of the darkest dye?’’ Briggs claimed to look askance on society, warning readers, ‘‘All is glare, glitter and pomp.’’ In view of her own career as a hostess, however, her comments may have been intended to assure readers who lacked access to society that they would not care to participate even if they could. Valuable as a source of social history, The Olivia Letters contain reprints of columns on personalities involved in the Johnson impeachment trial and gossipy portrayals of other notables. Her writing suffers from typical Victorian failings—gushy sentiment and flowery metaphors. But Briggs merits attention because she was the first, and one of the best known, of a long line of Washington society reporters. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Beasley, M. H., The First Women Washington Correspondents (George Washington University Studies No. 4,


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1976). Ingersoll, L. D., The Life of Horace Greeley (1873). Marzolf, M. T., Up From the Footnote (1977). Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: Washington Evening Star (4 July 1910). WP (10 July 1994, 5 July 1910). Washington Times (1 Nov. 1903). —MAURINE BEASLEY

BRINK, Carol Ryrie Born 28 December 1865, Moscow, Idaho; died 15 August 1981, La Jolla, California Daughter of Alexander and Henrietta Watkins Ryrie; married Raymond W. Brink, 1918 Carol Ryrie Brink grew up in the West she later used for the settings of some of her works. Her father was a Scotsman who emigrated to Idaho, helped to plan and lay out the town of Moscow, and became its first mayor. Her mother’s family were also pioneers, moving gradually westward from Boston to Missouri, to Wisconsin, and then to Idaho. Brink lost both parents before she was eight and went to live with her aunt and her maternal grandmother, who told her stories about her childhood in Wisconsin. A lonely child, Brink amused herself by reading, drawing, making up stories, and riding for hours about the countryside. While still in high school, she published poems in small magazines. She attended the University of Idaho and the University of California at Berkeley, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1918. After Brink’s marriage she moved with her husband to St. Paul, Minnesota, where the couple spent most of their lives. After their son and daughter were born, Brink began to compose stories for children. Altogether Brink wrote about 30 books of fiction and nonfiction, mostly for children, and more than 150 short stories, articles, poems, and plays. Among her numerous awards are a Litt.D. from the University of Idaho, and in 1954 Hamline University named her one of Minnesota’s most outstanding women. Brink’s first book, Anything Can Happen on the River! (1934), a fictionalization of some actual family adventures along the Seine, won praise from reviewers, but its appeal has not endured. Caddie Woodlawn (1935) received many awards, among them the Newbery Medal and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, and is now regarded as a modern classic of children’s literature. Based upon the reminiscences of Brink’s grandmother, Caddie Woodlawn recreates Wisconsin pioneer life through the lively doings of spunky eleven-year-old Caddie and her brothers, Tom and Warren. The characters are memorably drawn and their conversations are fresh and individualized. Rich details fill out the episodic story to vividly depict life on the Wisconsin frontier during the Civil War. Brink’s own grandmother, Caroline Woodhouse, is the Caddie of the book; most of the other characters also existed, and the events find their source in actual occurrences. The work has been translated into a dozen languages, and Caddie Woodlawn, A Play (1945) has been produced many times.

Magical Melons (1944) offers 14 more stories about this family and their homesteading neighbors during 1863-66. Less unified, it has never achieved the popularity of Caddie Woodlawn. While high in entertainment value, few of Brink’s early books have retained the original level of readership. Although the dialogue and episodes are true to a child’s point of view, the plots are contrived, climaxes are predictable, and language and incidents seem dated and occasionally patronizing. The frivolous fantasy, Baby Island (1937), reprinted more than a dozen times, tells the comic adventures of two young girls shipwrecked with four babies and cast upon a desert island in the Pacific. In The Highly Trained Dogs of Professor Petit (1953), young Willie finds jobs for the professor’s dogs in the little town of Puddling Center, restoring the professor’s fortunes and leaving the town a happier place. The Pink Motel (1959) also reveals fantasy overtones as it plays with form in bringing together an engaging combination of eccentrics in a Florida seaside motel. Brink’s All Over Town (1939), which relates the wellintentioned efforts of several children to help out their townspeople, was based on memories of her own childhood in a small Idaho town. Family Grandstand (1952) and Family Sabbatical (1956) concern the escapades of a professor’s children at home in their small, midwestern university town and while on leave for a few months in France. In spite of being spun out, these lightweight entertainments project a certain old-fashioned charm. Their abundance of action and warm humor offset the predictable plots and stereotyped characters. Two Are Better Than One (1968) and Louly (1974), about life around 1908 in Warsaw, Idaho, from the point of view of three girls in their early teens, find their source in Brink’s own youth. Fun-loving, flirtatious, resourceful Louly is a strong and memorable figure. Brink’s books for adults include Harps in the Wind (1947), a biographical study of the singing Hutchinson family, and Château Saint Barnabé (1963), an intriguing account of the five weeks Brink, her husband, and small son spent in a French pension where an American ex-patriot told them her strange story. Also with a French setting is The Headland (1955), a curiously flawed novel about five young people to whom World War II brings tragedy. Brink’s other adult novels include Buffalo Coat (1944), about the family of a physician in the Idaho town of Opportunity in the 1890s, and Strangers in the Forest (1959), concerning exploitation of western pine forests. Also set in Opportunity is Snow in the River (1964), which Brink has said is her own favorite; although ‘‘freely fictionalized, it is probably as near to an autobiography as I shall ever write.’’ This uneven story of the need for order and propriety, with its fine picture of ambitious Uncle Douglas, received the National League of American Pen Women award for fiction in 1966. Brink’s writing is marked by a graceful, leisurely narrative style, an ability to capture the atmosphere of places, careful research, warmth, and a good sense of humor. Although her children’s books sometimes tend to be cute and melodramatic, they speak to the secret desire of the young for fun and adventure in a world in which good and evil are easily identified and good

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inevitably triumphs. The most substantial of Brink’s works are her period stories, and it is the best of these, Caddie Woodlawn, winning her a position among the most distinguished and bestloved of American writers for children and young people.

OTHER WORKS: Mademoiselle Misfortune (1935). Lad with a Whistle (1941). Narcissa Whitman (1945). Lafayette (1946). Minty et Compagnie (1948). Stopover (1951). The Twin Cities (1961). Andy Buckram’s Tin Men (1966). Winter Cottage (1968). The Bad Times of Irma Baumlein (1972).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: The Junior Book of Authors, S. J. Kunitz and H. Haycraft, eds. (1951). More Books by More People: Interviews with 65 Authors of Books for Children (1974). Newbery Medal Books: 1922-1955 (1955). SAA (1971). —ALETHEA K. HELBIG

BRISTOW, Gwen Born 16 September 1903, Marion, South Carolina; died August 1980 Daughter of Louis Judson and Caroline Winkler Bristow; married Bruce Manning, 1929 From childhood, Gwen Bristow intended to be a writer; her first story was written when she was six and her first appearance in print came when she was twelve. At Judson College in Alabama she wrote plays and ghostwrote required essays for her friends. After a year at the Pulitzer School of Journalism, Columbia University, she joined the staff of the New Orleans TimesPicayune, for which she reported a wide variety of stories. Her first published novels were four detective stories, written in collaboration with her husband Bruce Manning, also a journalist. One of them, the Invisible Host (1930), was filmed by Columbia in 1934 under the title, The Ninth Guest. In 1934 the Mannings moved to Hollywood, where Bristow’s husband began a career as a screenwriter. Around 1934 Bristow began the Plantation Trilogy (1937-40), her most important and most original work. The series, set in significant historical moments and using succeeding generations of the same family, epitomizes Southern history. Deep Summer (1937) shows how pioneering white settlers came from the southeast and from New England to the east bank of the Mississippi River. The land and their experiences change them, and the central family develops several branches: two wealthy, plantation-owning lines of descent, one landless poor white line, and one black line. The Handsome Road (1938), set in Civil War times, centers around an aristocratic young woman and a poor white girl,

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whose lives parallel each other in a number of aspects. Both are deeply hurt by the war and Reconstruction, although in different ways. Their growing enmity symbolizes the gulf between the classes they represent. This Side of Glory (1940), set around World War I, tells of the marriage between a young man from the aristocratic family and a young woman from the poor white (now middle class) one. He is portrayed as a representative of the Old South, while she is a representative of the New; as Bristow says, he is a Southerner and she is an American. Their relationship is difficult because of their differences in character and heritage, but their successful alliance is meant to signify the eventual alliance of the traditions they represent. Tomorrow Is Forever (1943; filmed by RKO in 1946) is a World War II propaganda novel, which uses a variant of the Enoch Arden story. Here the central character’s first husband, thought dead in World War I, returns at the start of the second war. Concealing his identity, he permanently changes the life of his wife and her second family. Bristow’s other three novels are all historical, and they all deal with young women who lack the support of families but who are strong and find enough resources within themselves to build good lives. Jubilee Trail (1950; filmed by Republic in 1954) and Calico Palace (1970), both set in California during Gold Rush days, have very similar plotlines: a headstrong young woman rashly enters into a marriage that is happy but ends abruptly. Forced to fend for herself and her baby, the heroine discovers new strengths and develops old skills; her vitality and generosity enable her to form strong friendships with both women and men. Both novels conclude with the conventionally happy solution of marriage, but for neither woman is the marriage a retreat from autonomy and each man recognizes the value of the woman’s assertiveness and strength. Celia Garth (1959), set in South Carolina during the revolutionary war times, contains another such protagonist; although the plotline is somewhat different, her character develops in a similar way. Bristow’s work is popular, of the sort generally considered romantic women’s fiction. But her female protagonists are more rounded, more assertive and independent, more interesting than most in that genre. Her depiction of Southern history from the perspective of the poor white is a complement to the familiar myth of the magnolia-laden Old South. Her contribution is modest but significant.

OTHER WORKS: The Alien, and Other Poems (1926). The Gutenberg Murders (with B. Manning, 1931). The Mardi Gras (with B. Manning, 1932). Two and Two Make Twenty-Two (with B. Manning, 1932). Gwen Bristow: A Self Portrait (1940).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Taylor, M. G. S., ‘‘Gwen Bristow’s Portrayal of the South in Times of Crisis’’ (thesis, 1972). Theriot, B. J., Gwen


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Bristow: A Biography with Criticism of Her Plantation Trilogy (dissertation, 1994). Reference works: American Novelists of Today (1951). CB (1940). Other references: NYHTB (12 Feb. 1950). Wings (Literary Guild) (March 1950). Gwen Bristow: Historical Novelist (videocassette, 1976). —MARY JEAN DEMARR

BRODY, Jane E. Born 19 May 1941, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Lillian Kellner and Sidney Brody; married Richard Enquist, 1966; children: Lee Erik and Lorin Michael Hailed as ‘‘The High Priestess of Health’’ by Time magazine, writer and journalist Jane Brody began her career by obtaining her B.S. from New York State College in 1962. Followed by a masters in journalism from the University of Wisconsin in 1963, Brody then went on to receive honorary degrees from Princeton University (H.H.D., 1987) and Hamline University (L.H.D., 1993). Straight out of college in 1963, Brody went to work as a reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune, where she spent two years learning the ropes. She moved to New York City in 1965 where she began writing for the New York Times, elevated to the position of science writer. She started the ‘‘Personal Health’’ column, for which she has become best known, in 1976. Ironically, Brody originally believed her weekly column on health would be a burden, and committed to writing it for only three months. Fortunately for many health-conscious people, it quickly became the most popular feature on the New York Times news service. Brody has spent her days since then writing about everything from cancer and dental sealants to stress management and healthy cooking. In 1966 Brody married Richard Engquist, with whom she would go on to write her first book, Secrets of Good Health (1970). With Arthur Holleb, Brody would also write You Can Fight Cancer and Win (1977), both of which have gone out of print. Several years later, Brody had gained enough name recognition and clout at the New York Times to get top billing in her publications, releasing Jane Brody’s Nutrition Book: A Lifetime Guide to Good Eating for Better Health and Weight Control (1981), covering nutrition and diet, weight control, complete with complex carbohydrate-based recipes (rice, potatoes, pasta, and beans, for example) and calorie and nutrition charts. It became a bestseller, and her success hasn’t wavered since. Jane Brody’s The New York Times Guide to Personal Health (1982) collected selections from Brody’s column, covering health and medicine from November 1976 to the date of publication. More books soon followed: Jane Brody’s Good Food Book: Living the High Carbohydrate Way (1985), a cookbook containing more than 350 simple and healthy recipes based on complex

carbohydrates, as well as information about maintaining a balanced lifestyle; Jane Brody’s Good Food Gourmet: Recipes and Menus for Delicious and Healthful Entertaining (1990), a collection of more than 500 recipes designed for entertaining, including appetizers, entrees, vegetable dishes, and desserts, as well as cooking techniques, ingredients, and equipment; Jane Brody’s Good Seafood Book (1994), written with collaborator Richard Flaste, a primer on seafood and a collection of 200 recipes, with everything from sources of dietary protein to a comprehensive overview of seafood lore—including debunking the American myth that fish comes in one of two incarnations: fish sticks or tuna on rye; Jane Brody’s Cold and Flu Fighter (1995), offering everything there is to know about preventing and coping with colds and flu, including the author’s own chicken soup recipe; and Jane Brody’s Allergy Fighter (1997), a guide to understanding the causes of allergies, from prevention to the most effective antihistamines, decongestants, and topical sprays. Although The New York Times Book of Health: How to Feel Fitter, Eat Better, and Live Longer (1997) was written by a group of reporters from the New York Times, Brody gets top billing. The huge tome (496 pages), edited by Nicholas Wade, covers everything from health and popular medicine to physical fitness and nutrition, from menopause and vitamins to HMOs and jogging. In addition to her own books, Brody’s works appear in numerous anthologies, collections, cookbooks, and health books. She also designed Cooking á la Heart Cookbook: Delicious Heart Healthy Recipes to Reduce the Risk of Heart Disease and Stroke (1992), by Linda Hachfeld, Betsy Eykyn, and the Mankato Heart Health Program Foundation. The recipient of numerous awards during her career, Brody counts among them the Howard Blakeslee Award from the American Heart Association (1971), the Science Writer’s Award ADA (1978), and a Lifeline Award from the American Health Foundation (1978). She continues to write from her home in New York. OTHER WORKS: Jane Brody’s Weight Loss Program (cassette, 1987). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Who’s Who in America, 1998. ADA Daily News (19 Feb. 1998). Karp, J., ‘‘No Fries for You: A Checkup with the High Priestess of Health,’’ in At Random Magazine (Sept. 1998). —DARYL F. MALLETT

BRONER, E. M. Born Esther Masserman, 8 July 1930, Detroit, Michigan Daughter of Paul and Beatrice Weckstein Masserman; married Robert Broner, 1948; children: four E. M. Broner’s father was a journalist and a Jewish historian, while her mother had acted in the Yiddish theater in Poland. Both activities were to influence Broner’s plays, novels, and short

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stories, into which are woven many of the themes and traditions of Jewish culture.

heritage, Broner suggests something of women’s present goals and future prospects.

Broner’s first book, Summer Is a Foreign Land (1966), is a verse drama portraying a strong female character who works a particular kind of woman’s magic. A Russian Jewish matriarch, who earlier in life inherited three magical wishes from a pious ancestor, lies dying of leukemia. She has already used two wishes to get her family safely out of Russia, and in the course of the play, she must decide how to use the last wish and to whom to bequeath her powers. Her daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren gather at her deathbed, each hoping to inherit the wish that might make their future a little easier. The play ends with both a death and a wedding, emphasizing the perpetuation of life.

As a novelist, playwright, and teacher, Broner is concerned with establishing spiritual and artistic traditions for women. In the late 1970s and 1980s her interest in tradition led to explorations of women and Judaism. A feminist, she maintains that male authority in both the literary and the religious traditions has excluded women from positions of equality.

An early feminist work, the title piece of Journal/Nocturnal and Seven Stories (1968), decries the passivity of women. The protagonist of the novella, the Wife, leads a double life, which is effectively epitomized by the separate columns in which the tale is written. One half of each page represents the woman’s journal, the other her nocturnal pursuits. The Wife is married to a liberal professor who spends most of his time working against the Vietnam war. At night, she sleeps with the Guest, who defends the war. She agrees with both men, both political positions. The war becomes a metaphor for her life and her life becomes a symbol for the way the country as a whole was split during the war. In Her Mothers (1975, reissued 1985), Beatrice Palmer searches for her wayward, runaway daughter. In the process, she also searches for herself and for her literary, historical, and biological mothers. There is a powerful scene near the conclusion of the book where mother and daughter struggle in the ocean, the mother almost drowning her child. Ultimately, however, there is a kind of reconciliation. The novel ends with a paean to women, to women finding themselves and each other. Broner’s fourth book, A Weave of Women (1978, reissued 1985), provides a spiritual conclusion to the search initiated in her previous works. In the book, Broner creates a model for a woman’s utopian society. Significantly set in Jerusalem, land of the prophets, the novel describes a society where women are supportive, understanding, strong, and inventive. Twelve women and three confused girls come together to make ‘‘corrections’’ in their lives and to restore dignity to one another. The book celebrates women and womanhood, glorifying the female passages from birth to menses, marriages, motherhood, menopause, and death. Like Broner’s earlier writing, A Weave of Women discovers traditions for women, and where traditions are lacking, creates new ones. Aside from these published volumes, Broner has written essays, reviews, short fiction, and drama. She has also created new rituals for women, including ‘‘A Woman’s Passover Haggadah’’ (with Naomi Nimrod) published in Ms. (April 1977). Broner’s work is exciting and innovative in both form and content. Although her vision is basically tragic, as a feminist writer she is well aware of the comedy of androcentric manners. She does not simply lament woman’s current social state but celebrates woman’s strength and dignity. By placing her protagonists in an almost mythic context, and by giving them a cultural and a literary

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In 1980 Broner and Cathy Davidson jointly edited The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature, a large and diverse selection of essays by female scholars. In the introduction, the editors assert that the patriarchal tradition in literature has separated mothers from daughters. The essays discuss the depiction of women in literature from the ancient Near East and ancient Greece, the Old Testament, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance through to the 20th century. In recent years Broner has worked to reconcile her feminism with her religious faith. After her father’s death in 1986, she participated in an Orthodox prayer ceremony to mourn his passing. She recounts her experience at the Orthodox synagogue in Mornings and Mourning: A Kaddish Journal (1989). Prohibited because of her gender from participating fully in the ceremony, Broner resisted the sexist precepts of the Orthodox ritual, even as she became a part of the small group of men who participated in the Kaddish. With a straightforward style and a good deal of humor, the story chronicles her attempt to bring women into the religious community as full partners. In diary entries in the book, Broner talks of feeling like ‘‘half a man’’ during services. The women were separated from the men by quite unsophisticated dividers like drapes hung on a makeshift rack and plastic shower curtains. About the experience, Broner said: ‘‘I won that battle with the Mechitzah. I wouldn’t submit. I wouldn’t sit separately from them (the men in the minyan). It no longer had anything to do with separation, but total obliteration. Faithfulness is doing mitzvot, not being submissive.’’ Broner treats the same experience in her play Half-a-Man (1989), which was performed in both Los Angeles and Detroit. Two other plays, Letters to My Television Past (1985) and The Olympics (1986), have been performed in New York City. Broner’s interest in Judaism and feminism continues in a work-in-progress, tentatively titled The Repair Shop, which features a female rabbi; she received support for her work on this novel from the National Endowment for the Arts (1987) and a MacDowell Fellowship (1989-90). The Telling (1993) charts the spiritual journey of a group of Jewish women, which includes Broner herself, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, and other prominent feminists. It includes Broner’s earlier ‘‘A Woman’s Passover Haggadah’’ originally published in Ms. in 1977, which had created quite a stir. Audiences at readings booed her, and Broner admitted, ‘‘It was too shocking for audiences. A potential publisher called it a ‘trick Haggadah.’’’ Once published, though, it became the pattern for other projects by other authors. In Broner’s recent book, Ghost Stories (1995), she tells the tale of a daughter who encounters her mother’s ghost and forges a deeper relationship with it than the one she had with her mother


when she was alive. Leila meets her mother’s ghost during the ritual 11 months of mourning following death. As she attends synagogue, the two strike up conversations about family history, recipes, life, and news about neighbors and relatives. Broner’s humorous tale explores a mother-daughter relationship that doesn’t end with death. Broner continues to be an active teacher and lecturer as well as a writer. She is professor emeritus at Wayne State University, where she taught English and creative writing from 1964 to 1987. During the 1980s she was a guest writer at Sarah Lawrence, Columbia, Ohio State, Tulane, and City College of New York. She is a contributing editor of Tikkun and Lilith, and a regular book reviewer for Women’s Review of Books. Broner also has been a contributor to Epoch, Jewish Review, Commentary, North American Review, Letters and Heresies. OTHER WORKS: Colonel Higginson (musical drama, with M. Zieve, 1968). The Body Parts of Margaret Fuller (play, 1978). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barkowski, F., Feminist Utopias (1989). Heschel, S., ed., On Being a Jewish Feminist (1983). Reddy, M., and B. Daly, eds., Narrating Mothers (1991). Roreck, R., and E. Hoffman-Baruch, eds., Women in Search of Utopia (1984). Reference works: CA (1976). CANR (1983, 1989). CLC (1981). CN (1986). DLB (1984). FC (1990). Other references: Booklist (15 Mar. 1967, 1 Dec. 1975). Choice (Nov. 1967). Commentary (Apr. 1969). Dispatch (Fall 1988). Kalliope (1985). KR (15 July 1975). LJ (1 Dec. 1966, Aug. 1975). MELUS (Winter 1982). Ms. (July 1976, July/Aug. 1991). PW (11 Aug. 1975, 12 July 1976). Regionalism and the Female Imagination (special Broner piece, Winter 1977-78). Studies in American Jewish Literature (Spring 1991). —CATHY N. DAVIDSON, UPDATED BY MELISSA BURNS AND NICK ASSENDELFT

BROOKS, Gwendolyn Born 7 June 1917, Topeka, Kansas Daughter of David and Keziah Wims Brooks; married Henry Blakely, 1939 Gwendolyn Brooks attended public schools in Chicago and graduated from Wilson Junior College in 1936. A poetry workshop at Chicago’s South Side Community Art Center in the early 1940s introduced her to the rigors of poetic technique; her extraordinary talent was soon recognized. In 1945 her first volume, A Street in Bronzeville, appeared. A plethora of prizes quickly followed: grants from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Academy of Arts and Letters, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and, in 1950, the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. She was the first black poet so honored. A similar kind of recognition came in 1968 she was named poet laureate of Illinois.

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In addition to numerous honorary degrees, Brooks achieved an unusual distinction when in 1971 black poets of all ages contributed to a volume, To Gwen With Love. The presence of so many young writers was, in part, a response to a shift in Brooks’ political stance. From a rather apolitical integrationist in the 1940s, she became a strong advocate of black consciousness in the 1960s. This process of change is described in her autobiography, Report from Part One (1972). In A Street in Bronzeville Brooks penned memorable vignettes of the residents of Bronzeville, the black neighborhood of Chicago. Significantly, although the characters in these poems are poor, the emphasis is not on their material poverty but on their struggle to sustain their spiritual and aesthetic well-being. In ‘‘The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith,’’ a narrative poem which is a marvel of technical proficiency, the protagonist draws on his considerable imaginative powers to create a world on Sundays which contrasts sharply to the drudgery of his workdays. The poem celebrates Smith’s resourcefulness, his sensuality, and his keen aesthetic sense, yet it reveals the lack of substance underneath the style. The dislocations and uncertainties brought about by World War II are strongly conveyed throughout A Street, most profoundly in the sonnet series, ‘‘Gay Chaps at the Bar.’’ Even in a volume wherein Brooks handled diverse forms masterfully, these 12 off-rhyme sonnets are notable for their technical innovativeness. Her concern with the alienation, depersonalization, and terror accompanying war and modern life in general aligns her with the mainstream of 20th-century poetry. Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for Annie Allen, her most experimental work. Its subject is akin to her earlier poems: a young black girl comes of age, hoping to live out the drama and romance she fantasies. But the poverty and powerlessness which she kept at bay in her girlhood threaten her womanhood. Brooks’ only novel, Maud Martha (1953), illumines the life of a young black woman who must ward off continual, often petty, assaults to her human dignity. It was one of the first novels to portray a black girl’s coming of age. Written during the height of the civil-rights war, The Bean Eaters (1960) contained more topical poems than Brooks’ earlier books; her subjects include lynching and Emmett Till, school integration and Little Rock, and the violence accompanying the arrival of a black family in an all-white neighborhood. The epic title poem of In the Mecca (1968) brilliantly captures the mood of disillusionment and defiance of urban America in the 1960s. It is Brooks’ most richly textured poem. In her typical fashion, she combines formal eloquence and ordinary speech, and they are perfectly fused. Brooks employs various forms, but free verse and blank verse predominate. Visually rich as well, the poem projects razor-sharp images and a gallery of memorable and diverse characters. It is a tour de force. Riot (1968), Family Pictures (1970), and Beckonings (1975) follow the direction established by 1968’s In the Mecca. More overtly political and verbally less complex, these poems are, by Brooks’ own testimony, written primarily for a broadly based black audience. She intended they be read by the people whose lives she has celebrated throughout her career.

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Brooks was the first black American woman to achieve critical recognition as a poet. Observers have noted influences on her work as diverse as T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost, Langston Hughes and Wallace Stevens. Stylistically, she often remolds traditional verse forms such as the ballad and the sonnet to suit her poetic purposes; she also employs modern forms brilliantly. Philosophically, she is a humanist, particularly concerned with exploring the strengths and travails of black women in her work. By any reckoning, hers is and has remained one of the major voices of 20th-century American poetry. Brooks’s seventieth birthday in 1987 occasioned an outpouring of public affection and gestures of critical respect for this still-vital and productive poet. That year also saw the publication of Blacks, an anthology collecting Brooks’ writing of four decades. The volume’s succinct title expresses a unity in Brooks’s canon to which critics, readers, and perhaps Brooks herself had been blind. Bearing the imprint of the David Company, founded by Brooks, the volume testifies to her commitment to build alternative publishing institutions. Paradoxically, Brooks’ principled stance resulted in her work’s being less accessible to the reading public at the moment when it might have been in greatest demand. Generated by the burgeoning interest in black women’s writing, demand for the book was enhanced by Brooks’ enormous success as a lecturer. Visiting scores of colleges and universities annually, she has brought to enthusiastic audiences her message that ‘‘poetry was life distilled.’’ Her later work has distilled the most urgent and fundamental issues of contemporary life. Whether in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa or racism in the U.S., Brooks extracted for her poetry profiles of both heroic action and wary resistance. Among the public figures she has reimagined in verse are freedom fighter Winnie Mandela, poet Haki Madhubuti, social reformer Jane Addams, and child-abuse victim Elizabeth Steinberg. Sensitive as ever to the extraordinary dimensions of ordinary lives, Brooks has written poems narrating experiences of ‘‘the near-Johannesburg boy’’ fighting the ‘‘Fist-and-the-Fury’’ and of Lincoln West, the black American child who is liberated from self-hatred when he learns his African features make him the ‘‘real thing.’’ Although she rued the decline of activism in the 1980s—in her coinage, ‘‘a giantless time’’—she has continued to etch vivid portraits of those who ‘‘take today and jerk it out of joint.’’ In Report from Part One Brooks had promised not to imitate the voices of the young black poets of the 1960s, but to extend and adapt her own voice. Determined to address a black audience that did not normally read poetry, she abandoned the sonnet and rhyme generally for free verse and sparer diction. The results were uneven, as Brooks’ repeated revision of several poems seemed to concede, and the output was slender. Yet the best work fused formal eloquence and colloquial speech into a poetic language that was inimitably ‘‘Brooksian.’’ The first monograph analyzing Brooks’ writing appeared in 1980; subsequently, in two critical biographies, a collection of essays, and numerous journal articles and chapters in books, critics and scholars began to give Brooks’ work its due. She was

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inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1988 and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1989. Perhaps the critics’ most striking discovery was that Brooks’ aesthetic had always been ‘‘black.’’ Devoted from the start to representing the lives of the black urban poor, Brooks had drawn them as complex, spiritual, and contradictory human beings. Revisiting her early work, feminist critics noted that Brooks had pioneered in portraying multidimensional black female characters. Most important, her words almost always retain the capacity to surprise, delight, and instruct. Brooks prefers the word ‘‘B-L-A-C-K, which comes right out to meet you, eye to eye,’’ she said during a Jefferson Lecture in Washington, D.C. She travels through the states reading her works, much of which is on audio for all to enjoy. Her reading of her works resonates with urban imagery and wry social comment. Her cutting observations have made her one of the most well-known poets of our time. Brooks’ daughter, Nora Brooks Blakely, describes her not only as a loving mother, but also as a woman who ‘‘opens places for people—new doorways and mindpaths.’’ Brooks has had an extraordinary career; in addition to being the first black author to win the Pulitzer Prize, she holds over 70 honorary degrees. Among her other honors are Consultant in Poetry from the Library of Congress (1985-86); Jefferson Lecturer, NEH; National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters; and National Medal of Arts presented by President Bill and Mrs. Hilary Clinton. In addition, she has been inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York, joining another great black women’s writer, Maya Angelou. She has been honored by the naming of the Gwendolyn Brooks Cultural Center at Western Illinois University and the Gwendolyn Brooks Junior High School in Harvey, Illinois. OTHER WORKS: Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956). Selected Poems (1963). The World of Gwendolyn Brooks (1971). Aloneness (1971). Primer for Blacks (1980). Young Poet’s Primer (1980). To Disembark (1981). Mayor Harold Washington and Chicago, the I Will City (1983). Very Young Poets (1983). The Near-Johannesburg Boy (1986). Gottschalk and the Grande Tarantelle (1988). Winnie (1988). Children Coming Home (1991). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Juhasz, S., ‘‘A Sweet Inspiration . . . of My People: The Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks and Nikki Giovanni,’’ in Naked and Fiery Forms: Modern American Poetry by Women—A New Tradition (1976). Kent, G., Blackness and the Adventure of Western Culture (1972). Kent, G., A Life of Gwendolyn Brooks (1990). Madhubuti, H., ed., Say That the River Turns: The Impact of Gwendolyn Brooks (1987). Melhem, D. H., Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice (1987). Miller, R. B., Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks: A Reference Guide (1978). Mootry, M. K. and G. Smith, eds. A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry and Fiction, (1987). Shands, A. O., ‘‘Gwendolyn Brooks as Novelist,’’ in BlackWomen (June 1973).


Shaw, Harry B., Gwendolyn Brooks (1980). Voices From the Gap: Women Writers of Color (1999). Reference works: African American Writers (1991). Black Writers (1991). CANR (1989). CLC (1980, 1988). DLB (1988). FC (1990). Modern American Women Writers (1991). MTCW (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Black American Writer (1969). Black Scholar (Summer 1972). CLAJ (Dec. 1962, Dec. 1963, Sept. 1972, Sept. 1973). Jet (30 May 1994). SBL (Autumn 1973). Contemporary Literature (Winter 1970). —CHERYL A. WALL, UPDATED BY DEVRA M. SLADICS

BROOKS, Maria Gowen Born circa 1794, Medford, Massachusetts; died 11 November 1845, Mantanzas, Cuba Wrote under: Maria del Occidente Daughter of William and Eleanor Cutter Gowen; married John Brooks, 1810 When Maria Gowen was orphaned in her childhood, she came under the protection of John Brooks, a Boston merchant. In 1810 the fifty-year-old merchant married his fifteen-year-old ward. The marriage was evidently an unhappy one, and she threw herself into her studies. Brooks’ dissatisfaction with her marriage was exacerbated when John suffered financial losses and moved the family to backwater Portland, Maine. There she met the Canadian officer who became her romantic fixation. John died in 1823, and Maria moved to Cuba where relatives owned coffee plantations. On a subsequent visit to Canada, she became engaged to the Canadian officer, but they were estranged through a series of misunderstandings. Maria attempted suicide twice. In 1826 she began a correspondence with the British poet laureate Robert Southey. After trips to England and Europe, Maria returned to Cuba, where she died of a tropical fever. In 1820 some of Brooks’ poetry was published in a volume titled Judith, Esther, and Other Poems. By a Lover of the Fine Arts The personae in these poems are all female. In ‘‘Judith’’ and ‘‘Esther,’’ Brooks deals with the psychological aspects of the trials of these biblical heroines. ‘‘The Butterfly’’ presents an analogue to relationships between the sexes: a poet is too wrapped up in his own concerns to save an exquisite butterfly from the flame. The frank but almost naive ‘‘Written after passing an evening with E. W. R. A******, Esq., who has the finest person I ever saw’’ warmly describes the physical charms of the Canadian officer with whom Brooks had fallen in love. In 1833 Robert Southey supervised publication of Zophiel; or the Bride of Seven, which tells the story of a fallen angel’s love for a mortal woman. In it, Brooks was not afraid to include many passionate and ‘‘forbidden’’ scenes, or to vividly describe human physical beauty. Zophiel is ‘‘dense’’ in the manner of Milton and

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contains full and learned notes on Middle-Eastern history, sorcery, and biblical tradition, with many literary, botanical, cultural, and geographical references, as in the work of Yeats and Eliot. Deeply scholarly in one sense, its actual expression is similar to the sensuality of Keats’s Eve of St. Agnes and Coleridge’s symbolistic uncanniness in Christabel. In 1838 Brooks’s Idomen: or the Vale of Yumuri was published serially in the Boston Saturday Evening Gazette. Several publishers refused the fictionalized autobiography as ‘‘too elevated to sell,’’ so Brooks published it privately in New York in 1843. Idomen, the heroine, is ‘‘formed in every nerve for the refinements of pleasure,’’ although her real life is a round of ‘‘duties’’ and ‘‘wearisome employments.’’ For Brooks, virtuous passion is a sign of intellectual and emotional consciousness. The almost hallucinatory clarity of Idomen’s imagery heightens the impression that many of its images and scenes must be interpreted symbolically, even as archetypes. The Edenic myth is everywhere apparent—in the idyllic Cuban scenes, but also in the celestially majestic frozen glory of the rivers and mountains of Canada. Idomen herself seems a pattern of the human soul. Caught in a dull marriage as the soul is caught in the mortal body, she yearns for the Ideal Absolute as personified by Ethelwald, a character based on Brooks’s Canadian officer. Yet Idomen cannot have Ethelwald in this world, for some mysterious inability to communicate with him intervenes even after she is freed by the death of her husband. This is one manifestation of a continuing theme of psychic or supernatural fates or impulses which leads to an exploration of suicidal tendencies and the hypersensitive imagination. Idomen acts out the Christ-like cycle of death, resurrection, and ascension, although such an allegory may have been unconscious on Brooks’s part. It is as a psychological novel of considerable subtlety that Idomen will capture the modern imagination. It can hardly be explained why Brooks is not better known and studied. Her work is good, at times great, but she was too large for her assigned role in the social and intellectual world of her time. In this and in the continued lack of recognition of her worth, she is an archetype of the early American woman writer. OTHER WORKS: The papers of Maria Gowen Brooks are in the Boston Public Library, Yale University Library, and the Library of Congress. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Grannis, R., An American Friend of Southey (1913). Griswold, R., Southern Literary Messenger (1913). Gustafson, Z., introduction to Maria Gowen Brooks’ Zophiel (1879). Southey, R., The Doctor (1834). Reference works: Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography (1888). Cyclopedia of American Literature (1855). DAB (1929). NAW (1971). Other references: American Collector (Aug. 1926). Graham’s Magazine (Aug. 1848). Medford Historical Register (Oct. 1899). —L. W. KOENGETER

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BROUMAS, Olga Born 6 May 1949, Syros, Greece Daughter of Nicholas and Claire Pendeli Broumas; married Stephen E. Bangs, 1973 (divorced) Olga Broumas’ poems are voluptuous, exuberant, lyrical, rooted in history, and charged with political meaning. Poetry is for her both socially meaningful and a source of deep personal pleasure. Even when the poems concern pain and suffering, they take pleasure in their own sounds, shapes, and rhythms. Because of this play in language, there is more joy in Broumas’ poetic world than sorrow. Born in Greece in 1949, Broumas lived briefly in the U.S. as a child and returned in 1967 to attend college. She earned her B.A. in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania (1970) and a M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Oregon (1973). She has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and has taught widely—at the University of Oregon, the University of Idaho, Goddard College, Boston University, and Brandeis University. In 1982 she helped found Freehand, a learning community of women artists and writers, in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Broumas is currently the Fanny Hurst poet-in-residence at Brandeis and the director of creative writing. In ‘‘Demeter,’’ Broumas honors her poetic maternity—Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, and Adrienne Rich—but she has forged her own feminist, poetic idiom that is neither despairing nor homiletic. Rejecting the poetry of the crazy lady, the ‘‘Classic, almost Plathian stance that I’d been taught,’’ she seeks instead to affirm women’s power and health. In pursuit of the ‘‘adequate myth’’ to accomplish this affirmation, she reinscribes Greek myths in terms of ordinary women’s lives in the opening sequence, ‘‘Twelve Aspects of God,’’ of Beginning with O (1977) and reclaims god as a feminine principle. Broumas is a bodywork therapist who has practiced in Provincetown since 1983, and her aesthetic is intertwined with this work; the human body has a mythic, immediate presence in her poems. In ‘‘The Moon of Mind against the Wooden Louver’’ she writes to and honors a dying friend: ‘‘the pluck and humor of the song / your bones thrum while the blood still leaves / their broadside and their flank. / I kiss your bones.’’ The female body is powerfully and vitally erotic. In Caritas (chapbook, 1976), she regrets the lack of language for female sexuality: ‘‘A woman-made language would / have as many synonyms for pink / light-filled / holy as / the Eskimo does / for snow.’’ She seeks free and joyful language and imagery for lesbian love poems, in which the woman is both beloved and lover, giver and recipient. Since Beginning with O, she has published eight volumes of poetry, Soie Sauvage (1979), Pastoral Jazz (1983), Black Holes, Black Stockings (1985), Perpetua (1989), Sappho’s Gymnasium (1994), Helen Groves (1994), Unfolding the Tablecloth of God (1995), and Ithaca: Little Summer in Winter (1996). Black Holes, Black Stockings is a collection of prose poems written with poet Jane Miller. The last four volumes of Broumas’ poetry were

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written with poet T. Begley, with whom she also translated three books of Odysseas Elytis’ Greek poems, the last of which is Open Papers (1994). Broumas’ approach to poetry is expansive and syncretic. Her formal considerations derive from architecture and music, as well as from literary sources: she conceives of stanzas as spatial forms, words on the page ‘‘as notation for the voice.’’ To create her art, Broumas draws on the many parts of her life: her Greek and European background; her experiences as a woman; her feminist and liberation politics; her massage work. Her poems take daring leaps, almost greedily appropriating and juxtaposing disparate images, words, and experiences. OTHER WORKS: Restlessness (in Greek, 1967). Lyricism: Some Notes on Pleasure (1978). Namaste (1978). What I Love: Selected Poems of Odysseas Elytis, 1943-1978 (translation, 1986). The Little Mariner, poems by Odysseas Elytis (translation, 1988). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Abel, E. et al., eds., The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development (1983). Casto, E. K., Reading Feminist Poetry: A Study of the Work of Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, and Olga Broumas (dissertation, 1990). Duncan, E., Unless Soul Claps Its Hands: Portraits and Passages (1984). Reference works: CA (1980). CANR (1987, 1999). CLC (1979). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Poetry Review (Jan.-Feb. 1979). Atlantic (Oct. 1977). Book Forum (1977). Christopher Street (Mar. 1977). Chrysalis (1977). Emergency Librarian (Nov. 1977). Hudson Review (Autumn 1977, Summer 1980, Summer 1983). LJ (15 May 1977). Northwest Review (1978, 1980). NYT (24 June 1977). Off Our Backs (June 1978). VV (29 Aug. 1977). Yale Review (Autumn 1977). —DEANNA STEVENSON, UPDATED BY NORA MITCHELL AND LEAH J. SPARKS

BROWN, Abbie Farwell Born 21 August 1871, Boston, Massachusetts; died 5 March 1927, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of Benjamin F. and Clara Brown A descendant of the earliest New England settlers, Abbie Farwell Brown lived all her life in the family home on Beacon Hill in Boston. She was educated at Boston Girls’ Latin School, where she formed a close friendship with Josephine Prescott Peabody, and graduated from Radcliffe College in 1894. Although Brown had written verse for St. Nicholas, feature stories for the St. Louis Globe Democrat, and ‘‘Quits’’ (1896), a one-act comedy set in a women’s college, it was a visit in 1899 to Chester Cathedral, England, which inspired her first children’s book, The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts (1900), and led to her career as a juvenile author. In 1902, after the success of The


Lonesomest Doll (1901), the publishers Hall and Locke engaged her as editor of their Young Folks Library series. In addition to juvenile books, poetry, and plays, Brown also wrote two volumes of poetry for adults and composed lyrics for songs. Her poem ‘‘On the Trail,’’ set to music by Mabel Daniels, became the Girl Scouts’ anthem. The best of Brown’s children’s books derive their charm from her appreciation of traditional popular literature—legend, myth, and folktale, which includes, of course, the fairy tale. Her first and perhaps best work, The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts, retells episodes from saints’ legends, illustrating the affectionate relationship between beasts and holy men and women. Without resorting to quaintness, the flavor of the medieval legend is preserved, while the material is ordered and simplified for the secular modern child. In the Days of Giants (1902) introduces young people to the action, drama, and intrigue of Nordic myths as recounted in Icelandic sagas. Tales of the Red Children (1909), a collection of Canadian Indian stories coauthored by James MacIntosh Bell, faithfully adheres to the spirit and style of the folktale. The choice of stories reflects the importance of the trickster tale in Indian folklore. Besides adapting traditional popular literature to the level and tastes of a modern juvenile audience, Brown also employed well known narrative formulas from fairy tale and legend to create her own stories. In the title story of The Flower Princess (1904), Fleurette establishes a test for suitors: she will marry the man who can identify her favorite flower. Of course, the princes fail; only the minstrel Joyeuse has the wit, traditionally associated with the humble, to discover her secret. The hero of John of the Woods (1909) is the mistreated boy of fairy tales who, aided by friendly animals and a mysterious old man, finds his identity. That he also learns to be kind and have faith in the eventual triumph of goodness is part of the gentle didacticism of the tale. The Lucky Stone (1914) departs from the romanticism of Brown’s earlier books and translates the fairy tale into a realistic setting, but not however, without some creaking of the narrative machinery. Maggie Price, a slum child who believes in fairies, discovers a fairy palace in the country, receives mysterious gifts, finds a queer old woman, embarks on a quest, and is captured by an ogre. All the events are the amusements of a bored young woman, who finally does become a fairy godmother by opening her home to needy children. Brown’s one excursion into juvenile biography, The Boyhood of Edward MacDowell (1924), reflects her appreciation for summers spent in the MacDowell Colony, but it is too sentimental and speculative to be seriously recommended.

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Read and Pieces to Speak (1908). The Christmas Angel (1910). Their City Christmas; a Story for Boys and Girls (1912). Songs of Sixpence (1914). Kisington Town (1915). Surprise House (1917). The Gift; a Christmas Story (1920). Heart of New England (1920). The Rock of Liberty; a Pilgrim Ode (1920). What Luck! A Study in Opposites (1920). The Green Trunk; a Masque (1921). Round Robin (1921). The Lights of Beacon Hill; a Christmas Message (1922). The New England Poetry Club; an Outline of Its History, 1915-1923 (1923). Our Christmas Tree (1925). The Silver Stairs; Poems (1926). Under the Rowan Tree (1926). The Lantern and Other Plays for Children (1928). The Little Friend (1960). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Meigs, C., A Critical History of Children’s Literature (1969). Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). TCA (1942). Other references: Horn Book (1927). Poetry Review (1931). —PHYLLIS MOE

BROWN, Alice Born 5 December 1857, Hampton Falls, New Hampshire; died 21 June 1948, Boston, Massachusetts Also wrote under: Martin Redfield Daughter of Levi and Elizabeth Lucas Brown After graduating from Robinson Female Seminary, Alice Brown taught school in New England, but soon decided on a literary career. She wrote for the Christian Register, then joined the staff of The Youth’s Companion in 1885. In Boston, Brown belonged to a group of young Bohemian artists led by poet Louise Imogen Guiney. The collaborations of the two close friends included a biography of Robert Louis Stevenson (1896) and the founding of the Women’s Rest Tour Association. During these years Brown wrote in support of women’s rights and prison reform movements. An advocate of American involvement in World War I, she often commented on politics, criticizing the direction of modern life. In her later years, her passionate privacy and religious mysticism carried her further from the mainstream. Highly praised as late as the 1920s, Brown’s work was virtually forgotten by the time of her death. During a career spanning seven decades, Brown wrote in almost every genre, including criticism, biography, and sketches. She considered herself primarily a poet, but the Victorian idealism and strained diction of her verse has not aged well.

Nourished by myth, legend, and the folk tale, Brown contributed to children’s literature of the early 20th century a number of well-written, imaginative stories, some pleasant verse, and two distinguished versions of saints’ legends and Nordic myths.

Brown’s greatest public recognition came to her as a dramatist. In 1914, amid much publicity, she won the $10,000 Winthrop Ames prize for the best play submitted by an American author. Her entry, Children of Earth (1915), later opened on Broadway to mixed reviews and a short run. Brown’s one-act plays, often adapted from her stories, were more successful.

OTHER WORKS: A Pocketful of Poesies (1902). The Curious Book of Birds (1903). The Star Jewels (1905). Brothers and Sisters (1906). Friends and Cousins (1907). Fresh Posies; Rhymes to

Brown’s fiction is now considered her best work, particularly her early local color stories. Meadow-Grass made her literary reputation in 1895; Tiverton Tales confirmed it in 1899. Both

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consist of loosely connected sketches portraying the fictional village of Tiverton, a farming community close to the sea and modeled after Hampton Falls. These and subsequent stories were compared favorably to the work of Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman. Although Brown’s portraits of spinsters and rebellious wives (especially in ‘‘A Day Off’’ and ‘‘The Other Mrs. Dill’’) are as fine in their way as Freeman’s, her goodnatured humor, idealism, and careful craftsmanship bring her closer to Jewett’s more pastoral regionalism. However, Brown’s work can stand easily without such comparisons. Described as a ‘‘little masterpiece,’’ ‘‘Farmer Eli’s Vacation’’ demonstrates Brown’s gentle irony, control of plot, and psychological acuity. Having dreamed all his life of seeing the ocean, only six miles from his pastures, Eli makes the journey at last. The vision is more than he can bear; ‘‘He faced [the sea] as a soul might face Almighty Greatness, only to be stricken blind thereafter.’’ Leaving his family camping by the shore, Eli hurries home gratefully to his cows and barns, the world he knows and loves best. ‘‘Local color’’ is too narrow a category for this fine story. As public interest in regional writing waned at the turn of the century, Brown experimented with other genres. Unlike many local colorists, she made the transition successfully. Between 1900 and 1920, she published over 130 stories in prominent magazines. In these short pieces and her many novels, Brown attempts more urban settings and sophisticated characters. Her themes concern the strain of reconciling city and country, the industrial future with the values of the agrarian past. Critical opinion of this later work is mixed. Brown’s growing skill as a storyteller and firmer control of structure has been noted by one critic, who observed, however, that she mistakenly adopted an elaborate figurative style beyond her powers. Only when she returned to her New England characters, with their earthy straightforward dialect, did she regain the grace and authenticity of her early work. Although such novels as Old Crow (1922) and John Winterbourne’s Family (1910) achieve a greater philosophical and psychological depth than the more charming local color stories, Brown’s artistry could not keep pace with her ambition; her characters, puppetlike, mouth lofty ideas instead of embodying them. A devoted artist, Brown’s local stories hold their own against the more famous work of Jewett and Freeman and represent a distinctive contribution to the genre. Through a synthesis of symbolic and realistic representation, her work conveys an essentially romantic pastoralism. Brown’s sentimentality is, however, offset by knowing humor; her idealism is expressed with subtlety. Fresh, evocative, and lovingly detailed, her sketches of country life show a disciplined literary craft. Her New Englanders speak and act with authenticity; their dilemmas are universal, their resolutions sometimes wise and always human. OTHER WORKS: Stratford-by-the-Sea (1884). The Fools of Nature (1887). Three Heroines of New England Romance (with L. I. Guiney and H. P. Spofford, 1894). Robert Louis Stevenson (with

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L. I. Guiney, 1896). The Rose of Hope (1896). By Oak and Thorn (1896). Women of Colonial and Revolutionary Times—Mercy Otis Warren (1896). The Road to Castalay (1896). The Day of His Youth (1897). King’s End (1901). Margaret Warrener (1901). Judgement (1903). The Mannerings (1903). The Merrylinks (1903). High Noon (1904). The County Road (1906). The Court of Love (1906). Chap. XI of The Whole Family (a novel by 12 authors, 1908). Rose MacLeod (1908). The Story of Thryza (1909). Country Neighbors (1910). The One-Footed Fairy (1911). My Love and I (1912). The Secret of the Clan, A Story for Girls (1912). Vanishing Points (1913). Robin Hood’s Barn (1913). Joint Owners in Spain; A Comedy in One Act (1914). Children of Earth; A Play of New England (1915). The Prisoner (1916). Bromley Neighborhood (1917). The Flying Teuton and Other Stories (1918). The Loving Cup, A Play in One Act (1918). The Black Drop (1919). Homespun and Gold (1920). The Wind Between the Worlds (1920). One-Act Plays (1921). Louise Imogen Guiney (1921). Ellen Prior (1923). Charles Lamb: A Play (1924). The Mysteries of Ann (1925). Dear Old Templeton (1927). The Golden Ball (1929). The Marriage Feast, A Fantasy (1931). The Diary of a Dryad (1932). The Kingdom in the Sky (1932). Jeremy Hamblin (1934). The Willoughbys (1935). Fable and Song (1939). Pilgrim’s Progress (1944). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Langill, E. D., ‘‘Alice Brown: A Critical Study’’ (dissertation, 1975). Overton, G., The Wowen Who Make Our Novels (1922). Pattee, F. L., The New American Literature, 1890-1930 (1930). Toth, S. A., ‘‘Alice Brown (1857-1948),’’ in ALR (Spring 1972). Toth, S. A., ‘‘More Than Local Color: A Reappraisal of Rose Terry Cooke, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Alice Brown’’ (dissertation, 1969). Walker, D., Alice Brown (1974). Westbrook, P., Acres of Flint: Writers of Rural New England, 1870-1900 (1951). Williams, B., Our Short Story Writers (1920). Williams, Sister M., ‘‘The Pastoral in New England Local Color: Celia Thaxter, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Alice Brown’’ (dissertation, 1972). Wood, A. D., ‘‘The Literature of Impoverishment: The Women Local Colorists in America, 1865-1914,’’ in WS (1972). Other references: Atlantic (July 1906). Book Buyer (Nov. 1896). —SARAH WAY SHERMAN

BROWN, Hallie Quinn Born circa 10 March 1845, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; died 16 September 1949, Wilberforce, Ohio Daughter of Thomas and Frances Scroggins Brown Born the fifth of six children to parents of mixed blood who were freed slaves, Hallie Quinn Brown reminisces in her unpublished autobiography, ‘‘As the Mantle Falls,’’ that her childhood home in Philadelphia was the center of many activities both for the African Methodist Episcopal Church and for the Underground Railroad for runaway slaves on their flight to Canada. In 1873


Brown received her B.A. degree from Wilberforce University in Ohio, where she first came under the tutelage of professional elocutionists. She was awarded an honorary Master of Science (1890) and an LL.D. (1936) from Wilberforce. After graduation, Brown taught in several Southern schools. While in Dayton, Ohio, she enrolled in elocution classes and it was at this time that her career in public speaking began. As an elocutionist she toured several cities in Ohio and Indiana; favorable reception encouraged her to continue on to New York, Philadelphia, and various Southern states. In 1888 Brown took the first of several tours abroad, speaking and singing spirituals in an effort to raise funds for Wilberforce. On her return to the U.S. in 1892 she accepted the position of Lady Principal at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute and in 1893 was appointed professor of elocution at Wilberforce. In this same year, Brown was instrumental in forming the Colored Women’s League, later known as the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, and was its president from 1920 to 1924. She also became actively involved with the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and spoke at several of its meetings and conferences. Among Brown’s works is a textbook on elocution called First Lessons in Public Speaking (1920). It gives little or no concrete help to the neophyte orator, but rather is filled with exhortations to lead a Christian life and imitate the many examples of perseverance given in the book. In Tales My Father Told (1925), Brown retells stories with which her father, who worked on Mississippi riverboats, entertained the family on long winter nights in their Canadian home. The first three stories are highly romanticized tales of young women’s escapes from slavery and their finding of true happiness in Northern climes. In each of these stories the narrator-hero appears to be Brown’s father, who contrives, though never by violence, to secure freedom and eventually idyllic happiness for each young woman. Another selection in Tales My Father Told is a history of black spirituals that compares them to Hebrew songs of captivity. The final story in the collection is a didactic, melodramatic morality tale about the effects of whisky on a young man. Homespun Heroines, and Other Women of Distinction (1926) is a compilation of biographical sketches written by Brown and several other women. In the greeting to her readers, Brown says she hopes to preserve for future reference the life and character of ‘‘the history-making women of our race.’’ The 55 sketches are brief; they tend to be subjective, though not completely lacking a factual basis, and almost all earnestly exhort the reader to emulate these women. Brown’s life had two centers of focus—her religion and Wilberforce University. Her dedication to both led her to support the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and to advocate justice and equality for her race, especially for the women. She made use of her oratorical skills to further these ends and the political involvement of her later years can likewise be traced to both these interests.

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OTHER WORKS: Bits and Odds: A Choice Selection of Recitations (1880). Our Women: Past, Present and Future (1925). Pen Pictures of Pioneers of Wilberforce (1937). ‘‘As the Mantle Falls’’ (unpublished; at the Hallie Quinn Brown Memorial Library, Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Daniels, S. I., Women Builders (1970). Davis, E., Lifting As They Climb (1933). Dunlop, M. E., ‘‘A Biographical Sketch of Hallie Quinn Brown,’’ in the Wilberforce University Alumni Journal (1 June 1963). McFarlin, A. S., ‘‘Hallie Quinn Brown—Black Woman Elocutionist: 1845 (?)-1949’’ (dissertation, 1975). Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Noted Negro Women (1893). —MARILYN LAMPING

BROWN, Margaret Wise Born 23 May 1910, Brooklyn, New York; died 13 November 1952, Nice, France Also wrote under: Timothy Hay, Golden MacDonald, Juniper Sage (the last being used by Brown and Edith Thacher Hurd on collaborative works) Daughter of Robert B. and Maude Johnson Brown The middle child of a prosperous manufacturer, Margaret Wise Brown spent most of her formative years in solitary play on the beaches and in the woods at Whitestone Landing, Long Island, New York. There she developed an enduring love for animals and the outdoors, which she later faithfully recreated in almost 100 books written for young children. After attending New York schools until 1923, she spent the next two years at the Chateau Brilliantmont School in Lausanne, Switzerland, and graduated from Dana Hall in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in 1928. In 1932, Brown earned her B.A. in English Literature from Hollins College in Virginia. Interested in a career as a professional writer, Brown enrolled at Columbia University for postgraduate work, but did not find her niche until she became a student teacher in an innovative program sponsored by the Bureau for Educational Experiment (the Bank Street School) in 1935. Lucy Sprague Mitchell, who headed the group, initiated a technique for telling children’s stories from the child’s point of view, which gave Brown an opportunity to observe young children’s fresh reactions to their world. She related to the preschoolers in an almost symbiotic fashion, so she often said some of her stories were ‘‘their stories transcribed onto paper.’’ Although she did continue to write adult poetry (never published) for the rest of her life, it is as the ‘‘Laureate of the Nursery’’ that she earned fame, fortune, and a permanent place in American literature. Brown felt strongly that although her books were written for adults to read to small children, their illustrations should be so inextricably bound to the texts that a preschooler could ‘‘retell’’

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the story to himself just by looking at the pictures. Some 38 different artists worked closely with her, and although she was very demanding of them, she frequently altered her text to accommodate their illustrations as well. The results in many instances were stunning. From 1937 to 1952, Brown wrote four to eight books a year, did a children’s page for Good Housekeeping, contributed to some school primers, and maintained her association with young children as the basis for continuing a viable contact with the child within herself. Engaged to be married, Brown died quite suddenly at age forty-two, due to complications following an appendectomy. It is not a simple matter to single out particular books by Brown as ‘‘classics,’’ but consensus would have it that in addition to the Noisy Book Series, a few titles deserve special mention. The Dead Bird (1938) is noteworthy as a forerunner of realistic treatments of subjects only recently considered suitable for children’s books. At a very fundamental level, this story treats death, grief, and a return to normal living after a suitable time lapse. The Little Island (1946) is particularly interesting since the little kitten who visits the island learns from a fish that the Little Island is ‘‘a part of the world and a world of its own.’’ This philosophical idea, expressed by such writers as Shakespeare and John Donne, is here set down in very concrete terms completely within a small child’s frame of reference. Perhaps the all-time favorite, however, is Goodnight Moon (1947, reprinted dozens of times, the latest in 1994), meant to be read as a bedtime story. Done in simplest rhyme, and featuring alternate pages of black-and-white and colored illustrations, there is a very tiny mouse to be found by the youngster in each colored picture. As the mouse is never in the same spot twice, children actively participate in the reading experience be locating the mouse. Many of Brown’s books sold millions of copies and remain deservedly popular today. A number have been translated into foreign languages; but what is more significant than her prolificness or popularity, is that a number of her stories have rightfully been termed classics. In addition to Runaway Bunny, many of her tales have been reissued throughout the decades and into the late 1990s. Compilations also abound, with numerous collections like 1992’s Three Best-Loved Tales and John Speirs’ Margaret Wise Brown Treasury: Fourteen Classic Stories and Poems (1994). Brown’s first publisher, William Scott, perhaps best summed up the writer and her work when he wrote in 1955, ‘‘All her books have an elusive quality that was Margaret Wise Brown. . . . They have simplicity, directness, humor, unexpectedness, respect for the reader, and a sense of the importance of living.’’ OTHER WORKS: The Children’s Year (edited and translated by Brown, 1937). When the Wind Blew (1937). Bumble Bugs and Elephants (1938). The Fish with the Deep Sea Smile (1938). The Little Fireman (1938). The Log of Christopher Columbus (ed. by B. de las Casas and Brown, 1938). The Streamlined Pig (1938). Home in the Wilderness (ed. by Brown, 1939). Little Pig’s Picnic (1939). Noisy Book (1939). The Comical Tragedy or Tragical

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Comedy of Punch & Judy (ed. by J. P. Collier and Brown, 1940). Country Noisy Book (1940). The Fables of LaFontaine (ed. and trans. by Brown, 1940). Baby Animals (1941). The Polite Penguin (1941). The Poodle and the Sheep (1941). The Seashore Noisy Book (1941). A Child’s Good Morning (1942). Don’t Frighten the Lion (1942). The Indoor Noisy Book (1942). Night and Day (1942). The Runaway Bunny (1942). Big Dog Little Dog (1943). A Child’s Good Night Book (1943). The Noisy Bird Book (1943). SHHhhh. . .BANG (1943). The Big Fur Secret (1944). Black and White (1944). Horses (1944). Red Light Green Light (1944). They All Saw It (1944). Willie’s Walk to Grandmama (1944). The House of a Hundred Windows (1945). The Little Fisherman (1945). Little Lost Lamb (1945). Little Fur Family (1946). The Man in the Manhole and the Fix-it Man (1946). The Bad Little Duckhunter (1947). The First Story (1947). The Sleepy Little Lion (1947). The Winter Noisy Book (1947). Little Cowboy (1948). The Little Farmer (1948). Sleepy Book (1948). Wait Till the Moon Is Full (1948). Wonderful Story Book (1948). The Color Kittens (1949). Five Little Firemen (1949). The Important Book (1949). Little Chicken (1949). My World (1949). Pussycat’s Christmas (1949). Two Little Miners (1949). Two Little Trains (1949). The Dark Wood of the Golden Birds (1950). The Dream Book (1950). The Little Fat Policeman (1950). Peppermint Family (1950). The Quiet Noisy Book (1950). The Wonderful House (1950). Fox Eyes (1951). Pussy Willow (1951). The Summer Noisy Book (1951). The Train to Timbuctoo (1951). Two Little Gardeners (1951). Christmas in the Barn (1952). Doctor Squash the Doll Doctor (1952). The Duck (1952). Mister Dog (1952). The Noon Balloon (1952). Seven Little Postmen (1952). Where Have You Been? (1952). The Dead Bird (1953). The Golden Bunny (1953). The Hidden House (1953). Little Frightened Tiger (1953). The Sailor Dog (1953). Sleepy A B C (1953). The Friendly Book (1954). The Little Fir Tree (1954). Little Indian (1954). Wheel on the Chimney (1954). Willie’s Adventures (1954). The Little Brass Band (1955). Seven Stories about a Cat Named Sneakers (1955). Young Kangaroo (1955). Big Red Barn (1956). David’s Little Indian (1956). Home for a Bunny (1956). Three Little Animals (1956). Whistle for the Train (1956). Nibble Nibble (1959). The Diggers (1960). Four Fur Feet (1961). On Christmas Eve (1961). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Allen, M. N., One Hundred Years of Children’s Books in America: Decade by Decade (1996). Blos, J. W., The Days Before Now: An Autobiographical Note (1994). Greene, C., Margaret Wise Brown—Author of Goodnight Moon (1993). Marcus, L. S., Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon (1999). Marcus, L. S., The Making of Goodnight Moon: A 50th Anniversary Retrospective (1997). Rylant, C., Margaret, Frank, and Andy: Three Writers’ Stories (1996). Sheel, E. M., ‘‘M. W. Brown’’ (thesis, 1969). Tobias, T., A Wild and Private Place (1992). Reference works: DAB (1977). Junior Book of Authors (1951). Other references: Biography (Summer 1993). Hollins Alumnae Magazine (Winter 1949). Horn Book (June 1958). Life (2 Dec. 1946). NYT (15 Nov. 1952). PW (24 Nov. 1952). —EDYTHE M. MCGOVERN, UPDATED BY NELSON RHODES


BROWN, Nancy See LESLIE, Annie Brown

BROWN, Rita Mae Born 28 November 1944, Hanover, Pennsylvania Daughter of Ralph and Julia Buckingham Brown. Orphaned at an early age, Rita Mae Brown ‘‘escaped’’ from high school and college, then went to film school. She was a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. and in 1968, when Brown joined the New York chapter of National Organization for Women (NOW), she insisted women confront the issue of lesbian rights and was one of the Radicalesbians to write ‘‘The Woman-Identified Woman’’ (1970). Active in the women’s movement, she frequently lectured on feminism and gay liberation. The Hand That Cradles the Rock (1971), Brown’s first published collection of poetry, consists of 56 short poems with a brief statement by Brown that women will no longer accept the limiting definitions of their work imposed by men. Male culture and men are repeatedly associated with images of death and destruction, but women, ‘‘having slumbered,’’ are now ready to ‘‘break and run.’’ The image most frequently associated with women is that of the nourishing, life-giving sea, ever-changing and yet unchanged. Striking a recurrent theme throughout all her works, Brown insists change will occur not only from the rising strength of the individual woman but through the sisterhood of women. In ‘‘Sappho’s Reply,’’ Sappho’s voice ‘‘rings down through thousands of years’’ and Brown writes: ‘‘Tremble to the cadence of my legacy / An army of lovers shall not fail.’’ Although Coletta Reid, in an introduction to Brown’s first book, says Brown ‘‘works out of a tradition of carefully structured language and form,’’ this attention to language is more noticeable in Songs to a Handsome Woman (1973), perhaps because Brown focuses on one theme—love. Although loving another person brings sorrow and pain as well as joy, ‘‘a society or individual who denies love is a state away from denying life.’’ Brown’s best known book is her semiautobiographical Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), one of the first novels to feature a strong lesbian who feels no need to dissemble or apologize for her sexual preference. Molly Bolt grows up a dirt-poor illegitimate Southern child who quickly learns that survival depends on her own feelings and assertive actions. She refuses the conventional limitations of being a girl. Molly grows into a young woman who would lose her scholarship and be expelled from college rather than deny her love for her roommate. She works at menial jobs to earn money to continue her education, and battles the male chauvinism of the university where she is constantly frustrated in obtaining the materials and equipment readily available to men in the film department. Several episodes in the novel are comic, and lend themselves readily to Brown’s oral readings. As Jane Rule points out in

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Lesbian Images, ‘‘the earnestness would weigh heavily if the book were not lifted by arrogant humor, never-mind-the-consequences fury, and transcending tenderness.’’ Flashing wit and lively language is evident throughout the novel. A Plain Brown Rapper (1976) collects Brown’s essays and political writings originally published in Quest, Rat, Come Out!, The Ladder, The Furies, Woman, and other feminist journals. Throughout the essays on politics, economics, and feminism, Brown emphasizes the common struggles of oppressed people. In ‘‘Take a Lesbian to Lunch,’’ Brown argues not for separatism, but for understanding among all people, to ‘‘make a better life for ourselves individually and collectively.’’ In Six of One (1978) Brown continues the irreverent, jaunty style of Rubyfruit Jungle. Many of the scenes are improbable, a combination of fantasy and slapstick, but as one character observes, ‘‘You have to be absurd sometimes. Nothing is more deadly than routine rationality.’’ Concentrating her efforts on fiction—she would publish 19 novels between 1979 and 1999, in addition to several screenplays and an autobiography—Brown’s more recent fiction has appealed to a wider, more mainstream audience than her early work. Rubyfruit Jungle made her America’s best known ‘‘lesbian author’’ by the 1980s, and Brown consciously and vociferously fought such categorization, saying in a 1978 interview that ‘‘classifying fiction by race, sex, or sex preference of the author is a discreet form of censorship’’ that ghettoizes fiction and insults its authors. While moving toward a larger readership, Brown has seen her literary reputation suffer somewhat in the hands of critics attempting to categorize her work as that of a ‘‘lesbian,’’ ‘‘woman,’’ or ‘‘Southern’’ writer. Characterizing Brown as ‘‘impudent, iconoclastic, individualistic, [and] egotistical,’’ Deborah T. Meem noted in Feminist Writers that Brown ‘‘insists on her right to set her own literary, political, and personal agenda,’’ and has made an effort to separate herself from any social or political movement or dogma that interferes with this independence. The fluctuation in Brown’s literary stature was largely the result of the publication of two flawed novels—Sudden Death (1983) and Venus Envy (1993)—and of a style of wit many critics insist on reading as a lack of seriousness. Developments in the field of lesbian literature in the 1980s and 1990s also played a part. The emergence of a larger body of works emboldened lesbians and feminist reviewers to feel more comfortable delivering harsh criticism, yet this collection of works was still small enough to burden individual works with higher expectations. Further, mainstream reviewers remained more critical of work they perceived as noncanonical. The most persistent criticism of Brown’s oeuvre has been that she is overpresent and obvious as a narrator and that she resolves crucial issues too simplistically or avoids resolution altogether. From Nickle Smith of Six of One (1978) and Bingo (1988) to Frazier Armstrong of Venus Envy, Brown is more likely to tell, or have her protagonists tell, who her characters are and what’s happening than to let readers discover for themselves. And although Brown’s conclusions are sometimes rushed, critics often overstate the problem. In her review of Southern Discomfort

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(1983), an historical novel set in 1918 and 1928 Alabama, Charlotte Meyer makes a common complaint: ‘‘the private and social costs involved’’ in the affair between the aristocratic protagonist and a young black man ‘‘are not worked out. . .because Hercules is accidentally—and conveniently—killed.’’ Yet this apparent solution complicates in some ways rather than simplifies. Hercules’ death may save Hortensia from a public reckoning, but the circumstances of his death must bring a more painful personal reckoning. She has refused to run away with him to the North; the very social structure that gives her the power and position she is unable to relinquish for him is directly responsible for his death. A ‘‘whites only’’ ambulance refuses to take him to the hospital and leaves him bleeding to death on the ground. Tragedy here, as elsewhere in Brown’s works, is relieved by comedy in most other sections of the novel; slapstick humor and witty dialogue abound. Brown’s strength is in her sense of humor and her ability as a storyteller. Her characters are vividly drawn and the situations she places them in usually outrageous and entertaining. With access to a wider audience than most so-called ‘‘lesbian’’ writers, Brown tries to use her wit as a weapon, to present readers with both strong lesbian and gay characters and issues of race, class, and gender with which they may be uncomfortable. She also assails social conventions she sees as being at odds with human nature, but in a generally humorous and therefore less threatening format. If the risk is that those issues then become easier to dismiss—and that critics will consequently find Brown herself easier to dismiss—it seems a risk Brown is willing to take. In the early 1990s Brown joined the growing ranks of mystery novelists with the publication of Wish You Were Here (1990) and Rest in Pieces (1992). ‘‘Coauthored’’ with her cat, Sneakie Pie Brown, and featuring investigative postmistress Harry Haristeen, these books marked the beginning of a series of novels featuring feline sleuths Mrs. Murphy (a overfed tiger), the gray-furred Pewter, and their erstwhile corgi companion Tee Tucker. Taking place in Crozet, Virginia, the ‘‘Sneakie Pie’’ novels are imbued with Southern intrigue and a rural charm that have gained them a growing readership, despite some criticism that noncat lovers would find the novels less entertaining due to the frailty of their human characters. Reviewer Marilyn Stasio noted that despite the artifice of having the books narrated by a cat, Brown’s ‘‘solid storytelling and tart regional voice . . . keep her mysteries from congealing in their own cuteness.’’ Other novels by Brown with a Southern slant include Dolley: A Novel of Dolley Madison in Love and War (1995) and Riding Shotgun (1997). Dolley is Brown’s fictionalization of a year (1814) in the life of Dolley Madison, wife of President James Madison. Painting her protagonist as a protofeminist, Brown ‘‘breaths life into her historical characters’’ and the politics of the day, according to reviewer Marie Kuda, who praised Brown’s portrayal of Dolley Madison as ‘‘full-blown and vibrant, no longer a static silhouette on a cupcake wrapper.’’ Riding Shotgun, a novel mixing time travel and a 1990s protagonist into its historic plot, was less well received by critics, who found its plot confusing and implausible.

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Breaking with fiction, in 1997 Brown published Rita Will: Memoir of a Literary Rabble-Rouser, a look back at her life as a writer and a lesbian feminist. The book focuses on Brown’s celebrity status due to her notorious love affairs with several female athletes and gains its appeal from its author’s candid discussion of her ‘‘poverty-stricken upbringing’’ and ‘‘minutiae about those romantic escapades of tabloid fame,’’ in the opinion of critic Charlotte Innes. However, Brown’s iconoclastic attitude, her strongly voiced moral and political views, and her tendency toward sentimentality put off some critics, who continue to look to her fiction for signs of continued development as an author. OTHER WORKS: In Her Day (1976). High Hearts (1986). Poems (1987). Starting from Scratch: A Different Kind of Writers’ Manual (1988). Pay Dirt; or, Adventures at Ash Lawn (1996). Murder She Meowed (1997). Murder on the Prowl (1998). Cat on the Scent (1999). Loose Lips (1999). Screenplays: Slumber Party Massacre (1982); I Love Liberty (coauthor, 1982); The Long Hot Summer, Part One (1985) and The Long Hot Summer, Part Two (with Dennis Turner, 1985); My Two Loves (1986); Rich Men, Single Women (1989). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ward, C. M., Rita Mae Brown (1993). Reference works: CANR 35 (1992). CLC 43 (1987), 79 (1994). CBY (1986). FW (1996). Other references: Amer. Book Rev. (Jan./Feb. 1983). Booklist (15 Mar. 1994). Choice (Sept. 1972). Conditions (April 1977). HudR (Spring 1972). Lambda Rising Book Report (Dec. 1988/ Jan. 1989). LATBR (23 Aug. 1997). Ms. (June 1974). NYTBR (21 Mar. 1982, 19 June 1983, 20 Apr. 1986, 16 Dec. 1990, 8 Dec. 1996, 3 May 1998). PW (2 Oct. 1978). Signs (Summer 1984). Sinister Wisdom (Fall 1976). VV (April 1974). WPBW (17 Feb. 1974). —LOIS MARCHINO, UPDATED BY BETH GRIERSON AND PAMELA SHELTON

BROWN, Rosellen Born 12 May 1939, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Daughter of David H. and Blossom Lieberman Brown; married Marvin Hoffman, 1963; children: Adina, Elana In ‘‘A Fragment of Autobiography,’’ Rosellen Brown recounts her first memories of writing while her older brother was at school. It was during World War II and her memories include air raid drills, ration books, and ‘‘terrifying thunder.’’ Even before she learned to write, Brown practiced letters imagining a story to suit her mood. She also remembers early reading, and her grade school librarian’s policy of having children ‘‘sell’’ books they enjoyed to other classmates. Reading and writing focused much of her childhood, and Brown has said that she felt, even as a child, the


need to ‘‘replenish, just a little bit, the pool of words I’m drinking from, to give back a book or two.’’ Both her parents respected learning. Her mother, who mastered English in a few months after arriving from the Ukraine, became a teacher for other immigrants, and Brown says that she was a ‘‘natural poet’’ even though she never wrote a word. Her father supplemented his eighth grade education by voracious reading and writing. He sold many of his poems to New York newspapers and wrote articulate and sensible letters to the editor. His reading journals, Brown says, were monuments to a writing talent he could not pursue while supporting his family. Despite the seeming security in the family, Brown felt keenly her rootless childhood, moving from town to town for her father’s job. When she was nine, they moved to Los Angeles, where Brown was frightened, lonely, and depressed. To compensate, she turned to writing. Brown remembers herself as obnoxious in her self-advertisement, but she wrote and imagined, even at age nine and with no women’s movement, that she could combine marriage and family with writing. During her years at Barnard (B.A., 1960) Brown wrote and worked with Robert Pack and George P. Elliot, who encouraged her talent, and Pack obtained a place for her in the Cummington Writers’ workshop. She published her first poem, a sestina, in Poetry magazine when she was a senior in college. Brown’s marriage in 1963 initiated a return to the rootless life she had known as a child. She and her husband lived first in California, then in Mississippi, the setting for Civil Wars (1984), and subsequently in Boston, in Brooklyn, the neighborhood of her book of short stories, Street Games (1974, 1991), in New Hampshire, and finally in Houston, where she taught creative writing at the University of Houston. Of her constant relocation, both as a child and as an adult, she comments that it has given the theme of exile to her writing. She says this exile ‘‘can be just as deep an obsession as devotion to (or aversion to) home’’: the theme is seen in almost all of her work—poetry, short stories, and novels. Brown’s first novel, Autobiography of My Mother (1976), pits two women against one another. The mother, Gerda Stein, is a successful civil rights lawyer; her daughter, Renata, has become a flower child and has a baby out of wedlock. The two women not only represent poles of the political spectrum, but they also show readers how far apart and how hurtful mothers and daughters can be to each other. Tender Mercies (1978), the story of a young woman paralyzed in a boating accident caused by her husband, again rubs raw the nerve connecting people. The marriage of Dan Courser and Laura tests the strength of both and illustrates how people survive after they have committed monumental acts of carelessness. Civil Wars (1984), perhaps Brown’s most ambitious novel, combines political and personal themes and explores the public and private histories of a group of civil rights workers in Mississippi. Jessie and Teddy Carll are two 1960s liberals trying to survive and to keep their marriage together when the raison d’être

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of their lives, the civil rights movement, seems no longer to exist. The book is about families and about the politics that bring them together and drive them apart. Before and After (1992) again makes use of a 1960s liberal couple: Ben, who is a sculptor, works at home and does the cooking; Carolyn, his wife, practices medicine in a small New Hampshire town. Both are trying to live without losing the aura that the 1960s brought to their lives. When their teenaged son, Jacob, murders his girlfriend, the family must begin the long journey to reconstitute itself with this enormous burden. Like Tender Mercies, Before and After tears people’s lives apart and examines how the characters mend themselves. The novel has been translated into 23 languages, and a film version (with screenplay by Ted Tally) was released in 1996 that greatly distorted both the plot and the intercultural conflict driving it. In her two books of poetry, Some Deaths in the Delta (1970) and Cora Fry (1977), Brown again combines public politics and private dreams. Some Deaths is a series of trenchantly critical poems about the new South, and the tone often foreshadows Civil Wars. Cora Fry, a series of narrative poems about marriage and family, reveals the ways in which personal relationships recapitulate larger social forces. Cora, wanting only freedom, runs away with her children, but returns to her marriage and the risk that her husband may well destroy them all. Brown also collaborated on the Whole World Catalogue, a compendium of creative writing ideas for elementary and secondary schools. Here, as in her fiction, she replenishes the pool of words. In 1994 Brown continued to replenish the supply of her well-wrought words with Cora Fry’s Pillow Book, which includes Cora Fry and the sequel of the title. With elegant brevity, Brown continues the tale of Cora’s life in smalltown New England as well as that of her neighbors, packing rich imagery and deep emotion into very few words. In 1996 Brown moved from Houston to Chicago, where she teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is at work on a new novel. She reviews for the Women’s Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, the Boston Globe, the New Leader, and the American Book Review. An occasional travel piece appears in the New York Times as well and she has contributed to a number of anthologies, including A Place Called Home: Twenty Writing Women Remember (edited by Mickey Pearlman, 1997), Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales (edited by Kate Bernheimer, 1998), and From Daughters to Mothers: I Always Meant to Tell You (edited by Constance Warhoe, 1998), an anthology of letters from 75 writers to their mothers. John Updike has selected her superbly wry and painful short story ‘‘How to Win’’ for a volume tentatively titled The Best Short Stories of the Century. OTHER WORKS: A Rosellen Brown Reader (1992). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Howe, F., ed., Meridian, The Salt Eaters, Civil Wars (1991). Howe, F., ed., Tradition and the Talents of Women

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(1991). LeClair, T., and L. McCaffery, Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists (1983). Pearlman, M., ed., Mother Puzzles: Daughters and Mothers in Contemporary American Literature (1989). Reference works: CA (1979). CAAS (1989). CANR (1985). CLC (1985). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Imago (Summer 1988). Chicago Review (Winter 1983). Contemporary Literature (Summer 1986). South Atlantic Quarterly (Summer 1991). WRB (July 1989). —MARY A. MCCAY, UPDATED BY MARTHA ULLMAN WEST

BROWN, Sandra Born 12 March 1948, Waco, Texas Also writes under: Laura Jordan, Rachel Ryan, Erin St. Claire Daughter of Jimmie and Martha Cox; married Michael Brown, 1948; children: Rachel, Ryan Sandra Brown has been among the most prolific and commercially viable authors of romance and mainstream fiction throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Her current books contain many of the elements associated with the romance genre where she became established first, but also feature traits common to crime and political thrillers and mysteries. She is a rare example of a romance writer who has been able to make a successful transition into mainstream novels. A native Texan, Brown was the oldest of five daughters of a father who wrote editorials for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and a mother who counseled emotionally disturbed children. Brown attended Texas Christian University, Oklahoma State University, and the University of Texas at Arlington, although she never graduated. She met her husband, a video producer, while employed as a dancer at the Six Flags over America amusement park in Arlington. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, she was employed as a model, weather reporter, and entertainment reporter. Brown began writing in 1981 at age thirty-three and sold her first book, Love’s Encore, within the year under the pseudonym Rachel Ryan. This was followed the same year by Love Beyond Reason. In 1982, five of her titles were released and she was soon writing for all the major romance publishers, including Harlequin/ Silhouette, Dell, Bantam, Berkley/Jove and Richard Gallen/Pocket, under her own name and three pseudonyms. Romance readers loved the fact that her books were set in the American South rather than among European royalty, as was the norm. Some of her early genre novels included Eloquent Silence (1982) and A Treasure Worth Seeking (1982) under the pseudonym Rachel Ryan; Not Even for Love (1982), Hidden Fires (1982) and The Silken Web (1982) under Laura Jordan; A Kiss Remembered (1983) and Seduction by Design (1983) under Erin St.

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Claire; and Breakfast in Bed (1983), Prime Time (1983), and Heaven’s Price (1983) under her own name. Brown began to feel locked in by the conventions demanded by publishers and readers of romances, including the prohibition of graphic sex scenes and bad language and required happy endings. In 1988 she wrote her first mainstream novel, published by Warner Books. Her loyal romance readers were furious by the change at first, but she managed to keep most of her audience as well as adding even more fans. She became a fixture on the New York Times Bestseller List, where she was just the second female writer, after Danielle Steele, to have three titles appear simultaneously. As of 1998, Brown had produced more than 60 novels, including 36 bestsellers, and boasted well over 50 million copies in print. Her works have been translated into 30 languages. Brown’s first mainstream novel was Slow Heat in Heaven (1988), followed by Best Kept Secrets (1989); Mirror Image (1990), which represented her first appearance on the New York Times list; Breath of Scandal and Another Dawn (both 1991); French Silk (1992), which was developed into a made-for-television movie; Where There’s Smoke and Shadows of Yesterday (both 1993); Charade (1994); The Witness (1995); Exclusive (1996); Fat Tuesday (1997); Unspeakable (1998); and The Alibi (1999). She has also written three books known collectively as the Texas! trilogy, including Texas! Lucky (1990), Texas! Chase (1990), and Texas! Sage (1992). As a rule, critics love Brown’s plots but are less enamored of her writing style. Publishers Weekly noted of French Silk, ‘‘Despite occasionally stilted and didactic dialogue, the novel is adroitly plotted and sleekly paced, and has just the right mix of menace and sex to keep pages turning.’’ Similarly, the publication called Fat Tuesday a ‘‘suspenseful, if rarely subtle, tale of revenge and corruption’’ and Unspeakable a ‘‘fast-paced and romantically charged, if stiffly written, thriller. . . . Brown’s deftly plotted narrative twists and turns without losing hold of its suspense.’’ Brown’s work typically features a large number of fleshed-out characters, including a career-oriented female protagonist looking for love; lots of what one reviewer terms ‘‘raunchy sex scenes’’; complicated plots, often involving family issues, in which unanticipated secrets are revealed and the heroine is placed in dangerous situations; and settings in the American South, from Texas to New Orleans to Washington, D.C. Readers and critics alike laud her ability to create fresh plots with every new book and to keep readers guessing right up to the last page. OTHER WORKS: Relentless Desire (1983). Tempest in Eden (1983). Tomorrow’s Promise (1983). In a Class by Itself (1984). Send No Flowers (1984). Sunset Embrace (1984). Bittersweet Rain (1984). Words of Silk (1984). Thursday’s Child (1985). A Sweet Anger (1985). Led Astray (1985). Another Dawn (1985). Riley in the Morning (1985). Tiger Prince (1985). Above and Beyond (1986). The Rana Look (1986). Honor Bound (1986). 22 Indigo Place (1986). The Devil’s Own (1987). Sunny Chandler’s Return (1987). Demon Rumm (1987). Two Alone (1987). Fanta C (1987). Tidings


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of Great Joy (1988). Adam’s Fall (1988). Hawk O’Toole’s Hostage (1988). Long Time Coming (1989). Temperatures Rising (1989). Thrill of Victory (1989). A Whole New Light (1989). A Secret Splendor (1992). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference Works: CANR (1998). Other references: Forbes (2 June 1997). NYTBR (31 May 1992). People (4 July 1994, 21 Sept. 1998). PW (30 Aug. 1985, 15 Apr. 1988, 21 Dec. 1990, 7 June 1991, 16 Mar. 1992, 15 May 1995, 10 July 1995, 6 May 1996, 9 Sept. 1996, 31 May 1997, 25 May 1998, 8 June 1998). Texas Monthly (Oct. 1991). Writer’s Digest (Sept. 1984). —KAREN RAUGUST

BROWNE, Martha Griffith Born date unknown; died 25 May 1906 Wrote under: Martha Griffith, Mattie Griffith Daughter of Thomas and Martha Young Griffith; married Albert Gallatin Browne Daughter of slaveowners, Martha Griffith Browne freed the slaves she inherited, and over the protests of her relatives used her own resources to give her ex-slaves a start as free persons. Moving to Boston in 1860, she wrote for Boston and New York antislavery publications and participated in William Lloyd Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society. Browne’s principal work, Autobiograpby of a Female Slave, was first published anonymously in 1857 (reprinted 1998), but the author’s identity was soon made known by Garrison’s the Liberator, which on 9 January 1857 printed an extract. Since its first publication readers have sometimes taken the Autobiograpby to be an authentic slave narrative, sometimes an edited or shaped narrative, and sometimes a completely fictionalized story. Browne herself reported in 1904 that it was totally composed of ‘‘recited’’ and ‘‘well-known’’ facts. It is clear that Browne’s account of slave life in Kentucky is accurately based on her firsthand experiences, but she made the book readable by creating dialogue and shaping a plot. The value of the Autobiography is twofold. First, despite its touches of sentimentality and interspersed abolitionist polemic, it provides insight into day-to-day Kentucky slave life, both in country and city. The broad range of characters’ survival accommodations to slavery—from obsequiousness to militancy in the slaves, and from extreme cruelty to strong antislavery opinions in the whites—gives a comprehensive picture of human interaction with the ‘‘peculiar institution.’’ Second, having a female as the central character from whose first-person point of view the stories of many other females are told, is a needed addition to the ‘‘authentic’’ slave narratives, of which scores were published but in which women’s stories were sadly underrepresented. When comparing Browne’s novelized Autobiography with the slaves’ description of slavery culled from firsthand narratives,

one finds many similarities. Legally enforced illiteracy was the bane of slaves, and a mainstay of the system. Slave leaders or high achievers were those who, by subterfuge or luck, received some schooling. Violence was a second, less successful, mainstay of slavery. Mistresses and professed Christians were as cruel or more cruel than tobacco-chewing, whisky-drinking masters. Even though they whip slaves with impunity, even to death, for such sins as loss of a silver fork, slave loyalty is tied not to punishment, but to rewards. Slaves were not well-provided with clothing, food, shelter, or medical care. It was especially hard for childbearing women, who were severely punished for resisting white men’s advances, and were expected to do field work and housework while pregnant or nursing; they kept their children alive only to see them beaten or sold. Children were not properly cared for, and had no chance to develop self-esteem. Their mortality rate was extremely high. As a novel, the Autobiography is inevitably compared to Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which preceded it by four years. The Autobiography of a Female Slave is less derivative than might be expected, depending less than Stowe’s work on sentimental reaction for its antislavery impact, and being much more blunt and realistic about the majority of slaveholders than is Stowe’s depiction of Southern aristocrats. OTHER WORKS: Madge Vertner (1859-60). Poems (1852, 1853). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bayliss, J., Black Slave Narratives (1970). Dumond, D., A Bibliography of Anti-Slavery in America (1967). Loggins, V., The Negro Author, His Development in America to 1900 (1931). Lystar, K. J., ‘‘Two Female Perspectives on the Slave Family as Described in Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Mattie Griffith’s Autobiography of a Female Slave’’ (thesis, 1995). McPherson, J., The Struggle for Equality (1964). Nichols, C., Many Thousands Gone: The Ex-Slaves’ Account of Their Bondage and Freedom (1963). Ruchames, L., ed., The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison (From Disunion to the Brink of War, vol. 4, 1975). —CAROLYN WEDIN SYLVANDER

BROWNMILLER, Susan Born 15 February 1935, Brooklyn, New York Susan Brownmiller, best known as a feminist and activist, attended Cornell University from 1952-55. She began her career as an actress in New York City, but after four years she turned to editing for Coronet where she worked her way from assistant to managing editor. She pursued this path and worked as an editor for the Albany Report (1961-62), before becoming a national affairs researcher for Newsweek (1963-64). With experience in newswriting, she worked as staff writer for the Village Voice (1965) and then on to reporting for NBC-TV (1965) and network newswriting for ABC-TV (1966-68). During this time in the

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1960s, Brownmiller became one of the earliest politically active feminists in New York City. Acutely aware of the need for improved women’s rights, she was a founding member of the New York Radical Feminists in 1968. Their protest demonstrations, along with Brownmiller’s freelance journalism experiences led her to help organize a 1971 ‘‘Speak-Out on Rape’’ which became the focus of much of her subsequent work. She also was an organizer of Women Against Pornography. Her activism, and both nonfiction and fiction have garnered her respect as a leader of the feminist movement and an adversary of pornography. Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (1981) is the result of four years of research and writing in which Brownmiller explores the subject of rape in a way it had never been done before. This controversial work explores the history of rape, the political use of rape in wartime, and the cultural and social permutations of rape. The thesis of the work, which caused both outrage and introspection, states that rape ‘‘is nothing more or less than a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear,’’ an act of brute power, ‘‘a thoroughly detestable physical conquest from which there could be no retaliation in kind.’’ Heavily researched, Brownmiller relies on government statistics, historical accounts, and cultural myths to construct a view of rape as not a sexual act but as an act of power and oppression. While the book gained her celebrity, it was received very differently by different people. Many, especially women, saw the work as eye-opening and liberating by offering them a way to understand an otherwise unexplainable act of barbarism, while others felt it vindictively, angrily, and wrongfully accused all men of heinous crimes against women. The controversy of Against Our Will brought Brownmiller widespread attention and the book became a national bestseller. Her ultimate hope for her book was to give women a way to fight back against rape and to let all women together find a way ‘‘to redress the imbalance and rid ourselves and men of the ideology of rape. . . . My purpose in this book has been to give rape its history. Now we must deny it a future.’’ Brownmiller has since produced additional feminist writings, in addition to her foray into the novel with Waverly Place (1989). This novel again broaches a difficult subject by examining child abuse. Unlike with Against Our Will, she chose to set this work in fiction because ‘‘I wanted the freedom to invent dialogue, motivations, events, and characters based on my own understanding of battery and abuse.’’ Where she based herself entirely on fact and statistic in her first work, here she delves into the other side of abuse to emotionalize and personalize the unimaginable. Turning to a new genre, Seeing Vietnam; Encounters of the Road and the Heart (1994) she chronicles her experiences as an American in Vietnam. According to one critic, she ‘‘is a determined aggressive reporter with a fine sense for both background and detail. She makes the point of journeying off the beaten track. . . . And she manages to convey the flavor of ordinary life in Vietnam.’’ However, all reviews were not as favorable, and another critic found Brownmiller loses the beauty and joy of the curious moment when she interrupts her narrative ‘‘to give a history of the Vietnamese alphabet and discuss the faults of the Communist regime.’’ While she turns largely away from her

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Western feminist focus, she nevertheless maintains the focus of a newswoman and the passion of an activist. Hurled into the public eye, and surrounded by both criticism and applause alike, Brownmiller’s background as a newswriter and her passionate struggle for women’s rights have preserved her a place in the feminist cannon.

OTHER WORKS: Shirley Chisholm (1972). Femininity (1984).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hoy, P. C., et al., eds., Women’s Voices (1990). Reference works: CA (Online, 1999). Complete Marquis Who’s Who (1995). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Book Review Digest (1995). —JULIET BYINGTON

BROWNSON, Sarah N(icolena) Born 7 June 1839, Chelsea, Massachusetts; died 30 October 1876, Elizabeth, New Jersey Wrote under: An American, Sarah M(aria) Brownson, One of Themselves Daughter of Orestes A. and Sally Healy Brownson; married William J. Tenney, 1873; children: two daughters The daughter of a leading Roman Catholic thinker of 19thcentury America, Sarah N. Brownson spent almost her entire life in her father’s home. She shared his religious interests, contributing anonymous literary criticism to his Brownson’s Quarterly Review. Brownson also wrote articles, stories, and poems—many still unidentified—for other periodicals. Only three novels and a biography have been recognized as hers. In 1873 Brownson married an elderly widower, and, after giving birth to their second daughter, died, just six months after her father. In Marian Elwood, or How Girls Live (1859), the young author, identified only as ‘‘One of Themselves,’’ states that the book was ‘‘begun in an idle moment’’ with no thought of publication. Against a background of viciously competitive upper-class young ladies who flirt with and reject suitors, the heroine matures, falls in love with a good man, and atones for her former frivolity through suffering and good works. At Anchor, A Story of Our Civil War, by ‘‘An American’’ (1865), again deals with upper-class courtship and marriage. Georgie Vane, the New England heroine, marries a Southern gentleman and settles in the Confederacy with him, where she remains through much of the Civil War. In this story it is the horrors and suffering of war which lead the heroine to maturity and an ability to love deeply. The third novel, Heremore-Brandon, or the Fortunes of a Newsboy (1868), appeared only in serialized


form in the Catholic World; its episodic quality makes it inferior to its predecessor in unity, coherence of plot, and motivation. All three of Brownson’s novels have contrived plots: chance meetings with unknown or forgotten relatives, sudden reappearances of supposedly dead lovers or husbands. Yet the novels show an ability to develop complex characters, especially women, as well as an understanding of human growth and an increasing awareness of social problems. Although Catholicism runs through all of Brownson’s fiction, it is most explicit in Marian Elwood, where a sensible and wise priest is contrasted with a fatuous and infatuated Protestant minister. In the later novels Catholicism serves as a force in the characters’ lives, urging them toward good works, sympathy for the needy, and a relative simplicity of life. The work for which Brownson is most generally known, and the only book published under her own name, is the Life of Demetrius Augustine Gallitzin, Prince and Priest (1873), a biography of the intellectual Russian prince who converted to Roman Catholicism and served as a priest in the mountains of Pennsylvania. Brownson’s careful research resulted in the first in-depth study of Gallitzin. A French translation appeared posthumously. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Maynard, T., Orestes Brownson: Yankee, Radical, Catholic (1943). Other references: BrQR (1873). Catholic World (1873). CHR (1940). —ARLENE ANDERSON SWIDLER

BRYAN, Mary Edwards Born 17 May circa 1838, Lloyd, Florida; died 15 June 1913, Clarkston, Georgia Daughter of John D. and Louisa C. Houghton Edwards; married Iredell E. Bryan, 1854 Mary Edwards Bryan spent her early years on her father’s plantation near Tallahassee, Florida. Her childhood was given to outdoor sports and horseback rides through the wild woods surrounding her home. At age eleven Bryan was sent to the Fletcher Institute, a boarding school near Thomasville, Georgia. Before she was sixteen, she had already published poems and a story in the local paper. Mystery surrounds Bryan’s marriage at the age of fifteen or sixteen. An hour before she was married, she was sitting in her own room, studying her Latin lesson. Two hours afterward, she was on her way to her husband’s home on the banks of the Red River. For reasons unknown, she left her husband after a year. The separation was only partial, however, because her husband was devoted to her, and visited her frequently. The couple had at least five children. In 1858 Bryan began contributing to the Georgia Literary and Temperance Crusader, filling three to five columns every

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week. The expanded Crusader moved to Atlanta in 1859, and Bryan followed, serving as its literary editor. In 1868 Bryan worked for Scott’s Magazine of Atlanta, and her novel The Mystery of Cedar Bay was serialized in its pages. From 1874-84, Bryan served as associate editor of Sunny South, a popular Atlanta family weekly, and began to publish her novels in book form. Bryan moved to New York City in 1885 to become assistant editor of two magazines published by George Munro, Fireside Companion and Fashion Bazaar. In her spare time, she completed at least nine novels, most of which Munro published. Manch (1880) typifies the style and content of Bryan’s fiction. Fifteen-year-old Milly Brown goes into convulsions when her husband is accused of murder. Climaxes include a race to the gallows and a scaffold confession from the heroine’s supposed father, who reveals he had killed her true father for having married the woman he loved. Bryan supplements her sensational plotting with fairly believable descriptions of the bayous and border settlements. In Wild Work (1881), purportedly based on actual incidents in recontruction Louisiana, a heroine falls in love with a carpetbagger, is disowned by her family, and dies of consumption while her husband neglects her to pursue wealth and power. Despite the melodramatic plot, Bryan’s local color and history generally ring true. She stresses the credulity, superstition, and shiftlessness of the freedmen and the rapacity of the Yankees. Bryan’s poems were characterized by contemporaries as ‘‘brilliant and passionate.’’ Although derivative, her poetry is often strong and sensitive, and its earnestness recalls the religious fervor of her youthful years. In her 1860 essay, ‘‘How Should Women Write?’’ Bryan discusses her aspirations as a writer, and calls upon women to write honestly about ethical and social questions. If Bryan’s poems and novels generally fail to live up to her early promise and the serious aspirations of ‘‘How Should Women Write?’’ they offer valuable glimpses of the south both before and after the war. Bryan’s achievement as a well-paid editor of Northern magazines still seems remarkable today. OTHER WORKS: The Bayou Bride (1886). Kildee; or, The Sphinx of the Red House (1886). Munro’s Star Recitations for Parlor, School, and Exhibition (ed. by Bryan, 1887). Stormy Wedding (1887). My Own Sin; A Story of Life in New York (1888). Uncle Ned’s White Child (1889). The Ghost of the Hurricane Hills, or, A Florida Girl (1891). Ruth the Outcast (1891). His Legal Wife (1894). The Girl He Bought (1895). Nan Haggard, the Heiress of Dead Hopes Mine (1895). Poems and Stories in Verse (1895). Maple Leaf Amateur Reciter, a Book of Choice Dialogues for Parlor, School and Exhibition (ed. by Bryan, 1908). Bayou Tree (n.d.). A Fair Judas (n.d.). Fugitive Bride (n.d.). Her Husband’s Ghost (n.d.). His Greatest Sacrifice (n.d.). His Wife’s Friend (n.d.). Sinned Against (n.d.). Three Girls (n.d.). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Davidson, J. W., The Living Writers of the South (1869). Forrest, M., Women of the South Distinguished in Literature (1861). McVoy, L. C., and R. B. Campbell, A Bibliography of

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Fiction by Louisianians and on Louisiana Subjects (1935). Raymond, I., Southland Writers (1870). Raymond, I., The Living Female Writers of the South (1870). Reference works: American Women (1897). Dictionary of American Biography, National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH

BRYANT, Anita Born 25 March 1940, Barnsdall, Oklahoma Daughter of Warren and Lenora Berry Bryant; married Robert Green, 1960 (divorced 1980); Charlie Dry, 1990; children: four Anita Bryant’s husband once remarked to his wife: ‘‘I don’t think you had a childhood.’’ Bryant’s father was nineteen, her mother eighteen, when Bryant was born. They were divorced by the time she was two, remarried one another when she was three, and were divorced again when she was thirteen. Later both parents remarried others. Bryant and her younger sister were frequently uprooted as their father, a laborer in the oil fields, moved from job to job, and the family experienced periods of severe poverty. According to her autobiography, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory (1970), however, Bryant’s singing talent was noticed early. Before finishing high school, she was appearing on network radio and she later dropped out of Chicago’s Northwestern University because of heavy career demands. Bryant met her managerhusband, Bob Green, while promoting a highly successful record in Miami. Many of Bryant’s works are coauthored with her husband. Before 1977, Bryant was known as a wholesome and patriotic entertainer, a devoted wife and mother of four children, an author of religious books, and a promoter of orange juice for the Florida Citrus Commission. In January 1977, however, she became a highly controversial public figure, identified primarily as a crusader against homosexual rights. The books Bryant wrote before 1977 are much like Christmas family newsletters, filled with photos, anecdotes, and news of the Green family. Loosely organized, chatty, and platitudinous, the books lack profundity, but are sincere expressions of Bryant’s outlook on life and her personal understanding of the Christian faith. Bless This House (1972) presents Bryant’s philosophy of Christian marriage and includes four chapters written by her husband. Fishers of Men (1973) tells of the Green family’s efforts to spread their Christian faith; while Running the Good Race (1976) describes the family’s efforts at physical fitness. In the foreword to her second book, Amazing Grace (1971), Bryant’s publishers state Bryant ‘‘never considered herself an author’’ but was persuaded to write as one way to ‘‘witness to thousands . . . how the Lord had touched her life.’’

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All of Bryant’s books reflect her comfortable upper-middleclass lifestyle and the particular conservative Christian subculture of which she is a part. Her writings indicate a dogmatic conviction that her view of life is the right way, the biblical way, God’s way. If socialization agencies such as schools or the media are permitted to present alternative world views—especially on certain social issues—Bryant fears children may make wrong choices. Thus in The Anita Bryant Story (1977), Bryant, who believed God had tapped her on the shoulder and given her ‘‘direct marching orders,’’ and her husband claim that an ordinance guaranteeing homosexual civil rights provides children with the mistaken idea ‘‘that there is an alternative way of life—that being a homosexual or a lesbian is not really wrong.’’ Since Bryant admits before this time she had given no thought or study to homosexuality, The Anita Bryant Story contains a great deal of misinformation, sensationalism, and unsubstantiated generalizations about homosexuality, which Bryant hastily put together in the emotional heat of seeking repeal of the ordinance. In At Any Cost (1978), coauthored with her husband, Bryant explains that at the outset of her involvement in the homosexual controversy, ‘‘there wasn’t even time to try to inform myself,’’ and claims since then she ‘‘endeavored to become more knowledgeable.’’ The Greens felt they were misunderstood and mishandled by the media and thus wrote the book to tell their side of the story. The intent of At Any Cost is, apparently, to justify the political stance they have taken all along, to describe what they have ‘‘been through as a family’’ because of it, and to challenge others to ‘‘stand up’’ for what the Greens believe is right. Bryant describes homosexuality as ‘‘a cancer on the soul of society’’ and is convinced it was promoted (along with abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment) as part of a program of ‘‘revolutionary women’’ whose goal is to ‘‘destroy the social structure on which America rests.’’ She characterizes the 1977 National Women’s Year Convention held in Houston as being ‘‘antimale, antiwhite, antifamily, anti-Christian, and anti-American from start to finish.’’ At the same time, Bryant writes that it saddens her to be accused of bigotry, adding, ‘‘I truly do love the homosexual, and all sinners for that matter.’’ Bryant writes with surprising candor. She does not hesitate to disclose the details of her emotional breakdown and the psychological help that enabled her to work through childhood resentments. Both Bryant and her husband freely speak of their hot tempers, and the ongoing struggles they have in following what they believe is the biblical model for marriage, i.e., male leadership and wifely submission. At one point, Bryant considered supporting the ERA, but her husband and others convinced her that ‘‘the Equal Rights Amendment was not God’s will for the women of America.’’ Nevertheless, an unbidden feminist spirit shows up at various points in Bryant’s writings. At the beginning of her marriage, time hung ‘‘unbearably heavy’’ on her hands until she left her full-time homemaker role to return to the entertainment world. Bryant’s autobiography speaks of an ‘‘intense ambition and a relentless drive to succeed,’’ and most of her books contain lengthy confessions of her struggle to be a submissive wife.


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Bryant and Green’s struggle for a biblical marriage ended in divorce in 1980, and Bryant remarried in 1990, to a childhood pal who told her he’d been in love with her for 40 years. A New Day was published in 1996, presenting a mellower Bryant than her previous books, especially those written with former husband Green. OTHER WORKS: Light My Candle (with B. Green, 1974). Bless This Food: The Anita Bryant Family Cookbook (1975). Raising God’s Children (with B. Green, 1977). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Melgaard, M. J., ‘‘The New Politics of Fear: The 1977 Dade County Gay Rights Referendum and the Regeneration of the Radical Right, 1969-1980’’ (thesis, 1992). Scot, D. C., Something in Orange (1978). Reference works: CB (1975). Other references: Anita Bryant & The Protect America’s Children Campaign (Formerly Save Our Children) (1978). Playboy (May 1978). People (5 July 1999). Today’s Christian Woman (Fall/Winter 1978-79). —LETHA SCANZONI

BUCHANAN, Edna (Rydzik) Born circa 1939, Paterson, New Jersey. Married Emmett Miller (divorced); Jim Buchanan (divorced) Edna Buchanan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who covered the police beat for the Miami Herald for nearly two decades, as well as a bestselling crime novelist. She is known for her punchy writing style, which has carried over from her newspaper reporting into her fiction. She is also renowned for her attention to detail and her portrayals of Miami—which plays the role of a major character in her novels. Buchanan was born in Paterson, New Jersey. Her mother, taking Buchanan and her younger sister with her, left Buchanan’s father, who worked in a factory and later ran a tavern, when Buchanan was seven. When Edna was twelve, she took a position in a coat factory to help her mother with the family finances. This was followed by several other blue-collar jobs. Due to monetary concerns, she never attended college. Eventually Buchanan and her mother both became switchboard assemblers at Western Electric. During their first vacation, they visited Miami and decided to move there. In 1964 Buchanan took a position at the Miami Beach Sun, a small local newspaper where she received intensive on-the-job training as a reporter. She moved to the Miami Herald in 1970 and worked as a news and court reporter before transferring to the police beat in 1973, becoming the first woman to fill the position full-time. She quickly gained a reputation for her tenacity in gathering information and compassion for victims, about whom

she tried to find out as much as possible, and ultimately earned grudging respect from members of the police force. She also was acclaimed for her gripping writing style, particularly her leads. Over the course of 15 years, Buchanan covered more than 5,000 crimes, predominantly murders, winning awards from the National Newspaper Association, the American Bar Association, and the Society of Professional Journalists. She won the Pulitzer for general reporting in 1986. Buchanan’s first book, published in 1979, was Carr: Five Years of Rape and Murder, From the Personal Account of Robert Frederick Carr III. While in prison, the eponymous Carr confided to Edna details from his years of criminal behavior. The book achieved some critical acclaim, particularly for its psychological insight, but it did not sell well, and it was eight years before Buchanan released another book-length work. In 1987 Buchanan’s memoir of her years as a crime reporter, The Corpse Had a Familiar Face: Covering Miami, America’s Hottest Beat, became a bestseller, thanks in part to the publicity from her recent Pulitzer. Although some reviewers found her newspaper style irritating in book form, most embraced it. One example of Buchanan’s trademark prose: ‘‘Many of the corpses have had familiar faces: cops and killers, politicians and prostitutes, doctors and lawyers. Some were my friends.’’ Two made-for-television films based on The Corpse Had a Familiar Face were aired on CBS in 1994 and 1995, both featuring Elizabeth Montgomery as Buchanan. Buchanan then published a subsequent memoir, Never Let Them See You Cry: More from Miami, America’s Hottest Beat. Her first novel, Nobody Lives Forever, was published in 1990. It received somewhat mixed reviews but was nominated for an Edgar award for best first mystery. As in later novels, Buchanan featured Miami almost as a character in its own right and created believable characters who echoed the real lives of the people featured in her memoirs. Buchanan’s second novel, Contents Under Pressure, was published in 1992, the same year as Never Let Them See You Cry. It introduced Britt Montero, a Cuban-American reporter for a fictional Miami newspaper, who the author has admitted is somewhat of an alter ego. Or, as Buchanan puts it, Montero is what she would like to be. Contents Under Pressure was a commercial success, as were her subsequent novels, many of which feature Montero. They include Miami, It’s Murder (1994), Suitable for Framing (1995), Act of Betrayal (1996), and Margin of Error (1997). Most received mixed reviews from critics, although nearly all praised her journalistic eye and ability to create a good story and capture Miami’s atmosphere. Publishers Weekly wrote of Margin of Error: ‘‘Buchanan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning eye doesn’t miss much in Miami. She knows its poshest precincts, its poorest projects and the troubles lurking in both. She also knows how to reveal the vulnerable heart beating within Britt’s tough exterior.’’ Buchanan’s recent novel, Pulse (1998), was praised by reviewers as a character study containing both suspense and

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emotion. Miami again plays a starring role, but the book’s lead character (not Montero this time) also travels to Seattle, which the author portrays with equal believability. In addition to her novels, Buchanan also writes articles for publications including Cosmopolitan, Fame, Family Circle and Rolling Stone.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference Works: CA 132 (1991). CBY (1997). Other references: New Yorker (17 Feb. 1986). NYTBR (20 Feb. 1994, 24 March 1996). PW (19 Sept. 1994, 16 Jan. 1995, 2 June 1997, 30 March 1998). Time (28 Sept. 1987). —KAREN RAUGUST

BUCK, Pearl S(ydenstricker) Born 26 June 1892, Hillsboro, West Virginia; died 6 March 1973, Danby, Vermont Also wrote under: John Sedges Daughter of Absalom and Caroline Stulting Sydenstricker; married John L. Buck, 1917; Richard J. Walsh, 1935 The daughter of American missionaries who took her to China at the age of three months, Pearl S. Buck grew up in close contact with the Chinese and had no intention of ever leaving China except for periods of study, such as taking her degree at Randolph-Macon Women’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia. In 1917 she married an agriculturist employed by the Presbyterian Mission Board, and in 1924 the two attended Cornell, where Buck won the Laura Messenger Prize for an essay, ‘‘China and the West.’’ This was an omen for her future, for she was to explain China to the West again and again, from her first published work, East Wind: West Wind (1930), to the time of her death, when she was working on a novel, Red Earth, which was to tell the story of the modern descendants of Wang Lung, the protagonist of her famous novel, The Good Earth (1931). Many of her books concerned other countries of Asia and also the U.S., but her love for the China in which she was brought up lasted all her life. Twentieth-century struggles, however, destroyed traditional China and made it impossible for her to continue living in the country. In 1932 Buck returned to the U.S., divorced her husband, and in 1935 married her publisher, Richard J. Walsh. The original incentive for her to earn money by writing had come in 1928, when she realized her daughter Carol was incurably retarded. But Buck did not stop at providing care for this one child. Like her mother supporting Chinese famine refugees, she felt that any suffering was her concern. Selecting Amerasians, who were hard to place, she brought up nine adopted children. In 1941 she founded the East-West Association; in 1949, Welcome House (a non-profit organization which provided care for children of Asian

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women and American servicemen); and in 1963, the Pearl S. Buck Foundation. Buck has always been popular with the general public. Her simple style, her feeling for traditional values, and her skill in writing on universal themes account for her appeal to the general reader. Buck herself never felt the novel was a branch of great literature, intended for an elite. Her Confucian tutor had taught her to consider the novel a form of popular entertainment, unworthy of the scholar, and she wished to be popular, because she liked ordinary people. The Good Earth, acknowledged as her best book, was written out of sympathy with the Chinese peasants. Wang Lung, the farmer, marries the slave girl, O-Lan, who becomes a devoted wife and a tireless worker. As she helps him on his farm, his prosperity grows, and he begins to buy land. O-Lan also presents him with children—two boys and a girl. Then famine comes. OLan kills a fourth child at birth, a girl, because there is no food, and the family, together with the old grandfather, heads south. In a big city, they eke out a miserable living and the surviving daughter is retarded. Then, during an insurrection, O-Lan finds some jewels in a house being looted. These jewels make it possible to return to the farm, and Wang Lung becomes more and more prosperous. OLan bears twins, a boy and a girl. Then Wang Lung takes a concubine and forces O-Lan to give up two pearls, which were all she had kept for herself. He wants to give them to his other woman. His oldest son trifles with the concubine. After that, OLan dies. Finally, Wang Lung and his family are established in the great house where O-Lan once worked as a slave, in conditions of wealth and ease. The whole story is told with love and understanding, and without a trace of praise or blame. People everywhere identified with these Chinese peasants, and The Good Earth became a worldwide bestseller. It won Buck the Pulitzer Prize in 1931 and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1935. The 1937 film based on the book, and directed by Sidney Franklin, was also a great success, with Paul Muni as Wang Lung and Luise Rainer, who won an Academy Award for her touching performance of O-Lan. It was a beautiful film, although its happy ending was not faithful to the book. In 1938 Buck received the Nobel Prize ‘‘for rich and genuine epic portrayals of Chinese life and for masterpieces of biography.’’ The Nobel Prize was thus awarded not only for The Good Earth but also for Sons (1932) and A House Divided (1935), which carry the saga of Wang Lung’s family through three generations. Other works were East Wind: West Wind, The Young Revolutionist (1932), The First Wife, and Other Stories (1933), her translation of a Chinese novel, Shui Hu Chuan, All Men Are Brothers (1933), and The Mother (1934). The ‘‘masterpieces of biography’’ were Buck’s accounts of her mother, The Exile, and her father, Fighting Angel (both 1936). Her portraits of her parents are fresh, vivid, and true. She describes her father and his evangelical fervor with tenderness,


understanding, and an admiration that is not lessened by a touch of humor. The same qualities appear in her portrait of her mother, along with a fellow feeling of sympathy for the trials her mother had to endure. Buck’s mother deeply felt the loss of a child who succumbed to tropical diseases, but she took almost as hard her husband’s refusal to treat her as an equal. After these biographies, Buck’s most outstanding work of nonfiction also concerned her own family, especially The Child Who Never Grew (1950), which tells the heartrending story of her retarded child. The Good Earth has tended to overshadow all Buck’s other writings, a circumstance that irritated her considerably, and with reason, for she wrote much of value. Among her lesser novels, of particular interest are the following: Pavilion of Women (1946), which tells how a Chinese lady finds fulfillment in a spiritual love for an Italian priest; Peony (1948), which presents the assimilation of the Chinese Jews; and Imperial Woman (1956), which tells the story of Tzu Hsi, who was dowager empress of China when Buck was a child. Buck was forged by two great traditions—China and the evangelical Christianity of her missionary parents. Her writings, with their simple, eloquent, somewhat archaic style and their taste for a clear message based on real experience, have reminded people of the Bible. But she was too earthy for a missionary, and too accepting of all religions. She refused her father’s doctrines (for her mother was more loving and less dogmatic) as too harsh and narrow, and she tempered her parents’ ideal of Christian love and service with Confucian tolerance and calm. Whatever her subject, she sought to convey these dual lessons to the world. And in this task she had set herself, she was as untiring and as impossible to discourage as her father had been in his mission work. Her obituary in the New York Times said that by her 80th birthday, in 1972, she had published more than 85 novels and collections of short stories and essays, and that more than 25 volumes still awaited publication—a staggering output. Although it was never her ambition to rival the great writers of the world, the quality of her work is remarkable. When one also thinks of her humanitarian endeavors, of which only the briefest account has been given in this article, one wonders how a single human being could have done so much.

OTHER WORKS: East and West and the Novel (1932). Is There a Case for Foreign Missions? (1932). The Laymen’s Mission Report (1932). The Writing of East Wind: West Wind (1932). Far and Near (1934, pub. as Twenty-seven Stories, 1943). Today and Forever (1934). The Gifts They Bring (with G. T. Zarfoss, 1935). House of Earth (containing earlier works, 1935). On Discovering America (1937). This Proud Heart (1938). The Chinese Novel (1939). The Patriot (1939). Other Gods (1940). Stories for Little Children (1940). Of Men and Women (1941). Stories of China (containing earlier works, 1941). American Unity and Asia (1942). Asia and Democracy (1942). China Sky (1942). The Chinese Children Next Door (1942). Dragon Seed (1942). Freedom for All (1942). Freedom for India Now! (with Lin Yutang, K. Shridharani et al.; 1942). Pearl Buck Speaks for Democracy (with foreword

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by E. Roosevelt, 1942). The Promise (1943). The Water-Buffalo Children (1943). What America Means to Me (1943). The Dragon Fish (1944). The Spirit and the Flesh (containing earlier works, 1944). The Angry Wife (1945). China Flight (1945). China in Black and White (1945). Portrait of a Marriage (1945). Talk About Russia (with M. Scott, 1945). Tell the People (with J. Yen, 1945). The Townsman (1945). Yu Lan: Flying Boy of Japan (1945). Can the Church Lead? (1946). The Big Wave (1947). How It Happens (with E. von Pustau, 1947). This Proud Heart (1948). American Argument (with E. C. Robeson, 1949). Kinfolk (1949). The Long Love (1949). New Evidence of the Militarization of America (1949). One Bright Day (1950). God’s Men (1951). What the Peoples of Asia Want (1951). Bright Procession (1952). The Hidden Flower (1952). Come, My Beloved (1953). The Man Who Changed China (1953). Voices in the House (1953). The Beach Tree (1954). Johnny Jack and His Beginnings (1954). My Several Worlds (1954). A Certain Star (1957). The Christmas Miniature (1957). The Christmas Mouse (1957). Letter from Peking (1957). American Triptych (containing earlier works, 1958). Friend to Friend (with C. P. Romulo, 1958). Command the Morning (1959). The Christmas Ghost (1960). The Delights of Learning (1960). Fourteen Stories (1961). A Bridge for Passing (1962). Hearts Come Home and Other Stories (1962). Satan Never Sleeps (1962). The Living Reed (1963). The Big Fight (1964). Children for Adoption (1964). Escape at Midnight and Other Stories (1964). Joy of Children (1964). Welcome Child (1964). Death in the Castle (1965). Fairy Tales of the Orient (1965). My Mother’s House (1965). For Spacious Skies (with T. F. Harris, 1966). Little Fox in the Middle (1966). Matthew, Mark, Luke and John (1966). The People of Japan (1966). The Time Is Noon (1966). To My Daughters, with Love (1967). The New Year (1968). Elements of Democracy in the Chinese Traditional Culture (1969). The Good Deed and Other Stories of Asia (1969). The Three Daughters of Madame Liang (1969). China As I See It (1970). The Kennedy Women (1970). Mandala (1970). The Chinese Story Teller (1971). A Gift for The Children (1971). Pearl Buck’s America (1971). The Story Bible (1971). China Past and Present (1972). A Community Success Story: the Founding of the Pearl Buck Center (1972). The Goddess Abides (1972). Once Upon a Christmas (1972). Pearl Buck’s Oriental Cookbook (1972). All Under Heaven (1973). Mrs. Starling’s Problem (1973). Pearl S. Buck’s Book of Christmas (1974). The Rainbow (1974). Words of Love (1974). East and West; Stories (1975). Secrets of the Heart (1976). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Doyle, P. A., Pearl S. Buck (1965). Harris, T. E., Pearl S. Buck: A Biography (1969-71). Spencer, C., The Exile’s Daughter, a Biography of Pearl S. Buck (1936). Stirling, N., Pearl Buck: A Woman in Conflict (1983). Thompson, D. W., ‘‘Pearl Buck,’’ in American Winners of the Nobel Literary Prize (1968). Van Doren, C., The American Novel, 1789-1939 (1940). Van Gelder, R., Writers and Writing (1946). Walsh, R. J., A Biographical Sketch of Pearl S. Buck (1936). Zinn, L., ‘‘The Works of Pearl S. Buck: A Bibliography,’’ in Bulletin of Bibliography 36 (1979). —BARBARA J. BUCKNALL

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BUCKMASTER, Henrietta Born Henrietta Henkle, 10 March 1909, Cleveland, Ohio; died April 1983 Daughter of Rae D. and Pearl Wintermute Henkle; married Peter John Stephens Henriette Buckmaster grew up in New York City, where she attended the Friends’ Seminary and the Brearley School. In addition to writing historical studies and novels, Buckmaster wrote book reviews for the Saturday Review of Literature and the New York Times. Buckmaster’s works reveal a fascination with history. They include two history books—Let My People Go (1941), the story of the underground railroad, and Freedom Bound (1965), which describes the Reconstruction period from 1865 to 1877—as well as numerous historical novels. A major concern of Buckmaster’s historical novels is human freedom. American slaves and women are often her subjects. In Deep River (1944), Buckmaster presents opposition to slavery from the perspective of the mountain people of western Georgia. The strong-willed main character, Savanna Bliss, finds in her husband Simon a man strong enough to accept her strength. He allows her to share in his struggle against slavery in the Georgia legislature in order to advance the economic situation of the poor white mountain farmer. The issues of the emancipation of women and slaves come together again in the novel, Fire in the Heart (1948), which tells the story of Fanny Kemble, the great 19th-century English actress. Fanny saves her family from bankruptcy and at the same time becomes famous by playing Juliet at Covent Garden. At the death of her first love, the renowned artist Thomas Lawrence, Fanny travels to America with her father and aunt. The theatrical tour is highly successful, but Fanny leaves the stage to marry a wealthy Philadelphia lawyer and businessman. Always something of a misfit in his conventional and prestigious family, Fanny finds her love sufficient to overcome all difficulties except one: she must live with the uncomfortable knowledge that their land in the South is farmed by slaves they own. In Fire in the Heart, Buckmaster creates another free-spirited woman in conflict with the customs and attitudes of her day. Simultaneously, she reminds her readers of the involvement in slavery of northerners who derived wealth from the Southern system. The Lion in the Stone (1968) is the story of Devar Moragoda, secretary-general of the United Nations, and his colleagues as they struggle to maintain peace in the post-Vietnam era. The absence of China from the Security Council complicates their efforts when Mongolia, by declaring itself independent of Russian influence, shatters the tenuous balance of power between Russia and China. Buckmaster achieves an atmosphere of tension and

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reality as the leaders of great nations recognize their inadequacy in the face of potential nuclear catastrophe. Unless every nation makes peace its top priority, any nation can destroy all. Thus, the threat Buckmaster has presented lingers beyond the end of the novel. In The Walking Trip (1972), an American girl, Molly Sayers, comes to London to accompany her brother on a walking trip through Scotland. He disappears, and in an effort to find him, she becomes enmeshed in Rhodesian politics. Here Buckmaster uses a contemporary political situation in which black Africans seek to overthrow the power of colonialism in Rhodesia as the background against which to present the ideal feminine personality. Molly’s courage enables her to find a man who respects her as a person and helps rescue her brother. The style is straightforward, and the story is fast moving. It is not great literature but it is good popular fiction. The Rhodesian situation in The Walking Trip, like the United Nations and international politics in Lion and the Stone, demonstrates Buckmaster’s use of contemporary history. She uses the biblical era in And Walk in Love (1956), a novel about the Apostle Paul; the 16th century in All the Living (1962), an imaginary account of a year in the life of Shakespeare; and the 19th century in many works concerned with slavery and abolition. Buckmaster is careful with the facts of history and is true to the spirit of the times about which she writes. Buckmaster writes for the common reader. She makes American ideals engrossing and edifying. Sacrificing neither truth nor reality, she holds up to her readers the ideals of political democracy and human worth. Her novels combine the scholarship of the historian with the concern of the civil libertarian.

OTHER WORKS: Tomorrow Is Another Day (1934). His End Was His Beginning (1936). Bread from Heaven (1952). Lucy and Loki (1958). Walter Raleigh: Man of Two Worlds (1964). Paul: A Man Who Changed the World (1965). The Seminole Wars (1966). Women Who Shaped History (1966). The Fighting Congressmen: Thaddeus Stevens, Hiram Revels, James Rapier, Blanche K. Bruce (1971).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1974). SAA (1974). Other references: Best Sellers (1 July 1968). CSM (5 May 1966, 6 June 1968). NYTBR (14 July 1968). Variety (19 Aug. 1970). Young Reader’s Review (April 1966). Author Henrietta Buckmaster Discusses Her Book, The Lion in the Stone, with Robert Cromie (audiocassette, 1971). —GWENDOLYN A. THOMAS

BURKE, Fielding See DARGAN, Olive Tilford


BURNETT, Frances (Eliza) Hodgson Born 24 November 1849, Manchester, England; died 29 October 1924, Plandome, New York Daughter of Edwin and Eliza Boond Hodgson; married Swan Moses Burnett, 1875 (divorced 1898); Stephen Townsend, 1900 (until 1907) Frances Hodgson Burnett, the middle of five children, lived until she was sixteen in Manchester, England. A dame school she attended there provided her only formal education. In 1865, after her businessman father died, the family joined a relative in Knoxville, Tennessee, where financial need prompted Burnett to sell her first story, published when she was nineteen. In 1873 she married an eye specialist, with whom she had two sons. Burnett’s writing proved a major means of the young family’s support, and her success as a writer of popular fiction made her a celebrity which allowed her family to enjoy an expensive international lifestyle. In 1898 Burnett and her husband were divorced. From 1900 to 1907 she was married to Stephen Townsend, whose theatrical aspirations she had been championing since 1889 in London, while she was overseeing the stage production of her stories. Burnett’s career was productive as well as long. Her 55 titles include five bestsellers, and 13 of her stories and novels were adapted for the stage in England or America. After her first story was published in Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1868, Burnett wrote formulaic love stories for fashionable magazines before graduating to novels. Several of these, novels of working-class and political life such as That Lass o’ Lowries (1877), Louisiana (1880), and Through One Administration (1883), gained her critical recognition as a serious artist. American reviewers compared her work favorably with that of George Eliot and placed her in the front rank of young American fiction writers. Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), based on her son Vivian, established Burnett’s reputation as a popular writer. Intended primarily for children, the book became a bestseller and was soon translated into more than a dozen languages. Burnett’s stage version was popular in England and France as well as in America; in 1924, Mary Pickford starred in a film version. After this success, Burnett wrote more books for children, two of which continue to find an appreciative audience: A Little Princess (1905), which has been made into several film adaptations, including in 1939 starring Shirley Temple; and The Secret Garden (1911), a pastoral novel considered a juvenile classic. The books that found their way onto annual lists of bestsellers, however, were novels of fashionable social life written for adults: A Lady of Quality (1896), the story of a strong-willed woman in early 18th-century England; The Shuttle (1907), a novel about an Anglo-American marriage; T. Tembarom (1913), a Horatio Alger-type sequel to The Shuttle; and The Head of the House of Coombe (1922), a portrayal of social life in London before World War I. Burnett’s life and writing were characterized by tensions between the serious artist and the popular writer, the independent

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woman and the self-sacrificing wife and mother. While she was laboring over a 512-page portrayal of Anglo-American relationships (The Shuttle), she would shock her readers with a heroine who has been reared as a boy and later kills her husband with a riding whip (A Lady of Quality), then dash off a novella about a woman who, through self-abasing humility, wins the hand of a wealthy nobleman (The Making of a Marchioness, 1901). A Burnett biographer, Ann Thwaite, suggests that Burnett’s first bestseller changed her from a talented realist comparable to Elizabeth Gaskell into a pen-driving machine turning out inferior romances. But it can also be argued that Burnett excelled when she stayed close to the fairy tale, as in her best-known children’s works, or when her tensions as artist and woman were allowed to inform and discipline her work, as in The Making of a Marchioness, which contains within the literary context of a romantic Cinderella tale a scathing portrayal of women’s plight in the Edwardian marriage market. OTHER WORKS: Dolly (1877, reprinted as Vagabondia, 1883). Pretty Polly Pemberton (1877). Surly Tim (1877). Theo (1877). Earlier Stories, First and Second Series (1878). Kathleen (1878). Miss Crespigny (1878). Our Neighbor Opposite (1878). A Quiet Life (1878). The Tide on the Moaning Bar (1878). Haworth’s (1879). Jarl’s Daughter (1879). Natalie (1879). Esmeralda (1881). A Fair Barbarian (1881). Editha’s Burglar (1888; dramatization, Nixie, 1890). The Fortunes of Philippa Fairfax (1888; dramatization, Phyllis, 1889). The Real Little Lord Fauntleroy (1888). Sara Crewe (1888). A Woman’s Will; or, Miss Defarge (1888). The Pretty Sister of José (1889; dramatization, 1903). Little Saint Elizabeth (1890). The Drury Lane Boys’ Club (1892). Giovanni and the Other (1892). The Showman’s Daughter (1892). The One I Knew the Best of All (1893). Piccino, and Other Child Stories (1894). The Two Little Pilgrims’ Progress (1895). The First Gentleman of Europe (1897). His Grace of Osmonde (1897). In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim (1899; dramatization, That Man and I, 1904). The Methods of Lady Walderhurst (1901). In the Closed Room (1905). The Dawn of a Tomorrow (1906; produced 1909). Racketty Packetty House (1906; produced 1912). The Troubles of Queen Silver-Bell (1906). The Cozy Lion (1907). The Good Wolf (1908). The Spring Cleaning (1908). Barty Crusoe and His Man Saturday (1909). The Land of the Blue Flower (1909). My Robin (1912). The Lost Prince (1915). Little Hunchback Zia (1916). The White People (1917). Robin (1922). In the Garden (1925). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bixler, P., Frances Hodgson Burnett (1984). Burnett, C. B., Happily Ever After (1969). Burnett, V., The Romantick Lady (1927). Koppes, P. B., ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent of Frances Hodgson Burnett,’’ in Children’s Literature 7 (1978). Laski, M., Mrs. Ewing, Mrs. Molesworth, and Mrs. Hodgson Burnett (1950). Mollson, F. J., ‘‘Frances Hodgson Burnett, (1828-1924),’’ in American Literary Realism (Winter 1975). Thwaite, A., Waiting for the Party: The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnett (1974). —PHYLLIS BIXLIR KOPPES

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BURNHAM, Clara L(ouise) Root

BURR, Esther Edwards

Born 26 May 1854, Newton, Massachusetts; died 21 June 1927, ‘‘The Mooring,’’ Bailey’s Island, Casco Bay, Maine Daughter of George F. and Mary Woodman Root; married Walter Burnham, 1873

Born 1732, Northampton, Massachusetts; died April 1758, Princeton, New Jersey Daughter of Jonathan and Sarah Pierrepont Edwards; married Aaron Burr, 1752

Clara L. Root Burnham’s father composed songs and cantatas, one of his most famous pieces being the Civil War marching song, ‘‘The Battle Cry of Freedom.’’ Burnham attended Chicago public and private schools where she developed an ambition to become a musician.

Esther Edwards Burr was the third of 11 children of Sarah Pierrepont and the prominent minister, Jonathan Edwards. At the age of twenty she married Aaron Burr, pastor of the Presbyterian church at Newark, New Jersey, and later a founder and second president of Princeton College. At twenty-six years of age, Burr, having been widowed a year, died from the results of an innoculation against the small pox.

At age nineteen Clara married a lawyer, Walter Burnham, and began a long and fruitful writing career. Burnham turned out an amazing amount of work. Not only did she write poems and stories for numerous magazines, but she also produced the texts for many of her father’s cantatas. The list of Burnham’s novels is impressively long. She had been writing girlish love stories for some time when she was suddenly inspired to incorporate her Christian Science convictions into her fiction. The Right Princess (1902) was the first tale in which she did so, and it was followed by many others carrying similar religious messages. Jewel: A Chapter in Her Life (1903), a bestseller, was Burnham’s own favorite. ‘‘These cheery optimistic books,’’ says one critic of her novels, ‘‘well-laden with propaganda for the faith, appealed to Christian Scientists and to admirers of the Pollyanna type of romance.’’ Reviewers consistently labeled the novels ‘‘pleasant,’’ and commented on the pervasive, yet not obtrusive, strain of Christian Science philosophy in each. Her plot structures and clear style were praised. Burnham seems to have benefited personally from the beliefs she so earnestly tried to promulgate: the all-embracing love of God who works everything out harmoniously, and on whom one could rely with faith, love, and humility. Her fiction is not great literature but it is the reflection of a happy, serene spirit, and in its day, it gave pleasure and refreshment to many readers. OTHER WORKS: No Gentlemen (1881). A Sane Lunatic (1882). Dearly Bought (1884). Next Door (1886). Young Maids and Old (1888). The Mistress of Beech Knoll (1890). Sweet Clover (1894). The Wise Woman (1895). Miss Archer Archer (1897). A Great Love (1898). A West Point Wooing (1899). Miss Pritchard’s Wedding Trip (1901). Jewel’s Story Book (1904). The Opened Shutters (1906). The Leaven of Love (1908). Clever Betsy (1910). The Inner Flame (1912). The Right Track (1914). Instead of the Thorn (1916). Hearts Haven (1918). In Apple Blossom Time (1919). The Keynote (1921). The Queen of Farrandale (1923). The Lavarous (1925). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: TCA (1942). Other references: NYT (22 June 1927). Outlook (9 Nov. 1912). —ABIGAIL ANN HAMBLEN

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In 1754 Burr began a journal of her daily life and exchanged it periodically with one kept by her friend, Sarah Prince, of Boston. Burr’s journal is valuable for the views it gives of the Puritan woman’s life in the mid-18th century and for the insights into how Puritan values and habits of mind helped a woman to understand and evaluate the world in which she lived. The dominant themes of the journal are the loneliness and hardship of everyday existence which are only made endurable by the knowledge of God’s providential guidance of human affairs. For example, when her second child was born, Burr was entirely alone, but her faith in God helped her to meet the ordeal: ‘‘I felt very gloomy when I found I was actually in labour to think that I was, as it were, destitute of earthly friends—no mother, no husband, and none of my particular friends that belong to the town . . . only my dear God was all of these relations to me.’’ On another occasion she was visiting her father in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where the community was expecting an Indian attack. She had a momentary crisis of faith: ‘‘I want to be made willing to die in any way God pleases, but I am not willing to be butchered by a barbarous enemy nor can’t make myself willing.’’ Ultimately she trusted in Providence and prayed for survival: the Indians never attacked. In the Puritan manner the journal records events large and small—for God’s will was manifest in every activity of life. Thus the journal tells of visitations to the sick, attendance at sermons, entertainment of the governor’s wife with ‘‘cakes’’ on militia day, the depradations of the French and the Indians, the political maneuverings of the Newark community, the circumstances of the religious revival of the mid-1750s, and the problems of moving to Princeton and of establishing the college—all given with frank, moral assessments of what Burr thinks of the behavior of her contemporaries. Her commentary on the protestations of the local government as it prepared to meet the threatened advance of the French and the Indians is typical: I am perplexed about our publick affairs, the Men say (tho not Mr. Burr, he is not of that sort) that women have no business to concern themselves about ’em but to trust to those that know better and be content to be destroyed—because they did all for the best—Indeed, if I was convinced that our great men did as they really


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thought was for the Glory of God and the good of the country, it would go a great ways to make me easy. As a result of this personal evaluation of the events and interests of her time, Burr’s journal has a warm, emotional quality which makes the incidents of the past come alive. She is frank and explicit, never falsely sentimental or literary. Like the preachers she heard regularly, Burr kept to the plain style, proudly asserting that the ‘‘busy housewife’’ had no time to be ‘‘literary.’’ The journal is, then, a sensitive, lively account of God’s way with the Puritan woman. It is a moving story of a woman’s growth to maturity within the Puritan tradition of provincial America. OTHER WORKS: Esther Burr’s Journal (1754-1757). A Document of Evangelical Sisterhood (edited by L. Crumpacker and C. Karlsen, in preparation). Esther Burr’s Journal (edited by J. Rankin, 1902), an untrustworthy edition containing many pages that appear to be fabrications. The papers of Esther Edwards Burr are at Yale University, Andover-Newton Theological School (Newton, Massachusetts), and Princeton College. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Axtell, J., A School Upon a Hill (1974). Cott, N., The Bonds of Womanhood: Woman’s Sphere in New England, 1780-1835 (1977). Fisher, J., ‘‘The Journal of Esther Burr,’’ in NEQ 3 (1930). —MAUREEN GOLDMAN

BURTON, Katherine Kurz Born March 1890, Cleveland, Ohio; died 22 September 1969, Bronxville, New York Daughter of John and Louise Bittner Kurz; married Harry P. Burton, 1910 After graduating from Western Reserve University and teaching for a year in rural Pennsylvania, Katherine Kurz Burton married a journalist and editor in 1910. From this point forward she devoted herself to freelance writing and, for a short period, to magazine editing. From 1928 to 1930 Burton served as associate editor of McCall’s, and from 1930 to 1933 she worked at Redbook. On the basis of this experience, in 1935 she was invited to edit a women’s page for Sign, a Catholic monthly; according to the editor, it was the magazine’s most popular feature. Some of these pieces are collected in Woman to Woman (1961). Burton was a prolific writer. Her essays and poems were published in many religious periodicals, first Episcopalian and, after her reception into the Roman Catholic church in 1930, in Roman Catholic magazines. Her verse, light but controlled, also appeared in F. P. Adams’s ‘‘Conning Tower’’ in the New York Herald Tribune, some examples of which are included in her autobiographical The Next Thing (1949).

Burton did her most important work in the field of popular biography, a genre she pioneered only after her entrance into the Roman Catholic church. Her first book, Sorrow Built a Bridge (1937), which remained a favorite with both the author and her readers, narrates the life of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, the youngest child of Nathaniel Hawthorne. With her husband, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop became a Roman Catholic. After being widowed, she formed a Dominican community devoted to the care of poor and incurable victims of cancer. Other biographies of converts followed; Burton chose for these early works native-born Americans, usually of New England birth and upbringing, in an attempt to show that good Americans could be good Catholics. Because Burton had been attracted to the Roman Catholic church for its ‘‘continuity of doctrine,’’ she often chose as subjects converts with similar motivations. In her conversion narratives there is little tendency to denigrate other churches, for Burton was greatly moved by charitable works undertaken by any faith. Her books, however, are clearly intended to edify a Catholic readership, and their appeal outside this communion has been limited. The style of informal biography which Burton developed was reviewed with qualified praise by such scholars as Theodore Maynard and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Burton made no attempt, however, to be exhaustive or to document her sources, and she did little archival research. Burton was sensitive, however, to the charge that her stories were ‘‘fictional.’’ Her biographies included dialogue, but she insisted that, except for feed lines, any words within quotation marks were taken from letters, diaries, books, or conversations. Burton’s success in avoiding the piety and sentimentality of older biography was uneven. Much of the appeal of her earlier books lay in their portrayal of well-known figures, i.e., the Concord literary circles with which the Hawthornes associated, or the Brook Farm group. Such literary figures also provided Burton with considerable material for the construction of dialogue. Many of her later books, however, portrayed Catholic women who inhabited a less intellectual and more pious world; Burton’s life of Mother Butler of Marymount (1944), for example, was criticized in Commonweal as ‘‘sugar-coated and iced over.’’ Burton had strong feminist leanings, and she did not conceal the problems of women confronting male Catholic structures. According to the Pattern (1946) is the story of Cardinal Manning’s efforts to get a young woman admitted to medical school. It focuses on the Catholic woman’s long struggle to convince Vatican authorities that nuns should not be forbidden to become doctors. OTHER WORKS: Paradise Planters (1939). His Dear Persuasion (1940). In No Strange Land (1942). Brother Andre of Mount Royal (1943). Celestial Homespun (1943). No Shadow of Turning (1944). His Mercy Endureth Forever (1946). Difficult Star (1947). Three Generations (1947). Mightily and Sweetly (1948). Chaminade, Apostle of Mary (1949). So Surely Anchored (1949).

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The Great Mantle (1950). Feast Day Cookbook (with H. Ripperger, 1951). Where There Is Love (1951). The Table of the King (1952). Whom Love Impels (1952). So Much, So Soon (1953). Children’s Shepherd (1954). The Stars Beyond the Storms (1954). In Heaven We Shall Rest (1955). My Beloved to Me (1957). The Golden Door (1957). Lily and Sword and Crown (1958). With God and Two Ducats (1958). Witness of the Light (1958). Faith Is the Substance (1959). Make the Way Known (1959). Cry Jubilee! (1960). The Dream Lives Forever (1960). One Thing Needful (1960). Wheat for This Planting (1960). Leo the Thirteenth (1962). The Door of Hope (1963). The Bernardines (1964). Bells on Two Rivers (1965). Valiant Voyager (1965). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Black Friars (March 1938). CathLibW (Feb. 1944). CHR (Oct. 1939, Oct. 1944). CW (1943, 19 March 1946). NEQ (Sept. 1943). —ARLENE ANDERSON SWIDLER

BURTON, Virginia Lee Born 30 August 1909, Newton Center, Massachusetts; died 15 October 1968, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of Alfred E. and Lena Dalkeith Yates Burton; married George Demetrios, 1931 Daughter of an English poetess and musician, Lena Dalkeith, and the first dean of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Virginia Burton lived in Newton Center until she was eight years old, when her family moved to California. She received one of three state scholarships to the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco as a junior in high school. After a year of studying art and ballet in San Francisco, she returned to the Boston area in 1928. When her father broke a leg, Burton forfeited a contract with a traveling ballet company, and remained in the Boston area to care for him. At age twenty-one, she enrolled in a sculpture and drawing class at Boston Museum School, and married her teacher the next spring. Burton wrote and illustrated seven books for children, published between 1924 and 1962, and illustrated several others. Convinced children were distinct from adults in their comprehension of subject matter, she nevertheless thought aesthetics should be of utmost importance for either audience. The subjects she selected were indeed appropriate for children, and several related to the industrial technology of the time. She used a train, a steam shovel, a tractor-snow plow, and a cable car, and demonstrated how these personified machines could be nonconformist and creative. Even her first unsuccessful attempt at a children’s book had an inanimate character—a piece of dust, named ‘‘Jonnifer Lint.’’ Rejected by 13 publishers, however, the story bored even her three-and-a half-year-old son. Choo Choo; the Story of a Little Engine Who Ran Away (1935), Burton’s first published book, tells the adventure of a train

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that followed tracks not assigned to him. The hero of Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel (1939) digs himself into a hole, and the story’s innovative ending was provided by one of Burton’s neighborhood children. Burton satisfied her son’s curiosity about steam shovels by inserting a diagram of the machine with appropriate terms in the published book. The Little House (1942) describes a dwelling which becomes engulfed by the encroaching city, and is transported to the countryside. The background surroundings change over the years as the house becomes more dilapidated; it is then restored in its new location. When Burton considered writing on the subject of snowremoval equipment, she drove to Gloucester during a snowstorm to observe and sketch. She rejected the snowblower as being too dull, and instead expanded on a tractor with a plow attached, resulting in Katy and the Big Snow (1943). Mabelle, the Cable Car (1952) is based on Burton’s fond memories of the San Francisco cable car. She dedicated the book to the ‘‘People of San Francisco and Mrs. Hans Klussman,’’ who in 1951 rallied their efforts to retain the cable car when threatened as unsafe and a public nuisance. Burton also wrote stories about things other than inanimate objects. Calico, the Wonder Horse; or, the Saga of Stewy Slinker (1941) was motivated by her observing childrens’ fascination with comic books. She concluded that it was the spellbinding story and special format which claimed their interest, and she was determined to create a children’s book that would possess appealing illustrations as well as captivating content. The innovative horse in the story brings glory to his rider, Hank, and trouble to the villain. Folk humor is incorporated into the prose. Eight years of research were necessary to complete Burton’s final book, Life Story (1962). The evolution of the earth unfolds during five acts of a play, with the stage serving as the border for the illustrations. Burton’s family life through the seasons at Folly Cove is woven into the last chapter. Burton illustrated several books she did not write, including Arna Bontemps’s railroad yarn, Fast Sooner Hound (1942), and Anne Malcomson’s Song of Robin Hood (1947), for which Burton, after three years of research, meticulously prepared an illustration for each page. She also retold and illustrated Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes (1949), which had been read to her by her father during her childhood. Of all Burton’s works, The Little House achieved the greatest fame, for it received the Caldecott award as the most distinguished picturebook for children published during 1942. It has been translated into several languages and published in more than a dozen countries. However, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel is the favorite of children. Burton always conceived the illustrations for her books before writing the text. She made sketches, which had to be complete within themselves, as well as fitting into the whole, and arranged them on the wall of her barn studio as a ‘‘story board.’’ She then worked on the text, relating each page precisely to the pictures until overall clarity and accurate detail were attained.


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Elements of design, such as rhythm and repetition, were characteristic of both her illustrations and her story. Furthermore, her humor and imagination are inherent in both the situation, such as the steam shovel at the bottom of a hole, and in the plot, such as the schemes of the villain, Stewy Slinker. Burton’s training as a dancer and as an artist demanded fine form, and she incorporated these high standards in her children’s books. OTHER WORKS: The original manuscript and sketches for Katy and the Big Snow are in the Gloucester, Massachusetts, Public Library; The Life Story in the Free Library of Philadelphia; Mabelle, the Cable Car in the San Francisco Public Library; and The Little House in the Kerlan Collection at the University of Minnesota. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Burton, V. L., ‘‘Making Picture Books; Acceptance Paper,’’ and Hogarth, G. A., ‘‘V. L. Burton, Creative Artist,’’ in Caldecott Medal Books: 1938-1957, Miller, B., and E. Field, eds. (1957). Reference works: Authors and Illustrators of Children’s Books; Writing on Their Lives and Works (1972). Children and Books (1976). Illustrators of Children’s Books, 1744-1945 (1947). The Junior Book of Authors (1951). SAA (1971). Other references: Children’s Literature Review (1976). Horn Book (1970, 1971). —KAREN NELSON HOYLE

BUTLER, Octavia E(stelle) Born 22 June 1947, Pasadena, California Daughter of Laurice and Octavia Guy Butler Hailed as the first African-American woman science fiction writer, Octavia E. Butler began writing what would become the first draft of her Patternmaster series at age twelve after ‘‘watching a bad science fiction movie and [deciding] I could write a better story than that.’’ She admits, however, that she kept on writing science fiction because she needed ‘‘fantasies to shield her from the world.’’ Butler grew up in a strong matriarchal family with strict Baptist morals. Her mother and grandmother were the primary influences in her life; her father, a shoeshine man, died when she was an infant. Butler’s mother, who had worked as a maid, was born on a sugar plantation in Louisiana. At age ten, she was taken out of school so she could work. It was perhaps this hard life and history that made Butler’s family worry that a writing career would not be reliable employment for her. One of her aunts, the first in the family to earn a college degree, agreed, but encouraged her niece to do what she wanted. After earning an associate degree at Pasadena City College in 1968, where a creative writing teacher once asked her, ‘‘Can’t you write anything normal?,’’ Butler went on to California State

College (CSC) at Los Angeles. She left CSC when she couldn’t major in creative writing and began taking evening writing classes at UCLA. While at CSC, Butler met Harlan Ellison, who encouraged her to attend the summer 1970 Clarion Science Fiction Writer’s Workshop. Her first two stories were written during this intensive Pennsylvania workshop. In 1980 Butler won the YWCA Achievement Award for Creative Arts; in 1984, at the 42nd World Science Fiction Convention, her short story ‘‘Sounds’’ won a Hugo award, and at the next World Science Fiction Convention, Butler’s peers voted her the winner of the Nebula Award for best novelette for Bloodchild. She received another Nebula award nomination in 1987 for her novelette The Evening and the Morning and the Night. Butler’s first five novels are part of her Patternist saga, based on imposing generations of Patternists, the telepathic humans who wrestle for control of the Earth. Her novel Kindred (1979), though set apart from the serial stories and marketed as a mainstream novel by Butler’s publisher, continues the Patternist tradition of independent women of color who challenge the power structures of their societies and are embroiled in intense social relationships, and for whom self-expression and leadership roles are vital. Butler probes female experiences in terms of women’s survival, sexual objectification, threats to their autonomy, and full expression of their psychic and healing talents, as well as their strong, abiding kinship ties. Her female characters represent a dazzling array of experience and origins—both futuristic and historically grounded. Anyanwu of Wild Seed (1980) is a 300-year-old woman whom Butler fashioned after a mythological Onitsha Ibo woman named Atagbusi; Mary of Mind of My Mind (1977), a 20th-century woman and descendant of Anyanwu, is a gifted telepath who has survived physical abuse to become the mother of a new race of beings. Both Alanna, the Afro-Asian heroine of Survivor (1978), and Lilith, the matriarch of a small dislocated group of humans, forge bonds between different ethnic groups and species within their futuristic societies. Dana, the modern African-American heroine of Kindred, is repeatedly dragged back into her family’s slavery past and becomes an elusive, but nevertheless affected accomplice, victim, and link between her enslaved and free ancestors and her own, less-peopled, postslavery American future. Butler began a new series with Parable of the Sower (1993), a futuristic tale of an America decimated by violence and environmental catastrophes. In Los Angeles, small numbers of workers barricade themselves behind walls to hide from the mobs of desperate unemployed homeless. One of these workers is Lauren Olamina, a black teenager who suffers from hyperempathy, a condition causing her to literally feel the pain of others. Lauren escapes when her community is overrun and heads north, hoping that Earthseed, the religion she created, will guide her to better times. Lauren’s story is continued in Parable of the Talents (1998) when her community of believers must go to war against the fanatical terrorists in newly elected U.S. President Reverend Andrew Steele Jarret’s right-wing sect Christian America. Butler wrote Parable of the Talents partly on the proceeds of a $295,000

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grant from the MacArthur Foundation (‘‘genius’’) she received in 1995. Butler’s love of writing poetry is evident in both Parable of the Sower and its sequel in the form of poetry written by Lauren, the books’ protagonist. One of the signs Butler has posted above her desk reminds her that ‘‘tension and conflict can be achieved through uncompromising characters in a death struggle.’’ Indeed, the societies and communities of Butler’s fiction are inundated by a host of unpredictable, unrelenting individuals. The human, mutant, or hybrid life forms in Butler’s works are often engaged in violent struggles for power and mental freedom. Butler’s central female characters are not always protectors or mediators in these intense, high-stake struggles; women such as Mary in Mind of My Mind rely heavily on their warlike, competitive natures to reach positions of formidable power. Yet in places so diverse as the Patternist domains and the floating Oankali nations of Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rights (1988), and Imago (1989), Butler also suggests there are nurturing environments that can be culled from besieged nations and embattled histories. Butler capitalizes on the science fiction genre most dynamically in her representations of history as a layered entity—one that can be traversed, reentered, and never separated. Kindred and the works forming Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago, are especially gripping because of the ways in which Butler constructs versions of historical reality. Of Butler’s central characters, the women are especially imposing figures, whose identities as women, consorts, and childbearers are under siege by the social, racial, or genetic chaos of their communities. For the individuals—remnants of nations, and newly forming societies—drawn into such timeless and time-laden environments, tortured contemplation and mourning are inevitable. Yet the historical burdens and traditions of which they are so conscious also propel them to achieve increasingly symbolic victories against their oppressors. In her treatment and revisions of history, and her consistent development of evolving multiracial women, Butler puts a most distinctive mark upon the science fiction genre. She grounds her work in African-American history and complements her fictional plots with realistic debates on such contemporary issues as race, bigotry, sexism, and expansionism.

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The ways in which Butler’s characters have to resolve their ‘‘otherness’’ with their essential membership within groups may be seen as a telling metaphor for her own place within the realm of science fiction. Butler and writer Samuel Delany are the only well-known African-American science fiction writers, and Butler is perhaps the only African-American woman science fiction writer. Although she believes science fiction is ‘‘potentially the freest genre in existence,’’ she acknowledges the confines and preferred foci that have been encouraged for writers of the genre. Describing science fiction as having begun ‘‘in this country as a genre for young boys,’’ she argues it is this fact that explains the traditional exclusion of issues of race or sex from science fiction texts of the past. Butler uses powerful historical fact, African-American experience, and facets of the science fiction genre itself to challenge these narrow parameters. Her compelling stories masterfully blend traditional aspects of the genre and innovative futuristic designs with sobering contemplations of the realities of the world’s racial and historical present and past.

OTHER WORKS: Patternmaster (1976). Clay’s Ark (1984).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Black Writers (1989). CANR (1988, 1990). CLC (1986). DLB (1984). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). NBAW (1992). St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers (1996). Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers (1991). Other references: Black American Literary Forum (Summer 1984). Black Scholar (Mar.-Apr. 1986). Callaloo (1991). Emerge (June 1994). Equal Opportunity Forum Magazine (1980). Essence (April 1979). Extrapolation (Spring 1982). Life (July 1984). MELUS (Spring-Summer 1986). PW (13 Dec.1993). Salaga (1981). Sanus (Winter 1978-79). Thrust: Science Fiction in Review (Summer 1979). —LOIS BROWN, UPDATED BY LEAH J. SPARKS

C CABEZA DE BACA, Fabiola Born 16 May 1894, La Liendra, New Mexico; died 1991, Albuquerque, New Mexico Also wrote under: Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Gilbert, Fabiola C. Gilbert Daughter of Graciano and Indalecia Delgado Cabeza de Baca; married Carlos Gilbert, 1939 (separated) Four years after Fabiola Cabeza de Baca was born on her family’s northeastern New Mexico land grant, her mother died, and Cabeza de Baca was raised by her paternal grandmother, a traditional Hispanic woman of the patrón class. Cabeza de Baca attended schools in Las Vegas, New Mexico, earning a degree in pedagogy from New Mexico Normal University in 1921. After a year of study in Spain, Cabeza de Baca taught in New Mexico public schools for several years. She became intensely interested in ‘‘Domestic Science’’ after she was assigned to teach it, earned her B.S. in Home Economics at New Mexico State University, and immediately began work with the New Mexico State Extension Service. As a home demonstration agent, Cabeza de Baca visited the Hispanic and Pueblo villages of northern New Mexico, organizing clubs for women and children, teaching canning techniques, and developing skills and markets for craft products. Cabeza de Baca lost her right leg in an automobile accident, but continued her strenuous career. Her marriage to an insurance agent ended in their separation. In 1951, UNESCO sent her to Mexico to establish a home economics program among the Tarascan Indians and to instruct Latin Americans in her techniques. She has received many awards for outstanding achievement in her field. After retiring in 1959, she lectured widely, wrote newspaper articles on folklore and food, and trained Peace Corps volunteers in extension methods. Cabeza de Baca’s writing career grew from her home economics work, beginning with pamphlets in Spanish on food preparation and canning. Her article, ‘‘New Mexican Diets’’ (1942), stresses the nutritional value of traditional foods, and counsels extension agents to respect and understand those they serve. Her interest in New Mexican food, which blends Indian, Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo influences, led her to publish Historic Cookery (1939, reprinted 1970), an Extension Service cookbook that sold more than 100,000 copies and was reissued several times. Cabeza de Baca collected the recipes by watching village cooks and experimenting in her own kitchen to determine precise measurements. She pragmatically recommends using time-honored techniques or modern appliances according to their superiority for each particular dish. Cabeza de Baca’s book conveys the untranslatable Spanish ‘‘guisar,’’ which loosely means ‘‘to dress up food,’’ with spices and, more important, with caring. In The Good Life (1949, revised in 1982 as The Good Life: New Mexico Traditions and Food), Cabeza de Baca recounts the

yearly cycle of seasons and festivals in a fictionalized Hispanic village in contemporary northern New Mexico. Cabeza de Baca emphasizes the cultural context of cookery and the folklore associated with food preparation and herbal medicine. Without romanticizing the hard work rural living entails, Cabeza de Baca stresses the cooperative spirit and close relationships among village women that give The Good Life its quality. The second half of the book includes recipes for many of the traditional foods described in the text. Cabeza de Baca moves out of the kitchen in We Fed Them Cactus (1953, reprinted in 1954, 1989, and 1994); the title refers to keeping cattle alive during a drought. While strong in defense of the patrón system, Cabeza de Baca describes the life of all settlers on the plains in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She includes stories narrated by ‘‘El Cuate’’—the Twin, cook on her family’s rancho—concerning life on the llano before longhorn cattle replaced buffalo and sheep. Cabeza de Baca supplemented her memory with interviews with older residents and archival research, and produced a fascinating blend of folklore, history, and autobiography. She compares traditional Hispanic women’s roles with those of Anglo homesteaders, and with her own experience as a rural schoolteacher. Cabeza de Baca’s perspective as participant makes this a valuable work, especially became little has been written about this region’s Hispanos, in a period of drastic change. Cabeza de Baca’s contribution to the literature of the Southwest consists in imaginatively depicting the integrity and vitality of Hispanic culture. Her early books show food, and the women who prepare it, as central to an integrated social system that she explains in more detail in We Fed Them Cactus. She reveals the strength of the Hispanic woman, in her works and in her life.

OTHER WORKS: Los Alimentos y su Preparacion (1934; revised editions, 1937, 1942). Boletin de Conservar (1935; revised editions, 1937, 1941).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: American Association of University Women, Albuquerque Branch, Women in New Mexico (1976). McShane, B. J. G., ‘‘In Pursuit of Regional and Cultural Identity: The Autobiographies of Agnes Morely Cleaveland and Fabiola Cabeza de Baca’’ in Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women’s Regional Writing (1997). Ponce, M., The Life and Works of Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, New Mexican Hispanic Woman Writer: A Contextual Biography (1997). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Women in Education (1977). Other references: Albuquerque Journal (24 June 1959). California Farmer (16 Oct. 1954). El Palacio (June 1949). New

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Mexico Historical Review (Jan. 1956). New Mexico Magazine (Oct. 1958). Santa Fe New Mexican (6 Feb. 1966, 19 May 1968). —HELEN M. BANNAN

almost paranoiac conviction that freedom has steadily decreased since Teddy Roosevelt was president. Caldwell can be thought of as a modern Jeremiah, bewailing our fall from grace and its resultant consequences.

Born Janet Miriam Caldwell, 7 September 1900, Manchester, England; died 30 August 1985 Also wrote under: Marcus Holland, Max Reiner Daughter of Arthur F. and Anna Marks Caldwell; married William Combs, 1919; Marcus Reback, 1931

OTHER WORKS: The Eagles Gather (1939). The Earth Is the Lord’s (1940). The Strong City (1941). The Arm and the Darkness (1943, 1982). The Turnbulls (1943). The Final Hour (1944). The Wide House (1945). This Side of Innocence (1946, 1974, 1984). There Was a Time (1947). Melissa (1948). Let Love Come Last (1949). The Balance Wheel (1951). The Devil’s Advocate (1952). Never Victorious, Never Defeated (1954, 1982, 1984). Tender Victory (1956). The Sound of Thunder (1957). The Listener (1960). A Prologue to Love (1962). To See the Glory (1963). The Late Clara Beame (1964). Dialogues with the Devil (1968). On Growing Up Tough (1971). The Romance of Atlantis (1975). Ceremony of the Innocent (1976, 1983). Bright Flows the River (1978, 1983). Answer as a Man (1981). Yours Sins and Mine (1983).

CADE, Toni See BAMBARA, Toni Cade

CALDWELL, Taylor

Born of Scottish parents in England, Taylor Caldwell was educated at the University of Buffalo, New York. She wrote her first novel, ‘‘The Romance of Atlantis,’’ when she was twelve and wrote for many years before the publication of her first book, Dynasty of Death (1938). In addition to her own work as a novelist, Caldwell collaborated with psychic Jess Stearn and served as secretary on the Board of Special Inquiry of the U.S. Department of Immigration and Naturalization. She won many awards from such groups as the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), and the National League of Penwomen. From childhood she suffered from severely impaired hearing. Caldwell published over three dozen novels in the last 50 years, most of which attained popular if not critical success. In general her subjects alternate between power-hungry upper-class American families of the late-19th and early-20th centuries and historical figures of the ancient world. Successes from the 1960s and 1970s include Testimony of Two Men (1968; later serialized for television and reprinted in 1983), a saga of Dr. Jonathan Ferrier’s pioneering attempts to improve the medical profession; Captains and the Kings (1972; later serialized for television and reprinted in 1982), about a Kennedy-like family of Irish immigrants who build a dynasty and spawn a president; A Pillar of Iron (1965, 1983), with Cicero as protagonist; Glory and the Lightning (1974, 1983), centering on Pericles; Dear and Glorious Physician (1959, 1981), employing the gospel according to St. Luke as its storyline; Great Lion of God (1970, 1985), a portrait of St. Paul; and I, Judas (1978), a novel about the betrayal of Jesus Christ. An early reviewer stated that Caldwell had a gift for storytelling but lamented that she lacked the style to go with it; his evaluation still holds. Caldwell is adept at building suspense and at setting scenes, particularly those of ancient Greece, Rome, and Palestine. However, her prose is florid and her characters tend to borrow the more famous statements of Shakespeare, Emerson, Kennedy, and Hopkins, to name a few. In addition, her personal philosophies are obtrusive; many of her protagonists possess a Coriolanian contempt for the lower classes, regarded as destructive rabble, incapable of thought or feelings. Her American protagonists assert an

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BIBLIOGRAPHY: Schnabel, M. An Annotated Bibliography of the Works By and About Taylor Caldwell in the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, 1938-1981 (1983). Stearn, J., In Search of Taylor Caldwell (1981). Reference works: American Novelists of Today (1951). Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA (1942). Other references: Life (6 April 1959). Newsweek (3 Oct. 1938). NYT (18 Sept. 1938, 15 March 1959). NYTBR (28 April 1946 to April 1949, 27 June 1965). PW (15 Oct. 1938). Time (9 Jan. 1956). Saturday Review of Literature (6 Jan. 1940). WLB (Feb. 1940). —CYNTHIA L. WALKER

CALHOUN, Lucy See MONROE, Lucy

CALISHER, Hortense Born 20 December 1911, New York, New York Daughter of Joseph H. and Hedvig Lichtstern Calisher; married Heaton B. Heffelfinger, 1935 (divorced); Curtis A. Harnack, 1959; children: Bennet, Peter The older child of a German-born mother and a Southern father, Hortense Calisher was reared in an upper-middle class Jewish family. After earning her B.A. in 1932 at Barnard College, she worked as a sales clerk, model, and social worker in New York City. She began publishing short stories in 1948. In Herself (1972), an aptly titled autobiographical journal and meditation on her life as a writer, Calisher proclaims her emphasis on the individual, based on self-trust and acceptance. She rejects controversy in literature as well as group action in


politics. Her stories and novels intelligently and sensitively chronicle the experiences of the self: the loneliness of individual consciousness, epiphanies of communication, and pain of ‘‘tiny knife-moves,’’ especially within families and between lovers. In the Absence of Angels (1951) includes Calisher’s best short stories. ‘‘In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks’’ affirms the potential for love between two young people, emotionally deprived but old in responsibility. ‘‘The Woman Who Was Everybody’’ and ‘‘A Wreath for Miss Totten’’ show the sensitive individual and the ‘‘unsolicited good [act]’’ against the mask of the self-satisfied average. The title story affirms the moral importance of observing oneself and others fairly despite political differences. In this and subsequent short story collections—Tale for the Mirror (1962) and Extreme Magic (1963)—Calisher includes semiautobiographical stories of the Elkin family. She develops themes from her Southern and Jewish heritage in ‘‘May-ry’’ and ‘‘Old Stock,’’ explores the familial tensions of her girlhood in ‘‘The Coreopsis Kid,’’ and ‘‘The Gulf Between.’’ Textures of Life (1963) accomplishes Calisher’s aim to portray ‘‘that dailiness which subtly pushes our lives on while we wait for the overt event.’’ Two married women, mother and daughter, learn fundamental lessons; the bourgeois mother learns to accept her artistic daughter’s rebelliously austere lifestyle, while the daughter lowers her artistic goals and modifies her austerity. Only their husbands, however, consciously perceive that they all tread ‘‘the path between surprise and compromise’’ amidst the joys and inexorabilities of life. Three disappointingly unfocused novels explore the older generation’s puzzlement over the younger generation’s entry into adulthood: Queenie (1971) lightheartedly describes the heroine’s sexual coming of age as she rejects commercial and political sex for true love and revolution; in Eagle Eye (1973), young Bunty Bronstein tries to evaluate his past and build his future through a computer; while Standard Dreaming (1972) finds plastic surgeon Neils Berners agonizing over his lost son, seeking emotional support from a sensitivity group of deserted parents and intellectual relief from a theory that runaways signal downward human evolution. He finally continues his healing vocation and accepts his wandering son’s freedom. On Keeping Women, Calisher’s 1977 novel, shows the breakup of the family as liberation. She sensitively depicts the independent decisions of Lexie and Ray, as well as their four children, to leave the family home to achieve self-fulfillment. In her work in the 1980s Calisher expanded the range of her fictional forms and subjects. Mysteries of Motion (1983) imagines the first civilian space travel. In what Calisher claims is the first novel of ‘‘character’’ rather than science fiction set in space, six lives are revealed on a space journey. In 1985 she published short works under the title Saratoga, Hot, including ‘‘Gargantua Real Impudence,’’ ‘‘The Library,’’ ‘‘The Sound Track,’’ ‘‘The Passenger,’’ ‘‘The Tenth Child,’’ ‘‘Survival Techniques,’’ and the title story. The strict roles assigned to both sexes and the complexities of gender and sexuality are recurrent themes in Calisher’s work, as are loneliness and individuality. The Bobby Soxer (1986) takes these themes to the limit, narrating, through the eyes of a teenage

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girl, her discovery that Aunt Leo, a maiden aunt, had male and female organs. Although Aunt Leo is the pivotal character, she has little to do with the story that unfolds; that of the girl, her town, her extended family, her genteel Southern mother, her father, and his business ventures. The book won the Kafka Prize in 1987. In Age (1987) an aging couple, Gemma and Rupert, agree each should keep a diary for the other to read after the partner’s death. Their awareness that they are facing the end of life is reinforced through the suicide of two friends and the death of Rupert’s first wife. They abandon the diaries when they realize one will have to read alone. This deepening sense of loss that comes with advancing age continues as a theme in Kissing Cousins (1988), a memoir in which Calisher pays tribute to both her Southern and Northern heritages, as she has done in other novels, and to the value of memory. Nurse Katie Pyle is a relative only through the connection of their Southern families and their Southern Jewish heritage; she and Calisher remained emotionally close throughout their lives. The independent Pyle went to war as an army nurse and later continued a nursing career. As they reminisce, Southern expressions color New York memories and the extended family appears loving and eccentric. Pyle dies, Calisher has her memories. Kissing Cousins, as well as in most of Calisher’s work, is sorrowful, rich in language, loving in tone. Her language is powerful, her dialogue accurate, her memories vivid. The people in her stories are not terrible, eccentric, or bizarre, but believable in their faults and virtues. In the 1990s Calisher received a little of the critical attention she has long deserved. Her writing, alternately characterized as difficult, exasperating, pretentious, exciting, superlative, beautiful, Byzantine, or linguistically exuberant, depending on who’s doing the reviewing, both challenges and rewards. What no one has disputed is that she continues to produce highly original and intelligent work. Calisher’s In the Palace of the Movie King (1994), moves over and through the tale of displaced Russian filmmaker. The novel examines the loss of meaning and self, as well as that of language and place within a societal context. It is about immigrant experience and, to an extent, the experience of every person ever subject to a sense of marginality. The book is as much concerned about what it is to be dissident and newly American in the latter half of the 20th century as it is with the meaning of meaning. The Novellas of Hortense Calisher (1997) collects seven of Calisher’s short novels, peopled with complex characters caught up variously in infidelity, growing up, and family secrets. The collection includes one previously unpublished novella, ‘‘Women Men Don’t Talk About,’’ which finds a woman weaving a compelling myth around her absent husband, until a fascinating stranger threatens to rupture its fabric. In the Slammer with Carol Smith (1997) shows that Calisher, nearing ninety, maintained a perceptive and lively interest in the cadence of contemporary life. It is the story of a young woman of color who falls in with some bourgeois white revolutionaries and takes the fall for them, spending a good portion of her life in prison. When she is released, she must refind her memory and herself. Though many critics found the novel disjointed, others

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praised its kaleidoscopic quality and the way in which it slowly, but ultimately thrillingly, makes the reader privy to the protagonist’s growing sense of self. In a 1992 article, Calisher wrote of how a writer’s psyche is in part formed by the anecdotes they hear about their culture when they are children. Such a premise is vintage Calisher: a subtle, elusive, deeply refractive notion with its roots in both epistemological thinking and a playful interest in the tone and tenor of the culture in which she lives. OTHER WORKS: False Entry (1961). Journal from Ellipsia (1965). The Railway Police and The Last Trolley Ride (1966). The New Yorkers (1969). The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher (1975). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Islas, A., ‘‘The Work of Hortense Calisher: On Middle Ground’’ (thesis, 1971). Minnesota Review (1973). Segal, D., ed., Short Story Criticism: Excerpts from Criticism of the Works of Short Fiction Writers 15 (1994). Snodgrass, K., ‘‘Rites of Passage in the Works of Hortense Calisher’’ (thesis, 1987). Snodgrass, K., The Fiction of Hortense Calisher (1993). Reference works: CA Online (1999). CANR (1986). Contemporary Novelists (1976, 1986). FC (1990). Jewish American Women Writers: A Biobibliographical and Critical Sourcebook (1994). MTCW (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to the United States (1982). Reference Guide to American Literature (1987). Other references: Bulletin of Bibliography (Mar. 1988). CB (1973). Iowa Review (1994). Nation (25 May 1963, 1 Dec. 1997). New Criterion (Feb. 1983). NYT (18 Dec. 1988, 20 Feb. 1994, 27 July 1997). NYTBR (13 Apr. 1969, 1 Oct. 1972, 6 Nov. 1983, 20 May 1984, 30 Mar. 1986). Saturday Review (28 Oct. 1961, 25 Dec. 1965, July/Aug. 1985). Southwest Review (interview, Spring 1986). Texas Studies in Literature (Winter 1989). Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature (Summer 1965). —HELEN J. SCHWARTZ, UPDATED BY JESSICA REISMAN

CAMPBELL, Helen Stuart Born 4 July 1839, Lockport, New York; died 22 July 1918, Dedham, Massachusetts Wrote under: Helen C. Weeks, Campbell Wheaton Daughter of Homer H. and Jane E. Campbell Stuart; married Grenville M. Weeks, 1860 Under the name Helen Weeks, Helen Stuart Campbell wrote five children’s books as well as stories in Riverside Magazine and Our Young Folks. After 1877 Campbell adopted her mother’s maiden name (Campbell) and she wrote works mainly for an adult audience: novels, magazine articles, cookbooks, studies of poverty and women workers. Experience as a teacher in cooking

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schools qualified Campbell to become household editor of Our Continent (1882-84). From 1894 to 1912 Campbell was closely associated with Charlotte Perkins Gilman. They coedited Impress in San Francisco and worked in Unity Settlement in Chicago. Eventually Campbell lived with the Gilmans in New York. During this period she lectured on home economics at the University of Wisconsin in 1895, and at Kansas State Agricultural College in 1897 and 1898. Her final years were spent in Massachusetts. The Ainslee Series, consisting of Grandpa’s House (1868), The Ainslee Stories (1868), White and Red (1869), and Four and What They Did (1871) reveal Campbell’s ability to create troublesome, lively children who tumble from one misadventure to another as they explore their New England or Midwestern surroundings. The liveliest and most amusing are Ainslee, five-yearold hero of the second book, and Sinny, his black friend. Although no more than a collection of stories, the book is unified by its temporal frame and by the background of New England village life. While Harry in White and Red is hardly an interesting hero, the account of his journey and the description of Indian characters and customs in Red Lake capture the imagination and make the tale a valuable portrait of the American past. Six Sinners (1877), a boarding-school story written under the name Campbell Wheaton, lacks the freshness of Campbell’s earlier work, but maintains her characteristic flashes of humor. His Grandmothers (1877), which marks Campbell’s transition from juveniles to the adult novel, is a lighthearted sketch of a household turned upside down by a flint-hearted New England grandmother. It stands in lively contrast to Campbell’s subsequent novels, which often (to the detriment of the fiction) attempt to treat such social themes as the role of heredity, the economic plight of women, the relation of diet to disease, the greed and corruption of postwar America. In 1886’s Mrs. Herndon’s Income, Campbell’s most important novel, there are too many characters and a poorly constructed plot, manipulated to suit the author’s moral vision. It is partially redeemed, however, by the comic presence of Amanda Briggs and by the realistic description of New York slums. Miss Melinda’s Opportunity (1886) uses a smaller canvas and a simpler plot, but is equally didactic. For the modern reader the interest lies less in the scheme for cooperative housekeeping than in the characterization of Miss Melinda and the evocation of New York in the Gilded Age. Campbell’s reform writing, as Robert Bremner points out, places her in the company of propagandists ‘‘who hoped to alter conditions by rousing the conscience of the nation.’’ The Problem of the Poor (1882) and Darkness and Daylight (1891) describe life in New York’s slums and McAuley’s Water Street Mission. Prisoners of Poverty (1887) attacks the exploitation of women in New York sweatshops and department stores, employing case histories to illustrate the effects of starvation wages. Prisoners of Poverty Abroad (1889) feebly echoes its predecessor in a superficial survey of women workers in Europe. Less emotional than the earlier studies and buttressed by statistics, Women Wage-Earners (1893), which received an award from the American Economic Association, treats the plight of women factory workers across


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America, condemning low wages, long hours, and poor sanitation. Campbell concludes by recommending the organization of women’s labor clubs and the appointment of women inspectors, as well as higher wages and a shorter working week.

insistence on wearing the most expensive foreign fashions. The second brother can reestablish his fortune because he has a loving, loyal wife and daughter, both with simple tastes. They work for him until his business is lucrative once again.

As a fiction writer, Campbell was a minor figure, memorable only for the local color and abundant humor of her children’s stories. Her role as reformer, however, was more significant. Campbell’s studies of women wage-earners stirred the conscience of her age and led to the formation of consumers’ leagues in the 1890s, which monitored retail stores to assure fair labor practices.

The heart of the collection of tales is ‘‘Catherine Clayton.’’ In this short story, the father dies leaving his wife, their daughter Catherine, and several younger children with only a small inheritance. Catherine learns to develop the skills that enable her to be a good governess. The story recounts her humiliations, defeats, and her growing self-respect as she finally learns to support her family. Campbell contrasts Catherine’s efforts with the frivolous lives of other teenage girls who waste rather than earn money.

OTHER WORKS: An American Family in Paris (1869). Unto the Third and Fourth Generation (1880). Patty Pearson’s Boy: A Tale of Two Generations (1881). The Housekeeper’s Year Book (1882). Under Green Apple Boughs (1882). A Sylvan City or Quaint Corners in Philadelphia (with others, 1883). The American Girl’s Home Book of Work and Play (1883). The What-To-Do Club: A Story for Girls (1885). Good Dinners for Every Day in the Year (1886). Roger Berkeley’s Probation (1888). Anne Bradstreet and Her Time (1891). Some Passages in the Practice of Dr. Martha Scarborough (1893). In Foreign Kitchens (1893). Household Economics (1896). The Heart of It: A Series of Extracts from the Power of Silence and The Perfect Whole (ed. H. Campbell and K. Westendorf, 1897).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bremner, R. H., From the Depths: The Discovery of Poverty in the U.S. (1956). Darling, F. L., The Rise of Children’s Book Reviewing in America, 1865-1881 (1968). Gilman, C. P., The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935). Taylor, W. F., The Economic Novel in America (1942). Wright, L. H., American Fiction, 1876-1900 (1966). Reference works: Literary Writings in America: A Bibliography (1977). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971).

Campbell’s tales are heavily charged with moral messages. Her diction is solemn and authoritative, and she launches clear, consistent attacks against a society that does not encourage its women to work. She is thoroughly opposed to an education that promotes extravagance and frivolity as well as the pursuit of profit at the expense of social conscience. In most of her tales a rich man takes care of an infant who is not his own, and marriages are across class lines, demonstrating that a true American community is based on work and personal merit. —ROSE F. KAVO

CAMPBELL, Juliet (H.) Lewis Born 1823; died date unknown Wrote under: Judith Canute

Born circa 1820s; died date unknown

Juliet Lewis Campbell’s only novel (she also wrote nonfiction) was published in 1857 under the title Eros and Antieros; or, The Bachelor’s Ward, and in 1858 as The Old Love and the New. It opens with a tribute to the hero of the narrative, Arthur Walsingham, and to the great Susquehanna River. Walsingham, a dreamy, romantic poet and scholar, has been in love for years with the saintly Viola, even though she has married his closest friend. At her deathbed, soon after the death of her husband, Walsingham agrees to raise her daughter, also called Viola. Eventually the daughter grows to be as lovely and virtuous as her departed mother; Walsingham and she fall in love and marry.

Jane C. Campbell published two collections of short tales, the first initially under the title The Money-Maker, and Other Tales (1845), then in 1856 as American Evening Entertainment; or, Tales of City and Country Life. The second, Evenings at Home; or, Tales for the Fireside, was published in 1859. The first volume presents a series of didactic tales aimed mainly at a young female audience. It includes the story of two brothers who both experience serious financial setbacks. The first loses his fortune because he is married to a woman who ruins his thriving business by her

What is notable about the novel is not the sentimental plot line, but the closeups of patriotic American life around Lake Erie. Campbell’s ideal world is rural, pastoral, and communal. As a result, she defines heroism through kindness and charity, not through courageous deeds. Also of interest is the detailed chronicle of Viola’s education in French, dance, and needlework at Madame de Fleury’s boarding school. In all, Campbell provides a coherent view of the daily life of a rich American girl of her day. Campbell attributes much of Viola’s charm to her elitist education but balances the elegant frivolity of that education with simple

—PHYLLIS MOE

CAMPBELL, Jane C.

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American values. Viola is as welcome in the homes of the poor and infirm as she is at a ball with her fashionable set. Some of the most vivid scenes in the novel have to do with the sick and dying. Campbell’s strong point is the depth of her observations and descriptions. Her works are directed at young girls, and her intentions are largely didactic: she clearly wishes to encourage girls to be useful, loving people as well as charming creatures of fashion. In Walsingham, Campbell portrays a rarely seen American hero, one who is esteemed for his gentleness and quiet strength. —ROSE F. KAVO

writing with courage and honor. Hers was a minor gift but ‘‘The Honest Wine Merchant,’’ ‘‘The Lost Governess,’’ ‘‘The Wedding,’’ ‘‘The Rake,’’ and ‘‘Oblivion’’ are memorable stories. OTHER WORKS: History of Boswell’s Tavern (circa 1900). The Social Record of Virginia (edited by Caperton, 1937). Like a Falcon Flying (1943). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Carpenter, M. N., Virginia Authors’ Yearbook (1957). Parker, D., ‘‘A Few Words’’ in Helena Lefory Caperton’s Legends of Virginia (1950). Other references: Richmond Times Dispatch (26 March 1950). —MAUREEN MURPHY

CAPERTON, Helena Lefroy Born 1878, Richmond, Virginia; died 1962, Richmond, Virginia Daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Lefroy; married Mr. Caperton The child of an Irish father and an American mother, Helena Lefroy Caperton wrote local history, edited The Social Register of Virginia, and reviewed books for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Louisville Times. Her reputation, however, rests on her short stories. ‘‘The Honest Wine Merchant’’ was an O. Henry Memorial Award winner in 1930. ‘‘The Lost Governess’’ was listed in Edward O’Brien’s Anthology of the Best Short Stories of 1930. Both stories appeared in Legends of Virginia (1931). In her introduction to this book Dorothy Parker characterizes it as ‘‘. . . strange, swift, tense, emotional. . . . But there is more about them. There is a wildness, a fierce rush of drama, a long-spreading terror, a passionate championship of the lovely and the innocent and then a sudden curious tenderness.’’ Caperton’s preface to Legends of Virginia names her Virginian maternal grandfather as ‘‘the inimitable storyteller from whom came these tales. . .unconscious of preserving in an adolescent mind the tenderness and gallantry of a past generation.’’ A Southern regional writer, Caperton’s subject is honor, the affirmation of a way of life of a ruined people who had heroically fought a war they were destined to lose. In ‘‘The Lost Governess,’’ a Confederate doctor tirelessly attends his patients despite their inability to pay. A mysterious woman arrives in a storm, takes charge of his children’s education for five years, and then disappears again. Later, while visiting an asylum, the doctor discovers his governess is a violent psychopath who had escaped for five years but recommitted herself lest she harm someone. Caperton’s stories are slight but intensely dramatic. The need for grace in her characters in the face of their defeat informs her

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CARLSON, Natalie Savage Born 3 October 1906, Winchester, Virginia; died 23 September 1997 Daughter of Joseph H. and Natalie Villeneuve dit Vallar Savage; married Daniel Carlson, 1929 When Natalie Savage Carlson was eight years old, her first story was published on the children’s page of the Baltimore Sunday Sun. Later, the family moved to Long Beach, California, and after majoring in journalism, Carlson spent three years as a newspaper reporter for the Long Beach Morning Sun. Carlson’s mother was of French-Canadian extraction, and this French influence is evident in Carlson’s choice of subjects and geographic details. Carlson’s The Talking Cat, and Other Stories of French Canada (1952), Sashes Red and Blue (1956), and The Letter on the Tree (1964) are among others with French Canadian settings. Wings Against the Wind (1955) was first written as a French class composition. The Family Under the Bridge (1958) has a Parisian setting, in which the Tournelle Bridge serves as a shelter for a fatherless family. Befana’s Gift (1969) has an Italian setting, while The Song of the Lop-Eared Mule (1961) takes place in southern Spain. The Tomahawk Family (1960) is the least successful, as it describes a locale which Carlson apparently did not know thoroughly—South Dakota. Diverse family patterns appear in Carlson’s books, but there is always warmth. The white girl in Ann Aurelia and Dorothy (1968) lives in a foster home, since her mother left to marry Mr. Lacey. The three children in The Family Under the Bridge (1958) are fatherless. In The Happy Orpheline (1957) 20 orphans live with Madame Flattot and are upset with the possibility that the favorite, Brigitte, might be adopted. Carlson’s autobiographical books, The Half Sisters (1970) and Luvvy and the Girls (1971), tell of a closely knit family. In Carlson’s books, situation and dialogue are filled with humor. Albert and Pierre kick each other as they pull the church bell rope, and it tolls crazily at a funeral in The Letter on the Tree (1964). The orphan Brigitte in The Happy Orpheline lets the dogs


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loose, thinking this the most wicked thing she could do, and they upset the marketplace. The Family Under the Bridge was a Newbery honor book, and has been published in paperback and a number of translations, as have many of Carlson’s other books. Carlson was nominated as the U.S. candidate for the International Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1966. Most of her books have remained in print, particularly those with strong setting, family ties, and humor. OTHER WORKS: Alphonse, That Bearded One (1954). Hortense, the Cow for a Queen (1957). A Brother for the Orphelines (1959). Evangeline, Pigeon of Paris (1960). Carnival in Paris (1962). A Pet for the Orphelines (1962). Jean-Claude’s Island (1963). School Bell in the Valley (1963). The Orphelines in the Enchanted Castle (1964). The Empty Schoolhouse (1965). Sailor’s Choice (1966). Chalou (1967). Luigi of the Streets (1967). Marchers for the Dream (1969). Marie Louise & Christophe (1974). Marie Louise’s Heyday (1975). Runaway Marie Louise (1977). Jaky or Dodo? (1978). Time for the White Egret (1978). The papers of Natalie Savage Carlson are in the Kerlan Collection at the University of Minnesota. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Carlson, J., ‘‘Family Unity in N.S.C.’s Books for Children’’ in Authors and Illustrators of Children’s Books; Writing on Their Lives and Works (1972). Reference works: SAA (1971). More Books by More People (1974). More Junior Authors (1963). Other references: ChildL (1976). —KAREN N. HOYLE

CARMICHAEL, Sarah E(lizabeth) Born 1838, Setauket, New York; died 10 November 1901, Salt Lake City, Utah Also wrote under: S. E. Carmichael, Miss S. E. Carmichael Daughter of William and Mary Ann Carmichael; married Jonathan M. Williamson, 1866 (died 1882) Converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Williamson’s family joined the Mormons at Nauvoo, Illinois, and in 1850 moved to Salt Lake City, where her father worked as a carpenter. Despite frontier hardships and the absence of public schools, Williamson gained an education and began writing poetry. Her objection to polygamy, then practiced by the Latter-Day Saints, and her marriage to an army doctor of non-Mormon background, alienated her, to some extent, from the local community. Not long after her marriage, Williamson experienced a severe mental decline, the cause of which is unknown. Although she lived on for more than 30 years, her career as a poet was over. Widowed in 1882, Williamson spent her last years in a mental hospital. She had no children. Williamson’s first signed poem, ‘‘Truth,’’ appeared in the Deseret News on 10 March 1858. The Mormon newspaper

published more than 50 of her poems during the next eight years. Her poetry also appeared in the Daily Union Vedette, published at Camp Douglas, where her future husband was stationed, and the Woman’s Exponent, a feminist newspaper edited and published by Mormon women. Because so much of her poetry was published in newspapers, the full extent of her work may never be known. The early poems of Williamson do not emphasize a distinctively Mormon subject matter. Often homiletic in character, the verses treat friendship, love, integrity, writing, Indian pride, and similar topics from a humanistic, nonsectarian point of view. Even in the poem ‘‘Pharoah’’ (Deseret News, 30 March 1859), where man’s dependent relationship to God is explored, she avoided heavy-handed parallels between the exodus of the Israelites and that of the Mormons. And in a rare poem on a Mormon subject— ‘‘Brigham Young’’ (Deseret News, 17 October 1860)—Williamson retained control over her topic, refusing to be overawed by his power, as were some of her contemporaries. The result is a poem that praises but is not cloying. By the early 1860s, Williamson had won local recognition for her efforts, and community leaders called on her for occasional verse. Most of the praise she received was uncritical, although Edward W. Tullidge, Utah editor, writer, and historian, saw her as a genius whose powers of improvisation carried her to the heights, although patient shaping and reworking could not ‘‘justly be accredited among her higher poetic gifts and graces.’’ Williamson’s career was short, but her powers did mature. She began to see her subjects in dramatic terms, using conflict, contrast, and irony in an increasingly sophisticated way. Three poems published in the Deseret News, ‘‘The Daughter of Herodias’’ (22 October 1862), ‘‘Esau’s Petition’’ (11 March 1863), and the ‘‘Feast of Lucrezia Borgia’’ (6 May 1863), reveal a growing command of her art. Williamson’s advancing skill eventually brought her recognition outside of Utah. William Cullen Bryant anthologized ‘‘The Stolen Sunbeam,’’ retitling it ‘‘The Origin of Gold’’ (A Family Library of Poetry and Song, 1878). Another anthologizer, May Wentworth, included Williamson’s poems ‘‘A Christmas Rhyme’’ and ‘‘Sorrow’’ in her collection (Poetry of the Pacific, 1867). There have been claims that Williamson’s poems were often reprinted without credit by the Eastern press. Williamson was profoundly moved by the Civil War, about which she wrote vivid, dramatic poems, including her best-known poem, ‘‘President Lincoln’s Funeral’’ (Poems, 1866). The elegy attracted national recognition; it was reprinted and read many times at public functions. Its expression of grief achieves a solemn dignity that, reportedly, pleased Mrs. Lincoln. Williamson’s only book of poetry, Poems, was published in San Francisco to favorable reviews. The slim volume of 26 poems received similar notice in the East. Included in the collection are several of her best descriptive poems: ‘‘Moonlight on the Wasatch’’ and the haunting ‘‘April Flowers,’’ which seems to foreshadow her mental collapse in these lines: ‘‘Pale, blighted flowers, the summer time / Will smile on brighter leaves / They will not wither

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in their prime / Like a young heart that grieves.’’ Williamson’s friends arranged for the book’s publication and sale. The proceeds of almost $600—considerable for the time—were to be used to finance the poet’s further education at Vassar, a project that her marriage and mental decline prevented. Of the many women and men in Utah who wrote poetry in the 19th century, Williamson stands above all. She avoided the common faults of sentimentality, didacticism, and dogmatism to produce poems of genuine merit that, despite changing literary fashion, can be read with some pleasure today. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Selby, C., Sarah Elizabeth Carmichael (M.A. thesis, University of Utah, 1921). Other references: Relief Society Magazine (Sept. 1928). Salt Lake Tribune (16 Feb. 1836, 8 Mar. 1936). Utah Historical Quarterly (Winter 1975). Western Galaxy (May 1888). —MIRIAM B. MURPHY

CARRIGHAR, Sally Born 10 February 1898, Cleveland, Ohio; died October 1985 Daughter of George B. and Perle Harden Wagner In Home to the Wilderness (1973), Sally Carrighar tells a sad story. Partially disfigured at birth by a high-forceps delivery, she was abhorrent to her mother, who once attempted to strangle her. The psychotic woman, loathing even her daughter’s touch, sought to deprive Carrighar of all love and openly urged her to commit suicide. Carrighar was rescued from utter wretchedness by her father’s devotion, her own remarkable determination, and the supportive atmosphere of Wellesley College. She tried various artistic careers: pianist, dancer, and film production assistant, only to have her mother repeatedly snatch success from her. While undergoing psychoanalysis, Carrighar attempted to establish herself as a fictionalist, failed, and ‘‘abandoned words.’’ Convalescing in San Francisco from depression and heart disease, she began feeding the birds outside her window. The birds became fellow creatures; a mouse nesting inside her radio actually sang to her, and in a revelation she understood her vocation: nature writing. Words need not be abandoned, only the bizarre human world of madness, violence, greed. After seven years of study, Carrighar published One Day on Beetle Rock (1944), a narrative treating the interaction of various species in a Sierra Nevada habitat. Carrighar discovered that she could portray this interaction effectively by adopting in successive chapters the point of view of specific organisms and describing how a dramatic natural event (e.g., a flash flood) affects them. To present the ‘‘consciousness’’ of a female mosquito is of course risky, for the writer appears to be anthropomorphizing nature. But the literary strategy of Beetle Rock proved itself in One Day at Teton Marsh (1947), about the Grand Tetons; Icebound Summer (1953), about the north coast of Alaska; and The Twilight Seas (1975), about the blue whales.

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These objective narratives, in which the narrator never speaks in her own voice, are only a portion of Carrighar’s corpus. Her personal writings give a good introduction to the land and people of northern Alaska. Moonlight at Midday (1958) narrates her adventures researching Icebound Summer in the tiny village of Unalakleet; it examines Eskimo life, both the traditional ways and the changes wrought by the white man. Wild Voice of the North (1959) is the story of her husky, Bobo, whom she rescued and cared for while living and writing in Nome. Carrighar has worked in other genres as well: a play, As Far as They Go (1956), celebrates Alaskan history and pioneer life. An historical novel, The Glass Dove (1962), portrays a young girl whose farm home in southern Ohio becomes a station on the Underground Railroad. Wild Heritage (1965) is Carrighar’s most ambitious work. It synthesizes much of the pioneering work in the field of ethology and includes many of Carrighar’s own observations from her years in various wildernesses. The work treats life experiences which humans share with animals: parenthood, sex, aggressiveness, and play. She is especially concerned with what tendencies of animals are learned. In reporting her observations, she uses the technique of her nature narratives, dramatizing the behavior of a single individual of the species. But one finally returns to Carrighar’s autobiography, Home to the Wilderness, for her most deeply felt writing, for her observations that man’s morality originates in nature, for her comments about females as naturalists. Nature was Carrighar’s healer and vocation; she could approach it with naive joy, reverence, and awe. But she also knew it as a scientist who relies only on objective observation. That Carrighar successfully combined these two modes of cognition is perhaps her greatest achievement. OTHER WORKS: Exploring Marin (1941). Prey of the Arctic (1951). Blue Whale (1978). BIBLIOGRAPHY: NYHTBR (28 Sept. 1947, 19 July 1953). NYT (10 Dec. 1944). NYTBR (28 March 1965). San Francisco Chronicle (25 Sept. 1947). SR (20 March 1965). SRL (24 Feb. 1945). Weekly Book Review (26 Nov. 1944). —MARGARET MCFADDEN-GERBER

CARRINGTON, Elaine Sterne Born 1892, New York, New York; died 4 May 1958, New York, New York Also wrote under: John Ray, Elaine Sterne Daughter of Theodore and Mary Henriques Sterne; married George D. Carrington, 1920 While growing up in New York City, Elaine Sterne Carrington’s earliest ambition was to become a musical comedy star. Instead, she became the most prolific writer of radio serials, though she also wrote short stories, plays, and songs.


At eighteen, Carrington sold her first story, ‘‘King of the Christmas Feast,’’ to St. Nicholas magazine. At nineteen, she won the first prize in a scenario-writing contest sponsored by the New York Evening Sun in cooperation with Vitagraph for a script entitled Sins of the Mothers. Two more prizes that year—one in a New York Morning Telegraph scenario contest and another in a Collier’s magazine short story contest—launched Carrington’s professional career. Nightstick, a play written under the name of John Ray, was lengthened and produced as a film under the title Alibi (1929). The most frequent topic of Carrington’s plays is romance and marriage in the middle class. Five Minutes from the Station: A Comedy of Life that Comes Close to Being a Tragedy (1930), features Carrie Adams, a harried but spunky housewife who secures a promotion for her husband Bert by cooking dinner for his employer. Like the plays, Carrington’s stories concern courtship, marriage, and child rearing. Plots based on secret engagements, elopements, hopeless love between people of different classes, and friction between child and stepparent are common. The central characters generally are of the middle class—wives who ‘‘like to gossip,’’ storekeepers whose shops are ‘‘clean as a whistle,’’ young women with ‘‘milk-white skin’’ and ‘‘ash-blond hair,’’ and steady young men who like to do ‘‘the deciding.’’ Ten of Carrington’s short stories are collected in a volume entitled All Things Considered (1939). The sentimentality of the stories is redeemed by some incisive and devastating portraits in situations critics have deemed worthy of Evelyn Waugh or John Collier. Carrington’s fondness for ambiguity caused some reviewers to find ‘‘a streak of sharp satire running under the gloss.’’ A cool, sparse style allows the characters occasionally to break free of humdrum plots. Carrington moved to radio scriptwriting with her first series, Red Adams (1932), later renamed Red Davis. The series starred Burgess Meredith as Davis, a ‘‘supposedly typical, happy-golucky, middle class teenager, who lived in the supposedly typical small town of Oak Park.’’ Carrington drew the plots from her own experiences as a wife and mother, incorporating (in her words) ‘‘all the pangs of adolescence from both the children’s and parents’ points of view.’’ Under the sponsorship of Proctor & Gamble, the program was renamed Forever Young, and then Pepper Young’s Family (1936-56). The setting became the town of Elmwood, and Red Davis became Pepper. What began as a comedy had emerged as a thoroughgoing soap opera. In 1938 it was on the air at three different hours every day and was carried by both the NBC and CBS networks. Variety rated Pepper Young’s Family ‘‘above average both in quality and popularity. . . .Its story stresses everyday family situations, with little or no melodrama and nothing lurid or emotionally upsetting. If anything, the action is too mild for maximum dramatic effect. The pace is relatively slow and the dialogue is inclined to be a trifle innocuous.’’ When a Girl Marries (1939-56) became the serial that drew perhaps the largest of all cumulative radio soap opera audiences.

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The marriage of wealthy Joan Field to poor-but-promising Harry Davis was central but other marriages were also featured. Rosemary (1944-55) was, as the show’s opening announcement proclaimed, ‘‘dedicated to all the women of today.’’ Each episode began with ‘‘This is your story—this is you.’’ The serial told the story of the Dawson family and centered upon Rosemary Dawson’s marriage to Bill Roberts. A young working woman at series open, Rosemary quickly became the woman of domestic experience, the wife and mother endowed with the goodness and kindness required of soap opera heroines. Carrington’s intense patriotism (she also wrote scripts for the U.S. Treasury Department) manifested itself in appeals to listeners to buy war bonds. In addition, Carrington’s characters urged each other to buy Easter Seals, to help returning prisoners of war, or to support some other worthy cause. Acknowledged as the originator of the radio soap opera, Carrington established a simple principle for plots that often were complex: ‘‘the life of a middle class family and the bringing up of children in an understanding way.’’ This principle led Carrington to focus on youthful characters, complete with current slang, a focus which television soap operas of the 1970s have reestablished, The ‘‘understanding way’’ of bringing up children involved humor, which was often present in Carrington’s scripts. Plots—in which illogic was not uncommon—were always subordinate to characters. In Carrington’s words, ‘‘The story must be written about people you come to know and like and believe in. What happens to them is of secondary importance. Once characters are firmly established and entrenched in the hearts of listeners, the latter will have to tune in to find out what becomes of the characters because of what they feel for them.’’ For over 20 years Carrington succeeded in creating characters that evoked such loyalty from listeners. Without question, the ‘‘Queen of the Soapers,’’ as Carrington was known, had earned her title. OTHER WORKS: Follow Your Heart (TV drama, 1953). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Edmondson, M., and D. Rounds, From Mary Noble to Mary Hartman: The Complete Soap Opera Book (1976). Reference works: CB: Who’s News and Why 1944 (1945). Other references: NYHT (19 Nov. 1939). New York Post (25 Jan. 1940). NYT (12 Nov. 1939, 11 Feb. 1940, 5 May 1958). Newsweek (20 Oct. 1941, 3 May 1954). Parents’ Magazine (June 1942). Time (26 Aug. 1946). Variety (8 May 1940, 16 June 1943). —CAREN J. DEMING

CARROLL, Gladys Hasty Born 26 June 1904, Rochester, New Hampshire Daughter of Warren and Frances Hasty; married Herbert Carroll, 1925 Growing up in South Berwick, Maine, Gladys Hasty was educated at Bates College, where she graduated in 1925. That

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same year she married Herbert Carroll, who became a professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire. Carroll has been awarded honorary degrees from Bates College, the University of New Hampshire, and the University of Maine. Carroll’s most famous book is As the Earth Turns (1933), a story of the Shaw family. A selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, it was second on the fiction bestseller list, and was translated into many languages. The heroine of As the Earth Turns, Jen Shaw, is an ‘‘earth mother’’, slow, calm, and capable. Together with her father, Mark, Jen holds the Shaw family together. Mark lives for his farm work, and Jen apparently lives for her housework: ‘‘if there’s anything I like, it’s cleaning something awful dirty!’’ The action of the story focuses on various family crises and the relationship between the Shaws and the Janowskis, a Polish family newly moved into the area. As the Earth Turns was filmed by Warner in 1934. Directed by Alfred Green, the production starred Jean Muir and Donald Woods as Jen and Stan, with David Landau playing Mark Shaw. The New York Times reviewed it favorably. After the 1930s, Carroll’s novels are of little interest. Most of them are preachy, often centering on conservative women residing in Maine. One of her later novels, Man on the Mountain (1969), is a science fiction social satire, showing how America is destroying itself. A constant theme is cultural tolerance, whether it be of Poles, Irish Catholics, or French Canadians. Of more interest are her autobiographical works, beginning with Dunnybrook (1943), a social history of South Berwick from its founding to World War II. Only Fifty Years Ago (1962) is the story of her childhood; To Remember Forever (1963) is a journal of a year at Bates College. The Years Away from Home (1972) tells of her early married life through 1933. These autobiographical works, like her later novels, are repetitious and laced throughout with World War II poster-style patriotism, but they can serve as documents of local and cultural history. Carroll used her novels to express her own conservative Republican, rural, New England values, but much of her work cannot be rated as literature. She is a writer who had one major theme: the spell of the land, and she wrote it out in her first three novels. As the Earth Turns is a great popular novel, however, and it fully deserves its acclaim. OTHER WORKS: Cockatoo (1929). Land Spell (1930, reissued as A Few Foolish Ones, 1935). Neighbor to the Sky (1937). Head of the Line (1942). While the Angels Sing (1947). West of the Hill (1949). Christmas Without Johnny (1950). One White Star (1954). Sing Out the Glory (1957). Come With Me Home (1960). The Road Grows Strange (1965). The Light Here Kindled (1967). Next of Kin (1974). Unless You Die Young (1977). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hall, V. S., ‘‘Down East Today’’ (thesis, 1938). Nation (21 June 1933). NYT (7 May 1933). SRL (6 May 1933). —BEVERLY SEATON

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CARSON, Rachel (Louise) Born 27 May 1907, Springfield, Pennsylvania; died 14 April 1964, Silver Spring, Maryland Daughter of Robert Warden and Maria Frazier McLean Carson One of the most famous environmentalists of all time, Rachel Carson combined literary talent with scientific knowledge in her writings about the fragile state of nature. Her warnings about the havoc that humanity and its careless ways were wreaking on the environment led to new policies designed to protect nature. Written for both the scientist and the layperson, Carson’s works sought to show readers the wonder of nature and instill in them a sense of responsibility for protecting it. Carson was raised in rural Pennsylvania and doted on by her mother, a former schoolteacher who passed on her love of literature and nature to her youngest daughter. Rachel loved to write from an early age and had published articles in St. Nicholas magazine by the time she was ten. She entered Pennsylvania College for Women (later renamed Chatham College) with the intention of becoming a professional writer. Yet she switched her major to zoology by the end of her junior year against the advice of her professors, who told her there was no future for a woman in science. In 1929 Carson graduated magna cum laude and was awarded a fellowship for a summer at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. It was the first time she had seen the ocean. She continued to study at Woods Hole in the summers while earning an M.A. in zoology at Johns Hopkins University, where she wrote a thesis on the development of the catfish. After a brief stint teaching at Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland, Carson took a position as a junior aquatic biologist at the Bureau of Fisheries in Washington, D.C. She was one of the first two women hired by the Bureau for nonclerical jobs, and she wrote and edited high-quality radio broadcasts and Bureau publications for many years. Elmer Higgins, Carson’s supervisor at the Bureau of Fisheries, turned down a radio script she wrote about the sea but recommended she submit it to Atlantic Monthly. The resulting article, ‘‘Undersea,’’ (1937) came to the attention of Quincy Howe, an editor at Simon & Schuster, who asked her to write a book about the ocean. A thorough researcher and careful writer, Carson had an appealing descriptive style that appears throughout her works. Her first book, Under the Sea Wind: A Naturalist’s Picture of Ocean Life, was published in late 1941 just before the outbreak of World War II and sold poorly, despite its favorable reviews. The book made the bestseller list upon its reissue in 1952, however, after Carson had achieved fame for subsequent works. At the end of the war, Carson was promoted to chief editor of the newly renamed United States Fish & Wildlife Service. She still managed to find time to write and The Sea Around Us was published in 1951 after an overwhelmingly favorable response to excerpts published in the Yale Review and the New Yorker. The Sea Around Us utilized new information about the ocean to


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describe it and was referred to by Carson as a ‘‘biography of the sea.’’ The book remained on the bestseller list for 86 weeks and eventually won both the John Burroughs and the National Book awards.

1963. Silent Spring was immediately attacked by chemical companies and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which denounced the book’s findings of DDT’s ill effects on the environment as false.

The Sea Around Us’s three sections provide a detailed look at life beneath the ocean’s surface, yet Carson’s principal focus is still to provide readers with scientifically accurate information about the sea couched in her now trademark dramatic style. This work won Carson the National Book award; and she famously noted in her acceptance speech that ‘‘if there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave [it] out.’’

Carson herself was painted as an unreliable, hysterical woman by critics and attacked repeatedly in the media. Yet the furor over Silent Spring died down when it became apparent that Carson’s critics had misinterpreted the book’s message. In Silent Spring, Carson called for increased control over the distribution and use of pesticides like DDT as well as the development of biological controls as an alternative to spraying pesticides from the air. Her dramatic presentation of humanity’s destruction of the environment through DDT and other pesticides shocked a public that had heretofore been unaware of any reason for concern.

In 1953, two years after publication of The Sea Around Us, Carson became the first science writer in 13 years to be elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. RKO’s production of a full-length documentary of the book won an Oscar the same year, although Carson never approved of the film because of some scientific inaccuracies. Honorary degrees and other accolades continued to pour in along with royalties from the book’s eventual translation into 32 languages. With her financial well-being ensured, Carson resigned from the Fish & Wildlife Service to devote herself full time to writing. The Edge of the Sea was published in 1955 and became another instant bestseller. In this book Carson describes the fragility and interdependence of the creatures living along the ocean’s shore. Carson continued to provide occasional scripts for radio and television broadcasts, including one for an Omnibus program on clouds. Yet she had little time to write in the late 1950s due to family responsibilities. Her mother and niece died within a year of one another and the never-married Carson adopted Roger, her five year-old great-nephew. Roger was the inspiration for Carson’s fifth book, The Sense of Wonder, which grew out of an article for Women’s Home Companion. (The book was published posthumously in 1965 and urged parents to instill a love of nature in their children.) Carson was concerned about the effects of the chemical fertilizer DDT for many years and tried unsuccessfully to publish articles about the pesticide’s negative effects on plants and animals. Her concern grew in the years after World War II when DDT became widely available to farmers. Other scientists had noted the deterioration in the environment and the death of wildlife due to DDT, but none had Carson’s fame or respect. She pondered the topic of her next book in a letter to a friend in February 1958: ‘‘It seems time someone wrote of Life in the light of the truth as it now appears to us. And I think that may be the book I am to write. . . . As man approaches the ‘new heaven and the new earth’—or the space-age universe, if you will—he must do it with humility rather than arrogance.’’ Shortly after Carson began work on the book that would become Silent Spring, she was diagnosed with a malignant breast tumor. The cancer spread throughout her body, which made writing difficult, but a condensation of the book was published in the New Yorker in June 1962 and the entire book in September

The overwhelming interest and anxiety about the situation presented in Carson’s book led President John F. Kennedy to announce a federal investigation into the problem. The report of the President’s Science Advisory Committee in May 1963 agreed with Carson’s conclusions in Silent Spring. Later that year, Carson became the first woman to win the Audubon Medal. Within four months of Silent Spring’s publication, there were over 40 bills in state legislatures calling for stronger restrictions on the use of pesticides. Carson’s impact upon environmental policy did not cease with her death in 1964. In November 1969, five years after her death, the U.S. government took steps to phase out the use of DDT over a two-year period, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was established a year later. There have been two new posthumous publications of Carson’s writings in addition to either renamed partial or complete reprints of her earlier works. Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman was published in 1995 to great acclaim. Freeman, a naturalist and former teacher, had written to Carson in 1952 after the publication of The Sea Around Us when she learned Carson was building a summer home near the Freemans’ on Southport Island in Maine. The women later met and became close friends for the remainder of Carson’s life. Carson’s compassionate nature and joy in life shines through these letters, as does her concern for her family and the pain of her later illness. Near the end of her niece’s struggle with diabetes, Carson wrote to Freeman: ‘‘I think I wrote you a year ago that my great problem was how to be a writer and at the same time a member of my family. . . . It is that conflict that just tears me to pieces. Now, so near the end, I wonder why I can’t have peace for even ten days, but I have thought of no practical solution.’’ Always, Rachel reveals that Carson’s courage in the face of personal tragedy was as striking as her bravery in facing public criticism and her graciousness in acknowledging eventual public triumph. Lost Woods: The Discovered Writings of Rachel Carson (1998) is a collection of brief essays, talks, field notes, acceptance speeches, magazine articles, and personal letters. The selections in Lost Woods range from Carson’s first Atlantic Monthly article,

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‘‘Undersea,’’ which was the inspiration for the book Under the Sea Wind, to her final letter to Dorothy Freeman (1964). In this letter, which Freeman received after Carson’s death, the latter wrote: ‘‘My regrets, darling, are for your sadness, for leaving Roger, when I so wanted to see him through to manhood. . . . I have had a rich life, full of rewards and satisfactions that come to few, and if it must end now, I can feel that I have achieved most of what I wished to do. That wouldn’t have been true two years ago, when I first realized my time was short.’’ Rachel Carson was a gifted scientist and talented writer whose works introduced readers around the world to the delicate balance of nature and society’s responsibility for preserving it. Carson was one of the few women of her time able to achieve success in the male-dominated world of science. Through her inspirational and scientifically sound writings she convinced her colleagues and the general public of both the need for sound environmental policy and the capability of female scientists. Often hailed as the mother of the environmental movement, her impact on literature and environmental policy is still felt today. Yet her characteristic modesty did not allow her to believe her work would bring about lasting change. Shortly before the publication of Silent Spring, Carson wrote in a letter: ‘‘I have felt bound by a solemn obligation to do what I could—if I didn’t at least try I could never again be happy in nature. But now I can believe I have at least helped a little. It would be unrealistic to believe one book could bring a complete change.’’ As writer Paul Brooks noted in Speaking for Nature, ‘‘It may have been unrealistic, but history has proved it true.’’

OTHER WORKS: Food from the Sea: Fish and Shellfish of New England (1943). Food from Home Waters: Fishes of the Middle West (1943). Fish and Shellfish of the South Atlantic and Gulf Coasts (1944). Fish and Shellfish of the Middle Atlantic Coast (1945). Life Under the Sea (1968). The Rocky Coast (1971). The House of Life: Rachel Carson at Work (1972). Silent Spring Revisited (1987).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brooks, P., The House of Life: R. Carson at Work (1972). Brooks, P., Speaking for Nature (1980). Graham, F., Jr., Since Silent Spring (1970). Sterling, P., Sea and Earth: The Life of R. Carson (1970). Stille, D. R., Extraordinary Women Scientists. Veglahn, N., Women Scientists (1991). Whorton, J., Before Silent Spring: Pesticides and Public Health in Pre-DDT America (1974). Reference works: CANR 35 (1992). Current Biography (1951, 1964). CBY (1951). Notable Women in the Life Sciences (1996). Reader’s Companion to American History (1991). Twentieth Century Authors, 1st supp. (1955). Other references: American Forests (July 1970). ‘‘The Spirit of Rachel Carson,’’ in Audubon (July-August 1992). SatR (16 May 1964). Science (26 May 1995). —LEAH J. SPARKS

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CARVER, Ada Jack Born 7 April 1890, Natchitoches, Louisiana; died 1 December 1972, Minden, Louisiana Daughter of Marshall H. and Ada W. Jack Carver; married John B. Snell, 1918 Born into an upper-middle-class Baptist family, Ada Jack Carver was raised in an atmosphere of distinction and cultivated ease with the myths that continue to inform the girlhoods of the region. The soil of her native Natchitoches, a river town in northwest Louisiana, was enriched by multicultural strata—Indian, French, Spanish, and Anglo-American, with the usual Southern admixture of African-American. Carver remembered the locus and people of her childhood as colorful and exciting, especially in comparison to Minden, where she lived after she married. On the negative side, Carver’s heritage endowed her with a sense of propriety that became more fanatical after her marriage, and which may have impaired her ability to deal with materials related to her own class, race, and sex. It was as an insider jealously guarding the gate that she wrote such stories as ‘‘The Joyous Coast’’ (Southern Women’s Magazine, 1917), ‘‘Treeshy’’ (Harper’s, 1926), and ‘‘Maudie’’ (Harper’s, 1926). The last two are saved by the eccentricity of the protagonists, the bizarre circumstances of their lives, and Carver’s skill in delineating the interaction of inner and outer landscapes. A sense of cultural and moral ambivalence emerges from the confrontation of distinct socioeconomic classes and life styles that allows the reader to place in proper focus the supercilious attitude of the main narrative voices. A bright spot in the congenial but repressive milieu of Carver’s youth was a French grandmother who elected Carver from the family group to share her stories and perceptions, thereby stimulating the child’s intellect and literary imagination. Carver’s best stories deal with grandmothers or older women, e.g., ‘‘The Raspberry Dress’’ (The Century Magazine, 1926) and ‘‘The Old One’’ (Harper’s, 1926); or other cultures, e.g., ‘‘Redbone’’ (in A. Turner’s Southern Stories, 1925), and the one-act play, The Cajun (1926). The last two both won prestigious prizes. With the exception of ‘‘Redbone’’ the interest in these works centers on the perceptions and experiences of women, and on the construction of a cultural context. For the women in the stories, socialization provides a closed system that prevents communication with others and inhibits participation in the life that is offered to them. In ‘‘The Raspberry Dress’’ the grandmother is able to break through the barriers of her fantasy world and, instead of going back as she had intended, moves forward into life with her granddaughter. The dress itself is a central metaphor that reveals first the disjuncture and then the consonance between inner and outer worlds. The prospect is a good deal more bleak in The Cajun. Carver projects a wasteland situation in the play where ordinary ‘‘innocent’’ human acts tend to mutilate rather than further life’s purposes.


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Carver began to publish in 1915, but her most intense creative activity occurred in the mid-1920s. There are numerous unresolved mysteries surrounding the relationship between her life and her work. She virtually stopped publishing after 1928, with the exception of a children’s play, The Clock Strikes Tomorrow, written and produced in 1935, and a story, ‘‘For Suellen with Love,’’ which appeared in a college review in 1949. All of Carver’s personal papers are believed to have been destroyed at her death upon her request, so it’s unknown what manuscripts remained. She did work for a period of time on a novel, but we will probably never know whether or at what point her creative energies were stifled, or why.

which had already taken two of Cary’s sisters and which eventually occasioned her death following a lengthy illness.

What critics are now calling the ‘‘politics of greatness’’ has denied Carver a place in the annals of literary history she deserves to occupy. Although only one of her stories remained in print, Carver’s short fiction should be collected and studied in classes and by scholars interested in Southern or regional literature and women’s writing. Her work reflects a sensibility that conjoins time and place in a unique and enlightening way.

Cary was a firm believer in abolition and women’s rights, although many of her poems show woman’s noblest role to be that of wife and mother. Despite her illness and her self-imposed rigorous writing schedule, she served as the first president of the first women’s club in America, later kown as Sorosis. A prolific writer, Cary authored five volumes of poetry, as well as several novels and books of sketches and short stories. Although generally too didactic for modern sensibilities, her poetry was better than most of her contemporaries, and her prose retains a remarkable freshness. Clearly, her best works are the sketches based directly upon her recollections of western life.

OTHER WORKS: The Cajun (1926). Bagatelle (1927). The Clock Strikes Tomorrow (1935). The Collected Works of Ada Jack Carver (1980). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bowman, M. I., ‘‘The Negro in the Works of Three Contemporary Louisiana Writers’’ (thesis, 1931). Dodson, A., ‘‘Ada Jack Carver’’ (thesis, 1930). Ford, O. L., Ada Jack Carver: A Critical Biography (dissertation, 1975). Houston, M. A., ‘‘The Shadow of Africa on the Cane: An Examination of Africanisms in the Fiction of Lyle Saxon and Ada Jack Carver’’ (thesis, 1986). Taylor, D. M. W., Louisiana’s Literary Legacy: A Critical Appraisal of the Writings of Ada Jack Carver (dissertation, 1994). —ALICE PARKER

CARY, Alice Born 26 April 1820, Mount Healthy, Ohio; died 12 February 1871, New York, New York Also wrote under: Alice Carey, Patty Lee Daughter of Robert and Elizabeth Jessup Cary Growing up in what was then considered the far western area around Cincinnati, Ohio, Alice Cary’s educational opportunities were limited to those offered by a small country school, from which she was removed altogether quite early. Remarkably, with neither education, books, literary friends, nor encouragement, Cary and her sister Phoebe developed and sustained their literary talents. Lack of intellectual stimulation was not the only obstacle to Cary’s career as a writer. In 1835 her mother died of tuberculosis,

Alice and Phoebe began to publish first in western and then in eastern newspapers and journals.In 1850 Cary moved to New York, where Rufus W. Griswold praised her work in his Female Poets of America. It was also admired by other writers, including Edgar Allan Poe and Whittier, whose poem ‘‘The Singer’’ is about her. Phoebe joined Cary in 1851, and by 1856 both women had well-established literary reputations. Their home in New York City became the center of a literary salon that for 15 years met each Sunday.

Throughout Cary’s poetry there are recurring themes and personae. Much of her poetry is religious or is designed to teach a moral, with an overall dark tone. As she writes in ‘‘Life,’’ the world is ‘‘desolate and dreary,’’ ‘‘poor and pitiful,’’ and ‘‘fruitless and fruitionless.’’ Yet, not all of her poetry is pessimistic; her love poems, especially those in the 1873 volume, are vivid and powerful. In ‘‘Snowed Under,’’ for example, she stresses the sensuality of the older woman: ‘‘You would nip the blushing roses; / They were blighted long ago, / But the precious roots, my darling, / Are alive beneath the snow.’’ The most interesting personae of Cary’s poetry are the women. A recurring figure is that of the unmarried but pregnant woman. This figure in ‘‘Morna’’ and later in ‘‘No Ring’’ is ‘‘not mother, wife, nor bride.’’ Seduced and abandoned, she dies of a broken heart. Consistently, Cary urges understanding, offers poverty as both explanation and excuse, and stands quietly on the woman’s side. A second figure is the strong woman, who although she looks happily upon marriage, retains her own identity. Such a woman is found in ‘‘The Bridal Veil,’’ in Ballads, Lyrics, and Hymns (1866): We’re married! Oh, pray that our love do not fail! I have wings flattened down and hid under my veil: They are subtle as light—you can never undo them, And swift in their flight—you can never pursue them, And spite of all clasping and spite of all bands, I can slip like a shadow, a dream, from your hands. It is in Cary’s prose, however, that the modern reader would be most interested. Clovernook (1852, later appearing in five pirated editions printed in England), Clovernook Children (1855), and Pictures of Country Life (1859) taken together make a

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significant contribution to our understanding of early western community life. The sketches are not romantic; they depict lives that were deprived, hard, and marked by early deaths. There is ample material for study in Cary’s prose, especially for those interested in the folklore of women. Material incidental to the story lines gives fascinating glimpses into a world in which, as Aunt Caty in Clovernook Children tells us, ‘‘widders [are] sometimes better off than wives,’’ and in which an unmarried woman of 25 is a local tragedy. These stories are simple but satisfying, and especially remarkable for their vivid portrayal of life in the west.

OTHER WORKS: Poems of Alice and Phoebe Cary (1850). Hagar: A Story for Today (1852). Lyra and Other Poems (1852). Poems (1855). Married, Not Mated; or, How They Lived at Woodside and Throckmorton Hall (1856). Adopted Daughter and Other Tales (1859). The Josephine Gallery (edited by Cary with Phoebe Cary, 1859). The Bishop’s Son (1867). Snow-Berries: A Book for Young Folks (1867). A Lover’s Diary (1868). The Born Thrall (1871). The Last Poems of Alice and Phoebe Cary (edited by M. C. Ames, 1873). Ballads for Little Folks (edited by M. C. Ames, 1874). The Poetical Works of Alice and Phoebe Cary; with a Memorial of Their Lives (edited by M. C. Ames, 1877).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ames, M. C., A Memorial to Alice and Phoebe Cary, with Some of Their Later Poems (1873). Derby, J., Fifty Years Among Authors, Books, and Publishers (1884). Greeley, H., ‘‘Alice and Phoebe Cary’’ in Eminent Women of the Age (1869). Griswold, R. W., Female Poets of America (1859). Kolodny, A., The Land Before Her (1984). Venable, W. H., Beginnings of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley (1891). Wyman, M., ‘‘Women in the American Realistic Novel, 1860-1893’’ (dissertation, 1950). Reference works: American Women (1897). Cyclopedia of American Literature (1855). Essex Institute Historical Collections 109 (Jan. 1973). National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). A Supplement to Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors (1891). —BILLIE J. WAHLSTROM

CARY, Phoebe Born 4 September 1824, Mount Healthy, Ohio; died 31 July 1871, Newport, Rhode Island Daughter of Robert and Elizabeth Jessup Cary Phoebe Cary grew up in a rough farmhouse eight miles north of Cincinnati, Ohio. Her meager education, like her sister Alice’s,

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was based on The Trumpet, a Universalist journal, the Bible, and a few sentimental or sensational novels popular at the time. Cary started writing poetry at the age of thirteen. Like her sister’s poems, Cary’s are also filled with sudden deaths, meditations on graves, and lingering illness, characteristics not difficult to understand when one realizes Cary’s two sisters and mother succumbed to tuberculosis within two years of each other. Phoebe’s poems were included with those of her sister Alice in Rufus W. Griswold’s edition of The Female Poets of America (1849), and her early poems were collected with her sister’s for Poems of Alice and Phoebe Cary (1850). Following Alice to New York City, Cary settled there in 1851 and began to earn her living by her pen. Like her sister, she contributed to newspapers and religious journals. Within six years the two sisters had earned enough to purchase their own home on 20th Street, where they lived for the rest of their lives. Cary was not as prolific a writer as her sister Alice, a fact that put additional burdens on Alice, who was their main financial support. Cary’s poems are collected in two volumes, Poems and Parodies (1854) and Poems of Faith, Hope, and Love (1868). Most of her poems are sketches of simple country people or prayers for strength and God’s forgiveness. In a few poems she develops her attitudes toward women’s role. Critics of her day regarded Cary’s greatest gift to be her wit and keen parodic streak. Ironically, her best verse is that which parodies the sentimental works of Longfellow and the popular ballads of the day. Along with her sister, she also presided over the Sunday-evening receptions held for artistic and literary figures for 15 years in their 20th Street house. Sipping sweetened milk and water, the sisters presided over ‘‘the nearest approach to the first ideal blue-stocking reception in America.’’ Cary believed in temperance, human rights, and women’s social and civil enfranchisement. She briefly worked as assistant editor for Susan B. Anthony’s suffrage paper, The Revolution. Her attitude toward women, however, contained typical Victorian features. Cary and her sister, although vastly different in temperament, appearance, and productivity, were totally dependent on each other, and Cary often talked of the marriage proposals she rejected in order to continue living with Alice. After Alice’s death, Cary rapidly declined and died five months later. Their biographer Ames asserts: ‘‘It is impossible to estimate either sister without any reference to the other—as impossible as to tell what a husband and wife would have been, had they never lived together.’’

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ames, M. C., A Memorial of Alice and Phoebe Cary, with Some of Their Later Poems (1873). Greeley, H., ‘‘Alice and Phoebe Cary’’ in Eminent Women of the Age (1869). Pulsifer, J., ‘‘Alice and Phoebe Cary, Whittier’s Sweet Singers of the West’’ in Essex Institute Historical Collections (January 1973). Reference works: American Women (1897). Cyclopedia of American Literature (1855). National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). A Supplement


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to Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors (1891). —DIANE LONG HOEVELER

CASPARY, Vera Born 13 November 1904, Chicago, Illinois; died 13 June 1987 Daughter of Paul and Julia Cohen Caspary; married I. G. Goldsmith, 1949 Vera Caspary began her career by writing promotional booklets for an advertising agency, operating her own mail order ballet school, and editing trade magazines. She later drew from these experiences as well as from her Chicago background in her writings. Laura (1943) established Caspary’s reputation for suspenseful psychological studies and introduced one of her strongest fictional devices: multiple points of view. A unique treatment of the Pygmalion myth, the novel is especially satisfying in its adroit blending of clue and symbol. Caspary dramatized Laura (with G. Sklar, 1945), and J. Mankiewicz’s movie adaptation starred Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, and Clifton Webb. The film was nominated for four Academy Awards, and the musical theme was an instant success that is still heard today. Stranger Than Truth (1946) employs multiple points of view. As a result, all the narrators are rounded characters despite Caspary’s use of stereotypes. The novel is a blend of mystery and romance, and through Noble Barnes, the messiah of self-help psychology, Caspary castigates all simplistic reformers. Final Portrait (1971) includes serious discussion of painters’ ethics as it describes the search for the killer of Henry Leveret. The posthumous use of the victim’s own tape-recorded comments contributes to Caspary’s most sensational multiple point of view. The book is skillfully wrought, and its opening sentence, ‘‘I was refused admittance to my father’s funeral,’’ establishes an interest sustained throughout. The Husband (1957) offers a variant of the multiple viewpoint technique by reporting events twice—first as interpreted by Jean McVeigh, a wealthy spinster who marries to assuage loneliness, and then by Stuart Howell, entrepreneur and fraud. The device is largely responsible for the novel’s success. Bedelia (1945; film adaptation, 1947), False Face (1954), and Evvie (1960) are personality studies as well as mysteries. Bedelia focuses on the changes suspicion works in Charlie Horst when he learns that his almost perfect wife may be a murderer. A garish black pearl ring and a blizzard are among Caspary’s deftly handled symbols of deceit and growing uneasiness. False Face recounts the delayed maturation of Nina Redfield as she confronts the true personality of her childhood sweetheart, a fascinating combination of ‘‘simple faith and criminal blood.’’ The novel makes good use of angel and demon imagery; economical,

realistic dialogue provides sound characterization. Evvie examines murder within a triangular love affair and is very successful, especially in its depiction of the friendship between Evvie Ashton and Louise Goodman. Caspary’s nonmysteries, often centering on lonely urban girls, are realistic and moving portraits of young female wage earners. The White Girl (1929), Caspary’s first novel, is spare, unemotional, but powerful. Solaria Cox, having decided to pass for white, moves to New York. Her guilt and fear of discovery are dramatized in the blackmail scheme of a black man who turns seemingly innocent invitations to Harlem rent parties into extortion. Solaria’s relationships with her friend, Dell Findlay, and with her white fiancé complicate her masquerade. A Chosen Sparrow (1964), the story of Leni Neumann, survivor of Nazi prison camps, is Caspary’s interpretation of the aftereffects of the Holocaust. Taught to repress all memory of the horrors, Leni remains immature, easy prey for her ex-Nazi husband who symbolizes corruption in both wartime and postwar Germany. When Leni flees from him, she learns to know herself, to face her prison camp experiences, and to accept the fact of her survival without guilt. The novel is straightforward and unsensational, and Leni’s memories, forced to the surface by her husband, provide powerful flashbacks. During a 30-year period, Caspary was associated with more than 20 motion pictures. She adapted the story for A Letter to Three Wives which received outstanding critical reviews and appeared on the New York Times list of 10 Best Films of 1949. Other well known Caspary films are Claudia and David (1946), The Blue Gardenia (1953), Les Girls (1957), and Bachelor in Paradise (1961). Noted for her skill at characterization, her vivid evocation of setting, and her expert manipulation of tension, Caspary was considered a major talent: a sound novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. OTHER WORKS: Ladies and Gents (1929). Music in the Street (1930). Blind Mice (with W. Lenihan, 1931, film adaptation asWorking Girls, 1931). Geraniums in My Window (with W. S. Ornitz, 1934). The Murder in the Stork Club (1946). The Weeping and the Laughter (1950). Thelma (1952). Wedding in Paris (musical with H. May, 1956). The Man Who Loved His Wife (1966). The Rosecrest Cell (1967). Secrets of Grown-Ups (1979). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Klein, K. G., Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary (1994). McNamara, E., Laura as Novel, Film, and Myth (1992). Warren, A. L., Word Play: The Lives and Work of Four Women Writers in Hollywood’s Golden Age (dissertation, 1988). Reference works: Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection (1976). St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers (1996). Other references: Bookman (Sept. 1932). NYHTB (4 Sept. 1960). NYTBR (20 Jan. 1929, 18 Jan. 1940). SR (17 Sept. 1932). —JANE S. BAKERMAN

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CASTILLO, Ana Born 15 June 1953, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of Ramón (Ray) and Raquel (Rocha) Castillo; children: Marcel Ana Castillo grew up in Chicago, where she received a B.A. from Northwestern University (1975) and an M.A. from the University of Chicago. In 1991 she completed a Ph.D. in American studies at the University of Bremen, Germany. The voices populating Castillo’s texts speak from a multiplicity of positions that at times complement and at times contradict one another. Their subjectivity is a weave of differences, complex and potentially transformative. The epistolary novel The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986) explores the geographic and psychic borderlands between the U.S. and Mexico as internalized by Chicanas. It also maps the borderlands between women and women and women and men. Much of the bonding, both positive and negative, between Teresa and Alicia is established through their relationships with men, while they struggle with the differences between them. Teresa begins Letter 13, ‘‘Alicia, why i hated white women and sometimes didn’t like you,’’ and ends balancing Alicia’s class-and skin-privilege against her inferior physical attractiveness. While Teresa feels betrayed by Alicia’s ignorance of Mexican culture, she in turn hides from Alicia her perception that men are more attracted to her because she has internalized femininity as submissive. The text’s structure insists on polyvalence, presenting four possible combinations of the letters. As published, the ending foregrounds the bonding between the two women through failed relationships with men. The other endings represent the triumph of maternal and cultural dictates, the confirmation of women’s betrayal of women, and the quixotic preparations for yet another trip to Mexico. Castillo’s second novel Sapogonia (1990) positions women readers not to identify with the male subject Maximo, yet it is the story of Pastora, whose contradictory subjectivity is both revealed and concealed by the narrative. Maximo’s subjectivity is constructed in opposition to woman as inaccessible enigma and vagina dentata. He both desires the primordial unity he projects onto Pastora and is terrified of being absorbed by her. Although various alternative narratives are available to her, Pastora is complicit in her own objectification as enigma and object of desire. Her opacity also functions as a shield from intimacy; she is both contemptuously independent of men and dependent on them. Sapogonia explores male fantasy, its potential violence to women, and the female subject’s struggle to interpret herself both within and outside of this discourse on femininity. My Father Was a Toltec: Poems (1988), monolingual poems in English and Spanish, explores a subjectivity of marginalization: what it means to be poor, to be hated because of skin color and

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culture, to be the daughter of a Mexican woman and a Mexican man. The first section, ‘‘The Toltec,’’ focuses on what was received and rejected from father and mother; ‘‘La Heredera’’ on the ways heterosexual relationships have been culturally defined; ‘‘Ixtacihuatl Died in Vain’’ presents female bonding as a nonutopian possibility. The last section of My Father Was a Toltec documents the collective struggle against domination. ‘‘A Christmas Gift. . .’’ exposes literary authority as male, white, and privileged: ‘‘so these are not poems, i readily admit, / as i grapple with nonexistence, / making scratches with stolen pen.’’ The book ends with ‘‘In My Country,’’ a utopian vision of a world that has put an end to multiple oppressions: ‘‘In my world the poet sang loud / and clear and everyone heard / without recoiling. It was sweet / as harvest, sharp as tin, strong / as the western wind, and all had / a coat warm enough to bear it.’’ An expanded edition of the collection was published in 1995 as My Father Was a Toltec: New and Collected Poems. Castillo’s next work, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma (1994), is a series of 10 essays examining the roles of Mexican and Amerindian women in a sociological, historical, and political context. She challenges the notion of black-and-white race relations and advocates the need for Xicanisma—a brand of politically and socially active Chicana feminism. A collection of short stories followed in 1996 with the publication of Loverboys: Stories. The medley varies greatly in setting, narrative, and structure, but each examines an aspect of love. Women in the stories deal with issues of race, culture, love lost and love gained. Her latest work takes a different approach to Mexican history with a series of essays, poetry, fiction, and historical writings on the Virgin Guadalupe. Goddess of the Americas, La Diosa de Las Americas; Writings on the Virgin Guadalupe (1996) brings together the work of Octavio Paz, Sandra Cisneros, Denise Chavez, and others to examine the impression this figure has had on the people and history of Mexico and in countries far beyond in art and literature. Castillo has been recognized for her work from nearly the beginning of her career. She was given the American Book award, Before Columbus Foundation (1986 for The Mixquiahuala Letters), was honored in 1987 and in 1988 by Women’s Foundation of San Francisco, was granted a California Arts Council fellowship for fiction in 1989 and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for poetry in 1990, and received a New Mexico Arts Commission Grant in 1991. For So Far From God, she was awarded the Carl Sandburg Literary Award in Fiction (1993) and the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Award (1994). Castillo’s work continues to cast light on an often forgotten theme, refusing to let her issues drown in the sea of multiculturalism.

OTHER WORKS: Zero Makes Me Hungry (1975). I Close My Eyes (to See) (1976). Otro canto (1977). The Invitation (1979). Keats, Poe, and the Shaping of Cortazar’s Mythopoesis (1981). This


Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (coedited and collected with C. Moraga and G. Anzaldúa, 1981). Women Are Not Roses (1984). Esta puente, mi espalda. Voces de mujeres tercermundistas en los Estados Unidos (coeditor, 1988). Third Woman 4: The Sexuality of Latinas (coeditor, 1989). So Far from God (1993).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Horno-Delgado, A., et al, eds., Breaking Boundaries. Latina Writing and Critical Readings (1989). Alarcón, N., ed., Critical Approaches to Hispanic Women’s Literature (1994). Reference works: CA (1991). CA (Online, 1999). Hispanic Writers (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). WW of Hispanic Americans (1991, 1992). Other references: Americas Review (1992). Booklist (15 Sept.1994, 19 Aug. 1996, 15 Oct. 1996). Discurso Literario: Revista de Estudios Iberoamericanos (1990). MELUS (22 Sept. 1997). —YVONNE YARBRO-BEJARANO, UPDATED BY CARRIE SNYDER

CATHER, Willa Sibert Born 7 December 1873, Gore, Virginia; died 24 April 1947, New York, New York Daughter of Charles F. and Virginia Boak Cather Willa Cather, the first of seven children, was born to parents who owned a farm in the hilly country of northern Virginia. The family was dominated by Cather’s mother, a vigorous woman, backed up by Cather’s maternal grandmother, who made her home with them. Cather was to retain strong familial attachments all her life. In 1883 the family moved to the Nebraska frontier, and in 1884 to Red Cloud, a ‘‘bitter, dead little western town,’’ where Cather lived for the next six years. Cather, educated at home until high school, later attended the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. From 1895 to 1906, Cather lived in Pittsburgh, working first as a journalist on the Pittsburgh Leader and then as the principal of a Pittsburgh high school. Here she formed a friendship with Isabelle McClung, which was to last until McClung’s death. In 1906, Cather joined the staff of McClure’s Magazine in New York City and for the next six years assisted S.S. McClure as managing editor, staff writer, and general factotum. In these years she also formed a lifelong relationship with Edith Lewis. Between 1912 (the year she left McClure’s) and 1922, Cather wrote five novels, all of which derive from her childhood memory of the people and lifestyle she had observed in Nebraska. These are O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), My Ántonia (1918), One of Ours (1922), and A Lost Lady (1923). The least

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distinguished of these—One of Ours—was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. A novel of World War I, it tells the story of Claude Wheeler, a young man who has spent a dreary life on a Nebraska farm and has a brief experience of beauty and fulfillment in France before he is killed in action. In the years between 1922 and 1925, Cather seems to have suffered the kind of crisis bearing different names, according to one’s circumstances, e.g., midlife crisis, anomie, a fall from grace, acedia, depression, alienation. Cather attributed it to the times, a plausible interpretation since her melancholy was similar to the spiritual dislocation experienced by so many Americans after World War I. The new America that under Warren Harding was returning to normalcy seemed to her a vulgar and drab wasteland. Her despondency may also have stemmed from events in her personal life. Around 1923, Isabelle McClung, recently married to the violinist Jan Hambourg, went to live permanently in France. Cather’s recovery seems to have been related to a spiritual rebirth, marked externally by joining the Episcopalian Church in 1922. The Professor’s House (1925), My Mortal Enemy (1926), Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), and Shadows on the Rock (1931)—the four great works of her highwater period— illustrate her feeling that religion is the best life has to offer humankind. In the last 16 years of her life Cather wrote little. Deaths of loved ones, illness, housing difficulties, physical disabilities, the clouds of the Great Depression, and World War II all seem to have sapped her magnificent vitality. The more closely one looks at Cather’s works in the context of her life, the more clearly one sees Cather was always writing about herself. ‘‘Life began for me when I ceased to admire and began to remember,’’ she said. This reserved woman, who went to unusual lengths to maintain privacy, was driven by an inexorable need to give form to and reveal, albeit indirectly, her inner self. Some of the power in her works surely comes from this tension—the romantic confessional temperament writing in the classical restrained mode. Cather’s most widely read novel is My Ántonia, a fact lamented by many Cather critics. Ántonia is a daughter in an immigrant family struggling to survive on a farm on the Nebraska plains of the 1890s. Needing money, Ántonia enters domestic service and is seduced and abandoned by the son of her employer. Left with her child, she returns to the farm. By the end of the novel, Ántonia has triumphed. Married to the mild-tempered Anton Cuzak, she reigns, among a brood of children, over a prospering farm. The story is told by Jim Burden, Ántonia’s childhood friend. Now a weary middle-aged man, returning to Nebraska on a visit, he has experienced little joy from his successful law practice or his marriage. Jim sees Ántonia on many levels—as a childhood friend and fulfilled woman, as the apotheosis of the pioneer woman who conquered the land, as a personification of eternal values. To Jim, Ántonia symbolizes an America of the past, one in which there was heroism in everyday life. It seems safe to suggest here that Jim is Cather’s alter ego.

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A Lost Lady, set at the end of the era of transcontinental railroad expansion, is the story of Marion Forrester, the beautiful, young wife of Daniel Forrester, a dynamic railroad builder in the great days of the conquest of the West. As Daniel’s health and fortunes fail, Marion’s world is restricted to Sweet Water, a small railway-junction town. Because of her determination to return to a life style congenial to her, she accommodates herself to Ivy Peters, who becomes her business manager and her lover. Marion’s designs work. She escapes Sweet Water and in the end seems to have found happiness as the wife of a wealthy old Englishman in Argentina. By the end of the novel, word of her death reaches Sweet Water. On another level, A Lost Lady tells the story of Niel Herbert, the central observer. The nephew of Daniel’s lawyer and friend, Niel has been fiercely committed to the Forrester family in adolescence and young manhood. The emotion of the novel stems from Niel’s disillusionment with Marion and sadness about the passing of a greater era. With all the passion of idealistic youth, Niel cannot accept the fact that beautiful people adjust to the ugly and the sordid. Niel wants Marion to be a high priest of beauty. But Marion is a realist; she gets what she wants. This slender book is surely one of the high points of American fiction. Cather’s unaffected, powerful, and lucid style is the result of her untiring struggle for, as she formulated it herself, the correct and appropriate word, which makes possible ‘‘the gift of inner empathy.’’ In the course of The Professor’s House, Godfrey St. Peter (the professor) experiences a central passage. The setting is Hamilton, a college town in Michigan, about 1923. In the good days, now in the past for Godfrey, he had written a highly acclaimed work, an eight-volume historical chronicle of the Spanish adventurers in North America. He had enjoyed his teaching, had been blessed with a happy family life, and responded gratefully to a variety of good fortune. One of the most rewarding episodes in his life was his friendship with his student Tom Outland, a young man endowed with unusual gifts of mind and character. At the beginning of the novel Godfrey finds himself in a spiritual crisis. He is unable ‘‘to account for the fact that he now wanted to run away from everything he had intensely cared for.’’ He cannot return to the past. Nor can he face the future—a future with a once-beloved wife, now increasingly worldly and opportunistic, with daughters blighted by money, with uncongenial sonsin-law, with students and colleagues fettered by the materialistic values of the age. Only death can liberate Godfrey from his plight. The climax occurs on the night that gas infiltrates the attic room in which he is sleeping. Aware of what is happening, he passively drifts off to sleep, but he is saved by Augusta, the German Catholic seamstress who functions as a dea ex machina. Cather elliptically presents the change Godfrey undergoes. ‘‘He had let something go—and it was gone. . . .’’ His family, on a European holiday at the time, would probably not ‘‘realize that he

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was not the same man they had said goodbye to.’’ He muses on Augusta and himself after his encounter with death. ‘‘Augusta was like the taste of bitter herbs; she was the bloomless side of life that he had always run away from.—Yet when he had to face it, he found that it wasn’t altogether repugnant.’’ At the center of the novel lies Tom Outland’s account of the discovery of the ruins of the cliff dwellers on the Blue Mesa in the southwest. Living in their towns, examining the artifacts, Tom has a revelation of a life hitherto undreamed of. How much to be admired were the cliff dwellers. Living in a communal society in the midst of secure, spectacularly beautiful, natural surroundings, they spent harmonious days creating exquisite objects of daily use and worshiping their gods in reverential ritual, and also peaceably procuring the necessities of life. The Professor’s House is commonly held to be Cather’s autobiography, and apparently, through Godfrey, Cather wrote of what lay close to her heart. The novel may be looked at as a double autobiography—one in which Cather juxtaposed the young Willa as Tom Outland and the middle-aged Willa as Godfrey. Tom is very much like Jim Burden in My Ántonia and Niel Herbert in A Lost Lady. Myra Driscoll, the protagonist of My Mortal Enemy is the beloved heir apparent of a wealthy and powerful Roman Catholic uncle until she marries Oswald Henshawe against her uncle’s wishes. A fierce and unrelenting man, her uncle rejects and disinherits her. She gradually realizes how much she resembles her uncle: ‘‘I can feel his savagery strengthen inside of me.’’ In spite of Oswald’s gentle devotion, and the fact that his life, even his business affairs, have suffered from Myra’s tormented temperament, she begins to feel he is her mortal enemy. And also that she herself has been her own mortal enemy. ‘‘Violent natures like hers sometimes turn against themselves and all their idolatries.’’ Unreconciled to her fate, this magnificent, bitter woman meets a grim, lonely death at the end of the novel. Cather’s most mysterious work derives its impact from what remains unsaid, from the depths that seem constantly to be assaulting the cool surface. Religion, Myra comes to believe, ‘‘is different from everything else; because in religion seeking is finding.’’ Through a variety of images, Cather suggests that Myra’s sin was to have sought and found false gods, the most deceitful of which is romantic love. By rejecting the Roman Catholicism of her childhood and the position she was born to, she has lost herself. Cather does full justice to the compelling lure of eros, which continues to exert its power over Myra and Nellie Birdseye, the narrator of the story. Death Comes for the Archbishop—based on the lives of Bishop Jean Baptiste L’Amy (1814-88) and his vicar, Father Joseph Machebeut—is the chronicle of two French priests who are assigned to set up an apostolic vicariate in the territory of New Mexico, a work that could be accomplished only by long, arduous travels and devotion to their commitment. Father Jean-Marie Latour, later archbishop of Santa Fé, is patrician, intellectual, and


introverted. He is loved and admired for his quiet courage, for his courtesy, and for the respect with which he listens to the Indians’ tales of their old religion. His vicar, Father Joseph Vaillant, practical, companionable, is unswerving in his faith in God’s providence, in his zeal to convert people to Christianity. United in their love of France and their common purpose, they succeed in organizing the new diocese of Sante Fé despite the apathy of the Indians, the opposition of the Spanish priests, and the adversities that are the lot of all pioneers. The symbol of their success lies in the building of the cathedral. Technically, Death Comes for the Archbishop is perhaps best viewed as a picaresque novel, though the journeys made here are in the service of God. The framework gave Cather scope to communicate what she found compelling—biographies of many characters, recapitulation of miracles and saints’ legends, transmission of old documents, depiction of rituals and beliefs of the Roman Catholic church, description of landscapes and interiors. The unity of the novel derives from the characters of Bishop Latour and Father Vaillant, and the religious drama being enacted. It is a richly sympathetic creation of a golden world in which all ideals are realized. The particular nature of her achievement is viewed thus by Louis Auchincloss: ‘‘But the real common denominator is the glory of the southwest landscape described in a lyric prose that is the summit of the author’s achievement. There is nothing more vivid in American fiction that this series of brilliant pictures of an arid, glowing country.’’ It is Cather’s lot to be America’s least comprehended major novelist. Wallace Stevens said about her that ‘‘we have nothing better than she is.’’ But the particularity of her genius is elusive, and comments about Cather’s work often focus on its less central aspects. On Cather’s style, there is little dissent—her prose is of the highest quality, variously described as classical, restrained, wonderfully transparent. Cather wrote language of a kind that is not indigenous to American letters, yet the nature of her genius was such that the prose sounds impeccably American. Cather’s lyrical and profound evocations of nature in its many forms are not surpassed in American letters, and she is one of the few American writers who can take her place among the great European writers who have gloriously pictured the natural world. Cather has, as could not be otherwise, been recognized as a religious writer. It was Henry Steele Commager who wrote: ‘‘And all her novels and stories . . . were animated by a single great theme, as they were graced by a single felicitous style. The theme was that of the supremacy of moral and spiritual over material values, the ever recurrent but inexhaustible theme of gaining the whole world and losing one’s soul.’’ Cather may have been a mystic who saw this world as a prism of God.

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Many critics of the 1920s considered her to be the best American writer of her day. Cather’s rank is more qualified today, but the tide has started to turn, and Cather’s work is apparently to be revived with vigor and enthusiasm, as the majority of her works have been reprinted throughout the 1990s. When her work receives its just desserts, Cather will take her rightful place as one of America’s great writers.

OTHER WORKS: April Twilights (1903). The Troll Garden (1905). Alexander’s Bridge (1912). My Autobiography: S. S. McClure (ghost written by Cather, 1914). Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920). April Twilights, and Other Poems (1923). Obscure Destinies (1932). Lucy Gayheart (1935). Not Under Forty (1936). The Novels and Stories (1937-41). Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940). The Old Beauty, and Others (1948). On Writing (1949). Writings from Willa Cather’s Campus Years (edited by J. Shively, 1950). Willa Cather in Europe; Her Own Story of the First Journey (edited by G. N. Kates, 1956). Early Stories (edited by M. R. Bennett, 1957). Willa Cather’s Collected Short Fiction, 1892-1912 (edited by M. R. Bennett, 1965). The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather’s First Principles and Critical Statements, 1893 to 1896 (edited by B. Slote, 1966). The World and the Parish. Willa Cather’s Articles and Reviews, 1893-1902 (edited by W. M. Curtin, 1970). Uncle Valentine, and Other Stories (edited by B. Slote, 1973). Willa Cather in Person: Interviews, Speeches, and Letters (1986, 1990). The Willa Cather Reader (1997).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Auchincloss, L., Pioneers and Caretakers, A Study of Nine American Women Writers (1965). Bennett, M., The World of Willa Cather (1961). Bloom, H., ed., Willa Cather (1999). Bloom, E. A., and L. D. Bloom, Willa Cather’s Gift of Sympathy (1964). Dennis, H. M., ed., Willa Cather and European Cultural Influences (1996). Downs, M. C., Becoming Modern: Willa Cather’s Journalism (1999). Durham, M., History, Women and Cultural Transmission in the Work of Willa Cather (dissertation, 1991). Edel, L., Willa Cather: The Paradox of Success (1960). Faulkner, C., Putting Down the Rebellion: The Narrative Repression of Class in Willa Cather’s Fiction (disseration, 1993). Funda, E. I., ‘‘‘Every Word Counted for Twenty’: Storytelling and Intimacy in Willa Cather’s Fiction’’ (dissertation, 1994). Giannone, R., Music in Willa Cather’s Fiction (1968). Hacker, J. L. H., ‘‘Building a Cathedral of Alienation: A Study of Despair in Willa Cather’s Fiction’’ (dissertation, 1997). Heilbrun, C. G., Women’s Lives: The View from the Threshold (1999). Kvasnicka, M., ‘‘Education in the Parish, Preparation for the World: The Educational Tradition in the Life and Works of Willa Cather’’ (dissertation, 1997). Lewis, E., Willa Cather Living (1953). Lindemann, M. Willa Cather: Queering America (1999). McDonald, J., The Incommunicable Past: Willa Cather’s Pastoral Modes and the Southern Literary Imagination (dissertation, 1994). McDonald, J., The Stuff of Our Forebears: Willa Cather’s Southern Heritage (1998). McFarland, D. T., Willa Cather (1972). McLendon, M. J., ‘‘That Indefinable Something’’:

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The Role of Passion and Desire in the Works of Willa Cather (dissertation, 1993). Murphy, J. J., ed., Five Essays on Willa Cather (1974). O’Brien, S., ed., New Essays on Cather’s My Antonia (1999). O’Connor, M. A., Willa Cather: The Critical Reception (in preparation). Randall, J. H., III, The Landscape and the Looking Glass: Willa Cather’s Search for Value (1960). Rapin, R., Willa Cather (1930). Reynolds, G., Willa Cather in Context: Progress, Race, Empire (1996). Schroeter, J., ed., Willa Cather and Her Critics (1967). Sergeant, E. S., Willa Cather: A Memoir (1963). Slote, B., ‘‘Willa Cather’’ in Sixteen Modern American Authors (1974). Slote, B., and V. Faulkner, eds., The Art of Willa Cather (1974). Stouck, D., Willa Cather’s Imagination (1975). Urgo, J. R., Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration (1995). Winters, L., Giving the Land a Voice: The Demands of Multiple Landscapes in Five Cather Novels (dissertation, 1990). Woodress, J., Willa Cather: Her Life and Art (1970). Wooten, S. M., Willa Cather: Writer of the Prairie (1998). Wurzel, N., ‘‘Gender and Myth: Willa Cather’s Affirmative Modernism’’ (dissertation, 1993). Reference works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1987). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —LINA MAINIERO

CATHERWOOD, Mary Hartwell Born 16 December 1847, Luray, Ohio; died 26 December 1902, Chicago, Illinois Also wrote under: Mary Hartwell Daughter of Marcus and Phoebe Thompson Hartwell; married James Catherwood, 1877 After graduation in 1868 from Granville Female College in Granville, Ohio, Mary Hartwell Catherwood taught in Ohio and Illinois before she was able to support herself by writing. Her early work combined strands of critical realism and melodrama. She published many short stories and long serials in magazines such as the Atlantic and Lippincott’s. Two of the early serials, A Woman in Armor (1875) and Craque-o-Doom (1881), were published as novels. She also wrote a number of juveniles in the early years, which, while not well plotted, contain some fine local color; the best of these, Rocky Fork (1882), remained in print until the middle of this century. In 1889, with the publication of The Romance of Dollard, an historical romance based on the work of Francis Parkman, Catherwood took a new direction. From then until her death, she wrote romantic historical fiction, using the French settlement of the West and Canada as background. While remaining in the Midwest (in 1886 she helped found the Western Association of Writers), she turned her back on realistic treatment of Midwestern material. At her famous confrontation with Hamlin Garland at the

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Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, she argued for ‘‘the aristocratic in literature.’’ As an historical novelist Catherwood is somewhat of a contradiction; meticulously accurate about details, writing under the influence of Parkman, she nevertheless committed one of the cardinal sins of the careless historical novelist: she wove fact with fiction in recounting the lives of actual persons. Catherwood’s most popular novel, Lazarre (1901), is based on the claims of Eleazar Williams (1789-1858) that he was the lost dauphin of France. The novel is well written and exciting, with violence, dramatic scenes such as a visit with Napoleon, traditional American characters such as Johnny Appleseed, and a romantic ending in which Lazarre gives up the throne of France for the woman he loves and the freedom of the western plains. Otis Skinner dramatized Lazarre in 1902 and the play had a successful if not spectacular run. Historians of American fiction suggest that Catherwood’s importance lies in her having been the first novelist to write popular romantic historical novels, forecasting the bestselling genre at the turn of the century. Catherwood was the first woman novelist born west of the Alleghenies and the first woman novelist to be a college graduate. As a writer, however, she is much more important today because of her works of critical realism and her pioneering regional material. Her two early novels, A Woman in Armor and Craque-o-Doom, contain tantalizing hints of the social realist she might have become. A Woman in Armor, despite its melodramatic plot, has a detailed if satiric description of the town in which the action is set, Little Boston. It also has a slight feminist theme, although she never developed it much beyond that novel. Catherwood’s major literary achievement as a regionalist/ realist can be found in her short stories; three volumes of which remained in print into the 1980s. Her relentless portrayal of various Midwest towns, from Ohio to Indiana and Illinois, attest to her craftsmanship. Surrounded by the glamour of nature and the seasons, her towns are dreary cultural wastelands peopled with squalid characters whose little dramas often illustrate such basic beauties of human nature as parental love. Her most realistic stories, except for ‘‘The Spirit of an Illinois Town,’’ are not collected and can only be found in periodicals. When Catherwood abandoned realism, however, she did not leave the short story behind; in fact, she was one of the few writers who tried to use the materials of historical romance in the short-story form. Catherwood has a remarkable record of ‘‘firsts’’ to her name, and her early work is worth reading. It is ironic that perhaps her career as a serious writer was betrayed by her disdain for those prairie villages that she so realistically portrayed. ‘‘The aristocratic in literature’’ has lost its charms for the modern reader, who eagerly looks for evidence of just such provincial experience which Catherwood (and her characters) longed to escape.

OTHER WORKS: Lower Illinois Valley: Local Sketches of Long Ago of Mrs. Mary Hartwell Catherwood (1875). The Dogberry


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Bunch (1879). Old Caravan Days (1884). The Secrets at Roseladies (1888). The Story of Tonty (1890). The Lady of Fort St. John (1891). Old Kaskaskia (1893). The White Islander (1893). The Chase of St. Castin and Other Stories (1894). The Days of Jeanne d’Arc (1897). Bony and Ban: The Story of a Printing Venture (1898). Heroes of the Middle West: French (1898). Mackinac and Other Lake Stories (1899). The Queen of the Swamp and Other Plain Americans (1899). Spanish Peggy (1899). ‘‘The Stirring Off’’ in Home Material: Ohio’s Nineteenth-Century Regional Women’s Fiction (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dondore, D. A., The Prairie and the Making of America (1926). Garland, H., Roadside Meetings (1931). Pattee, F. L., A History of American Literature Since 1870. Price, R., A Critical Biography of Mary Hartwell Catherwood: A Study of Middle Western Regional Authorship, 1847-1902 (dissertation, 1944). Treece, P. B., ‘‘The Characterization of the Nineteenth Century Woman in the Selected Works of Mrs. Mary Hartwell Catherwood’’ (thesis, 1975). Wilson, M. L., Biography of Mary Hartwell Catherwood (1900, 1983). Reference works: DAB, NCAB (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: American Literature 17 (1945). Bulletin of Cincinnati Historical Society (1964). Michigan Historical Magazine 30 (1946). —BEVERLY SEATON

CATT, Carrie (Lane) Chapman Born 9 January 1859, Ripon, Wisconsin; died 9 March 1947, New Rochelle, New York Daughter of Lucius and Maria Clinton Lane; married Leo Chapman, 1885; George W. Catt, 1890 A key architect of the woman-suffrage victory in 1920, Carrie Chapman Catt was essentially an activist-lecturer rather than a writer. In 1917, she edited her first book, Woman Suffrage by Federal Constitutional Amendment, a series of six essays, four of which Catt wrote herself. Here she analyzed briefly the political obstacles women faced and focused on the practical reasons why the federal amendment route seemed the only truly feasible one. She discussed the problems of fraud women encountered in seeking state suffrage amendments and the causes of failure of the three 1916 referenda. She concluded with a chapter countering objections to the federal amendment. In 1923 came her major work, Woman Suffrage and Politics which she coauthored with Nettie Rogers Shuler. Writing immediately after the 1920 victory, Catt gave major attention not to the history of the woman suffrage drive itself, nor even to her own role in devising the final winning strategy. Rather she dealt with the question of why this victory had been so long delayed. Catt contended the delay was not caused by a hostile or indifferent

public opinion; instead, it was the result of political maneuvering, ‘‘the buying and selling of American politics.’’ Twice, according to Catt, women found the suffrage movement tied in with other major reforms: black rights in the 1860s and the Prohibition campaign later. Twice politicians gave precedence to the other issues. Catt focused particularly on the long period 1870-1910 when, she argued, the major obstacle was Prohibition. She denied any necessary linkage of suffrage with Prohibition. But the liquor forces, along with their allies, the political bosses, believed woman’s suffrage would adversely affect their interests. These two groups worked actively if often secretly against woman suffrage and for two generations thwarted it. Not till the rise of the Progressive Party in 1910 did proponents of woman suffrage secure a major political ally nationally. Then politicians of the two major parties began to break their long silence and opened the door for the successful new campaign. The final woman suffrage victory, however, Catt argued, was essentially a triumph for women acting from outside politics. She did pay limited tribute to male insiders who finally rescued woman suffrage from ‘‘the party trap.’’ Apart from these two books, Catt’s other publications were generally speeches later issued as pamphlets. Prior to 1920, woman suffrage dominated her concern; later, her major cause became world peace. One of the most significant suffrage pamphlets was The Winning Strategy, a 1916 speech in which Catt presented her blueprint for the final victory campaign: a double effort for state enfranchisement and the federal amendment. The thrust of her concern as proponent of world peace is seen in The Status Today of War vs. Peace, an address to the Third Conference on the Cause and Cure of War (1928). She defined the two great causes of war as being first, the dependence on ‘‘war preparedness as the way to peace’’ and second, economic colonialism with its underlying racism. The hope for peace she found in antiwar treaties between civilized nations and in an educated public opinion in which women must play a key part. Catt’s writings generally reflect the cool, logical style that hallmarked her political action. She avoids rhetorical flashes, relying instead on perceptive analysis and the weight of historical evidence. She saw suffrage as an evolutionary step, the logical outcome of an earlier commitment to democracy. She did reveal an underlying conservative cast of thought in her suffrage arguments. She indicted the major parties for offering the vote to unprepared black males and to uneducated Southern European males, many only on ‘‘first papers.’’ Though generally objective in her writings, Catt in Woman Suffrage and Politics often spoke as a partisan deeply wounded in the political struggle. The cost of the long-delayed victory for many women, she argued, was disillusionment with political parties. It is perhaps a mark of the struggle’s cost to herself that after 1920 her major cause was a nonpartisan one, world peace. OTHER WORKS: Woman Suffrage and Its Basic Argument (Interurban Woman Suffrage Series, no. 2, 1907). Woman Suffrage and

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the Home (Interurban Woman Suffrage Series, no. 4, 1907). A Bit of History (Interurban Woman Suffrage Series, no. 5, 1908). Perhaps (circa 1910). Do You Know? (1912). Woman Suffrage (1913). Feminism and Suffrage (1914). Address to the Congress of the United States (1917). Objections to the Federal Amendment (1919). Then and Now (1939). Who Can Answer? (1939). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Fowler, R. B., Carrie Catt: Feminist Politician (1986). Library of Congress Manuscript Division, The Blackwell Family, Carrie Chapman Catt, and the National American Woman Suffrage Association (1975). Peck, M. G., Carrie Chapman Catt (1944). Stanton E. C. et al, History of Woman Suffrage (1881). Van Voris, J., Carrie Chapman Catt: A Life (1987). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Political Science Review (Aug. 1923). NYT (13 May 1923). —INZER BYERS

CAULKINS, Frances Manwaring Born 26 April 1795, New London, Connecticut; died 3 February 1869, New London, Connecticut Daughter of Joshua and Fanny Manwaring Caulkins Frances Manwaring Caulkins centered her literary attention on two radically different areas of concern: the religious education of young people and local history. She began her work in the 1830s writing for the American Tract Society, which published a wide range of her work over the next 30 years, including The Child’s Hymn Book (1835), Children of the Bible: as Examples and as Warnings (1842), and Eve and Her Daughters of Holy Writ (1861). Representative of her religious educational work was The Bible Primer (1854), also issued under the title Youth’s Bible Studies. In the six short volumes, Caulkins gave brief practical lessons, utilizing question-and-answer techniques, narrative, and inspirational material. She addressed herself particularly to the individual student seeking ‘‘self-cultivation.’’ Accordingly, she deliberately omitted ‘‘what is bulky, heavy or wearisome’’ and utilized biblical texts rather than commentaries. Caulkins’s major achievements as a writer, however, came in the area of local history. She wrote first The History of Norwich, Connecticut, from Its Settlement in 1660 to January, 1845. A second, revised edition carried the history to 1866. She also wrote The History of New London, Connecticut (1852), with a second edition continuing to 1860. In the early sections of both works, Caulkins dealt with the local Indian tribes, their leadership conflicts, and their relationships with the new English settlers. In her view, ‘‘the providence of God’’ had prepared the way for peaceable settlement, for the tribes, weakened by conflict, eagerly sought new allies. Her perspective on the Indians is sympathetic, although at times

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condescending, and she stresses their dependent qualities. She underscores what she sees as the paternalistic concern of Norwich leaders for the Indians. Caulkins stressed the early religious focus of town life, the decline of fervor in the late 17th century and the impact of the 18th-century Great Awakening. She stressed the work of Tennent, Davenport, and Whitefield, citing the positive impact of revivalism as well as the problems of church division and separatism. She also noted in New London the role of the Rogerene sect, typical of religious extremists in their ‘‘determination to be persecuted.’’ While her primary focus is on political and religious history, Caulkins also has a sound grasp of local, social, and economic history. She noted the close hold on town leadership by descendants of the early town fathers; not until the end of the 18th century was there substantial expansion in the Norwich leadership ranks. Her history of New London concentrated on the pre-1815 period, with an account of the expansion of the whaling industry in the 19th century. The Norwich history dealt in some detail with 19th-century events, including the expansion of manufacturing in Norwich itself and neighboring valley towns. Caulkins underscored the towns’ roles in the various wars, particularly the Revolutionary War. In the revised edition of the Norwich history, she paid tribute to the town’s role in the Civil War. Of the two histories, that of New London has the more localized view, stressing personalities and incidents often of purely local concern. In both histories, Caulkins takes the view that events of local history ‘‘illustrate classes of men and ages of time.’’ She writes with ease; her tone is at times romantic. While she does not escape totally the self-congratulatory notes of the native, she does attempt to evaluate events within a broader historical perspective. Though the material differs sharply, there is a common denominator in her two types of writing. Both in her writing for the American Tract Society and in her histories, Caulkins has in mind young people and their concerns. A sense of God’s providence informs both types of works and she seeks to arouse through history ‘‘a more affectionate sympathy for your ancestors.’’ OTHER WORKS: The Tract Primer (circa 1848). Memoir of the Rev. William Adams, of Dedham, Mass., and of the Rev. Eliphalet Adams, of New London, Conn., and Their Descendants, with the Journal of William Adams, 1666-1682 (1849). Bride Brook, A Legend of New London, Connecticut (1852). Ye Antient Buriall Place of New London, Conn. (1899). The Stone Records of Groton (edited by E. S. Gilman, 1903). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Haven, H. P., ‘‘Memoir,’’ in History of Norwich (1874). Trumbull, H. C., A Model Superintendent: A Sketch of the Life . . . of Henry P. Haven (1880). Wilcox, G. B., In Memoriam, Miss Frances Manwaring Caulkins (1869). Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: New London County Historical Society Records (1890-94). —INZER BYERS


CAZNEAU, Jane McManus Born 6 April 1807, Troy, New York; died 12 December 1878, near Cape Hatteras, North Carolina Wrote under: Mrs. William Leslie Cazneau, Cora Montgomery, Corinne Montgomery Daughter of William T. and Catharina Coons McManus; married Allan B. (or William F.) Storms, 1825; William L. Cazneau, circa 1848 Jane McManus Cazneau’s major work is Eagle Pass; or, Life on the Border (1852), a first-person narrative of her months in a Texas border town. It is, as Cazneau states in her preface, mainly a protest against the government’s Native American policy, which she labels a system of ‘‘despoilment and extermination.’’ She also wants to alert the public to the Mexican government’s policy of imprisoning American citizens living in Mexico and along the border. In her opening chapter, Cazneau urges her countrymen to pressure Congress to act in the aid of these citizens; she blames their imprisonment as much on the U.S. government as on the Mexican regime. Her work also provides fascinating accounts of her conversations with the Native Americans and slaves living in Eagle Pass. Perhaps most compelling is her description of Wild Cat, the Seminole chief. Cazneau recounts his warm eloquence in talking with her as well as his resigned, yet devastating assessment of the White Man’s role in destroying his people. Eagle Pass closes with stunning predictions of the Red Man’s threatened extermination and of the inevitability of a revolution in Mexico. Cazneau, solidly on the side of the oppressed, pleads for Congress to stand behind the spirit of freedom in Mexico. She also attacks the abolitionists for their ‘‘hypocritical’’ attitudes, accusing them of ignoring the great injustice done to the Indians and the white servant classes. Cazneau’s other works include two companion pieces: The Queen of Islands (1850) and The King of Rivers (1850). In the former, Cazneau proposes aid to the Cuban people in their revolution against Spain. She further urges that Cuba be annexed and eventually granted statehood. Her treatise provides a comprehensive study of the Cuban economy, with charts, diagrams, and governmental statistics to document Cuba’s potential for economic growth and therefore its benefits to the U.S. In The King of Rivers, Cazneau argues against slavery along the states bordering the Mississippi River, again using her research to support the position that slavery would prove an economic, as well as a moral, disaster. She predicts the imminent emancipation of the slaves, and also denounces the abuse of the Native American and his land. Cazneau’s style is simple and direct. Even though she apologizes in her preface to Eagle Pass for her lack of rhetorical flourish, her clear-thinking, straightforward prose style is her strength. Cazneau presents her arguments in practical terms, basing her convictions on her research and knowledge of economic facts. She believes passionately in the cause of oppressed peoples who attempt to claim their freedom, and she thinks the historic revolutionary struggle of her own nation obligates the U.S. to

CERVANTES

support the claims of the Native American, the slave, and the oppressed everywhere. Cazneau attacks Congress for being incompetent and corrupt, charging politicians with being more concerned with reelection than with moral issues. —ROSE F. KAVO

CERVANTES, Lorna Dee Born 6 August 1954, San Francisco, California Lorna Dee Cervantes was born in the Mission District of San Francisco. She traces her ancestry to the Chumash tribe of the Santa Barbara coast on her mother’s side, and to the Tarascans of Michoacán, Mexico, on her father’s. After her parents separated when she was five years old, her mother resettled with Cervantes’ grandmother in San Jose, California. Cervantes has written poetry since she was eight, her love of language fed by the books she found in the houses her mother cleaned. In 1974 she founded Mango Publications, editing Mango, a literary review, and also publishing poetry chapbooks in order to broaden not only horizons but also the definitions of Chicana literature. A feminist ‘‘since I knew what that was’’ and activist in the Chicano cultural movement, Cervantes sees herself as a ‘‘cultural worker.‘‘ In 1978 she received a National Endowment for the Arts grant and subsequently spent nine months at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. After completing her B.A. at California State University, San Jose, Cervantes studied in the Ph.D. program in the history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She joined the creative writing department of the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1989; she has also coedited the crosscultural poetry magazine Red Dirt. In 1998 Cervantes received a Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Foundation Award. The title of Cervantes’ first book of poetry, Emplumada (1981), combines connotations of ‘‘feathered’’ (emplumado/a) and ‘‘flourish with the pen’’ (plumada); bird imagery abounds, resonant in both Mexican and U.S. cultures. The poems of this collection explore what it means to be connected to nature and to the urban wasteland, to be female and brown, in a voice remarkable for its clarity, depth of passion, and striking imagery. In ‘‘Visions of Mexico While at a Writing Symposium in Port Townsend, Washington,’’ the poetic voice expresses the urgent need to speak for those who have been silenced, to rewrite history from the point of view of the oppressed, and to challenge racist stereotypes of Mexican and Chicano people: ‘‘I come from a long line of eloquent illiterates / whose history reveals what words don’t say. / Our anger is our way of speaking, / the gesture is an utterance more pure than word.’’ Other poems explore the multiple facets of Chicana identity, for example the clash between her mirror image (‘‘bronzed skin, black hair’’) and the loss of the mother tongue (‘‘My name hangs about me like a loose tooth’’). In the process of self-naming, the poetic voice juxtaposes her experience with that of other Chicanas. In ‘‘To Virginia Chavez’’ class differences are momentarily balanced by gender solidarity: ‘‘ignoring what / the years had brought between us: / my diploma

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and the bare bulb / that always lit your bookless room.’’ In ‘‘Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway’’ the granddaughter prefers her grandmother’s ways to her mother’s hard pragmatism: ‘‘I tie up my hair into loose braids, / and trust only what I have built / with my own hands.’’ After a prolonged period of introspection following a family tragedy in 1982, Cervantes began producing the poems that form her second collection, From the Cables of Genocide (1991). The subtitle cues the book ’s thematic concerns: Poems of Love and Hunger. In some ways very like her first collection thematically, Cables is at the same time more personal and less readily accessible. ‘‘Pleiades from the Cables of Genocide’’ exemplifies the poems’ layered fusion of the personal and the political, referring simultaneously to the heritage of the Chumash, who believed they descended from the Pleiades, and to the ‘‘Seven Sisters’’ constituted by the seven major oil companies: ‘‘The power / peace / Of worthless sky that unfolds me—now—in its greedy / Reading: Weeder of Wreckage, Historian of the Native / Who says: It happened. That’s all. It just happened. / And runs on.’’ Her childhood passion for poetry has been collected in an as yet unpublished book of poetry for middle school and high school children. This collection of poetry written as a child between eight and fifteen includes work from a manuscript Cervantes first put together in her mid-teens. During this time, both poetry and her manuscript were a ‘‘fanatical obsession’’ for Cervantes; her youthful creative intensity led her to write prolifically, often at least five poems a day. This collection seeks to preserve the integrity of the child’s poetic voice and to connect with other young creative voices. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Harris, M. and K. Aguero, eds., A Gift of Tongues: Critical Challenges in Contemporary American Poetry (1987). Contemporary Chicana Poetry (1985). Reference books: CA (1991, 1999). DLB (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Latin American Literature and Arts (JulyDec. 1991). MELUS (Summer 1984). Tecolote (Dec. 1982). Third Woman (1984). Web site: Interview, ‘‘Calling Lorna Out,’’ available online at: www.colorado.edu/creativewriting/lornaint. —YVONNE YARBRO-BEJARANO, UPDATED BY JULIET BYINGTON

CHA, Theresa Hak Kyung Born 4 March 1951, Pusan, Korea; died 5 November 1982, New York, New York Daughter of Cha Hyung Sang and Huo Hyung Soon; married Richard Barnes, 1982 Particularly considering that an early and tragic death put an end to her career after the publication of just one book-length

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work, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s influence as a writer is extraordinary. Her book Dictée (1982), which combines poetry, prose, and visual art in unique and radical ways, has been a source of inspiration and empowerment for many artists and writers, and continues to be cited, excerpted, and viewed as a seminal text in the tradition of Asian and Asian-American women’s writing. Cha was not only a writer, but a prolific video, film, and performance artist as well. Her video and film work won numerous awards, including the Eisner Prize for Video and Film from the University of California at Berkeley (1975), the Stuart McKenna Nelson Memorial Award for the Photographic Medium (1977), and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1981). Cha was born in Pusan, Korea in 1951, the third of five children. Her parents had been raised in a Korean community in Manchuria, but returned to Korea during World War II. In 1962, when Cha was eleven, the family left Korea for the U.S., settling first in Hawaii, then in 1964 moving to San Francisco, where Cha attended Catholic schools and learned French as well as classical literature. She attended the University of San Francisco beginning in 1968, then transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, where she received a B.A. in comparative literature in 1973, a B.A. in art in 1975, and an M.F.A. in art in 1977. In the mid-1970s, Cha began performing and showing her works regularly; in a curriculum vita, she designated the year 1974 as the beginning of her career as ‘‘producer, director, performer, writer in video and film productions, installations, performances and published texts.’’ Works created between the mid-1970s and 1980 include the performance pieces Barren Cave Mute (1974), A Secret Spill (1974), A Blé Wall (1975), Aveugle Voix (1975), Life Mixing (1975), Vampyr (1976), and Reveille dans la Brume (1977), and the black-and-white videos Mouth to Mouth (1975), Passages Paysages (1978), Re Dis Appearing (1980) and Exilée (1980). In 1976 Cha went to France to study film at Centre d’Etudes Américaine du Cinéma á Paris, and also visited Amsterdam, where she met and became involved with international artists. In 1977 Cha became a naturalized U.S. citizen. She traveled to Korea in 1979 for a visit, the first time since her family had left 18 years earlier that she’d been back. In 1980 Cha moved to New York City, where she began work as an editor and writer at Tanam Press, and edited Apparatus, Cinematographic Apparatus: Selected Writings (1980), which included a piece by her, ‘‘Commentaire.’’ In 1981 she returned to Korea to begin gathering material for a film which was to be called White Dust from Mongolia. That same year she was appointed instructor in video art at Elizabeth Seaton College in New York. The year 1982 was perhaps Cha’s busiest year, and the year, ironically, that she began to get real critical notice. She was an artist-in-residence at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, her video Passages, Paysages was shown in New York and The Hague, her 16 mm film Permutations was shown at the San Francisco Art Institute, and Dictée was published by Tanam Press. In May she married freelance photographer Richard Barnes. Dictée broke with tradition in a number of important ways. Formally the work used a nonnarrative sequence, and was structured in nine sections, each one titled for one of the nine Greek


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muses. Dictée used a variety of both prose and poetry forms in its textual presentation, as well as using a fascinating array of graphic images (photographs, maps, drawings, illustrations). The use of non-English text (Korean and French) in numerous segments throughout the book added yet another layer of interest relating to language, and confronted the reader with an unexpected, and instructively uncomfortable, foreignness. The content of Dictée, or the ‘‘theme’’ to the extent that concept can or should be applied, is autobiographical. It is an examination of self, of memory and remembering, of family, of ethnicity, of history, of nationality, of the concept of home and ‘‘mother country.’’ It is a book about women in particular—Ya Guan Soon (a young Korean hero who spoke and acted out against the Japanese occupation), Cha’s own mother, and Joan of Arc—and women’s lives— predicaments, joys, sorrows—in general. It is also, as noted, very much a book about language, about learning language, acquiring it, having it, identifying with it, using it, being understood or misunderstood because of it. Cha was murdered by a stranger in the basement of a New York building in November of 1982. She had a number of works in progress at the time of her death, including the film about memory, White Dust from Mongolia, another book project, and a piece on the representation of hands in Western painting. OTHER WORKS: Audience Distant Relatives (1978). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hagedorn, J., ed., Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction (1993). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Afterimage (Summer 1986). —JESSICA GRIM

CHANDLER, Elizabeth Margaret Born 24 December 1807, Wilmington, Delaware; died 2 November 1834, Tecumseh, Michigan Daughter of Thomas and Margaret Evans Chandler The youngest child and only daughter of a prosperous Quaker farmer of English stock, Elizabeth Margaret Chandler lost her mother in infancy, was orphaned at nine, and was raised by her grandmother and three Quaker aunts in Philadelphia. She attended Quaker schools until only twelve or thirteen and was an avid reader all her life. At an early age she showed her talents as a poet: at nine she produced a poem called ‘‘Reflections on a Thunder Gust,’’ at sixteen she began to publish a few poems in the public press. At eighteen ‘‘The Slave Ship’’ brought her a prize from the editors of Casket, in which it was published. Benjamin Lundy, the antislavery publisher, noticed ‘‘The Slave Ship’’ and reprinted it in the Genius of Universal Emancipation. Lundy recruited Chandler as a regular contributor, and two years later she became the editor of the ‘‘Female Repository,’’ the

women’s department of his paper. Chandler moved with her brother to the Michigan frontier in 1830, but continued as editor of the Genius’s women’s department until her death, despite Lundy’s complaints about the difficulties of regular communication with a forest outpost. Chandler was the first American woman author to make slavery the principal theme of her writing. Half of her published poems and essays dealt with slavery, African life, the emancipation movement, or the American Indian. ‘‘The Slave Ship’’ employed a poignant theme which she used repeatedly: the wrenching despair and horror experienced by proud and independent Africans snatched from their native shores and transported in chains to the Americas and lifelong slavery. In ‘‘The Afric’s Dream’’ she shows the fettered slave remembering his former home where he lay under his own banana tree: ‘‘My own bright stream was at my feet, / And how I laughed to lave, / My burning lip and cheek and brow, / In that delicious wave!’’ Chandler showed amazing empathy with the black slave of whom she could have had no direct knowledge. Most of her poems have strong rhythms as well as vivid imagery. Frequently they were sung as hymns at antislavery meetings, or recited as dramatic presentations. Chandler also wrote about nature, especially the wilderness beauty of her beloved Michigan. Lundy, in the preface to Chandler’s collected works, has high praise for her poetic skill: ‘‘Though she was by no means deficient in prose, either for elegance of diction, or force of expression, she excelled in poetry. Her style was easy and graceful, while the flights of her fancy were lofty and soaring and her imagery natural and pleasing.’’ The romantic intensity of Chandler’s poetry sometimes approaches sentimentality, but she evoked vivid imagery in describing the natural world. In her essays Chandler emphasized the contradiction between slavery and the Declaration of Independence, the degrading effect of slavery on master as well as slave, and the need to destroy the economic base of slavery by refusing to use products which were produced by slave labor. In a series of lively pieces, ‘‘Letters to Isabel,’’ published in the Genius, Chandler berates an imaginary friend for hesitating to forego the pound cakes and ice creams made with slave-produced sugar, for ‘‘devotion to the cause of justice and mercy.’’ Chandler was also an early believer in the need for women to champion humane causes. In her essay ‘‘To the Ladies of the United States,’’ which appeared in Genius, she chided women for deceiving themselves when they protested that they had no power to ameliorate the horrors of slavery: ‘‘American women! Your power is sufficient for its extinction! And, oh! by every sympathy most holy to the breast of women, are ye called upon for exertion of that potency.’’ In Opinions she wrote that emancipation might require ‘‘the energies of men, but it requires also the influence of women.’’ Her articles were extensively reprinted in the U.S., Canada, and the British Isles by the more popular periodicals of the time. William Lloyd Garrison wrote her obituary for the Liberator: ‘‘There is not a female in the United States, who has labored so assiduously, or

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written so copiously in the cause of the oppressed.’’ Lundy placed her only after Elizabeth Heyrich of England among women writing in the antislavery cause and believed had she lived longer her fame would easily have rivaled that of Heyrich. OTHER WORKS: Essays, Philanthropic and Moral (1836). The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Margaret Chandler (1836). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Clark, G., The Liberty Minstrel (1844). Dillon, M. L., ‘‘E. Chandler and the Spread of Anti-slavery to Michigan,’’ in MichH (Dec. 1955). Griswold, R. W., The Female Poets of America (1859). Lundy, B., ‘‘A Memoir of Her Life and Character,’’ in The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Chandler (1836). Reference works: DAB. NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Woman’s Record (1853). —RUTH BORDIN

CHAPELLE, Georgette Meyer Born 14 March 1918, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; died 4 November 1965, Chu Lai, Vietnam Wrote under: Dickey Chapelle, Georgette Louise Chapelle, Georgette Louise Meyer Daughter of Paul and Edna Meyer; married Tony Chapelle, 1940 (divorced 1955) Georgette Meyer Chapelle was born to Quaker parents and grew up in suburban Milwaukee. She began studying aviation as an adolescent and at sixteen left her family to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There she worked more on developing writing skills at the Boston Traveler, however, than on completing engineering degree requirements. Returning to Milwaukee at eighteen, she learned to fly while working as a publicist for small barnstorming and air show companies. Moving to New York in 1939, she freelanced and learned photography from Tony Chapelle, whom she married in 1940. In the early years of World War II, Chapelle was a journalist for Look in the Panama Canal Zone, wrote six books on aviation (two of them for adolescents), and published stories and photographs about women in unusual war jobs. In 1945, as a war correspondent for Fawcett Publications in the Pacific, Chapelle shot some of her most widely distributed photographs of wounded soldiers. Soon after the war ended she joined her husband in Europe to cover stories on refugees for humanitarian agencies. Divorced in 1955, Chapelle accepted an assignment from Life in late 1956 covering the flight of Hungarians into Austria during the Hungarian revolution. In the next nine years, she covered revolutions and combat in Korea, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Algeria, Lebanon, Kashmir, and Vietnam for publications such as National Geographic, National Observer, and Reader’s Digest. She also interviewed revolutionary leaders, including Fidel Castro. For an account of her imprisonment in Hungary, Chapelle received the Reader’s Digest First Person Award in 1957 and, in

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1962, she was given the Overseas Press Club’s award for ‘‘reporting requiring exceptional courage and enterprise.’’ On an assignment for the National Observer, covering Operation Black Ferret with marines near Da Nang, Vietnam, Chapelle was mortally wounded by a land mine fragment which lodged in her neck. Fellow photographer Henry Huet (who was a Vietnam casualty in 1971), along with several wounded marines, observed as Chaplain John McNamara administered last rites. Huet’s photograph of the dying Chapelle, along with many of her own, were immortalized in Requiem: By the Photographers Who Died in Vietnam and Indochina (1997). She was forty-seven. Chapelle’s first photojournalism work appeared in Look in the early years of World War II, a six-page article on the ‘‘life throughout every hour of one day’’ of a woman sewing fabric onto the wings of RAF fighter planes in an aircraft plant in New Jersey. She also published books on women in aviation and in government service. The latter included a combination of patriotic propaganda and ‘‘dramatic picture’’ accounts of specific women holding ‘‘useful and profitable jobs’’ during the war. In the final years of World War II, Chapelle’s photographs received major attention, especially her work on wounded soldiers aboard hospital ships in the Pacific where, except for nurses, she was often the only woman aboard. Throughout the war, Chapelle encountered consistent difficulties in ‘‘going forward,’’ military officers explaining that there were ‘‘no facilities for women’’ in the field. Chapelle’s work followed typical patterns of war reporting, with a heavy emphasis on the human interest story of the individual soldier. Her reportage was widely used in government efforts to involve the civilian back home in the war effort. Chapelle’s major work is her autobiography, What’s a Woman Doing Here?: A Combat Reporter’s Report on Herself, published in 1961, just as she began to cover the American involvement in Southeast Asia. The autobiography is an important document in regard to understanding the American photojournalist’s role as a ‘‘chronicler of wars’’ during World War II and the Cold War which followed. In the opening pages of the autobiography, Chapelle described herself as a ‘‘pacifist by heredity.’’ She developed a ‘‘mad passion for the movies’’ and the adventure they portrayed, however, at the same time as she was ‘‘well taught that violence in any form was unthinkable.’’ Violence became for Chapelle ‘‘as attractive a mystery. . .as sex seemed to be to other teenagers.’’ As an adult woman she identified herself as an ‘‘interpreter of violence’’ and a person with a ‘‘need for recognition and a place.’’ Chapelle’s autobiography recounts a series of incidents which portray her conflicts between patriotism and a desire to show the truth, and between sympathy for subjects and a need to get a good story. She ended her association with Fawcett Publications when they refused to publish photographs of blood transfusions in battle: ‘‘Whatever suffering men could undergo in the name of the folks back home, surely anyone could endure to merely look at!’’ Chapelle refused to rely on government press releases, choosing to observe firsthand the ‘‘violence and want’’ which existed in


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developing nations. Her famous photograph of the execution of a Vietcong soldier in 1962, considered by the military as representative of the American Cold War perspective, was among the earliest published in America displaying the brutality of the Vietnam War. Yet Chapelle remained committed to the idea of American military forces as ‘‘freedom fighters’’ against communism. OTHER WORKS: Needed—Women in Government Service (1942). Needed—Women in Aviation (1942). How Planes Are Made (1945). The papers of Georgette Meyer Chapelle are at the Wisconsin State Historical Society in Madison, Wisconsin. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ellis, F., ‘‘D. C.: A Reporter and Her Work’’ (thesis, 1968). Faas, H. and T. Page, eds., Requiem: By the Photographers Who Died in Vietnam and Indochina (1997). Knightly, P., The First Casualty—From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker (1975). Marzolf, M., Up From the Footnote: A History of Women Journalists (1977). Other references: NYT (4 Nov. 1965). Harper’s (Sept. 1972). —JENNIFER L. TEBBE

CHAPIN, Katherine Garrison Born 4 September 1890, Waterford, Connecticut; died 30 December 1977, Devon, Pennsylvania Daughter of Lindley H. and Cornelia Van Auken Chapin; married Francis Biddle, 1918 Educated at private schools and Columbia University, Katherine Garrison Chapin was a poet, playwright, translator, reviewer and lecturer. In the late 1920s, she published poems in such magazines as Harper’s, Scribner’s, Saturday Review, North American Review, Poetry, and the Ladies’ Home Journal. Some of her poems were set to music and performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Orquesta Sinfonica de Mexico. Among these are ‘‘Lament for the Stolen’’ (1938), ‘‘And They Lynched Him on a Tree’’ (1940), and ‘‘Plain Chant for America’’ (1943). Chapin’s readings of her poems have been recorded in the Library of Congress Series (1945-60) and for Harvard’s Lamont Library (1961). Chapin’s subjects and opinions are typical of the times between 1930 and 1960, though she makes little direct reference to World War II. She treats such American subjects as Nancy Hanks; Gettysburg, and describes the landscapes of Maine, New Mexico, and New Orleans. She also gives accurate pictures of foreign places, often those significant in the history of Western civilization (Stonehenge, the Tiber, the Nile). Sometimes she speaks in the generalized voices of woman: as a bereaved mother in ‘‘Lament for the Stolen,’’ a poem on the Lindbergh kidnapping, as an anxious mother in ‘‘Nancy Hanks,’’ and as an affectionate and dependent lover in ‘‘Maine Night.’’

Chapin’s most ambitious poem is the long title poem of her last book, The Other Journey (1959). In it she explores the primal generic self. She sees poetry’s function as vatic and invokes the natural powers of bird and sea and sun on the self’s outward journey into space. Then her ‘‘heart returns on the other journey,’’ the inner journey, ‘‘To reach a source serene or ominous / . . .Where the unfinished revelation starts.’’ The two journeys are actually one, going backward into time, through history and prehistory, into preconsciousness. The circular movement from life into death into life again is the ultimate truth. In poetic technique Chapin is barely influenced by the modernist poets. Her lyrics are chiefly in rhyme and meter, controlled but not exceptionally tight or brilliant, and in no way innovative. Though she does use some free verse, its freedom consists mostly in varied line lengths. It is still largely iambic, often metrical, and employs frequent rhyme. Throughout, her imagery tends to be traditional and the metaphoric structures simple. In her poems Chapin shows that she is an aware member of her world, has an appropriate and dignified concern for its defects and possibilities, and indulges in no self-pity. In the words of Allen Tate, ‘‘Miss Chapin’s poems . . . will not give the reader the shock he has come to expect from our present ‘cult of experience.’’’ But they will give him or her a feeling of calm, the kind of calm that results from witnessing an educated, intelligent woman face an intractable universe with no help but her own resolution and her skill with tested tools. OTHER WORKS: The Tapestry of the Duchess (1925). Outside of the World (1930). Bright Mariner (1933). Time Has No Shadow (1936). Sojourner Truth (1948). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1963). Other references: A.B. Bookman’s Weekly (20 Feb. 1978). NR (9 May 1960). NYT (2 Jan. 1978). NYTBR (10 April 1960). WP (31 Dec. 1977). —ALBERTA TURNER

CHAPLIN, Jane Dunbar Born 11 February 1819, Scotland; died 17 April 1884 Wrote under: Hyla Daughter of Duncan Dunbar; married Jeremiah Chaplin II, 1841 Jane Dunbar Chaplin’s first major novel, Gems of the Bog: A Tale of Irish Peasantry (1869) was set in Ireland one generation before it was written. The narrative follows members of the Sheenan family through their hardships in Ireland to their final settlement in America. The major characters—such as Mammy Honey, the wise old matriarch of the family, Paddy and John, the struggling brothers, and Peggy O’Canty, the courageous young orphan beloved and adopted by the family—are realistically and affectionately drawn. As Kelleyrooke changes from a pastoral ideal to a place of ‘‘death and emigration,’’ Chaplin traces her

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characters’ endurance and emotional growth through long feuds, religious battles, famine, and death. Chaplin also carefully documents their triumphs in the course of daily life. In her easy, straightforward style, Chaplin sprinkles her narrative with pertinent allusions to Irish history, relating her characters’ struggles to larger social issues. Her tone throughout is one of measured melancholy, but it is also tender and optimistic. Perhaps Chaplin’s most interesting work is Out of the Wilderness (1870). It relates the history of Zeke and Weza, two poor but heroic southern blacks who migrate to New England after the Civil War. Weza’s story is a tale tinged by the sorrow of separation and oppression. In her dreams of freedom, Weza expresses the deep cruelty behind the slave system. As the tale progresses, it becomes clear that Weza’s sorrows are not finished with the end of the war, for she and Zeke are searching for her lost sons. Although the end of the novel is sentimental and ineffective (Weza comes ‘‘out of the wilderness’’ with her family intact and gains ownership of her former master’s plantation), most of the novel presents a realistic portrait of the life of southern blacks. Particularly memorable is Zeke and Weza’s wedding scene at a camp meeting, with the eccentric Preachin’ Jack officiating. Also impressive is Chaplin’s acute evaluation of the economic decline in the south during the last phases of the war. Chaplin’s works are effective in portraying a sympathetic and realistic vision of the darker side of the American experience: the lot of blacks, poor whites, and immigrants. Her historical and economic sense adds intelligence and depth to the emotional sketches of these people and their hard struggles for dignity in the American system. Her point of view is clear and consistent: the disadvantaged are men and women with the same potential and aspirations as the rich; only prejudice and lack of money impede their growth. Chaplin paints colorful backgrounds for her lively characters, and she introduces dialect and vernacular speech, thus lending added legitimacy to language patterns other than standard English. —ROSE F. KAVO

CHAPMAN, Lee See BRADLEY, Marion Zimmer

CHAPMAN, Maria Weston Born 25 July 1806, Weymouth, Massachusetts; died 12 July 1885, Weymouth, Massachusetts Daughter of Warren and Anne Bates Weston; married Henry Grafton Chapman, 1830 The oldest of six children, Maria Weston Chapman grew up in Weymouth and spent several years in England with the family of her maternal uncle, a London banker. When she returned to Boston at twenty-two, she became ‘‘lady principal’’ of Ebenezer Bailey’s Young Ladies’ High School. She married a fellow

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Unitarian, Henry Chapman, and joined him and his parents as an ardent abolitionist and supporter of William Lloyd Garrison. In 1832 Chapman joined 12 other women to found the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. She became their leader and the editor of their annual report, Right and Wrong in Boston (1836-38). When the ‘‘blue-coat mob’’ threatened the meeting of the Society on 21 October 1835, Chapman said: ‘‘If this is the last bulwark of freedom, we may as well die here as anywhere.’’ Chapman was ‘‘of inestimable help in editing the Liberator, taking charge with Edmund Quincy during Garrison’s absences and illnesses.’’ Beginning in 1834, she and her sisters ran yearly abolitionist fundraising fairs in Boston. For these fairs, Chapman edited the annual gift book, The Liberty Bell, ‘‘to which better versifiers and poets than herself contributed.’’ She also helped to edit the Non-Resistant, the periodical of Garrison’s New England Non-Resistance Society, from 1839 to 1842. After the 1840 split in the American Anti-Slavery Society, Chapman, as member of the executive committee of the national organization, helped establish and finance the National AntiSlavery Standard in New York. Although she took her children to Europe in 1848 and spent the next eight years chiefly in Paris, she kept in touch with abolitionists in the U.S. and Great Britain, and continued to contribute to The Liberty Bell. She returned to Boston in 1855 and accepted Garrison’s view that ‘‘with the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation and the enactment of the 13th Amendment, the time had come to disband the antislavery societies.’’ Believing that the crusade against slavery could be aided by music, Chapman edited Songs of the Free, and Hymns of Christian Freedom (1836), and contributed many songs and poems to this collection and to The Liberty Bell. Her hymns in Songs of the Free are frankly occasional and singable because they follow well-worn metrical and rhetorical paths. Chapman’s poetic contributions to The Liberty Bell are also conventional, sincere but derivative examples of sentimental religious poetry. Chapman’s polemics far outshine her poetry. Her Right and Wrong in Boston for 1837, the annual report of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, includes a long argument for sex equality. Her controversial pamphlet Right and Wrong in Massachusetts (1839) addressed the question of divisions within the antislavery movement and attributed the split to differences over women’s rights. Chapman sketched the history of the movement in Massachusetts, pointing out that women had staunchly supported antislavery in 1835, when few had rallied to the cause. Chapman contributed competent narratives and informational essays as they were needed by the cause, but her longest and most interesting prose work is her Memorials of Harriet Martineau (1877). Chapman met Martineau, the influential English writer who advocated unitarianism and abolition of slavery, when she visited America in 1835. The two became good friends, and in 1856 Martineau wrote to Chapman saying that her death was imminent, and asked Chapman to finish her autobiography and become her literary executor. Although Martineau lived until 1876, Chapman provided a 460-page supplement to Martineau’s


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Autobiography. It is a well-organized, sensitive biography including judicious selections from Martineau’s journals (1837-39) and letters. OTHER WORKS: Pinda (1840). Ten Years of Experience (1842). Trial and Imprisonment of Jonathan Walker, at Pensacola, for Aiding Slaves to Escape (1846). How Can I Help to Abolish Slavery? (1855). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Filler, L., The Crusade Against Slavery (1960). Kraditor, A. S., Means and Ends in American Abolitionism (1969). Lader, The Bold Brahmins (1961). Pease, J. H. and W. H. Pease, Bound Them with Chains: A Biographical History of the Anti-Slavery Movement (1972). Reference works: DAB, NCAB (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: New England Quarterly (March 1934). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH

CHARNAS, Suzy McKee Born 22 October 1939, New York, New York Daughter of Robinson and Maxine Szanton McKee; married Stephen Charnas; children: Charles, Joanna Suzy McKee Charnas earned a B.A. from Barnard College in 1961 and an M.A.T. from New York University in 1965. As a member of the Peace Corps, she taught English and economic history at various schools in Nigeria from 1961 to 1963. Returning to New York, she taught ancient history and African studies at the junior high level from 1965 to 1967. After working in curriculum development at New York’s Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital in the Division of Community Mental Health from 1967 to 1969, she launched her writing career. Charnas never forgot these formative experiences, though; she has instructed at the science fiction Clarion Workshops and chaired the Archive Project Committee of the National Council of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers beginning in 1986. Her first novel, Walk to the End of the World (1974), made a big splash, appearing as a finalist for the science fiction John W. Campbell award. This first of the Holdfast Chronicles was followed by Motherlines (1978), The Furies (1994), and The Conqueror’s Child (1999). These are savagely feminist novels depicting a postapocalyptic world in which women are enslaved and terribly abused. To produce children, they are raped; to feed their fellow ‘‘fems,’’ they are milked like cows. In Walk to the End of the World, Alldera, a slave message-runner, escapes this oppressive patriarchal society and heads west, following a legend of women who live freely on the plains without men. In Motherlines, Alldera finds these Riding Women, and Charnas explores the possibilities of a female society that

reproduces by cloning. It is not a utopian culture, however; the characters are prone to conflict and the distresses of stagnation in which a clone society results. In The Furies, Alldera leads a cavalry of horse-women against the Holdfast, where they kill or enslave all the men they find there. Disagreements about how to build a new civilization point the way toward the fourth novel. The 1970s and 1980s saw much feminist science fiction published, but Charnas’ work commanded attention because of the brutality she portrayed and the spotlight she focused upon dominance/submission politics. While her women can be as aggressive and manipulative as men, wreaking terrible vengeance upon their former masters, Charnas plainly shows testosterone-based thinking as barbaric and women as more likely to strive for a noble vision of a creative, nurturing community. Unicorn Tapestry earned the Science Fiction Writers of America’s Nebula award in 1980. The novella became the centerpiece of the novel The Vampire Tapestry, a Nebula finalist. This novel also investigates themes of dominance and submission, here dramatized as the relationship between predator and prey. It depicts five episodes in the life of one Dr. Weyland, a vampire. Charnas subverts vampire clichés, however; Weyland is no supernatural undead ghoul, but a unique biological mutation. While he considers humans inferior and calls them ‘‘cattle,’’ he also fears that if he is discovered, they will rise against him as ‘‘peasants with torches.’’ He is complexly drawn—Charnas feminizes him at times, inflicting upon him in some scenes the powerlessness and degradation that women endure. In the poignant drama of the Unicorn Tapestry segment, Weyland must undergo psychological therapy in order to regain the university post from which he was fired. In their pas de deux, during which Dr. Floria Landauer realizes Weyland is not delusional but a true vampire, Weyland refuses her encouragements to empathize with his prey, because then he would be unable to feed himself. But they form a rapport that allows him to find a human, even a feminine, side of himself. Weyland’s anagnorisis in Vampire Tapestry occurs when he attends the opera Tosca and discovers that he can, after all, be greatly moved by human passion and art. Charnas’ interest in music and opera often enriches her fiction, as such titles as the Nebula nominee ‘‘Listening to Brahms’’ (1991) and ‘‘Beauty and the Opera, or, The Phantom Beast’’ (1996) suggest. The occult novel Dorothea Dreams (1986) features a middle-aged artist of Taos, New Mexico (where Charnas lives), haunted by nightmares of revolutionary France during the Terror, while her house is haunted by an ancient ghost. Dorothea’s desire to live in solitude, creating her masterwork, is inevitably disrupted by the outside world. Charnas has also written novels for young adults. The Sorcery Hall trilogy—The Bronze King (1985), The Silver Glove (1988) and The Golden Thread (1989)—features Valentine, a New York City teenager who uses magic to protect mundane reality from evil invading from the Otherworld. In The Kingdom

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of Kevin Malone (1993), teenaged Amy is drawn into a dangerous fantasy world in Central Park, created by bully Kevin Malone as an escape from his abusive father. Charnas’ oft-reprinted short story ‘‘Boobs,’’ which won the 1989 Hugo award of the World Science Fiction Society, is narrated by a girl who discovers that during her first menses she is inflicted not merely with the usual pangs of puberty but also, unusually, with lycanthropy, the ability to transform oneself into a werewolf. Delighting in her newfound talent, she avenges herself upon the boys at her high school who torment her because of her budding breasts. Charnas’ fiction is clearly and crisply told in unornamented prose. She is praised for the characterization of her protagonists and antagonists, who alike are sympathetic and believable. Her skill at describing the feminine point of view in conflict with both the supernatural and with men is nonpareil. She is an extremely popular and well-respected author in science fiction and fantasy and has gained critical adulation among feminist theorists.

OTHER WORKS: Women in Science Fiction: A Symposium, with Suzy McKee Charnas et al. (ed. by J. D. Smith, 1975). ‘‘A Woman Appeared,’’ Future Females: A Critical Anthology (ed. by M. S. Barr, 1981). ‘‘No-Road,’’ Women of Vision (ed. by D. DuPont, 1988). ‘‘In Pursuit of Pure Horror: Robert Bloch, Suzy McKee Charnas, Harlan Ellison, Gahan Wilson,’’ Harper’s (1989). Moonstone and Tiger Eye (1992). ‘‘Meditations in Red: On Writing The Vampire Tapestry,’’ Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture (J. Gordon and V. Hollinger, eds., 1997). The Slave and the Free (contains Walk to the End of the World and Motherlines, 1999).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barr, M., Suzy McKee Charnas; Octavia Butler; Joan D. Vinge (1986). Bartkowski, F., ‘‘Toward a Feminist Eros: Readings in Feminist Utopian Fiction’’ (thesis, 1982). Bartkowski, F., Feminist Utopias (1989). Shugar, D. R., Separatism and Women’s Community (1995). Seven by Seven: Interviews with American Science Fiction Writers of the West and Southwest (1996). Reference works: Readers’ Guide to Twentieth-Century Science Fiction (1989). Articles about Charnas featured in American Horror Fiction: From Brockden Brown to Stephen King (1990), Feminism and Science Fiction (1989), Feminism, Utopia, and Narrative (1990), Science Fiction Roots and Branches (1990), The Feminine Eye: Science Fiction and the Women Who Write It (1982), Women and Utopia (1983). Other references: Extrapolation 27 (Spring 1986). Janus 15 (Spring 1979). Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 5 (1993). Locus (May 1990). Midnight Graffiti (Fall 1989). Science-Fiction Studies10 (July 1983). Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (1985). SATA (1990). —FIONA KELLEGHAN

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CHASE, Ilka Born 8 April 1905, New York, New York; died 15 February 1978, Mexico City Daughter of Francis D. and Edna Wollman Chase; married Louis Calhern, 1926; William Murray, 1938; Norton S. Brown, 1946 A descendant of revolutionary-war diarist John Woolman, Ilka Chase spent her life among the wealthy, fashionable New Yorkers who people her writings. Educated in French convents and U.S. private schools after her parents’ divorce, Chase was a Broadway actress (over 20 roles), a film star (over 30 movies), and a radio and television personality (Luncheon at the Waldorf, Penthouse Party, Kraft Theater, The Defenders). Civilized and witty rather than profound, Chase’s twovolume autobiography (Past Imperfect, 1942; Free Admission, 1948) anecdotally describes her stage and screen experiences, as well as her relationships with her husbands and with such literary and theatrical personalities as Clare Booth Luce and Dorothy Thompson. Disturbed in a conventional way by the horrors of fascism and war, Chase reacts even more strongly to their trivial intrusions upon her civilized life: dirty trains, boring army towns, inexplicable delays, and the inevitable depersonalization of the time. Chase’s In Bed We Cry (1943) and I Love Miss Tilli Bean (1946), her first two novels, provide coolly cynical insights into the cosmetics and fashion industry of the period: Chase’s characters are self-deceiving as well as customer-deceiving. Like all her heroines, Devon Wainwright and Tilli Bean are handsome and gifted women seeking success in a man’s world. Chase adapted In Bed We Cry for the stage, playing the lead herself to popular though not critical acclaim in Boston and Philadelphia, before bringing the show to Broadway, where it failed. Chase’s subsequent novels are less successful than the first two, with the exception of The Island Players (1956). This novel mingles gossipy revelations about the private lives of oftenmarried and divorced theater people and their defenses against aging with moments of brilliant slapstick comedy. As in all Chase’s novels, brittle sophistication and assumed cynicism do not preclude a happy ending; her heroines always end up with the man of their dreams. In a series of travel books, illustrated by her husband’s photographs, Chase socializes with the international set, interviews leaders of newly emergent nations, and admires most what is least Westernized in each country visited. Despite Chase’s sympathy for the aspirations of her hosts, however, she expresses a typically ethnocentric pessimism about their chances for survival. Chase’s other works, Always in Vogue (with her mother, 1954), Lady’s Pleasure (an anthology, 1946), and The Care and Feeding of Friends (recipes and social behavior, 1972), posit an audience with the time, money, and inclination to create a private world of gaiety and sophistication within the surrounding chaos of 20th-century America.


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Charming at first, Chase’s writing soon becomes predictable, formulaic, unexciting. Aware of the major issues of her time, Chase lacks both the ability to treat them profoundly and the discretion to avoid them. Her frequent stylistic device of twisting clichés (‘‘he worshipped the ground she trotted on’’) wears thin, yet reflects accurately the repartée of New York in the 1930s and 1940s. As a self-proclaimed feminist who refused to join any movement, Chase is thus a valuable source of anecdotes from that world, in which women carved out individual careers in fields where their gender was the focus of their profession: fashion, theater, radio, and television. OTHER WORKS: New York 22: That District of the City Which Lies between Fiftieth and Sixtieth Streets, Fifth Avenue, and the East River (1951). Three Men on the Left Hand (1956). Carthaginian Rose (1961). Elephants Arrive at Half-Past Five (1963). Second Spring and Two Potatoes (1965). Fresh from the Laundry (1967). The Varied Airs of Spring (1969). Around the World and Other Places (1970). The Sounds of Home (1972). Worlds Apart (1972). Dear Intruder (1977). BIBLIOGRAPHY: NYT (19 Feb. 1978). —AMY K. LEZBURG

CHASE, Mary Coyle Born 25 February 1906, Denver, Colorado; died October 1981 Daughter of Frank and Mary McDonough Coyle; married Robert L. Chase, 1928; children: three sons Mary Coyle Chase’s mother was Irish and her brothers brightened her childhood with tales of Irish folklore. This love of myth was reinforced by a major in classics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her first job, however, was writing society notes and ‘‘sob sister’’ stories for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. After her marriage she retired and invested her energy in volunteer work. She founded a chapter of the American Newspaper Guild, and worked for the rights of Colorado’s SpanishAmericans. Her writing career began and continued sporadically while she reared three sons. Nevertheless, she wrote several plays, a short story for Ladies’ Home Journal—‘‘He’s Our Baby’’—and a motion picture script, ‘‘Sorority House.’’ Chase is famous for Harvey (1944), a whimsical comedy named for a man-sized rabbit who is the constant companion of the amiable alcoholic, Elwood P. Dowd. Elwood’s insistence on Harvey’s presence so humiliates his sister, Veta Louise, that she attempts to have Elwood committed. After a series of comic mistakes, she gains a new appreciation of Elwood’s gentleness and prevents the doctors from turning him into a normal, dissatisfied person, like everybody else. Harvey was performed in London and Europe, filmed in 1950, and revived for the stage in 1970 by the American National Theater and Academy (ANTA) starring James Stewart and Helen Hayes. It won the 1944-45 Pulitzer Prize

and also placed second for the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. Mrs. McThing (1952), a runner-up for the 1951-52 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, was Chase’s second success. It was Chase’s attempt to create a full-length play for children that would provide a theatrical experience similar to the Christmas pantomimes that British children enjoy. Pleased with this aim, ANTA undertook production of the play despite very limited expectations, and audiences and critics were charmed by the production. The play is a fantasy about a witch, Mrs. McThing, who provides the wealthy Mrs. Larue and her son Howay an opportunity to become real human beings. Following Mrs. McThing was Bernardine (1952). Again Chase was writing for young people—her sons in particular. Bernardine presents a sympathetic view of the painful experiences of adolescence. A group of boys from respectable families fancy themselves as hoodlums and bolster their egos with tall tales of conquest. Critics found the production warm and moving. The best of Chase’s work, despite uneven writing, reveals a world of whimsy, good humor, and kindness. Elwood in Harvey sets the tone with his dignified courtesy and his guileless friendliness in a crass, unaccepting world. Mrs. McThing adds a touch of magic as the witch turns into a beautiful fairy to bid farewell to her tearful daughter. Bernardine carries forth Chase’s humor with the character of Wormy, who, by refusing to obey his mother’s threatening commands, causes her to realize the value of the boys as allies. Thus Chase’s vision is complete: love is victorious in a pleasant world of fancy. OTHER WORKS: Now I’ve Done It (1937). The Next Half Hour (1945). Loretta Mason Potts (1958). Midgie Purvis (1961). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CB (1945). Other references: Cosmopolitan (Feb. 1945). NYT (8 May 1945). Saturday Evening Post (1 Sept. 1945). —LUCINA P. GABBARD

CHASE, Mary Ellen Born 24 February 1887, Blue Hill, Maine; died 28 July 1973, Northampton, Massachusetts Daughter of Edward E. and Edith Lord Chase Mary Ellen Chase was the second of eight children in a family that preserved a 200-year heritage of New England maritime village life. Entering the University of Maine at seventeen and pausing at eighteen for a year of teaching in two one-room schools in Maine villages, Chase graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa at twenty. At thirty she entered the graduate school of the University of Minnesota, where she received her doctorate in 1922, and became assistant professor of English at the university.

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By 1926 Chase’s fame as a provocative teacher at Minnesota won her a post at Smith College that would last for 30 years. Her short stories and essays were also appearing frequently in the top literary magazines, launching her as a writer on a larger scale. In 1927 she published Thomas Hardy from Serial to Novel, which was adapted from her doctoral dissertation. Teaching and lecturing about the Bible as literature led Chase to write several enduring volumes of inspired, interpretive analysis: The Bible and the Common Reader (1944), Life and Language in the Old Testament (1955), The Psalms for the Common Reader (1962), and The Prophets for the Common Reader (1963). Chase’s regional novels of crisis and decline in maritime Maine began with Uplands (1927) and reached their full greatness in Mary Peters (1934), Silas Crockett (1935), Windswept (1941), and The Edge of Darkness (1957). Her novels show the destruction and regeneration of a region undergoing upheaval as a result of the cultural changes of the 19th and 20th centuries. Inspired to become a writer by Sarah Orne Jewett, whom Chase met as a young girl, the younger woman followed her mentor in observing nature and in presenting it and the land as determinants of character. Discussing the influence of the Maine coast on her writings, Chase said in her polished, classical style, ‘‘. . .to have sprung from Maine seafaring people; to have spent my childhood and. . .later years on a coastline unsurpassed in loveliness; to have inherited a wealth of thrilling history and tradition—such an inheritance of imperishable values imposes a debt which cannot possibly either be underestimated or ever fully discharged.’’ But Chase did discharge this debt to her Maine heritage and surroundings through her novels and reminiscences. Through the use of lyrical imagery, affection for words, and flowing sentence structure, she presented her philosophy that reflection on experience brings more reality than the experience itself. Her autobiographical reminiscences, The Golden Asse, and Other Essays (1929), A Goodly Heritage (1932), A Goodly Fellowship (1939), and The White Gate (1954), proved to be her most lasting works. OTHER WORKS: His Birthday (1915). The Girl from the Big Horn Country (1916). Virginia of Elk Creek Valley (1917). The Art of Narration (with F. K. Del Plaine, 1926). Mary Christmas (1926). The Writing of Informal Essays (1929). Constructive Theme Writing for College Freshmen (1929, rev. ed. 1938). The Silver Shell (1930). This England (1936). Dawn in Lyonesse (1938, dramatization by T. Job 1946). Jonathan Fisher, Maine Parson, 1768-1847 (1948). The Plum Tree (1949, dramatization by L. McMahon and R. Sengel 1953). Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (1950). Readings from the Bible (1952). Recipe for a Magic Childhood (1952). Sailing the Seven Seas (1958). Donald McKay and the Clipper Ships (1959). The Lovely Ambition (1960). The Fishing Fleets of New England (1961). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cary, R., ‘‘A Bibliography of the Published Writings of Mary Ellen Chase,’’ in CLQ (March 1962). Dorio, J. J., ‘‘Mary Ellen Chase and the Novel of Regional Crisis,’’ in CLQ

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(March 1962). Duckett, E. S., ‘‘A Portrait: 1962,’’ in CLQ (March 1962). Milbank, H. K., ‘‘Mary Ellen Chase: Teacher, Writer, Lecturer,’’ in CLQ (March 1962). Westbrook, P. D., Mary Ellen Chase (1965). Reference works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1987). —EVELYN HYMAN CHASE

CHEHIA See SHAW, Anna Moore

CHENEY, Ednah (Dow) Littlehale Born 27 June 1824, Boston, Massachusetts; died 19 November 1904, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of Sargent Smith and Ednah Dow Littlehale; married Seth Wells Cheney, 1853 (died 1858); children: one daughter Writer, activist, and self-proclaimed jack-of-all-trades, Ednah Littlehale Cheney was the third daughter of a New England family of comfortable means and liberal sentiments. The independent spirit she displayed as a child found a home when, as a very young woman, Cheney came under the influence of transcendentalists Theodore Parker, Bronson Alcott, and, above all, Margaret Fuller. As ardent an abolitionist as her mentors, Cheney led the way after the Civil War in recruiting Boston teachers for freedmen’s schools in the South. But for most of her eighty years, her energies as a reformer were devoted primarily to improving the educational, occupational, and political opportunities available to women. Through her long association with the New England Hospital for Women and Children, Cheney helped establish women’s rights to medical training as well as to proper health care and information. She was the moving force behind a school of design and a school of horticulture (both for women) and chairman of the New England Women’s Club committee that founded Boston’s distinguished Girls’ Latin School. As pamphleteer, public speaker, and clubwoman, she campaigned widely for female suffrage. In 1853 Ednah married portrait artist Seth Wells Cheney. His death five years later left her with an infant daughter who herself died at the age of twenty-six. For all her reform activities, Cheney thought of herself first as a writer. Three of her early books, Faithful to the Light (1871), Sally Williams (1874), and Child of the Tide (1874), are betterthan-average children’s fiction. Though marred by the besetting sins of the period and the genre—sentimentality, didacticism, and unlikely coincidence—they are absorbing stories which often correct conventional sexist stereotypes. In 1875 Cheney published a memoir of [surgeon] Susan Dimock, the first of several elegies written in tribute to family, friends, and colleagues. The finest, clearly a labor of love, is the


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sketch of her idol, Margaret Fuller. Rich in anecdote and personal reminiscence, it shows Cheney at her sensible, insightful, generous best. Cheney’s skills as a biographer again show to advantage in the Journals of Louisa May Alcott (1889), which she edited and extensively annotated. Later biographers are indebted to this fine work not only because it includes some journal entries now lost in the original, but because Cheney does not shrink from presenting the author of Little Women ‘‘without disguise.’’ Alcott’s passionate dissatisfactions are laid bare, as is the compulsive self-denial that embittered her life. Feminist interpretation, however appropriate it might seem, enters only indirectly, perhaps because of Cheney’s desire to lay no blame, especially on Bronson Alcott. But Nora’s Return (1890), a nondramatic sequel to Ibsen’s Doll’s House, is avowedly feminist. It is also outrageously simplistic, contrived, and, inadvertently, very funny. The delightful opening of Cheney’s last major work, Reminiscences (1902), recalls a time when Boston was all but an island, town criers called out descriptions of lost children, and Election Day was celebrated with oysters, lobster, and baked beans on the Common. Personally revealing detail abounds— Cheney staying awake in church by pricking her finger and writing in blood in her prayer book, Cheney being asked to leave a Beacon Hill school because of her ‘‘bad influence on the other girls.’’ Later sections of the autobiography, however, are flat and strangely impersonal. Colleagues like Julia Ward Howe attributed much of Cheney’s success as a reformer to her judiciousness, calm disposition, and broad-mindedness. The same qualities illuminate her writing, which is consistently lucid, unpretentious, and humane. Much of it deserves notice today only as social history, but her children’s fiction still entertains, and her biographies of Alcott, Fuller, and parts of Reminiscences hold their own as literature. At moments, Cheney achieved the kind of originality that sometimes blossoms out of diligent research and honest, compassionate reporting. OTHER WORKS: Handbook for American Citizens (1866). Patience (1870). Social Games (1871). Memoir of Susan Dimock (1875). Memoir of Seth Wells Cheney (1881). Gleanings in the Field of Art (1881). Memoir of John Cheney, Engraver (1888). Memoir of Margaret Swan Cheney (1889). Stories of Olden Times (1890). Memoirs of Lucretia Crocker and Abby W. May (1893). Life of Christian Daniel Rauch (1893). The letters of Ednah Cheney are at the Boston Public Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, Smith College, and the Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Representative Women of New England, Howe, J. W., ed. (1904). A Woman of the Century (1893). Other references: Memorial Meeting of the New England Women’s Club, Ednah Cheney, 1824-1904 (1905). Women’s Journal (26 Nov. 1904). —EVELYN SHAKIR

CHERNIN, Kim Born 7 May 1940, Bronx, New York Daughter of Paul and Rose Chernin Kusnitz; married David Netboy, 1958 (divorced); Robert Cantor, 1971 (divorced); children: Larissa Kim Chernin, daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants, spent the first five years of her life in New York City, before moving with her father (an engineer) and her mother (a radical organizer) to Los Angeles after an older sister died. Her early life was profoundly influenced by the loss of her sister, her mother’s political activism, and the incarcerations and trials of the McCarthy years. Chernin’s writings reflect this heritage, joining the poetic intuition of the child’s memory to a political voice, and presenting a mother-daughter conflict embedded in the modern woman’s search for self and the immigrant’s search for home. While a student at the University of California at Berkeley, she met and married David Netboy. They traveled to England and Ireland, where Chernin studied at Oxford and at Trinity College in Dublin. Returning to the U.S., she received her B.A. from the University of California in 1965 and an M.A. in psychology from New College of California in 1990. Chernin’s dual career as writer and therapist and the tension of her political and poetic sensibilities are evident in her publications, which include poetry, fiction, fictional autobiography, and meditative studies on women’s psychological issues. Work as a consultant on writing projects and on women’s eating disorders led her to focus initially on a series of books about contemporary problems of female development: The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness (1981), The Hungry Self: Women, Eating, and Identity (1985), and Reinventing Eve: Modern Woman in Search of Herself (1987). In this trio of autobiographically framed works, Chernin addresses first the middle-class ideal of slenderness as a problem with women’s power, and then the mother-daughter bonds and patriarchal culture as influences on female development. Through these books she evolves a visionary yet theorizing form to describe the essential psychological challenge, coming in Reinventing Eve, with its formulation of modern woman as the ‘‘Woman Who Is Not Yet,’’ to insist that theory be developed out of experience, particularly of the body. Her thesis leads her to challenge traditional psychoanalytic interpretation with the voices of the women who have come to her for consultation and to confront Judeo-Christian mythologies with the narrative of her own identity crisis, attempting to find the form that will successfully realize the female self and unite its conflicting voices. Chernin both uses and revises traditional psychology in her volume of poetry, The Hunger Song (1982), presenting childhood memory as a tool for the reimagination and recovery of a female goddess. Chernin’s use of story to present psychological ideas is pronounced in her fiction and fictionalized autobiographies, which develop the themes of ethnic identity and modern intergenerational conflict. In My Mother’s House (1983) begins when Rose Chernin asks her to write about her Communist party activities. Chernin

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uses this request to make a point about identity and interconnection, as she weaves a narrative that is as much a story of mother-daughter encounters as a transcription of the tales she and her mother tell. Different voices allow the author both to reclaim her heritage, beginning with life in the Russian shtetl, and proclaim her difference from it. Furthermore, as the two women’s stories of themselves as daughters and mothers come into counterpoint, the presumed narrative of Rose Chernin’s life becomes Chernin’s own tale, the story of four generations of immigrant Jewish women and their intimate connection. The Flame-Bearers (1986) and Sex and Other Sacred Games (1989) also reflect the themes of Chernin’s psychological writings. The Flame-Bearers tells the story of Rae (Israel) Shadmi, the rebellious inheritor of leadership in a mystical Jewish women’s sect. Once again exploring the relationships between several generations of Russian-Jewish immigrant women and tracing their heritage back to the Old World, Chernin both claims for her heroine the wisdom of a matriarchal spiritual tradition and identifies the reasons why this tradition must be reformulated. Sex and Other Sacred Games connects this spiritual drama directly to the social world. Chernin and coauthor Renate Stendahl tell a story of relationship by tracing conversations on women’s sexuality. Using two voices, plus written letters and journals, to reinvent the Platonic dialogue on eros and beauty, they participate in a project that both utilizes tradition and creates a new and uniquely feminine narrative. One very powerful contribution to Chernin’s work is its demonstration of the way women’s narratives are reinventing form and in so doing are beginning to integrate the conflicting voice of personal and political, psychological, and literary consciousness. In Crossing the Border: An Erotic Journey (1994), Chernin uses third person to recall her 1971 stay on an Israeli border kibbutz and her ensuing relationships with male and female Israelis. She explores the cultural conflict between herself and her lovers, who include a young soldier, a fellow kibbutz member, and her married Hebrew teacher. In A Different Kind of Listening: My Psychoanalysis and Its Shadow (1995), Chernin chronicles her therapy with three different analysts over a period of 25 years. She joins traditional psychology and literary narrative in her reminiscences about her search for self through psychoanalysis. Chernin’s next book, In My Father’s Garden: A Daughter’s Search for a Spiritual Life (1996), complements her earlier work In My Mother’s House. The former reveals Chernin’s growing awareness of her father as a kindred spirit and her appreciation of his quiet expressions of love. The second and third parts of this three-part book provide accounts of Chernin’s guidance of a dying woman through the process of death and of the author’s spontaneous trip to Germany to meet a spiritual guru. My Life as a Boy (1997) continues Chernin’s search for self-identity through literary memoirs. She writes about her affair with an elegant, worldly German Jewish woman and the eventual breakup of her second marriage. The title comes from her desire to break out of her old life by discovering ‘‘the capacity to act, the freedom to take, the license to choose desire’’ that she believes

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requires ‘‘the instinctive wholly natural ruthlessness of a boy.’’ Chernin switched gears for her next book, Cecilia Bartoli: The Passion of Song (1997), a part scholarly, part psychoanalytic, and part enraptured fan’s account of the life and performances of opera singer Bartoli. Chernin and coauthor Renate Stendhal include biographical information on Bartoli, transcripts of interviews with the singer, and plot summaries of operas in which she has appeared. Chernin returned to psychoanalysis and the quest for self in The Woman Who Gave Birth to Her Mother: Seven Stages of Change in Women’s Lives (1998). This volume provides fictionalized accounts of six mother-daughter stories Chernin obtained through private counseling of one or both of the women. The title comes from Chernin’s belief that women go through seven stages in their relationships with their mothers. The final stage of ‘‘giving birth’’ occurs when women learn to understand and accept their mothers after gaining a greater understanding of themselves. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1983). CANR (1998). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Feminist Studies (Spring 1991). PW (5 July 1985). Women’s Studies (1987). WRB (Mar. 1990) —KAREN E. WALDRON, UPDATED BY LEAH J. SPARKS

CHERRY, Kelly Born 21 December 1940, Baton Rouge, Louisiana Daughter of J. Milton and Mary Spooner Cherry; married Jonathan Silver, 1966 (divorced 1969) Kelly Cherry was born into a home filled with music. Her father taught music theory at Louisiana State University and both he and her mother were accomplished violinists specializing in the string quartets of Beethoven. When she was four, the family moved from Baton Rouge to Ithaca, New York, to enable her parents to further their careers. Although it was often a struggle to survive economically, they demonstrated an unflagging dedication to their art, and this sense of the importance of creative work was communicated to Cherry and her brother, who became writers, and to her sister, who became a solo concert flutist. After receiving a B.A. from Mary Washington College in 1961, Cherry was awarded a Dupont Fellowship and pursued a Ph.D. in philosophy until 1963. She then attended the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she earned an M.F.A. in 1967. Prior to taking her degree, she had gotten married in 1966 to Jonathan Silver, who was a visiting lecturer in art history. In The Exiled Heart: A Meditative Autobiography (1991), Cherry looks back on her decision to marry and sees it as an error in judgement due in part to an uncertainty about her future. ‘‘Women’s lives were so proscribed then, especially in the South. I had ambitions


but no understanding of how they might be spelled out in a professional life and very little encouragement and no guidance.’’ Another underlying factor was the vulnerability she had been feeling over what she believed to be the end of her relationship with Imant Kalnin, the Latvian composer she had met and fallen in love with during a visit to Moscow in 1965. She had not heard from him in several months and assumed he had lost interest. But the relationship was in fact far from over, and the story of how it continued to unfold is the central subject of The Exiled Heart. After Cherry and her husband were divorced in 1969, the correspondence with Kalnin resumed. Through letters they affirmed and further developed their sense of deep connection, which was personal and also professional, as they collaborated on projects that combined music and words. In 1975 she was able to obtain a visa for a few days to see him a second time. Their hope had long been to marry and live in Latvia, but the Soviet authorities continually found ways to prevent them from going forward. In the end, after every recourse had been exhausted over a period of 15 years, there was nothing to do but go their separate ways, an abiding friendship between them. When Kalnin was in the U.S. years later to attend the premiere of his fifth symphony in Boston, they got together briefly in New York City. Cherry writes about the moment at the airport when he glanced up and saw her: ‘‘I looked into his eyes and realized, for the third time in nearly twenty-five years, that this was the most remarkable man I had ever known.’’ While she was contending with Cold War bureaucracy and living with her parents, who had moved to England, Cherry received an invitation to teach at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She accepted a visiting lectureship for 1977-78 and remained on the staff, eventually becoming a full professor and writer-in-residence. She was named Eudora Welty Professor of English and Evjue-Bascom Professor in the Humanities. As she teaches the various forms of literature—poetry, short story, essay, and novel—she continues to write in all of them herself, because she believes that each form has its own particular uses. Her first collection, Benjamin John and Other Poems, was done as her M.F.A. thesis, and the years since have seen a steady outpouring of poetry works. For Cherry, poetry is closely allied with philosophy and the act of thinking. She commented in Writers Digest, ‘‘To be a poet is to be wholeheartedly committed to the search for meaning.’’ Indeed, as she sees it, all literature is a kind of knowing, one that urges us to go beyond our solipsistic selves. In this regard, literature has a kinship with science, another of her keen interests: ‘‘Both make it possible for us to recognize one another as real beings moving in the real world.’’ Cherry’s prose works include four novels. Her short fiction has been selected for Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize, and Prize Stories 1994: The O. Henry Awards. Her collection of essays, Writing the World (1995), explores the art of writing and what it means to be a woman writer and a Southern writer. In 1989 she was awarded the James G. Hanes Poetry Prize presented by the Fellowship of Southern Writers for a distinguished body of work. The citation naming her as recipient states,

CHESEBROUGH

‘‘Kelly Cherry’s poetry is marked by a firm intellectual passion, a reverent desire to possess the genuine thought of our century— historical, philosophical, and scientific—and a species of powerful ironic wit that is allied to rare good humor.’’ OTHER WORKS: Lessons from Our Living Past (coauthor, 1972). Teacher’s Guide to Lessons from Our Living Past (1972). Sick and Full of Burning (1974). Lovers and Agnostics (1975). Relativity: A Point of View (1977). Conversion (1979). Augusta Played (1979). Loneliness: Words for a Secular Canticle (1980). Songs for a Soviet Composer (1980). In the Wink of an Eye (1983). The Lost Traveller’s Dream (1984). Natural Theology (1988). My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers: A Novel in Stories (1990). God’s Loud Hand (1993). Time Out of Mind (1994). Death and Transfiguration (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: CANR 68 (1998). DLBY (1983). Georgia Review (Spring 1994, Winter 1996). Midwest Quarterly 35 (Winter 1994). New Literary History 23 (Winter 1992). Writer’s Digest 76 (July 1996). —MARLENE M. MILLER

CHESEBROUGH, Caroline Born 30 March 1825, Canandaigua, New York; died 16 February 1873, Piedmont, New York Wrote under: Caroline Cresebro’ Daughter of Nicholas G. and Betsey Kimball Chesebrough Caroline Chesebrough attended Canandaigua Seminary and taught English at the Packer Collegiate Institute, Brooklyn, New York, from 1865 until her death in 1873. She wrote novels and short stories for both adults and children, publishing them in daily newspapers and magazines such as Knickerbocker, Putnam’s, Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, and Appleton’s Journal. Chesebrough’s work can be classified as domestic-sentimental and highly moralistic. Some of it depicts seduction and betrayal (The Children of Light, 1853), but most of her fiction portrays women as agents of moral regeneration. Peter Carradine (1863), probably Chesebrough’s best work, falls in the latter category. It opens with a conflict between the schoolteacher, Miranda Roy, and the school’s patron, Peter Carradine. Roy has disciplined one of Carradine’s favorite students, and he decides to dismiss her. Roy’s position as a female teacher is tenuous and Carradine succeeds in removing her; to overcome her resistance he has her pupils vote on her exposition. The novel make a strong statement, with its setting grounded in a social milieu in which teaching was the only respectable employment for middle-class women. Chesebrough explored a variety of religious experiences in her fiction. The Foe in the Household (1871) depicts Delia Rose’s secret marriage to a man outside her Mennonite sect and the

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disastrous consequences of this act. The setting of the short story, ‘‘Victory and Jacqueline,’’ is France; the conflict is between the Protestants and the Roman Catholics. In Victoria (1856), Chesebrough attacks the Calvinist who bases his religion only upon justice, not mercy. She contrasts Calvinist justice with the compassion found in such women as Mercy Fuller (Peter Carradine), whose aid to a family in distress is subtle but powerful. For Chesebrough wisdom does not come from the intellect but from dreams which tell of a better world to come. God speaks through these dreams to the sleeping mind which was previously closed by the intrusion of the outside world. Women are the source of this knowledge and thus possess a power uniquely theirs and uniquely female. The ‘‘True Woman’’ of the 19th century is presented in Chesebrough’s fiction. She is merciful, long-suffering, pious, composed, and forgiving. She is never angry, vengeful, passionate, or egotistical. She might be initially poor or orphaned, but is usually rewarded for her spiritual goodness. Chesebrough’s fiction for children is primarily allegorical and features orphans who live in poverty and rural, remote settings. Death and loss are frequent events in these stories, and here, too, the female is the agent for moral regeneration. Even though Lucy Fitzhugh is an orphan raised without Christian instruction, she eventually brings spiritual enlightenment to Gamp’s Island (The Fishermen of Gamp’s Island, 1865). Her stories at times capture a child’s traumatic religious awakening as in ‘‘A Story of a Cross,’’ where young Fanny wonders at night what will be her affliction while watching the shadows of crosses formed on her bedroom wall shaped by the canes of a rose bush outside her window. In Chesebrough’s fiction the women are the primary characters and possess superior qualities. Although she wrote in a period that spans the Civil War, no mention is made of this or other political events. Her focus is on the spiritual world within and not on the social world without. Except for Peter Carradine, her fiction projects an inner world in which women reign; characterization replaces events. Although Chesebrough’s work offers some interest to the critic of American culture, it must be remembered that the cult of true womanhood represented in her fiction might have no relationship to the realities of 19th-century American women. Chesebrough’s novels and short stories remove the reader briefly to a world of female moral superiority where the male is incomplete without his spiritual complement. Calvinism, the religion of justice, is replaced by a religion of mercy in a society feminized by writers like Chesebrough. It is a world of camphor, of family Bibles, of fainting couches, and of moralistic, allegorical fiction. OTHER WORKS: Dream-land by Daylight (1851). Isa, A Pilgrimage (1852). The Little Cross-Bearers (1854). Susan, The Fisherman’s Daughter (1855). The Beautiful Gate, and Other Stories

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(1855). Philly and Kit (1856). The Sparrow’s Fall (1863). Amy Carr (1864). The Glen Cabin (circa 1865). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Baym, N. Women’s Fiction (1978). Brown, H. R., The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789-1860 (1940). Douglas, A., The Feminization of American Culture (1977). Papashvily, H. W., All the Happy Endings (1956). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —JULIANN E. FLEENOR

CHESLER, Phyllis Born 1 October 1940, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Leon and Lillian Hammer Chesler; married Nachmy Bronstein, 1973; children: Ariel, 1978 In 1972 Phyllis Chesler published the controversial Women and Madness, a book which quickly became seminal to 20thcentury feminism. Chesler is a psychology professor and psychotherapist as well as a feminist activist and writer. She attended Bard College and the New School for Social Research, from which she earned a Ph.D. in 1969. She has written and lectured widely on a variety of subjects, especially those dealing with the cultural and psychological significance of male and female roles. Chesler has taught at the Institute for Developmental Studies, at the New School for Social Research, and at City University of New York. She is politically active in the women’s movement and is the founder of the Association for Women in Psychology (1970) and the National Women’s Health Network (1976). Women and Madness takes the feminist position that, throughout history, women have been assigned a secondary and aberrant status in society; consequently, they have often been seen as mad—simply by definition. According to Chesler, mental illness in women is the result either of a dysfunctional exaggeration of the prescribed sex role or of its unacceptable rejection. Chesler devotes a chapter to the way female patients are viewed clinically and points out that mental health in women is measured by the extent to which they adjust to a role which demands guilt, conservatism, passivity, and self-hatred. She exposes a double standard of diagnosis and treatment of mental illness in women and men, and discusses in some detail the relationship between the female role and the psychiatric symptoms of depression, frigidity, and attempted suicide. Women, Money and Power (1976), was coauthored with Emily Jane Goodman, a lawyer and also a feminist. It too asks provocative questions but only implies the answers. The book, relying heavily on statistics and documented case studies, begins by dispelling the notion that American women either control money or have the power to manipulate it. In alternating chapters, Chesler and Goodman discuss in psychological and legal terms


the economic powerlessness of women. Both conclude that ‘‘women, by definition, have been shut out of the male aristocracy, in which a few have greater power than the many, but in which all members, as men, have more power than almost all women.’’ Chesler deals with the ways women have found for surviving in a society which deprives them of all social and economic control; she emphasizes that whatever status and economic privilege women have, they have ‘‘by association’’ with husbands and fathers. Chesler’s 1978 book, About Men, has been hailed by feminists as a classic—the first book ever to be written about the masculine experience as such. Unlike the preceding books, About Men is speculative rather than scholarly. Here Chesler relies heavily on the insights of myth, art, literature, and personal experience. She suggests men, to an even greater extent than women, have failed to come to terms with the essentiality of human relationships. She depicts the bitterness of unresolved conflict between fathers, sons, and brothers being projected on women in the form of hostility and envy—thus isolating men in a society where only males have value. Chesler writes: ‘‘A sexual revolution might destroy what men do so well together, away from women: the making of Hisstory, the making of war, the triumph of phallic will. . . . I write in the belief that understanding can weaken the worship of death— that has dominated patriarchal consciousness and human action for so long.’’ In 1977, before About Men was published, Chesler became pregnant with her first child, son Ariel. Chesler’s With Child: A Diary of Motherhood was published in 1979, a journal of her experiences during pregnancy, childbirth, and her first year as a mother. In this work, punctuated with insights as well as unresolved questions, Chesler gives voice to rarely expressed ambivalence of motherhood, the intensity with which a mother both loves and hates her child. This book marked a turn in Chesler’s career, and the beginning of a series of books concerned with mothering. While With Child explores the personal aspects of mothering, her next two works examine the legal side of motherhood. In Mothers on Trial: The Battle for Children and Custody (1986), Chesler exposes gender biases in the child-custody decision process. Refuting the popular belief mothers are given preference in custody cases, Chesler shows that in the contested custody cases she studied, fathers were awarded custody more often than were mothers, even when the father was abusive. Chesler’s concerns and arguments about motherhood and custody were crystallized in a single case. Sacred Bond: The Legacy of Baby M. (1988) discusses the Baby M. surrogatemother case of the 1980s as it reflected wider societal patterns of paternal rights and maternal obligations, the abuse of women by the legal system, and of women and children through the practice of adoption. Chesler also describes her own involvement in the case, which extended beyond the role of author to that of supporter and advocate for the biological mother, Mary Beth Whitehead. In Patriarchy: Notes of an Expert Witness (1994), Chesler chronicles the negative effects of bias against women in the health care and criminal justice systems. This collection of previously

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published essays includes tales of women on trial, women in psychiatric institutions, and women in custody battles. Chesler also contends that the media contributes to this patriarchal bias. She followed up this title with Feminist Foremothers in Women’s Studies, Psychology, and Mental Health (1995), which she coedited with Esther D. Rothblum and Ellen Cole. Letters to a Young Feminist (1997) contains brief essays about such diverse topics as marriage, the pro-choice movement, abuse, the working world, and political oppression, which Chesler directs ‘‘loving voice’’ to a new generation of women. She wants to help feminists and potential feminists alike ‘‘to see [their] place in the historical scheme of things’’ and to ‘‘choose whether and how to stand [their] feminist ground in history.’’ Chesler recounts not only what feminists have accomplished, but what still remains to be done, while arguing for solidarity against the patriarchal bias she documented in earlier works. Chesler is a provocative and controversial writer whose work has been both hailed and dismissed by critics. Reviewers have criticized her books as messy, biased, and inconclusive, while others have found the same books to be groundbreaking, courageous, and convincing. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CANR (1998). Other references: American Scholar (1973). Journal of Marriage and the Family (Aug. 1980). LJ (1 Sept. 1976). NYTBR (31 Dec. 1972, 4 April 1976, 5 Jan. 1986, 26 June 1988). Psychology Today (Feb. 1986). PW (13 May 1988). WS (1973). —JUDITH P. JONES, UPDATED BY EILEEN M. ANDERSON AND LEAH J. SPARKS

CHESNUT, Mary (Boykin) Miller Born 31 March 1823, Camden, South Carolina; died 22 November 1886, Camden, South Carolina Daughter of Stephen D. and Mary Boykin Miller; married James Chesnut, 1840 (died 1885) Mary Miller Chesnut was the oldest daughter of the Nullification Governor of South Carolina. In 1859 her husband was elected U.S. senator, only to resign his seat a year later. He returned to South Carolina to serve in the secession convention and was appointed a delegate to the Confederate Constitutional Convention and Provisional Congress in Montgomery, Alabama. Chesnut began keeping a daily journal in December 1860. In manuscript form, it runs to over 400,000 thousand words, She willed the diary to her friend Isabella Martin who edited it with Myrta Lockett Avary in 1905. This edition is roughly one-third of the original and focuses on Chesnut herself. Much interesting gossip was omitted for fear it would offend former Confederates or their descendants. In 1949 novelist Ben Ames Williams edited a more complete edition which is twice the length of the former; Williams restored all of the rumors and gossip which make the diary so fascinating.

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A Diary from Dixie is perhaps the most valuable source for the study of the social history of the Confederacy. Because of her husband’s position and her own charm, Chesnut was accepted everywhere and was on intimate terms with the most important people in the Confederate government. Their wives and daughters gravitated to her, and from this web of acquaintances emerges a detailed portrait of life in the Civil War South. The diary gives the reader an insider’s view of the war. Despite death and military reversals, romance and pleasure continued. Unlike other Confederate diarists who confidently predicted victory, Chesnut saw that, unless quarreling and jealousy among members of the administration and the army ceased, there would be defeat. While she was usually fair in her judgements of people and events, she reflects a definite bias in favor of Jefferson Davis, whom her husband served as aide. Chesnut’s own personality is clearly revealed in the diary. Though she loved and respected her husband, she admits that after 20 years of marriage, she did not really know him. There are some tender moments between them, but it appears that Chesnut was too stern and unbending for his vivacious wife. Whenever they returned to the Chesnut family plantation in Camden, she was seized by fevers and headaches which were probably psychosomatic. She was highly critical of her tyrannical ninety-year-old father-in-law, for he represented the epitome of the slaveholding Southerner. She detested slavery, claiming it forced white women not only to compete sexually with their husbands’ slave mistresses, but also to pretend that the mulatto offspring ‘‘drop from the clouds.’’ Chesnut’s diary explores the problems of an intelligent woman in a society which did not expect women to be more than wives and mothers. Chesnut believed a woman must defer to her husband, but she herself did not do so happily and often violated Chesnut’s explicit instructions about spending money for entertainment and luxuries. Her devious attempts to outwit her husband are comical and remind the reader of early television husbandwife situation comedies. Chesnut bemoaned the fact she did not have children, yet did not envy other women their confinements and responsibilities. Though somewhat vain and pampered by modern standards, Chesnut had a delightful sense of humor and a keen eye for the absurdities of life. These qualities, combined with her literary style, make the diary a pleasure to read. After the war, the Chesnuts returned to Camden. James became involved in state and local politics while Chesnut ran a butter business and revised her diary. James Chesnut died in 1885, and she died a year later in 1886. OTHER WORKS: Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (1981). The manuscript edition of Mary Chesnut’s A Diary from Dixie is in the South Carolina Library at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Avary, M. L., and I. Martin, eds., A Diary from Dixie (1905). Muhlenfield, E., Mary Boykin Chesnut: A Biography (1981). Wiley, B. I., Confederate Women (1975). Williams,

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B. A., ed., A Diary from Dixie (1949). Wilson, E., Patriotic Gore (1962). Woodward, C. V. ‘‘May Chesnut in Search of her Genre’’ in Yale Review (Winter 1984) —JANET E. KAUFMAN

CHIDESTER, Ann Born 1919, Stillwater, Minnesota Raised and educated in Minnesota, Ann Chidester graduated from St. Catherine’s College in St. Paul. She began to write during her teens, and in 1942, at age twenty-three, published her first novel. By 1950 Chidester had published five novels and numerous short stories in well-recognized magazines. Chidester’s novels show a concern for women and for the lower classes, but are frequently flawed by unnecessary dramatic and thematic complications, creating a lack of focus. They contain a strong commitment to the American scene, particularly the Midwest where she grew up. Young Pandora (1942), Chidester’s first novel, is largely autobiographical; a young Midwestern girl attends an area university, has a love affair, begins her career as a writer, and sets off to see the country. No Longer Fugitive (1943) repeats the theme of travel from and return to the Midwest. The main character, a young man who refuses to be drafted, travels widely but ultimately returns to his ancestral home in Minnesota. The novel is dominated by the young man’s grandfather, a pioneer of the Midwest, now living with grandchildren and great-grandchildren in the old homestead. But the potential drama of this patriarch is lost in a confusion of unresolved issues, including war and pacifism, women’s rights, the rights of blacks and Chicanos, Catholicism, and extramarital love. The Long Year (1946) begins with the return of another wanderer to her childhood home in Minnesota. Kay Hasswell is an attractive, sophisticated business woman, married three times but now ‘‘belonging to no man.’’ Feminists might cheer, but as Kay manipulates and subdues her brother, fires the employees of the company, arranges for the dismissal of a schoolteacher with leftist tendencies, and tries jealously to win her niece away from her boyfriend, we see that Chidester has damaged the image of the liberated female. Kay Hasswell finally leaves town without her niece, feeling old and lonely. The novel suffers from being overwrought; it includes threats of union activities and riots, two murders, a trial, and a suicide, all with undeveloped social implications. But with Mama Maria’s (1947) Chidester achieves focus and control, making it the most effective and moving of her novels. Mama Maria, an ailing widow whose only son was killed in the war, owns a rundown truck stop on a highway in mid-America. A veteran employed to pump gas and wait tables becomes a substitute son. Here Chidester’s concern for the lower class reaches maturity, and the theme of jealousy and loneliness in old age is sensitively developed. In Moon Gap (1950) a young Nevada


woman, deserted by her husband, goes to live with her father in a Mojave Desert ghost town. The atmosphere is that of an inescapable past, both for the town and for the girl. The theme of women’s liberation is again unresolved as the choices for Cassie King seem limited to either husband or father. The Lost and the Found (1963) develops Chidester’s concern for the lower class in the story of a migrant worker’s child who is raped and killed. The novel shows the California town’s reaction to this crime: the newspaper writer is moved, the rich landowner is unconcerned, the young woman is appalled. A local un-American activities group hunts for communists but is finally ousted by a younger generation devoted to the highest ideals of the moderate left. The unnecessary profusion of characters and their superficiality prevents this novel from being successful, although we applaud its concern for the migrant workers’ plight. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Warfel, H. R., American Novelists Today (1951). —SUZANNE HENNING UPHAUS

CHILD, Julia Born 15 August 1912, Pasadena, California Daughter of John and Carolyn Weston McWilliams; married Paul Child, 1945 Author and television’s French Chef, Julia Child coauthored the influential and bestselling Mastering the Art of French Cooking (2 vols. 1961, 1970). She thereby translated French culinary techniques into an American idiom and established the standards for authoritative culinary writing in what has become known as America’s gastronomical coming of age. Enrolled in Smith College by her mother when she was born, Child majored in history and received her B.A. in 1934. Although she aspired to become either a basketball star or a novelist, she accepted a copywriting position at the W. & J. Sloane department store and lived in New York for three years before returning to the leisurely life of Pasadena and its Junior League in 1937. When World War II began, Child went to Washington to work as a typist in a government information agency. After six months, she joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, the precursor to the CIA), opted for duty in the Far East, and was in charge of document centers in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and later in China. While in Ceylon, she met Paul Child, a former painter and language teacher, who designed war rooms for the OSS in the Far East. After the war they married and lived in Washington, D.C. until Paul was assigned to the American Embassy in Paris in 1948 as the exhibits officer for the U.S. Information Agency. During the next four years in Paris, Child took French lessons at Berlitz, studied with Max Bugnard, Claude Thillmont, and Pierre Mangelette at the Cordon Bleu, and at the suggestion of

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Simone Beck became a member of an exclusive society of women known as Le Cercle des Gourmettes. ‘‘From the beginning, I fell in love with everything I saw,’’ Child said. Her life was irrevocably changed by the experience of living in France. Child’s culinary career began when a group of American friends asked her to give cooking lessons in her Left Bank apartment. Assisted by Simone Beck, Louise Bertholle, and chefs from the Cordon Bleu, the classes developed into L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes. When Child’s husband was reassigned to the American embassies in Marseille, Bonn, and Oslo, classes were taught whenever and wherever they could be arranged. The school was so successful that the two Frenchwomen invited Child to collaborate in the writing of a cookbook adapting French culinary techniques to American ingredients and kitchens. Eight years in preparation, the first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking was published by Knopf in 1961, one year after Child’s husband had retired and the Childs were established in their home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The book was hailed by the New York Times as ‘‘the finest volume on French cooking ever published in English,’’ and widely praised by the culinary establishment. Invited to appear on a book reviewing program at WGBH, Boston’s educational television station, Child demonstrated beating egg whites with a balloon whisk as she talked about her book. Letters requesting more of the same led to The French Chef series that premiered on 11 February 1963. More than 200 shows were added to the original series of 26 black-and-white programs during the next nine years. Child had invented the theater of cooking; ‘‘Julia’’ had become a household name. After the publication of The French Chef Cookbook in 1968, three subsequent television series were the basis for From Julia Child’s Kitchen (1975), Julia Child and Company (1978), and Julia Child and More Company (1979). Recipes and techniques from four years of monthly Parade magazine articles, six onehour videocassettes called The Way to Cook, segments from the television program Good Morning America, and the Dinner at Julia’s television series contributed to the comprehensive cookbook The Way to Cook (1989). Over more than 40 years Child has developed the techniques to master fine cooking and fulfilled the joint possibilities of television and culinary instruction. Recognition as a television celebrity tends to deflect attention from Child’s writing. Her many books, however, force their readers to reexamine the canon, to look at culinary writing as a genre with its own potential for excellence. She has insisted that each book be a ‘‘teaching’’ book rather than a collection of recipes. In the later books, however, her Olympian tone about utensils has given way to an informal and personalized discussion of options. Child’s favorite book is From Julia Child’s Kitchen, because she says, ‘‘It is entirely my own, written the way I wanted to do it.’’ Indeed, the book resonates with the truest authorial voice and tells the most compelling stories of all of her books. The reader comes to know the narrator intimately, her voice inspires confidence, and every recipe becomes the beginning of a plot in whose denouement the reader participates.

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Yet the book that represents the culmination of Child’s career, however, is The Way to Cook. She breaks with conventional organization by structuring the chapters around master recipes, provides over 600 color photographs to illustrate the methods employed, and blends classic techniques with freestyle American cooking. The award-winning book is her magnum opus, and the distinction it has achieved ranks with the Peabody (1965) and Emmy (1966) awards and the Careme Medal (1974) that have also celebrated her culinary career. Even well into her 80s, Child continues to produce books that are highly prized for their helpfulness and down-to-earth handling of sometimes complicated cooking techniques. In Cooking with Master Chefs (1993), Child introduces the average cook to 16 of America’s top chefs with an accompanying lesson on each one’s prized recipes. A PBS television series covering the same topics followed shortly after the book’s release. Following along the same line, In Julia Child’s Kitchen with Master Chefs (1995) features 26 chefs from the U.S.’s top restaurants, but this time right in Child’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, kitchen. In typical fashion, the creation of the specialty dishes was captured for the television audience. Sidebars and special explanations in the book again simplify the preparation and adapt the restaurant meals to the home dining room. With recipes formerly featured in Julia Child and Company and Julia Child and More Company, Child pulls together a tutorial on menu planning in Julia’s Delicious Little Dinners (1998). With depth she leads the reader through six dinners for six and suggests occasions to use each menu. A similar book published with Little Dinners is Julia’s Menus for Special Occasions (1998). The recipes are from the same source and also include six dinner plans for six, but focus on special dinner party situations such as buffets, cocktail parties, and serving low fat or vegetarian fare. Nearing 90, Child continues to guide American eating traditions through both her books and her television tutorials.

OTHER WORKS: Julia Child’s Menu Cookbook (reprinted, 1991). Julia Child’s papers (professional and personal correspondence, scripts and proofs, fan letters, research notes, and various newspaper and magazine articles) are at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Chase, Chris, The Great American Waistline (1981). Fitch, N. R., Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child (1997). Fussell, Betty, Masters of American Cookery (1983). Booklist (15 April 1995). New Yorker (23 Dec. 1974). There also hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles from 1963 to 1999. Reference works: CA 41-44 (1979). CB (1967). WWAW (1974-75). Who’s Who in Television and Cable (1983). The Women’s Book of World Records and Achievements (1983). —JOAN REARDON, UPDATED BY CARRIE SNYDER

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CHILD, Lydia Maria (Frances) Born 11 February 1802, Medford, Massachusetts; died 20 October 1880, Wayland, Massachusetts Wrote under: L. Maria Child, Mrs. Child Daughter of David C. and Susanna Rand Francis; married David L. Child, 1828 Lydia Maria Child was the youngest of six children born to a prosperous baker and real estate broker and his wife. At twelve Child lost her mother and lived with her sister Mary and her husband. On her eighteenth birthday, announcing her independence, she moved to Watertown, Massachusetts, to stay with her brother Convers Francis, a Unitarian minister. She opened a girls’ school and startled parents by encouraging her pupils’ independent spirit. Child’s literary work included light romances, domestic books for women and children, and historical tracts advocating the rights of black slaves, Indians, and women. Hobomok (1824), Child’s early attempt to write an American romance, presents the Indian as a noble savage, and makes a plea for tolerance. The Rebels (1825) portrays the tensions leading up to the Revolution. In 1826 Child began the Juvenile Miscellany, the first periodical for children in the U.S., which ran successfully for eight years. With the wide reception of her practical American Frugal Housewife (1830), Child became well known and respected as a literary figure in New England. This reputation was dashed almost overnight with the publication of An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans in 1833. In her preface to this historical antislavery document, Child wrote: ‘‘I am fully aware of the unpopularity of the task I have undertaken; but though I expect ridicule and censure, it is not in my nature to fear them.’’ Child not only suffered financial ruin and social ostracism, but was forced to end her Juvenile Miscellany. Child’s constant and selfless devotion to abolitionism was supported by her husband David Lee Child, a founder of the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1832. In addition to writing many pamphlets in support of the cause, financing slave biographies, such as Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and editing the National Anti-Slavery Standard from 1841 to 1849, Child, along with her husband, sheltered fugitive slaves at their residence in Wayland, Massachusetts. Her courageous zeal persisted late into her career when she published the Freedmen’s Book (1865), the profits of which she donated to the Freedmen’s Aid Association. Used as a text in schools for freed slaves, the book stressed the importance of moral principles, good health, neatness, thrift, and politeness, citing black heroes as inspiring examples. Child’s approach to reform was well thought out and literary. Her documents combined strong argument, carefully researched analysis, and sincere compassion. These faculties are also evident in her feminist works. For a Ladies Library series she wrote biographies of exemplary women and a History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations (1835), in which she argued for female equality. In 1837 she was the Massachusetts


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delegate to a women’s rights convention in New York, though she generally avoided public attention. Best acknowledged as an abolitionist writer, Child’s versatility with feminist tracts, historical romances, and domestic books for women and children points to the principal motive behind all of her work: educating her readers and helping them to adopt a moral and humane way of life. She appealed to the young in her Flowers to Children (1844, 1846, 1855), which contains the famous ‘‘Boy’s Thanksgiving’’ poem beginning with ‘‘Over the river and through the woods / To grandfather’s house we go.’’ She addressed the elderly in Looking Toward Sunset (1864), a miscellaneous collection designed to give ‘‘some words of consolation and cheer to my companions on the way,’’ which was applauded by Whittier and Bryant. Even in her romances, she incorporated her ideas on social reform: feminism in Philothea (1836) and antislavery in The Romance of the Republic (1837). Hers was a lifelong commitment to humanitarian values. OTHER WORKS: Correspondence Between Lydia Marie Child and Gov. Wise and Mrs. Mason, of Virginia (1860). An Appeal for the Indians (1868). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Baer, H. G., The Heart Is Like Heaven: The Life of Lydia Maria Child (1964). Clifford, D. P., Crusader for Freedom: A Life of Lydia Maria Child (1992). Milton, M. and P. G. Holland, eds., Lydia Maria Child: Selected Letters, 1817-1880 (1982). Yellin, J. F., Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Literature (1989). Reference works: Cyclopedia of American Literature (1855). DAB (1852). NCAB (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Woman’s Record (1853). —BETTE B. ROBERTS

CHILDRESS, Alice Born 12 October 1920, Charleston, South Carolina; died 14 August 1994, Queens, New York Granddaughter of Eliza Campbell; married (second) Nathan Woodard, 1957; children: Jean Alice Childress moved north to Harlem at the age of five to be raised by her dynamic grandmother, Eliza Campbell. She deems her grandmother’s influence immeasurable for exposing her at an early age to New York’s cultural and artistic offerings. Campbell would take Childress to art galleries and private showings and, according to Childress, say ‘‘Now this is my granddaughter and we don’t have any money, but I want her to know about art. If you aren’t too busy, could you show us around?’’ Afterwards, her grandmother would quiz her about what she had learned. These initial experiences helped form a love for art Childress was able to

translate into her own literary and dramatic career. After finishing only two years of high school, her beloved grandmother died, and Childress was forced to leave school to begin supporting herself as an actress. By 1941 she had joined the American Negro Theatre in Harlem and was on her way to becoming not only an accomplished actress but in time a playwright, screenwriter, novelist, director, and a crusader for striving artists. Childress was married briefly in 1940 and had one daughter. While struggling to support herself and her daughter on an actress’s wages, she also worked as a domestic and in other low-paying jobs. Her experiences during this period shaped her career-long interest in portraying working class African American women caught in oppressive situations, yet maintaining their dignity. Her 1956 book, Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic’s Life uses selections and inspirations from her ‘‘Here’s Mildred’’ column, which ran in the Baltimore AfroAmerican from 1956-58, to explore these working class issues and successfully used satire to underscore the realities of the black domestic worker’s life. Although Childress has written plays, novels, young adult fiction, television scripts, and a screenplay, she is best known as a dramatist. While working with the American Negro Theatre, she began to write for the company because, in her words, ‘‘We needed things. We needed good writing.’’ Her first play, Florence (1949), (which she wrote in one night) draws on her early acting years and the stereotyping of African Americans. Like most of her subsequent plays, it revolves around black female protagonists struggling in a contradictory, often racist environment. (The play is set at a segregated train station). In a 1967 essay Childress described her characteristic and memorable heroines as ‘‘created and constructed on what hurts and what heals, slowly built and put in order out of the conflict which comes from the daily search for bread, love, and a place in the sun.’’ Consistently, Childress’ black women characters possess a depth and sensitivity rarely granted to black subjects in American theater. Childress’ second play, Just a Little Simple (1950), was based on stories by Langston Hughes. Gold Through Trees (1952), her third play, was the first play by an African American woman to have a professional production, meaning it was performed by equity actors. Childress’ 1955 play, Trouble in Mind, ran for 91 performances and won an Obie Award, the first presented to a woman playwright. The play also draws on her acting career, showing black actors resisting stereotypical portrayals of black characters. One critic says of Trouble in Mind that ‘‘Writing in 1955 . . . Alice Childress used the concentric circles of the play-within-the-play to examine the multiple roles blacks enact in order to survive.’’ But on being lauded as the first woman—and first African American woman—to receive the honors she did, Childress says ‘‘I never was ever interested in being the first woman to do anything. I always felt that I should be the 50th or 100th,’’ and explains how being the first means so many women before her of talent and importance were regretfully and unalterably shut out. In the 1960s Childress challenged convention with Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White, focusing on an

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interracial relationship between a black man and a white woman in South Carolina in 1918. Initial attempts to mount a production met with resistance; the first production took place at the University of Michigan in 1966. In 1973 the play was adapted for television, but a number of stations refused to carry the broadcast. Also facing widespread censorship, her comedy-drama contradicting image and role stereotypes, Wine in the Wilderness (1969), appeared as part of a television series, ‘‘On Being Black.’’ The entire state of Alabama banned this telecast. Aware of the tradition of African American drama that had long produced plays in schools, churches, and in community centers across the country, Childress sought to bring this tradition to the forefront of the American theater. In addition to her work as a playwright, she has also been an active supporter of her fellow artists. During the 1950s, her crusades in the Dramatists Guild led to union contracts for black performers and stagehands. Since the 1970s Childress wrote and produced works specifically for young adults. Ferdinand Monjo, editor and author of children’s books, suggested Childress write her first young adult book on the timely subject of drug use. The result, A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich (1973), was a novel about a black thirteen-year-old heroine user that met acclaim as well as censorship. The novel was nominated for a 1974 National Book Award and named a Notable Book by the American Library Association, as well as banned in the Savannah, Georgia school library (the first since Catcher in the Rye). A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich propelled Childress into the role of screenwriter for the 1977 film featuring Cicely Tyson and Paul Winfield. Childress’ later work includes another controversial young adult novel Those Other People (1989). This novel is told from several outsider’s points of view and addresses difficult issues including sexual abuse, homosexuality, and suicide. Called by one critic ‘‘a penetrating examination of bigotry and racism,’’ another critic claims this to be ‘‘a disturbing, disquieting novel that reflects another side of life.’’ With her husband, composer Nathan Woodward, Childress has written two plays focusing on the Gullah-speaking people who live off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, Sea Island Song (produced 1979) and Gullah (produced 1984). Moms, based on the life of blues singer and humorist Moms Mabley, appeared in 1986. Childress has received numerous acknowledgments for her contributions to American theater. In 1965 she appeared with James Baldwin, Leroi Jones (Imiri Baraka), and Langston Hughes on a British Broadcasting Corporation panel discussion on ‘‘The Negro in the American Theatre.’’ She received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1967 and from 1966-68 was a fellow at the Radcliffe (College) Institute for Independent Study. In 1984 she received the Radcliffe Graduate Society Medal; in 1986 she received the Audelco Pioneer Award; and before her death from cancer in 1994, she received the 1993 Association for Theatre in Higher Education Lifetime Achievement Award. OTHER WORKS: String (1969). The Freedom Drum (1970). Mojo: A Black Love Story (1970). Mojo and String: Two Plays (1971).

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Black Scenes (editor, 1973). A Short Walk (1979). Rainbow Jordan (1981). Many Closets (1987). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brown-Guillory, E., Their Place on the Stage: Black Playwrights in America (1988). Keyssar, H., Feminist Theater (1984). Patterson, L., ed., Anthology of the American Negro in the Theatre: A Critical Approach (1968). Reference works: Black American Writers Past and Present (1975). Black American Playwrights (1976). Black Playwrights (1978). Black Writers (1989). Children’s Books and Their Creators (1995). CA (1974, 1999). CANR (1981, 1989). CLC (1980, 1997). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). More Black Playwrights (1978). Notable Women in American Theater (1989). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). SATA (1975, 1995). Other references: Freedomways (Winter 1966). Sage (Spring 1987). Southern Quarterly (Spring 1987). —CAROL ALLEN, UPDATED BY JULIET BYINGTON

CHILTON, Eleanor Carroll Born 11 September 1898, Charleston, West Virginia; died 8 February 1949, New York, New York Daughter of William E. and Mary Tarr Chilton; married Herbert Agar, 1933 (divorced) Eleanor Carroll Chilton, the daughter of a U.S. senator, was educated at private schools in Charleston and New York, and graduated from Smith College in 1922. She published her first novel, Shadows Waiting in 1926, and then moved to London, where her second novel, The Burning Fountain appeared in 1929. There Chilton also published, with Herbert Agar, a volume of poetry, a book of criticism, and several plays. In 1933, Chilton married Agar, a poet, critic, newspaper columnist, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for history. Chilton’s last novel Follow the Furies appeared in 1935; it was later adapted into a play produced in New York in 1940. Chilton died, divorced and childless, after a long illness. Chilton’s primary literary importance is as a novelist. As a critic her work is negligible; The Garment of Praise (1929), which she coauthored, lacks theoretic originality and perception into individual poems. As a poet Chilton’s output is slight and uneven, bound by conventional forms and vague imagery. Yet there is a strength of feeling, particularly in the sonnet sequence in Fire and Sleet and Candlelight (1928). These 15 love sonnets frequently describe an internal conflict between proud independence and passionate love. The poet is reluctant to surrender her secret spirit that ‘‘walks alone, inviolate and unwed.’’ She is aware of the ultimate separateness of lovers, the failure of love’s illusions, the inevitable loneliness and futility of a life that moves ‘‘toward a hungry grave and gaping night.’’ But when Chilton deals with this same theme of the ultimate separateness of lovers in her first novel, her talent becomes


apparent. Shadows Waiting (1926) introduces a young writer who resents total involvement with his lover and retreats to his separate and inviolable art, writing a novel within the novel peopled by purely private dreams and memories. Reviewers applauded the thematic depth and technical experimentation which make this an exceptional first novel, while recognizing its often slowmoving and artificial style. Chilton’s second novel demonstrates the limitations of reason and the power of the natural and instinctive in our lives. In The Burning Fountain (1929) a young couple planned to have two children to raise in a wholly rational environment. But a third child, born during a fierce thunderstorm, disrupts their orderly lives with her wild and ungovernable ways. In spite of parental restraint she finally runs off into a storm, returning to the elements. The descriptions of nature are powerful, but the effect is weakened by contrived symbolism. In Follow the Furies (1935) the same struggle of intellect vs. emotion is explored but here it is internalized and intensified into a private hell. Barbara Linton is the daughter of a freethinking rationalist who has raised her to have no illusions, no religion, no conscience, no belief in anything except the ultimate dignity and rationality of man. Because her father has taught her to be rational above all else, Barbara poisons her paralyzed and increasingly incompetent, fatally ill, mother. Although this mercy killing was intellectually justifiable, emotional justification is a different matter. Barbara becomes increasingly haunted by the killing, and by the fact that, in her illness, her mother had returned to the Catholic church of her childhood, rejecting her husband’s rationalism. Although Barbara can intellectually explain this deathbed conversion as a psychological phenomenon, she cannot explain away the fears which follow her, her nightmares, her new, doubting, and unwilling fascination with religion. Returning to her home and forced by an overflow of guests to sleep in her dead mother’s bed, Barbara imagines poisoning her father, champion of the rationality which has failed her; horrified by this thought, she kills herself. Chilton’s strength as a writer is in her willingness to confront serious philosophical issues, while refusing to accept easy answers. In her last novel the reader senses Chilton’s intensely honest but futile effort to answer unanswerable ultimate questions. BIBLIOGRAPHY: WLB (May 1929). —SUZANNE HENNING UPHAUS

CHIN, Marilyn Born Mei Ling Chin, 14 January 1955, Hong Kong Daughter of George and Rose Chin; married Charles Moore, 1993 Poet and professor Marilyn Chin was born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon. She received a B.A. in Chinese

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American Literature from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1977 and worked as a translator and editor in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa from 1978 to 1982. She earned her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1981 and was coeditor of the Iowa Review in 1984. Chin taught in the creative writing department at San Diego State University from 1988 to 1996, when she became a professor of English and Asian American studies. Chin is the director of San Diego State’s Hugh C. Hyde Living Writer Series, which brings respected authors to the university to discuss their works. She has been a visiting professor at several other California universities. Since graduating from the University of Massachusetts, Chin has translated or edited several volumes of Asian poetry and prose, including Devil’s Wind: A Thousand Steps or More by Gozo Yoshimasu (1980), Selected Poems of Ai Qing (1982), Writing from the World (1985), and Dissident Song: A Contemporary Asian American Anthology (1991). Chin’s own writings have appeared in anthologies like Two Hundred Contemporary Poets (1981) and Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Poets (1984). She has also contributed to periodicals, including Yellow Silk, Massachusetts Review, and Ms. Among her awards are National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1984 and 1991 and a Yaddo Writer’s Colony fellowship from 1990 to 1994. Chin’s first volume of original poetry, Dwarf Bamboo, was published in 1987 to critical praise. Like much of her writing, the poems in Dwarf Bamboo focus on what it means to be a first-generation Asian American (‘‘I’m Ten, Have Lots of Friends, and Don’t Care’’) and the subjugation of Asian women in a male-dominated society (‘‘Homage to Diana Toy’’). The latter is a friend institutionalized in a mental hospital to whom Chin writes: ‘‘Remember, what they deny you won’t hurt you. / What they spare you, you must make shine, / so shine, shine, shine. . . .’’ Other verses comment on the cultural stereotypes of Asian Americans or, as in ‘‘Chinaman’s Chance,’’ the difficulty in integrating both American and Chinese cultures: If you were a Chinese born in America, who would you believe, Plato who said what Socrates said, Or Confucius in his bawdy way: ‘‘So a male child is born to you I am happy, very very happy.’’ The railroad killed your great-grandfather. His arms here, his legs there. . . How can we remake ourselves in his image? Cultural assimilation is a particularly strong theme in Chin’s second work, The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty (1994), a collection of prose and verse. Among the pieces in this work is ‘‘How I Got That Name: An Essay on Assimilation,’’ in which Chin writes of her restaurant-owner father’s obsession with Western culture and mores. Her father became so enamored of film star Marilyn Monroe that he changed his daughter’s name from Mei Ling to Marilyn. Chin recalls her name change to that of ‘‘some tragic white woman / swollen with gin and Nembutal’’ with a mixture of bitterness and sorrow.

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Chin’s ability with language is revealed in other verses, which are by turns funny, earthy, and bleak, but always clever in their use of spare imagery and symbolism. Chin made the following comments on her writing in an interview for Contemporary Women Poets: ‘‘I believe that my work is daring, both technically and thematically. . . . My work is seeped with the themes and travails of exile, loss and assimilation. What is the loss of country if it were not the loss of self?’’ In discussing the compulsion to write, she also explained that ‘‘you know you’re a poet when you can’t live without it.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY: Wang, L. L., and H. Y. Zhao, Chinese American Poetry: An Anthology (1991). Reference works: CANR (1999). CWP (1997). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —LEAH J. SPARKS

CHOPIN, Kate (O’Flaherty) Born 8 February 1851, St. Louis, Missouri; died 22 August 1904, St. Louis, Missouri Daughter of Thomas and Eliza Faris O’Flaherty; married Oscar Chopin, 1870 (died 1882); children: five sons Descended on her mother’s side from the French and Creole elite of St. Louis and on her father’s side from Irish newcomers, Kate Chopin, after her father’s death in 1855, was raised in a household dominated by three generations of widowed women. Her mother filled the home with people attracted to her unusual beauty and vivacity; her grandmother reinforced the religious atmosphere of the home; her great-grandmother enthralled the young girl with many stories ‘‘of the characters and characteristics, often quite intimate, of the city’s founders.’’ Although a child during the Civil War, Chopin strongly supported the South and was deeply affected by the death of her half-brother George. After her graduation from Sacred Heart Convent, she married Oscar Chopin, a native of Louisiana, in 1870. Chopin moved with her husband to New Orleans, where she bore five sons in the next 10 years. The family then settled in Cloutiersville in the Natchitoches Parish, the setting of many of her best stories. Chopin’s husband died in 1882, and she then returned to her mother’s home in St. Louis to begin a new life as a writer. Her first poem, ‘‘If It Might Be,’’ was published in 1899; her first novel, At Fault, appeared in 1890. Chopin wrote most of her small canon of two collections of short stories and two novels in 10 years. The hostile reception of her second novel, The Awakening (1899), seemed to have silenced its author who thereafter wrote only 10 more stories, mostly for young people. Chopin’s earliest writing, ‘‘Emancipation: A Fable’’ dates from 1869, and tells of the confinement and subsequent escape of an animal ‘‘born in a cage,’’ prefiguring her concern for the themes of freedom and nature vs. civilization. Because her central

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character is often a woman in search of freedom, Chopin is admired by feminist critics of today, but not by the moralistic critics of her own day. Chopin’s first novel, At Fault, despite its pedestrian style, is notable for its unromantic characters and its absence of moralizing. The first American novel to treat divorce amorally, it tells of a young widow’s attempts to apply the morality she has been taught to life itself. When she learns her suitor had divorced a weak, alcoholic wife in the past, she insists he return to mend the damage he had done. The subsequent remarriage proves destructive to everyone involved, ultimately leading to the wife’s death. Our heroine must admit it was she who was ‘‘at fault,’’ learning ‘‘there is rottenness and evil in the world, masquerading as right and morality—when we learn to know the living spirit from the dead letter.’’ Allowing her characters to live ‘‘in the world’’ produced the bold realism of the short stories collected in Chopin’s next two books, Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). These stories, many of them published earlier in magazines, established her reputation as a local colorist because of her vivid recreations of the lives and language of Creoles and Acadians in Louisiana. Both collections further explore the theme of nature vs. civilization, and they also show an increasing concern with women’s quest for self-fulfillment. Chopin’s exploration of this women’s quest began with her first published stories. In ‘‘Wiser Than a God’’ Paula Van Stolz chooses a career over a marriage which could have provided love and economic security, but then succeeds both in becoming a famous pianist and in gaining the love of her music professor. Another story worth noting, ‘‘The Maid of Saint Phillippe,’’ is set in 1765 and tells the story of a young girl who chooses to join the Cherokees, asserting that ‘‘hardships may await me, but let it be death rather than bondage.’’ Through this heroine, Chopin establishes a history of independence for American women. Unfortunately, however, Chopin’s women are not free of biology, and in her highly praised masterpiece, ‘‘Desiree’s Baby,’’ Chopin tells of a woman who drowns herself and her baby when her husband inaccurately suspects her of having the black blood that manifested itself in their child. Biology is also the key to understanding Edna’s fate in The Awakening. Edna, the strongest and most controversial of Chopin’s heroines, has immersed herself in an empty marriage and a confusing maternity. Awakening to a sense of herself through her exposure to the more natural Creole society and through the attentions of Robert LeBrun, she chooses to express herself artistically and sensually despite social and personal repercussions. But although Edna walks away from her marriage and from her children, she cannot escape the biological reality of motherhood. Neither can she achieve her artistic goals, because the artist in Chopin’s novel can only gain her career at the expense of both her social and her sensual self. Edna chooses to save the self she has discovered, but she must do so at the cost of the life she owes her children. As she walks to the beach to join herself with the eternal flux of Nature symbolized by the sea, ‘‘the children appeared before her like antagonists who had overcome her; who


had overpowered and sought to drag her into the soul’s slavery for the rest of her days. But she knew a way to elude them.’’ Chopin’s superb psychological insight, especially into the lives of her women, her vivid descriptions of Creole and Acadian life, and her deep-felt concern with human relationships and social institutions will preserve her reputation long after the initial excitement of her rediscovery by contemporary critics has passed. OTHER WORKS: The Complete Works of Kate Chopin (edited by P. Seyersted, 2 vols. 1969). Kate Chopin’s papers are in the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis, as well as in the Eugene Watson Memorial Library of Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bloom, H., ed., Kate Chopin (1987). Bonner, T., The Kate Chopin Companion: With Chopin’s Translations from French Fiction (1989). Boren, L. and S. Davis, eds., Kate Chopin Reconsidered: Beyond the Bayou (1992). Boyd, V. D., ‘‘The Rhetoric of Gender Politics in ‘At Fault’ and Selected Short Stories of Kate Chopin’’ (dissertation, 1995). Chelte, J. S., Philomela’s Tapestry: Empowering Voice Through Text, Texture, and Silence (dissertation, 1996). Dickson, R. J., Ladies Out of Touch: Kate Chopin’s Voiceless and Disembodied Women (dissertation, 1998). Dyer, J., The Awakening: A Novel of Beginnings (1993). Ewell, B. C., Kate Chopin (1986). Fick, T. H., and E. Gold, eds., Kate Chopin (1994). Green, S. D., Kate Chopin: An Annotated Bibliography of Critical Works (1999). Green, S. D., Knowing Is Seeing: Conceptual Metaphor in the Fiction of Kate Chopin (dissertation, 1998). Hoffman, P. E., ‘‘The Search for Self-Fulfillment: Marriage in the Short Fiction of Kate Chopin, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Sarah Orne Jewett’’ (thesis, 1991). Koloski, B., Kate Chopin: A Study of the Short Fiction (1996). Leary, L., Southern Excursions: Essays on Marks Twain and Others (1971). Martin, W., ed., New Essays on The Awakening (1994). Petry, A. H., ed., Critical Essays on Kate Chopin (1996). Podlasli, H. M., Freedom and Existentialist Choice in the Fiction of Kate Chopin (dissertation, 1991). Russell, K. E., Hidden Darkness: Landscape as Psychological Symbol in Kate Chopin’s Fiction (dissertation, 1998). Seyersted, P., Kate Chopin: A Critical Biography (1990). Sparks, L. V., Counterparts: The Fiction of Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Kate Chopin (1993). Springer, M., Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin: A Reference Guide (1976). The Awakening: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives (1993). Toth, E., Kate Chopin (1993). Toth, E., Unveiling Kate Chopin (1999). Van Sittert, B. C., Social Institutions and Biological Determinism in the Fictional World of K. Chopin (dissertation, 1975). Reference works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1987). DAB. NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Twayne’s Women Authors on CD-ROM (1995). Other references: Kate Chopin (video, 1994). Kate Chopin and the 19th-Century Woman (audiocassette, 1987). Kate Chopin

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Newsletter. Markham Review (1968). Perspectives on Kate Chopin: Proceedings from the Kate Chopin International Conference, 6-8 April 1989, Northwestern State University, Natchitoches, Louisiana (1990).Southern Review (1975). The Courage to Write: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century (audiocassette, 1993). —THELMA J. SHINN

CHURCH, Ella Rodman (McIlvane) Born 1831; death date unknown Wrote under: Ella Rodman Ella Rodman Church’s publications include novels, children’s stories, and pamphlets on gardening, needlework, and bird life. Church’s major novel is The Catanese; or, The Real and the Ideal (1853). Set in southern Italy, the novel presents an interesting blend of sentimental and gothic modes. Characters such as the depraved priest, Father Roberts, and the pious heroine, Phillippa, are standard Gothic types; however, in the portraits of the King and Queen of the Castel Novo, Church presents characters whose complex, imperfect relationship suggests her strong interest in exploring the subtleties of male-female liaisons. Flights of Fancy (1853) is Church’s collection of short fiction. In ‘‘First Impressions,’’ one of the simplest but best tales, a husband and wife affectionately recall their initial negative impressions of each other. In several other tales, Church experiments with the dramatic monologue form. The best is ‘‘The Widower,’’ in which Church traces the emotional life of a spinster through her journals and interior monologues. Of central interest in the collection is the two-part saga of the Clavers family. In the first tale, ‘‘The Wife’s Revenge,’’ a young wife leaves her husband to become a famous actress. Whereas the reader’s sympathy should go to the abandoned husband who must rear their infant daughter alone, Church deftly reverses this attitude through a series of flashbacks illustrating how Duncan Clavers’ obsessive drive for power, money, and a more beautiful wife created his tragedy. Eventually, his teenage daughter learns of his coldness to her mother and deserts him to live with her. The second part of the narrative, ‘‘Minna Clavers,’’ is the story of the daughter’s maturity and the backstage world of the theater. Church is skilled in creating complex characters. She is particularly good at sketching intelligent, creative women with sophisticated patterns of motivation and conflict. Her writings deal thoughtfully with many different types of relationships between men and women. Her consistent theme is the distinction between what is possible and what is only desirable, and she prefers reality with its imperfections to unrealistic expectations. —ROSE F. KAVO

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CHUTE, Beatrice J(oy) Born 3 January 1913, Minneapolis, Minnesota; died 1987 Wrote under: B. J. Chute Daughter of William Young and Mary Pickburn Chute The youngest of three literary sisters, Beatrice J. Chute worked for 10 years in her father’s Minneapolis realty office until his death in 1930 prompted her to move to New York City with her scholarly sister Marchette and their forceful, English-born mother. As professor of writing at Barnard College, Chute also worked as a volunteer for 35 years with the New York Police Department’s youth recreation program. At nineteen Chute established her pen name with a juvenile sports story. Readers assumed B. J. Chute, author of over 50 formulaic stories about young male athletes, was a man. Her first novel, Blocking Back (1938), sets a prep school’s tense popularity contest on the football field. The same rivalry in Shattuck Cadet (1940) divides a Minnesota Episcopal military academy between the letter and the spirit of its disciplinary code. While Chute’s sports stories were appearing regularly in Boy’s Life and in her own collections, Shift to the Right (1944) and Teen-Age Sports Parade (1949), she adjusted the formula to popular romance for McCall’s, Redbook, and Woman’s Home Companion. In 1944, however, she abandoned formula writing. In her most successful novel, Greenwillow (1956), Chute writes a lyric pastoral fantasy. Two ministers in amiable conflict preach delight and damnation to an innocent and isolated community. In an elegant style precisely descriptive of woodlands, kittens, and kitchen smells, Chute collects a pastiche of warm affections—from a farm boy’s pride in a cow to the devotion of two aging spinster sisters. At its heart lies a love story of freshness and appealing charm. In 1960 Greenwillow was produced as a musical play by Lesser Samuels with a score by Frank Loesser. It played almost 100 performances in New York, winning praise for the energetic Halloween ballet, a real cow, and actor Anthony Perkins, who played Gideon. In The Moon and the Thorn (1961) Chute makes a new statement with a courtship novel that unfolds three love stories. She imaginatively creates a folklore to reinterpret the theme of her realistic novels: the fault of infidelity is not love of one person but neglect of another. The sexual passion which can break family ties resolves into a memory under the power of a sister’s understanding affection. Lecturing to young writers in 1962 (‘‘When the Writer Comes of Age’’), Chute examined the subjective style she developed to study inner experience. This style controls most of the collected short stories in One Touch of Nature (1965), an anthology portraying temporary solutions to perpetual domestic conflicts. In Katie (1978), Chute creates a sexual comedy in the eloquent, whimsical style of her best work. Katie rebels against her mother’s and sisters’ doctrine of free love by chastely demanding a

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marriage proposal from every suitor until the acceptable bridegroom, like his devoted cat, unobtrusively joins her affectionate female ménage. Chute has a genius for making believable characters perceive in poetry and speak in clever prose. She wrote her first stories in male disguise and returns frequently to the male protagonist, although her female characters are consistently brighter, more attractive, and more genuine than their lovers and husbands. Chute finds her fictional voice in the popular magazine but modulates it beautifully to describe comfortable people who win small victories for their better selves. OTHER WORKS: Camp Hero (1942). The Fields Are White (1950). The End of Loving (1953). The Blue Cup and Other Stories (1957). Journey to Christmas (1958). The Story of a Small Life (1972). The Good Woman (1986). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Chute, M., Minnesota Writers (1961). Coffin, R. W., ed., New York Theatre Critics Reviews (1960). Wylie, G. M., ‘‘B. J. Chute: Theory and Practice’’ (thesis, 1966). Reference works: CA (1962). More Junior Authors (1963). Other references: WLB (Sept. 1950). Marchette and B.J. Chute (videocassette, 1958). —GAYLE GASKILL

CHUTE, Carolyn Born 14 June 1947, Portland, Maine Daughter of Joseph R. and Annie Prindall Penny; married James Hawkes, 1963 (divorced 1971); Michael Chute, 1978; children: Joannah, Reuben (died in infancy) The oldest of three children, Carolyn Chute grew up in a military housing development in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. At sixteen, after dropping out of high school, she married a factory worker, James Hawkes, who was as disenchanted with school as she was. Divorced at twenty-four, Chute picked potatoes, scrubbed floors, cleaned chickens, and performed low-paying jobs to supplement the meager child support Hawkes could provide for their daughter, Joannah. She rarely made more than $2,000 per year. In 1978 Chute married a sometimes-employed woodsman eight years her junior, Michael Chute—a man slow with words because of illiteracy and a mild speech impediment. Though Chute completed high school by taking evening classes and then took several courses at the University of Southern Maine, she is a slow reader and probably had read no more than 30 books by the time her first novel was published. Her novels and her stories are authentic, powerful regional fiction about what it means to be poor in backwoods Maine. Some critics have denounced the novels for wallowing in deprivation, while others commend Chute’s humor, sensitivity, and compassion for those who do not take part in the American dream.


Clearly, it is not the social implications of her characters’ lives that interest her, for she wrote, ‘‘Ever since the beginning of time, and until the world ends, there will be some people who will get everything and others that don’t.’’ It is rather the struggle, and the human dignity of those, like Chute herself, who have lived in hunger, shame, and deprivation that she wants to make known. Despite their enraged, violent, incestuous, tacky, frustrated, and ignorant ways, the characters in The Beans of Egypt, Maine (1985) and Letourneau’s Used Auto Parts (1989) exact from the reader not only attention but also respect. Poverty and human connectedness are central themes in Chute’s fiction, as in the author’s life. The first novel is dedicated to her son, Reuben Chute, who died in infancy from the negligent medical attention available to the poor. Chute began writing it as self-help. She gave her son’s name to the worst Bean character, whose rage is bred by poverty. Often the violence is against women. Reuben used to beat his ex-wife; his cousin, Beal, rapes Earlene Pomerleau. Earlene drifts into marriage with Beal, but ends up Reuben’s woman, after Beal is killed before her eyes and Reuben has come home from prison for nearly beating a game warden to death. In contrast to Reuben and his rage is green-thumbed Roberta Bean, earth mother to a brood of adoring children, some of them Beal’s. Chute got some publicity when, in a December 1992 interview in Spin, singer Kurt Cobain and his wife, Courtney Love, named their daughter Frances Bean Cobain, supposedly after the novel, which the interviewer described as ‘‘the ultimate white trash novel.’’ Just down the road from Egypt is Miracle City, the setting of Chute’s second novel, whose name reflects the heart of gold of Big Lucien Letourneau, who fills his home with stray individuals along with all the children he sires. He operates a trailer park free of charge for the down-and-outs in his battle against the book’s only real villain, the housing code man. With the third book set in the area, Merry Men (1994), Booklist reviewer Donna Seaman coined the phrase ‘‘Egyptmainea’’ for the series. This time we follow the life of Lloyd Barrington. We see him as an eight-year-old boy whose mother has died, leaving him and his womanizing father and uncles to fend for themselves. Thinking himself a young Johnny Appleseed, he is Super Tree Man, planting maple tree seedlings in the yards of less fortunate neighbors by night. We watch him grow into a very young grandfather. Along with Lloyd’s strange Uncle Walt (Unk Walty), who makes life-sized sculptures of the residents of Egypt, Maine, Chute’s staples appear throughout the book, with an ex-con (Carroll Plummer) and violent death (a housewife is shot to death in her backyard). She deviates from her poverty-ridden path to tell the story of Gwen, a rich widow who returns to Egypt and pursues Lloyd. The book came about as a result of Chute’s leadership, in the early 1990s, of her own movement of the poor and underrepresented, which most called ‘‘The Second Maine Militia,’’ but which she referred to as her ‘‘Wicked Good Militia.’’ The book also tells about the militia and offers a fascinating and deep look into the tensions which exist between Maine natives and those from ‘‘away.’’ Two additional novels, The School on Hearts Content Road and Snow, were as yet forthcoming from Harcourt at the time of this writing.

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Photography books have also been the focus of two of Chute’s recent works, as she puts words to the pictures. The first of the pair, Up River: The Story of a Maine Fishing Community, teamed the regional writer with photographer Olive Pierce and focused on the real people of Maine, mostly hard-working, mostly poverty-stricken, so she doesn’t stray far from her usual tree. Well-known novelist Peter Matthiessen said of the book, ‘‘It conveys sharply and poignantly, in text as well as photographs, the gritty culture of a last outpost of the beleaguered commercial fishing communities on our diminished coasts.’’ The second, Elmer Walker: Hermit to Hero, was due for publication in mid-1999. But her poverty-stricken upbringing and erratic schooling have not resulted in someone ignorant. Quite the contrary, the shy, genial personality, combined with a disarmingly rumpled-looking exterior, contains a sharp mind within. Active in local politics, she talks about everything from the American economic climate to shoddy product workmanship in numerous public appearances. She also teaches creative writing classes, including at the University of Southern Maine, and has gained words of praise and recognition from colleagues such as Joyce Carol Oates. Chute started writing, the only activity for which she felt qualified, when she was eight years old. As a part-time correspondent for the Portland Evening Express, she learned to edit and to detach herself emotionally from what she was writing. Her widely disparate narrative styles, as in Earlene’s rural first-person, next-to-articulate narration in Beans, together with the anecdotal prose of Auto Parts, belie a meticulous writing process. Chute considers herself a perfectionist who edits her work painstakingly, particularly at its inception. In Chute, the state of Maine has a powerful native voice. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1988). CLC (1986). Other references: Ms. (April 1986). New England Review and Bread Loaf (Winter 1985, interviews). People Weekly (25 March 1985). —ELISABETH SANDBERG, UPDATED BY DARYL F. MALLETT

CHUTE, Marchette (Gaylord) Born 16 August 1909, Hazelwood, Minnesota; died 6 May 1994 Daughter of William Young and Mary Pickburn Chute The second of three daughters born to a Minneapolis realtor and his English-born wife, Marchette Chute studied at the Minneapolis School of Art before earning her B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1930. After her father’s death in 1939, Chute moved to a Manhattan apartment with her mother and younger sister, novelist Beatrice J. (B. J.) Chute. Chute’s diligently researched reconstructions of the lives of Shakespeare and Chaucer have contributed a great deal to scholarship about the ages in which they wrote. In Shakespeare of

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London (1949), still in print after 30 years, Chute surveys wills, law suits, council minutes, and church registers to detect the affections and jealousies that reveal late Elizabethan personalities, and then threads them into historical speculations. The remarkable absence of lawsuits in Shakespeare’s company, for example, suggests harmonious personal loyalties. Chute’s Shakespeare is a successful theatrical investor, an actor-writer who knows his craft, his company, and all the classes of his audience; he is also a householder who must remain aloof from his Stratford neighbors. Chute’s imagination occasionally produces dubious assertions: from excuses for slow mail she contrives a lonely Stratford death for little Hamnet Shakespeare while his unknowing father tours the provinces. Generally, however, she offers her wide audience encyclopedic research with novelistic relish. Chute had discovered her writing forte in Geoffrey Chaucer of England (1946), a popular literary biography growing ingeniously from her wide contextual research. Details of international diplomacy and wine trade reveal Chaucer’s social status; of King Edward’s courts, his audience’s attitudes; and of the Romance of the Rose, his literary prototypes. Chute’s commentaries are sound and feminist, alert to Chaucer’s sympathy for faithless Criseyde, his bitterness in the Merchant’s tale of courtly lust, and his portrait of marriage as loving partnership in the Franklin’s tale. Chute’s practical criticism and rich storytelling introduce Chaucer to a popular audience. The artful scholarship that portrays Shakespeare or Chaucer as practical, friendly men of their times meets an obstacle in Ben Jonson of Westminster (1953). Chute describes Jonson’s environment with entertaining detail—the lot of a poor scholar in Camden’s school, the grim struggle of a soldier in the Low Countries, the controversial Elizabethan theater, and the Jacobean court where Jonson acted and wrote—but despite earnest diligence, she cannot quite approach her subject. She accepts Jonson’s self-proclamation as dictator of a moral, truly classical English theater without acknowledging the dramatic inadequacies, classical misreadings, and sheer self-promotion. Though she has read Jonson’s vituperative satires, she discounts their revelation of his bitter jealousy, vulgarity, and self-disgust. In Jonson’s eulogy to Shakespeare— ‘‘He was not of an age but for all time’’—Chute is so pleased to find practical friendship that she overlooks the triumph of critical acumen that makes his words a tribute to both men. With Two Gentle Men: The Lives of George Herbert and Robert Herrick (1959), Chute turns her careful, sympathetic personality research to two rural poet-priests of the 17th-century Church of England, defining itself between reformation and civil war. With her usual understated style, Chute frames her subjects with the London and Cambridge of their early development and contrasts their difficult lives as country priests with their forsaken ambitions in politics and Jonsonian poetry. Though she interprets Herbert’s struggling sacred colloquies and Herrick’s classical imitations of country pleasures largely as biographical evidence, she gives a popular audience her sure grasp of historical context. Throughout her writing career, Chute applied her investigative talents to reconstructions of events of biblical stories. The

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Search for God (1941) is a biblical commentary using the techniques of the New Criticism: by placing familiar lines of Scripture into their original contexts, she evokes the personalities of writers behind the words. Chute identifies the Genesis conflict of creative love with punishable sin as an ancient dissatisfaction with human ignorance of the God who would be found in Jesus, the teacher who overcame not only death but irritation with his slow-witted disciples. She initiates her study with Job, who sanctifies intellectual struggle with ecclesiastical authority. Adroit quotation and lucid style compensate for theological simplicity. A sequel to this work, The End of the Search (1946), is a guide to the New Testament history of the early church. Chute emphasizes the Jewish tradition within Christian doctrine, practice, and factionalism. Her contextual approach allows her to overlook Paul’s pharisaical admonitions to women and to admire his panegyric on love, but it gives her little help in decoding the mystic metaphors of Revelation. Chute begins and ends her biography of Jesus of Israel (1961) with messianic prophecies and conflates conflicting gospels to show the son of God as an orthodox, 1st-century Jew under Roman rule. Chute’s diligent, colorful scholarship releases a new historical subject from reverent myths in The First Liberty: A History of the Right to Vote in America, 1619-1850, which she abridged and updated for high school readers in The Green Tree of Democracy (1971). Her detailed colonial history links the hesitant growth of individual political responsibility to English tradition and capitalist expansion. Regressive property requirements dog every extension of the franchise, so Jefferson’s radical Declaration of Independence wins grudging colonial approval chiefly as an access to French aid. Chute treats the suffrage of women and blacks as part of a ceaseless struggle of all citizens to achieve democratic identity. Chute’s many works for children include rhymes about city and country life and juvenile historical romances. In The Wonderful Winter (1954), a runaway young baronet joins Shakespeare’s company for Romeo and Juliet. Because her plot line permits Chute to explore the London theater with a bright child’s delight, its incredible coincidences are excusable. Chute summarizes Shakespeare’s exciting plots in Stories from Shakespeare (1956), a reference work as useful for the young scholar as for the casual adult theatergoer. It is a convenient home reference book that stirs the general reader with an expert’s knowledge. With patient, observant discipline and imagination, Chute lovingly creates historical personalities from her library research, and, in a style that is gracious, gently humorous, unimpassioned, and lucid, presents them to general readers as sympathetic, lively souls concerned with the temporal and timeless issues of their own experience. OTHER WORKS: Rhymes About Ourselves (1932). Rhymes About the Country (1941). The Innocent Wayfaring (1943). Rhymes About the City (1946). An Introduction to Shakespeare (1951). Around and About (1957). ‘‘The Fun of Writing a Book’’ in


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Bulletin of the New York Public Library (1957). The Worlds of Shakespeare (with E. Perrie, 1963). Rhymes About Us (1974).

he broke the door when his foot went through, though on most days he is okay. Except he won’t let her talk on the telephone. And he doesn’t let her look out the window.’’

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Armor, J., ‘‘Bio-bibliography of Marchette Chute’’ (thesis, 1959). Dobbs, P. J., ‘‘Marchette Chute’s Biographies: A Critical Analysis and Definition of Her Life-Writing Style’’ (thesis, 1974). Reference works: CA (1962). CB (1950). Everyman’s Dictionary of Literary Biography (revised edition, 1969). More Junior Authors (1963). SAA (1971). TCA: First Supplement (1955). Other references: Marchette and B. J. Chute (videocassette, 1958).

By the end of the book, Esperanza’s journey toward independence merges two central themes, that of writing and a house of her own. Her rejection of woman’s place in the culture involves not only writing but also leaving the barrio, raising problematic issues of changing class and cultural identity. But Esperanza concludes the book with the promise to return, understood metaphorically, through her writing: ‘‘They will not know I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot get out.’’

—GAYLE GASKILL

CISNEROS, Sandra Born 1954, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of Elvira C. Anguiano and Alfredo Cisneros del Moral The daughter of a Mexican father and a Mexican-American mother, and sister to six brothers, Sandra Cisneros has worked as a teacher to high school dropouts, a poet-in-the-schools, a college recruiter, and an arts administrator. She has also taught as a visiting writer at a number of universities around the country. Cisneros is a graduate of the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop and recipient of four writing fellowships for poetry and fiction, two from the National Endowment for the Arts, one from the Lannan Foundation (1991), and one from the MacArthur Foundation (1995). She is the first Chicana writer to be published by a mainstream press (Random House). Told through the point of view of a young girl, Cisneros’ first book of fiction, The House on Mango Street (1984), is characterized by a deceptively simple, accessible style and structure. The novel’s short sections are marvels of poetic language that capture a girl’s vision of the world she inhabits. Esperanza is already painfully aware of the racial and economic oppression her community suffers, but it is the fate of the women in her barrio that has the most profound impact on her, especially as she begins to develop sexually and learns that the same fate might be hers. The parade of women victimized by their culture’s rigid gender roles begins with her great-grandmother, ‘‘a wild horse of a woman, so wild she wouldn’t marry until my great-grandfather threw a sack over her head and carried her off. And the story goes she never forgave him. She looked out the window all her life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow. . . I have inherited her name, but I don’t want to inherit her place by the window.’’ Esperanza bears witness to the hard lessons taught Chicanas about being women and belonging to men: Rafaela whose husband locks her up because she is too beautiful, Minerva who takes her husband back every time he leaves her, Sally whose father beats her. Sally gets married before the eighth grade to escape her father’s domination, only to fall under the control of her husband: ‘‘She is happy except sometimes her husband gets angry and once

Mango Street captures the dialectic between self and community in Chicana writing. Esperanza finds her literary voice through her own cultural experience and that of other Chicanas. She seeks self-empowerment through writing, while recognizing her commitment to Chicanas. Her promise to pass down to other women the power she has gained from writing is fulfilled by the text itself. In Cisneros’ 1984 collection of poetry, My Wicked Wicked Ways, the young voice of Mango Street coexists with that of a grown woman/poet struggling with her contradictory desires. The narrator of these poems wants to be independent and an artist. While she takes many lovers, she prefers to ‘‘dance alone.’’ As Theresa Martínez notes, ‘‘Poetry—both painful and miraculous emerges from a lonely and sometimes isolated self who is, at the same time, truly her core being, a woman who is well worth knowing for her own sake.’’ This struggle to find her place not only as a woman but also as an artist is carried through in Woman Hollering Creek (1991), a collection of short stories. Set on both sides of the border, the stories of Woman capture the ‘‘in-between’’ of Chicano identity, as in ‘‘Mericans,’’ when gringo tourists are disappointed to learn that the picturesque children they have photographed are Americans visiting their Mexican grandmother. It is in these stories that Cisneros first gives full rein to her biting sense of humor: the grandmother’s full moniker is ‘‘the awful grandmother,’’ and the child narrator passes her time in church counting the awful grandmother’s nose hairs. In ‘‘One Holy Night,’’ Cisneros lightens an otherwise depressing tale with confessions like: ‘‘I don’t know how many girls have gone bad from selling cucumbers. I know I’m not the first.’’ In ‘‘My Tocaya,’’ the narrator, Patricia, has a Chicana schoolmate who changes her name to Trish and affects a British accent. ‘‘A girl who wore rhinestone earrings and glitter high heels to school,’’ Patricia observes, ‘‘was destined for trouble that nobody—not God or correctional institutions— could mend.’’ The stories in Woman mine the rich vein of popular culture, as in ‘‘Little Miracles, Kept Promises,’’ and continue Cisneros’ thematic concern with male/female relationships, whether spiraling in old patterns (‘‘Never Marry a Mexican’’) or telling the story of a woman’s escape from a battering husband through the legend of La Llorona in the title story ‘‘Woman Hollering Creek.’’ The woman’s savior appeared in the form of a loud, laughing, pickup truck driving comadre named Felice (Happiness). Felice doesn’t

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need a man. She’s got her truck, and she makes the payments herself. In Loose Woman (1994), a book of love poems, Cisneros poetic voice has grown stronger and more self-assured. Most of the bravado of Wicked Ways has worn off, and the poet who is left alone sometimes finds herself wishing ‘‘books loved back.’’ But she picks herself up and shakes off self-pity in the catalogue poem, ‘‘You Bring Out the Mexican in Me,’’ a rollicking, Whitmanesque howl at love’s power to affirm life. OTHER WORKS: Bad Boys (1980). Hair: Pelitos (1994). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Calderón, H. and J. D. Saldívar, eds., Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology (1991). García, M. and E. McCraken, eds., Rearticulations: The Practice of Chicano Cultural Studies (1994). HornoDelgado, A., et al eds., Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Reading (1989). Kester-Shelton, P., ed., Feminist Writers (1996). López-González, A., et al, eds. Mujer y literatura mexicana y chicana: Culturas en contacts (1990). Quintana, A. E., Chicana Discourse: Negations and Meditations (dissertation, 1990). Reference works: CA (1991). Hispanic Writers (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Americas Review (Fall-Winter 1990, Spring 1990). Critica (1986). Midwest Quarterly (Autumn 1995). Revista Chicano-Riquena (1985). —YVONNE YARBRO-BEJARANO AND HELENA ALONSO

CLAMPITT, Amy (Kathleen) Born 15 June 1920, New Providence, Iowa; died 10 September 1994 Daughter of Roy Justice and Lutie Pauline Felt Clampitt; married Harold L. Korn Amy Clampitt grew up in Iowa on a 125-acre farm, gaining an appreciation for nature but at the same time becoming cognizant of feelings of isolation and unhappiness. Both her love for the natural world and her awareness of the darker emotions are evident throughout her densely literate and allusion-filled work. She has often been hailed as one of the leading contemporary poets in America, a fact especially notable given that her first major collection of poetry was not published until she was sixty-three. While attending Grinnell College in Iowa, she discovered poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who became a major influence. After graduating in 1941, Clampitt moved to New York and studied briefly at Columbia University and later at the New School for Social Research. Never viewing herself as an academic, she dropped out of Columbia and found a job as a secretary at Oxford University Press, where she eventually rose to promotion

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director for the college textbook division. In 1952 she moved to the National Audubon Society, where she served as research librarian. The 1950s were an unhappy period for Clampitt, who felt herself somewhat of a misfit. She wrote several novels during this decade, but none were ever published. In 1959 she returned to Iowa to be closer to her family, but after six months returned to New York. The 1960s, with the decade’s anything-goes acceptance, was a happier time for Clampitt who found success as a freelance editor, writer, and researcher for the next 17 years. In 1977 she accepted a position as editor at E. P. Dutton, where she remained until 1982. During the 1960s and 1970s Clampitt began to concentrate on writing poetry. After being unable to secure a publisher, Clampitt paid Washington Street Press to publish a limited edition of her first collection, Multitudes, Multitudes, which was released in 1973. In 1978 the poetry editor at the New Yorker, Howard Moss, noticed her work and began to publish her frequently, as did other magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly, Kenyon Review and Yale Review. In 1981 the Coalition of Publishers for Employment published her second limited-edition collection, The Isthmus. Two more limited editions of Clampitt’s poetry followed, The Summer Solstice in 1983 and A Homage to John Keats in 1984. Meanwhile, Clampitt’s first major collection, The Kingfisher—the title inspired by a Hopkins poem—was published in 1983 and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award. The collection is organized around the four elements of fire, water, earth, and air, focusing on natural themes and contains examinations of negative emotions (although rarely of relationships). The sixty-three-year-old’s reputation as a leading contemporary American poet was immediate. Clampitt’s second collection, What the Light Was Like, was published in 1985 and contains 40 poems organized into five sections. Like The Kingfisher and all of her subsequent work, it garnered nearly unanimous critical approval, although some reviewers took issue with individual poems. Clampitt’s poetry is full of allusions to modern and classical literature. A poem in the second collection, ‘‘Voyages: A Homage to John Keats,’’ for example, requires knowledge not only of his poetry but of his correspondence and the facts of his life. Clampitt purposely included some poems on lighter subjects in What the Light Was Like, although the overall darkness of the collection persisted. Three other collections followed, Archaic Figure (1987), Westward (1990), and A Silence Opens (1994), the latter of which was published the year Clampitt died from cancer. Publishers Weekly wrote of the last, ‘‘Clampitt’s gravely luminous fifth volume of poems dwells, with an extraordinary certainty of language, on the uncertain texture of living.’’ The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt (1997) contains excerpts from all of her five previous works but none of the new poems that had surfaced since her death. All of Clampitt’s poetry is challenging to the reader on many levels. Its rich vocabulary includes many unfamiliar words; its


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syntax is complicated; and its allusions, which are central to the poems’ meanings, require an educated audience. While her themes are universal, her topics are wide-ranging and her work brings together travel, science, psychology, metaphysics, myth, foreign language, commerce, nature, art, and, in some instances, humor. Her dense poems defied the 1980s’ trend toward plain-language poetry. Clampitt won a number of awards after her late start as an acclaimed poet, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, membership in the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a MacArthur Foundation grant, and a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s award. She was a writer-in-residence at several colleges, including the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the College of William and Mary, and Amherst. OTHER WORKS: The Essential Donne (ed., 1988). Predecessors, Et Cetera (a collection of essays, 1991). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference Works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature (1991). CANR 29 (1990). CBY (1992, 1994). Other references: Economist (15 Aug. 1998). Nation (3 Nov. 1997). New Republic (19 and 26 Sept. 1994, 6 March 1995). NYT (12 Sept. 1994). NYTBR (9 Nov. 1997). Poetry (July 1998). PW (31 Jan. 1994). Time (26 Sept. 1994). Wall Street Journal (7 Nov. 1997). —KAREN RAUGUST

CLAPP, Margaret Antoinette Born 11 April 1910, East Orange, New Jersey; died 3 May 1974, Tyringham, Massachusetts Daughter of Alfred Chapin and Anna Roth Clapp Margaret Antoinette Clapp, who was for many years president of Wellesley College, is primarily known as an educator. In 1948, however, she won a Pulitzer Prize for Forgotten First Citizen: John Bigelow (1947), a biography of the versatile 19thcentury New Yorker who early on found that one career could not absorb all his emotions or energies. Thus Bigelow pursued such diverse careers as practicing law, editing the New York Evening Post with William Cullen Bryant, taking part in Democratic and Republican party politics, and serving as minister to France during the Civil War. He had a lifetime interest in progressive change and was involved in prison reform, abolition, and urban reform. He ended his career as a founder of the New York Public Library. Clapp wrote with a keen eye for character and was sensitive to the changing aspirations of a man who ‘‘never did completely fulfill the worldly promise he showed as a young man.’’ In

Clapp’s view, the crucial event in Bigelow’s life was his discovery, at age thirty-seven, of Swedenborgian philosophy. This discovery coincided with a critical time of questioning in Bigelow’s personal life. Under Swedenborg’s influence, Bigelow increasingly turned his attention to public service. In Forgotten First Citizen, Clapp focuses primarily on the public, rather than the private, figure. She argues that the ‘‘public arena of disinterested service’’ was the focus of Bigelow’s life. Although Clapp draws on Bigelow’s extensive journals, she does not trace the actual development of his thought. Instead, she stresses the practical consequences of his theories. Clapp had a firm grasp of the internal workings of the American political system and of the role that the political publicist plays in American life. Her grasp of political reality and her perceptive approach to the life of public service gave strength and focus to her portrait of Bigelow. With clarity and understanding she portrayed the growth of the private individual’s commitment to public interest. She noted that both Bigelow and Bryant viewed the primary role of the newspaper to be the formation of public opinion. Both men stressed the influence the press could have in shaping the quality of life in democratic America. Clapp saw Bigelow as a man of ‘‘singularly balanced qualities of mind and spirit.’’ He was, she contended, a man of idealism and practicality, of realism and integrity. Though he had a clear sense of the power of money, he was not committed to obtaining wealth. In the end, it was Bigelow’s long-term, clear-headed commitment to public welfare in New York City that won him the city’s high praise as ‘‘first citizen.’’ Clapp edited The Modern University in 1950, and in it she shares with Bigelow a concern for educating American society. In the one chapter Clapp herself wrote, she focuses on the postWorld War II demand for the democratization of higher education. She clearly evaluates the immediate opportunities and problems associated with that dream, and discusses the difficulty of financing such a commitment. She stresses the need to balance enthusiasm for scientific research with a concern for education as the transmission of culture. As an educator, Clapp was responsive to the difficult task Bigelow set for himself, the task of educating the American society of his day to issues of public concern. As she reveals in The Modern University, Clapp shared Bigelow’s concern for determining long range goals and devising practical day-to-day actions to translate vision into reality. Clapp’s most important biographical achievement lies in taking a relatively minor figure in the American political scene and demonstrating convincingly the impact that such a man can have in shaping the quality of American life. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CB (1948). Other references: NYT (22 June 1947, 4 May 1974). NYHTB (22 July 1947). Saturday Review of Literature (26 July 1947). —INZER BYERS

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CLAPPE, Louise (Amelia Knapp) Smith

CLARK, Ann Nolan

Born 28 July 1819, Elizabethtown, New Jersey; died 9 February 1906, Morristown, New Jersey Wrote under: Dame Shirley Daughter of Moses and Lois Lee Smith; married Fayette Clappe, 1848 or 1849

Born 1898, Las Vegas, New Mexico; died 13 December 1995 Daughter of Patrick F. and Mary Dunn Nolan; married Thomas P. Clark, 1919

Shortly after Louise Smith Clappe’s marriage to her physician husband the couple migrated to the California gold fields where, they believed, there would be a great need for the services of a physician. The couple lived in Rich Bar and the neighboring gold camp of Indian Bar until near the end of 1852. From this experience came Clappe’s observations of life in the gold camps, The Shirley Letters (1854-55). Although she wrote other letters and verse both before and after The Shirley Letters, none came even close to the latter’s literary quality. The Shirley Letters were written to Clappe’s sister Mary in 1851-52 while Clappe was living in the gold camps. Their purpose was ‘‘. . . to give you a true picture (as much as in me lies) of mining life and its peculiar temptations, ‘nothing extenuating nor setting down aught in malice.’’’ The letters reflect a spirit of spontaneity and vitality, giving detailed observations and vivid commentary on daily life in the gold camps. Ferdinand Clappe Ewer, editor of The Pioneer; or California Monthly Magazine, published them serially from January 1854, to December 1855, and described them as ‘‘. . . penned in that light, graceful, epistolary style, which only a lady can fall into; and as they are a transcript of the impressions which the condition of California affairs, two years ago, made upon a cultivated mind, [they] cannot fail to be of general interest.’’ In the 1933 edition of the letters Carl I. Wheat wrote in the introduction: ‘‘. . . the ‘Shirley Letters’ were at once recognized as the first literary production of outstanding merit inspired by the gold rush. Men who had lived through those earliest mad years of California’s peopling found in them a faithful and accurate portrayal of scenes which they themselves had witnessed. . . . In her words we of today may in truth see and come . . . to understand life in the California mines as it was. . . . Her woman’s eye caught and recorded an array of intimate details which no man would have noticed. These . . . elements . . . lend brilliancy and verisimilitude to the picture which she painted. . . . With the ‘Shirley Letters’ Clappe created a real masterpiece.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY: Oglesby, R. E., introduction to Louise Clappe’s The Shirley Letters (1970). Paul, R. W., ‘‘In Search of ‘Dame Shirley,’’’ in Pacific Historical Review 33 (May 1964). Russell, T. C., introduction to The Shirley Letters from California in 1851-52 (1922). Walker, F., San Francisco’s Literary Frontier (1939). Wheat, C. I., introduction to California in 1851: The Letters of Dame Shirley (1933). Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). —LOIS E. CHRISTENSEN

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A shy young girl, Ann Nolan Clark first attended convent schools and later majored in education at Highland University. Her early life in Las Vegas was inculcated with the attitudes and lifestyles of four distinct cultural groups: Indian, Spanish, French, and Anglo-European. This influence later contributed to Clark’s belief in cultural understanding and to her acceptance of divergent peoples. Her interest in minority children caused her to enter the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1930 as a junior high school teacher. Since then Clark taught Indian children throughout the Southwest, completed education-oriented UNESCO assignments in South America, and authored several children’s books. Clark’s first significant books were published by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as bilingual texts after she began working as a teacher for the Tesuque Pueblo Indian children. Written in English and Tesuque, these simple stories reflect Indian culture, traditions, and history. In simple, poetic, rhythmic prose, these early stories relate the lifestyles of the Plains Indians, the Papapa, the Pueblo, and the Navaho. One of Clark’s early Navaho readers, In My Mother’s House (1941), was published in a trade edition, and helped Clark gain national recognition. It reflects the Navaho respect for nature and pride in their culture. Throughout her works Clark has maintained a reverent attitude toward minority cultures and has depicted them as quiet people with great human dignity. Their cultural heritage always remains intact, and the pride within the group is finally acclaimed by the new generation. Clark’s primary concern is to inform her young readers of the strengths found within the many different ethnic groups living in the U.S. She is intent upon portraying each group as a strong, positive culture whose only threats come from outside. Winner of the Regina Medal for her continued distinguished contribution to children’s literature and of the Newbery Medal for her book The Secret of the Andes (1953), Clark maintained a high standard. In her adult book Journey to the People (1969), she says ‘‘I believe children need children’s books that have been written with honesty, accuracy, and reality . . . that enrich imagination and foster appreciation.’’ Some of her finest later works (e.g., Circle of Seasons, 1970; Year Walk, 1975) concern the yearly patterns of a cultural group, and depict a changing community whose rituals, goals, and aspirations are being affected by other nationalities within their particular geographic region. Clark’s early books were heralded for their honesty and their sympathy with Native American Indians in a period when there were no valuable children’s materials written that espoused the Indian’s viewpoint. Her early books remain eloquent, lasting portraits of American Indians and of South Americans. Clark’s books in the later 1970s deal with immigrants to the U.S. and their adjustments, including Spanish (Year Walk, 1975), Finnish (All This Wild Land, 1976), and Vietnamese (To Stand Against the


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Wind, 1978) peoples. While these stories contain the same positive theme of respect and understanding, they are less significant to children’s literature. Her earlier stories, which were written largely for nonreading Indian children, are more skilled in plot, characterization, and tone. Her early writing style reflects the quiet simple attitudes of American Indian tribes and helps young readers to respect and understand Native Americans. OTHER WORKS: The Slim Butte Raccoon (1942, 1996). Little Navajo Bluebird (1943). Bringer of the Mystery Dog: A Story of a Young Boy, Who in His Quest for Bravery Brought the First Horse to His People, the Antelope Band, a Plains Indian tribe, About the Year 1700 (1943, 1996). Young Hunter of Picuris (1943, 1996). Blue Canyon Horse (1954). Third Monkey (1956). The Little Indian Basket Maker (1957). Santiago (1957). There Still Are Buffalo (1958, 1996). The Pine Ridge Porcupine (1958). Little Boy with Three Names (1959). A Santo for Pasqualita (1959). A Child’s Story of New Mexico (1960). World Song (1960). Looking-for-Something (1961). The Desert People (1962). Paco’s Miracle (1962). A Keepsake (1963). Bear Cub (1963). Brave Against the Enemy (1963). Medicine Man’s Daughter (1963). Tia Maria’s Garden (1963). Father Kino; Priest to the Pimas (1963). Who Wants to Be a Prairie Dog? (1964, 1996). This for That (1965). Little Herder in Autumn (1965). Little Herder in Summer (1965). Brother Andre of Montreal (1967). Summer Is for Growing (1968). Sun Journey; A Story of Zuni Pueblo (1968, 1988). Little Herder in Winter (1969). Along Sandy Trails (1969). These Were the Valiant; A Collection of New Mexico Profiles (1969). Little Herder in Spring (1970). Hoofprint in the Wind (1972). Ann Nolan Clark Manuscripts (mixed materials, 1962). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Miller, B. M., and E. W. Field, eds., Newbery Medal Books: 1922-1955 with Their Authors’ Acceptance Papers and Related Material Chiefly from the Horn Book Magazine (1955). Whitehouse, J. C., ‘‘The Early Life of Ann Nolan Clark: A Contextual Biography’’ (thesis, 1987). Other references: WLB (Nov. 1960). —JILL P. MAY

CLARK, Eleanor Born 6 July 1913, Los Angeles, California; died February 1996 Daughter of Frederick H. and Eleanor Phelps Clark; married Robert Penn Warren, 1952 Although born in California, Eleanor Clark grew up in Roxbury, Connecticut, and describes herself as an ‘‘unregenerate Yankee.’’ She attended a one-room country school in Roxbury, convent schools in Europe, and then Rosemary Hall. After her graduation from Vassar in 1934, she wrote essays and reviews for a number of periodicals including the Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, New Republic, and the Nation. Her writing demonstrated

the control and conciseness which the essay demands. From 1936 to 1939, Clark was a member of the editorial staff of W. W. Norton; in 1937, she edited with Horace Gregory a collection of works by young writers called New Letters in America. It included her first published short story. After the publication of her first novel, The Bitter Box (1946), Clark received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The Bitter Box, a heavily symbolic novel, deals with the acceptance of life as it is and the possibility of redemption through love and suffering. Clark carefully manipulates point of view, balancing surrealism and stream of consciousness with a commentary by an objective narrator who is more interested in ideas than events. In 1952 Clark finished the first of her unusual ‘‘travel’’ books produced during long periods abroad, Rome and A Villa. Although it is concerned with setting, the book’s effect is meditative rather than descriptive. It reveals a keen awareness of atmosphere and the passing of time. Clark’s observations are not limited to place but encompass the political, literary, and personal as well. Katherine Anne Porter has said that Rome and A Villa is ‘‘autobiographical in the best sense’’ because it reflects the impact of the outer world upon the inner. For her next book, The Oysters of Locmariaquer (1964), Clark was awarded the National Book Award for nonfiction. Oysters, too, is a book about a place, and it too belongs to a unique genre. It combines the techniques of the essay and the novel to portray life in a little town on the northwest coast of France which nurtures and produces most of the world’s oysters. As she describes, Clark writes of history, ecology, and philosophy with a profusion of detail enriched by allusions to modern and classical literature. Eyes, Etc.: A Memoir (1977), like so much that Clark has written, belongs in a class of its own. It is a moving but never sentimental account of a brief period in her life, shortly after she learned she was rapidly going blind. Eyes tells of the author’s angry and always realistic response to ‘‘the event,’’ her ‘‘affliction.’’ But the book is also an opinionated and wry commentary on contemporary life, especially on our melodramatic and simplistic methods of coping with frustration and disaster. Against this background are woven the events of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Clark constantly contrasts Homer’s tough-minded portrayal of suffering and heroism with feeble modern attempts to cope with life. The book contains the familiar themes of past and present, renewal, suffering, and survival. Her style is even more cryptic than usual, due, perhaps, to the circumstances under which she was writing. OTHER WORKS: Dark Wedding by Ramón José Sender (trans. by Clark, 1943). Song of Roland (adaptation by Clark, 1960). Baldur’s Gate (1970). Dr. Heart: A Novella and Other Stories (1974). Tamrart: 13 Days in the Sahara (1984). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Miller, V. T., The Literary Achievement and Reputation of Eleanor Clark (dissertation, 1991). Writers at

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Work: A Tribute to Elizabeth Bishop, Eleanor Clark, Mary Crapo Hyde and Muriel Rukeyser: An Exhibit, June 1-July 30 (1984). Other references: CW (13 June 1952). Ms. (Nov. 1977). Nation (27 April 1946). NYRB (30 July 1964). SR (29 Oct. 1977). —JUDITH P. JONES

CLARK, Mary Higgins Born 24 December 1929, New York, New York Daughter of Luke Joseph and Nora C. Durkin Higgins; married Warren F. Clark (died 1964); Raymond Charles Ploetz, 1978 (annulled); children: Marilyn, Warren, David, Carol, Patricia. Mary Higgins Clark’s work portrays average people unsuspectingly tossed into terrifying situations. Appealing primarily to women, her novels involve a woman and/or her children being threatened with kidnaping, murder, or abuse. A combination of suspense and mystery, Clark’s novels show the fear of her characters and provide clues for the solving of myriad crimes. Clark was born on 24 December 1929, a middle daughter between two sons. Her father, the owner of a bar, died when she was ten years old. Her mother did menial jobs to support her children, and the children took part-time jobs while still in school. Foregoing college, Clark went to secretarial school and secured a job in the field of advertising. After working for three years, she met with a friend who was an airline stewardess and listened to her friend describe and complain about conditions in faraway countries. Clark quit her job and signed on as a stewardess for Pan Am. A witness to much political unrest, she was on the last American flight out of Czechoslovakia before it turned communist. Only a year was devoted to world travel. After that, Clark married her childhood sweetheart and raised five children. At the same time, she decided to write fiction. Attendance at a creative writing class at New York University led Clark to write a short story based on her experiences as a stewardess. Entitled ‘‘Last Flight from Danubia,’’ the story involves a stowaway from Czechoslovakia and the stewardess who discovers him and must decide his fate. Forty rejection slips later, the story was sold to Extension magazine for $100. Clark’s husband died of a heart attack in 1964. Faced with the same situation her mother had faced when Clark was ten, the new widow sought work as a writer, turning to radio shows about American history, cooking, and feature news stories. She wrote prodigiously, turning out approximately 15 stories a week. She also spent this time writing short fiction, getting up at five o’clock a.m. so she could have two hours to write before the children went to school. Using her experiences from the radio show ‘‘Portrait of a Patriot,’’ Clark wrote Aspire to the Heavens: A Portrait of

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George Washington (1969). Though not a success, the experience encouraged her to write book-length fiction. Going from a hired writer of radio shows to a partner in her own radio show production company, Clark looked over the fiction she enjoyed reading—it was almost all mysteries—and decided to write thrillers. Based on a news story about a mother who murdered her children to keep them out of her ex-husband’s custody and then claimed that they had been kidnaped, Where Are the Children? (1974) began Clark’s successful writing career. Earning a $3,000 advance in hardcover, Clark in three months was able to obtain a $100,000 advance for paperback rights. She used the money for her children’s education as well as her own, obtaining a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1978. Clark also remarried in 1978 to Raymond Ploetz, but the marriage was later annulled. While pursuing her education, Clark followed her first novel with A Stranger Is Watching (1978), which garnered her over $1 million in paperback rights. This time she portrayed the kidnaping of a man’s son and lover by the stranger who killed his wife. The Cradle Will Fall (1980), A Cry in the Night (1982), and Stillwatch (1984) followed in turn, all involve a woman who is threatened by someone planning on killing her. Weep No More, My Lady (1987), in contrast, is a more traditional murder mystery set in a California health spa. All Clark’s books became bestsellers, and in 1988 she received monetary recognition of this fact when she obtained a record-breaking $10.1 million contract from Simon & Schuster for four novels and a collection of short stories. In 1992 she received a contract for $35 million for five novels and a memoir. Along with her financial success, Clark obtained honorary degrees from Villanova University and Rider College. She also won the New Jersey Author Award in 1969, 1977, and 1978, the French Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in 1989, the Gold Medal of Honor from the American Irish Society in 1993, and a Gold Medal in Education from the National Arts Club in 1994. Clark continued to write novels well into the 1990s, accompanied by her daughter Carol Higgins Clark, who also writes bestselling suspense novels. OTHER WORKS: While My Pretty One Sleeps (1989). The Anastasia Syndrome and Other Stories (1991). Loves Music, Loves to Dance (1991). All Around the Town (1992). The Lottery Winner: Alvira and Willy Suspense Stories (1994). I’ll Be Seeing You (1993). Remember Me (1994). Let Me Call You Sweetheart (1995). Silent Night (1995). Moonlight Becomes You (1996). My Gal Sunday (1997). Pretend You Don’t See Her (1997). Stillwatch (1997). All Through the Night (1998). You Belong to Me (1998). We’ll Meet Again (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Pelzer, L. C., Mary Higgins Clark: A Critical Companion (1995). Reference works: CANR 51 (1996). Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers (1991). Beacham’s Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction (1996). Great Women Mystery Writers (1994). —ROSE SECREST


CLARKE, Rebecca Sophia Born 22 February 1833, Norridgewock, Maine; died 16 August 1906, Norridgewock, Maine Wrote under: Sophie May Daughter of Asa and Sophia Bates Clarke Rebecca Sophia Clarke, who as ‘‘Sophie May’’ delighted child readers for four decades, was educated at the Norridgewock (Maine) Female Academy and at home, where she had private tutors in Latin and Greek. Subsequently, she taught school for several years in Evansville, Illinois, until increasing deafness caused her to retire to her family home in Norridgewock. Clarke quickly became a regular contributor to the Little Pilgrim (a juvenile magazine) and to the Congregationalist. Following the practice of the time, she then collected her periodical stories and republished them as series books. In the introduction to the first volume of Little Prudy stories (1863), she greets her young readers, saying, ‘‘You who have read of Prudy Parlin, in the Congregationalist and Little Pilgrim, and have learned to love her there, may love her better in a book by herself, with pictures.’’ Little Prudy was the first and title volume of Clarke’s first series. Her second, and most popular, series was Dotty Dimple, which appeared from 1867 to 1869. Her other principal juvenile works include Little Prudy’s Flyaway Series (1870-73), the Quinnebasset Series (1871-91), the Flaxie Frizzle Stories (1876-84), and Little Prudy’s Children (1894-1901). Clarke’s greatest strength as a writer for children is her ability to create characters. Her children—some say they were modeled on family members or other residents of Norridgewock— are buoyant, natural, good-hearted, and often naughty. That is, realistic. Whether rationalizing their own naughty behavior by comparing themselves to friends, or suffering through the death of a friend, Clarke’s children remain firmly grounded in reality. Their charm is, however, somewhat lessened for modern readers by Clarke’s custom of having her young children use baby-talk in which, for example, ‘‘the respect of a friend’’ becomes ‘‘spec of a fend.’’ Along with other juvenile writers of her time, Clarke had a tendency to moralize. Although she clearly expects her children to be childishly irresponsible and lacking in understanding, she also lets them understand such behavior is not a part of responsible adult life. Children in her books are not expected to behave as adults, but it is also clear that adults will not be allowed to act like children. Responsible adults, usually parents, are obliged not only to demonstrate and train children in virtuous behavior but also to protect children from whatever danger their own thoughtlessness may bring to them. In addition to her very successful juveniles, Clarke wrote adult novels in which pert and lively heroines are involved in highly romanticized plots. These novels, without exception highly moral, were thought to be appropriate reading for ‘‘middle’’ readers—those ready to graduate from juveniles to general novels.

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OTHER WORKS: Christmas Fairies (1860). The Doctor’s Daughter (1871). Our Helen (1874). The Asbury Twins (1875). Honey (1878). Janet: A Poor Heiress (1882). A Christmas Breeze (1886). The Campion Diamonds (1897). Pauline Wyman (1898). Santa Claus on Snow Shoes, and Other Stories (1898). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: American Authors: 1600-1900 (1938). American Women (1897). DAB (1929). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: Boston Transcript (17 Aug. 1906). Kennebec Journal (18 Aug. 1906). Lewiston Journal (2 Feb. 1924). —KATHARYN F. CRABBE

CLEARY, Beverly Born 1916, McMinnville, Oregon Daughter of Chester L. and Mabel Bunn Lloyd; married Clarence T. Cleary, 1940 In one of her many laudatory reviews of Beverly Cleary’s work, critic E. L. Buell said, ‘‘Few writers for children can handle everyday comedy so briskly and so realistically.’’ Cleary claims that from childhood on she wanted to read ‘‘funny stories about the sort of children I knew,’’ and she began writing such stories. Her experience (1939-40) as a children’s librarian in Yakima, Washington, gave her a good grounding in the conventions of juvenile literature, and her own children, boy-girl twins, provided her with additional insights into the world of childhood. Two books for preschoolers, The Real Hole (1960) and Two Dog Biscuits (1961), follow twins Jimmy and Janet through their sometimes heated debate over the nature and purpose of backyard holes and through their grand discovery that cats eat dog biscuits. Older twins in Mitch and Amy (1967) learn to help each other through the trials of school life. These books are, as Horn Book magazine noted, realistic and unsentimental. A group of Cleary’s books are written about and for adolescent girls and have been consistently praised for their understanding of the teenager. ‘‘This is good comedy, underlaid with common sense and insight,’’ Buell wrote of Fifteen (1956), the story of Jane Purdy’s search for a boyfriend. Jean of Jean and Johnny (1959) discovers and learns to live with the pangs of unrequited love, and in The Luckiest Girl (1958), Cleary expertly handles the mother-daughter relationship. In Sister of the Bride (1963), she brings her usual sane observation to the problem of early marriages. Cleary’s most universally acclaimed books, however, have been about grade school children. In Ellen Tebbits (1951), Otis Spofford (1953), and the quieter Emily’s Runaway Imagination (1961), Cleary reveals the gift, for which the Saturday Review praised her ‘‘for making the children in her stories funny and pathetic at the same time.’’ Her earliest and most famous character, Henry Huggins, keeps his verve and individuality through five

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books: Henry Huggins (1950), Henry and Beezus (1952), Henry and Ribsy (1954), Henry and the Paper Route (1957), and Henry and the Clubhouse (1962). The world Henry inhabits with his dog, Ribsy, his friend Beezus, and her unquenchable little sister, Ramona, is superficially close to that of Dick, Jane, and Sally, but Cleary’s wit and superior observation transform the everyday events. Spin-offs from this series are Ribsy (1964), which gives the adventures of the dog while lost, Ramona the Pest (1968), Ramona the Brave (1975), Ramona and Her Father (1977), and several other Ramona novels. Ramona may turn out to be Cleary’s most memorable character. Anyone who followed the woes she caused Henry Huggins is delighted to meet Ramona in other books and to learn of her tribulations as a kindergarten dropout who finally makes good. Ramona Quimby is one of American letters’ truly comic characters and deserves her popularity with readers and her book awards. Although lighthearted realism is one of Cleary’s strengths, she ventured into fantasy with an anthropomorphic mouse in The Mouse and the Motorcycle (1965) and Runaway Ralph (1970). Another animal story, Socks (1973), a return to realism, is a gently humorous account of a cat’s temporary jealousy of a new baby. Cleary is one of those rare children’s writers who is able to amuse adult as well as young listeners. ‘‘Parents chuckle and boys [and girls] laugh out loud,’’ said L. S. Bechtel. Most critics would agree with the authority on children’s literature, May Hill Arbuthnot, who finds Cleary’s stories ‘‘hilarious commentaries on modern life.’’ As an author of more than 30 books for young people, Cleary has established herself as a humorist of enduring appeal who has amply fulfilled her often-reiterated desire to capture on her pages the humor in the everyday lives of children. She is able to blend a healing laughter into even the more serious moments in her fiction. Cleary’s 1984 Newbery Medal winner, Dear Mr. Henshaw (the letter-and-diary account of young Leigh Bott’s struggle to come to terms with his parents’ separation), is, as Natalie Babbitt said, a ‘‘first-rate poignant story’’ in which Cleary ‘‘never allows Leigh’s writing to slide a millimeter away from the natural humor and unconscious pathos that make it work so honestly.’’ Dear Mr. Henshaw also won the 1984 Christopher award and made many best books lists. Throughout her career, Cleary has won numerous awards from both juvenile readers and professional critics, including the American Library Association’s Laura Ingalls Wilder Award (1975) and the Everychild Award from the Children’s Book Council (1985) for her 35-year contribution to children’s literature. Cleary’s later books both present new protagonists and add further sequels. A new character appears in Lucky Chuck (1984), in which Chuck, unable to learn from that adolescent primer, the traffic regulations manual, must learn through on-the-road experience that motorcycles and laws deserve respect. Muggie Maggie (1990), a book with another new character, deals humorously with that bane of school children’s lives, cursive writing. Cleary adds herself as a child character in her warmly praised memoir of her own growing-up years, A Girl from Yamhill.

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New sequels feature the twins Janet and Jimmy, the unquenchable Ramona, and her fantasy character, Ralph the motorcycle mouse. In Ralph S. Mouse (1982), Ralph serves as a peacemaker at school. The twins return in The Growing-Up Feet (1987), a book whose emphasis on the virtues of red boots will recall an incident in Ramona the Pest (1968). In Janet’s Thingamajigs (1987), Janet learns to share with her twin brother. Cleary has added three books to the six in which Ramona Quimby either appears or is featured. Ramona and Her Mother (1979) deals sympathetically with the family conflicts engendered when Mrs. Quimby retains her job even after Mr. Quimby finds an interim job and then decides to return to college. In Ramona Quimby, Age Eight (1981) Ramona shows a maturing attitude about her parents’ problems and about four-year-old Willa Jean, a minor-league pest with whom Ramona must contend after school each day. Ramona Forever (1984) takes the Quimby family saga through the wedding of Aunt Bea, the birth of a third girl, and an acceptable if not ideal resolution of the father’s job situation. Observing all that her baby sister has to learn, Ramona speculates, ‘‘It is hard work to be a baby,’’ and her father pronounces, ‘‘Growing up is hard work.’’ This respect for the difficulties of childhood runs through all of Cleary’s books, keeping the humor sound and strong. The Ramona stories became a television series, an experience Cleary recounts in Ramona Quimby: The Making of a Television Film (1988). A Ramona paper-doll book and two children’s diaries also appeared in the 1980s. Ramona seems well on her way to joining the pantheon of humorous characters in American literature. Readers first met Ramona when she was only four. At the time, she was a major bother to her older sister, Beezus (Beezus and Ramona, 1955.) Over 40 years later and well into her second generation of adoring readers, Cleary, in her eighties, continues to represent the fears, ideas, and viewpoints of children with intelligence, humor, and mischievousness. Her most recent book will see Ramona turn ten (Ramona’s World, 1999.) Eleanor Cameron, in her book, The Green and Burning Tree, states that ‘‘a child goes back to characters he loves as if they were his own family or friends.’’ Children continue to find—in the worlds created by Cleary—friends with whom they resonate and have fun. Cleary’s beloved characters have entered the upper echelon of classics in children’s literature. Henry Huggins, Ramona, and Ribsy were recently immortalized in the Beverly Cleary Sculpture Garden for Children in Portland, Oregon. The statues are only four blocks from the real Klickitat Street, location of numerous Cleary adventures. Young people who struggle to make sense of the challenges life presents captivate Cleary’s imagination. She engages younger readers in The Hullabaloo ABC (1998), a rhyming alphabet book. Older readers as well as adults will enjoy losing themselves in Cleary’s second installment of her memoirs, My Own Two Feet (1995), the sequel to 1988’s A Girl from Yamhill (1988). Despite her popularity, Cleary’s books have been criticized because they don’t provide any racial or ethnic mix in the


characters nor do they confront any of the serious problems of childhood. Cleary does not attempt to create a world different from the white, middle-class one in which she grew up. Yet Anita Trout of the University of Tennessee contends, ‘‘The incidents in her books are common to the lives of most children.’’ Most of the Ramona books, Dear Mr. Henshaw (1983), which won the prestigious Newbery Medal, and the well-received Strider (1991) are all available in Spanish translations. In April of 1997 Cleary spoke at the reopening and rededication ceremonies for the Central Library, the main branch of Multnomah County’s libraries in her home state of Oregon. Seventy-five years after her first visit to the library, Cleary recalled what it was like to be a six-year-old girl awed by the grandeur of the library. She painted a credible, heartwarming sight: a young girl, walking through the massive building, yanking at slouching stockings with one hand and clutching library books to her chest with the other. The young Beverly Cleary, she said, might ask the adult Beverly Cleary: ‘‘Did you always know that you would write books for children?’’ After conferring with the child, the adult would answer: ‘‘I knew I would be a children’s librarian, and with luck, write books to help fill the library shelves.’’ It was the child’s hope and determination that fueled the adult’s years of success. OTHER WORKS: Cutting Up with Ramona (paper dolls, 1983). The Ramona Quimby Diary (1984). The Beezus and Ramona Diary (1986). Here Come the Twins (1989). The Twins Again (1989). Petey’s Bedtime Story (1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Arbuthnot, M. H., The Arbuthnot Anthology of Children’s Literature (1961). Arbuthnot, M. H., Children and Books (1964). Reference works: DLB 52. Other references: Booklist (1 Sept. 1959). Children’s Literature Association Quarterly (Fall 1988). Horn Book (Dec. 1959, Oct. 1962, June 1967, Aug. 1970, Aug. 1984). Language Arts (Jan. 1979). NYHT (27 Sept. 1953). NYTBR (26 Sept. 1954, 16 Sept. 1956, 23 Oct. 1983). Saturday Review of Literature (10 Nov. 1951). —CELIA CATLETT ANDERSON, UPDATED BY CELESTE DEROCHE

CLEGHORN, Sarah Norcliffe Born 4 February 1876, Norfolk, Virginia; died 4 April 1959, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Daughter of John D. and Sarah Hawley Cleghorn After the death of her sister and mother, Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn was sent to Vermont where she was raised by two unmarried aunts. Even in adolescence, Cleghorn was deeply disturbed by human cruelty and became a quiet opponent of vivisection and of atrocities against blacks. In 1912 she began to write protest poetry and essays, coauthoring two collections of

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essays with her close friend Dorothy Canfield Fisher. She organized an unsuccessful campaign against capital punishment in Vermont, and became involved in prison reform. Cleghorn’s strong religious faith was the basis for all of her political action. After the war, unable to sell her writing because of its strong pacifist bias, Cleghorn (in her mid-forties) began teaching at Manumit Farm, an experimental school with socialist backing primarily for workers’ children. Here an interracial and international group of children were taught according to the Dalton method and shared farm chores and housework with the staff. Cleghorn retired because of ill health, and, at the age of sixty, published her autobiography. This was followed, before her death at eighty-three, by a collection of poetry and a volume of inspirational essays. Cleghorn’s early poetry and her first novel, The Turnpike Lady (1907), avoid political themes, concentrating instead on the charm of the rural past and the natural world, particularly Vermont. In her autobiography Cleghorn explains the nonpolitical nature of her early work, telling us that at this time she could not write coherently on a subject about which she felt powerfully. While it was popular at the time, the contemporary reader finds Cleghorn’s work of this period soft, vague, and sentimental. But with her increasing commitment to socialism and pacifism Cleghorn’s poetic themes change, and the 1917 collection of her poetry, Portraits and Protests, contains many political poems written between 1912 and 1916. Cleghorn’s protest poetry is far more direct in style, avoiding the artificial diction of the early poetry. This quatrain, written in 1914, became her most famous poem: ‘‘The golf links lie so near the mill / That almost every day / The laboring children can look out / And see the men at play.’’ Cleghorn’s most explosive poem, ‘‘The Poltroon,’’ was published during the war in the Tribune, causing threats upon the publisher and hundreds of irate letters. Cleghorn’s later poetry, collected in Poems of Peace and Freedom (1945), includes ballads, written for her students, about Harriet Tubman, Eugene Debs, and other lesser known figures, and a series of sonnets with a strong sense of personal mysticism. Cleghorn’s second novel, The Spinster (1916), has strong autobiographical overtones. But far more successful is the actual autobiography, published in 1936. Threescore successfully conveys the cheerful, generous, and sensitive disposition of its author. Presented with a disarming honesty and humility, this autobiography shows the quiet courage of a gentle reformer who lacks the bitter shrillness which so often accompanies political protest. In the introduction to Threescore, Robert Frost calls Cleghorn ‘‘a saint, a poet and a reformer.’’ OTHER WORKS: Fellow Captains (with D. C. Fisher, 1916). Nothing Ever Happens and How It Does (with D. C. Fisher, 1940). The Seamless Robe (1945). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cook, H. W., Our Poets of Today (1918). Smith, L., ed., Women’s Poetry Today (1929). —SUZANNE HENNING UPHAUS

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CLIFF, Michelle Born 2 November 1946, Kingston, Jamaica Michelle Cliff spent her early years in Jamaica and in New York City, where her parents emigrated when she was a child. Although legally an American born abroad, Cliff claims a Jamaican identity. She calls herself ‘‘Jamaican by birth, heritage and indoctrination,’’ an indoctrination she sees as separating Jamaicans into a hierarchy based on the gamut of skin tones from white to red to dark. Cliff went to a girls’ private school on the island conducted by English women. Her experience there confirmed her sense of the divisive effects of color. Cliff received a B.A. in European history at Wagner College in New York City (1969). Subsequently, at the Warburg Institute in London she earned a master’s in philosophy (1974) for her work in languages and comparative historical studies. Between 1969 and 1979 she held a variety of positions in publishing in New York City. Very light skinned, one of the fairest in her family, Cliff uses this relationship to society as a ‘‘white’’ woman of color as a central theme in her writing. Her characters are frequently based on herself and members of her family who are challenged by the dualities of colonialism and revolution, white and black, America and the Third World. Cliff’s first publication, The Winner Names the Age (1978), is an edition of antiracist writings by the Southern American writer Lillian Smith. Raised in the South, Smith was acutely aware of its racial divisions and uneasy with the privileges that came with whiteness. Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise (1980) brings together poetry and prose, autobiography and history, to evoke the colors of Jamaica and memories of her family and to ‘‘conjure a knowledge’’ and vivid portrayal of her past. Cliff’s The Land of Look Behind: Prose and Poetry (1985) demonstrates her strengthening feminist voice against colonialism. In ‘‘The Laughing Mulatto (Formerly a Statue) Speaks,’’ she speaks of the link between passing for white and heterosexual in society despite the fact that she is in reality black and lesbian. The idea that it is impossible to separate aspects of one’s identity like race and sexuality is a theme throughout her work Cliff explained her views on feminism and what the feminist movement gave her in an interview with African American Review in Summer 1994: ‘‘I think that liberation has to begin with oneself. The feminist movement allowed me certain things, like choosing to live alone, which was frowned on in the world in which I lived. Feminism for me was a way of looking in a mirror and seeing possibilities. It gave me support for my choices. One of these choices ultimately was to become a writer, which was something not at all encouraged in the world in which I grew up.’’ In her first novel, Abeng (1984), Cliff writes of a light-skinned Jamaican girl, Clare Savage, and her relation to the dark-skinned Zoe. The story focuses on the status and the damages with which Clare’s lightness is associated; within the power her skin color

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gives her, she sees the true history of colonialism, racism, and privilege. At the novel’s end, Clare is left unsure of herself and her place in society. Cliff describes the book as ‘‘emotionally an autobiography.’’ No Telephone to Heaven (1987), the sequel to Abeng, follows the Savage family’s decision to leave Jamaica and migrate to America, leaving a predestined life in a racist and classist society for a place where so much more could belong to them. Tracing the adjustment of each family member to a new life, she focuses again on Clare who, like Cliff, moves through America, Europe, and back to Jamaica. On the island she is brought through an old friend into a group of revolutionaries; embracing their beliefs, Clare rejects the privilege of her skin color and turns to her community to find wholeness. Cliff’s sense of history and its effects on the present recurs in a collection of reflective short stories, Bodies of Water (1990), which looks at how ordinary people cope with extraordinary events like the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement. Cliff’s next volume of short stories, The Store of a Million Items (1998), contains 11 stories about tragedy, grief, and the joy of everyday living. Her protagonists may experience sorrow, but they also celebrate life in small ways like the children in the title story, who note the passing of time through the changing displays in a store window. Cliff’s understanding of the destructiveness of racism informs her feminist voice. As editor (1981-83) with her longtime companion Adrienne Rich of Sinister Wisdom, she enabled the publication of significant lesbian feminist writing. She has also written of the influence on her of Simone Weil and of the work of black women visual artists, and provided the introduction to Audre Lorde and Rich’s book on black feminism in Germany, Macht und Sinnlichkeit (1983). Free Enterprise (1993), Cliff’s third novel, is about two African American women, the legendary Annie Christmas and the real historical figure Mary Ellen Pleasant, who join forces to assist John Brown’s antislavery efforts. Like Cliff herself, the Caribbean-born Annie has very light skin, but is determined to reject the privileges that come with it in favor of an active role in the antislavery movement. Annie finds a mother figure in Mary Ellen, an entrepreneur who owned property in California that provided refuge to runaway slaves. The two women are contrasted with two white women, Alice and Clover Hooper, whose race enables them to openly oppose slavery and yet who are themselves proven racist in the end. Once again, Cliff’s theme is the challenge to maintain one’s identity when one is a minority, whether sexual or racial or both, in an oppressive, racist, homophobic society. Cliff’s work has been recognized by fellowships from the MacDowell Colony (1982), the National Endowment of the Arts (1982, 1989), and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation (1984); she was Eli Kantor Fellow at the Yaddo Writer’s Colony in 1984. She has taught at the New School for Social Research (1974-76), Hampshire College (1980 and 1981), the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (1980), Norwich University (1983-84), Vista College (1985), San Jose State University (1986), University College of Santa Cruz (1987), Stanford University (1987-1991), and at Trinity College in Connecticut (1991-92). In addition to


teaching, Cliff has been an invited participant at workshops and symposiums around the world and a member of the editorial board at Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society (1981-89). Her stories and essays have appeared in Chrysalis, Conditions, Sojourner, Heresies, Feminist Review, Black Scholar, and other journals. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Black Writers (1989). CA (1986). CANR (1999). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: African American Review (Summer 1994, Spring 1995, Winter 1998). Conditions (1986). NYTBR (15 July 1987). WRB (Nov. 1987). —SUZANNE GIRONDA, UPDATED BY LEAH J. SPARKS

CLIFTON, Lucille Born Lucille Sayles in 1936, Depew, New York Married Fred Clifton (died 1984); children: six ‘‘What I knew was true about me was that I could breathe and I made poems,’’ Lucille Clifton said about herself as a child, in a Belles Lettres interview with Naomi Thiers in 1994. But she never aspired to be a professional poet because, she said ‘‘I hadn’t thought it possible. . . . The only poets I ever saw or heard of were . . . old dead white men from New England with beards.’’ Today Clifton is a prolific, prize-winning poet and writer of children’s books, who in recent years has been awarded Pulitzer recognition. Known for her simple verses and quiet, powerful tone, Clifton illuminates the ordinary with a life-affirming vision that is widely celebrated by critics. Lucille Clifton was born in 1936 near Buffalo in Depew, New York, a place she described as ‘‘a small town, . . .all its life turned like a machine around the steel mill.’’ Her parents were part of the Southern African-American migration north. Clifton explained: ‘‘We were poor but not downtrodden. We didn’t have much money, but we had a lot of love.’’ Her mother wrote poetry that she would read aloud to her four children. Clifton once said, ‘‘From Mama I knew one could write as a way to express oneself.’’ In her autobiography, Generations: A Memoir (1976), which was reprinted in a later book of collected works, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980 (1987), Clifton wrote, ‘‘When the colored people came to Depew they came to be a family. Everybody began to be related in thin ways that last and last ’’ Jean Anaporte-Easton said that, thematically and spiritually, Clifton’s work is shaped by a ‘‘vision of the web which connects us’’ and a strong rootedness in her ancestry. In particular, Clifton often cites her great-great-grandmother, Ca’line, who was captured in the Dahomey Republic of West Africa and brought to

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New Orleans as a slave in 1830, as an inspirational and mythical presence in her life. Clifton attended Howard University in Washington, D.C. (1953-1955) and Fredonia State Teacher’s College (now State University of New York at Fredonia) in Fredonia, New York (1955), where as a drama major she performed plays, developed a writing style, and first met and associated with an emerging class of black intellectuals that included LeRoi Jones, A. B. Spellman, and others. In 1958 she married Fred Clifton. They were married for 27 years and had six children together when he died in 1984. One of the most important influences on Clifton’s writing was the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which advocated the use of the arts as a means of overcoming racial oppression and actively promoted African-American cultural and political nationalism. Clifton’s work expresses a strong affirmation of African-American experience and identity, consistently addresses the problems of racial injustice, and advocates for black children and families in the language, metaphors, and rhythms of black vernacular speech. As critic Haki Madhubhuti put it, Clifton is a ‘‘black cultural poet. We see in her work a clear transmission of values.’’ Clifton’s style is spare: she uses little punctuation; her use of words and space is economical; the words and lines tend to be short, as do the poems themselves. She writes in free verse and frequently uses only lowercase letters. She deliberately uses simple words in her poetry because, she says, ‘‘I am interested in trying to render big ideas in a simple way. I am interested in being understood, not admired.’’ Critics, including Madhubhuti often agree with her: ‘‘Clifton’s style is simple and solid, like rock and granite.’’ This apparent simplicity is belied, however, by the resonant imagery and lyrical rhythms that characterize her poems. Like other 20th-century black women poets, Clifton’s verses have often been stylistically compared to black women’s blues music. Audrey McClusky wrote that she takes a ‘‘moral stance’’ and is ‘‘guided by the dictates of her own consciousness rather than the dictates of form, structure and audience.’’ The result is poetry that is often richly imagistic, emotive, and a clear expression of Clifton’s perspective and integrity as a woman of color. Clifton’s first published collection, Good Times: Poems (1969), won the Discovery award and was cited by the New York Times as one of the best books of 1969. Like her second collection, Good News About the Earth: New Poems (1972), these early volumes reflect the political climate of their time. They pointedly examine racial issues, focusing on contemporary African-American public figures like Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, Angela Davis, and the Black Panthers. At the same time she began publishing her poetry, Clifton was also the mother of six children under the age of ten and began to write children’s books. She has often credited her children and her role as a mother as among her most important influences as a poet, saying, for example, ‘‘Having six children kept me human.’’ In 1970 Clifton’s first children’s book, The Black BC’s came out, followed by nearly 20 other books, including the well-known Everett Anderson series, which celebrates pride in black history and heritage.

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While her first two books of poetry were critically successful, the critical success of the next two, An Ordinary Woman (1974) and Two-Headed Woman (1980), confirmed Clifton’s place as a major ‘‘contemporary African-American poet.’’ Coinciding in time with the women’s movement, these two volumes turn away from broad racial issues to take up the more personal subject of Clifton’s life as a woman of color. Subsequent volumes of poetry follow the trajectory of Clifton’s life as an aging poet, widow, and grandmother, and continue her commentary on contemporary life from her trademark life-affirming vision. Most recently, The Terrible Stories: Poems (1996) details her own experiences with breast cancer and mastectomy. Embracing the good with the bad and always reaching for wholeness and healing, she wrote, ‘‘All night it is the one breast / comforting the other.’’ Madhubuti wrote, ‘‘She is always looking for the good, the best, but not naively so. Her work is realistic and burning with the energy of renewal.’’ Clifton was the Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1989 to 1991 and in the late 1990s was the Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary’s College in St. Mary’s City, Maryland. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Anaporte-Easton, J., ‘‘‘She Has Made Herself Again’: The Maternal Impulse as Poetry’’ in 13th Moon 9 (1991). Belles Lettres (Summer 1994). Evans, M., ed., Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation. Metzger, L., et al, eds., Black Writers: A Selection of Sketches from Contemporary Authors (1989). Middlebrook, D. and M. Yalow, eds., Coming to Light: American Women Poets in the Twentieth Century (1985). WRB (Mar. 1997). Reference works: CA (1994). CLC (1991). DLB (1985). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995).

Coatsworth has written for both children and adults, but all her novels and verses are notable for their poetic charm and lucidity of style. Grown-ups can take pleasure in reading such charming tales as The Cat Who Went to Heaven (1939), and young people can understand the subtle lesson of Silky, An Incredible Tale (1953). Many of her stories for children have historical settings and involve actual historic figures: Boston Bells (1952) and Old Whirlwind; a Story of Davy Crockett (1953) are two examples. Invariably, Coatsworth’s books for young readers drew praise from reviewers who spoke of her ‘‘excellent character development and realistic dialogue.’’ One critic makes the general statement that ‘‘the books of Elizabeth Coatsworth are remarkable for their evocative period and regional sense as well as immediacy of action.’’ Again and again Coatsworth was praised for her graceful style and the poetic quality of her prose. Edmund Fuller, reviewing Silky, An Incredible Tale, says ‘‘as with all Miss Coatsworth’s work, it is a poet’s book, mystic, delicate, lovely.’’ He goes on to explain how Coatsworth has ‘‘created a rich, fresh medium that is at once original and yet the revival of a tradition neglected or distorted in this material age.’’ Readers also praise the accuracy of her historical data and the vividness of her descriptions. Through everything Coatsworth writes breathes a love of living, an ever-fresh appreciation of nature and children, a real compassion for men and women who suffer, and a delight in those who rise above their suffering. There is no taint of solemn moralizing, only an implied lesson that human beings are capable of conquering the obstacles that circumstances put before them. Coatsworth’s work is an excellent example of what is best and most wholesome in American writing.

—DENISE BAUER

COATSWORTH, Elizabeth Jane Born 31 May 1893, Buffalo, New York; died August 1986 Daughter of William T. and Ida Reid Coatsworth; married Henry Beston, 1929 After attending Buffalo Seminary, Elizabeth Jane Coatsworth graduated from Vassar College with a B.A. in 1915, and earned an M.A. from Columbia University in 1916. She was later granted two honorary degrees: Litt.D. (University of Maine, 1955) and L.H.D. (New England College, 1958). Following her years at college, Coatsworth traveled widely and came to know such countries as England, France, China, Egypt, and Mexico ‘‘as a leisurely visitor, not as a tourist.’’ In 1931 Coatsworth was awarded the Newbery Medal for fiction, and in 1967 the Golden Rose Award of the New England Poetry Club. In 1968 she was the first runner-up for the Hans Christian Andersen Award, and also earned the Maine Arts and Science Award.

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OTHER WORKS: Fox Footprints (1923). Atlas and Beyond (1924). Compass Rose (1929). The Cat and the Captain (1930). The Golden Horseshoe (1935). Sword of the Wilderness (1936). Aliceall-by-herself (1937). Five Bushel Farm (1939). The Fair American (1940). Country Poems (1942). Country Neighborhood (1944). Maine Ways (1947). Summer Green (1948). South Shore Town (1948). Here I Stay; The Enchanted (1951). Night and the Cat (1950). Mountain Bride (1951). Dollar for Luck (1951). The Sod House (1954). The Sally Series, beginning with Away Goes Sally; Horses, Dogs and Cats (1957). Poems (1957). The White Room (1958). The Peaceable Kingdom (1958). The Cave (1958). Indian Encounters (1960). Lonely Maria (1960). Desert Dan (1960). The UNICEF Christmas Book (1960). The Noble Doll (1961). Ronnie and the Chief’s Son (1962). The Princess and the Lion (1963). Jock’s Island (1963). Cricket and the Emperor’s Son (1965). The Secret (1965). The Hand of Apollo (1965). The Sparrow Bush (1966). The Fox Friend (1966). The Place (with H. Beston, 1966). Chimney Farm Bedtime Stories (1966). Maine Memories (1968). Bess and the Sphinx (1968). Light-house Island (1968). George and Red (1969). Indian Mound Farm (1969). Grandmother Cat and the Hermit (1970). Good Night (1972). The Wanderers (1972). Daisy (1973). Pure Magic (1973). All of a Sudden Susan


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(1974). Marra’s World (1975). Personal Geography: Almost an Autobiography (1994).

Coit’s more powerful and penetrating portrait is of Calhoun, the man who did risk political action, though he failed in his ultimate aim.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Sturges, F. M., Elizabeth Coatsworth Beston: A Tribute (1978). Reference works: The Junior Book of Authors (1951). Other references: Horn Book (1936, May 1951). KR (1 Feb. 1951). NYHTB (20 May 1951). NYT (12 Nov. 1950).

Coit also coauthored two accounts of the early American nation, The Growing Years: 1789-1829 (1963) and The Sweep Westward: 1829-49 (1963). The Growing Years focuses primarily on the political and military history of the early republic. The Sweep Westward is centered on the transformation of America through geographical expansion and the growth of industrialization. Both books capture the sense of movement and energetic growth of early national history. Again, Coit reveals her gift for incisive analysis of national character and mood.

—ABIGAIL ANN HAMBLEN

COIT, Margaret L. Born 30 May 1919, Norwich, Connecticut Daughter of Arch W. and Grace Trow Coit It is as a biographer that Margaret Coit made her major impact as a writer. Her two most influential works are John C. Calhoun: American Portrait (1950, reprinted in 1977), for which she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1951, and Mr. Baruch (1957). Her biography of Calhoun involved a significant recasting of the story of his life. Rejecting the traditional stress on Calhoun as sectionalist, Coit argued that his great concern throughout his career was to preserve his section within the Union and ‘‘to make democracy work.’’ From the time of the triumph of Jacksonian democracy, Calhoun tried to avert the consequences of unlimited majority rule, eventually posing the concurrent majority concept. In Coit’s view, interest in slavery was not at the center of Calhoun’s concern for the South. Rather, his defense of slavery reflected his view of human nature. Calhoun, she contends, ‘‘loved [freedom] too much to surrender it to those who he thought might endanger it,’’ as he felt blacks must inevitably do. Her portrait of Calhoun is of a man of tragic vision desperately trying to avert an unavoidable future. In her second biography, Mr. Baruch, Coit deftly depicts the transformation of a post-Reconstruction South Carolinean into the Wall Street entrepreneur. The primary focus of the biography, however, is on Baruch’s extended period of public service beginning with World War I. Baruch’s relations with the presidents he served are perceptively analyzed. Coit stresses Wilson’s crucial role in capturing Baruch’s imagination and enlisting his talents in the wartime mobilization of industry. In the Roosevelt years, the relationships were more strained and Baruch’s contributions to the nation more indirect. According to Coit, between Roosevelt and Baruch was ‘‘the uneasy truce of two extraordinarily able men’’ whose dominant personalities made collaboration difficult. Baruch’s last major contribution came in the Truman years with the formulation of the Baruch Plan for international control of atomic energy. Coit’s picture of Baruch is of a proud individualist, an intensely private person creating his own myth. In her view, Baruch’s chief weakness was that he would not put himself to the political test and seek the public office where his talents might most significantly have been put to use. Of the two biographies,

In all her writing, Coit displays a gift for portraiture and a sense of drama. Her sensitivity to the spirit of the age enables her to evoke past issues and national mood, and to deal perceptively with the changes in America. She contrasts the frontier world of Calhoun’s youth with the new industrializing, consolidating nation against which he struggled; the post-Reconstruction South of Baruch’s youth with the precision-oriented, standardized America which he promoted during World War I. As a political biographer, Coit had a strong grasp of political reality, adroitly weaving together both public action and the maneuvers behind the scenes. Her gift for individual character analysis is particularly striking, whether in short sketches or fullfaceted studies. While she often utilizes bold, dramatic colors, she is also sensitive to the play of light and shadow within a personality. As a biographer, she depicts with grace and insight the private as well as the public world of fully realized human beings.

OTHER WORKS: The Fight for Union (1961). Andrew Jackson (1965). Massachusetts (1967). John C. Calhoun (edited by Coit, 1971). ‘‘The Continuing Relevance of John C. Calhoun’’ in Continuity: Special Issue—Recovering Southern History (Fall, 1984).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Annals of the American Academy (Nov. 1950). Nation (1 April 1950). NYT (5 March 1950, 24 Nov. 1957). Political Science Quarterly (June 1950). SRL (4 Jan. 1958). —INZER BYERS

COLUM, Mary Maguire Born 13 June 1887, Derryhollow, County Fermanagh, Ireland; died 22 October 1957, New York, New York Daughter of Charles and Maria Gunning Maguire; married Padraic Colum, 1912 Reared in northwest Ireland by elderly relatives, Mary Maguire Colum was sent at thirteen to a convent boarding school where she

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received the traditional, multilingual education on which she drew for the rest of her life. At the height of the Irish revival she graduated from the National University, Dublin, where she knew such figures as Yeats, Maude Gonne, Lady Gregory, and Joyce. Yeats advised her to take up criticism, although she had already published fiction; he also suggested she adopt a masculine pen name, which she did not. In 1914, two years after her marriage to poet Padraic Colum, Colum came to the United States. She wrote ‘‘ghost’’ reviews and in 1916 joined Women’s Wear as translator and reporter. Though she regarded writing as ‘‘a very risky business’’ and criticism even more so, she gradually won her place, contributing regularly to Forum, Saturday Review, Dial, Scribners, and other periodicals. Colum received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1930 and 1938, was honored by Georgetown University and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 1953 was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. From These Roots (1937) is Colum’s attempt to render ‘‘an account of the ideas that have gone into the making of modern literature,’’ beginning in mid-18th century with the works of Lessing and Herder, tracing parallel development in England and France. Her book is not a history of criticism, but an examination of ‘‘patterns.’’ Colum identifies true criticism as a creative force, ‘‘a principle through which the world of ideas renews itself,’’ and literary criticism as ‘‘that branch of literature whose most important office is the originating of . . . ideas.’’ She argues that modern literature has reached a dead end, that a new criticism is required to stimulate new and original literature. Her thesis places undue emphasis upon the role of criticism as a generative force and makes no allowance for individual genius of the creative writer. Her evaluation of American literature is also questionable; firmly rooted in European culture, Colum cannot recognize the folk tradition in American writing, and ranks the influence of Poe above that of Hawthorne and Melville. Her autobiography, Life and the Dream (1947), sensitively portrays the austerity of rural Irish life and the excitement of the Irish revival in Dublin. Colum offers sketches of the literati of Dublin, New York, and Chicago, along with a great many opinions. She attacks American materialism, education, and marriages; she lauds Elinor Wylie and feuds with Harriet Monroe. In a world where she struggles constantly for acceptance as an intellectual equal, Colum is impatient with women who fail to utilize their full abilities. She is always independent, dogmatic, and passionately Irish. Colum’s reputation as a respected critic rests upon her first book and the many reviews she contributed to periodicals during her long career. Her autobiography and Our Friend James Joyce (1958) reveal a more personal side. Although her style is still formal, her writing is frequently anecdotal, displaying a sometimes awkward humor. Her prejudices are strong; she loves a good fight. Yet all her books indicate she is still very much outside American thought. As she herself writes: ‘‘I feel an exile always, everywhere, including the land in which I was born.’’

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BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Catholic Authors: Contemporary Biographical Sketches 1930-1947 (1948). Other references: NY (22 March 1947). NYHTB (19 Dec. 1937). NYT (20 March 1947). NYTBR (19 Dec. 1937). SR (13 Nov. 1937, 27 Nov. 1937). —JOANNE MCCARTHY

COMAN, Katharine Born 23 November 1857, Newark, Ohio; died 11 January 1915, Wellesley, Massachusetts Daughter of Levi P. and Martha Seymour Coman Katharine Coman’s father, a graduate of Hamilton College, was a teacher, a lawyer, and a Civil War veteran. Coman graduated from the University of Michigan in 1880 with the Ph.B. degree. She immediately joined the faculty of Wellesley College in Massachusetts, and remained there all her life, teaching rhetoric, economics, history, and sociology. She retired in 1913 as professor emeritus. Coman was able to convince the college administration that economics was both suitable and necessary to the education of women. She was coauthor of four textbooks on English history, but wrote alone when she turned to economics. Her writings were of a practical bent, based on personal observation during her extensive travels. The Industrial History of the United States (1905) was widely used as a textbook through 11 editions. In recognition of Coman’s contribution, the Katharine Coman Professorship of Industrial History was established at Wellesley in 1921. The twovolume Economic Beginnings of the Far West (1912) was the result of a four-year leave of absence for travel and research. It gives the reader an absorbing account of the explorers, the colonizers, the Mormon migration, the missionary priests in California, the Gold Rush, and the spread of slavery. Coman makes it clear that history proved the superiority of the free settler: ‘‘In competition with the fur traders and gold seekers, with Spaniards exploiting Indian labor, and Southern slave holders, the homesteaders, working with his family in liberty, everywhere won the land.’’ Coman’s life was active in pursuit of social improvement. She helped to develop the Young Women’s Christian Association at Wellesley in 1884. In 1881, when her friend Jane Addams was starting Hull House in Chicago, eastern colleges were talking about similar settlement houses. In 1891 the Wellesley Chapter of the College Settlements Association was organized by Coman, Vida Scudder, Katherine Lee Bates, Emily Balch, and other faculty members. In 1892 they opened Denison House, a college


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settlement in Boston. It was used as a center for union organizing as well as for child and adult education classes. Wellesley students worked here and in other settlement houses in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. In addition to the practical social work experience it provided for students, the real purpose of college sponsorship was to arouse interest and sympathy on social questions and provide moral and financial support for the operation. When Coman was visiting in Chicago in 1910 she came to the aid of the United Garment Workers in their strike against makers of ready-made men’s clothing in Chicago. She acted as chairman of the grievance committee, and she wrote a stirring introduction to a booklet detailing the grievances. As a result, favorable publicity and public sympathy for the strike were achieved. Throughout her life Coman was attached to her ‘‘family’’ on the faculty at Wellesley. She lived there with her closest friend, Katherine Lee Bates, who published a book of poems, Yellow Clover, as a memorial to Coman. It is a loving tribute to their companionship of 35 years. OTHER WORKS: The Growth of the English Nation (with E. Kendall, 1894). A History of England for High Schools and Academies (with E. Kendall, 1899). History of England for Beginners (1901). English History Told by English Poets (with K. L. Bates, 1902). History of Contract Labor in the Hawaiian Islands (1903). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bates, K. L., Yellow Clover: A Book of Remembrance (1922). Burgess, D., Dream and Deed (1952). Hackett, A. P., Wellesley: Part of the American Story (1949). Halsey, O. S., ‘‘Katherine Coman 1857-1915,’’ in The Survey (23 Jan. 1915). Henry, A., The Trade Union Woman (1915). Scudder, V., On Journey (1937). Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). —JOAN M. MCCREA

provided income or personal potential. Both her autobiographical account, The Comstocks of Cornell (posthumously published in 1953), and reminiscences of Cornell students reflect a determinedly cheerful woman who once observed, ‘‘our usual way has ever been to pretend that we like whatever happens.’’ Comstock’s early work in science writing was as collaborator with her husband, a faculty member at Cornell. She began as his assistant and clerk but later turned to drawing and wood engraving, for which she won exposition prizes and was elected a member of the American Association of Wood Engravers. Working steadily, she illustrated John Comstock’s college textbooks, An Introduction to Entomology (1888) and A Manual for the Study of Insects (1894); in the latter she was presented as the ‘‘junior author’’ and credited with some written work as well. Her contribution was even more evident in Insect Life (1897), a simplified textbook on entomology. In the 1890s Comstock became involved in the nature study movement, lecturing and writing leaflets on special natural history topics for classroom use. State support for the Cornell extension programs permitted her unprecedented appointment as assistant professor for the summer session in 1898. After protest by some trustees her rank was changed to lecturer, but in 1913 she was again named assistant professor, and in 1920, professor. Like other leaders in the nature study movement, Comstock insisted that her goal was not to teach scaled-down species hunting or microscopical work but rather ‘‘to give pupils an outlook regarding all forms of life and their relationship one to another.’’ Nonetheless, her work was accurate, unlike much natural history writing of the period, and Comstock often included taxonomic terms. How to Know the Butterflies (1904), for example, begins with an elementary account of butterfly characteristics, outlines methods for collecting, and then discusses 12 families in detail. Such manuals as How to Keep Bees (1905), The Pet Book (1914), and Trees at Leisure (1916) contained anecdotal and literary materials as well as practical advice.

Born 1 September 1854, Otto, Cattaraugus County, New York; died 24 August 1930, Ithaca, New York Also wrote under: Marion Lee Daughter of Marvin and Phebe Irish Botsford; married John H. Comstock, 1878

Much of Comstock’s own energy went into popular lectures and essays which were romantic without being sentimental and suggested her belief in moral education. Ways of the Six-footed (1903) contained 10 stories illustrating the social organization of insects, their communication by sound, their use of mimicry as a defense strategy, and other adaptive features. The chapter on ants, bees, and wasps is entitled ‘‘The Perfect Socialism.’’ Comstock did not belabor the analogy here nor ascribe human characteristics to the insects; she did, however, use human experience to describe animal behavior as an educational device.

While attending Cornell University from 1874 to 1876 Anna Botsford studied zoology under John Henry Comstock, whom she married. In 1885 she completed a B.S. degree in natural history and about that time began systematic study of wood engraving with John P. Davis of Cooper Union in New York City. Childless, Comstock had several overlapping careers which were unplanned, the apparent result of her patient application to tasks which

Many of Comstock’s essays appeared in The Chautauquan and Country Life in America. She briefly edited Boys and Girls (1903-07), a nature study magazine, before turning it over to her Cornell colleague Martha Van Rensselaer. For years she contributed to the educational Nature Study Review (1906-23), serving as its editor from 1917 until its merger with Nature Magazine. Typically, her contributions underscored the value of all life, the

COMSTOCK, Anna Botsford

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importance of understanding nature, and the interrelationship among creatures. Personal anecdote was a prominent feature.

CONANT, Hannah (O’Brien) Chaplin

Comstock’s single most important volume was a compendium of her earlier work consolidated into the 900-page Handbook of Nature Study (1911). Not discouraged by the skepticism of her husband and her coworker Liberty Hyde Bailey about the need for such a text, Comstock provided a teaching guide for elementary teachers dealing with animal life, plant life, and the ‘‘earth and sky.’’ The Handbook outlined programs for nature study in the classroom and outside, provided review questions, and suggested additional references. Vindication of her initiative came in 24 editions and translation into eight languages of the Handbook. Comstock’s text became known as the ‘‘nature Bible’’ because of her sensitive counseling on such topics as children’s attitude toward death when dealing with predatory behavior, and because of her concern that living creatures be returned to their natural habitat after study.

Born 5 September 1809, Danvers, Massachusetts; died 18 February 1865, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Jeremiah and Marcia S. O’Brien Chaplin; married Thomas J. Conant, 1830; children: ten

Only once did Comstock attempt to write fiction. Confessions to a Heathen Idol (1906), written under the pseudonym Marion Lee, is a romantic fantasy without any reference to Comstock’s daily work of science. The ‘‘heathen idol’’ was a teakwood Japanese figure to whom a forty-year-old widow mused in her evening diary. It is a book in the sentimental tradition of the 19th century, high-minded in its morality and without any surprises in its development. It is, however, suggestive of Comstock’s own marriage, describing as it does, continuity and satisfaction, but also a fundamental loneliness. More strictly autobiographical is The Comstocks of Cornell, edited and published two decades after Comstock’s death; the narrative centers on family life and indicates Comstock accepted her role as homemaker and helpmate without much question. She remained detached from suffrage and other feminist activity. In 1923 the League of Women Voters named Comstock one of the 12 greatest women in the United States. Popular yet scholarly in her science writing, she was a key figure in the nature study movement, and a moving force on the Cornell campus.

OTHER WORKS: Nature Notebook Series (1920). The papers of Anna Botsford Comstock are at the Cornell Collection of Regional History and University Archives, Cornell University.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Herriar, G. W., and R. G. Smith, eds., The Comstocks of Cornell (1953). Needham, J. C., ‘‘The Length and Shadow of a Man and His Wife,’’ in ScM (1946). Smith, E. J., ‘‘The Comstocks of Cornell: In the People’s Service,’’ in Annual Review of Entomology (1975). Reference works: NCAB (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). —SALLY GREGORY KOHLSTEDT

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From her father Hannah Chaplin Conant learned several foreign languages, which turned out to be important in her later career. Her parents filled the Baptist parsonage in Danvers with 10 children, and in 1818 the family moved to Waterville, Maine, to head the struggling Baptist institution, Waterville (later Colby) College. Conant was well prepared to be a true ‘‘helpmeet’’ for her husband, the college’s professor of languages. In 1835 they both accepted positions at Hamilton Literary and Theological Institution in Hamilton, New York (later to become Colgate University). In addition to college and domestic duties—which included the care of 10 children by 1853—Conant edited the Mother’s Monthly Journal of Utica from 1838 to 1839 and continued to write for it thereafter. In 1850 the family moved to Rochester where Conant’s husband taught Hebrew, biblical criticism, and interpretation at the Rochester Theological Seminary. During this period Conant pursued her own parallel interests, translating three ‘‘popular practical commentaries’’ on Philippians, James, and John by the eminent German biblical scholar Augustus Neander. While in Rochester she also wrote her own two major works—a biography of Baptist missionary Adoniram Judson and a history of the English Bible. Conant’s first original work, The Earnest Man; or the Character and Labors of Adoniram Judson (1856), was designed as a more popular ‘‘life’’ to complement the scholarly Memoir by Francis Wayland. Conant’s most important work, which became a standard text in courses on the English Bible, quite popular in the proliferating religious colleges, was The English Bible (1857). In it she traces the history of English translations from Wycliffe through the version authorized by King James. Interestingly, the book contains a chapter on ‘‘Anne Boleyn: the Royal Patroness.’’ Conant concludes with an acknowledgment of the wealth of earlier manuscripts and translations becoming available to biblical scholars and raises the possibility of a new translation to replace the King James Version.

OTHER WORKS: Lea; or, the Baptism in Jordan by G. F. A. Strauss (trans. by Conant, 1844). The Epistle of Paul to the Philippians by Augustus Neander (trans. by Conant, 1851). The Epistle of James by Augustus Neander (trans. by Conant, 1852). The First Epistle of John by Augustus Neander (trans. by Conant, 1852). Erna, the Forest Princess; or Pilgrimage of the Three Wise Men to Bethlehem by G. Nieritz (trans. by Conant, 1855). The New England


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Theocracy: A History of the Congregationalists in New England to the Revivals of 1740 by H. F. Uhden (trans. by Conant, 1855). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: NCAB. NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: NYT (20 Feb. 1865). —NANCY A. HARDESTY

CONWAY, Katherine Eleanor Born 1852, Rochester, New York; died 2 January 1927, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of James and Sarah Conway Katherine Eleanor Conway’s parents were Irish Catholic immigrants and Conway received a traditional Catholic girls’ school education. After graduation from Sacred Heart Academy in New York City, she began her career as a teacher, but she soon left the field to become an assistant editor at the Buffalo Catholic Union and Times. Conway later successively became the editor of three Catholic newspapers: the Catholic Union, the Pilot, and the Republic. During her editorial career Conway lectured, taught at St. Mary’s College for Women in Indiana, traveled, and wrote. She remained single and was active in Catholic intellectual and literary circles. In 1907 she was awarded the Laetare Medal by Notre Dame University; this award, founded in 1883, was given each year to an American Catholic for distinguished accomplishments on behalf of the Church and/or the nation. A similar, higher honor was awarded to Conway in 1912 when Pope Pius X conferred upon her the decoration Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice, for Church and Pope. Conway’s nonfiction and poetry best characterize the style and intent of her work. The major motivation behind her nonfiction writing was to reinforce the traditional role of Catholic wife and mother. Even though Conway herself worked outside of the home and never married, she expended a tremendous amount of literary effort to promote woman’s domestic roles. In the late 1890s she wrote The Family Sitting Room Series, a five-volume collection of books directed toward young Catholic women. Although Conway posed insightful questions concerning many turn-of-the-century, upwardly mobile, Catholic women, she answered those questions in a traditional Catholic manner. She asked rhetorically in The Christian Gentlewoman (1904), ‘‘What is the good—the highest good—for a woman? Simply, the perfection of her womanhood.’’ For Conway a woman’s power and ability came from her ‘‘natural charms,’’ ‘‘large-hearted simplicity,’’ ‘‘lack of self-consciousness.’’ A woman’s role in activating social change was limited to exerting influence on her children and husband. Conway’s poetry almost exclusively explored the relationship between God and human in the face of hardships, especially death. Life might be bitter, but death was sweet, for it brought the intimate meeting between God and his children. Conway used

specifically religious images to convey her message of meaningful death, such as the Resurrection and the death of Joseph of Nazareth. But it was in her poem ‘‘Her Little Dying Son’’ that she most explicitly expressed the delights of death. Drawing from the Victorian leitmotif of the dying child, Conway created the scene of a dying son telling his mother not to grieve: ‘‘His arm is underneath my head!—Oh, it is splendid—being dead!’’ One cannot fully evaluate the significance and creativity of Conway’s writing without analyzing her role as journalist. Her active life as editor, lecturer, teacher, and writer stood in conflict with her perceived standard of womanhood. As a member of the emerging Catholic middle class, Conway articulated many of the important questions facing Catholic women. Her answers, however, were traditional and inattentive to women’s needs. Although Conway’s own life was filled with professional achievement and intellectual stimulation, she did not regard it to be a viable life style for all women. OTHER WORKS: On the Sunrise Slope (1881). The Good Shepherd in Boston (1892). A Dream of Lilies (1893). A Lady and Her Letters (1895). Making Friends and Keeping Them (1895). Questions of Honor in Christian Life (1896). New Footsteps in WellTrodden Ways (1899). The Way of the World and Other Ways . . . Bettering Ourselves (1899). A Story of Our Set (1900). Lalor’s Maples (1901). In the Footprints of the Good Shepherd (1907). Charles Francis Donnelly; A Memoir (1909). The Woman Who Never Did Wrong, and Other Stories (1909). Fifty Years with Christ, The Good Shepherd (1925). The Color of Life: A Selection from the Poems of Katherine E. Conway (1947). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Romig, W., Guide to Catholic Literature 1888-1940 (1940). Other references: Catholic World 124. —M. COLLEEN MCDANNELL

COOEY, Paula Marie Born 21 March 1945, Hays, Kansas Daughter of Edward Wilton and Polly Miller Cooey, Jr.; married Philip C. Nichols Jr.; children: Benjamin Paula Cooey’s writings during her distinguished academic career have ranged from her systematic analysis of Jonathan Edwards, a colonial American Puritan preacher, on nature and destiny, to works of feminist theory that focus on the significance of the body in the context of religious experience, law, and domestic abuse. Most recently she has published a highly readable and generally accessible book in which she takes a look at the American family in the late 20th century. In her creative and sensitive themes, she has used current social theory and critique, cognitive psychology, contemporary fiction and arts, and women’s accounts of religious experience. Cooey, who writes and speaks passionately about things that concern her, began writing

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as a primary means of thinking when she was seven years old. At that time, she wrote her first short story and began to keep a journal. She once claimed the greatest limitation and the greatest strength of the body of her written work are one and the same: its experimental quality. This is reflected not only in the content and the topics but also in her writing style and her choice of words and images.

family values.’’ She proposes a constructive theological position that supports concern for family life in the context of secularity, religious and political diversity, and social justice, and she specifically addresses ways that confessing and civic communities can identify avenues ‘‘that empower more and more people . . . to take charge of and to contribute responsibly to the communal processes that govern their lives.’’

Born in 1945 in Georgia, she received her B.A. in philosophy from the University of Georgia (1968), continuing doctoral work there in comparative literature. She transferred to the Harvard Divinity School, where she received a Master of Theological Studies in 1974. In 1981 she received a Ph.D. in the study of religion from Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. After serving one year as a full-time visiting instructor at Connecticut College in 1979-80 and as a part-time instructor at the University of Massachusetts, Harbor Campus, in 1980-81, Cooey joined the faculty of Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas, in August 1981. During her 18 years at Trinity, she was promoted through the ranks to become professor of religion in 1993. In 1999 she was appointed the Margaret W. Harmon Professor of Christian Theology and Culture at Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota.

In addition to her books, Cooey has written more than 20 scholarly articles and essays, numerous book reviews, and various other writings, such as ‘‘Transformations of Humanistic Studies in the 21st Century’’ in Religious Studies News (1998) and ‘‘The Messiness of Dying,’’ in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (1999). With her commitment to scholarship, research, and writing, Cooey also devotes enormous time and energy to the teaching of undergraduate students. She is a creative and highly respected teacher, always seeking new ways to communicate with students. She received the Sears-Roebuck Foundation Award for Excellence in Teaching and Campus Leadership in 1991; was codirector of the Southwest Regional American Academy of Religion Workshop on Teaching for Junior Faculty, funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities and the Lilly Endowment (1994-96); and was the Trinity University nominee for the CASE award for outstanding teaching (1988).

One often finds variations of the word ‘‘transformation’’ in her writings. From the first publication, Jonathan Edwards on Nature and Destiny: A Systematic Analysis (1985), which was based on her doctoral dissertation, she wrote, ‘‘Grace is the only word I know that captures both the commonness and the specialness of reality. It takes human misery and sorrow seriously and transforms them.’’ The subtitle of the edited volume After Patriarchy (1991), on which she worked with William R. Eakin and Jay B. McDaniel, was Feminist Transformations of the World Religions. In her essay in this volume, ‘‘The Redemption of the Body,’’ she wrote, ‘‘The body provides a source of seemingly never-ending conflict and a locus for social and environmental violence. . . . A post-patriarchal understanding of incarnation must be committed to a redemption of the body. In so doing, it must recognize that the transfiguration of pain begins with giving voice or bearing witness to injustice with a view to healing and nurture.’’ Again, in Embodied Love: Sensuality and Relationship as Feminist Values (1987, edited by Cooey, Sharon A. Farmer, and Mary Ellen Ross), in Cooey’s essay, ‘‘Woman’s Body, Language, and Value,’’ she sees women’s toughest choice in the extent to which they assume responsibility for what they value, ‘‘for our acts of valuing ultimately define our identities.’’ She discusses indiscriminate love and concludes, ‘‘Whereas to love indiscriminately perpetuates women’s subordination to men as definitive of woman’s identity as ‘woman’ in a negative sense, to love with integrity is to participate in a revolution in value that transforms identity in ways yet to be imagined.’’ Cooey’s book on the American family in the late 20th century, Family, Freedom & Faith: Building Community Today (1996), deals with the public discussion of family life. She discusses human religious and political diversity as well as private stories of domestic violence, believing ‘‘the connecting point is

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She actively participates in professional organizations, serving in leadership roles in almost every group. These include the American Academy of Religion, the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies, the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and the American Association of University Professors. In addition, she frequently presents papers, gives endowed lectures, and addresses diverse groups nationally and internationally. Referring to herself as an ‘‘itinerant teacher,’’ she speaks and teaches in churches and in various community and civic settings. Truly involved with her roots and her family, she frequently notes the intellectual, editorial, and personal contributions and support offered by her spouse, Philip Nichols, and her son, Benjamin. She also speaks of her grandparents and parents. In 1985 she poignantly described her grandparents, Mary Isabelle and Ora Irl Miller, who ‘‘helped me to see grace at work in the Bible and nature. . . . Together with Ora, [Mary] taught me to garden, milk cows, feed chickens, and candle eggs. With them I touched soil, held up earthworms for scrutiny, looked for rainbows on the Georgia horizon, and watched tornadoes cross the Oklahoma plains’’ (from Jonathan Edwards on Nature and Destiny). Later she would write in Family, Freedom, and Faith (1996), ‘‘Not a perfect family. . . . Our private stories, as opposed to our public faces, are sometimes stories of near defeat, temporary defeat, and finally the small triumphs that build slowly into survival and partial healing.’’ OTHER WORKS: Religious Imagination and the Body: A Feminist Analysis (1994). Contributed to, among others: Created in the Image: Religious Values and the Shaping of Identity (audio & videocassette, 1994). Imagining Faith: Essays in Honor of Richard R. Niebuhr (1995). Dictionary of Feminist Theologies (1996).


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Horizons in Feminist Theology: Identity, Tradition, and Norms (1997). Encyclopedia of Women and World Religion (1998). No Easy Task: Dilemmas Confronting Contemporary Mothers (1999). The Liberating Spirit of Truth (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Modern Theology (January 1993). —LOIS A. BOYD

COOK, Fannie Born 4 October 1893, St. Charles, Missouri; died 25 August 1949, St. Louis, Missouri Daughter of Julius and Jennie Frank; married Jerome E. Cook, 1915 Fannie Cook grew up and attended school in St. Louis. She received her B.A. from the University of Missouri in 1914, and her M.A. from Washington University in 1916. Though Cook published widely and was a painter of some distinction, she is largely remembered for her novel, Mrs. Palmer’s Honey (1946), which was judged the most important literary contribution ‘‘to the importance of the Negro’s place in American life.’’ Cook was dedicated to defining and improving the Negro’s ‘‘place’’ and that of other oppressed groups. She was a member of the Mayor’s Committee on Race Relations, an adviser to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the 1940 chairperson of the Missouri Committee for Rehabilitation of Sharecroppers. Cook resigned her position as instructor of English at Washington University and began to write articles, short stories, and novels. Her first literary success came in 1935 when she won first prize in a Reader’s Digest contest for new writers. Most of her works are regional but they are also timely and universal, reflecting the plight of the dispossessed and oppressed. Though her landscape is usually confined to Missouri, the colonized situations there mirror those of oppressed people everywhere. Her characters, however, are never the do-nothing kind who sorrowfully accept their lot. Rather, they struggle to make America live up to its promise of democracy, freedom, and equality for all. Through their struggles, they come of age as individuals, thereby attaining a new selfhood through which they can look at the light of day and not be ashamed. Cook’s characters rise above their miseries to demand what is rightfully theirs. Cook’s short works, published between 1940 and 1946, reflect her conviction that unions are the only solution for the ailments of struggling people. In ‘‘Killer’s Knife Ain’t Holy,’’ Ambor, the preacher-protagonist, is asked to choose between the church and the union. He chooses both, aiming to serve his people in every way possible. Whereas he had once preached that black men would achieve their kingdom after death, now that he has joined the union and understood what unionization made possible,

he preaches the possibility of kingdom on Earth. One must ‘‘organize fer Jesus.’’ Cook’s theme in all her novels is basically the same: the coming of age of the individual and, often by extension, of the group to which he or she belongs. Boot-Heel Doctor (1941) and Mrs. Palmer’s Honey (1946) best illustrate this point. In Mrs. Palmer’s Honey the blacks in the Ville have dreams of breaking out of their stifling, overcrowded confines into a place where they can with dignity ‘‘move about as full citizens.’’ ‘‘The Ville exists, a real place within a real city.’’ It is the CIO—the brotherhood of men and women groping toward a common goal— that makes some of these things possible, though none occurs without a long, heart-and-body-rending fight. This novel has been criticized for its labor propaganda. One reviewer for the New Yorker said that what started as a ‘‘quietly perceptive study of a very lovable Negro girl’’ abruptly shifts to ‘‘a sort of labor tract with characters are not so important as people as they are as espousers of the cause for democracy, unionization, justice for all. Though Cook, by making the reader privy to Honey’s thoughts, suggests Honey’s potential as an individual, she never allows her fully to realize that potential. Rather, Honey, like the other characters in the novel, remains just beyond the grasp of the reader, fathomable, but subjugated to the wishes of the author. Though the master-servant relationship is clearly upheld and therefore seemingly sanctioned in Cook’s works, it should be pointed out that the black maids, or their male counterparts working in the factories and the fields, somehow appear to be more capable than their white ‘‘charges.’’ They are always ‘‘looking after’’ their white employers as though they needed ‘‘tending to’’ as much as the cooking and cleaning. In fact, it is to Cook’s credit that she endows her maids, whether they are serving blacks or whites, with so much dignity that, like them, we too pity those who must be cared for and we become convinced that the white world would be in dire straits without the input of blacks. Cook always renders reality as she sees it, but manages to suggest that reality can be changed, that it must be improved upon. She writes simply, lovingly, using regional dialects and regional prejudices and shortcomings to convey verisimilitude. Her main characters are ‘‘big people spiritually who are lesser people in society.’’ They are always neighborly, always engaging, gently nudging themselves, even when not fully developed as characters, into the reader’s life for keeps. OTHER WORKS: The Hill Grows Steeper (1938). Storm Against the Wall (1948). The Long Bridge (1949). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: American Novelists of Today (1951). CB (1946, 1949). Other references: NYT (26 Aug. 1949). PW (23 Feb. 1946, 17 Sept. 1949). WLB (10 Oct. 1949). —LILLIE HOWARD

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COOKE, Rose Terry Born 17 February 1827, Hartford, Connecticut; died 18 July 1892, Pittsfield, Massachusetts Also wrote under: Rose Terry Daughter of Henry Wadsworth and Anne Hurlburt Terry; married Rollin H. Cooke, 1873 Born into an old New England family, Rose Terry Cooke at sixteen graduated from the Hartford Female Seminary. Following her conversion that year, she became a lifelong member of the Congregational church. To support herself, she taught school, and in 1848 a legacy gave Cooke leisure to write. Although she considered herself primarily a poet, she is remembered mainly as a local colorist. Cooke’s published works include two volumes of poetry, a novel, children’s stories, religious sketches, and more than 100 short stories. Her verse now seems conventional and spiritless; only her short stories endure. For almost 40 years Cooke’s fiction appeared in prominent magazines, where it had a decisive impact on the development of regional or local-color writing. Although the local colorists she influenced soon overshadowed her, Van Wyck Brooks felt some of Cooke’s tales were never surpassed by later authors. Rich in realistic detail and shrewd social observation, these stories recreate rural New England before and during the 19thcentury migration to cities and prairies. Cooke knew the regional mind as it was shaped by Calvinism and hard work, bleak landscapes, and scanty resources. Although she could treat her characters with broad Yankee humor, she took their ‘‘controversies with Providence’’ seriously and reviewed their eccentric behavior with the sympathetic but critical eye of the insider. Cooke describes New England’s woods and seasons with poetic sympathy, but deliberately refutes its nostalgic, pastoral image. Life on her farms centers on work, ranging from bitter drudgery to quiet self-fulfillment. Although the mills loom on the periphery, her setting is preindustrial. Husband and wife share responsibility for their family’s survival, and a woman’s skill within her sphere is highly prized. Domestic scenes, rendered lovingly, dominate Cooke’s fiction. Critical of women’s rights activists, she often reminds readers that a woman’s place is in her home, under the ‘‘headship’’ of a good husband. However, in ‘‘Mrs. Flint’s Married Experience,’’ a miserly deacon works his wife nearly to death, grudging her even food and clothing; Cooke’s repudiation of the patriarchy which supports him is compelling. In ‘‘How Celia Changed Her Mind’’ and ‘‘Polly Mariner, Tailoress,’’ Cooke characterizes outspoken and self-determined spinsters with evident sympathy. Although many of Cooke’s stories are too didactic, the best probe the Puritan psyche with considerable sophistication.

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Cooke’s respect for Calvinism’s moral seriousness is reflected in her careful analysis of character and motivation. Nevertheless, she criticizes the Puritan tradition’s legalism and emotional repression and argues that its ‘‘sour sublimity’’ should be sweetened with mercy and human love, the Christian nurture of social bonds. Cooke’s importance as an innovator is increasingly clear. A major influence on local-color writing, Cooke turned the dialect story to serious themes and gained it a place in respectable literary magazines. Her portrayal of spinsters, deacons, handymen, and farm women opened new possibilities for the representation of everyday life. Cooke smoothed the transition from the sentimental romances of the 1850s to the realism of William Dean Howells—a role evidenced by Cooke’s style, which swings from florid romantic rhetoric to vernacular dialect and concrete historical detail. Although her tales are loosely structured and occasionally plotless, their focus on character is a hallmark of the modern short story. Read primarily for her impact on later writers, and for her depiction of a lost time and place, Cooke offers a significant handful of stories valuable in their own right.

OTHER WORKS: Poems (1861). Groton Massacre Centennial Poem (1881). Somebody’s Neighbors (1881). A Lay Preacher (1884). Root-Bound and Other Sketches (1885). No (1886). The Sphinx’s Children (1886). The Deacon’s Week (1887). The Deacon’s Week. And What Deacon Baxter Said (1887). Happy Dodd (1887). The Old Garden (1888). Poems (1888). Steadfast, the Story of a Saint and a Sinner (1889). Polly and Dolly, and Other Stories (1890). Huckleberries Gathered from New England Hills (1891). Little Foxes (1904).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brooks, V. W., New England: Indian Summer (1940). Donovan, J., New England Local Color Literature: A Women’s Tradition (1983). Downey, J., ‘‘A Biographical and Critical Study of Rose Terry Cooke’’ (dissertation, 1956). Elrod, E. R., ‘‘Reforming Fictions: Gender and Religion in the Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose Terry Cooke, and Mary Wilkins Freeman’’ (thesis, 1991). Jobes, K. T., ‘‘The Resolution of Solitude: A Study of Four Writers of the New England Decline’’ (dissertation, 1961). Martin, J., Harvests of Change: American Literature 1865-1914 (1967). Patee, F. L., The Development of the American Short Story (1923). Spofford, H. P., A Little Book of Friends (1916). Toth, S. A., ‘‘More Than Local Color: A Reappraisal of Rose Terry Cooke, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and Alice Brown’’ (dissertation, 1969). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Transcendental Quarterly (Summer-Fall 1980). BB (Summer and Fall 1955). KCN (1976). Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers (Fall 1992). WS (1972). —SARAH WAY SHERMAN


COOK-LYNN, Elizabeth Born Elizabeth Bowed Head Irving, 17 November 1930, Fort Thompson, South Dakota Daughter of Henry Renville and Hulda Petersen Irving; married Melvin T. Cook, 1953 (divorced 1970); Clyde J. Lynn, 1975; children: David, Mary, Lisa, Margaret Elizabeth Cook-Lynn is one of the leading figures in the 20th-Century Native American Literary Renaissance. As a writer, editor, teacher, and consultant in native studies, she has pursued literary, scholarly, and political interests that connect deeply to her heritage. She was born in the Government Hospital on the Sioux Reservation at Fort Thompson, South Dakota, and grew up in an extended family environment along the Crow Creek, a tributary of the James and Missouri rivers. She was named Elizabeth Bowed Head Irving after two grandparents, both of whom figured as influences and role models in her life and work. Her grandmother, Eliza Renville Irving, was from the Sisseton-Wahpeton Sioux Reservation near the North Dakota/Canada border. During Cook-Lynn’s childhood, she lived only a few miles away and they were able to spend a great deal of time together. She had been a bilingual writer who worked in the Dakotah language of her people and published in some of the early Christian newspapers. In her dedication to the written word, Cook-Lynn followed in the literary footsteps of her father, Gabriel Renville, a native linguist who was instrumental in developing early Dakotah language dictionaries. Cook-Lynn’s other namesake was her grandfather, Joe Bowed Head Irving, a tribal leader and someone she characterized as a ‘‘great talker.’’ He was a longtime member of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribal Council. Cook-Lynn’s father, Jerome Irving, was a rancher who also served as a member of the Council. Her mother, Hulda Irving, was a teacher whose example she would follow when she became involved in the educational field for many years. In 1952 Cook-Lynn received a B.A. in English and journalism from South Dakota State College (now University). The next year she married Melvin Cook of Eagle Butte, South Dakota, a fellow student and a Sioux from the Cheyenne River Reservation. They started a family and had a son and three daughters. During this period, Cook-Lynn worked as a newspaper editor and writer from 1952 to 1964 in South Dakota and New Mexico. From 1965 to 1969, she pursued a career as a high school teacher. She did graduate studies at New Mexico State University and Black Hills State College and in 1971 received a Masters of Education in psychology and counseling from the University of South Dakota. She and her husband were divorced in 1970 and Cook-Lynn accepted a professorship in 1971 at Eastern Washington University in Cheney. She remained on the faculty teaching English and Native American studies until 1990, when she was named Professor Emerita. While at EWU, she founded The Wicazo Sa Review in 1985 along with her colleagues Roger Buffalohead, Beatrice

COOK-LYNN

Medicine, and William Willard. Translated as ‘‘Red Pencil,’’ Wicazo Sa is a journal focusing on the scholarship associated with developing Native American studies as an academic discipline. Cook-Lynn has served as the journal’s editor and has contributed numerous articles on topics ranging from land issues to Native American literature. In 1975 she married Clyde Lynn, a teacher and a Spokane Native American from Willpinit, Washington. The following year, she was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship at Stanford University. She also studied in the doctoral program in comparative literature at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln from 1977 to 1978. Cook-Lynn’s work became widely recognized when her mixed-genre collection, Then Badger Said This (1977), had excerpts included in Geary Hobson’s The Remembered Earth: An Anthology of Native American Literature (1979) and was reissued in 1983. Then Badger Said This explores the theme of the destruction of native lands as a result of the damming of the Missouri River in 1952. It is influenced by the writing of Kiowa novelist N. Scott Momaday, an author Cook-Lynn admires for his pioneering technique of combining oral tradition, multiple genres, personal narrative, and tribal history to express a Native American worldview. Over the years, Cook-Lynn has continued to create stories and poems that depict her people’s way of life and at the same time show the effects white culture has had on it. In her novella From the River’s Edge (1991), she explores her central concerns from the point of view of John Tatekeya, a cattleman who seeks reparation for the theft of 45 head of his cattle and finds himself the one accused in the white man’s legal system. From the River’s Edge was reissued as the first work in the novella collection Aurelia: A Crow Creek Trilogy (1999). It is followed by Circle of Dancers, which features a character from the first book, Aurelia Blue, John Tatekeya’s lover of many years. Aurelia searches for her identity as a Dakotah Sioux woman even as she is trying to survive the consequences of the damming of the Missouri River, one of the worst environmental disasters ever visited on the region. In the final novella of the trilogy, In the Presence of River Gods, Aurelia has been witness to events including the birth of the American Indian Movement and the 1974 uprising at Wounded Knee. Her perspective spans the years 1930 to 1990, and like the Corn Wife of Sioux legends, she carries within her the history of her people. In nonfiction, Cook-Lynn’s political and cultural thinking achieved powerful expression in Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice (1996), which received the Myers Center award for the Study of Human Rights in North America in 1997. She was also the recipient in 1995 of the Oyate Igluwitaya award at South Dakota University, given by Native American students to those who aid in the ability of the people to see clearly in the company of each other. OTHER WORKS: Seek the House of Relatives (1983). The Power of Horses and Other Stories (1990). I Remember the Fallen Trees:

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New and Selected Poems (1998). The Politics of Hallowed Ground: Wounded Knee and the Struggle for Indian Sovereignty (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Allen, P. G., ed., Spider Woman’s Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women (1989). Bruchac, J., and J. Witalec, eds., Smoke Rising: The Native North American Literary Companion (1995). Swann, B., and A. Krupat, eds., I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers (1987). Witalec, J., ed., Native North American Literature (1994). Reference works: CA (1991). CLC (1996). DLB (1997). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Indian Quarterly (Winter 1996). Journal of American Ethnic History (Summer 1995). —MARLENE M. MILLER

COOLBRITH, Ina Donna Born Josephine D. Smith, 10 March 1842, Nauvoo, Illinois; died 29 February 1928, San Francisco, California Daughter of Don Carlos and Agnes Coolbrith Smith; married Robert B. Carsley, 1859 (divorced) Ina Donna Coolbrith was four months old when her father died and with his death, Coolbrith’s mother moved the family to St. Louis, Missouri, where she married printer William Pickett. In 1849, two years after the gold rush began, Pickett took his wife and children to California. They settled in Los Angeles where Coolbrith spent her early teens and twenties. At eleven, she began writing verses and publishing in the local paper, the Los Angeles Star. The California Home Journal also printed many of her early poems. After a disappointing marriage to Robert Carsley, a partner in the Salamander Iron Works, Coolbrith divorced her husband and moved to San Francisco. Here she broke all associations with her unpleasant past and adopted her pseudonym, Ina Coolbrith. Soon her writings attained a local reputation, and when, in 1868, Bret Harte founded the Overland Monthly, he named her as one of the coeditors. Primarily a poet, though she did write reviews on occasion, Coolbrith wrote for the Californian, Harper’s Weekly, Century, Scribner’s and other magazines and became a close associate and friend of Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and Joaquin Miller. With George Stoddard and Bret Harte, she was said to complete the ‘‘Golden Gate Trinity’’ of authors. After being acclaimed by critics in England and America, Coolbrith planned to go to New York and eventually to London. However, she was suddenly left with the responsibility of rearing a niece and nephew, and was forced to stay in California where she worked for the Oakland Library, the San Francisco Mercantile Library, and the San Francisco Bohemian Club. In 1915 Coolbrith was summoned to a World Congress of Authors, and named poet laureate of California.

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Despite Coolbrith’s rich personal history, she wrote little of her poetry from autobiographical or topical experiences. An early poem about the ambush of Sheriff Barton, written when she was sixteen and published in the Los Angeles Star, is a rare exception to her later sentimental lyrics. Of Coolbrith’s mature work, done primarily for the Overland Monthly and her books, only four poems refer to her personal past: ‘‘Retrospect,’’ ‘‘Fragment of an Unfinished Poem,’’ ‘‘Unrest,’’ and ‘‘A Mother’s Grief.’’ ‘‘Fragment of an Unfinished Poem’’ (Poetry of the Pacific, 1867) illustrates the unfortunately brief retrospective period when Coolbrith molded a sensuous perception of her disillusioning past: ‘‘The soft star closes to the golden days / I dreamed away, in that far, tropic clime, / Wherein Love’s blossom budded, bloomed and died.’’ In ‘‘Unrest’’ Coolbrith’s topic is her failed marriage; the poet ‘‘cannot sleep’’ for the ‘‘mourning memory / Her dream domains.’’ She searches for hopes that have perished on ‘‘ruined footpaths’’ and ‘‘by the grave of Love’’ kneels and ‘‘sheds no tear.’’ No doubt Coolbrith could make such resolves by forging a new identity in San Francisco where she kept her past a secret, even from close friends. Yet a poem like ‘‘A Mother’s Grief’’ (Outcroppings, 1866), which mourns the loss of an infant, perhaps Robert Carsley’s child, hint that the wounds were permanent. Because of her reticence on subjects of her past, Coolbrith’s ‘‘Blossom Time,’’ her second published poem in the Overland Monthly, is viewed as typical of the majority of her work in theme and style; it celebrates the coming of spring. What was a personal passion in the autobiographical poems becomes a wistful sadness mixed with love of nature. These lines from ‘‘Longing,’’ published in 1868, exemplify this sadness: And I could Kiss, with longing wild, Earth’s dear brown bosom, loved so much, A grass-blade fanned across my hand Would thrill me like a lover’s touch. Coolbrith continued to pipe this same theme—unhappiness abated in the simple pleasures of nature—in her books, A Perfect Day, and Other Poems (1881), The Singer by the Sea (1894), and Songs from the Golden Gate (1896), a collected edition of her work. But despite the single-mindedness of her poems, she emerges as a top writer of the San Francisco literary group. When evaluating Coolbrith, one must remember the fixed literary tastes that influenced the poetry of the period and the attitudes that conditioned women writers. There is a strength in Coolbrith’s imagery which takes her beyond the sentimental lyricists of her day. In fact, many of her images—sensuous, yet wistful—are analogous to Theodore Roethke’s perception of man and nature in the 20th century. As George Stoddard said of her work: ‘‘She has no superior among the female poets of her own land, and scarcely an equal. Her poems are singularly sympathetic; I know of none more palpably spontaneous. The minor key predominates; but, there are a few lark-like carols suffused with the ‘unpremeditated art’ of heavenly inspiration.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY: Rhodehamel, J., and R. Wood, Ina Coolbrith, Librarian and Laureate of California (1973). Walker, F., San


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Francisco’s Literary Frontier (1939). Walker, F., A Literary History of Southern California (1950). Other references: Pacific Historian (1973). Westward (1928). —SHELLEY ARMITAGE

COOLIDGE, Susan See WOOLSEY, Sarah Chauncey

COOPER, Anna Julia (Haywood) Born 10 August 1858, Raleigh, North Carolina; died 27 February 1964, Washington, D.C. Daughter of George Washington and Hanna Stanley Haywood; married George A. C. Cooper, 1877 Anna Julia Cooper had a lengthy career which she depicted as a conscious attempt to rectify the ‘‘one muffled strain in the Silent South,’’ the voice of blacks. She believed that the black woman, in particular, had been ‘‘mute.’’ Cooper’s life and work provided a voice for the ‘‘hitherto voiceless black woman of America.’’ Born a slave in Wake County, North Carolina, Cooper began her remarkable career at the age of six when she entered St. Augustine’s Normal and Collegiate Institute (an Episcopalian school) in Raleigh. There she became a ‘‘Pupil Teacher’’ when only nine years old. From that time until her death at age 105, Cooper dedicated her life to teaching. The education of others and herself defined the pattern of Cooper’s career. In 1881, Cooper enrolled at Oberlin College in Ohio, where she received both a B.A. (1884) and an M.A. (1887). During her matriculation, she continued to teach, holding a position at the college preparatory, Oberlin Academy. In 1884, she returned to the South and to her alma mater, St. Augustine’s, as an instructor of Latin, Greek, and mathematics. St. Augustine’s became the springboard for Cooper’s career as a writer. Her first book, A Voice from the South by a Black Woman of the South (1892), is a collection of essays, treatises, and reflections, based upon keen feminist insights and heightened racial awareness, which resulted from Cooper’s own experiences. Her literary reputation rests primarily upon this pioneering volume. Divided into two parts, ‘‘Soprano Obligato’’ and ‘‘Tutti Ad Libitum,’’ A Voice from the South contains eight essays which address the issues related specifically to the position of women and blacks in society. In her preface, ‘‘Our Raison d’Etre,’’ Cooper announces that she has raised her voice as a black woman who ‘‘can more sensibly realize and more accurately tell the weight and the fret’’ of black life in the South. Her objective is to

present the woman’s point of view, the ‘‘other side’’ by one who ‘‘lives there,’’ and who is ‘‘sensitive . . . to social atmospheric conditions.’’ Cooper’s emphasis emerges out of an awareness that just as whites ‘‘were not to blame if they cannot quite put themselves in the dark man’s place, neither should the dark man be wholly expected fully and adequately to reproduce the exact Voice of the Black Woman.’’ Her vision is clear, intelligent, and forceful. Cooper’s essays are not merely impassioned pleas by a woman for the equitable treatment of her race. Thoughtful and scholarly, her work evidences a comprehensive understanding of the position of women in America. Written in an energetic yet graceful prose, her essays are as engaging as they are persuasive. They constitute a significant contribution to the cultural and intellectual history of women and blacks in the U.S. It is fortunate that her collection, reprinted in 1969, is available to contemporary readers. The fighting yet rational spirit of Cooper’s essays carried over into her private life. She was the second woman appointed as principal in the Washington, D.C., public school system, and headed ‘‘M’’ Street (later renamed Dunbar) High School from 1901 to 1906. It was in this capacity that she made her most farreaching contribution to education. When Congress proposed a ‘‘special colored curriculum’’ in vocational education, it did not foresee strident opposition. Cooper, however, opposed the proposal because she believed it was based upon a conception of mental inferiority of blacks. She fought for, and won, an equal course of study for black youths. As a principal, Cooper was ahead of her times in educational theory, just as she was in 1929 when she became president of Frelinghuysen University for employed adults in Washington. She was among the first educators to recognize the need for an evening college for working people. Cooper served as president of Frelinghuysen from 1929 to 1941, and worked actively for its accreditation. Not only was Cooper a pioneer in education for blacks, but she was also a pioneer in life styles for women. At the age of sixtyseven, she received a doctorate from the Sorbonne, University of Paris. The year was 1925, and few women, especially black women, of any age held a doctorate. Cooper allowed neither age nor convention to deter her personal development. Two books in French are the result of her graduate research at the Sorbonne, Le Pèlerinage de Charlemagne: Voyage à Jérusalem et à Constantinople (1925) and L’Attitude de La France a L’Egard de L’Esclavage Pendant La Révolution (1925). When Cooper died a centenarian in 1964, she left an inspirational legacy of activism for which she was eulogized at funeral services held, appropriately, in the chapel of St. Augustine’s College where her career had begun. She left, as well, an impressive collection of unpublished and privately printed works which provide a rich field for further study. OTHER WORKS: Legislative Measures Concerning Slavery in the United States (1942). Equality of Races and the Democratic

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Movement (1945). The Life and Writings of the Grimké Family (1951). The Third Step (n.d.). The papers of Anna Julia Cooper are at the MoorlandSpingarn Research Center at Howard University in Washington, D.C. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bogin, R., and B. J. Lowenberg, ‘‘Anna Julia Cooper,’’ in Black Women in Nineteenth-Century American Life (1976). Harley, S., ‘‘Anna Julia Cooper: A Voice for Black Women’’ in The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images (1978). Hutchinson, L. D., Anna J. Cooper: A Voice from the South (1981). Lerner, G., ed., Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (1972). Majors, M. A., Noted Negro Women: Their Triumphs and Activities (1893). Reference works: Afro-American Encyclopedia (1976). Notable Black American Women (1992). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Baltimore Afro-American (14 March 1964). Parent-Teacher Journal (May 1930). —THADIOUS M. DAVIS

COOPER, Jane Born 9 October 1924, Atlantic City, New Jersey Daughter of John C. and Martha Marvel Cooper Although Jane Cooper worked ‘‘strenuously and perfectly seriously on a book of poems’’ between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-six, she did not publish her first book until she was in her mid-forties. Since then, she has published several collections of poems and a long poem, Threads: Rosa Luxemburg from Prison (1979). Cooper lived until she was ten in Jacksonville, Florida, and spent summers in the North Carolina mountains. In 1934 she and her family moved north to Princeton, New Jersey, where she attended Miss Fine’s School (1934-42). She studied at Vassar College from 1942 to 1944 and received a B.A. in comparative literature from the University of Wisconsin in 1946, completing an honors thesis on García Lorca’s ‘‘vocabulary of images.’’ The following year, Cooper attended the first Oxford (England) Summer School, where she began to think about writing ‘‘a book of war poems from a woman’s point of view.’’ Some of these poems appeared in a section of Maps and Windows (1974) called ‘‘Mercator’s World (Poems 1947-1951).’’ After a stint of freelance editing, Cooper began teaching literature and creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College in 1950 and remained a faculty member there until 1987. She spent a year at the University of Iowa (M.A., 1954), where she worked on her poems and did a creative thesis with Robert Lowell and John Berryman. The structure of Cooper’s books is architectural, like a house she has built to which she keeps adding rooms and wings. Her own ‘‘vocabulary of images’’ includes many doors, windows, roofs, and walls. Cooper has always seen her poems as parts of a larger

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whole, and all of her books have included earlier poems reprinted from previous books as well as new ones. Her poems often use architecture as metaphor, and two of her books use the language of building as a title, Maps and Windows and Scaffolding (1984). As in Emily Dickinson’s poems, the house in Cooper’s work is also the body. People often appear in the protective shells of their houses— ‘‘Houses, houses, we lodge in such husks’’ (‘‘Souvenirs,’’ 1971)—and in the context of their ‘‘fragile human settlement’’ (‘‘The Blue Anchor,’’ 1978). The language of house construction serves for both private and public spaces—both our mortal bodies and the imperiled world. Cooper’s first book of poems, The Weather of Six Mornings (1969), won the Lamont Poetry Award of the Academy of American Poets (then a first-book prize) in 1968. The award gave Cooper’s work the approval of some of the leading male poets of the 1960s (the judges included Hayden Carruth, Donald Hall, and James Wright) and brought her critical attention. Cooper was also at this time part of a vigorous and supportive group of women writers whose companionship and guidance she has continued to acknowledge in all of her works. They included Sarah Appleton, Grace Paley, Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser, and Jean Valentine. The poems of The Weather of Six Mornings show the tension of a generous political vision struggling with anger and of an imagination struggling to work freely despite the press of the diurnal. In the title poem, Cooper addresses the courage it takes for a woman writer simply to come to speech at all: ‘‘I try to speak / of what is so hard for me.’’ Maps and Windows includes poems from 1947-51, new poems, and the first printing of Cooper’s essay, ‘‘Nothing Has Been Used in the Manufacture of This Poetry That Could Have Been Used in the Manufacture of Bread.’’ Here she writes of ‘‘the sort of upper-middle class education that encourages writing, painting, music, theater so long as they aren’t taken too seriously,’’ and poses a central question about her early work: ‘‘Why, then, didn’t I publish? And why, even more, did I give up writing poems?’’ In this essay, Cooper traces her ‘‘poetry of development,’’ which the poems themselves demonstrate, and confronts honestly women’s need to be modest or generous at the expense of full creative exploration. Scaffolding (published in England in 1984 and republished as Scaffolding: Selected Poems in the U.S. in 1993) includes most of the poems from her two earlier books as well as five ‘‘Reclaimed Poems’’ from 1954-1969 and new poems from 1970-1983, including her long poem ‘‘Threads: Rosa Luxemburg from Prison.’’ Cooper does here the feminist work of retrieval on herself by resurrecting poems she had earlier discounted as unfinished or unimportant. Welcoming the ‘‘opportunity to see my work arranged chronologically,’’ Cooper wrote ‘‘Scaffolding gives a sense of the continuous journey the work has been for me all along.’’ Her fourth collection, Green Notebook, Winter Road (1994), is in the author’s words, ‘‘a book that is meant to be very fluid, as the private and public worlds intersect.’’ While a melancholy undercurrent weaves the poems together, critics assert that there remains a balancing sense of hope. The works make Cooper’s


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maturity her greatest strength by pulling the present into the light of the past. Her newest venture, The Flashboat: Poems Collected and Reclaimed, was not yet published in late 1999.

life in Cooperstown, which was founded by her grandfather. She later moved with her family to Mamaroneck, New York. Her education was received in boarding schools in New York and Paris.

Cooper has also coedited and authored forewords for a number of publications, including Senior English Reading (1980, with Malcolm Cooper), Extended Outlooks: The Iowa Review Collection of Contemporary Women Writers (1981, coeditor and author of introduction), The Sanity of Earth and Grass: Complete Poems (1994, coeditor and author of foreword), and The Life of Poetry (1997, author of foreword). Her work is also found in periodicals like the New Yorker, Transatlantic Review, and American Poetry Review.

In 1833 Cooper returned to Cooperstown, where she remained till her death. She never married. Most of her community activities centered on humanitarian efforts. Devoted to her father, Cooper served for many years as his copyist. Her literary achievements include fiction, articles, biographical sketches, a series of prefaces for the edition of her father’s works, and her best known work, Rural Hours (1850). Her novel, Elinor Wyllys; or, The Young Folk at Longbridge (1946), was published under the pseudonym Anabel Penfeather, and was originally thought to be the work of her father, who edited it and wrote the preface.

Cooper’s many awards include grants from the Guggenheim Foundation (1960), the Ingram Merrill Foundation (1971), the National Endowment for the Arts (1981), and a Bunting Fellowship from Radcliffe College in 1988. In 1978 she was the corecipient of the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Award. She has frequently been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Blue Mountain Center. She received the Maurice English Poetry award for a book of poems by a writer in her sixth decade or older for Scaffolding. Honors continue into her seventies. Cooper earned an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts in Letters in 1995, and was chosen New York State Poet for 1996-97. Green Notebook was also a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Cooper’s poems document a journey in search of ‘‘necessary truths.’’ In his juror’s statement for the English award, poet Galway Kinnell wrote, ‘‘Looking at the whole body of Jane Cooper’s work, one sees an artist who changes: who confronts unsettling experience and learns to see the world and herself in new ways.’’ Never afraid to take the next surprising turn, Cooper has written, ‘‘If my poems have always been about survival—and I believe they have been—then survival too keeps revealing itself as an art of the unexpected.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1977). CA Online (8 May 1999). CANR (1986). CP (1985, 1991). Other references: Belles Lettres (1985). Booklist (15 Sept. 1994). Parnassus (1989). WRB (1986). Web site: The Academy of American Poets available online at poets.org/LIT/POET/jcooper (8 May 1999). —MAGGIE ANDERSON, UPDATED BY CARRIE SNYDER

Rural Hours is a year-long journal of life in a rural American community. Its concerns are mainly the natural events of the four seasons which structure the work. In this it bears a great resemblance to Thoreau’s Walden, published four years later, and, in its treatment of local folklore and Indians, to his A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Its gentle humor often brings to mind Emily Dickinson’s similar treatment of birds, bugs, and other natural subjects. An 1851 illustrated edition included color plates of birds and plants native to the region of Cooperstown. There were two English editions in 1850 and 1855. After Rural Hours Cooper took on a number of editing tasks culminating with Pages and Pictures from the Writings of James Fenimore Cooper (1861), a volume of selections from 25 of her father’s writings. For this volume she wrote an introduction including a biography of James Fenimore Cooper. OTHER WORKS: Country Rambles in England; or, Journal of a Naturalist by J. L. Knapp (edited by Cooper, 1853). The Rhyme and Reason of Country Life; or, Selections from Fields Old and New (edited by Cooper, 1854). Mount Vernon: A Letter to the Children of America (1858). Worthy Women of Our First Century (1877). William West Skiles: A Sketch of Missionary Life at Valle Cruis in Western North Carolina: 1842-1862 (1890). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Birdsall, R., The Story of Cooperstown (1917). Cooper, J. F., Legends and Traditions of A Northern County (1921). Cunningham, A. K., ‘‘Susan Fenimore Cooper, Child of Genius,’’ in NYH (July 1944). Jones, D., introduction to Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours (1968 ed.). Other references: Otsego Farmer (4 Jan. 1895). —JOANN PECK KRIEG

COOPER, Susan Fenimore CORBETT, Elizabeth Frances

Born 17 April 1813, Scarsdale, New York; died 31 December 1894, Cooperstown, New York Also wrote under: Anabel Penfeather Daughter of James Fenimore and Susan de Lancey Cooper

Born 30 September 1887, Aurora, Illinois; died January 1981 Daughter of Richard W. and Isabelle Adkins Corbett

Susan Fenimore Cooper, the daughter of the great American novelist, James Fenimore Cooper, lived the first four years of her

One of three children, Elizabeth Corbett grew up on the grounds of a Civil War veterans’ home near Milwaukee where her

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father was a member of the staff. She received her B.A., Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Wisconsin in 1910. After her father’s death in 1927, she and her mother moved to New York City. Corbett has authored more than 50 novels. She has also written short stories, plays, and many articles. Her best known character is the spry octogenarian, Mrs. Meigs, who was introduced in 1931 in The Young Mrs. Meigs. The Mrs. Meigs novels deal with typical Corbett themes: the necessity of maintaining one’s independence and the importance of overcoming obstacles such as ill health and onerous social demands. Mrs. Meigs appears as the central character in A Nice Long Evening (1933); she finds a love interest at 82 in Mrs. Meigs and Mr. Cunningham (1936) and marries him in Excuse Me, Mrs. Meigs (1943). The character’s early life is treated in She Was Carrie Eaton (1938) and Mr. and Mrs. Meigs (1940). Another series of novels concerns the residents of Mount Royal, a fictional small town in Illinois, and is set in the 19th century. The novels in this series include Mount Royal (1936), The Langworth Family (1937), Light of Other Days (1938), and Charley Manning (1939). Corbett has also written a number of stories for girls about the three Graper sisters and their family. Corbett’s novels provide pleasant, undemanding reading and offer an afternoon’s diversion for a feminine audience. The conflict in her novels comes from family pressures and the difficulties of finding an appropriate mate in the white uppermiddle classes of the small Midwestern communities she describes. Though many of Corbett’s novels were written and set during the Depression, the realities of poverty, work, violence, and lack of education receive little attention. The conventional roles of men and women in society are not challenged and conventional values are upheld. Corbett’s ingénues and heroines accept ‘‘a woman’s life is spent waiting on men. . . . indeed a woman’s life is best spent that way.’’ And in turn, her male characters willingly take on the responsibilities of supporting wives and families. In The Constant Sex (1935) a woman of 32 frees herself from the serfdom of running a household for her six brothers to find happiness in marrying and reforming an irresponsible artist. Ingénues such as Elva in Mr. Underhill’s Progress (1934) and Cecile in The Young Mrs. Meigs have nothing much to do after high school but wait for the young, brash, usually somewhat insouciant bridegroom Corbett is sure to provide. If Corbett’s young men and women tend to be indistinguishable from novel to novel, her middle-aged and older characters are highly individualized and presented with great sympathy and optimism. Charley Manning is drawn as an attractive and sympathetic figure, but Corbett cannot permit his adultery to go unpunished. This conflict generates a characterization more complex than her portrayals of younger people. In A Nice Long Evening Corbett presents the threat of Mrs. Meigs’s blindness realistically and confronts the problems of old age with objectivity. Corbett has written one volume of reminiscences about her early years at the national soldiers’ home, Out at the Soldiers’

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Home (1941) and one autobiographical novel, The Red-Haired Lady (1945). OTHER WORKS: Cecily and the Wide World (1916). The Vanished Helga (1918). Puritan and Pagan (1920). Walt: The Good Gray Poet Speaks for Himself (1928). ‘‘If It Takes All Summer,’’ the Life Story of Ulysses Grant (1930). The Graper Girls (1931). After Five O’Clock (1932). The Graper Girls Go to College (1932). Growing Up with the Grapers (1934). The House Across the River (1934). Beth and Ernestine Graper (1936). The Far Down (1939). The Queen’s Holiday (1940). Faye’s Folly (1941). Early Summer (1942). The Kimball Collection (1942). Golden Grain (1943). Lady with Parasol (1946). Immortal Helen (1948). Eve and Christopher (1949). The Duke’s Daughter (1950). Portrait of Isabelle (1951). The Richer Harvest (1952). In Miss Armstrong’s Room (1953). Family Portrait (1955). The Head of Apollo (1956). Professor Preston at Home (1957). The President’s Wife (1958). Hamilton Terrace (1960). The Wainwright Inheritance (1960). Hidden Island (1961). The Paige Girls (1962). The Distant Princess (1963). The Heart of the Village (1963). Anniversary (1964). Lisa Kinnerley’s Husband (1964). The Continuing City (1965). The Crossroads (1965). The Old Callahan Place (1966). Harry Martin’s Wife (1967). Ladies’ Day (1968). The Three Lives of Sharon Spence (1969). Hotel Belvedere (1970). Sunday at Six (1971). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Pfeifer, W. E., A Guide to the Collection of Elizabeth Corbett—A Milwaukee Author: Her Letters, Business Papers, Drafts of Stories, Manuscripts, Newspaper Clippings, and Photos (1980). Warfel, H. R., American Novelists of Today (1951). Reference works: TCA (1942). Other references: NYHTB (10 June 1945). NYTBR (27 Sept. 1931, 17 Sept. 1939). TLS (20 May 1939). —HEDDY A. RICHTER

CORNWELL, Patricia Born 9 June 1956, Miami, Florida Daughter of Marilyn and Sam Daniels; married Charles Cornwell, 1979 (divorced 1990) With the publication of her first novel, Postmortem, in 1990, Patricia Cornwell staked claim to territory distinctly her own in the field of the crime novel. Bringing to bear her knowledge of forensic pathology and the informational and analytical capabilities of modern computer technology (as well as some old-fashioned legwork), Dr. Kay Scarpetta, chief medical examiner of Virginia and Cornwell’s fictional alter ego, tracked down the serial killer terrorizing the women of Richmond, but not before she herself had become his intended target. The novel’s curious blend of creepy suspense and scientific investigation thrilled readers and earned accolades from her peers, sweeping five major


mystery awards that year: the John Creasy Award from the British Crime Writers Association; the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America; the Anthony and Boucheron awards from the World Mystery Convention; the Macavity from the Mystery Readers International; as well as France’s Prix du roman d’aventure. Scarpetta’s eight subsequent forensic investigations have not diminished her appeal; they have made her one of the most successful contemporary crime writers. Only a childhood filled with personal trauma and a dream in adolescence of becoming an archaeologist could have foreshadowed Cornwell’s preoccupation with detection and with law and order. Two years after her parents’ separation, when she was five, Cornwell moved with her mother and two brothers from her Miami, Florida, birthplace to Montreat, North Carolina. Suffering from a crippling bout of depression two years later, her mother tried to give her children to the evangelist Reverend Billy Graham and his wife, Ruth, who lived nearby. Ruth, who temporarily placed the children with a missionary family, became Cornwell’s mentor and the subject of her first published work, A Time for Remembering: The Story of Ruth Bell Graham (1983). Tough and resilient, but not without her vulnerabilities, like Scarpetta, Cornwell excelled at her studies and, following a battle with anorexia nervosa and bulimia, graduated in 1979 with a degree in English from Davidson College in Davidson, North Carolina. After marriage to an English professor 17 years her senior, Cornwell began a career as a journalist for the Charlotte (North Carolina) Observer, eventually becoming a crime reporter. A 1981 move to Richmond, where her husband pursued his studies for the ministry, brought her into contact with a Virginia medical examiner, Marcella Fierro, who inspired Cornwell to become a volunteer police officer to gain access to the autopsy room. ‘‘When she started talking about how you could make the body talk to you, I was just blown away,’’ Cornwell explained. Soon she had worked her way into a job as a technical writer and then as a computer analyst in the Richmond medical examiner’s office. Her six years of experience in the world of the morgue accounts for the authenticity that characterizes her well-researched novels. Postmortem, Cornwell’s first crime novel, was quickly followed by Body of Evidence (1991), in which Scarpetta investigates the stabbing death of a Richmond-area romance writer. All That Remains (1992) found Scarpetta examining the skeletal remains of two college students, victims of a serial killer targeting young lovers. In Cruel and Unusual (1993), her next Scarpetta adventure, Cornwell introduced readers to Temple Gault, a serial killer who would elude law enforcement officers and reappear again in The Body Farm (1994) and From Potter’s Field (1995). Scarpetta’s three subsequent investigations—Cause of Death’s (1996) tale of nuclear terrorism, Unnatural Exposure’s (1997) inquiry into the smallpox deaths of two women, and Point of Origin’s (1998) story of racial hatred and murder—all bear Cornwell’s trademarks: multiple murders; detailed descriptions of forensic procedures that convey the violence perpetrated against the victims, who are usually women; and her formidable heroine, who must not only battle the kind of person who kills for sport, but also confront the prejudices of a male-dominated justice system. The latest Scarpetta thriller, Black Notice (1999), takes readers

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from Virginia to Paris and back again for another of Cornwell’s chilling adventures. As a crime writer, Cornwell differs from practitioners of the genre who are interested in the mind of the psychopath. ‘‘In America we’ve become so focused and so curious about these aberrant people, we almost celebrate them,’’ she says. Instead, she focuses on science and law enforcement and, like her heroine, lives with a palpable sense of evil. Like Scarpetta, she also sleeps with a gun by her side and carries others on her person, and she lives within a high-security, gated community in Richmond in a home equipped with motion sensors and other security devices, facts which may provide some insight into the series’ increasing tone of paranoia. In 1997 Cornwell launched a second series of police procedurals with the publication of Hornet’s Nest, the clearly autobiographical tale of a rising young crime reporter for the Charlotte Observer assigned to ride with the city’s deputy chief of police. In their first outing together, they work with Charlotte’s beleaguered police chief, Judy Hammer, to track a serial killer preying on visiting businessman. In their second outing, detailed in Southern Cross (1998), the trio must find the link between the desecration of a Confederate memorial and the murder of an elderly woman as well as clean house in a corrupt Richmond police force. Satirical in tone, this series, which has garnered little critical approval, lacks the verve and authenticity of the Scarpetta series but is still a hit with fans. Clearly, in the male-dominated world of police procedurals and crime novels, Cornwell and her female crime fighters are equal to their tasks. OTHER WORKS: Ruth: A Portrait (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Biography (May 1998). Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary (1994). Miller, M., and K. Ames, ‘‘A League of Her Own,’’ in Newsweek (22 July 1996). New York Times Magazine (14 July 1996). Reference works: ANR 53. CBY (1997). —LINDA C. PELZER

CORTEZ, Jayne Born 19 May 1936, Arizona Married Ornette Coleman (divorced); children: Denardo Jayne Cortez, a poet of extraordinary musicality, was born in Arizona but reared in the Watts section of Los Angeles. A participant in writers’ workshops in Watts during the 1960s, she published her first volume of poems, Pissstained Stairs and the Monkey Man’s Wares in 1969. Since then, she has published six volumes of poetry, made three recordings of readings of her work, and has had her poems included in numerous anthologies, magazines, and journals. In 1979 she received a National Endowment

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for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. A performing poet, Cortez has lectured and read widely in the U.S., Latin America, and Africa, often reading to musical accompaniment. Cortez has been described as a ‘‘surrealist’’ poet because of her startling use of symbol and imagery. In her poems, colors have tastes, sounds have texture and shape, odors are visible and audible. Cortez yokes opposites and contradictories, such as ‘‘signifying stones’’ and ‘‘tattooed holes.’’ She juxtaposes the beautiful and the ugly, the sublime and the disgusting, often in the same line or phrase. Cortez’s images combine with her use of language and sound. Often the poems have a sense of incantation achieved through a judicious use of repetition. In addition, she is a student of black musical traditions, ancient and modern, grounding poems in African rhythms, blues lines, and avant-garde jazz structures. Orality is central to Cortez’s art. The sounds of the words reinforce their sense. In Cortez’s performances, the English language also becomes tonal as she varies pitch and duration of syllables to enhance the musicality of her lines. Vocalized breaths provide rhythmic punctuation for other lines in the mode of the traditional African American preacher. A high priestess for the human race, Cortez has nonetheless a black woman’s vision. She is seer and healer, singer and chastiser. She self-consciously assumes a ‘‘griot’’ stance, singing praise of such cultural figures as Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington, Cuban drummer Chano Pozo, Martinican poet Leon Damas, and South African freedom fighter Solomon Mahlangu. Praises for the works of people such as these who have joined the ancestors commingle with exhortations to the living. Cortez orates from a pulpit of Pan-African cultural identity, environmental concerns, and human rights advocacy. ‘‘Push back the catastrophes,’’ she urges in her poem of the same name. Her poems see as catastrophic all ideas and actions that prevent the actualization of human potential, dignity, and creativity. Beginning her career as a writer during a period when poets often took to the public platform, Cortez has become known as a highly polished performer. In 1975 she recorded her first album, Celebrations and Solitudes: The Poetry of Jayne Cortez, with bassist Richard Davis. Subsequent recordings have featured other noted jazz musicians, including her son, Denardo Coleman. In her sixth book, Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere (1996), Cortez again presents life in her streetwise, musical, and rhythmic style. In this collection, as in her other work, the poetry ranges from the clearly political to the grim; full of insight into life and some of its darker moments. Critics continue to praise Cortez’s work as a tribute to human resilience and a showcase of poetic confrontation. Cortez continues to merge art, music, and poetry in her life and work. Involved in a wide range of creative efforts, Cortez has worked on films such as Tribeca (1993) and music videos including Mandela is Coming (1991). Her verse reflects her extensive travels, which have included lecture tours throughout Africa, Europe, Canada, and the U.S. and tours with her jazz ensemble to Brazil, Germany, Italy, Zimbabwe, the British Isles,

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and Japan. She also appears at jazz festivals in the U.S., London, and Germany. In addition to her artistic efforts, Cortez has taught at Rutgers University (English) and was writer-in-residence at the Writers’ Community in New York. She also serves on the advisory board of Poets House, the executive board of PEN, the governing board of the Poetry Society of America, and the board of directors of the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines. Together with Ama Ata Aidoo, a resident of Zimbabwe, she formed the Organization of Women Writers of Africa (OWWA) to establish links between professional African women writers and to promote interest in the literature of African women. Continually active in her chosen artistic fields, Cortez offers the following on her own creative process: ‘‘I use dreams, the subconscious, and the real objects, and I open up the body and use organs, and I sink them into words, and I ritualize them and fuse them into events. I guess the poetry is like a festival. Everything can be transformed.’’ OTHER WORKS: Festivals and Funerals (1971). Scarifications (1973). Mouth on Paper (1977). Firespitter (1982). Coagulations: New and Selected Poems (1984). Poet Magnetic (1991). Fragments (1994). Recordings: Unsubmissive Blues (1980). There It Is (1982). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Melhem, D. H., ed., Heroism in the New Black Poetry (1990). Redmond, E. B., Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry—A Critical History (1976). Reference works: CA (1978). CANR (1984). DLB (1985). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Callaloo (1986). MELUS (Spring 1996). PW (3 June 1996). Yardbird Reader (1976). —FAHAMISHA PATRICIA BROWN, UPDATED BY REBECCA C. CONDIT

COTT, Nancy F. Born 8 November 1945, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Daughter of Max F. and Estelle Hollander Falik; married Leland Cott, 1969; children: Joshua, Emma Nancy Falik Cott is a historian, educator, editor and writer specializing in women’s history. She is recognized as an influential feminist scholar and is credited with contributing a great deal to the body of knowledge on women’s roles, both social and political, throughout the history of the United States. Cott received her B.A. from Cornell University in 1967 and her Ph.D. from Brandeis in 1974. She held teaching positions throughout the early 1970s, including at Wheaton College, Clark University, and Wellesley. In 1975 she joined Yale University as an assistant professor and has remained there, rising to full


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professor of both history and American studies. She has served as the chair of both the American studies and women’s studies programs at Yale, where she helped establish the latter. She also lectures at other colleges and universities and at the Boston Public Library.

of publications, including Feminist Studies, William and Mary Quarterly, Journal of Social History, Psychohistory Review, Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Journal of American History, Yale Review, American Quarterly, and American Historical Review.

Cott’s first book was Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women (1972), which was reissued in 1996 in an edition coedited with Jeanne Boydston, Ann Braude, Lori D. Ginzberg, and Molly Ladd-Taylor. Cott’s second book, The Bonds of Womanhood: ‘‘Woman’s Sphere’’ in New England, 1780-1835, was based on research conducted while she was a student at Brandeis.

As a reviewer and essayist, Cott has written for Yale Review, American Quarterly, New York Review of Books, American History, American Bar Foundation Research Journal, American Quarterly, American Historical Review, Business History Review, Intellectual History Newsletter, International Labor and Workingclass History, Journal of American History, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, New York Times Book Review, Pacific Studies, Signs, Times (London) Literary Supplement, and Women’s History Review.

In 1979 Cott coedited, with E. H. Pleck, A Heritage of Her Own: Towards a New Social History of American Women. The book gathered 20 popular and scholarly essays by women from many periods of U.S. history and from diverse walks of life; many of the essays are considered classics in the field of American women’s history. The selections included Cott’s ‘‘Passionless,’’ which held that Victorian society’s demand that women be sexless may have offered advantages and rewards, contrary to the dominant view that the period was predominately negative for women. A Heritage of Her Own was praised for its carefully chosen essays, its range and variety, and its focus on controversial milestones. Cott’s The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987) offers a historical context for modern feminists, presenting a discussion of the factionalism that developed within the women’s movement even before the 19th amendment was passed. Critics praised the book. Nation wrote, ‘‘Nancy F. Cott has given us a new way to understand the paradoxes of modern feminism. Her brilliant book literally grounds feminism in history, both as an ideology and as a social movement, and clarifies its inescapable dilemma.’’ Joanne Meyerowitz, in the Journal of American History, added, ‘‘Cott’s complex work stands among the most important books on United States women’s history. It recovers the broad range of the early 20th-century women’s movement and uncovers the neglected roots of contemporary feminism. Spiced with insight and irony, this is subtle and sophisticated fare.’’ Joan Scott, writing in Ms. magazine, agreed: ‘‘Yale historian Nancy Cott traces the history of this period in an engaging and intelligent book, packed with fascinating details, new information, and wonderfully pointed quotations. She also offers a profoundly important interpretation crucial for understanding contemporary feminism.’’ In A Woman Making History: Mary Ritter Beard through Her Letters (1991), Cott compiled 141 letters from more than 30 correspondents, gleaned from a number of archives, which provide an overview of Beard’s life from 1912 to 1955. The letters are chronological and enhanced by Cott’s notes explaining the historical context surrounding each missive. The book offers a rare glimpse into the life of Beard, who was often overshadowed by the attention paid to her husband. Cott also edited an 11-volume series of books for young readers, The Young Oxford History of Women in the United States (1995). In addition to her book-length works, Cott has published articles on women’s social issues and feminist history in a number

She has contributed essays to historical compilation books edited by others, including What is Feminism? (1986), A New Perspective: Southern Women’s Cultural History from the Civil War to Civil Rights (1989), Women, Politics and Change (1990), One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman Suffrage Movement (1995), Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (1990), Conflicts in Feminism (1990), La Storia Delle Donne (1992), Suffrage & Beyond (1994), U.S. History as Women’s History (1995), and Justice and Injustice (1996). She has also supplied essays on Mary Ritter Beard and other women to various biographical anthologies and contributed afterwords, introductions, editorials, interviews and commentary to a range of scholarly books and journals. Cott has earned numerous honors throughout her career, including fellowships, grants, and awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, Harvard Law School, Radcliffe, Yale, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment of the Humanities. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference Works: CANR (1998). Other references: Journal of American History (Dec. 1988). Ms. (Sept. 1980, Oct. 1987, Mar./Apr. 1995). NYTBR (2 Mar. 1980, 24 Mar. 1991). Nation (6 Feb. 1988). PW (18 Jan. 1991). —KAREN RAUGUST

COYLE, Kathleen Born 1886, Derry, Northern Ireland; died 25 March 1952, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Married Charles O’Maher; children: a son and a daughter The oldest of five children, Kathleen Coyle describes her youth as a ‘‘tragic Brontë sort of childhood.’’ Educated at home by a French governess and by her father’s library, Coyle started writing when she was very young. Although Magical Realm (1943) describes her early years, Coyle was reticent about her private life and few details are known. She lived in Paris for many years before moving to New

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York at the beginning of World War I. She married Charles O’Maher who predeceased her; she had a daughter and a son. Although she suffered from poor health, Coyle was a prolific writer. Coyle’s first novel was published in 1923, but it was her fifth and best known novel Liv (1929) that established her reputation. It was translated into Italian as Come un Volo d’uccelli (1944). In the novel Liv Evensen asks to go to Paris to study cooking before marrying Harold Christensen. In Paris she meets the Dadaists and falls in love with Per Mazons who will not dissolve his loveless marriage because of the financial security it offers. While Liv experiences an intense relationship with Per, there is no affair. She leaves Paris and returns home to Norway to a sympathetic aunt. Liv’s life in Paris touches the expatriate experience, the moral consequences of rootlessness: ‘‘We feel that we can do what we like and people won’t know, our own people I mean.’’ Liv is passionate but reason is her greater strength. Coyle judged A Flock of Birds (1930) to be her best book. A critical success, it is a mother’s story. Catherine Munster’s son Christy is sentenced to death for shooting a British soldier in Dublin in 1919. His older brother Valentine, a former British Army officer, disapproves of Christy but tries to intercede on his behalf. Christy’s sister Kathleen carries a petition to well-known Dublin literary figures. Only Catherine Munster is willing to see her son die for his ideals. ‘‘He was dying at the right moment, at twenty-one, with one thing well done and nothing undone.’’ Frank about her possessive love for her son, Catherine realizes that she’d rather see Christy die while he is hers. Coyle was widely read but she never emerged from the ranks of minor novelists. Able powerfully to evoke emotion, she sacrificed clarity for intensity. Most of Coyle’s women have too much spirit and intelligence for the lives they are given. Failing to find an acceptable focus, their energy is usually destructive. Liv, the heroine of her most successful book, is an exception; she is saved by her self-possession. It is Coyle’s examination of her past, a past that was responsible for her tragic mode, that is of lasting interest. Explaining her preoccupation with the past, she says in Magical Realm (1943), ‘‘Why, at the end of life, we return so insistently to the mould of our childhood is simply because it is only at the end that we are capable of comprehending the beginning.’’ OTHER WORKS: Picadilly (1923). The Widow’s House (1923). Youth in the Saddle (1927). Shule Agra (1927). It is Better to Tell (1927). There Is a Door (1931). The French Husband (1932). The Skeleton (1933). Morning Comes Early (1934). Undue Fulfillment (1934). Immortal Ease (1939). Brittany Summer (1940). Who Dwells with Wonder (1940). Josephine (1942). To Hold Against Famine (1942). Major (1942). BIBLIOGRAPHY: West, R., preface to Kathleen Coyle’s Liv (1929). Reference works: TCA (1942, 1955). Other references: NYT (29 March 1952). WLB (May 1952). —MAUREEN MURPHY

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CRAIG, Elisabeth May Born 19 December 1888, Coosaw Mines, South Carolina; died 15 July 1975, Silver Spring, Maryland Also wrote under: May Craig Daughter of Alexander and Elizabeth Adams; married Donald A. Craig, 1909 Elisabeth May Craig was the sixth of nine children born to parents who left England for a small South Carolina mining town. Her mother died when she was five, and she was raised by Frances and William Weymouth, one of the owners of the phosphate mines in which her father was a blacksmith. In 1900 the Weymouths moved to Washington, D.C., where Craig attended Central High School, enrolled in George Washington Hospital Nursing School, and worked at developing fiction and nonfiction writing skills. After marriage to journalist Donald Craig in 1909, Elizabeth began to publish feature articles and in 1923 to assist her husband with the column he wrote for the Gannett chain of newspapers in Maine. When her husband died in 1936, she kept his Maine column, retitling it ‘‘Inside in Washington’’ and writing it almost seven days a week until her retirement in 1965. In the 1940s Craig began radio broadcasts, and in 1949 appeared on the first televised ‘‘Meet the Press’’ broadcast. She received national prominence as the lady with the hats and the ‘‘dodgeproof’’ questions during her tenure of 18 years. The best of Craig’s reportage appeared in the Gannett column ‘‘Inside in Washington,’’ which was published in four major Maine newspapers. For this column she developed a vast store of political knowledge about complex bills, laws, and issues relevant to the national and local Maine environments. The column’s topic was introduced within the first few sentences, or else a ‘‘chatty’’ description of Washington social events was followed by an abrupt shift to a political theme. Readers were presented with a large array of political facts organized within a framework of personal opinion. Generally approving of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal reforms because they were efforts ‘‘to do something for the forgotten man,’’ Craig also kept her readers aware of the various interest groups who stood to benefit from each new piece of legislation. Legislative ‘‘samples’’ explained political philosophies and practical politics. Discussions of the ‘‘milk imbroglio,’’ the ‘‘homestead idea,’’ or the ‘‘medical trust’’ illustrated issues of an ideal ‘‘American standard of living’’ and ‘‘the little local grafters who saw to it that they got theirs.’’ Throughout her journalistic career Craig covered presidential and congressional politics; she attended press conferences, legislative sessions, political conventions, and diplomatic conferences. In World War II, Craig was in the European theater, where she wrote about the Normandy campaign, London during the buzzbomb raids, and Paris the day after its liberation. She was the first woman correspondent to fly in the Berlin Airlift and the first to fly over the North Pole. During Truman’s Administration she was the only woman present at the Kaesong ceasefire talks in Korea and the first woman correspondent to receive accreditation by the U.S.


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Navy. During the 1950s and 1960s she wrote about Cold War politics in Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia. Despite the difficulties being a woman journalist presented (such as exclusion from ‘‘stag’’ White House correspondents’ gatherings), Craig was part of the ‘‘established’’ Washington press corps. This gave her a powerful vantage point from which she did not hesitate to criticize officials’ behavior. In her most widely read article, ‘‘Decline of the United States—And Fall’’ (reprinted in several magazines and newspapers in 1964), she castigated the American government for being ‘‘incapable of giving leadership.’’ This column called for a ‘‘strong man to lead us’’ in ‘‘worthy’’ causes of ‘‘schools for the young, care for the elderly, strength so that none will dare attack us.’’ Craig was an active member of the journalists’ union, the American Newspaper Guild, and she served as an executive officer of the local Washington Newspaper Guild. An articulate feminist, Craig was a vocal member of the board of governors of the Women’s National Press Club and an elected president in 1943. She was the first woman elected to the Standing Committee for Congressional Press Galleries (1944-46). As an ‘‘able journalist’’ Craig was presented with an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the University of Maine in 1946, and in 1952 she received the Business and Professional Women’s Association Award for Distinguished Service. Ahead of her male colleagues on issues of equal rights in the profession of journalism, Craig was in other matters a journalist critically attuned to the times in which she lived. Her columns are a unique personal reflection on nearly 40 years of American domestic and foreign policymaking.

OTHER WORKS: Elisabeth May Craig’s column ‘‘Inside in Washington’’ appeared during the years 1925-65 in Maine’s Portland Press Herald, Evening Express, Kennebec Journal, and Waterville Sentinel. She also shared a byline with Donald Craig for the Maine column from 1925 until 1936. The papers of Elisabeth May Craig are at the Library of Congress, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, the Gannett Publishing Company, and the archives of ‘‘Meet the Press.’’

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Marzolf, M., Up from the Footnote: A History of Women Journalists (1977). Ross, I., Ladies of the Press (1936). Other references: Down East (Aug. 1959). Look (26 April 1962). Newsweek (12 Aug. 1957). NYT (15 July 1975). Time (14 June 1943). —JENNIFER L. TEBBE

CRAIG, Kit See REED, Kit

CRAIGIE, Pearl (Mary Teresa) Richards Born 3 November 1867, Boston, Massachusetts; died 13 August 1906 Wrote under: John Oliver Hobbes Daughter of John M. and Laura Arnold Richards; married Reginald W. Craigie, 1887 Born into a respectable Bostonian family, Pearl Richards Craigie was educated by private tutors in America and at schools in Paris and London. Most of Craigie’s life was spent in Europe, and her writing reflects her familiarity with European culture. Although she returned frequently to the U.S. for visits, Craigie never took up residence. With the publication of Some Emotions and a Moral in 1891, Craigie embarked on a 15-year literary career that ended abruptly with her death at the age of thirty-eight. Her plays were performed at many British theaters, including the St. James in London. But although Craigie’s writings were popular, they elicited negative comments from the literary critics of her time. One major complaint was that she imitated the literary style of George Meredith, an author whose influence she acknowledged. One reason for the popularity of Craigie’s writings was their continuity of theme, setting, and purpose. In more than 25 novels, dramas, and travelogues, Craigie adhered to one basic formula. Her stage is the French chateau, English castle, or London home. Her characters are wealthy, influential, and intellectual—the men are virile, but foolish; the women beautiful, but cunning. Craigie’s purpose was always the same: to illustrate how wealthy, influential, and intellectual people initially lose themselves in romantic games of love, but in the end discover truth. Craigie believed that through the maze of love, self-actualization occurred: ‘‘The passion of love invariably drives men and women to an extreme step in one direction or another. It will send some to cloister, some to tribune, some to the stage, some to heroism, some to crime, and all to their natural calling.’’ Craigie created several types of women characters which she used over and over in her plays and novels. One type is beautiful, self-indulgent, and jealous; her polar opposite is unmarried, homely, and intelligent: ‘‘theology was her recreation,’’ Craigie wrote, ‘‘discrete; coldblooded.’’ Usually a third woman, older and more mature, functions as a mediator between these two types: she has the dignity, self-confidence, and wisdom that comes with age. Sometimes this character might be male, as in The Bishop’s Move. In this play it is the bishop who, through gentle manipulation, is able to untangle the situation of an older woman falling in love with an insecure younger man. This pattern of discovering truth through love can be found throughout Craigie’s work. In The School for Saints (1897) and its sequel Robert Orange (1899) an up-and-coming politician discovers that his wife was married to another man for five years of their marriage. What action should the politician now take? In The School for Saints he continues living with his wife; in Robert

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Orange, he leaves her and his political career for religious sanctuary. Craigie’s theme is again repeated: through trials and tribulations Robert Orange discovers his destiny. Craigie was one of the many women writers who captured the popular imagination at the turn of the century. She drew attention away from prevailing social tensions and created a world of unthreatening romantic escapades. OTHER WORKS: The Sinner’s Comedy (1892). A Study in Temptations (1893). The Gods, Some Mortals and Lord Wickenham (1894). A Bundle of Life (1894). The Herb-Moon, a Fantasia (1896). The Ambassador (1898). A Repentance (1899). The Wisdom of the Wise (1900). The Serious Wooing, a Heart’s History (1901). Tales About Temperaments (1902). The Vineyard (1903). Love and the Soul Hunters (1903). Imperial India, Letters from the East (1903). Letters from a Silent Study (1904). The Science of Life (1904). The Artist’s Life (1904). The Flutes of Pan, a Romance (1905). The Dream and the Business (1906). Tales (1909). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Richards, J. M., The Life of John Oliver Hobbes Told in Her Correspondence (1911). Reference works: Catholic Encyclopedia (1914). NCAB. Other references: Catholic World 84.

Crapsey had long been experimenting with poetic forms. She filled her commonplace book with poems by W. S. Landor, T. L. Beddoes, Oscar Wilde, and Lionel Johnson. Many of her poems show the influence of these and earlier poets, even as they exhibit her own reticence, humor, and interest in experiments in sound and form. Although her consciousness of contemporary poetic and artistic developments is important, it is also essential to recognize the role of Crapsey’s own informed craftsmanship and studies in metrics in shaping her poetry, which shows affinities with the Georgian and Imagist movements. The cinquain, a five-line poetic form invented and named by Crapsey, is ‘‘built on stresses, one for the first line, two for the second, three for the third, four for the fourth, with a drop back to one for the fifth line. In the poet’s opinion this made the most condensed metrical form in English that would hold together as a complete unit.’’ Although the cinquain is built of stresses rather than syllables, it resembles such Japanese forms as the haiku and tanka in its brevity and in its juxtaposition of images. Crapsey’s finest cinquains, including ‘‘Amaze,’’ ‘‘Niagara,’’ ‘‘Roma Aeterna,’’ and ‘‘Snow,’’ involve a superposition of ideas or intersection between the eternal and the momentary, the motionless and the moving. These qualities, and the distinctive compression of Crapsey’s best work, have led Louis Untermeyer to describe her as an ‘‘unconscious Imagist’’ and Yvor Winters to state she ‘‘achieves more effectively than did most of the Imagists the aims of Imagism.’’

—M. COLLEEN MCDANNELL

Crapsey’s unfinished work on prosody, on which she worked so hard while in England and at Smith, was published after her death with a preface by Esther Lowenthal. A Study in English Metrics (1918) divides English poets into three classes according to the proportions of monosyllabic, dissyllabic, and polysyllabic words used.

Born 9 September 1878, Brooklyn, New York; died 8 October 1914, Rochester, New York Daughter of Algernon S. and Adelaide Trowbridge Crapsey

The reticence and firm control characteristic of her finest poems marked Crapsey’s own conduct. Her letters to her family and friends provide a rare opportunity to study a person always private and elusive, although never reclusive or withdrawn until her health had been seriously impaired. Her letters from Saranac Lake show her fighting bravely and humorously what she herself knew to be a losing battle; ‘‘vital, vivid, and detailed,’’ they ‘‘seldom fail to convey an extremely alert intelligence and a sensitivity to what she perceived was going on in the intellectual world.’’

CRAPSEY, Adelaide

Adelaide Crapsey was taken to Rochester in 1879 when her father became rector of St. Andrew’s Church. In 1893 Crapsey and her sister Emily were sent to Kemper Hall, an Episcopal boarding school in Kenosha, Wisconsin. After graduation from Vassar in 1901, Crapsey spent one year at home in Rochester and then returned to Kemper Hall to teach history and literature. Around 1903 Crapsey first began to suffer from the fatigue caused by tuberculosis, the disease that would eventually take her life at the age of thirty-six. From 1906 to 1908 she served as instructor of literature and history at a preparatory school in Stamford, Connecticut. Failing health caused Crapsey to give up teaching, however, and in December 1908 she went to Europe, living in Rome, London, and Kent. In London Crapsey continued her work on the ‘‘application of phonetics to metrical problems.’’ In 1911 she returned to America and began work immediately as an instructor in poetics at Smith College. From September 1913 to August 1914 Crapsey underwent treatment for her tuberculosis in a private nursing home at Saranac Lake, New York. After returning to her family’s home in Rochester she suddenly grew worse and died.

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OTHER WORKS: Verse (1915). The Last of the Heretics (1924). The Complete Poems and Collected Letters of Adelaide Crapsey (edited by S. S. Smith, 1977). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bragdon, C., Merely Players (1929). Bragdon, C., More Lives Than One (1938). Fletcher, I., ‘‘Adelaide Crapsey’s Cinquains,’’ in Adam: International Review (1970). Fraser, G. S., ‘‘Two Rochester Muses,’’ in Adam: International Review (1970). Kawanami, H., ‘‘A. Crapsey and Michel Revon: Their Connection with Japanese Literature,’’ in University of Osaka College of Commerce Festschrift (n.d.). O’Connor, M. E., ‘‘Adelaide Crapsey: A Biographical Study’’ (thesis, 1931). Osborn, M. E., Adelaide


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Crapsey (1933). Smith, S. S., The Complete Poems and Collected Letters of Adelaide Crapsey (1977). Winters, Y., Forms of Discovery (1967). Winters, Y., In Defense of Reason (1947). Other references: TLS (5 May 1978). Vassar Miscellany (1915). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH

CRAVEN, Margaret Born 13 March 1901, Helena, Montana; died July 1980 Daughter of Arthur J. and Clara Kerr Craven Author of numerous short stories and two novels, Margaret Craven grew up in the Puget Sound area. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford in 1924, she worked for the San Jose Mercury Herald for three years, beginning as a secretary but swiftly establishing herself as an editorial writer. She continued to write features for the paper after moving to San Francisco but discontinued this means of financial support two years later when her short stories began to sell. The most significant factor in Craven’s career was her almost total loss of eyesight from a bus accident when she was in her twenties. As a result, Craven limited her writing to short stories which could be written in her mind and then rapidly transferred to paper. Faced with the necessity of earning a living during the Depression and supporting her mother, Craven found a market for her short stories in the popular magazines of the period: Delineator, Collier’s, Ladies’ Home Companion, American Magazine. The Saturday Evening Post was her major avenue of publication for more than 22 years. Just as hard work and personal sacrifice are most certainly elements in Craven’s triumph over adversity, so too are her short stories and novels dominated by this theme. Characters are faced with difficulties which they determine to surmount: the struggle builds character and leads to success. Craven’s numerous stories, published from 1930 to 1962, attest to the popularity of this theme throughout the years of economic depression, World War II and postwar adjustment. Although Craven’s stories sold, they were relegated to the ‘‘delightful little stories’’ category and largely ignored by serious critics. Inadvertently, Craven pointed to the major source of this dearth of critical attention when she commented that ‘‘a short story comes out exactly right, like a soufflé, or it falls flat on its face.’’ Craven’s stories are like soufflés, light and delectable, but rarely filling. Major characters, generally women, too often confront adversity and achieve success that is predictable and banal. If Craven’s female characters are frequently professional women or young girls aspiring to this status, ‘‘true’’ success is identified with marriage to respectable, affluent, and preferably ‘‘self-made’’ men. If character is developed by working one’s way through college, wisdom lies in the recognition that intelligence must be hidden and achievement curtailed for ‘‘true’’ success. As a character in ‘‘Pardon My Round Shoulders’’ advises about men, ‘‘you have to attract them first and show them

how bright you are afterward. Or better yet, never show them how bright you are.’’ Craven’s competence in her craft and her ability to write more than delightful little stories which reflect earlier cultural norms became evident with the publication of her first novel in 1973, I Heard the Owl Call My Name. When, in the 1960s, an eye operation improved her vision, she traveled to Kingcome, an Indian village in British Columbia. What Craven saw and heard is transformed, in the novel, into the insights of her protagonist, a young Anglican priest. Although the theme is familiar—the development of character through a courageous struggle with adversity—Craven transcends the banal with the choice of a male protagonist, sensitive use of Indian mythology, and lyrical descriptions of nature. The Christian Science Monitor described the novel, in double-digit printings, as ‘‘a shining parable. . .rare and memorable.’’ In 1973 General Electric Theater dramatized the novel in a television production. In her second novel, Walk Gently This Good Earth, published in 1977, Craven incorporates characters, incidents, and truisms from earlier short stories. Although the descriptions of the Puget Sound area and the Montana wilderness are beautifully written, characters are flat and homilies substitute for dialogue. In this work Craven’s dismay over the disintegration of traditional values in the modern world has resulted in the celebration of traditional male-female roles and the virtue of hard work. Inspirational and didactic, the novel is marred by narrowness of scope. Craven died in July of 1980, and in the following year a longawaited compilation of her stories entitled The Home Front: Collected Stories by Margaret Craven (1981) became available. OTHER WORKS: Again Calls the Owl (1984). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Robbins, M. L., A Literature Unit for I Heard the Owl Call My Name,by Margaret Craven (1994). Troy, A., Teacher Guide:I Heard the Owl Call My Name [by] Margaret Craven (1987). Other references: Atlantic Monthly (April 1980). Booklist (May 1980). CSM (30 Jan. 1974, 28 Dec. 1977). LAT (25 May 1981). LJ (1 Jan. 1978). NYTBR (3 Feb. 1974). PW (10 Oct. 1977). San Diego Union (25 June 1978). Time (28 Jan. 1974). Wilson Library Bulletin (Feb. 1978). —JOYCE FLINT

CRIST, Judith Born 22 May 1922, New York, New York Daughter of Solomon and Helen Schoenberg Klein; married William P. Crist, 1947 (died 1993); children Steven Judith Crist attended Hunter College (A.B., 1941) and Columbia College (M.S., 1945). She began her career of film reviewer and critic as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune

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in 1945, moving on to editor for the arts (1960-63), film critic and associate drama critic (1963-66), and then to film critic for the New York World Journal Tribune (1966-67). Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Crist could be found almost everywhere as her reputation became firmly established as a film commentator for NBC-TV’s Today Show (1963-73); contributing editor and film critic for TV Guide (1966-87); contributor and critic-at-large for Ladies’ Home Journal (1966-67), as well as a contributor to Vogue, Look, The Washingtonian, and other mass-market publications. She was also a film critic for New York magazine (196875), Palm Springs Life (1971-75), Saturday Review (1975-77), and the New York Post (1977-78). Through her collected New York Herald Tribune reviews, key events in the film world are documented in a first book, The Private Eye, the Cowboy and the Very Naked Girl: Movies from Cleo to Clyde (1968), followed by a second book on film, TV Guide to the Movies (1974). Crist also contributed to several other books written during the 1970s, including Censorship: For and Against (1971), Marriage: For and Against (1972), and Favorite Movies (1972). Beginning in 1971, she organized a series of Judith Crist Film Weekends in Tarrytown, New York, to allow film professionals, including actors, directors, producers, and screenwriters, to interact with movie buffs and academics. Crist collected transcripts from several of these sessions for a book called Take 22: Moviemakers on Moviemaking (1984, reissued 1991), which she edited with Shirley Sealey. The book includes illuminating anecdotes about both the creative and business angles of the movie industry. While working on her books, Crist was still reviewing for a number of magazines and organizations, including the Saturday Review (she left in 1977 and returned for 1980-84). In the late 1980s, she was the arts critic for WWOR-TV (Channel 9 News) from 1981-87, and provided film reviews for both Coming Attractions and Hollywood magazine from 1985 through 1993. Crist is a charter member of an important cultural group: that of women film critics, including such luminaries as Pauline Kael, Penelope Gilliatt, Renata Adler, and Susan Sontag, who lead the burgeoning art form not only by virtue of their extensive backgrounds in film history but also as innovators in prose style (often sardonic, opinionated, and personal), in a serious yet ironic attitude toward their subject, and in setting forth new definitions, standards, and ideals of film aesthetics and effects. Writing for the general audience of the mass media—the film and, increasingly, the television-movie audience—and feeling she was serving a broad popular readership rather than the elite circles of critics and intellectuals who see movies as ‘‘filmic art,’’ Crist is known for her Consumer Reports-style orientation toward film. These reports address the external meanings of subject matter, values, and impact, rather than the film’s internal symbolism and aesthetic; hence, her concern with issues of sex, violence, and stereotyping of all kinds. As a self-proclaimed ‘‘journalistic critic with no pretensions to esoterica,’’ Crist’s position is one of spokesperson for the

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moviegoer and ‘‘fan,’’ not for the elite cineast type of film expert. Crist’s ascerbic critical style as a ‘‘snide, sarcastic, supercilious bitch’’ earned her the enmity of film and news industries alike. Her scathing review of the then-huge budgeted Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, for example, caused an uproar and an upset in news and film industry relations. Her brash outspokenness, in the face of studio and film advertising agencies’ reprisals, was naturally accompanied by a concern with freedom of speech for the film critic. Crist’s own experiences have made her a crusader against the low state of newspaper criticism, whose content is all too easily compromised by the film industry through advertising dollars and the influence of movie moguls on publishers. Crist attributes her anti-industry breakthroughs in film reviewing to the liberal and progressive policies of John Hay Whitney, whose 1960 acquisition of the Herald Tribune ‘‘began an era of critical freedom that had not and has not been equaled.’’ These practices and principles give Crist’s work a mandate going well beyond providing recommendations for good films and criticisms against bad ones. Believing with critic James Agee that ‘‘film criticism is a conversation between moviegoers,’’ Crist dedicates her work to the idea that the first purpose of criticism is to stimulate the audience’s response by offering judgements purposefully controversial and volatile, provoking the individual to draw upon their own responses to make personal judgements of film either in accord with or in conflict against those of the assertive and self-assured critic. In her years of film criticism, Crist has also taught journalism at Hunter, Columbia, and Sarah Lawrence Colleges. A host of awards for film criticism, including the George Polk award (1951), have come from the American Newspaper Guild, the Educational Writers Association (1952), the New York Newspaper Guild (1955), the New York Newspaper Women’s Club (1955, 1959, 1963, 1965, and 1967), and Columbia Graduate School of Journalism Alumni award (1961). She has been a longtime member of the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Society of Film Critics, and Sigma Tau Delta, and received an honorary M.HL. from the State University of New York (SUNY) at New Paltz in 1994. In 1996, she contributed ‘‘Where Does It Go?’’ to the book What We Know So Far: Wisdom Among Women. Crist continues to reside in New York City, where her son is now an editor and publisher.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Censors and Free Speech: Judith Crist, Paul Krassner and Dr. Isidore Rubin (audiocassette, 1971). Judith Crist (audiocassette, n.d.). Reference works: CANR (1986). Holiday (Mar. 1976). Other references: SR (4 Oct. 1975). Saturday Review of the Arts (Mar. 1973). —MARGARET J. KING, UPDATED BY LEAH J. SPARKS


CROCKER, Hannah Mather Born 27 June 1752, Boston, Massachusetts; died 11 July 1829, Roxbury, Massachusetts Wrote under: A Lady of Boston Daughter of Samuel and Hannah Hutchinson Mather; married Joseph Crocker, 1779 With Cotton and Increase Mather, her great-grandfather and grandfather respectively, Hannah Mather Crocker has claims to a particular sort of American blue blood. Her husband was a captain in the revolutionary army and a Harvard graduate. It was not until after her children were grown that Crocker turned to writing and more public concerns. ‘‘When child-rearing duties are past,’’ she said, ‘‘this is a fully ripe season’’ for older women to deliver their ‘‘well-digested thoughts for the improvement of the rising generation.’’ Crocker’s initial publication, A Series of Letters on Free Masonry (1815), was written to support her old friends, the Society of Free Masons, when they came under attack in 1810 for carousing in Boston lodges. In the year before her marriage, Crocker had organized a number of her friends into a female Mason society. Crocker not only defended the Masons in her treatise, but took the revolutionary position of encouraging women to ‘‘promote science and literature’’ in formal societies, as more suitable to their dignity than those frivolous activities ordinarily thought appropriate for female leisure. The next year, in The School of Reform, or: The Seaman’s Safe Pilot to the Cape of Good Hope (1816), Crocker extends an enthusiastic but occasionally graceless exhortation to seamen against drinking. Crocker’s Observations on the Real Rights of Women, with Their Appropriate Duties, Agreeable to Scripture, Reason and Common Sense was published by subscription in 1818. Crocker is clearly familiar with the foremost feminist thinking of her day and she dedicates her Real Rights of Women to Hannah More, an eminent English evangelical writer. Crocker even praises Mary Wollstonecraft as ‘‘a woman of great energy and a very independent mind,’’ although she does ‘‘not coincide with her opinion respecting the total independence of the female sex.’’ Using Christian justice as her basis, Crocker uncompromisingly insists men and women have equal powers and faculties. Women’s minds are equal to the tasks of the statesman, lawyer, or minister, and only ‘‘local circumstances and domestic cares’’ have prevented them from being as productive as men. But Crocker does concede to what she takes to be social reality and political necessity: ‘‘For the interest of their country, or in the cause of humanity, we shall strictly adhere to the principle and the impropriety of females ever trespassing on masculine ground: as it is morally incorrect, and physically improper.’’ Women’s roles, according to Crocker, lie in the training of men, and in the teaching of peace and virtue. They must be the psychological counselors who ‘‘convince by reason and persuasion,’’ who are ‘‘calm and serene’’ under all crises, and who ‘‘soothe and alleviate the anxious cares of men.’’ Additionally, ‘‘right’’ takes on the meaning of duty and obligation; ‘‘every

CROLY

female’’ has the ‘‘right’’ to cover the faults of those around her with the ‘‘mantle of meek charity.’’ Women have ‘‘rights’’ to be virtuous, loving, religious, and sympathetic, and thus support and improve human society. Harmonious relations between the sexes are the basis not only of family life, but the greatness of the nation as well. Crocker maintains it was the ‘‘mutual virtue, energy, and fortitude of the sexes’’ that accomplished the American Revolution, and insists their proper union will preserve it. The title Observations on the Real Rights of Women (1818) is a misnomer. It is, rather, a commonplace book generally imparting advice on the sensible and Christian conduct of life. As a consistent discussion of women’s particular issues, it is certainly a failure. Crocker was a natural patriot and reformer, and her sincere convictions of the efficacy of human will and energy in solving problems is in the best American tradition. It is her great energy and force of character that appears through the occasionally clumsy form of her writing to convince us of her essential genius as a person, if not as a writer. OTHER WORKS: The papers of Hannah Mather Crocker are at the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston, and the American Antiquarian Society in Worchester, Massachusetts. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Evans, S., Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (1989). Flexner, E., Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States (revised edition, 1975). Hill, B., ed., The Diary of Isaiah Thomas, 1805-1828 (1909). Riegel, R., American Feminists (1963). Reference works: DAB, NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: New York Historical Magazine (March 1965, May 1865). —L. W. KOENGETER

CROLY, Jane Cunningham Born 19 December 1829, Market Harborough, Leicestershire, England; died 23 December 1901, New York, New York Wrote under: Jennie June, Mrs. J. C. Croly Daughter of Joseph and Jane Cunningham; married David G. Croly, 1856 The Unitarianism of Jane Cunningham Croly’s father was illreceived by his English neighbors and in 1841 the family moved to Poughkeepsie and then to Wappinger’s Falls, New York. Croly studied at home, taught district school, kept house for her older brother, a Congregationalist minister, and wrote a popular semimonthly newspaper for his congregation. In 1855 she moved to New York City and began her career as a professional journalist.

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Unable to win employment as a regular staff member on a city newspaper because she was a woman, Croly was assigned to write a regular column on fashion for ladies. In 1857, she became one of the earliest syndicated female columnists, and was carried in newspapers in New York, New Orleans, Richmond, Baltimore, and Louisville. In 1856 Croly married an Irish immigrant on the staff of the New York Herald. In 1859 he bought, edited, and published the Rockford Daily News in Illinois, where Croly’s official duty was to write a column entitled ‘‘Gossip with and for Ladies.’’ Croly’s first child, Minnie, was born before the Crolys moved back to New York in 1860 to work on the World, where Croly wrote the women’s column from 1862 to 1872. In addition to newspaper work, Croly contributed to Graham’s Magazine, Frank Leslie’s Weekly, and Demorest’s Monthly Magazine, coediting the latter for many years. She produced a popular cookbook, several sewing manuals, and three collections of her newspaper columns. She supported the family with her writing and by teaching journalism when her husband, due to illness, left newspaper work in 1875. Croly developed an interest in the woman’s club movement of her day. She became an influential member of many clubs, including the Woman’s Endowment Cattle Company, the Association for the Advancement of Women, the Women’s Press Club of New York, the Association for the Advancement of Medical Education for Women, and, most important, a founder of the literary club, Sorosis. Later in life, Croly edited clubwomen’s magazines and wrote organizational histories. Croly’s collected articles, like Jennie Juneiana (1864), provide vignettes of the domestic world, some as harmless as descriptions of Christmas day and patchwork quilts, but others filled with anger at male arrogance and thoughtlessness. Husbands who opened their wives’ mail, fussed about meals, and demanded pristine households when they themselves were shamefully careless, won her scorn. Croly also found fault with women, describing them as ‘‘hidden under clouds of dyspepsia, nervousness, overeating, personal neglect, personal abuse, vanity, deceit, treachery, fibbing, equivocation, and a hundred other signs of equal magnitude.’’ For all her criticism, however, Croly felt women had a special potential to become loving, loyal, morally superior, sensitive, perfect beings. Croly’s observations enabled her to define the sources of women’s shortcomings. She considered education for girls in the ornamental arts to be useless, a restriction keeping them from the path of perfection. Croly also faulted women’s behavior, clothing, and ambitions; instead, she advocated devotion to home duties, declaring that they prepared women to extend their superior influence beyond family life to identify and rectify injustice. Use of domestic handbooks like her own would minimize household duties and allow women to enter the clubs where they would broaden their education, confidence, friendships, and abilities to analyze and solve social problems. Croly’s brand of women’s rights, less shocking than the radical and militant woman suffrage movement, won greater

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numbers of supporters. The club magazines Croly edited won adherents for her movement, and in speech, as Sorosis’ presiding officer, she alluded to the success of her writing and club activity: ‘‘We shall live. . .to see the Woman’s Club the conservator of public morals, the uprooter of social evils, the defender of women against women as well as against men, the preserver of the sanctities of domestic life, the synonym of the brave, true, and noble in women.’’ Croly’s History of the Woman’s Club Movement in America (1898) is further testimony to the appeal of her analysis and solution to women’s oppression in the nineteenth century. The work is a staggering 1190-page reference work, with entries describing 1000 clubs—a careful compendium of their programs, leaders, and histories. Croly’s introduction is an ambitious and early work in women’s history, looking back as far as 5th-century monasticism for precedents to women’s organizations. Croly’s modesty, however, caused her to minimize her own contribution to the movement of women’s club development.

OTHER WORKS: Jennie June’s American Cookery Book. . . (1866). For Better or Worse (1875). Knitting and Crochet: A Guide to the Use of the Needle and the Hook (1885). Needle Work: A Manual of Stitches and Studies in Embroidery and Drawn Work (1885). Ladies Fancy Work: A Manual of Designs and Instructions in All Kinds of Needlework (1886). Letters and Monograms for Marking on Silk, Linen, and Other Fabrics, for Individual and Household Use (1886). Sorosis, Its Origin and History (1886). Thrown on Her Own Resources (1891). Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly (1904). The papers of Jane Cunningham Croly are at the Arthur and Elizabeth B. Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College; in the Sorosis Papers, Sophia Smith Collection at the Smith College Library; and in the Caroline M. Severance Papers at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Blair, Karen J., ‘‘The Clubwoman as Feminist: The Woman’s Culture Club Movement in the U.S., 1868-1914,’’ (dissertation, 1976). Bolquerin, M. J., ‘‘An Investigation of the Contributions of David, June and Herbert Croly to American Life—with Emphasis on the Influence of the Father on the Son’’ (thesis, 1948). Forcey, C., The Crossroads of Liberalism (1961). Hanaford, P. A., Daughters of America (1883). Hays, F., Women of the Day (1885). June, J., Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly (1904). Mott, F. L., History of American Magazines (1957). Wells, M., Unity in Diversity: The History of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (1953). Winant, M. D., A Century of Sorosis, 1868-1968 (1968). Wingate, C. F., Views and Interviews on Journalism (1875). Wood, M. I., The History of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (1912). Reference works: American Women (1897). DAB, NCAB (1892 et seq.). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: Demorest’s Monthly Magazine (Jan. 1871). Journalism Quarterly (Spring 1963). New York History (Oct.


CROSBY

1961). NYT (24 Dec. 1901). Woman’s Journal (4 Jan. 1902, 11 Jan. 1902). —KAREN J. BLAIR

CROSBY, Caresse Born Mary Phelps Jacob, 20 April 1892, New York, New York; died 24 January 1970, Rome, Italy Daughter of William and Mary Phelps Jacob; married Richard R. Peabody, 1915 (divorced); Henry G. Crosby, 1922 (died 1929); Bert Young, 1937 Caresse Crosby grew up with a ‘‘crystal chandelier background.’’ Her life was that of a young socialite: debutante parties at Sherry’s, Yale proms, and London court presentations. Her first marriage was to a Back Bay Bostonian; the couple had two children and were divorced in 1921. Her second marriage—when she embarked on a life in Paris, escaping with her husband from proper Boston—was the starting point of her literary career. In 1925 she changed her first name to ‘‘Caresse’’ and began publishing her poetry. Although a friend and promoter of many avant-garde artists and writers, Crosby’s own poetry tends toward conventional forms and topics. Almost all of her poems are love poems, reflecting her relationship with her second husband. Her other major theme, an offshoot of her romantic passion, is the search for Beauty and Life (in capital letters). This theme is present in most of her short descriptive poems, her panegyrics to other artists, and several of her short prose poems, particularly ‘‘Wisdom of the East,’’ where the wise Oriental artist directs the young sculptress: ‘‘You must live before you can work. . .you must understand what beauty really is before you can portray it.’’ Crosses of Gold (printed in Paris, 1925) is typical of Crosby’s poetic works, consisting mainly of love poems. The majority of these are rhymed, resulting in occasional distortions and anachronisms. Her best poems, such as ‘‘With You I Have Known Beauty in the Night,’’ result from the successful use of sonnet form rather than a break with conventional forms. Although Crosby is quick to note the physical element of love, she loses her reader in romanticized and abstract passion rather than in her use of imagistic realism. Crosby’s Painted Shores (1927) exemplifies her careful sequencing of poems to reflect the path of her love relationship. Particularly in the first third of this volume, Crosby links the poems thematically as well as technically. The final line of each poem is repeated (with minor variation) as either the title or first line of the succeeding poem. The poems progress from the departure of two lovers from New York, follow their crossing to

Europe, trace their love’s development to the recognition of a betrayal, and conclude with their decision to remain together. In 1927 the Crosbys founded Black Sun Press, which published original works by Joyce, Lawrence, Proust, Pound, and Hart Crane throughout the 1930s. After Henry G. Crosby’s death in 1929, Crosby maintained Black Sun Press and expanded her interests by founding Crosby Continental Editions, which published and reprinted the works of French and American writers. Crosby was also an active publisher of other modernist writers. However, her career as a poet ended with Poems for Harry Crosby (1930). Published after his suicide, the love poems seek to reassure and reassert her belief that their love was so strong, so passionate, the two are fated ‘‘Forever to be Harry and Caresse.’’ Much of Crosby’s life, through World War II, is covered in her autobiography, The Passionate Years (1953). As she indicates in her foreword, she worked from memory, not notes, using only the information ‘‘lined upon the tablets of the mind.’’ As a result, her first-person memoirs are extremely anecdotal, focusing on personalities and her response to them. Many remembrances are of short personal encounters, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald intentionally dropping his gloves in her stateroom, hoping to accompany her abroad, and Hemingway’s irate response to being called ‘‘precious.’’ Crosby’s recall is idiosyncratic. She writes as a reporter of scenes and feelings rather than as an analyzer. Her autobiography is spritely, and provides the reader with interesting glimpses into both the woman and the milieu. Crosby’s final publishing venture was the editing and producing of Portfolio, a mixed-media magazine published in Washington and designed to ‘‘present to an imaginative public, lively and varied examples of work by modern authors.’’ Although Portfolio had a shorter lifespan than Crosby’s earlier enterprises, its contributors and its critical reception were exciting. The later years of Crosby’s life were spent in active support of both the arts and humanitarian causes. She ran an art gallery in Washington, D.C., established an artists’ colony near Rome, maintained and sought out new friendships with artists and writers, founded the Citizens of the World organization, and was an active member of Women Against War. Although Crosby was not a major poet in her own right, her interest and support of modernist writing as a publisher make her a fascinating character. She lived her life by the motto she believed in: ‘‘The answer to the challenge is always ‘Yes.’’’

OTHER WORKS: The Stranger (1927). Impossible Melodies (1928).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Nin, A., The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume 5 (1975). Wolff, G., Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby (1976). Other references: Newsweek (15 Jan. 1945). SR (4 July 1953). —MELODY M. ZAJDEL

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CROTHERS, Rachel

CROSS, Amanda See HEILBRUN, Carolyn G.

Born 12 December 1871, Bloomington, Illinois; died 5 July 1958, Danbury, Connecticut Daughter of Eli K. and Marie Louise dePew Crothers

CROSS, Jane (Tandy Chinn) Hardin Born 1817, Harrodsburg, Kentucky; death date unknown Wrote under: Jane T(andy) H. Cross Daughter of Judge Chinn; married James P. Hardin, 1835 (died); Reverend Cross, 1848 Married at the age of eighteen, Jane Hardin Cross was widowed with three children at twenty-five. She remarried six years later and began a nomadic life traveling around Europe and the South, teaching at various colleges together with her husband. This mode of living seemed to suit her, for she remarked with good humor that her life was ‘‘as roving as that of an Arab.’’ Soon after her remarriage Cross began publishing her four-volume collection of children’s tales and her tales for ‘‘sorrowful women.’’ She also wrote poetry and was a prolific contributor to religious magazines. Cross’ collections of works for children—Heart Blossoms for My Little Daughter (1855), Wayside Flowerets (1850), Bible Gleanings (1853), and Driftwood (1851)—are composed of short, whimsical prose sketches illustrating one specific mood or theme. Typical of her work is ‘‘Scarlet Geraniums,’’ in which Cross tries to capture the essence of a ‘‘day made for joy.’’ The sketch, which runs only a few pages, conveys mood rather than plot. ‘‘La Petite Fée,’’ another mood piece, is a panegyric to a close female friend whose charm and good nature have the much-appreciated effect of bringing the author from depression to joy. By analogy, Cross praises all close female friendships she feels are nurturing. ‘‘Manangel’’ recounts the death of a good man who, facing death, shows his true courage and moral strength. He ends his life without fear of bitterness, praising God’s will with equanimity. Other sketches, such as ‘‘The Magic Ring,’’ are fantasies for children. Cross’ prose style is ornate, elegant, and poetical. It is steeped with references to religious persons and events. Her most frequent images deal with flowers, sunlight, precious jewels, pretty colors, and sweet fragrances. Yet there is also a darker, more morbid side to her sketches. Grief, sorrow, and death are not absent from Cross’ awareness, but she would rather soothe sorrow than expose it.

OTHER WORKS: Duncan Adair; or, Captured in Escape (1864). Azile (1868).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Freeman, J. D., Women of the South Distinguished in Literature (1866). —ROSE F. KAVO

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Rachel Crothers’ childhood, not surprisingly, was lonely— first, because she was much younger than her eight siblings; secondly, because her mother decided at age forty to become the first woman physician in central Illinois, so Crothers was sent to an aunt in Wellesley, Massachusetts, for four years while her mother attended medical school in Philadelphia. Somewhat precocious, Crothers ‘‘made up’’ people, and produced a five-act, nine-scene play, Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining, or The Ruined Merchant, at age twelve, staging it in the family parlor. After graduating from Illinois Normal in 1892, where she formed a theater group, she attended Wheatcroft School of Acting in New York against her family’s wishes. Her first four professional efforts at playwriting failed, but in 1906 John Golden produced The Three of Us, and Crothers’ Broadway career was launched. Some 24 full-length plays (plus some one-acts for amateurs) followed, most of them commercially successful, almost all of them cast and directed by the playwright. During World War I, Crothers headed the Stage Women’s War Relief, which raised money for entertainments in soldiers’ camps, produced by George M. Cohan and Sam Harris. In 1932, with John Golden, she founded the Stage Relief Fund to assist unemployed actors, remaining a member of its governing board until it disbanded in 1951. In 1933 Crothers received the Megrue Prize, awarded by the Dramatists Guild, for her play When Ladies Meet (1932), and in 1939 she was given the Chi Omega National Achievement Award, in the presence of President and Mrs. Roosevelt at the White House. In 1940 she helped form the American Theater Wing for British War Relief, an organization which operated the Stage Door Canteen after the U.S. entered the war. Although Crothers asserted her plays would comprise a kind of ‘‘Comédie Humaine de la Femme,’’ many seem closer to what Joseph Wood Krutch characterized as ‘‘dramatization of the works of Mrs. [Emily] Post,’’ being for the most part amusing, well-made pieces about comfortably situated, refined people. Only rarely does Crothers touch more than obliquely on problems confronting women, despite claims that feminine concerns were her major focus. A number of her plays deal with marital problems, although she remained single throughout her life. Basically reflecting her genteel, conservative roots, her work as a whole is not socially critical. However, her keen sense of ‘‘audience readiness’’ was helpful in prompting the idea that Americans who wished to spend a pleasant evening in the theater did not have to look to Europe for ‘‘social comedies,’’ but could enjoy locally created material instead. Crothers was consistent in taking a stand against the ‘‘double standard’’ in sexual behavior. In Let Us Be Gay (1929) she made it clear in the prologue that a man’s infidelity was cause for divorce. She does have the couple reunited by the play’s end, but only after


the wife has had three years as a gay divorcée. Along the same thematic line, Crothers wrote When Ladies Meet (1932), in which an independent woman, Mary Howard, has accepted assurances from her married lover that a divorce is imminent until she meets Claire Rogers, the wife, neither woman knowing who the other is. After the true situation becomes known, both women renounce Rogers: Mary returning him to his wife, and Claire realizing she can never forgive him for having deceived Mary, just one in a long line of ‘‘affairs’’ for him. Despite concern with fair play in sexual conduct, most of Crothers’ plays show women happy in the traditional wife-mother role, frequently eschewing a career and independence in favor of resting comfortably in the arms of a strong man who will take care of them. In her best-known play, Susan and God (1937), the protagonist, Susan Trexel, returns from Europe after having taken a keen interest there in the Oxford Movement. She spouts the philosophy, but, in reality, is interested primarily in associating with prominent people in the group and becoming a power in the movement’s American version. Her alcoholic husband takes her at her word and tries to reform through faith. Susan then spends her summer pretending to make a real home for him and their lonely adolescent daughter and is surprised to find that she herself has changed through a recognition of the power of genuine faith from within. The final curtain descends on a chastened mother, a now-strong father, and a happy teenager. For more than 30 years Crothers wrote prolifically and staged a Broadway play almost every season, no small achievement for a woman, particularly prior to World War I. Her dialogue sounds natural, but her tendency to manipulate characters to achieve a predetermined plotline detracts from their theatrical effectiveness and from the plays as literature. When compared with other playwrights of both sexes writing at the same time, it cannot be said that Crothers made more than a modest contribution to the American theater.

CROUTER

1924, Aug. 1931). Women’s Journal (April 1931, May 1931). World Today (June 1908). —EDYTHE M. MCGOVERN

CROUTER, Natalie (Corona) Stark Born 30 October 1898, Dorchester, Massachusetts; died October 1985 Daughter of Frederick J. and Bertha Scott Stark; married Erroll E. Crouter, 1927 (died 1951); children: two Natalie Stark Crouter grew up in a comfortable household of a Boston suburb. Her early experiences as a polio victim (which began at nine and left her mildly crippled) and later as a participant in the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti endowed her with considerable moral and physical fortitude. These qualities, plus her strong sense of social commitment and her enduring curiosity about human nature, prepared her well for her internment in a Japanese civilian camp in Baguio, Philippine Islands. Along with her husband, an American businessman in the Philippines, and their two children, Crouter was confined in the camp with 500 American and British citizens throughout World War II. After the war, widowed since 1951, she lived in the Midwest and remained active in liberal, social, and political causes. Her activism led to friendships with Mme Sun Yat-sen and journalist Edgar Snow, and to worldwide travel, including trips to China and to many African countries.

OTHER WORKS: Nora (1903). Point of View (1904). Criss Cross (1904). Rector (1905). The Coming of Mrs. Patrick (1907). Myself Bettina (1908). A Man’s World (1910). Ourselves (1913). Young Wisdom (1914). The Heart of Paddy Whack (1914). Old Lady ’31 (1916). Mother Carey’s Chickens (with K. Douglas Wiggin, 1917). Once Upon a Time (1918). A Little Journey (1918). 39 East (1919). He and She (1920). Nice People (1921). Everyday (1921). Mary the Third (1923). Expressing Willie (1924). A Lady’s Virtue (1925). Venus (1927). Bon Voyage (1929). Caught Wet (1931). As Husbands Go (1931). We Happy Few (1955).

Crouter’s A Diary of Internment, 1941-45 (1979), her only published book, is not a narrative of horror and torture, but a daily account of courage, grace, and ingenuity under the pressures of privation. The Diary, begun by coincidence two days before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and kept for three-and-a-half years, was originally written in microscopic script on scraps of paper, carefully concealed from her captors. The complete version, which took Crouter two postwar years to transcribe, totaled 5,000 pages. The published edition, about one-tenth of the original, retains Crouter’s perceptive understanding of her milieu, as it chronicles the daily activities, occupations and preoccupations, hopes and fears of the captives and their Japanese captors. The diary emphasizes the social organization and humanity of the people involved, captors and captives alike. Except for the bombing of Manila (the internees had been moved to Manila at the war’s end), major battles are subordinate, atrocities almost nonexistent.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hackett, F., Horizons, A Book of Criticism (1918). Mantle, B., American Playwrights of Today (1929). Other references: Good Housekeeping (Nov. 1911). Harper’s Bazaar (Jan. 1911). Independent Woman (Jan. 1946). Literary Digest (16 June 1917, 15 Aug. 1936). Mentor (1 March 1923). Nation (23 Oct. 1937). NYT (23 June 1933, 6 July 1958, 12 July 1958). NYT Magazine (4 May 1941). Pictorial Review (June 1931). Theatre Arts (Dec. 1932). Theatre Magazine (March 1931). Touchstone (Oct. 1918). Women’s Home Companion (Feb.

The Diary, laced with its author’s wit, New England morality, social philosophy, and realistic pragmatism, comments on the immediate: the issues and problems of family and communal living, marriage, child rearing, work and play; the surroundings, vast mountain and ocean beauty juxtaposed with crowded barracks and regimented activities; precious food, precarious health, rumors about the war, longings for freedom and for communication with the outer world, whether ‘‘liberated’’ Filipino friends, American GIs, or stateside relatives. Like so many prison diaries, this work was written to maintain the author’s mental agility and

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sense of self; yet it avoids the self-pity, religious zeal, or despondent fatalism characterizing many such works. Paramount are Crouter’s common sense and identification of the revealing minutiae as well as the human universals.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: American Heritage (April/May 1979). —LYNN Z. BLOOM

CROWE, F. J. See JOHNSTON, Jill

CRUGER, Mary Born 9 May 1834, Westchester County, New York; died 1908, Montrose, New York Daughter of Nicholas and Eliza Kortright Cruger Although biographical information about Mary Cruger is scarce, she remains of interest to the literary historian because her five novels are emblematic of the variety and scope of socially conscious fiction written by American women during the final decades of the 19th century. Each of Cruger’s novels examines one or more social issues and posits a theory of reform. Her emphasis is primarily Christian; social problems are resolved through faith in a more egalitarian afterlife and the model of idealized behavior is that of the Christian committed to a social gospel of salvation. Cruger’s first novel, Hyperaesthesia (1886), centers on several vacationers at an upstate New York resort. Each of her major characters suffers from an incapacitating form of ‘‘hyperaesthesia,’’ an almost morbid nervous sensitiveness affecting them physically, emotionally, and mentally. Cruger’s novel treats the problem of the ‘‘hysterical woman,’’ a widespread medical problem which first attracted public attention due to the work of S. Weir Mitchell. Recent historians, among them Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Kathryn Kish Sklar, have studied the social implication of this female hysteria and invalidism, and their orientation is similar to Cruger’s. The treatment prescribed in her novel is that of wider activity and charity work in one case and a more responsive marriage in the other. Cruger’s temperance novel, A Den of Thieves (1886), focuses on the efforts of a newlywed couple to convince their neighbors to join with them to destroy the liquor trade. These middle-class reformers quickly recognize alcohol abuse explains all of the problems in their town: the inability of factory workers to live on

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their wages, bad marriages, and poor church attendance. Alice, the heroine, is Cruger’s most overtly political character. She rejects standards of female behavior which prescribe decorum and propriety rather than public involvement and she chooses her husband on the basis of his position on numerous social issues. Both Alice and her husband die as a result of their temperance work, consistent with Cruger’s general emphasis on a heavenly resolution to social problems, but the townspeople vow to continue their work. Information about Cruger’s life may be surmised from her novel, How She Did It; Or, Comfort on $150 a Year (1888). In her introduction to this novel about how a recently impoverished daughter of a prominent family builds her own home and lives off the land, Cruger assures her readers that ‘‘The author of this little book wishes to say, as strongly and impressively as words can express it, that its story is not merely founded on fact, but is an actual portrayal, step by step, of her own experience, her own wonderful success in carrying out a long cherished theory of comfortable economy.’’ Complete with blueprints of the house, detailed account books, recipes, carpentry and horticultural guidelines, and nutrition advice, the novel is memorable less for its plot than for its attempt to provide a fully realized plan for living. Cruger’s last novel, Brotherhood (1891), was written in response to the militant labor organizing and social unrest so frequent in the latter 19th century. Although sympathetic to the problems created by inadequate wages and unsafe working conditions, the novel takes a stand against labor unions. Brotherhood contrasts a charismatic labor leader, who preaches industrial brotherhood, with a domestic heroine, who preaches Christian brotherhood. The heroine convinces the workers that a Christian faith is the only viable social philosophy. Justice will be found in heaven, if not in the factory. Cruger’s fiction is often characterized by a certain confusion of intention. She repeatedly begins a novel with an indictment of existing social conditions, only to abandon this focus and write what appears to be first a ghost story and later a pastoral romance. These frequent convolutions of plot and purpose prove detrimental to any lasting interest in her fiction.

OTHER WORKS: The Vanderheyde Manor House (1887). Labor, the Divine Command, by Leo Tolstoy (translated by Cruger, 1890).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hill, V. L., Strategy and Breadth: The SocialistFeminist in American Fiction (dissertation, 1979). Taylor, W., The Economic Novel in America (1942). Reference works: DAB, 1600-1900 (1904). A Woman of the Century (1893). Other references: Chautauquan (April 1886). Critic (14 Jan. 1885). Literary World (21 Aug. 1886, 20 March 1886). —VICKI LYNN HILL


CUMMING, Kate Born 1828, Edinburgh, Scotland; died 5 June 1909, Birmingham, Alabama Daughter of David and Jessie Cumming Kate Cumming’s family moved from their native Scotland to Mobile, Alabama, when she was a child. There she attended school and became attached to her adopted homeland and its way of life. After the war, Cumming, who never married, moved to Birmingham with her father. There she taught school and did religious and charitable work. Later in life she was active in Confederate veterans organizations. Early in the Civil War, Cumming was one of a number of women who volunteered their services to the Confederacy as nurses. The government was at first reluctant to accept them: 19th-century conventions held that a woman’s delicate nature would not allow her to tolerate the sights, sounds, and smells of a hospital without permanent damage to her central nervous system. In addition, because of women’s alarming propensity to faint at the slightest distress, physicians feared they would be more trouble than the patients they were assigned to tend. However, Cumming and other women soon proved themselves sturdier than was imagined and were quickly accepted as an integral part of the Confederate medical system. Cumming was not a nurse in the modern sense of the term. The morality of the day did not permit women to bathe or dress male patients, nor could they administer medications or treatments. The former was done by male nurses and convalescent patients, the latter by the physicians themselves. The women were, rather, matrons—the administrators of the wards and supervisors of the kitchens. It was their job to see that beds were prepared for incoming patients, diets prepared by the kitchen staff according to the physician’s instructions, laundry done, and the patient kept as comfortable as possible by all those under their command. Often the matrons wrote letters home for the soldiers, read the Bible to them, and prayed with them in the absence of chaplains. In death, they gathered up the personal belongings, cut off a lock of hair, and sent them back to grieving families. The matron’s work was not easy. In her journal, published in 1866 as A Journal of Hospital Life in the Confederate Army of Tennessee, Cumming describes a typical day: ‘‘Mrs. Williamson and I live like Sisters of Charity; we get up in the morning about 4 o’clock, and breakfast by candle-light, which meal consists of real coffee without milk, but sugar, hash, and bread; we eat it in our room. Unless we get up early, we find it impossible to get through with our duties. Mrs. Williamson prepared toddies and egg-nogs; I see that the delicacies for the sick are properly prepared. After the duties of the day are over, we then write letters for the men, telling their relations they are here, or informing them of their decease; other times mending some little articles for them. Mrs. Williamson is up many a night till 12 o’clock, working for her ‘dear boys,’ as she calls them.’’ Cumming served in a number of hospitals in Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Georgia. While some of the hospitals

CUMMINS

were well equipped, others were hastily thrown together to accommodate increasing numbers of wounded, and abandoned just as quickly when the enemy drew too close. Confederate medical care in general was often a compromise between what one wanted and what one could obtain under difficult conditions. It was not always possible to obtain delicacies like coffee or milk to tempt the appetites of wounded men, or the drugs to ease their pain. The Journal reflects Cumming’s helplessness, anger, and final acceptance of death which she cannot prevent or even make less painful. Cumming’s journal does not display the wit or fine eye for characterization of many other Civil War diaries. It is a straightforward account of life in Confederate hospitals, and does not tell the reader much about Cumming herself. We know that she was devoted to the Confederacy and took her work and responsibilities seriously, but learn little about her hopes and dreams for the future or what she did during off-duty hours. Cumming appears to us quiet and capable, rather than engaging or passionate.

OTHER WORKS: Gleanings from the Southland (1895).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Harwell, R., ed., Kate, The Journal of a Confederate Nurse (1959). Massey, M. E., Bonnet Brigades: American Women and the Civil War (1966). Scott, A. F. The Southern Lady (1971). —JANET E. KAUFMAN

CUMMINS, Maria Susanna Born 9 April 1827, Salem, Massachusetts; died 1 October 1866, Dorchester, Massachusetts Daughter of David and Mehitable Cave Cummins Both of Maria Susanna Cummins’ parents were descendants of prominent New England families. The Cummings family (the name was originally spelled with a ‘‘g’’) can trace their roots to Isaac Cummings, a Scottish immigrant who settled in Ipswich shortly before 1638. Cummins’ father, a man of cultivated taste, made certain she received a classical education, and he encouraged his daughter’s writing talents. After his death she lived quietly in Dorchester, devoting the rest of her life to her writing and to church work. Cummins’ first novel, The Lamplighter, was published in Boston in 1854 and shortly afterward in London. It was the most talked about novel of the year and an immediate bestseller. The average sale during the first two months after publication was 5000 copies a week; by the end of the first year it had sold 70,000

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copies. Her second novel, Mabel Vaughan (1857), was not so popular, but in 1858 both novels were selected for publication by the Leipzig-based Tauchnitz Library of British and American Authors, an indication of her international fame. Cummins’ novels are filled with pious sentiments and moral formulae, typical of the genre, called ‘‘folk fiction’’ by some, which led to Hawthorne’s comment in 1855 that ‘‘America is now wholly given over to a d——d mob of scribbling women. . . .’’ Specifically he asked, ‘‘What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of The Lamplighter?’’ The success of Lamplighter is no mystery at all. Relying liberally on Dickens and the Bronté sisters, it tells the story of an abandoned and mistreated orphan, Gerty, befriended by a kindly old lamplighter (aptly named Trueman Flint) and then by a wealthy young blind woman, Emily Graham, who becomes her patron and teacher. The story recounts Gerty’s transformation from a ragged, ignorant orphan into a self-reliant and virtuous young woman, ‘‘the image of female goodness and purity.’’ By the novel’s end Gerty has found her long-lost father (who turns out to be Emily Graham’s stepbrother and former lover) and will marry her childhood sweetheart, now a successful businessman. Cummins’ second novel, Mabel Vaughan (1857), features a heroine who is not a poor orphan waif but who is nevertheless the victim of a series of calamities. Once a pampered child of fashion, she finds herself nearly penniless and charged with the care of two incorrigible nephews, a melancholic father, and an alcoholic brother. A great part of this novel is set in the West and the reader is introduced to some interesting pioneer characters as well as, in the city scenes, such stock characters as a dying orphan who exemplifies piety and submissiveness to God’s will. Both of these novels relied upon the bestselling formula of the sentimental-domestic novel for their appeal: the plots feature calamities, sudden reversals of fortune, long-lost relatives, and the reform of profligates; the central characters are young women who grow in strength and piety throughout the novel, enabling them to accomplish the gentle subjugation and reform of rogues, alcoholics, and conscienceless men. El Fureidis (1860), Cummins’s third novel, is a story of Palestine and Syria, and her fourth, Haunted Hearts (1864), is a rather pedestrian sentimental tale. Neither of these approached Lamplighter in popular appeal.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Baym, N., Women’s Fiction (1978). Hart, J. D., The Popular Book (1950). Kelley, M., Private Women, Public Stage (1984). Koch, D. A., introduction to Maria Susanna Cummins’ The Lamplighter (1968). Mott, F. L., Golden Multitudes (1947). Reference works: American Authors, 1600-1900 (1938). DAB (1929, 1934). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —ELAINE K. GINSBERG

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CURTISS, Mina (Stein) Kirstein Born 13 October 1896, Boston, Massachusetts; died October 1985 Daughter of Louis E. and Rose Stein Kirstein; married Henry T. Curtiss, 1926 (died 1928) Daughter of a prosperous Boston merchant and noted philanthropist, Mina Kirstein Curtiss was tutored at home by a governess until the age of ten. She completed her secondary education with two years of prep school, received a B.A. from Smith College in 1918, and an M.A. from Columbia University in 1920. During three periods (1920-34, 1940-41, and 1977) Curtiss taught in the English Department at Smith, where she attained the rank of full professor. Her younger brother, Lincoln, became director of the New York City Ballet, while George became a publisher of the periodical, Nation. In 1928 Curtiss’ husband died. From 1935-38, she worked as a research assistant for the Mercury Theater and Mercury Theater of the Air, and during World War II edited and wrote radio scripts for the Office of War Information. Between 1947 and 1957, Curtiss spent many months in France researching the letters of Marcel Proust and the life of Georges Bizet. For her subsequent books on these subjects and for her donation to the Bibliothèque Nationale of her Bizet collection, she was awarded the Legion of Honor by the French Government in 1960. Curtiss’ first publication, Olive, Cypress and Palm, An Anthology of Elegiac Verse (1930), is a selection of nearly 150 poems by authors including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dryden, Donne, Spenser, Shelley, Byron, Poe, Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Christina Rossetti. Letters Curtiss wrote to her husband were compiled in The Midst of Life: A Romance (1933), excerpts of which ran serially in the Atlantic Monthly. In her 1978 autobiography, Other People’s Letters, Curtiss wrote: ‘‘Femme de Lettres, if it had an English synonym, would most accurately describe my profession. For letters have literally been the driving force behind every book I have produced.’’ She traced her interest to a childhood incident when she was caught looking at a packet of her parents’ love letters, which her mother quickly snatched away from her. After this she concluded that letters intended for someone else held clues to a person’s secret life and the creative process. The first book of other people’s letters she edited, Letters Home (1944), was an anthology of enlisted men’s letters about their lives in various branches of the armed services. Next she edited and translated the Letters of Marcel Proust (1949), which, she indicated, were ‘‘chosen primarily, to provide readers of Remembrance of Things Past with clues to the development of the personality and the creative process out of which the novel grew.’’ Curtiss’ research in France also led to her first biography, Bizet and His World (1958), and to her editing and translating Daniel Halévy’s Degas parle. . . , published in English as My Friend Degas (1964). A second biography was about Anna Ivanovna, the 18th-century ruler whose encouragement of European and native artists laid the foundations for the flourishing of Russian ballet, opera, music, and drama. Called A Forgotten


CURTISS

Empress (1974), it was inspired by Curtiss’ travels in Russia with her brother’s ballet company. Curtiss recounts the incidents which led to her books and to some of her periodical articles in her autobiography, with emphasis on her Proust research in France. Curtiss’ writing is characterized by its lively character portraits; its judicious evaluation of people within the contexts of their cultures, periods, and relationships; and its combined tone of scholarship and enthusiasm. Reviewing Other People’s Letters in the New York Times Book Review, Nancy Milford referred to Curtiss’ ‘‘having lived passionately more lives than one, in eras other than [her] own,’’ and concluded that Curtiss ‘‘has become a source to the very past she once sought.’’

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Smith Alumnae Quarterly (April 1977).

of the Tiger (1958), innocent Lou Fabian finds herself suspected of kidnapping for the second time. The device for the concealment of the child is brilliantly simple, and the characterization of the baby’s mother is especially incisive and touching. Sarah Trafton, in So Dies the Dreamer (1960), must find the murderer of her husband’s stepmother in order to solve his apparent suicide. The incorporation of information about pheasant breeding adds interest, and the use of the beautiful birds as symbols of danger is effective. Three of Curtiss’ best novels combine two of her most common—and most compelling—devices. In ‘‘inverted’’ mysteries (the murderer’s identity being known from the outset), Curtiss depicts women lacking some civilizing element of introspection, imagination, or gentleness. The tension depends entirely upon the author’s skill at ever more horrifying characterization, deft enough to preserve realism. Curtiss is masterful at this difficult technique.

—HOLLY HILL

CURTISS, Ursula Reilly Born 8 April 1923, Yonkers, New York; died October 1984 Daughter of Paul and Helen Kieran Reilly; married John Curtiss, Jr., 1947

In The Stairway (1957) Madeline Potter copes with financial and psychological blackmail by seemingly meek Cora Applegate, actually a killer. Among Madeline’s difficulties is her struggle not to act from jealousy of her child’s affection for Cora, a factor adding depth to the characterization. The Forbidden Garden (1962) traces the disintegration of elderly Elsa Marrable’s murderous personality. The portraits of Alice Dimmock, avenger turned victim, and Harriet Crewe, entangled innocent bystander, are overshadowed only by that of little James Crewe, who knows how to turn sickliness into advantage. Here, storm-driven tumbleweeds symbolize the forces driving the characters.

Ursula Reilly Curtiss’ novels are psychological studies seasoned with suspense and detection. Her heroines are often endangered young career women barred by uncertainty, self-doubt, or promises from seeking police aid. Several novels also incorporate gothic overtones, for example, The Second Sickle (1950, British title The Hollow House), The Wasp (1963), and The Birthday Gift (1976, British title Dig a Little Deeper).

Celia Brett in Letter of Intent (1971) commits crimes to escape from her slum background into comfort and security. Much of the novel’s strength lies in the portraits of the Vestry sisters—weak, loving Mary Ellen and strong, loyal Susan—who are contrasted with Celia. The conclusion provides a double twist and is chillingly appropriate, as is the quiet, measured tone.

The Second Sickle tries the imagination through Victoria Devlin’s stubborn insistence on keeping a promise even in the face of murder. Yet the tension never flags and the book shows Curtiss’ potential. In The Wasp, Curtiss uses the common horror of insects as an unusual weapon threatening the sanity and the life of Kate Barlow. The ending is particularly clever: the murderer dead but lionized. Lydia Peel of The Birthday Gift finds a simple errand complicated by false identities and murder. Here, three of Curtiss’s cleverest characterizations stop just short of caricature: chainsmoking Mrs. Chilton, her femme fatale daughter, and her frightful little grandson. In all three novels, as is usual in Curtiss’ work, a dash of romance lends spice.

Curtiss’ portraits of children are always intriguing and psychologically sound, and in Out of the Dark (1964, British title Child’s Play), perhaps her best novel, she presents a broad range of children’s personalities. The five Mannering youngsters, lively, mischievous, and innocent, are imperiled by and contrasted with their guest, teenaged Kit Austen. Kit, sensual and selfcentered, unwittingly triggers murder with a prank phone call. The reader meets the killer early, and the suspense builds as he ‘‘detects’’ the whereabouts of his tormentor. Though reviewers deplored Curtiss’ reliance on sometimes awkward adverbial constructions, she is recognized as a skillful writer, particularly adroit at sustained tension, characterization, and the ‘‘end-of-the-chapter hook.’’

In Curtiss’ fiction, an old murder frequently spawns new deaths. Katie Meredith of Voice Out of Darkness (1948) suddenly finds herself accused of the murder of her foster sister, accidentally drowned years before. The book is neatly crafted, and here, as elsewhere, Curtiss makes good use of blizzards to symbolize isolation and danger. In one of Curtiss’ strongest novels, The Face

OTHER WORKS: The Noonday Devil (1951). The Iron Cobweb (1953). The Deadly Climate (1954). Widow’s Web (1956). Hours to Kill (1961). Danger, Hospital Zone (1966). Don’t Open the Door (1968). In Cold Pursuit (1977). The Menace Within (1979). The Poisoned Orchard (1980). Dog in the Manger (1982). Death

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of a Crow (1983). The House of Plymouth Street and Other Stories (1985). A manuscript collection of Ursula Reilly Curtiss is in the Mugar Memorial Library at Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994). Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detections (1976). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery (1996). Other references: NY (24 July 1971). NYHTB (19 April 1953). NYTBR (19 March 1950, 14 June 1964). —JANE S. BAKERMAN

CUSTER, Elizabeth Bacon Born 8 April 1842, Monroe, Michigan; died 4 April 1933, New York, New York Also wrote under: Elizabeth B. Custer Daughter of Daniel S. and Sophia Page Bacon; married George Armstrong Custer, 1864 (died 1876) In 1863 Elizabeth Bacon Custer met Captain George Armstrong Custer, then visiting Monroe on leave from Civil War duty. Overcoming paternal opposition to Custer’s involvement with a soldier, they courted by mail and married. Custer accompanied her husband to the Virginia front, where he became a major general. His postwar military career took Custer to posts in Texas, Kansas, Kentucky, and Dakota Territory, where she learned of his fatal ‘‘last stand.’’ Although Custer’s life extended 57 years beyond her husband’s she kept her marriage vows, fulfilling what she believed were her ‘‘responsibilities’’ as ‘‘the widow of a national hero’’ by writing and lecturing. She wrote to perpetuate her husband’s memory, scrupulously avoiding army political disputes by focusing on the domestic aspects of frontier cavalry life. Her first book, Boots and Saddles (1885), describes her life in Dakota with General Custer from 1873 to 1876. Custer emphasizes the closeness within and among army couples as both result of and defense against wilderness isolation. Although she tried to appear ‘‘plucky,’’ Custer expresses her overwhelming fear of the Native Americans and often gives thanks that, as a woman, she was not required to be brave. Women were, however, required to wait; Custer compellingly presents the shared anxiety of wives left at Fort Lincoln while husbands fought and died at Little Big Horn. The enthusiastic reception of her first book led Custer to write her reminiscences of earlier campaigns. In Tenting on the Plains (1887), Custer describes her experiences following General Custer in Kansas and Texas from 1865 to 1867. Insects, illness,

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and scorpions dominate Custer’s recollections of the march to Texas, and her Kansas memories include prairie fire, flood, and cholera. Racism pervades her accounts of blacks in Reconstruction Texas, Mexican mule drivers, and American Indians; class bias colors her portraits of those who attained officers’ positions through war service rather than West Point. She alludes to postwar dissension in the ranks, but ends her book before the court-martial and suspension that interrupted her husband’s career. In Following the Guidon (1890), Custer picks up the story when her husband returned to duty in Kansas in 1868 to join the campaign culminating in the Battle of Washita. Custer vividly recalls her fearful visits with captured Native Americans and tribal peace council delegates, while glorifying her husband’s honest treatment of those he helped defeat. She also explains how constantly menacing rattlesnakes and Native Americans impair enjoyment of recreational hunting, riding, and horse and mule racing. Her posthumously published letters to husband and family reveal the pampered, pious, and principled aspects of her personality. Custer’s works provide important insights into one woman’s attempt to redefine ‘‘lady’’ to fit the regimen of cavalry life. The closeness she depicts among army wives balances the traditional emphasis on military male bonding. While marred by prejudice, self-deprecation, and repetition, and intentionally incomplete by avoidance of controversy, Custer’s writings are lively and lucid accounts of an unusual female life style. OTHER WORKS: General Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn, June 25, 1876 (1897). The Boy General: Story of the Life of Major-General George A. Custer (edited by M. E. Burt, 1901). The Custer Story: The Life and Intimate Letters of General George A. Custer and His Wife Elizabeth (edited by M. Merington, 1950). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Frost, L. A., General Custer’s Libbie (1976). Stewart, J. R., introduction to Elizabeth B. Custer’s Boots and Saddles (1961 ed.). Reference works: American Women (1897). Other references: Collier’s (29 Jan. 1927). Harper’s (Jan. 1891). Nation (30 April 1885). NYT (11 May 1888, 5 April 1933). Winner’s (30 June 1935). —HELEN BANNAN

CUTHRELL, Faith Baldwin Born 1 October 1893, New Rochelle, New York; died 18 March 1978, Norwalk, Connecticut Wrote under: Faith Baldwin, Faith B. Cuthrell Daughter of Stephen C. and Edith Finch Baldwin; married Hugh H. Cuthrell, 1920 Faith Baldwin Cuthrell spent a fashionable girlhood in Manhattan and Brooklyn Heights. She could read at three, and at six


was writing a drama, ‘‘The Deserted Wife.’’ She first published verse in her teens, prose in her twenties. Cuthrell’s books, stories, poems, and articles appeared steadily from 1921 to 1977, bringing her enormous popular and financial success. Many of her novels were made into films. She was a founder and faculty member of the Famous Writers School in Westport, Connecticut. Cuthrell’s family history emerges in The American Family (1935), based on her grandfather’s diaries. Tobias Condit takes his wife to China in the 1860s to work as a missionary. Their son is sent to America to be educated, returning to China as a doctor. The sequel, The Puritan Strain (1935), centers on Dr. Condit’s daughter Elizabeth. Courtship and marriage with their attendant joys and crises are Cuthrell’s favored themes. Her first novel, Mavis of Green Hill (1921), shows the maturation of a childlike bride, once an invalid, into a passionate wife. Something Special (1940) explores the threats to a union of 14 years. Satisfactory resolutions are always brought about. Cuthrell’s novels are usually told from the woman’s viewpoint and reveal an intimate group of women’s problems. Salient problems are the work women do and its relation to love and marriage. Cuthrell’s heroines are secretaries, hostesses, nurses, actresses, real estate brokers. They sell bonds and securities, design dresses, and run beauty salons. White Collar Girl (1933) speaks of the wasted talent of girls from affluent families who stay in their hometowns to wrap up fudge in the Goodie Shoppe. Private Duty (1935) describes the working girl’s lot, the long days, the social life crammed into after-hours, the little sleep. Rich girls might work for pleasure: ‘‘To be a working girl and socially secure gave one a certain cachet. Working without the social security made all the difference.’’ Career By Proxy (1939) queries whether a wealthy girl ought to work, thus taking employment from one who needs it. In Hotel Hostess (1938), an unsympathetic male supposes women usually work for frivolous reasons, or because they are ‘‘exhibitionists.’’ Conflict between career and marriage is a frequent theme. Cuthrell’s suitors and husbands generally regard the woman’s work as unnecessary, or inimical to their mutual happiness. Cuthrell writes searchingly of the emotion on both sides. More often Cuthrell’s heroines vainly strive to keep both marriage and career going, finally abandoning the career. In Self-Made Woman (1939) the clash is acute, the resolution uneasy. The wife capitulates to her dominant, sexually magnetic husband with ‘‘an awareness of defeat.’’ The West Wind (1962) patiently explores the corrosive effect on a childless marriage of a husband’s single casual act of infidelity. The wife, fear-ridden and bitter, forgives her husband daily and thus makes their life impossible. Their spiritual isolation and agony ultimately give way to acceptance. Cuthrell’s nonfiction, following her husband’s death, includes the inspirational, semiautobiographical Face Toward the Spring (1956) and Many Windows: Seasons of the Heart (1958).

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From July 1958 to December 1965 she wrote the monthly feature ‘‘The Open Door’’ for Woman’s Day magazine, which she expanded to produce Testament of Trust (1960), Harvest of Hope (1962), Living by Faith (1964), and Evening Star (1966). Reflective and discursive, these ‘‘almanac books’’ follow the year’s cycle. Cuthrell shares her thoughts on the seasonal activities and weather, on gardens and rooms, on love, sorrow, books, travel, memories, prayer, and people. Among Cuthrell’s last works are the six Little Oxford novels: Any Village (1971), No Bed of Roses (1973), Time and the Hour (1974), New Girl in Town (1975), Thursday’s Child (1976), and Adam’s Eden (1977). Seasons are breathtakingly beautiful in this suburban town, a ‘‘collage’’ of Westchester, Connecticut, and Long Island. Life is friendly and comfortable. A cast of characters reappears; new people pass through or settle, usually the heirs, relatives, or friends of the inhabitants. The principal action is the forming of a marriage, or an adjustment to marriage of a sympathetic young pair (maturer lovers marry or remarry offstage), who will in subsequent novels have already started a family and become part of the backdrop for the next set of lovers. Cuthrell produced highly professional popular fiction, skillfully plotted, swift-paced, and entertaining. She captures the accents of daily speech, from plain talk to breezy dialogue. Her characters are middle- and upper-class Americans, living in Manhattan penthouses, luxurious country estates, and suburban communities. Cuthrell explores matters of concern to women— work, money, love, marriage, motherhood, divorce, dignified age. Her heroines are self-possessed women of mettle, some quietly independent, others spitfires. Individuals, couples, families, and neighbors resolve their difficulties. Cuthrell’s inspirational works praise the seasons, the pleasures of books, dwellings, and precious objects, and the importance of solitude and friendship alike.

OTHER WORKS: Laurel of Stonystream (1923). Magic and Mary Rose (1924). Sign Posts (1924). Thresholds (1925). Those Difficult Years (1925). Three Women (1926). Departing Wings (1927). Rosalie’s Career (1928). Betty (1928). Alimony (1928). The Incredible Year (1929). Garden Oats (1929). Broadway Interlude (with Achmed Adullah, 1929). Judy: A Story of Divine Corners (1930). Make-Believe (1930). The Office Wife (1930). Babs: A Story of Divine Corners (1931). Skyscraper (1931, film version, 1932). Today’s Virtue (1931). Mary Lou: A Story of Divine Corners (1931). Self-Made Woman (1932). Week-End Marriage (with Achmed Adullah, 1932, film version, 1933). Girl on the Make (1932). District Nurse (1932). Myra: A Story of Divine Corners (1932). Beauty (1933, film version, 1933). Love’s a Puzzle (1933). Innocent Bystander (1934). Within a Year (1934). Wife vs. Secretary (1934). Honor Bound (1934). The Moon’s Our Home (1936, film version, 1936). Men are Such Fools! (1936, film version, 1938). Girls of Divine Corners (1936). Omnibus:

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Alimony; The Office Wife; Skyscraper (1936). The Heart Has Wings (1937). That Man Is Mine (1937). Twenty-Four Hours a Day (1937). Manhattan Nights (1937). Enchanted Oasis (1938). Rich Girl, Poor Girl (1938). White Magic (1939). Station Wagon Set (1939). The High Road (1939). Letty and the Law (1940). Medical Center (1940). Picnic Adventures (1940). Rehearsal for Love (1940). Temporary Address: Reno (1941). And New Stars Burn (1941). The Heart Remembers (1941). Blue Horizons (1942). Breath of Life (1942). Five Women in Three Novels (1942). The Rest of My Life With You (1942). You Can’t Escape (1943). Washington, USA (1943). Change of Heart (1944). He Married a Doctor (1944). Romance Book (1944). A Job for Jenny (1945). Second Romance Book (1945). Arizona Star (1945). No Private Heaven (1946). Woman on Her Way (1946). Give Love the Air (1947). Sleeping Beauty (1947). They Who Love (1948). Marry for Money (1948). The Golden Shoestring (1949). Look Out for Liza (1950). The Whole Armor (1951). The Juniper Tree (1952). Widow’s Walk (1954). Three Faces of Love (1957). Blaze of

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Sunlight (1959). The Lonely Man (1964). There Is a Season (1966). The Velvet Hammer (1969). Take What You Want (1970). One More Time (1972). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cooper, P., Faith Baldwin’s American Family (1938). Van Gelder, R., ‘‘Interview with Faith Baldwin’’ in Writers and Writing (1946). Reference works: TCA (1942, 1955). CA (1969). Other references: CSM (11 Jan. 1947). Colliers (27 May 1944). Cosmopolitan (Aug. 1959). Good Housekeeping (Oct. 1943). NRTA Journal (Sept.-Oct. 1975). NY Post (2 Sept. 1972). NYT (25 Oct. 1973, 20 March 1978). Pictorial Review (Dec. 1935). Saturday Evening Post (14 March 1936). Saturday Review of Literature (11 April 1936, 29 April 1939). Time (8 July 1935). Writer (May 1940). —MARCELLE THIÉBAUX

D DAHLGREN, Madeleine Vinton Born Sarah Madeleine Vinton, 13 July 1825, Gallipolis, Ohio; died 28 May 1898, Washington, D.C. Wrote under: Corinne Daughter of Samuel F. and Romain Bureau Vinton; married Daniel Goddard, circa 1855 (died); John A. Dahlgren, 1865 (died 1870); children: five Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren was educated in Philadelphia’s Monsieur Picot’s boarding school and in the Convent of the Visitation in Georgetown, D.C. After her mother and brother died during her childhood, Dahlgren assumed the role of companion and hostess for her father, a veteran congressman from Ohio. Her husband, Daniel C. Goddard, was assistant secretary of the Interior Department. Widowed five years after her marriage, she returned to her father’s Washington house with her two children. She published her first collection of writings, Idealities (1859), under the name of Corinne. Until her second marriage to John Dahlgren, she helped support her family by writing and translating a variety of political and religious essays from French, Spanish, and Italian. She and Dahlgren had three children; and when widowed for a second time in 1870, Dahlgren again returned to her father’s home and to writing. An extremely conservative, traditional Catholic view permeates Dahlgren’s fiction and nonfiction. In 1871 she wrote a letter to Congress and a pamphlet, Thoughts on Female Suffrage, arguing woman suffrage was a burden added to the distinct and sacred duties, including motherhood, that women were already responsible for by a law ‘‘higher’’ than the U.S. Constitution. To Dahlgren marriage was a sacred unity in which the family with the husband at the head was the foundation of the state. She believed the 19th amendment, on the other hand, proposed marriage as a mere compact in which each family member required individual representation, leading to diversity and discord rather than unity and peace. In the 1880s Dahlgren turned from nonfiction to fictionalized sketches and highly didactic melodramatic novels, often serialized in popular magazines. South Mountain Magic (1882), perhaps her most interesting book, is a fascinating account of the mysterious beliefs and supernatural symbols of the South Mountain descendants of the German settlers in a Maryland community. A Washington Winter (1883), an involved romance set in a typical ‘‘Washington season,’’ reflects the political and social manners of Dahlgren’s world. Her strong religious convictions and their ramifications in the political world surface in Lights and Shadows of a Life (1887), which upholds the American prejudice against racial and social intermixture as a providential means of preserving the superiority of the Republic’s governing race. The novel traces the complicated life of a young Southern girl and her relationship with a Frenchman who might have a black ancestor.

As a founder of the Literary Society of Washington and president of the Ladies’ Catholic Missionary Society, Dahlgren remained a noted literary and religious leader of Washington society until her death. OTHER WORKS: Pius IX and France by Montalembert (translated by Dahlgren, 1861). An Essay on Catholicism, Authority and Order by J. Donoso Cortes (translated by Dahlgren, 1862). Memoir of Ulric Dahlgren (1872). Etiquette of Social Life in Washington (1873). The Executive Power in the United States by A. de Chambrun (translated by Dahlgren, 1874). South Sea Sketches (1881). Memoir of John A. Dahlgren (1882). The Lost Name (1886). Divorced (1887). Chim: His Washington Winter (1892). Samuel Finley Vinton (1895). The Secret Directory (1896). The Woodley Lane Ghost and Other Stories (1899). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Washington Evening Star (30 May 1898). WP (29 May 1898). —SUZANNE ALLEN

DALL, Caroline (Wells) Healey Born 22 June 1822, Boston, Massachusetts; died 17 December 1912, Washington, D.C. Daughter of Mark and Caroline Foster Healey; married Charles Appleton Dall, 1844 (died 1886); children: son and a daughter Daughter of a prosperous Boston merchant who had ‘‘desired a son’’ and was ‘‘determined I should supply the place of one,’’ Caroline Healey Dall received a thorough education and was devoted to her father until her desire to spend her life in charitable and religious work conflicted with her father’s desire that she pursue a literary career. Her marriage to Reverend Dall produced a son and a daughter but the union was not happy. In 1855 he went as a Unitarian missionary to India, where he remained, except for occasional visits, until his death in 1886. Dall helped Pauline Wright Davis organize the woman’s rights convention in Boston in 1855, and she organized and delivered one of the principal addresses at the 1859 New England woman’s rights convention, also in Boston. She was one of the founders of the American Social Science Association. Essays and Sketches (1849) collects Dall’s early essays on moral and religious subjects, which had been published in newspapers and periodicals since she was thirteen. In Liberty Bell (1847), another collection of her writings, she holds, in contrast to her later writings and actions, that political activity for women is ‘‘utterly incompatible with the more previous and positive duties of the nursery and the fireside.’’ A series of nine lectures,

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delivered between 1859 and 1862, was described in the New York Evening Post as ‘‘the most eloquent and forcible statement of the Woman’s Question which has been made.’’ Dall calls for the removal of educational and legal barriers so that each human being can fully develop, and insists on a woman’s right to work and to receive equal pay for equal work: ‘‘If low wages, by actually starving women and those dependent upon them, force many into vicious courses, so does the want of employment lower the whole moral tone, and destroy even the domestic efficiency of those whose minds seek variety and freedom. More than once have I been to insane asylums with young girls whom active and acceptable employment would have saved from mania; and scores of times have young women of fortune asked me, ‘What can you give me to do?’ And to this question there is, in the present state of the public mind no possible answer.’’ Her convincing historical analysis, well supplied with examples, shows women have ‘‘since the beginning of civilization’’ shared the hardest and most unwholesome work, that they have been the worst paid, and that their efforts to find ‘‘new avenues of labor’’ (e.g., efforts to train women as watchmakers) have often been met ‘‘by the selfish opposition of man.’’ She feels that such opposition will be overcome and that all the work woman asks for ‘‘will inevitably be given.’’ A consistent advocate of coeducation and higher education for women, Dall responded to Dr. Edward H. Clarke’s book Sex in Education (1873), in which he claimed women’s health could not withstand the strain of a college education. Her review affirms her belief that no ‘‘greater difference of capacity, whether physical or psychical, will be found between man and woman than is found between man and man,’’ that a proper coeducational system will make possible the fullest development of both sexes, and that ‘‘whatever danger menaces the health of America, it cannot, thus far, have sprung from the overeducation of her women.’’ She calls upon women, ‘‘contented in ignominious dependence, restless even to insanity from the need of healthy employment and the perversion of their instincts, and confessedly looking to marriage for salvation,’’ to ‘‘make thorough preparation for trades or professions’’ and to abide by the consequences of their resolutions. Dall was, in later years, a prolific writer of obituary tributes, devotional pamphlets, genealogical studies, and quasihistorical works. OTHER WORKS: What We Really Know About Shakespeare (1855). Woman’s Right to Labor; or Low Wages and Hard Work (1860). A Practical Illustration of ‘‘Woman’s Right to Labor’’; or, A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska (edited by Dall, 1860). Historical Pictures Retouched (1860). Woman’s Rights Under the Law (1861). Sunshine; A New Name for a Popular Lecture on Health (1864). The Bible Story Told for Children (1866). Nazareth (1866). The College, the Market, and the Court (1867). Egypt’s Place in History (1868). Patty Gray’s Journey: From Boston to Baltimore (1869). From Baltimore to Washington (1870). On the Way; or, Patty at Mount Vernon (1870). Genealogical Notes and Errata to Savage’s Genealogical Dictionary (1873). Sex and Education (1874). The Romance of the Association (1875). The

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Whittingham Genealogy (1880). My First Holiday (1881). Sordello: A History and A Poem (1886). The Life of Dr. Anandabai Joshee (1888). Barbara Fritchie (1892). Otis; The Story of an Old House (1892). Margaret and Her Friends (1895). In Memoriam. Susan Wadden Turner et al. (1896). Transcendentalism in New England (1897). In Memoriam, Alexander Wadsworth (1898). Alongside (1902). Memorial to Charles Henry Appleton Dall (edited by Dall, 1902). Of ‘‘Lady Rose’s Daughter’’ (1903). The Story of a Boston Family (1903). Fog Bells (1904). Charles Lowell, Pastor. . .of the West Church, Boston (1907). The papers of Caroline Healey Dall are in the Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College, and at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Buell, L., Literary Transcendentalism (1973). Conrad, S. F., Perish the Thought: Intellectual Women in Romantic America, 1830-1860 (1971). Leach, W., True Love and Perfect Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society (1980). Riegel, R. E., American Feminists (1963). Stanton, E. C. et al., History of Woman Suffrage (1881). Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: HLB (Oct. 1974). New England Quarterly (March 1969). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH

DALY, Elizabeth Born 15 October 1878, New York, New York; died 2 September 1967, Port Washington, New York Daughter of Emma (Barker) and Joseph Francis Daly Elizabeth Daly was the author of 16 crime novels popular during the 1940s and 1950s, all featuring Henry Gamadge, a genteel, intelligent, upper-class man who was an expert on antiquarian books, maps, prints, autographs, and other documents. Agatha Christie once named Daly her favorite American mystery writer, and in fact Daly’s work has often been compared to Christie’s and those of other writers from the British Golden Age of detective fiction, including Arthur Conan Doyle. Daly was born in 1878 in New York City. Her father was a County of New York Supreme Court justice and her uncle was Augustin Daly, a noted 1890s playwright and theatrical producer. Daly’s writing career began during her teens, when periodicals such as Puck, Life, and Scribner’s published her short prose and poetry works. After graduating with a B.A. from Bryn Mawr College in 1901 and an M.A. from Columbia University in 1902, Daly worked as a tutor and a producer of amateur theater. She did not write a detective story until she was in her thirties. She was in her sixties when her first book, Unexpected Night (1940), was published. She went on to write 15 more crime novels and one general fiction title, all from 1940 to 1951. Daly won an Edgar Allan Poe award in 1960 from the Mystery Writers of America.


Unexpected Night introduces Henry Gamadge, who returned as the protagonist of all her full-length detective stories. Gamadge is the opposite of the ‘‘hard-boiled’’ fictional detectives popular at the time. ‘‘He’s the semi-bookish type, but not pretentious,’’ Daly said of Gamadge. ‘‘He’s not good-looking, but eye-catching. . . . He knows a lot, but doesn’t talk about it. He is basically kind, but at times can be ruthless.’’ Over the course of the 16 novels in which he stars, Gamadge acquires a staff, a wife, a family, and two pets, all of which become recurring characters. Gamadge lives in New York’s fashionable Murray Hill district and is essentially unemployed, but accepts frequent commissions as an expert on old books and papers. Nearly all of Daly’s novels hinge on a work of literature or a literary situation. Murders in Volume 2 (1941) features the poetry of Byron, The Book of the Dead (1944) revolves around Shakespeare’s The Tempest, The Wrong Way Down (1946) centers on a Bartolozzi engraving of a Holbein portrait, The Book of the Lion (1948) involves a lost Chaucer manuscript, and the solution of Death and Letters (1950), one of her last and most acclaimed novels, relies on the discovery of the secret sale of a Victorian poet’s love letters. Daly is probably best known for her complex plots, which involve crimes of forgery, theft, and murder and incorporate everything from reincarnations to apparitions, in addition to literary clues. She was especially commended for her unexpected resolutions. Will Cuppy of the New York Herald Tribune said of Deadly Nightshade (1940): ‘‘The plot thickens amazingly toward the end, with a flurry of romantic gambits, and Miss Daly proves herself as deft at juggling hints as the armchair sleuth could wish.’’ Similarly, Isaac Anderson commented in the New York Times Book Review on Evidence of Things Seen (1943): ‘‘So ingenious is the plot of this story that we feel safe in predicting that most readers will be completely fooled and will then wonder how they ever happened to muff the solution.’’ The Gamadge novels take place among wealthy New York society, a group of individuals who are not greatly interested in or affected by the lower classes, crime, or even World War II. At times, both Daly’s writing style and her character Gamadge were criticized as ‘‘over-urbane,’’ ‘‘precious,’’ and ‘‘self-consciously literary,’’ but readers and reviewers generally felt compensated for those drawbacks by her ingenious plotting. While her work was most often considered light and civilized, Daly herself felt detective fiction was a high form of literature that brought with it great responsibilities for the author. Other books featuring Gamadge include The House Without the Door (1942), Nothing Can Rescue Me (1943), Arrow Pointing Nowhere (1944), Any Shape or Form (1945), Somewhere in the House (1946), Night Walk (1947), And Dangerous to Know (1949), and The Book of the Crime (1951). In 1941 Daly wrote her only nonmystery and her sole book without Gamadge. Called The Street Has Changed, the novel (her fourth) was a 40-year saga set in the world of New York theater. The work was praised—in part for her supposed extensive research, which Daly claimed was not necessary since she had grown up in a theatrical family—but she never broke away from the detective genre again.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature (1991). CANR 60 (1998). CLC 52 (1989). 20th Century Crime and Mystery Writers (1985). World Authors 1900-1950 (1996). Other references: NYT (3 Sept. 1967). —KAREN RAUGUST

DALY, Mary Born 16 October 1928, Schenectady, New York Daughter of Frank X. and Anna Catherine Morse Daly In her first book, The Church and the Second Sex (1968), Mary Daly examines Simone de Beauvoir’s accusations against Christianity (particularly Catholicism) found in the book The Second Sex. Daly supports her indictment of the church as an oppressor of women by citing its denial of women’s full participation in the affairs of society, thereby restricting their maturity, as well as excluding women from the church’s hierarchy. Underlying this oppression, according to Daly, is the church doctrine that denies women equality in this life while promising they will be equal souls in heaven. In addition, she analyzes the impact of the women’s liberation movement on nuns and Catholic women in general. Daly’s examples are well organized and lucid, and are drawn from scripture, patristic doctrine, historical evidence, and specific papal documents on marriage and abortion. In a chapter entitled ‘‘The Pedestal Peddlars,’’ she traces the church’s identification of woman with nature rather than culture, with Eve rather than Mary. She also shows how woman is oppressed through what the church calls her ‘‘place’’ in the divine plan, a term Daly feels silences and awes the critical faculty of most women. Her language of reform is rather strong: she would ‘‘exorcise’’ the idea of man’s superiority and use ‘‘radical surgery’’ on the theology that genderizes God and sustains a static world view. This idea of man’s superiority wounds the marriages of its members through insistence on the inferiority of woman. She calls for the ordination of women priests and a movement away from the masculine principle in the hierarchical patterns of society. Daly also advocates the release of nuns from the cloister into the service of their societies and champions universal coeducation. Daly hopes theological wounds can be healed from within the church. While this book was accused by some reviewers as ‘‘overkill,’’ it is actually a clear, well-documented statement of what Roman Catholicism has done to women. Daly’s second book, Beyond God the Father (1973), sparkles with brilliant, original concepts. Although it did not receive critical acclaim, its importance lies in its setting forth seminal philosophical and theological ideas. Whereas her first book is derivative of another thinker (Simone de Beauvoir), the second reflects her own deep understanding of ancient, medieval, and modern theologians, philosophers, and social scientists. She evaluates their ideas by showing that their thinking would have been

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more fruitful had they taken decisive issue with the universal oppression of women. Although theologians have feared woman as the antichrist (a fear manifested in witch hunts and the burning of Joan of Arc), Daly believes woman’s realization of her authentic self will constitute the Second Coming, as women will create new dimensions of concern for all humanity. Daly sees the tolerance for diversity and many forms of becoming as part of the Mary archetype stripped of patriarchal values. She believes Mary to be the last remnant of the Mother goddess who was human and fallible and hence could have love also for the irregular and the imperfect. She rejects Christ as an exclusively masculine symbol for incarnation. Daly is attacked by some critics for not defining precisely what the feminine element will be in her androgynous vision of the future, but her point is that women cannot yet know who they will be. Nevertheless, she does discuss several positive aspects that the ‘‘Cosmic Sisterhood’’ will bring and warns that women will have to be aroused to their plight before they will be able to assert these new dimensions of becoming. Although Daly’s writing is at times so complex it borders on scholasticism, her sardonic wit and vivid imagery help carry the reader along. As Betty Graf, her most appreciative reviewer, says, although Daly uses language that may shock uninformed laity and clergy and may outrage the uncritical, orthodox religious adherent, the book is ‘‘good news’’ for modern woman and man. As a radical feminist theorist, Daly, who holds doctoral degrees in philosophy (1965) and theology (1963) from the University of Fribourg, and a doctorate in theology from St. Mary’s College, Indiana (1954), has taught for years as an associate professor in the Department of Theology at Boston College. The corpus of her writing is central in shaping the questions and debates of feminist theology/religious studies and theory. The Church and the Second Sex was reissued in 1975 with a ‘‘Feminist Postchristian Introduction.’’ including a chapter-bychapter review from Daly’s transformed post-Christian vantage point. Her ‘‘New Archaic Afterwords’’ to a 1985 reissue, greatly influenced by her later development of ‘‘New Words’’ to describe women’s experience, offers a further reflection on her departure from Christianity. Here, Daly views ‘‘the earlier Daly as a foresister whose work is an essential source.’’


and ‘‘Possessions’’ (deception, pride, and avarice). Pure Lust (1984) deals with ‘‘Aggression’’ and ‘‘Obsession’’ (anger and lust). The third volume, Outer-Course: The Be-Dazzling Voyage (1993) addresses ‘‘Assimilation,’’ ‘‘Elimination,’’and ‘‘Fragmentation’’ (gluttony, envy, and sloth), also tacitly dealt with in the 1987 Wickedary of the English Language. In Gyn/Ecology Daly crisscrosses cultures and continents painstakingly exposing Indian suttee, Chinese foot binding, African genital mutilation, European witch burning, and the development of American gynecology to show that gynocidal practices are universal. She begins here her journey of creating womenidentified Time/Space. Daly differentiates between Background, ‘‘the divine depth within the Self,’’ and Foreground, ‘‘surface consciousness,’’ analytical distinctions upon which she draws in her later work. In Pure Lust, Daly journeys into the Background through three realms: (1) archespheres, uncovering ‘‘the Archimage—the Original Witch—within our Selves,’’ (2) pyrospheres, the space of Elemental E-motions and ontological Passions, and (3) metamorphospheres, the center of Belonging and Be-friending. The discussion of each realm ensues with the exposure of the foreground that patriarchy has created to mask the spheres: sadospirituality, potted passions and plastic virtues, and patriarchal, inauthentic belonging and befriending. Daly retrieves ‘‘lust’’ from a phallocentric lechery and renews it with its other meanings of eagerness, craving, and intense longing. Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language brings together a collection of Daly’s New Words and their various meanings. The volume has preliminary articles on spelling, grammar, pronunciation, and guides that mirror the image of a dictionary but are actually theoretical pieces. The presentation of words and meanings, woven ‘‘in cahoots with Jane Caputi,’’ appears in the second phase of the book. Readers unfamiliar with Daly’s work will be impeded from using Wickedary as a reference tool because the words are divided into three different word-webs that depend upon a basic understanding of her thought. A third phase, ‘‘Appendicular Webs,’’ contains four further essays by Daly

In her 1985 ‘‘Original Reintroduction’’ to Beyond God the Father Daly maintains most of the views expressed in her second book, but rejects traditional theological vocabulary. In her later work, language becomes paramount. While always passionate, her words become increasingly lyrical, alliterative, and specialized. Irregular capitalization in her works are used to delineate words she has revitalized and reclaimed.

In Outer-Course: The Be-Dazzling Voyage (1992) Daly intertwines both autobiographical and philosophical material to portray her intellectual voyage in four interconnected spiral galaxies. These spirals roughly correspond to the writing of each of her books, although the first spiral includes many memories from preexistence through the writing of The Church and the Second Sex. The volume focuses on the power that recollections of a woman who has journeyed through the spirals and understands their interrelatedness can have to energize women and Daly herself for further voyaging.

Daly’s 1975 article, ‘‘The Qualitative Leap beyond Patriarchal Religion,’’ provides the trajectory of a new constructive phase. In the ‘‘New Intergalactic Introduction (1990)’’ of Gyn/Ecology Daly reiterates a plan for a three-volume work based on the identification of eight Deadly Sins of the Fathers. Gyn/Ecology (1978) deals with ‘‘Processions,’’ ‘‘Professions,’’

In 1979 Audre Lorde penned the most well-known criticism of Daly, citing Daly’s failure to include the writings and experiences of women of color except as victims. Daly publicly acknowledged the criticism in Gyn/Ecology’s second edition and in Outer-Course. In Pure Lust and Wickedary Daly does try to address diversity. The 1990 edition of Gyn/Ecology also includes

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an afterword by Bonnie Mann portraying the usefulness of Daly’s analysis in Mann’s work with battered women, an effort to show the accessibility of the work to different classes. Writers of feminist criticism and texts on theory generally label Daly as cultural feminist, an appellation Daly does not espouse in her own self-descriptions. She prefers Positively Revolting Hag, i.e., ‘‘a stunning, beauteous Crone, one who inspires positive revulsion from phallic institutions and morality, inciting Others to Act of Pure Lust.’’ In 1999, while still teaching at Boston College, Daly made the news when the administration, apparently responding to a threatened affirmative action suit, insisted she allow men in her ‘‘Introduction to Feminist Ethics’’ course. Her policy had always been to teach separate classes to men and to women. Professor Daly responded by taking a semester’s leave while considering her retirement. Ironically, the all-male student body of 1969 successfully demonstrated for her reinstatement and tenure when the administration did not renew her contract. Student support in the recent controversy was represented in a letter signed by 14 women and printed in the campus newspaper: ‘‘Throughout her 33-year career at Boston College, Professor Daly has provided insight, inspiration and mentoring. . .the administration is silencing Mary Daly and negating the very ideals that it proclaims invaluable.’’ During her sabbatical, however, Daly wasn’t idle— she continued work on a sequel to her 1998 book, Quintessence. . .Realizing the Archaic Future: A Radical Elemental Feminist Manifesto . The value and power of language led Daly to writing, as she indicates in her autobiographical essay, ‘‘Sin Big’’ (1996), where she describes her early experiences and decisions about her education. ‘‘Ever since childhood, I have been honing my skills for living the life of a Radical Feminist Pirate and cultivating the Courage to Sin.’’ Her eighth book, a futuristic, millennial journey, Quintessence, completes the quest begun in Gyn/Ecology and Pure Lust by imagining a world beyond the patriarchal history. As she recounts the situation, the oppression of women, the exhaustion of natural resources, and the dominance of fundamentalist thought characterize life at the end of the 20th century. The title page of Quintessence includes the additional inscription that explains the circumstances of the text: ‘‘2048 B.E. (Biophilic Era) Edition: Containing Cosmic Comments and Conversations with the Author, Published on Lost Found Continent by Anonyma Network (An Intergalactic Enterprise of Anonyma Network) In Celebration of the 50th Anniversary of the Work.’’ Daly structures a fictive context in which Annie (Anonyma), the future editor, writes a preface and records her ‘‘transtemporal’’ dialogues with the author, Mary Daly. Daly’s chapters enumerate women’s experiences of Diaspora in the patriarchal, postmodernist world. Following each chapter are Annie’s commentary and conversations with the author that describe this world inhabited by women and a few enlightened men who live out Daly’s feminist dreams, unencumbered by the patriarchal world they left behind in 2012 B.E.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY: Lorde, A., ‘‘An Open Letter to Mary Daly,’’ in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, C. Moraga and G. Azaldúa, eds. (1981). Spencer, M. L., M. Kehoe, and K. Speece, eds., Handbook for Women Scholars: Strategies for Success (1982). Reference works: CANR (1990). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). Other references: America (Jan. 1974). Boston Globe (25 Feb. 1999, 28 Feb. 1999, 23 Mar. 1999). Christian Century (Jan. 1974). CW (Feb. 1974). Critic (Jan.-Feb. 1974). LJ (1 Oct. 1998). National Catholic Reporter (5 Feb. 1999, 5 Mar. 1999). Off Our Backs (1998). On The Issues (1998). PW (17 Aug. 1998). WRB 16:6. —STEPHANIE DEMETRAKOPOULOS, UPDATED BY BARBARA ANNE RADTKE AND KAREN MCLENNAN

DALY, Maureen Born 15 March 1921, County Tyrone, Ireland Daughter of Joseph D. and Margaret Kelly Daly; married William P. McGivern, 1948 Maureen Daly began her writing career at a young age. While still a high school senior, her short story ‘‘Sixteen’’ placed first in a student contest in Scholastic magazine, and was selected for the O. Henry Prize Award Collection of 1938. While a student at Rosary College (now Dominican University) in River Forest, Illinois, she worked as a reporter and columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Upon graduation in 1942 she went on to the Ladies’ Home Journal as an associate editor, reporter, and foreign correspondent, and in the early 1950s, she began writing for the Saturday Evening Post. Throughout her career, Daly interposed magazine and newspaper work with writing for films and television. Daly’s stories have been widely published in national magazines such as Vogue, Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan, and Woman’s Home Companion. Her writing for the magazine audience centers on problems relating to the socialization process and the psychology of adolescence. Daly’s stories, novels, articles, and columns hold a prominent place among works designed to advise and reassure young women in their struggle for identity throughout adolescence. Among her works of these genres are ‘‘Sixteen,’’ ‘‘What’s Your P. Q.? (Personality Quotient),’’ a syndicated column for teenagers, and a cultural commentary in ‘‘Meet a SubDeb’’ installments for the Ladies’ Home Journal. Daly’s first novel, Seventeenth Summer (1942, 1985) is by far her best known and most highly acclaimed publication. Described as the Little Women of the 20th century, it has gone through innumerable printings since its first publication. Set in the author’s own hometown of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, the story relates the hope, joy, pain, and sadness of a first young love.

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Accolades for the book called it serious, sensitive, charming, and original, with appreciation of and insight into youthful emotions. The novel is written in an expert but simple style, and is notable for creating a Midwestern summer ambience of evocative nostalgia for growing up in the American heartland. Reviewers regarded Seventeenth Summer the start of a promising career for a young writer with a keen sense of emotional states and inner feelings. To this day, Daly is viewed as offering an exceptionally fresh approach to a genre customarily dominated by clichéd formulas. Daly’s individual and memorable treatment of the theme of young love shows how a writer’s imagination and personal insight can bring overused literary themes alive. Daly’s repertoire also includes children’s books, light foreign-locale fiction, and anthologies of classic short stories for young adults. Daly’s reputation is based on her flair for translating personal experience and memory of teenage life—with its hopes, frustrations, and inhibitions—into a popular and sympathetic vernacular. Her first story, ‘‘Sixteen,’’ was not originally intended for publication, but was a personal exercise in introspection and catharsis meant to ‘‘relieve the tense hurt feelings inside.’’ Daly believes her empathy for adolescence depends on her gift for remaining psychically close to the experiences of that period. A collection of her news column commentaries, Smarter and Smoother: A Handbook on How to Be That Way (1944), drew its effectiveness from Daly’s involved but mature identification with her audience. It has been reviewed as ‘‘the best, all things considered, of our high school manners and ethics.’’

OTHER WORKS: My Favorite Stories (edited by Daly, 1948, 1965). High School Career Series (1948-). The Perfect Hostess: Complete Etiquette and Entertainment for the Home (1948, 1951). Profile of Youth (edited by Daly, 1951). What’s Your P.Q.— Personality Quotient? (1952, 1970). Twelve Around the World (1957). Mention My Name in Mombasa: The Unscheduled Adventures of a Family Aboard (with W. P. McGivern, 1958). Patrick Visits the Farm (1959). Patrick Takes a Trip (1960). Spanish Roundabout (1960). Sixteen and Other Stories (1961, 1972). Moroccan Roudabout (1961). Patrick Visits the Library (1961). Patrick Visits the Zoo (1963). The Ginger Horse (1964). Spain’s Wonderland of Contrasts (1965). The Small War of Sergeant Donkey (1966, 1969). My Favorite Mystery Stories (edited by Daly, 1966). Rosie, the Dancing Elephant (1967). My Favorite Suspense Stories (edited by Daly, 1968). The Seeing (1981). Acts of Love (1986). First a Dream (1990).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Martens, A. C., Seventeenth Summer, A Play in Three Acts (1949). Martens, A. C., You Can’t Kiss Caroline; A Comedy in Three Acts (1963). Reference works: CB (1946). Other references: Scholastic (20 March 1944, 22 Oct. 1945). Ladies’ Home Journal (June 1951, Jan. 1968). —MARGARET KING

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DANIELS, Dorothy Born 1 July 1907, Waterbury, Connecticut Also writes under: Angela Gray, Danielle Dorsett, Cynthia Kavanaugh, Helaine Ross, Suzanne Somers, Geraldine Thayer Daughter of Judson R. and Mary Guilfoile Smith; married Norman Daniels (died) Dorothy Daniels’ writing career commenced shortly after her marriage to Norman Daniels, a prolific detective and spy-story author. She began by writing romantic short stories and doctor/ nurse novels, but when their healthy sales figures declined, Daniels’ publisher suggested she turn to the gothic romance. Daniels is best known for her work in this genre. Her first gothic novel, Shadow Glen, was published in 1965. From that year through 1975, Daniels had sales figures of over 10 million copies, with more than 150 titles in print. Daniels’ originally helped her late husband with his writing by editing and typing his manuscripts. He later aided her in getting her own career started, and has been widely and wrongly credited with writing much of her work. Daniels achieves originality in a narrowly defined genre by paying close attention to detail and vividly recreating an era into which the reader can escape. The depiction of women in Daniels’ gothics is very traditional. Home and marriage are often the end result of the storyline. Generally written in the first person, the plots are predictable—the reader is aware that the heroine will ultimately survive and be far better off by the conclusion of the final chapter. It is this very predictability, however, that seems to draw readers. Gothic devotees are searching for variations on established themes, and Daniels achieves this variation through careful and precise characterization. Her novels uphold the traditions and attitudes of a solid middle-class experience where age and sex role expectations are clearly defined. The characters in the gothics pose no threat to the beliefs of the readers; Daniels receives popular acceptance because she treats the values of ordinary people with respect. Her insistence on happy endings reinforces the concept that good, by its very nature, must ultimately triumph over evil. For a reading audience experiencing many challenges to traditional modes of behavior in the 1970s, the gothic novel was a comforting assurance that certain standards never change. And despite rampant changes in society and mores in the 1980s and 1990s, Daniels is still a favorite among readers of gothic novels, or as they are frequently labeled, escapist literature. The immense response to her writing, however, stands as testimony to her ability to know and fulfill the desires of her reading audience. Rather than debate the merits or shortcomings of escapist literature, it is more important to study Daniels for her insight into the American psyche. OTHER WORKS: Selected: The Caduceus Tree (1961). The Dark Rider (1961). Leland Legacy (1965). Cliffside Castle (1965). The Templeton Memoirs (1966). Mystic Manor (1966). Lily Lily Pond (1966). Midday Moon (1967). House of Stolen Memories (1967). House of the Seven Courts (1967). Candle in the Sun (1968). The


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Spanish Chapel (1969). Voice on the Wind (1970). The Attic Rope (1970). The Tormented (1970). Journey into Terror (1970). Willow Weep (1971). House of Many Doors (1971). Diablo Manor (1971). House on Circus Hill (1972). Dark Island (1972). The Dark Stage (1972). The Stone House (1973). The Larrabee Heiress (1973). Apollo Fountain (1974). Ghost Song (1974). The Unlamented (1975). Illusion at Haven’s Edge (1975). The Possessed (1975). Whistle in the Wind (1976). Vineyard Chapel (1976). Woman in Silk and Shadows (1977). Juniper Hill (1977). In the Shadows (1978). The Lonely Place (1978). Perrine (1978). Cormac Legend (1979). Yesterday’s Evil (1979). Legend of Death (1980). Bridal Black (1980). House of Silence (1980). Nicola (1980). The Purple and the Gold (1980). Monte Carlo (1981). The Sisters of Valcour (1981). Saratoga (1981). For Love of Valcour (1983). Crisis at Valcour (1985).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dorothy Daniels Memorial Children’s Book Collection: Selected Catalogue (Riverside Public Library [CA], 1981). Twentieth Century Romance & Historical Writers. —KAREN M. STODDARD

DARGAN, Olive Tilford Born 1869, Grayson County, Kentucky; died 22 January 1968, Asheville, North Carolina Also wrote under: Fielding Burke Daughter of Elisha F. and Rebecca Day Tilford; married Pegram Dargan (died 1915) Raised in Kentucky and Missouri in an academic family, Olive Tilford Dargan was educated at George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville, and later at Radcliffe College, where she met her future husband, Pegram Dargan. She began her writing career as a poet and lyrical dramatist living in New York, but, following her husband’s death by drowning in 1915, she returned to Kentucky and wrote about the southern mountain people. Her literary approach ranged from bemused local color anecdotes written during the 1920s to angry Marxist novels written during the Depression. Throughout her long life, Dargan published social fiction under the pseudonym Fielding Burke while using her real name for poetry and local color stories. In 1916 Dargan was awarded the Southern Society of New York Prize for the best book written by a Southerner, and in 1924 she received the Belmont-Ward Fugitive Prize and an honorary doctorate from the University of North Carolina. Dargan’s early lyrical dramas give some clues to the intensely political nature of her mature fiction. The Mortal Gods (1912), though archaic in form and remote in setting, is nevertheless a powerful study of the oppression of the working class in modern industrial society. In her collection of plays, The Flutter of the Gold Leaf (1922), Dargan explores conflicting emotional and

intellectual loyalties, and the different impulses created by personal and public roles. The plays were not well received by critics. Dargan’s more conventional poetry was treated admiringly. The sonnet collection, The Cycle’s Rim (1916) was described by one reviewer as ‘‘in a class with Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese.’’ The extent of Dargan’s left-wing intellectual leanings becomes apparent in Highland Annals (1925), a collection of short stories about the poor white inhabitants of the southern mountains. Although these sketches exhibit many of the traditional features of Southern local color writing—tall tales, extravagant humor, rhapsodic appreciation of nature, quaintness of language and custom—they also note the ominous threat of the exploitative cotton mill and the vulnerability of the poor white woman who suffers both for her class and for her sex. A bloody strike among hitherto docile workers in a textile mill in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1929 gave Dargan the ideal setting for her first novel. Call Home the Heart (1932) is about the predicament of Ishma, a Southern poor white woman who is torn between her love for her husband, family, and mountain life, and an overwhelming desire to seek freedom from the obligations they heap upon her. But when Ishma deserts her family for an urban, industrial life with a lover, she only finds a new set of duties. She discovers the poor worker trapped by the cruel paternalism of the textile factories, and she slowly educates herself in the intricacies of Marxist socialism until she is ready to participate fully in strike organization. However, just when Ishma’s intellectual principles appear to have triumphed, she flees back to her husband and family, driven by ancient prejudices against the black workers who embrace her, and drawn by her yearning for a husband’s love and the tranquil beauty of the mountains. Many critics applauded what they called the novel’s final ‘‘retreat into art’’ after Marxist and feminist ‘‘propaganda.’’ Dargan, however, leaves no doubt that Ishma’s retreat, though passionate and consoling, is a failure of principle—a step backward from the new consciousness she seemed to be approaching. The novel implies there can be no reconciliation of pleasure and principle, that one must always be subordinate to the other. Dargan returned to the predicament of Ishma in her second proletarian novel, A Stone Came Rolling (1935). Here the heroine achieves the triumph of principle, but only at the cost of the death of her beloved husband. She returns to dedicate her energy to revolutionary activities with a new sense of the danger of a wasted life. Though Dargan’s novels show a clear Marxist emphasis, their power lies in their sensitivity to the circumstances of an intellectual and passionate woman who discovers personal happiness is the price demanded by both the traditional feminine role and the revolutionary feminist one. After the 1930s, Dargan, like most other leftward-leaning American writers, retreated from extreme ideological concerns. She returned to anecdotal fiction of the mountain people in From My Highest Hill (1941), and to a liberal treatment of labor warfare among organizing mine workers in Sons of the Stranger (1947). Yet it is in the earlier novels of political engagement that Dargan produced her finest and most original work.

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OTHER WORKS: Path Flower, and Other Verses (1904). Semiramis, and Other Plays (1904). Lords and Lovers, and Other Dramas (1906). Lute and Furrow (1922). The Spotted Hawk (1958). Innocent Bigamy, and Other Stories (1962). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Polsky, T., North Carolina Authors: A Selective Handbook (1952). Rideout, W. B., The Radical Novel in the U.S. 1900-1954: Some Interrelations of Literature and Society (1956). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). WW of Women (1914). Other references: Nation (8 Jan. 1936). NR (29 Jan. 1936). NYTBR (15 Dec. 1935). North Carolina Librarian (Spring 1960). SRL (16 April 1932). Writers’s Markets and Methods (interview, 1950). —SYLVIA COOK

D’AULAIRE, Ingri Mortenson Born 27 December 1904, Königsberg, Norway; died 24 October 1980, Wilton, Connecticut Daughter of Per and Line Sandsmark Mortenson; married Edgar D. d’Aulaire, 1925; children: two sons Ingri Mortenson d’Aulaire met her husband while at art school in Munich, where they married. They returned to the U.S. in 1930, and embarked on a joint career of writer and illustrator that endured for many years. Although it is hard to ascertain where the creative spark came from, it was d’Aulaire’s childhood that overflowed with wild antics and childish pranks. She herself said their first seven books capture the experiences of her childhood, while the later books present childhood through the youthful activities of their two sons. This husband/wife team shared in the creation of both texts and illustrations. When asked to separate their roles, Edgar replied, ‘‘When you find something amusingly expressed in our books it has been said by Ingri.’’ Winners of the Caldecott Medal for their illustrations of Abraham Lincoln (1939), and of the Regina Medal from the Catholic Library Association (1970) for their continual contribution to children’s literature, the d’Aulaires have created the most significant biographical series available concerning early U.S. heroes. Their style is highly evocative of folklore traditions. Their simple stories of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Benjamin Franklin contain humorous details often unknown to children. While the characters remain great, these are portraits of people rich in human foibles; and the biographies are also beautifully illustrated. The illustrations, while in complete complement with the text, do not tell the same story; the two media reflect and support each other, but do not necessarily dwell on the same single event. Thus the text can be effectively used without the illustrations. Because of d’Aulaire’s childhood in Norway, the couple also produced excellent books concerning the Norse people. Ola (1932) is a beautiful folk picture of the Norwegian fishing village. The tale combines a joyous text with brilliant illustrations. Later

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books, Nils (1948) and Don’t Count Your Chicks (1943), reflect d’Aulaire’s Norwegian heritage. The couple’s contributions cannot be separated in the field of children’s literature. Yet certain important aesthetic elements must be acknowledged to d’Aulaire. It was her early happy childhood that was the wellspring for the spontaneity so vividly captured in their early books. Her practical eye kept text at a minimum, but helped it retain all its vitality. OTHER WORKS: (co-authored with Edgar d’Aulaire): The Magic Rug (1931). Ola and Blakken and Line, Sine, Trine (1933). The Conquest of the Atlantic (1933). The Lord’s Prayer (1934). Children of the Northlights (1935). George Washington (1936). East of the Sun and West of the Moon (1938). Leif the Lucky (1941). Wings for Per (1944). Too Big (1945). Pocahontas (1946). Foxie (1949). Benjamin Franklin (1950). Buffalo Bill (1952). Animals Everywhere (1954). Columbus (1955). The Two Cars (1955). The Magic Meadow (1958). Book of Greek Myths (1962). Norse Gods and Giants (1967). D’Aulaire’s Trolls (1972). The Terrible Troll-Bird (1976). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Miller, B. M., and E. W. Field, eds., Caldecott Medal Books: 1938-1957 with The Artists’ Acceptance Papers and Related Material Chiefly from the Horn Book Magazine (1957). Other references: Catholic World (Feb. 1970). Horn Book (Oct. 1964). Children of the Northlights (film interview, Weston Woods, Weston, Connecticut). —JILL P. MAY

DAVENPORT, Marcia Gluck Born 9 June 1903, New York, New York; died January 1996 Daughter of Alma Gluck and stepdaughter of Efrem Zimbalist, Sr.; married Russell Davenport, 1929 Marcia Davenport was the daughter of Alma Gluck, celebrated soprano of the concert stage and the Metropolitan opera. Davenport’s husband exited from her life when their child was five, and she began supporting herself by writing for the New Yorker. Later Davenport became the music critic for Stage, and went on to be the musical commentator for NBC and the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. Davenport’s life was many-faceted. She had an almost mystical attraction for the land and culture of Czechoslovakia, that started years before she ever met and loved Jan Masaryk, a Czech foreign minister. The country became her second homeland, and she gave in to the lure of Prague, where she took up residence after World War II. Davenport’s career as an author started with her love for Mozart, whose biography she published in 1932. Her first novel, Of Lena Geyer (1936, reprinted 1982), is the story of a poor Czech girl and of her ascent to fame and fortune, triumph and tragedy. It


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is a work of fiction, yet Lena is only partly the child of imagination: she is a composite figure of several singers Davenport had known intimately, among them her own mother. The background of the novel opens a wide vista on the golden age of opera both in New York and in Europe. Davenport’s most significant book is her autobiography, Too Strong for Fantasy (1967, reprinted 1992), dedicated to ‘‘J. M. In Memoriam.’’ It is a bouquet of reminiscences, an easy-flowing parade of the people in Davenport’s life, a mosaic that is a Who’s Who of the musical, literary, and political worlds of New York and Prague. The feminine touch comes through in Davenport’s descriptions of places and architecture, and in her attachment to her feline companion, Tam. It is equally clear, however, that Davenport is first and foremost an independent soul; she is never a mere appendage to her mother or to the men in her life. Historically, the most meaningful part of the memoirs is the last third of the book, dealing with the international situation. It describes the regrettably one-sided struggle between East and West over Czechoslovakia, and the mysterious death of Jan Masaryk, who either committed suicide or was assassinated a few days before his planned marriage to Davenport. She quotes firsthand information no other source provides about the political crisis of 1948 and the communist coup. She also draws a clear picture of Masaryk, the ‘‘playboy of the Western world,’’ who in his last days became the ‘‘latter-day Hamlet.’’ By her own admission, Davenport never had the genius to make literary history with her novels: she was driven by a need to write what she knew rather than what she was. Only in her autobiography does Davenport open up and give of herself. She is a superb craftsman of the pen and a captivating reconteur. OTHER WORKS: Mozart (1932, 1995). Valley of Decision (1942, 1969, 1989; video versions 1945 and 1994). East Side—West Side (1947, video versions 1949 and 1991). My Brother’s Keeper (1954, 1982). The Constant Image (1960, 1960). Jan (1980). BIBLIOGRAPHY: ‘‘The Revival of Bel Canto’’ in Curtain Call for Opera News: Articles from Recent Issues of the Metropolitan Opera Guild’s (1964). Canadian Forum (Nov. 1936). LJ (1 Oct. 1967). NYTBR (13 Sept. 1936, 22 Oct. 1967). SR (25 Nov. 1967). SRL (19 Sept. 1936). —VERA LASKA

DAVIDSON, Lucretia Maria Born 27 September 1808, Plattsburg, New York; died 27 August 1825, Plattsburg, New York Daughter of Oliver and Margaret Miller Davidson After her early schooling at home, Lucretia Davidson was sent to Troy Female Academy. Coming from a household ‘‘with the sickbed as focal point,’’ Davidson’s delicate health was

further undermined by the school’s excessively ambitious curriculum; by the eight to ten hours’ daily study in ill-ventilated rooms; by the virtual absence of outdoor exercise; and by insufficient sleep, further curtailed, before examinations, by rising at two a.m. or midnight to study until four. Despite her mother’s concern, her father approved of sending her back to school, this time at Miss Gilbert’s Albany Academy. Within three months Davidson returned home to die. Restricted by her inexperience, Davidson sensibly drew her writing subject matter either from her daily life or from her studies. From history, biblical and national, came ‘‘David and Jonathon,’’ ‘‘Ruth’s Answer to Naomi,’’ the prose ‘‘Columbus,’’ and the spirited ‘‘Vermont Cadets’’—from the classroom, the humorous ‘‘Week Before Examination’’ which was deservedly popular with her schoolmates; from her brief but poignant personal encounters with suffering, mental and physical, poems like ‘‘Headache’’ and ‘‘Fears of Death.’’ These latter, especially, have the ring of sincerity, transcending her usual level of stock images and poetic diction. Amir Khan and Other Poems, selected by her mother and with a biographical introduction by the artist and inventor Samuel Morse, was published in 1829. Copies were sent by Morse to a number of leading writers. In his covering letter to Robert Southey, poet laureate of England, Morse invited comparison with other youthful prodigies such as Chatterton and White, of ‘‘this new genius which sprang up and bloomed in the wilderness, assumed the female form and wore the features of exquisite beauty and perished in the bloom.’’ Southey’s response was an 11-page review in the prestigious London Quarterly (1829), the conclusion of which, Poe protested, was ‘‘twice as strong as was necessary to establish her fame in England-fearing America.’’ Within 30 years, no less than 15 editions appeared on both sides of the Atlantic, all but the first preceded by the biographical sketch by Catherine Sedgwick, the first American woman novelist. A German translation was published in 1844, and an Italian edition in 1906. Washington Irving, in his introduction to the poetry of the younger Davidson sister, Margaret, confessed to finding ‘‘a popular font of tears. . .in the blissful agony. . .of these lovely American girls who after giving promise of rare poetic excellence [were] snatched from existence.’’ Had these sophisticated and otherwise discerning contemporaries, upon encountering the romantically tragic young poet, abandoned all sense of proportion and critical judgement to wallow ‘‘like mawkish donkeys’’ in sentimentality, asks Irving’s biographer? His own explanation is the reasonable one that attuned as they were to the mind of their generation, they responded to the prevailing philosophy of sentiment as we do to that of criticism. But how is Davidson’s permanent contribution to literature to be determined? Edgar Allan Poe’s review, challenging Southey’s ipse dixit, suggests one reasonable line of approach. We must, he says, distinguish a heart-felt love of her ‘‘worth’’ from an intellectual ‘‘appreciation of [her] poetic ability.’’ Additionally, this ‘‘distinction, would have spared us much twaddle on the part of commentators.’’

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But such a distinction is one very difficult to make. In the case of Davidson, writing before there was much American poetry to judge by and dying before her own poetic skills and critical powers could be properly formed, it is virtually impossible to be so completely objective. OTHER WORKS: Poetical Remains of the Late Lucretia Maria Davidson (edited by M. Davidson with biography by C. Sedgwick, 1846, revised edition with Biographical and Poetical Remains of the Late Margaret Miller Davidson, 1857, revised 1860). Poems by Lucretia Maria Davidson (edited by M. O. Davidson, 1871). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brooks, V. W., The World of Washington Irving (1944). Curry, K., ed., New Letters of Robert Southey (1965). Dewey, M. E., Life and Letters of Catherine Sedgwick (1871). Lutz, A., Emma Willard: Daughter of Democracy (1929). Mabee, C., Samuel Morse; The American Leonard (1944). Poe, E. A., Complete Works, Harrison, J., ed. (1902). Sparks, J., ed., The Library of American Biography (1837). Williams, S., Life of Washington Irving (1925). —MARION NORMAN

DAVIDSON, Margaret Miller Born 26 March 1823, Plattsburg, New York; died 25 November 1838, Saratoga, New York Daughter of Oliver and Margaret Miller Davidson Margaret Miller Davidson received the best education at home from her chronically ill mother. Anxious to assume the family poetic mantle bequeathed her by her dying sister Lucretia, she eagerly absorbed the ideas, tastes, and moral and religious standards of her mother toward whom she formed an exceptionally close attachment. This attachment was then reflected in innumerable verses. Frequent extended vacations and changes of residence proved unable to arrest Davidson’s fatal tuberculosis. Her verses, highly autobiographic, reflect her pathetic attempts to conceal from her family the extent of her suffering, and, despite a mature acceptance of death and strong faith in immortality, her wistful clinging to life: ‘‘Oh my dear, dear Mother, I am so young.’’ She was fifteen when she died. Mrs. Davidson who, three years earlier when negotiating for a new edition of Lucretia’s poetry, had introduced her younger daughter to Washington Irving, now provided him with all that remained of Margaret’s poems. She also gave him copious memoranda which he used, often verbatim, for his biographical introduction to Davidson’s Poetical Remains (1841). A second edition was called for in the same year, one each in London and Philadelphia the following year, and by 1864, there were 20 editions in all.

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Davidson’s poems, as is hardly surprising, reflect two main influences: Lucretia whom she idolized and emulated as far as she could, and her mother whom she reflected so completely that it is difficult to determine if there was anything of her own. Davidson’s poems are, on the whole, longer than most of her sister’s, written in quatrains rather than rhyming couplets and express stronger religious faith and devotion. Many deal with her various homes and the flowers, trees, rivers, and mountains surrounding them. Despite her mother’s disapproval of extensive memorizations, echoes (perhaps unconscious) of Cowper, Thomson, and Scott constantly recur. Among Davidson’s better efforts are the paraphrases of the 23rd and 42nd psalms, the ‘‘Hymn of the FireWorshippers,’’ and ‘‘The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah’’— but these are clearly inferior to Lucretia’s handling of similar biblical material. Faced with the task of evaluating her contribution to American literature and women’s writing, one is apt (while making due allowance for her youth and narrowness of experience) to dismiss Davidson as a fainter echo of her more promising elder sister. Many believe she has been lifted to an entirely undeserved eminence because of the compassion of distinguished family friends like Irving and that this eminence has been perpetuated by the next quarter-century’s sentimental bad taste. Poets, as they mature, usually have the sense to destroy juvenilia. In Davidson’s case, there was no time and her mother’s blind urge to preserve every slightest memento of a beloved gifted child, inadvertantly did Davidson a disservice in exposing indiscriminately to the harsh glare of the judgement of posterity what should have been reserved for the loving, uncritical eyes of family and close friends. OTHER WORKS: Biographical and Poetical Remains of the Late Margaret Miller Davidson (ed. by W. Irving, 1841, revised edition, 1846, revised with Poetical Remains of the Late Lucretia Maria Davidson, 1857). Life and Poetical Remains (1945). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Griswold, R., Female Poets of America (1848). May, C., The American Female Poets (1848). Poe, E. A., Complete Works, Harrison, J., ed. (1902). —MARION NORMAN

DAVIS, Adelle Born 25 February 1904, Hendricks County, Indiana; died 31 May 1974, Palos Verdes Estates, California Also wrote under: Jane Dunlap Daughter of Charles E. and Harriet McBroom Davis; married George E. Leisey, 1943; Frank V. Sieglinger, 1960 The youngest of five daughters, Adelle Davis attended Purdue University and then the University of California at Berkeley where she received her B.S. in dietetics in 1927. She then moved to New York and was a dietician for the Yonkers public schools,


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and a consulting nutritionist at the Judson Health Center. Davis returned to California in 1931 to be a consulting nutritionist for the Alameda County Health Clinic in Oakland and for the William E. Branch Clinic in Hollywood. She attained her M.S. in biochemistry from the University of Southern California School of Medicine in 1939. After writing several bestselling books Davis resigned from her consulting practice in order to devote time to the lectures and television appearances made during the last years of her life.

often accused by the medical profession of being grossly inaccurate and of distorting her facts. On the other hand, she has been commended by professionals in her field as well as by her readers and those she personally helped through diet and vitamin therapy. Writing in her exuberant yet conversational style, Davis has perhaps done more to make Americans aware of nutrition and change their eating habits than has any other individual.

Davis first became well known with the publication in 1947 of her cookbook, Let’s Cook It Right, which offers the novice in nutrition an enthusiastic introduction to the preparation of healthful foods. She stresses the use of protein and natural foods in cooking. Recipes are simple, easy to follow, and have innumerable variants depending upon what the cook happens to have in stock. The introduction gives sound nutritional cooking principles, and Davis includes a lengthy section on meat, recognizing that failures in this category are a major hurdle for most cooks. Also included are sections on meat substitutes, leftovers, fish, eggs and cheese, vegetables, soups, salads, bread, and healthful desserts. This is the most popular and successful of Davis’ books, devoid as it is of the contradictions and repetitions found so often in her later books. Let’s Cook It Right offers cooking advice and directions in a clear, concise, and direct style.

OTHER WORKS: Optimum Health (1935). You Can Stay Well (1939). Vitality Through Planned Nutrition (1942).

Let’s Have Healthy Children came out in 1951. Here Davis stresses diet and vitamin supplements for the woman before conception, during pregnancy when extra vitamin B-6 and folic acid are required, and during lactation. The book also centers on proper diet for babies and young children. A staunch advocate of breastfeeding for the first six months of life, Davis also provides formula recipes. Let’s Have Healthy Children was generally well received by the public, but with the publication of Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit in 1954 Davis came under increasing attack from the medical profession for her bold assertions that proper diet with vitamin supplements could prevent most diseases and abnormalities. Here she details the vitamin and mineral contents of foods and thoroughly explains what one must eat to prevent illness, describing, by way of example, her own regimen. In 1961 Davis published Exploring Inner Space (under the pseudonym of Jane Dunlap) which describes her experiences while under the influence of LSD. The book is written in an extravagant, even gushing style, as Davis describes her revelations of God and her visions; yet she is open, honest, and sincere. When later medical reports surfaced about LSD’s harm to the genes and body, Davis continued to claim the drug’s benefits. Finally, in Let’s Get Well (1965) Davis describes most common illnesses and diseases and prescribes specific vitamin and dietary cures for them. She bases her findings, as always, on case studies, personal testimonials, and a wealth of scientific data, painstakingly cross-referenced. This is her most controversial book, since Davis orders as cures heavy vitamin doses which doctors warn can be dangerously toxic. In all of her books, Davis attempts to act as an intermediary between the medical profession and the lay nutritionist. Thus she takes the plethora of medical data, synthesizes it, simplifies it, and offers it to the public in an understandable language. Davis was

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CB (1973). Other references: BiogNews (Feb. 1974). Life (22 Oct. 1971). NYT (1 June 1974). NYTM (20 May 1973). Reader’s Digest (Oct. 1973). Time (18 Dec. 1972). —ANN RAYSON

DAVIS, Angela Yvonne Born 26 January 1944, Birmingham, Alabama Daughter of Nebjamin F. and Sallye Bell Davis Born to a middle-class African-American family whose social circle included Communist Party members, Angela Davis became one of the most prominent political activists of the 1960s and 1970s. An American Friends Service Committee scholarship allowed her to leave Birmingham to attend the progressive Elizabeth Irwin High School in New York City, where she became active in a Marxist-Leninist youth group and supported the antinuclear and civil rights movements. Later, at Brandeis University she became a student of Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse. Davis spent her junior year in Paris at the Sorbonne and returned to Europe after graduation from Brandeis (B.A. 1965) to continue her education at the University of Frankfurt (1965-67). Davis received a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of California at San Diego in 1968, working again with Marcuse. She has held faculty positions in a number of universities in the U.S. and abroad. By the late 1960s, the civil rights movement was in full swing. Davis joined several activist groups, including the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the Communist Party of the United States, and the Black Panthers. While working on her doctoral dissertation, she was hired to teach philosophy at UCLA. Then Governor Ronald Reagan, citing a law that banned Communist Party members from teaching at state universities, protested her appointment and Davis was dismissed. The law was ultimately declared unconstitutional, while the ensuing controversy propelled Davis into the political spotlight. As a champion of the work of the Black Panthers, Davis became involved with the plight of black prison inmates. She was an especially strong advocate of a group called the Soledad Brothers and of their leader, George Jackson. In August 1970 Jackson’s younger brother, Jonathan, sought to force his release

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by taking hostages at gunpoint in a California courthouse. During the shootout that followed, the judge and several others were killed. Police accused Davis of purchasing the guns used in the shooting and charged her with conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder. Fleeing underground, Davis was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List for several months until her capture. With the rallying cry, ‘‘Free Angela,’’ the civil rights movement and the activist left rallied to her defense through her imprisonment and a lengthy court trial. If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (1971) collects Davis’ prison writings and those of other black activists, including Erika Huggins, Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, and George Jackson. It is a firsthand account of political, racial, class, and economic oppression focusing primarily on the plight of African Americans in the U.S. prison system in the 1960s. Davis was acquitted of all charges in 1972. Angela Davis, an Autobiography (1974; reprinted as Angela Davis: With My Mind on Freedom, 1974), written in the wake of her exoneration, is a compelling book that chronicles her life as it intersected with the emergence of the civil rights movement. The book also details the rise of the Black Panther party and Davis’ involvement with the group. Davis continued her activist work on behalf of black prisoners and against racism. Remaining in the Communist Party, she ran for vice president on the party ticket in 1980. Davis’s groundbreaking feminist analysis of the intersecting oppressions of race, class, and gender in American culture, Women, Race, and Class appeared in 1982. The book provides an overview of oppression as it is constructed, conducted, and institutionalized by the dominant majority. Women, Culture, and Politics (1988) is a collection of Davis’ lectures, essays, and commentary on the changing social order in the 1980s. Her topics include violence against women, nuclear disarmament, apartheid in South Africa, health care, and the role of black artists. In the 1990s, Davis persevered as an ardent voice of social and cultural critique. A tenured professor of the history of consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Davis lectures widely and continues to write with radical, scholarly vision. In 1995, amid controversy, she was appointed a presidential chair. Her book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude ‘‘Ma’’ Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (1998) argues a new understanding of the singers’ music and its effects on the black middle class and on U.S. culture more widely. Davis’ analysis is informed by social commentators like Carl Van Vechten, Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, and by feminist writers and jazz critics. Her work on oppression, racism, and the prison system continues, with a focus on the privatization of prisons, prison populations as a growing source of cheap labor without rights or unions, and the preponderance of African-American men as the main source of prison labor ‘‘raw material.’’ In numerous articles she addresses and delineates the invisible experiences of black inmates and the workings of the prison system’s entrenched racist structure.

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The Angela Y. Davis Reader (1998), a collected works that brings together excerpts of Davis’ writings from 1971 through 1998, provides an impressive documentation of Davis’ unfailing courage and analytical rigor as a radical intellectual, whether she is writing of prisoners’ rights, Marxism and antiracist feminism, or culture. Her articles have appeared in scholarly journals and popular press, and her writing, which sometimes analyzes and sometimes agitates, has pushed the boundaries and redefined the compass of social philosophy and political theory. Davis is a passionate social and cultural critic whose writing is consistently informed by a black, radical, and feminist consciousness. In addition to her writing and teaching, Davis lectures widely in the U.S. and abroad on numerous progressive issues ranging from antiapartheid efforts to reproductive rights. OTHER WORKS: Women & Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation (1971). Violence Against Women and the Ongoing Challenge to Racism (1985). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Aptheker, B., The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis (1975). Ashman, C., The People vs. Angela Davis (1972). David, J., ed., Growing Up Black: From the Slave Days to the Present—25 African-Americans Reveal the Trials and Triumphs of Their Childhoods (1968). Dicks, V. I., ‘‘A Rhetorical Analysis of the Forensic and Deliberative Issues and Strategies in the Angela Davis Trial’’ (thesis, 1976). Finke, B. F., Angela Davis: Traitor or Martyr of the Freedom of Expression (1972). Lanker, B., I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America (1989). Major, R., Justice in the Round: The Trial of Angela Davis (1973). Nelson, R., Who is Angela Davis?: The Biography of a Revolutionary (1972). O’Connor, M., ‘‘The Reardon Standards and the Angela Davis Trial’’ (thesis, 1973). Olden, M., Angela Davis (1973). Parker, J. A., Angela Davis: The Making of a Revolutionary (1973). Smith, N. J., From Where I Sat (1973). Smith, J. C., ed., Epic Lives : One Hundred Black Women Who Made a Difference (1993). Smith, R. A., ‘‘The Angela Davis Case and Public Opinion’’ (thesis, 1971). Timothy, M., Jury Woman: The Story of the Trial of Angela Y. Davis, Written by a Member of the Jury (1974). Reference works: African-American Orators : A Bio-Critical Sourcebook (1996). Afro-American Encyclopedia (1974). Bearing Witness: Selections from African-American Autobiography in the Twentieth Century (1991). Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1991). CA 57-60 (1976). CA Online (1999). CANR (1983). Contemporary Black Biography (1994). Encyclopedia of the American Left (1990). Encyclopedia of World Biography: 20th Century Supplement (1987). FC (1990). NBAW (1992). Newsmakers, 1998 Cumulation: The People Behind Today’s Headlines (1999). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Essence (Aug. 1986). Feminist Review (Spring 1989). New Moon (July/Aug. 1995). New Statesman (14 Aug. 1987). New York Magazine (31 Jan. 1993). —EVELYN C. WHITE, UPDATED BY JESSICA REISMAN


DAVIS, Dorothy Salisbury Born 26 April 1916, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of Alfred J. and Margaret Greer Salisbury; married Harry Davis, 1946 Dorothy Salisbury Davis is a writer of mysteries and crime fiction, adept at both novels and short stories. She is known for her interest in the psychological forces behind criminal activity, for her avoidance of violence, and for her sympathetic treatment of her villains as well as her protagonists. Davis was born in 1916 and grew up in Chicago. After graduating in 1938 from Barat College in Lake Forest, Illinois, she took a position as a writer for Swift & Company, later becoming a research librarian and editor at the Merchandiser. Her first novel, The Judas Cat, was published in 1949 by Scribner’s—which remained her publisher throughout her career—and was followed by The Clay Hand in 1950. Her third book, A Gentle Murderer (1951), a suspenseful story of a killer and the priest who tries to find him, is the book that established Davis’ reputation. Unlike many writers in the mystery genre who create central protagonists appearing in novel after novel, Davis has created few recurring characters. Those who come back are featured in just a few books. They include Mrs. Norris, who stars in Death of an Old Sinner (1957), A Gentleman Called (1958), and Old Sinners Never Die (1959); Jasper Tully, who appears with Mrs. Norris in the first two of those stories; and Detective Marks, who is featured in The Pale Betrayer (1965), among others. Her best-known character is probably her most recent, Julie Hayes, the central figure in A Death in the Life (1976), Scarlet Night (1980), Lullaby of Murder (1984), and The Habit of Fear (1987). All of Davis’ protagonists are recognized as much for their eccentric personalities as for their sharp minds. Davis cowrote God Speed the Night with Jerome Ross (1968) and has edited collections of mysteries, including A Choice of Murders (1958) and Crime Without Murder (1970). The latter was inspired by her belief that a good mystery did not have to feature graphic violence (although some of Davis’ books do contain violent elements). Davis has also written several mainstream novels, though they weren’t as popular as her mysteries. Applauded for her talent as a writer of short stories as well as novels, Davis is particularly fond of psychological studies, some of which were included in her Tales for a Stormy Night: Collected Crime Stories (1984). She has contributed to anthologies including Mirror, Mirror, Fatal Mirror, edited by Hans Santesson (1973), When Last Seen, edited by Arthur Maling (1977), and Mistletoe Mysteries, edited by Charlotte MacLeod (1989). She has also had her stories published in periodicals ranging from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine to Modern Maturity. In addition, Davis is a member of the Adams Round Table, a group of mystery writers who gather for monthly dinners and have produced several mystery collection, including Missing in Manhattan (1992) and Justice in Manhattan (1994), to which Davis has contributed.

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Known for her fascination with the workings of the criminal mind and with the circumstances or character flaws that can turn a person to crime, Davis creates a range of well-defined characters who participate in complicated plots and often face religious crises as the plot heads toward its resolution. As noted in Publishers Weekly, ‘‘Two themes have recurred in the Davis mysteries, sometimes as minor counterpoints, sometimes as major elements in the plot: Roman Catholicism and psychotherapy.’’ Another common thread in her books and stories—whether they take place in the U.S. or Europe, are set in big cities or small towns or feature male or female detectives—is the similarity between the villain and the protagonist, with the two often coming to an understanding of one another before the dénouement. Among the books dealing with this ambiguity include Death of an Old Sinner (one of Davis’ best-loved books), The Pale Betrayer, Enemy and Brother (1966), and Where the Dark Streets Go (1969, filmed for CBS as Broken Vows, 1986). A founding director of Sisters in Crime, Davis was president of the Mystery Writers of America (MWA) from 1955-56 and its executive vice president from 1977-78. She won the Grandmaster award for lifetime achievement from MWA in 1989 and has been nominated for seven Edgar awards, four times for her novels and three times for short stories, demonstrating her facility in both forms. OTHER WORKS: A Town of Masks (1952) The Evening of the Good Samaritan (1961) Black Sheep, White Lamb (1963) Men of No Property (1965). Shock Wave (1972) The Little Brothers (1973) BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference Works: CANR 32 (1991). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1991). St. James Guide to Romance & Historical Writers (1990). Other references: NYTBR (28 Sept. 1980). PW (13 June 1980, 23 Oct. 1987, 31 Aug. 1992). —KAREN RAUGUST

DAVIS, Elizabeth Gould Born 1910, Kansas; died 31 July 1974, Sarasota, Florida When Elizabeth Gould Davis’ The First Sex appeared in 1971, it was barely reviewed and apparently ignored by the reading public. Yet three years later it was producing enormous sales in its paperback edition. Highly controversial, it was called everything from the ‘‘nut book of the year’’ to the ‘‘Bible of the Women’s Movement,’’ and has since become one of the essential documents of twentieth-century feminism. Davis attended Randolph-Macon College in Virginia and the University of Kentucky from which she received a master’s in 1951. She went to work as a librarian in Sarasota, Florida, and remained there until the time of her death.

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Davis wrote two other major books, The Female Principle and The Founding Mothers, which were never published. Yet at the time of her death—thanks to The First Sex—she had become something of a celebrity, surrounded by fans and devotees. It was the product of years of work and of commitment to an idea that Davis said she felt compelled to put into writing. She, like many modern feminists, was convinced history, as we know it, is grossly distorted because it has been written by men in a way perpetuating a tradition male view.

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The book challenges ‘‘male history’’ with the assertion that women, not men, were the deities, educators, architects, artists, and civilizers of the world in our most distant and most peaceful past. She supports her thesis with a monumental amount of evidence (although she said the book was drastically cut by her editors) taken from all sorts of scholarly and literary sources including mythology, psychiatry, linguistics, archaeology, and anthropology.

An only daughter in a family of nine children, Mollie (née Mary) Moore Davis grew up in rural Alabama and on a plantation near San Marcos, Texas, which later provided rich material for her poetry and fiction. In 1860 her first poems appeared in the local newspaper, the Tyler (Texas) Reporter. Between 1861 and 1865, her poetry, inspired by the Civil War, was printed in the Reporter and a number of Southern newspapers. During the 1880s, Davis turned increasingly to the writing of fiction for publication in national literary magazines.

The First Sex is heavily influenced by the Mother-centered mythological interpretations of history developed in part by Johann Jacob Bachofen, Robert Graves, and Robert Briffault. Davis postulates women developed and dominated the earliest civilizations and that the Celtic races were able to preserve and pass on some of the values and skills of these matriarchies despite the onslaught of barbarian Germanic tribes and the surge of Christianity. She believes the abuse of woman by the succeeding patriarchies validates her theory of former female dominance— ‘‘a dominance that man felt compelled to stamp out and forget.’’ In Part I of the book, Davis establishes the existence and superiority of the peaceful Golden Age of the matriarchies. She speculates males were eventually able to overthrow them because the women, in selecting the largest and strongest males as mates, contributed to superior physical development in men. It is clear Davis believes female society was destroyed and replaced by something infinitely inferior: ‘‘When man substituted God for the Great Goddess, he at the same time substituted authoritarian for humanistic values.’’ According to Davis, a war is still being waged between the physical superiority of the patriarchal male and the inherent moral and mental superiority of the female. Part II deals in some detail with the patriarchal takeover, especially as it is recorded in mythology and reflected in the continuing hostility between men and women. Part III demonstrates the extent to which remnants of female dominance survived in pre-Christian and Celtic societies. The conclusion treats the ‘‘Tragedy of Western Woman,’’ who has fallen so far from her rightful place. Although The First Sex is neither the most sensible nor the most scientific book to come out of the contemporary women’s movement, it seems destined to be one of the most influential. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Best Sellers (15 Sept. 1971). Ms. (Dec. 1974). NR (22 Oct. 1971). The Social Studies (Nov. 1972). —JUDITH P. JONES

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Born Mary Evelyn Moore, 12 April 1852, Talladage, Alabama; died 1 January 1909, New Orleans, Louisiana Also wrote under: Mrs. M. E. M. Davis, Mollie Evelyn Moore Davis, Mollie E. Moore Daughter of John and Marian Crutchfield Moore; married Thomas E. Davis, 1874

Davis’ more popular poems typify her musical, energetic versification and skillful handling of rhyme. A number of poems after 1869 suggest a shift in her interests from short lyrics to narratives and monologues, such as ‘‘The Golden Rose,’’ ‘‘The Ball (A True Incident),’’ and ‘‘Eleanor to Arthur,’’ which is possibly autobiographical. In War Times at La Rose Blanche (1888), her first book of prose and her best-known work, is a semiautobiographical story sequence, which now, however, appears superficial. Under the Man-Fig (1895), Davis’ first and most fully realized novel, is a Southwestern tale of mystery and romance that reveals her fascination with the past. The intricate plot, characteristic of all her novels, involves a wide spectrum of characters spanning several generations and every social class in a small Texas town. The work is most effective in its deft use of regional dialect, historical detail, and humorous characters. An Elephant’s Track, and Other Stories (1897) serves as a sampler of Davis’ work in short fiction, in which she is technically at her best. This volume contains 15 stories depicting rural Texas folk, Louisiana Creoles, and plantation blacks. Among the more memorable are ‘‘A Bamboula,’’ and ‘‘The Love Stranche,’’ which delve into the mysterious world of voodoo, and ‘‘At La Glorieuse’’ and ‘‘The Soul of Rose Dédé,’’ which treat ghosts as an everyday reality. Davis’ achievement in the stories lies in her subtle handling of regional settings, faithful rendering of rural mores, and vivid delineation of the different socioeconomic levels of Southern society. The Wire Cutters (1899), a novel set primarily in a rural Texas community, is reminiscent of the work of Charles Dickens in its ingenious plot complications and numerous secret identities. This work contains Davis’ most controversial subjects—divorce and physical abuse in marriage—and her most complex characterizations, particularly of women who, though entangled in some stock situations, emerge convincingly as strong individuals. Concerned with the struggle against the fencing in of pasture lands and water sources, The Wire Cutters reflects Davis’s interest in Texas history. Texas history was also the subject of Under Six Flags:


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The Story of Texas (1897), a simple rendering of Texas history with an emphasis on the dramatic human dimensions. An untechnical, well-written book for young readers, it was used previously in Texas schools and reissued in 1953. New Orleans Creole society inspired two of Davis’ major works, The Little Chevalier (1903), a historical novel regarded as her best, and The Price of Silence (1907), her most popular novel. Set in the French Louisiana territory of the mid-18th century, The Little Chevalier is an adventure story of intrigue and love on a grand scale. It realistically depicts the manners and milieu of the early Creoles. The Price of Silence focuses on a Creole family in contemporary New Orleans whose surviving matriarch guards a family secret. Davis effectively portrays the attitudes, activities, and speech of the upper-class French Creoles, but her treatment of the theme of miscegenation is weak in conception and execution. Equally adept at portraying Texas or Louisiana, plantation or city, Davis is exact in locating her work in time, and faithful to contemporary conditions of dress, travel, worship, and entertainment. She has a discerning eye for visual details and paints accurate pictures of background scenes, natural landscapes, and physical appearance of characters, though her tendency is toward the more appealing details. Her skillful use of local flora, in particular the lush flowering plants of the Southwest, creates a convincing verisimilitude, despite her melodramatic plots which overemploy coincidence and improbable turns of events. Her painstaking attention to exteriors does not compensate for her seeming avoidance of much beneath the surface in human beings and personal interactions, and this is perhaps why her work lacks vitality. Yet Davis is an engaging storyteller whose romances and adventures consistently hold the reader’s attention. OTHER WORKS: Minding the Gap and Other Poems (1867). Poems By Mollie E. Moore (1869). Poems by Mollie E. Moore (1872). A Christmas Masque of Saint Roch; Père Dagobert (1896). Throwing the Wanga (1896). The Queen’s Garden (1900). Jaconetta: Her Love (1901). Tulane Songs (1901). The Mistress of Odd Corner (1902). The Yellow Apples (with P. Stapleton, 1902). A Bunch of Roses, and Other Parlor Plays (1903). A Bunch of Roses (1907). Christmas Boxes (1907). A Dress Rehearsal (1907). His Lordship (1907). The New System (1907). Queen Anne Cottages (1907). The Flagship Goes Down: A Broadside Poem (1908). The Moons of Balcanca (1908). Selected Poems by Mollie Moore Davis (1927). The Ships of Desire (1955). Ode to Texas: Written for the Occasion of the Ladies’ Bazaar for the Benefit of San Jacinto Battle Ground (n.d.). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Anderson, J. Q., ‘‘Notes on Mary Moore Davis,’’ in LaS (Summer 1962). Davidson, J. W., The Living Writers of the South (1896). Wilkenson, C., ‘‘The Broadening Stream: The Life and Literary Career of Mary E. Moore Davis’’ (dissertation, 1947). Reference works: DAB (1909). The Library of Southern Literature (1909). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: Texas Monthly (April 1930). —THADIOUS M. DAVIS

DAVIS, Natalie Zemon Born 8 November 1928, Detroit, Michigan Daughter of Julian L. and Helen Lamport Zemon; married Chandler Davis, 1948; children: Aaron, Hannah, Simone Long admired for bringing the lives of obscure people to life, Natalie Zemon Davis is a historian with an international reputation. Her books are published in multiple languages, and The Return of Martin Guerre (1983) had more than 78,000 copies in print at the end of the 1990s, and she served as historical consultant for the film version of Le retour de Martin Guerre. The recipient of many awards and fellowships, including 20 honorary degrees, Davis served as president of the American Historical Association in 1987. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the British Academy. In July 1996, Davis took early retirement from Princeton and moved to Toronto, where her husband lives and where she is a research associate in the Comparative Literature Department at the University of Toronto. Of Polish Jewish and Russian Jewish ancestry, Davis was influenced by growing up a Jew in a neighborhood where only two Jewish families had homes. In an interview with Roger Adelson, Davis recalled, ‘‘The ability to identify anti-Semitism became a part of my life without anyone sitting down and giving me a lesson in it.’’ Davis’ father was a successful businessman in the Detroit textile industry. He was also an amateur playwright and an avid reader and writer. Davis’ mother was a homemaker and businesswoman. Davis attended elementary school at the Hampton School in Detroit. She then went to Kingswood, a private girls’ school in suburban Detroit. Davis quickly learned what it meant to have outsider status, because she was one of only two Jewish girls in her class. She turned her attention to her studies. She received outstanding grades and developed leadership skills, serving as president of the student council. And most important she learned that she loved history, ‘‘especially the Enlightenment and the American Revolution.’’ Davis attended Smith College and continued to not only take her intellectual pursuits seriously but her student activism as well. She applied questions raised by her political work to her honors program in history. She received her bachelor’s degree in 1949, a year after she eloped with Chandler Davis, a graduate student in mathematics at Harvard University. Davis and her husband Chandler remained committed to and active in political work. They protested the Korean War and the work of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Davis continued her education at Radcliffe and completed a master’s degree in 1950. She found her intellectual interests turning more toward the history not of elites but of merchants, artisans, laborers, and peasants. Without neglecting her political work, she pursued a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, completing the dissertation in 1959. Her first academic appointment at Brown University coincided with her husband’s six-month term in Danbury Prison for charges brought against him by the House

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Un-American Activities Committee. Chandler Davis was blacklisted in U.S. universities after serving his term, and consequently both Davises took jobs at the University of Toronto, he in 1962 and she in 1963. Natalie went on to teach at the University of California at Berkeley and at Princeton University, where she was named Henry Charles Lea Professor of History in 1978. Arthur Quinn in the New York Times Book Review noted, ‘‘Ms. Davis’ published work is. . .modest. She abstains from the big book, the grand synthesis, on which academic historians usually make their reputations. She prefers instead to produce exquisite miniatures whose scale reflects the lives she seeks to represent.’’ Over the course of her career, Davis has helped to transform our understanding of both the common people and the elite. She argues that ‘‘lower- and upper-class worlds were reacting and reflecting on each other and even sometimes sharing rules and readers.’’ While Davis’ early work focused on class dimensions in early modern Europe, particularly in France, she went on to explore both literary and anthropological materials and approaches. She tries to exemplify in her work what she calls a multidimensional view of society. This approach is well represented in Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (1995). Davis uses diaries, letters, and a rich array of supporting documents to illuminate the very different lives of three women. Glikl bas Judah Leib is a Jewish businesswoman in Hamburg, Germany; Marie de L’Incarnation is an ascetic nun and missionary among the Huron Native Americans; and Maria Sibylla Merian joined a radical Protestant sect and illustrates texts on insects. This book brings together Davis’ reverence for history as narrative and, as Lorna Sage noted in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, ‘‘its patient and imaginative narrative.’’ As a triptych of 17th-century women, Davis presents a multilayered history where her three subjects come alive. The women’s lives may have indeed been lived on the margin, but their history is far from marginal. Like her other books, Women on the Margins will be translated into several languages, including Italian, German, and Finnish. Davis has received tremendous scholarly acclaim, yet her focus remains on the common people, both in history and contemporary society. She contends, ‘‘I think that people simply want to know more about the common people of the past.’’ With incisive analysis and challenging scholarship, Davis brings the pleasures of reading history to new readers.

OTHER WORKS: Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (1975). Frauen und Gesellschaft am Beginn der Neuzeit (1986). Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth Century France (1987).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works:American Women Historians, 1700s-1990s: A Biographical Dictionary (1996). CA (1997). —CELESTE DEROCHE

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DAVIS, Paulina (Kellogg) Wright Born 7 August 1813, Bloomfield, New York; died 24 August 1876, Providence, Rhode Island Daughter of Captain Ebenezer and Polly Saxton Kellogg; married Francis Wright, 1833 (died 1845); Thomas Davis, 1849 Paulina Wright Davis spent her early childhood in the opening territories of western New York state. When her parents died, before she was seven, Davis was sent to LeRoy, New York, to live with her aunt who reared her in orthodox Presbyterianism and encouraged her to become a missionary. Instead, Davis married Francis Wright, a Utica, New York, merchant, and with him began her life’s work of activism on behalf of the causes of antislavery, temperance, and women’s rights. The rights of married women and health reform were particular interests of hers. After Wright’s death in 1845, Davis supported herself by lecturing about health and physiology, illustrating her talks with a female anatomical model that shocked many of her audience (and inspired others). In 1849 Davis married Thomas Davis, a Providence, Rhode Island, jewelry manufacturer and member of the Rhode Island legislature. A beautiful and charming woman, Davis was admired by the Providence community, although her ideas were more radical than her neighbors’. Davis helped organize and presided at the first National Woman’s Rights Convention in Worcester, October 1850, and at many later conventions she was similarly involved. In February 1853 she began to publish, almost entirely at her own expense, the monthly woman’s magazine, the Una, ‘‘A Paper Devoted to the Elevation of Woman,’’ as an alternative to the current popular magazines, commenting: ‘‘Women have been too well, and too long, satisfied with Ladies’ Books, Ladies’ Magazines and Miscellanies; it is time they should have stronger nourishment.’’ For two years, with the help of a sister, Davis undertook the full responsibility for the publication; when this became too burdensome, she planned to discontinue the journal but was enabled to carry on an additional nine months through the editorial assistance of Caroline Dall, a regular contributor. Issues which elicited Davis’ editorial comments were equal pay for equal work, the need for equality within marriage, the opening of professions to women, and the need for respect and equal treatment of women in all phases of life. These were ideals shared by all feminists of the period, and Davis gave them intelligent and forceful expression: ‘‘Women have to exchange the noblest rights of their humanity for the paltry privileges and fulsome flatteries which they. . .receive. . . .Why need women be cramped, crippled and crushed into idiocy to make them lovely and beloved?’’ After the demise of the Una, Davis, suffering increasingly from rheumatic gout, traveled in Europe, studied painting, and continued to work for women’s rights. In 1868 she helped found the New England Woman Suffrage Association, and served as president of the Rhode Island suffrage association until 1869. She supported Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony when


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the national suffrage association split, contributing lively articles to their short-lived journal, The Revolution. Davis died at sixty-three. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the chief speaker at a memorial service held for a large group of friends at Davis’s home. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Frankel, N., and N. S. Dye, eds., Gender, Class, Race, and reform in the Progressive Era (1991). Hanaford, P., Daughter of America (1882). Harper, I. H., The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (1898). Lutz, A., Created Equal: A Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1940). Lutz, A., Susan B. Anthony (1959). O’Connor, L., Pioneer Women Orators (1954). Riegel, R. E., American Feminists (1963). Stanton, E. C., et al., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. I (1881). Wyman, L. B. C. and A. C. Wyman, Elizabeth Buffum Chace, 1806-1899 (1914). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Phrenological Journal (July 1853). NEQ (Oct., 1930). —KAREN F. STEIN

DAVIS, Rebecca Harding Born 24 June 1831, Washington, Pennsylvania; died 29 September 1910, Mt. Kisco, New York Daughter of Richard and Rachel Leet Harding; married Lemuel C. Davis, 1863 Rebecca Harding Davis’s major work ‘‘Life in the Iron Mills’’ was published in the April 1861 Atlantic Monthly. ‘‘Life in the Iron Mills’’ depicts the hardships of Hugh Wolfe, a sensitive artist fated to a life of deprivation, harshness, and futility as a furnace tender in a Virginia mill. Although occasionally veering toward emotionalism, in spite of Davis’ conscious effort to write objectively, the novella has a gripping quality that earned it an enthusiastic reception. Grimly naturalistic, ‘‘Life in the Iron Mills’’ is a landmark in the history of American literature. Also noteworthy are ‘‘John LaMar’’ and ‘‘David Gaunt,’’ the country’s first realistic accounts of the horrors of the Civil War, published in 1862 in the Atlantic Monthly. In them Davis expressed her reaction to the ‘‘filthy spewings’’ of the war. Sadly, Davis did not live up to her promise. Her career had begun with the publication in little magazines of a few book reviews, verses, and stories of ‘‘dark conspiracies’’ and ‘‘stately romances.’’ She continued to write in the prevailing sentimental and melodramatic modes. Davis wrote essays for the New York Tribune, the North American Review, and Harper’s Bazaar, numerous children’s stories, historical essays for the Youth’s Companion, and gothic thrillers for Peterson’s. Of her longer works, the most significant is Waiting for the Verdict (1868), a melodramatic study of the problems that befall a prominent Philadelphia surgeon when he reveals he is part black.

Awkward rendition of the black dialect and unconvincing characterization brought uncomplimentary reviews. Davis, undeterred by the criticism, brought out another novel the same year—Dallas Galbraith. In Davis’ middle years, her views became exceedingly conservative. In Pro Aris et Focis (1870), for example, she declared that a woman’s ordained role is motherhood, and only the woman with ‘‘no chance of rest in a husband’s house’’ should enter the professions. In her lifetime Davis was best known for her journalistic observations. She was never again to achieve the artistry of ‘‘Life in the Iron Mills.’’ Today, few of her works have survived, and her career is of interest only within the context of American literary history. OTHER WORKS: Margaret Howth (1862). Berrytown (1872). John Andross (1874). Kitty’s Choice (1874). A Law Unto Herself (1878). Natasqua (1886). Kent Hampden (1892). Silhouettes of American Life (1892). Dr. Warrick’s Daughters (1896). Frances Waldeaux (1897). Bits of Gossip (1904). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Langford, G., The Richard Harding Davis Years: A Biography of Mother and Son (1961). Quinn, A. H., American Fiction (1936). Sheaffer, H. W., ‘‘Rebecca Harding Davis, Pioneer Realist’’ (dissertation, 1947). Wann, L., The Rise of Realism (1942). Wyman, M., ‘‘Women in the American Realistic Novel’’ (dissertation, 1950). Reference works: American Authors 1600-1900 (1938). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Legacy (Fall 1990). NYT (30 Sept. 1910). —DOROTHY KISH

DAWIDOWICZ, Lucy S. Born 16 June 1915, New York, New York; died 5 December 1990, New York, New York Daughter of Max and Dora Ofnaem Schildkret; married Szymon M. Dawidowicz, 1948 In her lifetime, Lucy S. Dawidowicz was widely regarded as one of the foremost historians of the Holocaust and of Eastern European Jewish life. Her profound identification with her subject and groundbreaking research, marked by her distinctive use of the Yiddish language and traditional Jewish sources, continue to shape the course of Holocaust and Jewish scholarship today. She was born Lucy Schildkret in New York City in 1915 to Polish Jewish immigrants who had emigrated from Poland in 1908. After graduating with a B.A. from Hunter College in 1936, she took up a postgraduate fellowship at the Jewish Scientific Institute (YIVO) in Vilna, Poland, in August of 1938, where she studied the Yiddish language and Jewish history. ‘‘One of the last people to see Vilna before its destruction in the fires of the

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Holocaust,’’ as she later wrote, she was finally forced to flee one week before Nazi Germany invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. After returning to the U.S. in 1939, Dawidowicz became assistant to the research director of YIVO in New York in 1940. In 1946 she went to postwar Germany to serve as an education officer in displaced persons’ camps for the American Joint Distribution Committee. She also worked to recover the remnants of YIVO’s library. Decades later she wrote a memoir of her prewar year in Vilna and of her postwar return to Europe. Entitled From That Time and Place: A Memoir, 1938-1947 (1989, reprinted 1991), the memoir was awarded the National Jewish Book Award. In 1948 she assumed a lecturing post at Yeshiva University in Manhattan and married Szymon Dawidowicz. Three years later, in 1951, she received her M.A. from Columbia University. Together with L. J. Goldstein she published Politics in a Pluralist Democracy: Studies of Voting in the 1960 Election (1963, revised 1974). Her anthology, The Golden Tradition: Jewish Life and Thought in Eastern Europe, chronicles the evolution of Jewish culture and religion from the end of the 18th century up to the Holocaust through the memoirs of Jewish spiritual and intellectual leaders. Published in 1967 (reprinted 1972), The Golden Tradition marked the beginning of Dawidowicz’s singular scholarly pursuit of Jewish themes. In 1969 she became professor of social history at Yeshiva University. Between 1970 and 1975 she held the Paul and Lea Lewis Chair in Holocaust studies and, beginning in 1976, the Eli and Diana Zbrowski Chair in Interdisciplinary Holocaust Studies, both at Yeshiva University. Dawidowicz published her most celebrated work, The War Against the Jews, 1933-45 in 1975 (reissued 1990). This book, her masterpiece, surpassed previous research conducted on the Holocaust through its use of a wide range of source materials in Yiddish and other languages to support her groundbreaking, critical theses. She challenged a number of prevailing scholarly conceptions of the Holocaust, most significantly those claims holding the Jews responsible for too little resistance against and too much collaboration with the Nazis. In addition, she countered the assertion that Nazi antisemitism had no roots in European history, and pioneered the thesis that Hitler’s antisemitism was, indeed, part of his deepest aims, dating back to Germany’s surrender in World War I. She maintained the Final Solution was central to Nazi ideology and war aims, as crucial as the conquering of Europe. This argument ran counter to other scholarly assertions that the Final Solution began in 1941 as an evolving response to particular events and circumstances. The War Against the Jews was awarded the Anisfield-Wolf Prize in 1976; the same year, Dawidowicz received a Guggenheim Fellowship. With the publication of A Holocaust Reader in 1976, Dawidowicz presented many of the little known public and private sources employed in The War Against the Jews. This collection proved to be a wealth of resources for later researchers. She also published countless articles, especially in the Jewish intellectual magazine Commentary, on subjects of historical and topical interest, including the sociology of American Jewry. In 1977 she published a widely praised collection of her articles in

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The Jewish Presence: Essays on Identity and History. In The Holocaust and the Historians, published in 1981, she refuted revisionist theories of the Holocaust. From That Time and Place was her last published book. At the time of her death, she was working on a history of American Jewry. Her last article, in Commentary (February 1990), was a critique of Arthur Hertzberg’s book on the same subject. Dawidowicz’s entire career was devoted to chronicling the history, influences, and ideas of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe and wherever that culture was transplanted. Her theme was consistently that of Eastern European Jewish culture attempting to reconcile the conflict of modernity and traditionalism. She claimed that whenever Jews compromised traditional values for modernity, whether in Europe or in the U.S., they confused and weakened their identity. Yiddish culture was the only solution to the conflict, but its leaders and practitioners were totally annihilated by Hitler. Because her historical view sees sacrifice of traditionalism as self-defeating to Jewish survival, her position on women is that tradition should prevail, and ‘‘in Judaism, women are assigned to primacy in the home, not in shul.’’ Her own life, however, exemplified the fruits born of women’s prominence in the world of scholarship. Dawidowicz died of cancer at the age of seventy-five. OTHER WORKS: The 1966 Elections: A Political Patchwork (1967). For Max Weinreich on His Seventieth Birthday: Studies in Jewish Language, Literature and Society (edited by Davidowicz, with J. A. Fishman et al., 1964). What is the Use of Jewish History? (1980, 1992). Babi Yar’s Legacy (1981). On Equal Terms: Jews in America, 1881-1981 (1982). American Jews and the Holocaust (1982). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Altshuler, D. A., Hitler’s War Against the Jews: A Young Reader’s Version of ‘‘The War Against the Jews, 19331945,’’ by Lucy S. Dawidowicz (1978). Reference works: CA (1977). Other references: Commentary (Feb. 1990, May 1992). Jewish Quarterly (Spring 1968). Lilith (Fall 1977). NYTBR (26 Nov. 1967). —SHANA PENN

DAY, Dorothy Born 8 November 1897, Bath Beach, New York; died 29 November 1980, New York, New York Daughter of John and Grace Satterlee Day; married (commonlaw) Forster Battingham; children: Tamar As an eight-year-old, Dorothy Day first experienced that ‘‘sweetness of faith’’ in a Methodist Sunday school which later caused her to become a devout Roman Catholic. After the San Francisco earthquake, which destroyed the newspaper plant for which Day’s father worked, the family moved to Chicago, where


Day spent her girlhood years. In 1914 she went to the University of Illinois at Urbana. During her high school years, Day became affected by the plight of the underprivileged and read the stories of Eugene Debs, of the Haymarket anarchists, of Kropotkin, and of the Russian revolutionists. Feeling she had received a call, Day directed her life toward practical means of improving conditions among the poor. During her two years at college she began writing for a local newspaper, joined the Socialist club, and in general pursued her own way. At age eighteen, Day began a serious journalistic career as a reporter for the Socialist New York Call. She joined with others in 1917 in Madison Square Garden to celebrate the Russian Revolution, traveled to Washington with Columbia University students to protest Woodrow Wilson’s draft of young men into the armed services, and then went to work for Max Eastman’s revolutionary publication, The Masses. After the suppression of The Masses by the government, Day went to Washington with a group of militant suffragists, who were arrested and sentenced to 30 days in prison. This was the first of a number of imprisonments which Day underwent throughout the years for her activism in the causes of peace and justice. During 1918 Day came to know the Provincetown Players and talked long hours with Eugene O’Neill about religion and death as they walked the streets or ‘‘sat out the nights in taverns, in waterfront back rooms.’’ With $5,000 for the movie-rights to her novel The Eleventh Virgin (1924), Day bought a small bungalow on Raritan Bay, Staten Island. There she had a daughter by her common-law husband, Forster Battingham, an anarchist, who parted with her when she later had the child baptized in the Catholic Church. In From Union Square to Rome (1938) she tells the story of her conversion, and in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness (1952), of her struggle against Catholic priests whose vision did not extend beyond their parish. Like many other writers in the 1920s, Day spent some fruitless months on a screenwriting assignment in Hollywood, thereafter going with her daughter, Tamar, to Mexico City, where she supported herself by writing articles about the life of the people for Commonweal. Back in New York, she met Peter Maurin, whose ideas dominated the rest of her life. He encouraged her to start a paper for the workingman, extolling ‘‘personalist action’’ and using love as a means of changing institutions to enable each individual to lead a full life. In Union Square on 1 May 1933, a day of massive celebration of Russian and worldwide communism, Day heroically hawked the first issue of the Catholic Worker, a four-page tabloid-sized paper, which urged social Christian action in place of the Marxist communism of the Daily Worker. For almost half a century, she continued to publish every month this liberal voice of the Catholic Church. Among the many charitable farms and houses of refuge for the poor and homeless which she helped found are the Maryfarm Retreat House, Newburgh, New York; St. Joseph’s House of

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Hospitality, New York City; Peter Maurin Farm, Pleasant Plains, Staten Island; Maryfarm, Easton, Pennsylvania; Chrystie Street House, New York City; and the Tivoli Farm Retreat on the Hudson. The Catholic Worker offices on Mott Street have also served as soup kitchen for the hungry. This tough-minded but gentle-hearted woman, who seemed a saint to wanderers lacking food and shelter, has been the inspiration for numerous Worker Groups, where friendship as well as food is shared. OTHER WORKS: House of Hospitality (1939). On Pilgrimage (1948). I Remember Peter Maurin (1958). Thérèse (1960). Loaves and Fishes (1963). On Pilgrimage: The Sixties (1972).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Avitabile, A., ‘‘A Bibliography on Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day, and the Catholic Worker’’ (available from A.A., Fordham University). Coles, R., A Spectacle Unto the World: The Catholic Worker Movement (1973). Ellsberg, R., ed., By Little and by Little: Selected Writings of Dorothy Day (1983). Hennacy, A., Autobiography of a Catholic Anarchist (1945). Hennacy, A., The Book of Ammon (1970). Klejment, A. and A., Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker: A Bibliography and Index (1986). Maurin, P., Catholic Radicalism: Phrased Essays for the Green Revolution (1949). Miller, W. D., A Harsh and Dreadful Love: Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement (1973). Miller, W. D., Dorothy Day: A Biography (1982). O’Brien, D. J., American Catholics and Social Reform: the New Deal Years (1968). Roberts, N., Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker (1984). Sheehan, A., Peter Maurin: Gay Believer (1959). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Catholic Worker (1933 to present). NY (4 Oct. 1952, 11 Oct. 1952). NYRB (28 Jan. 1971). —WINIFRED FRAZER

DE ANGELI, Marguerite Lofft Born 14 March 1889, Lapeer, Michigan; died June 1987 Daughter of S. C. and Ruby Tuttle Lofft; married John de Angeli, 1910 Marguerite Lofft de Angeli perfected her contralto voice and planned for a musical career, but her inclination to draw was stronger. After 15 years of illustrating for magazines such as Country Gentleman and books such as Elizabeth Vining’s Peggy MacIntosh, her editor, Helen Ferris, encouraged her to write the text of a book and illustrate it herself. She created a series of short picture books for six-year-olds based on family situations, which were also the inspiration for later stories, but expanded into chapter-length episodes. De Angeli recreated her father’s childhood in Lapeer, Michigan, in Copper-Toed Boots (1938). Fiddlestrings (1974) is a fictionalized biography of her husband.

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Jeffrey, de Angeli’s six-year-old grandson, was the model for Just Like David (1951). Butter at the Old Price (1971) is her autobiography, written in her eighties. In addition to family stories, her subjects have been ethnic, traditional, and historical. She pioneered in introducing immigrant groups in Pennsylvania to children through literature. Two books—Henner’s Lydia (1936) and Yonnie Wondernose (1944)— are about Amish children on Pennsylvania Dutch farms. De Angeli captured the quaintness of the language in her dialogue. The pioneer days of William Penn and the Pennsylvania woods was the background for Skippack School, Being the Story of Eli Shrawder and of One Christopher Dock, Schoolmaster about the Year 1750 (1939). She illustrated a book of prayers and graces and then selected 50 songs for Marguerite de Angeli’s Book of Favorite Hymns (1963). She excerpted from the King James version of the Bible and illustrated The Old Testament (1960). She also wove Bible verses into her books. Bright April (1946) ends with ‘‘Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’’ Skippack School concludes with, ‘‘The word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.’’ De Angeli’s most ambitious work is Marguerite de Angeli’s Book of Nursery and Mother Goose Rhymes (1954). She selected 376 rhymes for which she did 260 illustrations. After World War II, de Angeli traveled to England and sketched churches, castles, inns, and scenery for two months. She specialized in the 13th century under the rule of Edward III. De Angeli’s strength is in the setting of her stories and character development. She researched each book to recreate the time and place correctly. Her carefully drawn characters are developed with insight, and they inevitably mature through the story. The Newbery award was given to her in 1966 for The Door in the Wall (1949), while Black Fox of Lorne (1956) was later an honor book. Yonnie Wondernose and her Book of Nursery and Mother Goose Rhymes were Caldecott honor books. She was the first recipient in 1963 of the Drexel award for children’s literature given by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1968 she was awarded the Regina Medal by the Catholic Library Association for a ‘‘lifetime of devotion to literature for children.’’ OTHER WORKS: Ted and Nina Go to the Grocery Store (1935). Ted and Nina Have a Happy Rainy Day (1936). Petite Suzanne (1937). A Summer Day with Ted and Nina (1940). Thee, Hannah! (1940). Elin’s Amerika (1941). Up the Hill (1942). Turkey for Christmas (1944). Jared’s Island (1947). A Pocket Full of Posies (1961). The Ted and Nina Storybook (1965). The Empty Barn (with A. de Angeli, 1966). The Old Testament (1967). The Door in the Wall: A Play (1969). The Lion in the Box (1975). Whistle for the Crossing (1977). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hoffman, M., and E. Samuels, Authors and Illustrators of Children’s Books (1972). Hopkins, L., More Books by More People (1974). Miller, B., Illustrators of Children’s

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Books (1947). Miller, B., and E. Field, eds., Newbery Medal Books: 1922-1955 (1955). Reference works: Junior Book of Authors (1951). SATA (1971). Other references: Children’ Literature Review (1976). —KAREN NELSON HOYLE

DE BURGOS, Julia Born 17 February 1914, Carolina, Puerto Rico; died 6 July 1953, New York, New York Daughter of Paula Garcia de Burgos and Francisco B. Hans; married Rubén R. Beauchamp, 1934 (divorced); Armando Marín, circa 1943 Julia de Burgos revealed herself in her poetry and her life as a woman ahead of her times. In both, she challenged the social conventions that ruled over the Puerto Rican women of her epoch. Her humble origins in the rural barrio of Santa Cruz in Carolina, Puerto Rico, where she grew up as the eldest of a large family, gave her the strong unity with nature appearing constantly in her poetry. When her family moved to Rio Piedras in 1928, de Burgos enrolled at the University of Puerto Rico High School where her studiousness won her recognition. In 1931 she entered the University of Puerto Rico, earning a teaching certificate in 1933. Financial difficulties prevented her from continuing her studies. In 1934, the year of her first marriage, she started working for the Puerto Rico Economic Reconstruction Administration in a daycare center. The following year (1935), she taught in another rural area in Naranjito and took courses during the summer at the university. Although poets like Luis Palés Matos, Evaristo Ribera Chevremont, and Luis Llorens Torres would influence her work, it was the revolutionary patriotism of the president of the Nationalist party, Pedro Albizu Campos, that inspired her early poems which called for social and political reform. Her first collection, Poemas exactos a mí misma (Exact Poems to Myself), was published in 1937 in a private edition. Apparently dissatisfied with this work, she tried to suppress it. Poema en veinte surcos (Poem in Twenty Furrows), containing her famous poem ‘‘Río Grande de Loíza,’’ appeared in 1938. The river of her childhood is a powerful image throughout her work; it is in the river that the poet seems to search for her essence. Her recurrent themes of the eternal search for her true self, love, social reform, and art as a means of liberation first appear in this collection. Canción de la verdad sencilia (Song of the Simple Truth, 1939), which received an award from the Institute of Puerto Rican Literature, presents love as its central theme. The river is present in various poems, now also as a rival of her lover. In ‘‘Confesión del Sí y del No’’ de Burgos repeats her resistance to the imposition of social values, earlier seen in ‘‘Á Julia de Burgos.’’ In an attempt


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to free herself from social constraint, in 1940 de Burgos moved first to New York and then to Cuba with the man who had inspired her love poems. In Havana she met the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, the writer who most deeply influenced her work. In 1942, a love disillusionment that marked her for the rest of her life occasioned her return to New York. While living there, she actively collaborated in the publication of Pueblos Hispánicos, founded and directed by the Puerto Rican poet Juan Antonio Correjer. Although she continued to write, in her last years alcoholism weakened both her spirit and health. She spent most of this time in various hospitals. Collapsing on a Harlem street in 1953, she died, and her body was taken to Puerto Rico for burial near the river she had made famous. A posthumous volume El mar y tú, y otros poemas (1954) pays tribute again to her one great love and reflects her disillusionment and final disintegration. The sea, symbol of the infinite and witness of the cosmic union of the lovers, becomes the deathbed that called her. A compilation of her works, Obra Poética, appeared in 1961. Critics have seen influences of modernism in de Burgos’s work. José Emilio González, pointing out imperfections in her poetry, contrasts her lack of interest in the discussion of aesthetics with her deep concern with social problems. The importance she placed on truth and justice, and her understanding of poetry as an instrument for social and political change, gave priority to the message rather than to the form. The result was the revelation of the essence of the poet herself, making her poetry so strikingly unique. OTHER WORKS: A Rose Made of Water: Ten Selected Poems of Julia de Burgos; Translated by Rafael Ramos Albelo, from the Original Spanish (1994). Roses in the Mirror (1992). Song of the Simple Truth: Obra Completa Poetica (The Complete Poems) (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: A Dream of Light & Shadow: Portraits of Latin American Women Writers (1995). Cabrera, F. M., Historia de la Literatura Puertoriquena (1971). González, Jose E., La Poesía Contemporánea de Puerto Rico, 1930-1960 (1972). Jiménez de Baez, L., Julia de Burgos: Vida y Poesía (1966). Julia de Burgos, 1914-1953 (1986). Price, J., ‘‘Faces of Rebellion: Critical Commentary and Translation of the Poetry of Julia de Burgos, Rosario Castellanos, Clementina Suarez’’ (thesis, 1981). Reference works: Inventing a Word: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Puerto Rican Poetry (1980). NAW (1980). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Puerto Rican Authors: A Biobibliographic Handbook (1974). Spanish American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Source Book (1990). Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology (1996). Other references: La Torre (Sept.-Dec. 1965). Sin Nombre (Oct.-Dec. 1976). —AMIRIS PEREZ-GUNTIN

DE CLEYRE, Voltairine Born 17 November 1866, Leslie, Michigan; died 6 June 1912, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of Auguste and Eliza de Cleyre As a young woman, Voltairine de Cleyre began to earn fees as a free-thought lecturer in Philadelphia, where she taught foreign languages and conducted classes in English for workers. The Haymarket bombing trial of 1887 had converted de Cleyre to anarchism: she, like many others, was radicalized by the martyrdom of innocent workers, whose fate showed her the flaws in American law and trial by jury. Despite physical weakness, de Cleyre gained a reputation as a lecturer and writer on such subjects as ‘‘Anarchism and the American Tradition,’’ ‘‘Crime and Punishment,’’ ‘‘Thomas Paine,’’ ‘‘In Defense of Emma Goldman,’’ and ‘‘Modern Educational Reform.’’ She urged greater freedom for the individual, and in one tract entitled ‘‘Sex Slavery,’’ she called every married woman ‘‘a bonded slave, who takes her master’s name, her master’s bread, her master’s commands, and serves her master’s passion; who passes through the ordeal of pregnancy and the throes of travail at his dictation—not at her desire; who can control no property, not even her own body, without his consent.’’ At other times, de Cleyre blasted the church, which ‘‘from its birth has taught the inferiority of women,’’ and the state, which holds women in unpropertied thralldom. Sounding a modern note on education, she condemned Mrs. Grundy for demanding women must cover their ‘‘obscene’’ bodies with long ‘‘prison’’ skirts and high necks, and for decreeing little girls must not climb trees or swim (activities inappropriate to their subservient role). Her articles and poetry appeared in such magazines as Open Court, Twentieth Century, Boston Investigator, Chicago Liberal, Liberty, Magazine of Poetry, Free Society, Mother Earth, and the Independent. She translated from the French Jean Grave’s ‘‘Moribund Society and Anarchy’’ and Louise Michel’s work on the Paris Commune. In Mother Earth appeared her translations from the Yiddish of Libin and Peretz. Some 30 of de Cleyre’s poems and a dozen short stories and sketches are included in Selected Works (1913), along with a biographical sketch by Hippolyte Havel, an old anarchist companion of Emma Goldman and a barroom friend of Eugene O’Neill. Leonard D. Abbott highly praised de Cleyre’s life and her writing, calling her ‘‘a priestess of Pity and Vengeance.’’ De Cleyre’s words were often high-flown, but never empty: ‘‘Liberty! Out of the dungeon, out of the sorrow, out of the sacrifice, out of the pain grew this child of the heart; and pure and strong she grew until the sabled plumes have tottered on the despot’s brow.’’ De Cleyre illustrated liberty in her own life and fought for it on behalf of the world’s imprisoned. When she died, she was buried in Chicago’s Waldheim Cemetery beside the Haymarket martyrs.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY: Drinnon, R., Rebel in Paradise (1961). MacDonald, G. E., Fifty Years of Freethought (1931). Symes, L., and T. Clement, Rebel America (1934). —WINIFRED FRAZER

Mille’s historical research was meticulous, as it was for her earlier, illustrated Book of the Dance (1963). After a careful exploration of the scene of Lizzie Borden’s crime, de Mille conducts the reader through her own transformation of historical fact into dance-drama. Accidents, personality clashes, and economic obstacles make of the creative process itself a taut, suspenseful narrative. In her Russian Journals (1970), de Mille recalls the stunned appreciation of Soviet audiences for this ballet when it was performed by American Ballet Theater on its USSR tour.

Born 1905, New York, New York; died October 1993 Daughter of William C. and Anna George de Mille; married Walter Prude, 1943

Speak to Me, Dance With Me (1973) goes back in time to de Mille’s 1933-34 stay in London, which had been telescoped into three chapters in Dance to the Piper. The text consists of lively letters she wrote to her mother, interspersed with a running commentary on affairs about which she could not write home.

DE MILLE, Agnes

Agnes de Mille’s mother was the daughter of political economist Henry George. Her father was a successful playwright, but after an unexpected flop on Broadway he went West to join his younger brother, Cecil B. de Mille, and became a movie director. De Mille’s first book, Dance to the Piper (1951), begins with her family’s move from New York City to Hollywood in 1914, covers her difficult years of struggle to become a dancer and to launch a career, and culminates with her first two solid choreographic successes, Rodeo (1942) and Oklahoma! (1943). The book ranges from child’s-eye sketches of personalities who frequented the de Mille household, such as Geraldine Farrar, Ruth St. Denis, Elinor Glyn, and Charlie Chaplin, to more detailed portraits of those who affected de Mille’s dance career—Martha Graham, Argentina, Marie Rambert, Antony Tudor, Lucia Chase. Enthusiasm and honesty are the keynotes of de Mille’s literary style. Her greatest enthusiasm is for other accomplished artists, and her most brutal honesty concerns her own limitations. At fifteen, she says, ‘‘I considered my body a shame, a trap and a betrayal. But I could break it. I was a dancer.’’ She is absolutely forthright in her advice on careers in dance, with constructive suggestions for dance teachers and critics, in To A Young Dancer (1962). In several of her books, she discusses how the development of professional dance, like the development of female consciousness, has been retarded by social, religious, and economic restraints. The balancing of de Mille’s own emotional and professional life in an especially turbulent period, 1942-45, is the basis of her second book, And Promenade Home (1956). She describes her whirlwind courtship, marriage to Lt. Walter F. Prude, and their subsequent two-year wartime separation, in counterpoint to her choreographic work on Oklahoma!, One Touch of Venus, TallyHo, Bloomer Girl, and Carousel. The nightmarish process of getting a Broadway show opened is reported by means of humorous anecdotes, fond portraits of collaborators, and some unabashed diatribes. Lizzie Borden: A Dance of Death (1968) is a book-length study of the creation of her 1948 folk ballet, Fall River Legend. De

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In Where the Wings Grow (1978), de Mille covers the earliest period in her life, before she had any serious thought of becoming a dancer. In this childhood memoir of summers at Merriewold, in Sullivan County, New York, de Mille evokes a turn-of-thecentury way of life innocent of indoor plumbing and refrigeration, with home remedies, Irish Catholic house servants, lemonade and embroidery on the verandah, and ladies—like her mother—who prided themselves on their sheltered, genteel public image, even though it masked a great deal of anguished drudgery. She also writes of Sho-Foo-Den, the exotic Japanese mansion at Merriewold, and the story of its inhabitants, the Takamine family, first glimpsed through the child’s eyes, later understood on an adult level. This latest book is a landmark in de Mille’s literary career, because its lyricism and passion and the interest it sustains depend not at all upon the author’s reputation as a dancer/choreographer. In 1973, de Mille, who was an authority on Anglo-American folklore, founded the Agnes de Mille Heritage Dance Theater for the purpose of giving theatrical life to American folk-dance forms. She also received numerous professional awards and honorary degrees. Long recognized for her energetic contributions to American dance theater, de Mille was respected as a serious and prolific writer as well. Nearly half of her books were autobiographical; the others, like most of her magazine articles and speaking engagements, deal more specifically with dance as an artistic and social form of expression. De Mille was much in demand as a speaker, known for her engaging zeal and wit, and remained active until her death in 1993. OTHER WORKS: American Ballet Theatre, 35th Anniversary Gala (with L. Chase, 1975). Dance to the Piper & Promenade Home: A Two-Part Autobiography (1980). Reprieve: A Memoir (1981). Scrapbook (clippings, 1987, 1993). Agnes de Mille [Speech on the Arts in America] (video, 1987). Agnes de Mille Talks About Martha Graham, Women and Fashion (audiocassette, 1987). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brosnan, P. L., Agnes de Mille Interview (video, 1985). Cavett, D., Agnes de Mille Interview (video, 1980). Edwards, A., The de Milles: An American Family (1988). Felder, D. G., The 100 Most Influential Women of All Time: A Ranking Past and


Present (1996). Getz, L., Dancers and Choreographers: A Selected Bibliography (1995). Gherman, B., Agnes de Mille: Dancing Off the Earth (1994). Speaker-Yuan, M., Agnes de Mille (1990). Reference works: CB (1943). International Dictionary of Ballet (1993). International Dictionary of Modern Dance (1998). Notable Names in the American Theatre (1976). Other references: Ballet Review (Winter 1994). Dance Chronicle (1996, 1998). Dance Magazine (Oct. 1971, Sept. 1973, Nov. 1974, June 1974, Jan. 1998). NYTBR (13 Jan. 1952, 12 Oct. 1968). Agnes: The Indomitable de Mille (video, 1987). Agnes de Mille Rehearsing Rodeo and Fall River Legend (videocassette, 1991). City Edition: Agnes de Mille (video, 1979). The Creative Process: Agnes de Mille (video, 1988). The De Mille Dynasty: A Brief History of the Life and Times of Henry C. de Mille, William C. de Mille, Cecil B. de Mille, Agnes George de Mille (video, 1985). The Frail Quarry [excerpt] (video, 1990). Good Morning America: Agnes de Mille (video, 1991). Profile of Agnes de Mille (video, 1979). —FELICIA HARDISON LONDRÉ

DE MONDRAGON, Margaret Randall See RANDALL, Margaret

DÉGH, Linda Born 19 March 1920, Budapest, Hungary Daughter of Karoly and Folan Engl Dégh; married Andrew Vazsonyi, 1958 Linda Dégh studied with the eminent folklorist, G. Ortutay, at Pázmány Peter University in Budapest and received a Ph.D. in ethnography in 1943. Her first major publication was her dissertation, Pandur Péter meséi (Tales of Peter Pandur, 1942), a collection of folktales with an analytical essay and annotation. After graduation, Dégh conducted fieldwork and research for various scholarly institutions in Hungary, investigating primarily two major problems: urban/industrial folklore as it relates to the rural peasantry, and the folk traditions of the Hungarian revolution of 1848. Her research and publication on the latter demonstrated how historical facts have become ‘‘folklorized’’ through oral circulation over time, especially in lyrical and narrative folksongs. Later Dégh did extensive fieldwork throughout eastern Europe examining ethnic change and interethnic relations as well as traditional narratives, world view, and folk religion. Dégh eventually focused her European fieldwork on collecting the oral traditions of the Bukovina Székely villagers who were resettled in western Hungary after World War II. This fieldwork resulted in a major study on the sociology of storytelling, Märchen, Erzähler und Erzählgemeinschaft, dargestellt an der ungarischen Volksüberlieferung (1962), which was awarded the international

DÉGH

Pitré prize in 1963 and was later published in the U.S. as Folktales and Society: Storytelling in a Hungarian Peasant Community (1969). This is Dégh’s most widely known work in America and it is used as a textbook in many colleges and universities. A ‘‘major classic of folklore analysis,’’ it treats the inclusive narrative art of the villagers of Kakasd as well as the general process of transmission and innovation of oral tradition. The book also deals authoritatively with the interplay of print and oral tradition in the modern world. In 1951 Dégh was appointed to the faculty of the Folklore Department of Eötvös-University in Budapest. She also served on various national boards and commissions dealing with folklore and ethnography. Dégh published extensively during this phase of her career, but since most of her books and articles are in Hungarian, they are not generally accessible to an American audience. In 1964 she was invited to Indiana University as a visiting professor in the Folklore Institute. After a year of fieldwork among the Hungarian ethnic colony in the industrial region of northwest Indiana, Dégh returned to Indiana University as a full professor. Since coming to the U.S., Dégh’s folklore interests continued to develop in two major areas: interethnic relations in North America and the modern American legend. Her research among U.S. and Canadian ethnics has been supported by various national organizations including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Canadian Centre for Folk Culture Studies. Although she published numerous articles dealing with different aspects of this fieldwork, her major contribution so far has been a monograph, People in the Tobacco Belt: Four Lives (1975). This work is comprised of the translated life histories of Hungarians now living in Canada with annotation and an analytical essay dealing with each. Dégh examines, among other things, the techniques by which the narrators structured their stories and the world view revealed by them. The transcribed life histories depart from standard anthropological practice because they have not been rearranged and edited to fit conventional chronologies. Although her work with ethnicity is extensive, Dégh is best known in the U.S. for her research and publication dealing with the folktale (Märchen) and the legend. In 1968 she founded and began editing a scholarly journal, Indiana Folklore, specializing in the publication and analysis of legends and legend-telling. Using her own meticulous fieldwork and publications as examples, Dégh has trained a whole generation of Indiana University graduate students in the theories and techniques of dealing with folk legendry. Dégh is also a member of a committee of the prestigious International Congress of Folk Narrative Studies which has undertaken the classification and intensive study of the legend in the U.S. and Europe. OTHER WORKS: Pandur Péter hét bagi meséje (Seven Tales by P. Pandur from Bag, 1940). Bodrogközi mesék (Tales from Bodrogköz, 1945). Ütmutató 48-as hagyo-mány gyüjtéséhez (Fieldworkers’

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Guide for Researching Historical Traditions of 1848-49, 1947). A magyar népi szinjáték kutatása (Hungarian Folk Drama Research, 1947). Történeti énekek és katonadalok (Historical Songs and Soldiers’ Songs, with I. Katona and L. Péter, 1952). A szabadságharc népköltészete (Folklore of the War of Independence, 1952). Szépen szól a Kossuth muzsikája (Selected Songs from the Revolution of 1848, 1953). Népköltészet (Folk Literature, 1953). Magyarországi munkásdalok (Workers’ Songs from Hungary, with T. Dömötör and I. Katona, 1955). Kakasdi népmesék (Folktales from Kakasd, 1955). Magyar népmesék (Hungarian Tales, 1960). Gonaquadate a viziszörny (North American Indian Tales, 1960). A világjáró királyfi (North European Folktales, 1961). Tolna megyei székely népmesék (Szekely Folktales from Tolna County, 1965). Folklore Today: A Festschrift for Richard M. Dorson (edited by Dégh with F. Oinas and H. Glassie, 1976). East European Folk Narrative Studies (edited by Dégh, 1977). Articles: ‘‘Ethnology in Hungary’’ in Anthropology in EastCentral and Southeast (1970), ‘‘Folk Religion as Ideology for Ethnic Survival: The Hungarians of Kipling, Saskatchewan’’ in Ethnicity on the Great Plains (1980).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Burlakoff, N., et al, eds., Folklore on Two Continents: Essays in Honor of Linda Degh (1980). Other references: Canadian-American Review: of Hungarian Studies (1977). JAF (1971, 1978). —SYLVIA ANN GRIDER

DELAND, Margaret (Wade) Campbell Born Margaretta Campbell, 28 February 1857, Allegheny, Pennsylvania; died 1945, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of Sample and Margaretta Wade Campbell; married Lorin F. Deland, 1880 At sixteen, after attending private schools, Margaret Campbell Deland was sent for a year to Pelham Priory, a strict boarding school near New Rochelle, New York, and then enrolled in the Cooper Union, New York City, for a course in design, perspective, freehand, and geometrical drawing. After finishing her studies at the Cooper Union, she was appointed assistant instructor in drawing and design at Girls’ Normal School (now Hunter College). Deland’s first novel, John Ward, Preacher (1888), is a story of religious doubt and adamant orthodoxy. Deland had been brought up a strict Presbyterian, but in the years following her marriage she found herself painfully questioning her earlier religious attitudes. She finally left her family’s denomination and, with her husband, was confirmed in the Episcopal church. It was many years, however, before she was at peace with her convictions, and John Ward, Preacher was the result of her own soul

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searching. It made her suddenly famous, for it was much discussed, and often angrily denounced as wicked and immoral. Deland followed this first novel with a steady output of fiction so popular that she became one of the best-known writers of her day. Four honorary doctorates were awarded to her: Rutgers, 1917; Tufts, 1920; Bates, 1929; and Bowdoin, 1931. She was also one of the first women elected to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1926). ‘‘Essentially a novelist of character,’’ as one writer calls her, Deland created a group of likable men, women, and children who appear time after time in her various novels and short stories. These are inhabitants of a small town, ‘‘Old Chester,’’ which was modeled on Manchester, where she grew up. Dominating the Old Chester scene is the all-wise, all-compassionate Dr. Lavendar, Rector of St. Michael’s Church. The plots are concerned with sin and its expiation, self-sacrifice, maternal love, pride, and oddly assorted marriages. Through them all runs a strong current of religion, for Deland’s people conceive of a deity who is intensely personal. Also apparent is a delightful appreciation of nature—the shifting seasons, flowers, hills, rivers. Though Deland’s fiction is definitely dated, it is extremely useful to any student seeking to understand the values and mores of a bygone era. Further, while its faint gloss of sentimentality, its assertions regarding extramarital relations, and its firm insistence on the need for renouncing ‘‘sin’’ may seem quaint and unreal to the modern reader, Deland’s work does portray the timeless qualities of personal integrity, devotion, and courage. OTHER WORKS: The Old Garden (1886). A Summer Day (1889). Philip and His Wife (1890). Sidney: The Story of a Child (1892). The Wisdom of Fools (1894). Mr. Tommy Dove and Other Stories (1897). Old Chester Tales (1899). Dr. Lavendar’s People (1903). The Common Way (1904). The Awakening of Helena Richie (1906). An Encore (1907). The Iron Woman (1911). The Voice (1912). Partners (1913). The Hands of Esau (1914). Around Old Chester (1915). The Rising Tide (1916). The Vehement Flame (1922). New Friends in Old Chester (1924). The Kays (1926). Captain Archer’s Daughter (1932). Old Chester Days (1935). If This Be I (1935). Golden Yesterdays (1941). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dodd, L. H., Celebrities at Our Hearthside (1959). Overton, G., The Women Who Make Our Novels (1928). Reep, D. C., The Rescue and the Romance: Popular Novels before World War I (1982). Smith, H. F., The Popular American Novel, 1865-1920 (1980). Welter, B., Dimity Convictions: The American Women in the Nineteenth Century (1976). Williams, B. C., Our Short Story Writers (1920). Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA (1942). Other references: American Literature (June 1990). NYT (14 Jan. 1945). —ABIGAIL ANN HAMBLEN


DEL OCCIDENTE, Maria See BROOKS, Maria Gowen

DELORIA, Ella Cara Born Anpetu Waśte (Dakota name), 31 January 1889, at White Swan on the Yankton Sioux Reservation, South Dakota; died 12 February 1971, Vermillion, South Dakota Daughter of Philip and Mary Sulley Bordeaux Deloria Anpetu Waśte (which means Beautiful Day) was Ella Cara Deloria’s Dakota name. Her father was a deacon in the Episcopal church and Deloria was greatly influenced by the church as well as by her Sioux heritage. Dakota was the primary language spoken in her home, and Sioux culture was practiced there alongside Christianity. Deloria grew up on the Standing Rock Reservation, and graduated from the All Saints boarding school in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Following her graduation in 1910, she attended Oberlin College in Ohio, and then transferred in 1913 to Columbia Teachers College, receiving a B.S. in 1915. About 1927 Deloria began a long collaboration with Franz Boas, the distinguished anthropologist, with whom she had worked and studied while at Teachers College. She produced for him an immense body of research notes on Plains Indian language and culture. Speaking of Indians (1944) is Deloria’s analytical description of Sioux culture. Waterlily (1988), first published 17 years after her death, is based on her ethnographic work, but written in the form of a novel in order to convey the details of her culture to a wide range of readers. Those who wish to know more about Native American women, as well as about Sioux culture, change, and more important continuity, will find the novel richly rewarding. Deloria was bilingual as well as bicultural. Her work reveals the value of an insider’s perspective, providing a bridge of understanding about Sioux society for those outside her tradition, as witnessed through the eyes of a Sioux woman. The paucity of books written by Native American women also makes her work an important contribution to Native American studies as well as to American literature. The major part of Deloria’s work is focused on the period just prior to white settlement on the western plains of North America in the mid-19th century. Much of it challenges the still commonly held stereotypes of Native American peoples and especially the images of Indian women. Deloria’s Waterlily offers answers to questions about the role of women by providing a platform on which they speak for themselves. Deloria also provides perspectives on tribal history as well as the social and religious ideas centered on the obligations of reciprocity to one’s kin that are evident in Sioux tradition to the present day. Unlike her extensive ethnographic and linguistic work, Waterlily explores a series of important concepts in an intriguing fictional narrative. Engaging anecdotes alternate with serious commentary on issues that arise while contemplating life

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in the mid-19th century Teton (Tiyospaye) extended family camp circle. Enriched with her own experiences and views, and the insights of a writer who combines previous research on her own culture with the skills of the trained insider, the author creates excellent fiction. No one was better qualified than Deloria to draw a series of Sioux female characters such as the ones central to this novel. Against the exaggerated representation of the Sioux Nation as fabricated by contemporary media imagemakers, Deloria’s work stands firmly and honestly, portraying Sioux tradition and especially Sioux women in the visibly important roles they held and continue to hold within their culture. OTHER WORKS: Dakota Texts (1932). Dakota Grammar (with F. Boas, 1941). Some Notes on the Santee (1967). Deer Women and Elk Men: The Lakota Narratives of Ella Deloria (edited by J. Rice, 1992). Articles: ‘‘The Sun Dance’’ in Journal of American Folklore (1929), ‘‘From Waterlily’’ in Growing up Native American (1993). The unpublished manuscripts of Deloria, including her voluminous correspondence with Franz Boas, are in the Library of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. Manuscript pages of Waterlily are at the Dakota Indian Foundation in Chamberlain, South Dakota. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Finn, J. L., ‘‘Ella Cara Deloria and Mourning Dove: Writing for Cultures, Writing Against the Grain’’ in Women Writing Culture (1995). Mead, M., Cooperation and Competition Among Primitive Peoples (1937, chapter by J. Mirsky based on Deloria’s research). Morgan, K. J., ‘‘The Depiction of Lakota Culture in Waterlily’’ (thesis, 1990). Murray, J. K., ‘‘Ella Deloria: A Biographical Sketch and Literary Analysis’’ (dissertation, 1974). Rice, J., Deer Women and Elk Men: The Lakota Narratives of Ella Deloria (1992). Rice, J., Lakota Storytelling: Black Elk, Ella Deloria, and Frank Fools Crow (1989). Sligh, G. L., Activism, Accommodation, and Autobiography: The Novels of Sophia Alice Callahan, Mourning Dove, and Ella Cara Deloria (dissertation, 1998). Reference works: NAW (1980). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Introducing Ella C. Deloria (1988). Meridel LeSueur, Ella Deloria (video, 1984). —INÉS TALAMANTEZ

DEMING, Barbara Born 23 July 1917, New York, New York; died 2 August 1984, Sugarloaf Key, Florida Daughter of Harold S. and Katherine Burritt Deming Barbara Deming’s fiction, essays, and poetry were all grounded in her personal experiences. From the age of sixteen when she

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realized she was a lesbian and began to write, Deming’s life and writing were joined in a Gandhian struggle to ‘‘cling to the truth’’ (satyagraha). This struggle later led Deming to perceive herself as a lifelong activist, even though she did not enter public politics until 1960. Writing, Deming felt, ‘‘could itself be named activism’’ because it was a process through which she discovered and ‘‘affirmed’’ what she knew about herself and the world around her. Living her life as a lesbian—defying the homophobic society that tried to define her—was another aspect of her activism. Although literary periodicals published some of her poems, short stories, and reviews in the 1940s and 1950s, it was not until Deming began writing news articles about the peace and civil rights movements that her work steadily reached a large audience. These pieces, initially published in left-wing journals, detailed her own and others’ participation in social movements and offered her reflections on nonviolence and other issues. Whether because of the reputation she had gained or because changes in American society made personal narratives and social analysis more acceptable, both her earlier and new work reached print after the late 1960s. Deming’s powerful feminist critiques, veiled in her early work and central after the early 1970s, gained her a devoted audience among women. Her almost spiritual theorizing about the connections among people and political movements continues to challenge readers to claim their lives as their own while respecting the same right of others. Deming and her three brothers grew up in New York City and New City, New York. Her father was an admiralty lawyer, her mother a former singer. When Deming was sixteen, she fell in love with an older woman and began writing poetry. Their relationship probably lasted until Deming went to Bennington College where she majored in drama (B.A. 1938) and learned that a ‘‘woman’s sensibility’’ was incongruent with good writing. She earned an M.A. from Cleveland’s Western Reserve University (1941) and became an analyst for the Library of Congress film project at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (1942-44). In 1945 she decided to become a full-time freelance writer. Her theater essays, film reviews, and some poetry were published in New Directions, Chimera, New Yorker, and other periodicals, and in 1950 she finished a book analyzing the dreams and heroes portrayed in American films of the 1940s. A work of sociocultural criticism, Running Away from Myself: A Dream Portrait of America Drawn from the Films of the Forties was not published until 1969. Deming notes that this ‘‘psychological study of America’’ had taken on greater relevance in the wake of a national crisis of faith and a concomitant desire by the U.S. to impose its will in Vietnam. Deming traveled to Europe in 1950 to recover from the painful breakup of a love relationship. When she returned she began a ‘‘fictional’’ chronicle of her emotional and physical ‘‘travail,’’ but friends discouraged her from going beyond the first chapter. She turned to writing short stories. When Deming returned to the novel in 1972 she realized that it, like others of her rejected works, held great promise—the lesbian protagonist, like her powerful social commentaries, made friends (and publishers) uncomfortable, but the story was strong. A Humming Under My Feet: A Book of Travail was published in 1985.

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In 1959 Deming discovered the writings of Mahatma Gandhi while she was traveling through India. The following year she went to Cuba, and then attended a Peacemakers workshop. These experiences launched Deming into a new phase of her life marked by public activism and a commitment to practicing and writing about nonviolence. Her personal activism made it easier for her to empathize with the struggles of other people (Cuban, Vietnamese, African American) and she joined a community that Leah Fritz describes as ‘‘cling[ing] to a whole complexity of political truths.’’ Active in the New England Committee for Nonviolent Action and the War Registers League, Deming demonstrated, sat in, walked for peace and social justice, went to jail for acts of civil disobedience, and wrote about her experiences. Prison Notes (1966) grew out of her participation in the Quebec-Washington-Guantanamo Walk for Peace and Freedom and her arrest and imprisonment in Alabama. Revolution and Equilibrium (1971) includes essays that stemmed from her journeys to Cuba and to North Vietnam (1966-67). The essays in both volumes provide ‘‘a series of studies of nonviolent action and its possibilities’’ as well as a history of ‘‘The Movement’’ for peace and social change as it evolved during the 1960s. Deming’s essays remain among the most significant writings on nonviolence. In 1971, a near-fatal car crash curtailed her physical activism, but her writings continued to be publicly political for the rest of her life. In the mid-1970s Deming became a radical feminist and ‘‘came out’’ publicly during a Catholic Worker meeting. Through letters, several of which were then printed as ‘‘dialogues,’’ she debated women’s rights and sexuality with such civil rights and peace activists as Dave Dellinger and Arthur Kinoy and nonviolent tactics with feminist Jane Alpert. We Cannot Live Without Our Lives (1974) reprints these and an exchange of letters on ‘‘confronting one’s own oppression,’’ which recognizes the common roots of racism, sexism, and homophobia, and the importance of claiming one’s own identity. The book is dedicated to ‘‘all those seeking the courage to assert ‘‘I am—and especially to my lesbian sisters’’; it makes clear Deming’s defiance of the attempts of a homophobic and sexist society to define her. In 1983 she took part in actions organized by the Women’s Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice near Seneca Falls, New York, and served her final jail term. Deming died in her home on Sugarloaf Key of cervical cancer. She was survived by partners in two long-term relationships: painter and writer Mary Meigs (Deming’s companion in the late 1950s and early 1960s) and artist Jane Gapen (Watrous) Verlaine, Deming’s lover since the late 1960s. OTHER WORKS: Wash Us and Comb Us: Stories by Barbara Deming (1972). Remembering Who We Are: Barbara Deming in Dialogue with Gwenda Blair, Kathy Brown, Arthur Kinoy, Bradford Lyttle, Susan Sherman, Leah Fritz, Susan Saxe (1981). We Are All Part of One Another: A Barbara Deming Reader (edited by Jane Meyerding, 1984). I Change, I Change: Love Poems of Barbara Deming (1996). Articles in the 1940s and 1950s in Charm, Chimera, City Lights, Hudson Review, Partisan Review, New Directions, New


Yorker, Paris Review, Tulane Drama Review, Voices, Wake; in the 1960s and 1970s in the Nation, the Catholic Worker, Liberation (of which she was an editor), WIN, Kalliope, and other magazines; ‘‘Militant Nonviolence’’ in The Witness (July 1995). The major collection of Deming’s papers is in the Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College; additional papers are in the Twentieth Century Collection of Boston University. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Combellick, K. A., Feminine Forms of Closure: Gilman, Deming, and H.D. (dissertation, 1989). Reference works: CANR (1998). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Broadside (1984). Gay Community News (25 Aug./1 Sept. 1984, obituary). Kalliope: A Journal of Women’s Art (1984). NYT (4 May 1984, obituary). Ms. (Nov. 1978, article by Leah Fritz). —KIMBERLY HAYDEN BROOKES

DENISON, Mary Andrews Born 26 May circa 1826, Cambridge, Massachusetts; died 15 October 1911, Cambridge, Massachusetts Wrote under: N. I. Edson, Clara Vance Daughter of Thomas and Jerusha Robbins Andrews; married Charles W. Denison, 1846 Mary Andrews Denison’s first publications were short sketches printed in the Boston Olive Branch where her husband, a Baptist minister and active abolitionist, was assistant editor. In 1847 Denison published her first novel, Edna Etheril, the Boston Seamstress. This potboiler began her prolific career as author of pulp fiction and dime novels. Denison published over 80 novels during her lifetime. Many of them do not deserve close scrutiny; they can be divided into a few groupings. Denison exploited the convention of the spotless heroine, extolled on one of her book covers as ‘‘purer, sweeter, and nobler than [women] are often found in real life.’’ The epitome of this genre is her most famous novel, That Husband of Mine (1877), quickly followed by That Wife of Mine (1878). Both novels, along with dozens of her others, celebrate the domestic ideal and were dedicated to ‘‘All Who Love Happy Homes.’’ In addition to championing marital bliss, Denison also crusaded against alcohol in her Gertrude Russel (1849), published by the American Baptist Publication Society. Another group of her novels depicted stereotypical situations and stock formulas. Chip, the Cave Child (ca. 1860) presented the story of a little white boy captured by Native Americans, while The Prisoner of La Vintresse (ca. 1860) exploited a tropical setting with conventional political intrigues. Eventually, Denison wrote novels reinforcing religious conservatism and piety, such as Out of Prison (1864), Victor Norman, Rector (1873), and John Dane (1874). They all depict the temptation of evil, sin, and lust, but always conclude, anticlimactically,

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with the triumph of the powers of good. The majority of Denison’s readers probably read these works not for their high-minded preachings but for their thrilling and graphic portrayals of evil. Denison was also a continual contributor to a number of periodicals, chiefly Frank Leslie’s Monthly, Harper’s Weekly, the People’s Home Journal, and Youth’s Companion. She worked as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War and was a charter member of the League of American Penwomen. OTHER WORKS: Raphael Inglesse (1848). Home Pictures (1853). The Mad Hunter (circa 1860). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography (1888). A Critical Dictionary of English Literature, and British and American Authors (1858). Notable American Women, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: Boston Transcript (17 Oct. 1911). Home (Dec. 1856). Magazine of Poetry and Literary Review (Feb. 1895). —DIANE LONG HOEVELER

DENNETT, Mary Ware Born 4 April 1872, Worcester, Massachusetts; died 25 July 1947, Valatie, New York Daughter of George W. and Livonia Ames Ware; married William H. Dennett, 1900 (divorced 1913); children: three sons (one of whom died young) Mary Ware Dennett came from an old and by her account ‘‘deadly respectable’’ New England family. She received her education at both public and private institutions in Massachusetts and at the school of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. At twentytwo, she began working at the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia, where she was to serve as head of the School of Design and Decoration. Desiring to practice what she was teaching, Dennett opened a shop with her sister in Boston. The beauty of the work they sold, particularly gilded leather, brought her to the attention of other artists in the area. They elected her a director of the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts. Her marriage to architect Dennett was at first a happy one; they had three sons, only two of whom lived to maturity. They collaborated in business; Dennett worked with her husband as a consulting home decorator. Increasingly interested in the campaign to enfranchise women, Dennett became field secretary of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association. In 1910 she was elected corresponding secretary of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), and spent three years in the New York City office. As organizer of the literary department, she sent out millions of pamphlets, books, and reprints of speeches advocating enfranchisement for her sex. Dennett’s husband did not share her interest in suffrage, nor did he appreciate the geographical separation. The couple was divorced in 1913; she retained custody of the two boys.

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It was for these boys that Dennett wrote an essay describing, in a straightforward way, human reproduction and the sexual experience. Called ‘‘The Sex Side of Life,’’ it was published in the Medical Review of Reviews in 1918. Dennett received requests for reprints and had sent out approximately 25,000 copies when the postmaster general deemed the pamphlet obscene and banned it from the mails. Dennett, who continued to fill requests for the piece, was found to be in violation of the law by a district court. The American Civil Liberties Union took on Dennett’s case, and secured a reversal of the decision in the district court of appeals. Dennett’s book, Who’s Obscene (1930), is a bright and fascinating account of these experiences with the courts. Dennett’s interest in sex education and birth control caused her to work with, and ultimately against, Margaret Sanger. In 1915 Sanger violated the federal obscenity statutes by publishing her magazine, the Woman Rebel. She fled to Europe to avoid prosecution. During her absence, Dennett took over the fledgling contraceptive movement, organized in the National Birth Control League (NBCL), repudiating Sanger and her tactics. Sanger returned to set up her own organization. It and the NBCL clashed throughout the 1920s. Dennett believed that a question of basic civil liberty was involved in the birth control campaign and therefore worked through the legislature to eliminate all legal constraints on the distribution of contraceptive material. Birth Control Laws, which she wrote in 1926, explains her position. Although certainly not an objective account of the obscenity rulings existing then, the book contains a detailed and well-researched delineation of the statutes, as well as thoughtful arguments for their repeal. Dennett’s final contribution to the cause was The Sex Education of Children, published in 1931. During and after her participation in the birth control movement, Dennett was also involved in other causes. Always interested in the campaign for world peace, she worked from 1914 to 1916 to keep the U.S. out of the European war, serving as field secretary of the American Union Against Militarism. When American involvement in the conflict caused her to break with the Democratic party, she joined the radically antiwar People’s Council. Years later, she was a member of the World Federalists and served as their first chairman from 1941 to 1944. Illness forced Dennett to withdraw from active participation in her beloved movements. But only death, which came in 1947 in a New York nursing home, could quench her interest in reform and social change. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dienes, C. T., Law, Politics and Birth Control (1972). Kennedy, D., Birth Control in America (1970). Lader, L., The Margaret Sanger Story (1955). Sanger, M., An Autobiography (1938). Reference works: Notable American Women, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: The Prosecution of Mary Ware for ‘Obscenity’ (1929). —LYNNE MASEL-WALTERS

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DERRICOTTE, Toi Born Toinette Webster, 12 April 1941, Hamtramck, Michigan Daughter of Benjamin S. and Antonia Baquet Webster; married C. Bruce Derricotte, 1964; children: Anthony In 1983, having published two books of poetry and more than 200 poems and several articles in periodicals and anthologies, given countless readings, and conducted numerous seminars for students of all ages, Toi Derricotte remarked, ‘‘I want my work to be a wedge into the world, as what is real and not what people want to hear.’’ In 1991 she flatly declared, ‘‘Definitely my teaching and writing is about making change,’’ yet in a ‘‘Letter to an Editor Who Wants to Publish a Black Writer’’ she said, ‘‘To be published as a woman of color makes me fear I will be ignored by most white people, treated as if I don’t exist’’ (Callaloo). Happily, Derricotte has been far from ignored and her writing acknowledged as much too compelling to be treated as if it does not exist. Publishing widely in journals and anthologies, she was recognized by Maxine Kumin as a poet who ‘‘transforms the raw stuff of experience into a language we can all treasure and continue to draw on.’’ The Village Voice’s review of Captivity (1989), her boldest examination of contemporary black female experience, proclaimed it an ‘‘outstanding example of personal exploration yielding truths that apply to all of us—if we admit them.’’ An African American feminist poet, Derricotte speaks from a position particularly attuned to American culture’s racism and sexism. Yet in doing so, she speaks to men as well as to women, to whites as well as to blacks; indeed, the profound paradox in Derricotte’s work is that by repeatedly examining states of poverty, abuse, motherhood, and sexual pleasure that could only be known by women, she manages also to explore experiences of fear, pain, struggle, and ecstasy common to people of all races, sexes, nations, and creeds. At twenty-one Derricotte was sent to a home for unwed mothers to bear a son; 17 years later she wrote a book of poems about this experience, Natural Birth (1983). After receiving her B.A. in special education in 1965 from Wayne State University in Detroit and marrying Bruce Derricotte, she moved to New York City. There she continued her education by participating in numerous writers’ workshops and by studying English literature and creative writing at New York University (M.A. 1984). An associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh since 1991, she was a visiting professor of creative writing at NYU in 1992. Derricotte lived for nearly two decades in New Jersey before moving to Maryland in 1986. Between 1974 and 1991, she held diverse teaching positions, including Poet-in-the-School in both New Jersey (1974-88) and Maryland (1987-88), writer-inresidence for Cummington Community and School of the Arts (1986), associate professor of English literature at Old Dominion University (1988-90), and Commonwealth Professor of English at George Mason University (1990-91). Derricotte is currently an associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Among Derricotte’s awards are first prizes from the Academy of American Poets in 1974 and 1978, the Lucille Medwick


Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America in 1985, National Endowment for the Arts grants in 1985 and 1990, a Pushcart Prize in 1989, a Nicholas Roerich Poets’ Prize nomination in 1990, a Distinguished Pioneering of the Arts award in 1993, and the 1998 Paterson Prize for poetry. She has also contributed to various anthologies and numerous periodicals, including Iowa Review, American Poetry Review, Massachusetts Review, Ploughshares, and Feminist Studies. Derricotte served as a member of the editorial staff of the New York Quarterly from 1973 to 1977 and cofounded Cave Canem, a summer workshop retreat for African American poets, in 1996. Since her first book in 1978, Derricotte has courageously examined the powers and influences, agonies and ecstasies of family relations. Dedicated to a grandmother who owned a funeral home and who never offered her Cadillac Fleetwood to drive her granddaughter and daughter-in-law home after their weekly visits, Empress of the Death House (1978) does more than relay the pathos of mother and daughter always being forced to take the bus and to remember their lower status. In this book, formal experimentations abound—‘‘disappeared’’ punctuation, radically staggered lines, stanzas of varying and unpredictable length, ampersands and abbreviations employed for suggestively casual diction (‘‘yr’’), capitalization used only for emphasis. These disruptive techniques complement the volume’s forbidden topics—deep and abiding anger toward the family all black women are expected to protect and raw articulations of being hurt and stifled by one’s own people. Natural Birth explores subjects considered too ‘‘low’’ and socially transgressive for poetry—childbirth and an unwed mother’s responses to being hidden away from public knowledge in a special home, to being pummeled by an impatient doctor’s procedure, and to being separated from the life her womb had protected for nine months. Though she incorporates the period into her technique much more frequently than before, Derricotte uses italics, prose segments, staggered and rhythmically commanding schemes for lineation, and titles underscoring conflations of objective and subjective time so readers are reminded that meanings are never simply a matter of word choice. When she reads from this collection, the texts are transformed into rocking, rolling, rhythmic, erotic performances. Through her near ecstatic readings, Derricotte implicitly reminds her audience of the truth of the situation: what is unnatural is not the birth out of wedlock but society’s systematically abetted brutal, slashing response to it. In Captivity, Derricotte speculates more boldly on the debilitating effects of a perpetually powerless status. Though her technique is somewhat more conventional than in the previous two volumes, prose segments, arresting lineation, and unpredictable stanzaic division still underscore subject matter that is even more unconventional. In the prose poem ‘‘Abuse,’’ Derricotte portrays a daughter seeking maternal protection by speaking out about abuse by the janitor and abuse by ‘‘Daddy.’’ ‘‘Mama’’ seeks to fend off consciousness, responding: ‘‘Don’t tell me that, you / make me suffer.’’ ‘‘On the Turning up of Unidentified Black Female Corpses,’’ a nine-stanza poem of regular, never disrupted four-line stanzas, mirrors ‘‘Mama’s’’ attitude of desperate resignation.

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Poignantly, Derricotte’s most radical subject is examined in the most formally regularized poem, as if to emphasize the fact that the victims are held captive even in death, where they are scrutinized anonymously and only within the confines of the television. Yet this poem’s speaker dares to ask the type of question ‘‘Mama’’ refuses her battered little girl: ‘‘Am I wrong to think / if five white women had been stripped, / broken, the sirens would wail until / someone was named?’’ The speaking of lost lives long overlooked, their tragedies denied, is equated with exhuming those rendered a ‘‘living dead’’ through neglect. Tender (1997), Derricotte’s fourth book of poetry, is divided into seven sections on topics ranging from the violence of slavery to contemporary domestic violence. The title poem serves as a hub from which each section radiates as Derricotte explores how violence destroys mind, body, and spirit. Derricotte, a selfdescribed ‘‘white-appearing Black person,’’ focuses largely on the varied identities a woman takes on through her roles as wife, mother, sister, and daughter, and how each of these identities can lead to violent outcomes. The psychology of race and gender also comes into play as Derricotte’s poetry speaks of what it means to pass for white in today’s society. Derricotte’s racial identity forms the core of The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey (1997), which contains excerpts from the journals she kept following her 1974 move to an all-white upper-neighborhood in New Jersey. She expresses both her pride in her blackness and her shame and self-hatred in allowing others to think her white in passages like the following: ‘‘All my life I have passed invisibly into the white world, and all my life I have felt that sudden and alarming moment of consciousness there, of remembering I am black.’’ Derricotte unflinchingly reveals the emotional turmoil caused by the constant internal struggle over her identity. She describes the ways in which her ambivalent appearance affected every aspect of her life, from riding in a cab to her relationship with her husband. The deeply intimate and impassioned journal entries that make up The Black Notebooks are by turns moving, hilarious, and painful. Derricotte won several awards for The Black Notebooks, including the 1998 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the 1998 Black Caucus of the American Library Association Literary Award for nonfiction. Tackling bloody, bruising, and bruised subjects in her poetry, Derricotte launches complex and caring critiques of American society in her persistent poetic attention to lives of disenfranchised African American women. In doing so, she forces readers to grapple with her contention, proclaimed in her 1991 Callaloo interview, that ‘‘a lot of what doesn’t get talked about gets translated into violence—racism, sexism—and gets worked out in families as physical and emotional abuse.’’ She still believes ‘‘we are prisoners of what we don’t know, of what we don’t acknowledge, what we don’t bring out, what we aren’t conscious of, deny.’’ And thus Derricotte has dedicated her formidable talents to producing poetic work that is indisputably ‘‘a wedge into the world.’’

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OTHER WORKS: Creative Writing: A Manual for Teachers (with Madeline Tyger,1985). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1985). CANR (1991). Oxford Companion to African-American Literature (1997). WW Among African Americans, 1998-1999 (1997). WW of Writers, Editors and Poets (1989). Other references: Callaloo (1991). Ikon (1986). Kenyon Review (1991). Paris Review (1992). —MARTHA NELL SMITH, UPDATED BY LEAH J. SPARKS

DEUTSCH, Babette Born 22 September 1895, New York, New York; died November 1982 Daughter of Michael and Melanie Fisher Deutsch; married Avrahm Yarmolinsky, 1921 Of German descent, Babette Deutsch grew up in New York City, where she received her B.A. from Barnard College in 1917. Although best known as a poet, Deutsch published novels, translations, literary criticism, and children’s books. In 1919, Deutsch published her first volume of poems, Banners, whose title piece celebrates the Russian Revolution as ‘‘new freedoms, and new slavery.’’ Honey Out of the Rock (1925), Deutsch’s second book, contains a number of short imagistic poems, biblically inspired ballads, and poems to her son. Both volumes display the influence of imagism, Japanese haiku, and Greek and Jewish culture. Considered by some critics to be Deutsch’s best work, Epistle to Prometheus (1930), is a letter written by a contemporary to the Greek god. It is a survey of human history, beginning with his creation and tracing the Promethean spirit as it has inspired humanity in 5th-century Greece, 18th-century France, and 20th-century Russia. Deutsch’s final three volumes of poetry, One Part Love (1939), Take Them, Stranger (1944), and Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral (1954), all reveal her rage at the destruction of World War II. In ‘‘To Napoleon’’ she asks, ‘‘But who will cut the growth/ That gnaws at Europe now?’’ Deutsch’s poetry has been collected in two volumes: Collected Poems, 1919-62 (1963) and Coming of Age: New and Selected Poems (1959). As a novelist, Deutsch began her career with A Brittle Heaven (1926), a thinly veiled autobiography about a young woman’s youth, education, and marriage. The novel reveals the major conflicts facing a woman struggling to define herself both as a professional writer, and a wife and mother. Deutsch’s second novel, In Such a Night (1927), is essentially a series of character sketches showing the influence of Virginia Woolf’s stream-ofconsciousness technique in Mrs. Dalloway. Deutsch’s other novels are Mask of Silenus (1933), a historical novel based on

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Socrates’ life, and Rogue’s Legacy (1942), a tale patterned after the life of the French poet, François Villon. Deutsch’s critical writings are concerned with the correlation between modern poetry and modern society. Potable Gold: Some Notes on Poetry and This Age (1929) discusses the influence of technology on poetry and the poet’s relationship to his public. This Modern Poetry (1935) and Poetry in Our Time (1952) both analyze major poetic figures and study the interrelationship between poet and politics. According to Deutsch, the modern poet must ‘‘create a myth beyond the power of man’’ and therefore be a ‘‘true revolutionary.’’ OTHER WORKS: Fire for the Night (1930). Poetry Handbook: A Dictionary of Terms (1956). Articles: ‘‘An Unhabitual Way’’ in Critical Essays on Kay Boyle (1997), ‘‘Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951)’’ in Langston Hughes: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (1993) Audio recordings: Babette Deutsch Reading Her Poems in the Recording Laboratory (1947), Babette Deutsch Reading Her Poems in the Coolidge Auditorium (1961), Babette Deutsch Reading Her Poems with Comment at Station WRVR (1961). The papers of Babette Deutsch are in the New York Public Library in New York City. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Davis, R. H., Jr., ‘‘Something Truly Revolutionary: The Correspondence of Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky from Russia, November 1923 to March 1924’’ in Biblion: The Bulletin of the New York Public Library (1993). Drake, W., The First Wave: Women Poets in America (1987). Driscoll, M. C., ‘‘Babette Deutsch and Her Contribution to American Letters’’ (thesis, 1944). Gould, J. American Women Poets: Pioneers of Modern Poetry (1980). Reference works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1987). CA (1977). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Kresh, P., ed., Babette Deutsch, Louise Bogan, Leonore G. Marshall, Stephen Vincent Benet, and Malcolm Cowley Reading Their Poems (audio recording, 1970). NYHTB (12 July 1959). Poetry (1964). SR (25 July 1959). TLS (18 June 1964). VQR (1964). —DIANE LONG HOEVELLER

DeVEAUX, Alexis Born 24 September 1948, New York Daughter of Richard Hill and Mae DeVeaux Feminist, poet, playwright, fiction and children’s book writer, illustrator, and political journalist, Alexis DeVeaux places African Americans, most often black women, at the center of her artistic world. Her work concentrates on the personal struggles and resolve of women, especially as they deal with love and sexuality. DeVeaux focuses on intimate relationships, whether


they involve lesbian lovers (‘‘The Sister’’), contending forces in a love triangle (Don’t Explain, 1980), or a daughter and her parent (‘‘Adventures of the Dread Sisters’’). Because she believes that an understanding of the self in relationship with the intimate other leads to an understanding of the community, the nation, the world, DeVeaux’s work also gives testimony to black culture. As Mary Helen Washington notes, Nigeria, the central character in ‘‘Dread Sisters’’ (1989), is then not ‘‘an isolated teenager but a collective protagonist.’’ DeVeaux’s writing projects her feminist perspective that the personal is the political. DeVeaux grew up in Harlem and the South Bronx, which serve as the settings for most of her work. Both Na-Ni (1973), which received an Art Books for Children Award from the Brooklyn Museum (1974-75), and Spirits in the Streets (1973) are set in Harlem and revolve around the theme of ‘‘preserving spiritual vitality in a ghetto environment.’’ While DeVeaux’s stories often embrace the harsh realities of poverty and exploitation, they are also infused with hope and beauty. Spirits in the Streets (1973) reflects DeVeaux’s array of artistic talents. It integrates innovative use of language within narrative, lyric, and dialogue, with illustrations and variations of typography. Spirits is at once a poem, a mural, and a song. Music has a great influence on DeVeaux’s writing. ‘‘The Riddles of Egypt Brownstone’’ (1977), she explains, ‘‘is like jazz, each instrument/character playing variations on the melody so that the story is told not as a linear experience but as a holistic one.’’ Jazz and language come together fully in Don’t Explain: A Song of Billie Holiday (1980), a fictionalized biography of the singer, written in lyric form for young adults. DeVeaux earned a B.A. from the State University of New York-Empire State College (1976) and a Ph.D. from the SUNY at Buffalo (1992). She has been a community worker, an instructor of reading and English, and a teacher of creative writing and theater workshops in New York and Connecticut. A freelance writer since 1974, she has also been a contributing editor and editor-at-large of Essence magazine. DeVeaux has written a number of essays for Essence in which she reasserts her global feminist perspective, calling for the political and social liberation of black and Third World women. Her stories and poems have appeared in several publications, including Black Creation, Conditions: Five, and the Iowa Review. As a playwright, DeVeaux’s Tapestry and Circles were produced for the television series Visions in 1976, while three other plays were produced by different theatre groups: A Season to Unravel (1979), No (1981), and Elbow Rooms (1987). In the late 1990s, DeVeaux was back at SUNY Buffalo, where she’d completed her Ph.D., to teach in the American Studies Department. OTHER WORKS: Li Chen/Second Daughter, First Son (1975). Blue Heat: a Portfolio of Poems and Drawings (1985). An Enchanted Hair Tale (1987). The Woolu Hat (1997). Audre Lorde (1997). Contributor to: Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983); Black-Eyed Susans; ‘‘The Tapestry’’ in 9 Plays by Black Women (1986); ‘‘An Enchanted Hair’’ in The Lady with the Ship

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on Her Head (videocassette and book, 1987, 1991); Midnight Birds: Stories by Contemporary Black Women (1990); Memory of Kin: Stories About Family by Black Writers (1991); and others. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Clarke, C., ‘‘Blue Heat by Alexis DeVeaux’’ in Conditions, Thirteen: International Focus I (1986). Kraft, M., ‘‘Alexis De Veaux: The Riddles of Egypt Brownstone’’ in The African American short story, 1970-1990: A Collection of Critical Essays (1993). Tate, C., ed., Black Women Writers at Work (1983). Washington, M. H., ‘‘Commentary on Alexis De Veaux,’’ Memory of Kin. Wilkerson, M. B. ed., Nine Plays by Black Women (1985). Reference works: Black Authors and Illustrators of Children’s Books (1988). Black Writers (1989). CA (1977). CANR (1989). DLB (1985). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Ms. 8 (June 1980). —DALE A. DOOLEY, UPDATED BY NELSON RHODES

DEXTER, John See BRADLEY, Marion Zimmer

DIAZ, Abby Morton Born Abigail Morton, 22 November 1821, Plymouth, Massachusetts; died 1 April 1904, Belmont, Massachusetts Daughter of Ichabod and Patty Weston Morton; married Manuel Diaz, 1845 Abigail Diaz was the only daughter of Ichabod Morton, a shipbuilder, liberal Unitarian, and social reformer. In 1842 he took his family to the Transcendental utopian community, Brook Farm, where Diaz remained until 1847, teaching in the association’s infant school. She later taught school in Plymouth and began writing. In May 1861 her first story appeared in Atlantic Monthly, and she eventually published in many leading juvenile and domestic magazines of the day. Diaz was a founder and, from 1881 to 1892, president of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union of Boston, which she saw as a ‘‘sisterhood’’ allying urban women of means with country girls seeking work in the city. In the 1880s and 1890s, Diaz traveled widely, organizing women’s unions and lecturing at women’s clubs. She was active in the woman suffrage movement, which she saw as an outgrowth of the abolition of slavery. In her later years, she became interested in Christian Science and published articles on religious subjects. Diaz’s best, and most successful, juvenile fiction is The William Henry Letters (1870), first published in 1867 in the magazine Our Young Folks. Epistolary in form, it recounts the adventures of a mischievous redheaded boy raised by his loving grandmother. Overall, the Letters sentimentally evoke family life and simple fun in an idealized New England village. Theodore

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Roosevelt in his Autobiography described this book, one of his favorites, as a ‘‘good healthy’’ story, ‘‘teaching manliness, decency and good conduct.’’ Two sequels were popular: William Henry and His Friends (1871) and Lucy Maria (1874). The latter, apparently loosely autobiographical, concerns a girl who took up ‘‘school-keeping with too much self-confidence’’ and soon concluded that it is a ‘‘very solemn thing’’ to give ‘‘even one life its first direction.’’ Lucy Maria wants to do ‘‘heart-teaching,’’ rather than headteaching; like Diaz at Brook Farm, she takes her students into the woods to interest them in ‘‘flowers, trees, insects—all natural objects.’’ On woman suffrage, Lucy Maria, again like Diaz at this time, disclaims personal interest in the vote (except on ‘‘some neighborhood affair’’ such as the ‘‘location of a schoolhouse’’) but feels that other women should have the vote if they want it, as suffrage is a natural right. Diaz’s interest in improving home life and the instruction of young children is evinced in several of her most effective books: The Schoolmaster’s Trunk (1874), A Domestic Problem (1875), Bybury to Beacon Street (1887), and Only a Flock of Women (1893). These novels are set in small towns with little social life. Isolated and repressive, they are halfway stations between the old-fashioned village and the modern city. Families struggle to maintain ‘‘decent’’ standards and parents wear themselves out with work. To reform these conditions, Diaz proposes various domestic economies, simplifying women’s chores so they may devote more time to their children and to self-improvement. Men, she feels, should share household tasks so they may appreciate the difficulty of women’s work. The community should meet convivially to discuss its problems. These ideas found their practical outlet in Diaz’s work for the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, which provided personal guidance and legal protection for working girls and women in Boston. Because of this affiliation alone, she is described as an ‘‘industrial reformer’’ in Willard and Livermore’s American Women (1897). Through more than 20 years, Diaz was a prolific author of juvenile stories and essays. These consistently reflect her affection for children and a charming delight in games and pastimes. The volumes of domestic advice are pleasantly stated, chatty, down-to-earth. Many of the household reforms Diaz suggests have since been accomplished by labor-saving machinery, but her comments testify to the physical difficulty of farm and village life for women a century ago. Her early exposure to Transcendental or Emersonian idealism is evident to the end of her life in her views of children, education, and the prospect of moral improvement. OTHER WORKS: The Entertaining Story of King Bronde, His Lily and His Rosebud (1869). A Storybook for the Children (1875). Neighborhood Talks, As Reported by Mr. Codding (1876). Birds of Prey (with N. A. Calkins, 1878). Cat Family (with N. A. Calkins, 1878). The Jimmyjohns and Other Stories (1878). Scratching Birds (with N. A. Calkins, 1878). Swimming Birds (with N. A. Calkins, 1878). Wading Birds (with N. A. Calkins, 1878). Brave Little Goose-girl: Little Stories for Little Folks (1880). Christmas Morning (1880). Merry Christmas (1880). Molasses Candy (1880).

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Simple Traveller (1880). The Story of Boxberry (1880). King Grimalkin and Pussyanna (1881). Polly Cologne (1881). Chronicles of the Stimpcett Family and Others (1882). Spirit As Power (1886). The Law of Perfection (1886). The John Spicer Lectures (1887). Leaves of Healing (1887). Conventions During the Anti-Slavery Agitation (1889). In the Strength of the Lord (1889). Mother Goose’s Christmas Party (1891). The Law of Perfection (1895). The Religious Training of Children (1895). The Flatiron and the Red Cloak (1901). ‘‘Those People From Skyton’’ and Nine Other Stories (1906). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Codman, J. T., Brook Farm (1884). Croly, J. C., History of the Women’s Club Movement in America (1898). Donham, S. A., History of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union (dissertation, 1955). Swift, L., Brook Farm (1900). Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). A Woman of the Century (1893). Other references: Women’s Journal (14 Apr. 1904). —JANE BENARDETE

DICKINSON, Emily Born 10 December 1830, Amherst, Massachusetts; died 15 May 1886, Amherst, Massachusetts Daughter of Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson Emily Dickinson’s American ancestry began with Nathaniel Dickinson, a religious dissenter who settled in Connecticut in 1630. Dickinson’s grandfather was a founder of Amherst College, and her father, Edward Dickinson, became a Massachusetts judge, member of the state legislature, and a U.S. congressman. A formidable parent, and an exemplar of the Puritan ethic of industry and public service, he was for the most part aloof; his daughter observed that he was ‘‘too busy with his briefs’’ to notice his children. Her mother, Emily Norcross Dickinson, appears to have been an equally remote parent, a semi-invalid for much of her children’s lives and, in Dickinson’s view, a failure as a mother. Dickinson once wrote a friend, ‘‘I never had a mother.’’ In childhood Dickinson suffered from a shyness and an emotional sensitivity she recognized as marking her ‘‘different from the others.’’ She grew up companioned mainly by her older brother and younger sister, who were to remain her closest ties. In accordance with the family emphasis upon education—for daughters as well as sons—she attended Amherst Academy and was sent for a year to Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before her father decided her precarious health made further formal education unwise. Returning home, Dickinson developed the literary interests that suited her preference for isolation—reading, corresponding with a few friends, and writing poems. Except for occasional visits to neighboring cities and a trip with her father to Washington, D.C., she did not leave her birthplace again. By her thirtieth year, she had withdrawn even from the life of Amherst. To the townspeople she became a legendary figure, an eccentric spinster


who dressed always in white, rarely received a visitor, and refused to venture beyond the family house and garden. Found in her room after her death was a manuscript, in the style of homemade pamphlets, of almost 900 poems, only seven of which she had published. All were short lyrics, often no more than a quatrain or two; almost all were untitled and undated; some were unfinished; some appeared in variant versions. The labor of collecting additional manuscripts and of publishing selections of her verse was undertaken first by family and friends, none of whom suspected their actual value. The first Poems by Emily Dickinson appeared four years after her death, to mainly hostile reviews. Periodically, as new poems originally sent to friends were discovered, new collections followed. In this century, the number of poems has continued to increase; more than 650 were published for the first time as late as 1945. The authoritative text of all known poems, numbering almost 1,800, is the three-volume edition by Thomas H. Johnson, which finally appeared in 1955. (The poems cited below are identified by their numbers in the Johnson edition. The text has been normalized.) The subjects of Dickinson’s poetry are, broadly, the subjects of lyric tradition: love, nature, death, and God. Her religious attitudes, in all their bewildering variety, permeate the bulk of her verse. Except for a brief conversion experience in adolescence, she resisted both family pressures and the revivalist fervor that moved through New England in her time. In some poems she is seemingly the orthodox believer, ‘‘Given in marriage unto Thee’’ (317). More often she acknowledges herself the disbeliever whom ‘‘Christ omitted,’’ observing of her exclusion that ‘‘The abdication of belief/ Makes the behavior small’’ (1551). Characteristically, she is both doubter and quester, probing the mysteries of death, immortality, and eternity, appropriating biblical sources of Calvinist theology, but preferring to question on her own terms— ‘‘Infinitude, hadst thou no face/ That I might look on Thee?’’ (564). The grand abstractions come to hand as readily as her metaphors for God, whom she may address with a familiarity that would have scandalized her ancestors. He is her ‘‘Visitor,’’ ‘‘our old neighbor, God,’’ ‘‘Banker,’’ ‘‘Shopmall,’’ even the remorseless ‘‘Inquisitor,’’ who withholds from his victims the release of death. There is another God, the one the unbeliever cannot approach, the withdrawn God she knows ‘‘exists/ Somewhere, in silence.’’ And the silence is unendurable—a jest that has ‘‘crawled too far’’ (338). Death, on the other hand, is the ‘‘mighty’’ reality. She contemplates it with chilling comprehension, both in the abstract and in the particular. As in other poems, Dickinson’s fascination with death is not macabre; it is prompted by her awareness of the irreducible separation of the dead from the living. The tragedy lies in the inability of the living to come to terms with the separation— with what she elsewhere calls ‘‘the distance/ On the look of Death’’ (258). When Dickinson imagines her own death, she explores the other side. The viewpoint is reversed; it is that of the corpse, which must try to accept the separation of the living from the dead. In one of her most famous poems, ‘‘Because I could not stop for Death’’ (712), death appears personified, and with the eerie ‘‘civility’’ of a

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gentleman caller, escorts her to her grave: ‘‘The carriage held but just ourselves/ And Immortality.’’ The prospects of immortality are left uncertain. Its significance is that it is her only companion in her isolation from the world left behind. In some poems, death may be simply a welcome release into oblivion; in others it contains the tantalizing possibility of salvation. In this poem it is a horrifying sentence to the solitude of unending existence. Dickinson’s love poems are also usually about parting, separation, and loss. They support the biographical evidence that she suffered from a secret and hopeless love explaining her years of seclusion. The identity of the man has not been established. Circumstantial evidence suggests Charles Wadsworth, a married minister with whom she corresponded for many years. Other candidates have been argued. The most impassioned poems are the ‘‘renunciation’’ and ‘‘bridal’’ poems of the 1860s, in which earthly separation is a prelude to spiritual reunion in heaven. In these, the theological doctrines of Divine Election and the Marriage Covenant are applied to a spiritual ‘‘contract’’ with a temporal groom. The subject is sometimes handled with an ingenuity reminiscent of John Donne, as in ‘‘I cannot live with you’’ (640), and ‘‘’Twas a long parting’’ (625). The poems, however, are highly generalized and, without sustaining particulars, tend to be unconvincing. At their worst, as in ‘‘Mine by the right of the white election’’ (528), they become a series of ecstatic assertions, an abandonment to excess verging on mental unbalance. The best poems are those that are least reliant upon religious vocabulary and which deal simply, often very movingly, with the grief of separation. Many of Dickinson’s nature poems are slight, whimsical exercises describing the particulars available in her own garden— a caterpillar, a garden snake, a robin, or butterfly. Their charm is in their metaphorical exactitude. A snake becomes a ‘‘whip-lash,/ Unbraiding in the sun’’ (986). In its larger aspects, nature may be responsive to her moods, but it never becomes the surrogate divinity of Emersonian transcendentalism. It remains remote, a ‘‘haunted house’’ from which man is excluded. It is an ominous reminder of transiency and human isolation, for which Dickinson supplies her own religious analogues. An impressive example is the poem beginning, ‘‘There’s a certain slant of light,/ Winter afternoons,/ That oppresses like the heft/Of cathedral tunes’’ (258). Nature is here sealed in seasonal death, but for man, death translates as ‘‘the seal, Despair,’’ or spiritual death. This is one of Dickinson’s finest poems. Dickinson’s letters supplement her poetry. They relate her early reactions to death, notably the death of a girlfriend her own age, and the religious stresses of adolescence when she saw herself ‘‘standing alone in rebellion.’’ She often refers to her loneliness, but there are early hints, too, that her highly sensitive nature found refuge in isolation. As her letters increasingly become her only contact with the world, her dependency upon her father and brother extends to other men, with whom she establishes a pupil-teacher relationship. The letters to Charles Wadsworth have been lost, but there is evidence his move to California precipitated an emotional crisis. His departure coincides with the beginning of her serious dedication to poetry and of her most

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productive years. About the same time, the friend who ‘‘saved her life’’ appears. This was Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a poetry critic for Atlantic Monthly, to whom she submitted four of her poems. Higginson’s response initiated a correspondence lasting more than two decades, during which he served as friend and literary mentor. Unfortunately, he appears to have been a man of conventional tastes, and his limited appreciation of her work may have confirmed her fear of publication. Aside from biographical interest, the letters are marked very early by Dickinson’s talent for language. She recreates in detail the limited world she knew—Amherst, the meeting house, daily family life—and she entertains with a surprising flare for witty appraisals of neighbors and family members. She shows little interest in external matters, even a civil war. The personality is present in her need for warm, human exchange and in her sensibility; but the inner life, which is the life of her poetry, rarely surfaces. The strengths, as well as the strangeness, of Dickinson’s poetry derive in large measure from her Puritan heritage. She saw, as she said, ‘‘New Englandly.’’ In the waning years of Puritanism, life remained for her a spiritual drama. She lived the drama, and she recorded it with the terseness of her native idiom. She did not translate the terms of the conflict simplistically into those of good and evil—evil did not interest her—but into the shifting oppositions of doubt and belief, of the known and the unknowable. Even her major themes—denial and renunciation—were the themes of the Puritan pulpit, enacted in the rigorous lives and other-worldliness of her ancestors. Her favorite verse forms were the short lines and stanza patterns of the hymnal. Dickinson is noted for the technical irregularities that aroused the scorn of some of her 19th-century reviewers—and caused drastic revisions by early editors: off-rhymes, broken meters, curious punctuation, and ungrammatical phrasing. These are given less importance by the less conventional-minded critics of today. The flaws rarely obtrude on her better poetry, and when they do, they hardly outweigh its virtues. At her best, she is a skillful prosodist, who adapted rhyme and meter to her purposes, achieving emotional shadings unobtainable by conventional means. Her elliptical grammar remains troublesome. It adds to an already highly abbreviated style the mark of mannerism, of private note-taking. In this century, Yvor Winters, Alan Tate, and R. P. Blackmur were among the first important critics to recognize her stature as a major poet. Winters’ assessment that she is ‘‘one of the greatest poets of our language’’ has stood. At extremes, she is childish or overdramatic. The ‘‘oddity’’ of her verse is more often than not the oddity of her genius for powerful expression, unexpected turns, and striking phrases. Her great achievement is that she confronted implacable truths with dreadful honesty and—in the words of another woman poet, Louise Bogan—had the ‘‘power to say the unsayable.’’ OTHER WORKS: Selected titles: Poems by Emily Dickinson, Second Series, edited by M. L. Todd and T. W. Higginson (1891).

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Poems by Emily Dickinson, Third Series, edited by M. L. Todd (1896). The Single Hound, edited by M. D. Bianchi (1914). The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by M. D. Bianchi and A. L. Hampson (1924). Further Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by M. Bianchi and A. L. Hampson (1929). The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by M. D. Bianchi and A. L. Hampson (1930). Unpublished Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by M. D. Bianchi and A. L. Hampson (1935). Poems by Emily Dickinson, edited by M. D. Bianchi and A. L. Hampson (1937). Ancestors’ Brocades: The Literary Debut of Emily Dickinson, edited by M. T. Bingham (1945). Bolts of Melody: New Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by M. L. Todd and M. T. Bingham (1945). The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by T. H. Johnson (1955). The Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by T. H. Johnson and T. Ward (1958). The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson, edited by J. Leyda (1960). Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson’s Poems, edited by T. H. Johnson (1961). The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson (1986). Selected Letters of Emily Dickinson (1986). Eleven Poems by Emily Dickinson (1988). A Brighter Garden: Poetry (1989). Inland Souls: Emily Dickinson Poems, Mary Beth Fogarty Paper Drawings (1989). Emily Dickinson Journal (1992). The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson (1993). The Works of Emily Dickinson (1994). Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing (1995). Seven Poems of Emily Dickinson (1995). Skies in Blossom: The Nature Poetry of Emily Dickinson (1995). Emily Dickinson: Selected Poems (1996). A Light Exists in Spring, and Other Poems (1996). The Essential Dickinson (1996). Final Harvest: Emily Dickinson’s Poems (1997). Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson (1998). The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1999). Both the Jones Library at Amherst College and the Houghton Library at Harvard University house collections of Emily Dickinson’s manuscripts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Alfrey, S., The Sublime of Intense Sociability: Emily Dickinson, H. D., and Gertrude Stein (1999). Anderson, C. R., Emily Dickinson’s Poetry: Stairway of Surprise (1960). Blackmur, R. P., Language as Gesture (1952). Cameron, S., Choosing Not Choosing (1992). Caze, A., ed., Emily Dickinson (1997). Chase, R., Emily Dickinson (1951). Cunningham, J. V., Collected Essays (1976). Donoghue, D., Emily Dickinson (1969). Eberwein, J. D., ed., An Emily Dickinson Encyclopedia (1998). Farr, J., The Passion of Emily Dickinson (1994). Franklin, R. W., ed., The Mansucript Books of Emily Dickinson (2 volumes, 1981). Frye, N., Fables of Identity (1963). Fuller, J., The Diary of Emily Dickinson (1993). Fulton, A., Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry (1999). Grabher, G., et al eds., Emily Dickinson Handbook (1998). Gelpi, J., Emily Dickinson: The Mind of the Poet (1965). Griffith, C., The Long Shadow: Emily Dickinson’s Tragic Poetry (1964). Higgins, D., Portrait of Emily Dickinson: The Poet and Her Prose (1967). Juhasz, ed., Feminist Critics Read Emily Dickinson (1983). Loeffelholz, M., Dickinson and the Boundaries of Feminist Thought (1991). Longsworth, P., The World of Emily Dickinson (1997). Lundin, R.,


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Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief (1998). Miller, C., Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar (1987). Pearce, R. H., The Continuity of American Poetry (1961). Perkins, C. N., 100 Authors Who Shaped World History (1996). Petrino, E. A., Emily Dickinson and Her Contemporaries: Women’s Verse in America, 1820-1885 (1998). St. Armand, B. L., Emily Dickinson and her Culture: The Soul’s Society (1984). Sewall, R. B., The Life of Emily Dickinson (1974). Simon, M., and T. H. Parsons, eds., Transcendentalism and Its Legacy (1966). Small, J. J., Postitive as Sound: Emily Dickinson’s Rhyme (1990). Smith, M. N., Rowing in Eden: Rereading Emily Dickinson (1992). Stein, E., A Ribbon at a Time: A Portrait of Emily Dickinson (1996). Strait, D. H., The Work of Community: Solitude, Service, and Experience in Selected Prose and Poetry of George Herbert and Emily Dickinson (dissertation, 1998). Tanter, M. L., ‘‘Behind the Wall of Sense’’: Emily Dickinson and her Nineteenth-Century British Writers (dissertation, 1996). Tate, A., Collected Essays (1959). Teegarden, L. M., ‘‘The Search of the Circumferencial Poet: A Study of the Religious Questionings of Emily Dickinson’’ (thesis, 1994). Ward, T., The Capsule of the Mind: Chapters in the Life of Emily Dickinson (1961). Winters, Y., Maule’s Curse (1938). Wolff, C. G., Emily Dickinson (1986). Other references: American Literature (Sept., 1994). Architectural Digest (July, 1992). Perspectives USA (Spring 1956). Legacy (1998). Journal of American History (1999). NYRB (May 1990, 1999). NYTBR (December 1998). New England Quarterly (June 1993, 1997). —MARGARET PETERSON

DIDION, Joan Born 5 December 1934, Sacramento, California Daughter of Frank R. and Eduene Jerrett Didion; married John Gregory Dunne, 1964 Joan Didion graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a B.A. in English in 1956, and in the same year became an associate feature editor with Vogue magazine in New York City. She remained at Vogue until 1963, the year in which she published Run River, her first novel. Between 1963 and 1969, Didion wrote essays and feature articles for Vogue, the National Review, Harper’s, Holiday, and, most regularly, the Saturday Evening Post. Her first collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem was published in 1968, and in the same year she became a contributing editor of Life magazine. Slouching Towards Bethlehem’s essays, all published previously (the majority in the Saturday Evening Post) make a powerful statement about American society in the 1960s. The title essay describes the variety of young people Didion met in 1967 when she spent some time in Haight-Ashbury. It is a vivid narrative, a

recording of actual dialogue conveying the pathetic naiveté of the ‘‘flower children,’’ drifting through drug-filled days, their lives circumscribed by a few vague ideas rendered only in pale and repetitious platitudes. The other essays that comprise the first section of the collection, entitled ‘‘Life Styles in the Golden Land,’’ are companion pieces to the title essay in that they either dramatize a desperation for immediate gratification or recall with nostalgia the old American values of courage, self-sufficiency, and privacy. In all of these essays, California emerges as the last frontier of American idealism, the place where people act out their largely vain hopes for peace, for community, for eternal romance. The two final sections of Slouching Towards Bethlehem consist of five personal essays and seven that seek to capture the peculiar spirit and flavor of a geographical place. These 12 essays mingle the objective and the frankly personal; they provide an insight into Didion’s background and her character, which is observant, self-critical, unsentimental, and keenly sensitive to all types of irony and incongruity. Didion has all the qualities of a brilliant essayist. Her themes are clear, her anecdotes dramatic, her style swift and crisp. In addition to their merit as models of prose style, her essays increase our understanding of her fiction. ‘‘Notes from a Native Daughter’’ narrates the history of the Sacramento Valley, the setting for Run River, and ‘‘Los Angeles Notebook’’ depicts this city as one of impersonal tensions, while providing sketches of the barren relationships we find in Play It as It Lays. Between 1971, the year in which her second novel, Play It as It Lays appeared, and 1977, Didion concentrated primarily on her fiction, pausing only to do an occasional screenplay with her husband. (Didion and Dunne collaborated on the screenplay for the film version of Play It as It Lays, and on the script for the Barbra Streisand version of A Star Is Born.) Her novel A Book of Common Prayer appeared in March 1977. In 1972 Didion alienated many feminists with an essay in the New York Times Book Review that attacked feminists for their tendency to become obsessed with trivia. The essay makes explicit a view of women that is pervasive in her fiction; women share, she believes, a ‘‘sense of living one’s deepest life underwater, that dark involvement with blood and birth and death.’’ In the same essay, Didion attacked narrow feminist interpretations of literature, expressing the view that since the writer is committed to the ‘‘exploration of moral distinctions and ambiguities,’’ all political interpretations of literature must of necessity represent a distortion. Ironically, there is much in Didion’s fiction to appeal to the true feminist. Each of her novels concerns the experience of women—their relationships with men, with their parents and children, and with each other. Maria Wyeth, the central character of Play It as It Lays, feels her closest bonds with her daughter and her dead mother; Grace Strasser-Mendana, the narrator of A Book of Common Prayer, is not only the strongest and most rational character in the novel, but also feels a sisterly bond with Charlotte Douglas, whose life and death form the subject of the book.

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Didion’s deepest concern, however, is with the illusions on which people build their lives, illusions made necessary by the death of old values and the absence of viable new ones. Her novels dramatize the consequences of social, economic, and political change that occurs so rapidly as to produce disorder in individual lives, in families, and, ultimately, in whole societies. In Run River, set in the early 1940s, Didion studies the younger generation of two old families of California’s Sacramento Valley. In this work, Didion demonstrated the qualities for which her fiction has become known—swift action, convincing dialogue, and the ability to render complex female characters struggling to find purpose in a disordered society. The chief weakness of the book is the wooden character of Everett; as the pivotal male figure loved desperately by the two central female characters, he required sharper delineation than Didion gave him. Play It as It Lays is a biting portrayal of a world in which people use each other to gain success, recognition, or sensual pleasure. Because men possess most of the power, women are especially likely to be victims. As narrator of the novel, Didion is unobtrusive, completely neutral; she simply presents Maria’s thoughts and actions. As a consequence of her technique, the reader is not sure of her attitude toward her central character. Some reviewers of the novel considered Maria the victim of a brutal society; others considered her malevolent. The truth lies somewhere between these extreme interpretations. As a child/ woman, Maria is far too fragile for the society in which she lived; however, through her passivity she participates in her own exploitation so her breakdown becomes, in effect, a self-confirming prophecy. In A Book of Common Prayer, Didion’s strongest female character yet serves as narrator. This is Didion’s most ambitious novel in several respects; it has the most complex narrative structure: since the narrator met Charlotte Douglas late in both their lives, she must convincingly reconstruct all the previous action involving her. It also has the most complex cast of characters, four of whom—Charlotte, Grace, and Charlotte’s two husbands—are fully developed, and the most complex setting, with scenes in San Francisco, New York City, and several Southern cities, all interlaced with scenes in Boca Grande, a fictitious Central American country Didion renders as convincing as any of the other locales. In these two novels, Didion has refined a tight and colloquial style, stripped of any expansive descriptions or explanations. The strength of her fiction resides in this dramatic style, bringing the reader close to the events and characters and to render complex, often ironic, relationships through pure dialogue. Since 1979, most of Didion’s work has been nonfiction; she has published only one novel, Democracy (1984), which is fiction appearing as nonfiction, even journalism. Didion places herself in the book as a narrator recounting the story of the Christian and Victor families and of their rise and eventual fall. Deliberately blurring the distinctions between fiction and journalism, Didion creates a convincing narrative, especially in its climax against the backdrop of the U.S. evacuation of Saigon and the fall of the city.

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The White Album (1979) is Didion’s second collection of essays, most of which were previously published in such magazines as Esquire and Life. The essays record her response to events of the late 1960s and early 1970s, including reflections on the Manson family, and a return to the subject of Hollywood, described here ironically as ‘‘the last extant stable society.’’ The volume also reprints Didion’s essay on the women’s movement, which caused considerable controversy among feminists when it first appeared in 1972. Didion takes less political looks at Georgia O’Keeffe, writes about personal experiences with migraines and travels in Hawaii and Bogotá and even includes her own psychiatric evaluation. Salvador (1982) is a difficult, extended essay documenting Didion’s two-week stay in the country. In one sense a travel diary, the book seeks to provide insight into the complexities plaguing Central America. She presents the conflict in El Salvador with little explanation or background; the confusion of the narrative mirrors the senselessness of the violence and hate she finds there. Often the people she meets who are involved in the fighting do not seem to understand the conflict themselves. Quite scathingly critical of American involvement in the crisis, Didion finds the ‘‘mechanism of terror’’ to be beyond irony. Salvador is Didion at her most despairing. In Miami (1987), Didion analyzes the many complexities of the society, culture, and politics of a city of exiles and racial groups deeply at odds. Within the context of the history of U.S.Cuban relations and its many failures, she explores the diverse views and feelings of Cuban exiles and the impact of the experience of exile. The book richly demonstrates Didion’s ability to see the many sides of a difficult and confusing situation. Didion’s ability to recognize, imagine, and capture a variety of viewpoints and her mastery of the language establish her as a major writer. As critic Joan Zseleckzy concluded, ‘‘It is not any journalist who can write a novel. It is not any journalist who can tell a story.’’ Didion has continued to contribute to a variety of magazines, particularly the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and to write screenplays with her husband (including 1996’s Up Close and Personal starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer). All of her work takes an honest, often cynical view of politics, society, personal relationships, even of Didion herself. A master of language and prose, she conveys ideas succinctly in a spare but eloquent style. Believing that ‘‘we tell ourselves stories in order to live,’’ her work continues to be driven by her sense of moral urgency. In Didion’s recent literary offering, The Last Thing He Wanted (1996), she weaves a web of covert operations and cloaked assassination attempts in a stunningly written arms-deal-for-hostages story making it all too clear that American foreign policy is not always created by branches of the government. Told in the objective, almost disembodied voice of investigative journalist Lilianne Owen, the reader follows along as the reporter reconstructs the story 10 years after its actual occurrence. Didion’s format in The Last Thing He Wanted is quite effective. The reader is led through the journalist’s reconstruction


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of the story and, in effect, eavesdrops on the ‘‘raw notes’’ dictated into the journalist’s tape recorder. Lilianne is an enigma. She very often seems to be the protagonist Elena, but reminds the reader she (Lilianne) is only reconstructing Elena’s story. An interesting approach, especially since the reader is never given much information about Lilianne. When asked why she wanted to write a thriller such as Last Thing, Didion replied, ‘‘I had never written anything that depended totally on working out a plot, where everything has to mean something. It was a technical exercise. It is quite hard to do, but quite interesting.’’ The result is some of Didion’s finest work.

OTHER WORKS: Telling Stories (1978). After Henry (1992, in the U.K. as Sentimental Journeys). Some Women (1992).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Friedman, E. G., Joan Didion: Essays and Conversations (1984). Gender Studies: New Directions in Feminist Criticism (1986). Hanley, L. T., Writing War: Fiction, Gender, and Memory (1991). Henderson, K. U., Joan Didion (1981). Merivale, P., ed., Innocence, Loss, and Recovery in the Art of Joan Didion (1989). Pearlman, M., ed., American Women Writing Fiction (1989). Winchell, M. R., Joan Didion (1980). Reference works: CA (1969). CANR (1985). CLC (1973, 1975, 1978, 1980, 1985). CB (1978). DLB (1978). DLBY (1981, 1986). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). Modern American Women Writers (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: America (5 April 1997). American Literature (Oct. 1987). Booklist (July 1996). Commentary (July 1977). Critique (Spring 1984). Esquire (June 1990, Mar. 1996). Harper’s (Dec. 1971). Hollins Critic (Oct. 1989). Ms. (Jan. 1973). Massachusetts Review (Spring 1983). NR (25 Mar. 1996). NYTBR (3 Apr. 1977, 17 May 1992). PW (13 Nov. 1987, 24 June 1996). Saturday Review (Apr. 1982). South Carolina Review (Spring 1989). Working Woman (April 1982). —KATHY HENDERSON,

forces its way through the picturesque. Annie Dillard’s writings beautifully depict earthly places, but she is no tourist. Nor, as some would have it, is she a sort of roving regionalist. Raised in the city, she adopted the Blue Ridge creeks, valleys, and hills around Roanoke, Virginia, during and after her days at Hollins College. She now is scholar-in-residence at Western Washington State College and lives on northern Puget Sound. Dillard startled critics with Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974. Viewed by many as a naturalist who brilliantly revealed nature’s fecundity and violence, Dillard was compared to writers as disparate as Thoreau and Melville. Nature is not her real focus, however. She says of her work, ‘‘Art is my interest, mysticism my message, Christian mysticism.’’ Indeed, the ultimate meaning of all her work is missed if Dillard is interpreted as a Thoreauvian transcendentalist. The faults identified by many commentators—her extreme allusiveness and toodense imagery, her obliviousness to what humans have done to nature, her ‘‘escapism’’—can all be accounted for if the reader understands that Dillard’s main subject is not creation (nature), but Creator. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is, she says, ‘‘really a book of theology’’ it records the changing patterns of nature over a year in a few acres on Tinker Creek, in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The year is as liturgical as it is natural, and this ‘‘journal’’ is a mystic meditation on the terror and glory of creation. The terror is captured in such episodes as the giant water bug sucking out the frog’s life blood or the praying mantis consuming her mate as he couples with her. Also revealed is creation’s glory, experienced only in unselfconscious instants, where the ego is diminished in selfless epiphanies of complete understanding. Dillard’s mission is to see fully. Tickets for a Prayer Wheel (1974) presents several visionary and difficult poems that use private religious symbolism. Other poems in the volume are more accessible, excellent topical works which focus on a quotation. The title poem of the volume prefigures the ideas and images of Holy the Firm (1977). The prayer wheel ‘‘tickets’’ are various prayers, as the narrator begins: ‘‘Our family is looking / for someone who knows how to pray.’’

UPDATED BY SHAUNA SUMMERS AND REBECCA C. CONDIT

DILLARD, Annie Born 30 April 1945, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Daughter of Frank and Pain Lambert Doak; married Richard Dillard, 1965. For the tourist, places are ends in themselves, scenes to be consumed by the ravishing eye. For the pilgrim, places are means—of refreshment, of soul-building, of education about the Way. To the pilgrim, allegory dissolves mere scenery, the picture

A parable of creation and the incarnation, a revelation of grace in the face of the suffering and evil of the world, Holy the Firm is concentrated, spare, deep, intensely poetic. The emphasis is still on the narrator’s relationship with the Creator. The work is a very personal explanation of the doctrines of immanence and emanation. To immanence, ‘‘Christ is redundant, and all things are one,’’ while to emanation, the world is wholly other, linked to God through Christ. Dillard, like many mystics, opts for a reconciliation of these two views: ‘‘And the universe is real and not a dream, not a manufacture of the senses; subject may know object, knowledge may proceed.’’ Describing the ‘‘writing life’’ Dillard asserts that ‘‘the art must enter the body.’’ From her Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek she establishes this relationship with both her

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writing and the environment it reflects. Rather than objectively observing the scenes of her life, she experiences them as religious encounters. Her early work, up through Holy the Firm, secured Dillard a place among both naturalist and mystical essayists. Within her natural descriptions, Dillard theologizes on creation and its creator. A searching spirituality tempers her acute physical perceptions to create works heavy in allusionary and abstract meaning. After Holy the Firm, Dillard began to change her focus from external to internal environments. With the 1982 publications of Living by Fiction and Teaching a Stone to Talk, the grand spiritual abstraction that characterized her early natural vision gave way to a more personal and human intimacy. Living by Fiction explores the landscape of fiction as a natural sphere of influence and means of personal definition, while Teaching a Stone to Talk continues to rely on nature as landscape. Although her earlier work suggests that meaning is present and observable in nature, Dillard’s later work begins to examine her personal interactions with the landscape, recognizing that most meaning is humanly imposed on a scene. Dillard clarified this movement with the 1984 publication of Encounters with Chinese Writers, a collection of essays based on her experience as a member of the U.S. Cultural Delegation to China in 1982. Describing a foreign landscape and people, Dillard seeks personal definition within cultural difference. In her autobiography, the National Book Critics Circle-nominated An American Childhood (1987), Dillard brings that search back to the most familiar of all landscapes—childhood. Both works exhibit a fluid exchange between the writer and her landscape. The writing itself becomes more concrete and accessible. By the time of publication of The Writing Life (1989) Dillard has struggled to identify the tracks of her thoughts and the fissures they leave in the observed landscapes. Her writing no longer exposes only the interaction of God and nature as creator and creation, but the human mind as both creator and creation. Dillard’s movement into fiction attests to her attempt to understand the complex relationship between the human mind and the natural world. The Living (1992) chronicles the growth of Bellingham Bay and its inhabitants. Although the novel is historical, Dillard concentrates on the parallel evolutions of the personal and the physical landscapes. Literary critics have commented on the difficulty of pinning Dillard down. Indeed, ambivalence is the engine that powers her work: the strength with which she can make an argument and then subsequently (or even simultaneously) present an opposing view with equal conviction. A Dillard trademark is the uninhibited, unbridled awe with which she views the world, and this marvel extends to its apparent contradictions. She depicts the wonder of God’s creation, at the same time wondering if He gives a hoot about it. In a recent essay, ‘‘Sand and Clouds,’’ she quotes the Mahabarata: ‘‘Of all the world’s wonders, which is the most wonderful? That no man, though he sees others dying all around him, believes that he himself will die.’’

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In ‘‘The Wreck of Time, Taking our Century’s Measure,’’ Dillard piles on statistic after statistic (130,000 drowned in Bangladesh, 69 suns in the universe for every living person), hammering home the idea of our insignificance; at the same time she makes clear her belief that while her readers may be moved by these numbers, they will nonetheless be unable to give up the idea that their individual lives matter. Death has always been ubiquitous in Dillard’s writing; it has perhaps been especially morbid dating back to The Living, in which she fills a small cemetery with dead characters. This millennial essay is steeped in morbidity— horrible natural disasters juxtaposed with the man-made horrors of Holocaust and purge. She makes a strong case, concluding: ‘‘We arise from dirt and dwindle to dirt, and the might of the universe is arrayed against us.’’ Yet beside this she sets the strong possibility that all life is sacred. Perhaps Dillard’s writing should be seen as not only ambivalent but provisional, as suggested by the title of her 1999 collection of essays, For the Time Being. Mornings Like This (1995) is a collection of poems constructed from sentences Dillard lifted from sources as various as an antique medical text and the New Testament Apocrypha. ‘‘Sarcasm has no place in literature,’’ Dillard told an interviewer in 1996, ‘‘but irony has the highest place.’’ She introduces Mornings Like This with: ‘‘Half the poems seek to serve poetry’s oldest and most sincere aims with one of its newest and most ironic methods, to dig deep with a shallow tool. The other half are just jokes.’’ True to her word the book is alternately heartbreaking and hilarious, irony in service of ambivalence. Dillard’s older work continues to find new readers. In addition to being heavily anthologized, it has been collected in Three by Dillard (1990) and The Annie Dillard Reader (1995). She was the 1988 editor of The Best American Essays and editor of the 1995 anthology, Modern American Memoirs. Her latest project was a new book, ‘‘a personal narration about God and the problem of pain.’’ Dillard resides in Middletown, Connecticut, with her husband and daughter. A writer-in-residence and professor at Wesleyan University, she has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1980-81) and the Guggenheim Foundation (1985-86).

OTHER WORKS: ‘‘Sand and Clouds,’’ Raritan (fall 1998).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bawer, B., ‘‘Quiet—Author Suffering,’’ in American Scholar (Summer 1990). Clark, S., ‘‘Annie Dillard: The Woman in Nature and the Subject of Nonfiction,’’ in Literary Nonfiction (1989). Guenther, C., ‘‘Dillard Finds Poems in Others’ Work,’’ in St. Louis Post-Dispatch (25 June 1995). Johnson, S. H., The Space Between: Literary Epiphany in the Work of Annie Dillard (1992). Kingsolver, B., ‘‘Whipsawed in Washington,’’ in Nation (25 May 1992). Scheick, W., ‘‘Annie Dillard: Narrative Fringe,’’ in Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative


Strategies (1985). Suhl, G., ‘‘Ideas are Tough; Irony is Easy,’’ in Yale Herald (online, 4 Oct. 1996). Smith, P. A., ‘‘The Ecotheology of Annie Dillard,’’ Cross Currents (Fall 1995.) Other references: America (8 Oct. 1977). Amer. Lit. 59:1 (March 1987). Belles Lettres 8 (Fall 1992). Booklist, (1 June 1995). Commentary (Oct. 1974). CW (24 Oct. 1975). J. Feminist Studies in Religion 6 (Spring 1990). Harper’s (Jan. 1998). Hungry Mind Review (1 Nov. 1995). LA Times (25 May 1992). LATBR (25 Sept. 1988). Ms. (June 1985). Nation (16 Oct. 1989, 25 May 1992). NewR (6 Apr. 1974). NYTBR (24 Mar. 1974, 25 Sept. 1977, 9 May 1982, 23 Sept. 1984, 27 Sept. 1987, 18 Nov. 1990). Sewanee Review 92 (Winter 1984). Signs 15 (Spring 1990). So. Atl. Q. 85 (Spring 1986). VQR (Fall 1974). WRB (Jan. 1988). —MARGARET MCFADDEN-GERBER, UPDATED BY JULLIE ANN FIORE AND VALERIE VOGRIN

DINNIES, Anna Peyre (Shackelford) Born 7 February 1805, Georgetown, South Carolina; died 8 August 1886, New Orleans, Louisiana Also wrote under: Moina, Rachel, Mrs. Anna Peyre Daughter of W. F. Shackelford; married John C. Dinnies, 1830 A lifelong resident of the South, Anna Peyre Dinnies showed at an early age the promise of genius and a talent for poetry. Her father, a judge and a distinguished scholar, supported her literary ambitions and is said to have ‘‘happily and effectively’’ influenced her literary taste. Fortunate enough to be educated at the Female Seminary of the Miss Ramsays in Charleston, South Carolina, Dinnies was further encouraged and her talents developed. In 1826 Anna and John C. Dinnies began a four-year correspondence, but Anna did not meet her husband-to-be until a week before their wedding. Sarah Josepha Hale wrote in her anthology, The Ladies’ Wreath (1837), that the Dinnies’ marriage contract was ‘‘entered into solely from sympathy and congeniality of mind and taste.’’ Although Dinnies wrote before she was married, her published poetry comes chiefly after 1830. Known as a poet of ‘‘Domestic Affections’’ because she relied heavily on themes of married life, contemporary critics took her work to be a reflection of her own happily wedded state. Hale commented that Dinnies’ poetry ‘‘breathes the tender, trusting, and devoted feeling of conjugal love, in a manner very flattering to her husband.’’ Whether or not Dinnies’ poems reflect her personal happiness, they do present an idealized vision of marriage. Dinnies’ most famous and frequently anthologized poem, ‘‘The Wife,’’ is typical of her work. In it she tells of the dependency of a wife upon her husband:

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I could have stemmed misfortune’s tide, And borne the rich one’s sneer, Have braved the haughty glance of pride, Nor shed a single tear. I could have smiled on every blow From Life’s full quiver thrown, While I might gaze on thee, and know I should not be ‘alone.’ Others of Dinnies’ poems are as unremittingly romantic. Focusing as they do on the modesty of woman and the perfections of marriage, they strike the modern reader as excessively emotional. For example, in her poem, ‘‘The Blush,’’ she defines a blush as ‘‘A gush of feeling from the soul!’’ Dinnies often uses emotion to a didactic end, as in ‘‘To My Husband’s First Gray Hair.’’ Here the wife of the poem first laments the gray hair and later sees in it a reminder that all things must pass away. Dinnies’ work is not entirely without humor, depth, and an occasional sharp edge. In ‘‘Wedded Love,’’ the wife of the poem lifts her husband out of his depression not by praising his virtues but by affirming her own good taste. He is superior to other men because she would not have ‘‘stooped to bind / Her fate unto a common mind.’’ The poem ‘‘Addressed to My Daughter While She Slept’’ shows another side of Dinnies’ work. Although the first stanza gives the reader the traditional image of a mother and her sleeping child, the next six stanzas focus on the unhappy changes that accompany childhood and young womanhood. The last stanza alludes to the difficult life of an adult woman and all the ‘‘sorrows woman must sustain.’’ The majority of Dinnies’ literary work appeared in various Southern journals. She wrote for the Illinois Quarterly under the name of Moina, and she contributed a series of didactic articles called ‘‘Rachel’s What Not’’ for the weekly Catholic Standard, edited by her husband. Dinnies also published an illustrated volume called The Floral Year (1847), containing 100 compositions in 12 groups, along with illustrations of different bouquets, one for each month. This volume was typical of the many early 19th-century anthologies of ‘‘flower sentiment,’’ in which poetry is combined with pictures of flowers. Although she published only one book, Dinnies’ poetry was frequently anthologized in such volumes. Today her book and others like it seem literary curiosities. Nonetheless, Dinnies and other traditional poets of the early 19th century take their place as precursors of more significant American poets, Emily Dickinson among them. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Coggeshall, W. T., The Poets and Poetry of the West: With Biographical and Critical Notes (1861). Griswold, R. W., The Female Poets of America (1873). Hale, S. J., Flora’s Interpreter; or the American Book of Flowers and Sentiments (1848). Hale, S. J., The Ladies’ Wreath (1837). Stedman, E. C., ed., An American Anthology, 1787-1900 (1900). Watts, E. S., The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945 (1977). Reference works: A Cyclopedia of Female Biography (1857). Woman’s Record (1853). —BILLIE J. WAHLSTROM

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DiPRIMA, Diane Born 6 August 1934, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Francis and Emma Mallozzi DiPrima; married Alan S. Marlowe, 1962 (divorced); Grant Fisher, 1972 (divorced); children: Jeanne, Dominique, Alexander, Tara, Rudra Since the late 1950s, Diane DiPrima has earned recognition for writings marked by a spirit of rebellion and countercultural exploration. Perhaps best known as a poet and editor, she has also published novels, plays, and translations. Her early writing chronicles the experiences of the Beat Generation, with special attention to the female dimensions of this culture. Together with LeRoi Jones (Imiri Baraka), DiPrima coedited the Floating Bear (1961-69), a monthly poetry newsletter that became one of the most influential publications of its kind, featuring many important Beat writers. In all her work, she has maintained a strong consciousness of her identity as a woman writer, depicting through personal relationships, political tensions, and mythological images a particularly female experience or truth. DiPrima was born in Brooklyn, New York, a second generation American of Italian descent. She began writing at the age of seven and had decided to become a poet by the age of fourteen. Enrolling in Swarthmore College at seventeen, DiPrima dropped out two years later and returned to New York, to Greenwich Village and the emerging Beat scene there. She published her first book of poems, This Kind of Bird Flies Backwards, with LeRoi Jones’s Totem Press in 1958. These poems make generous use of the Beat idiom, in such lines as ‘‘Like man don’t flip, I’m hip you / cooled this scene.’’ The book also reveals DiPrima’s early interest in myths and fables, which become central motives in Loba: Parts I-VII (1973), one of her major works of poetry. DiPrima’s autobiographical novel Memoirs of a Beatnik (1969) describes her experience among the Beats. Some critics consider her ‘‘female’’ experience circumscribed in comparison to the rambling adventures of such male Beats as Jack Kerouac. Others see DiPrima’s work as adding an important dimension to our understanding of the Beat world, reminding us, George Butterick notes, ‘‘that the generation spent as much time in urban ‘pads’ as it did ‘on the road,’ and that one can travel as far by human relationships as by thumb.’’ Along with the Floating Bear, DiPrima worked with several other influential poetry journals of the time, including Kulchur and Yugen. She and husband Alan Marlowe founded the Poets Press (1964-69) and the New York Poets Theatre (1961-65), which produced plays by Frank O’Hara, Robert Duncan, James Schuyler, and others. Her own plays were performed at the Living Theater in New York. In 1965 DiPrima moved to upstate New York, where she joined Timothy Leary’s psychedelic community at Millbrook. She continued to write and received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1973 and 1979. DiPrima’s poetry is often highly accessible in language and emotion, revealing ‘‘a willingness to trust language with deep

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feelings even if it is to declare more than explore those feelings.’’ Her most challenging poems use a complex symbolism that is both idiosyncratic and archetypal. These poems, Butterick writes, ‘‘represent private feelings revealed in the tradition of symbolism, if not in traditional symbols themselves.’’ In ‘‘The Waiting Room’’ (The New Handbook of Heaven, 1963) she writes: ‘‘Every human skull / uncovered, is one more home / for the spirits of darkness. / I leave the dice at the rat hole every night / no one keeps score.’’ In Loba, DiPrima turns her symbolizing to the task of creating an epic of the female principle. ‘‘Loba’’ is a protean character, transforming from spirit to beast to human, alternately representing a Lilith- and an Eve-figure. This mythic persona embodies female power in a variety of forms, as in these first lines: ‘‘O lost moon sisters / crescent in hair, sea underfoot do you wander / in blue veil, in green leaf, in tattered shawl do you wander / with goldleaf skin, with flaming hair do you wander / on Avenue A, on Bleecker Street do you wander.’’ The full 16 parts of Loba were published for the first time in 1998 to critical acclaim. Reviewer William Gargon noted that the strength of this epic poem ‘‘lies in DiPrima’s ability to ‘make it new’—to synthesize mythological elements from a wide range of cultures into a unique vision based on Navajo wolf mythology.’’ Critic Armand Schwerner argues that DiPrima’s verse is not always equal to her task: that ‘‘in the attempt to particularize within the context of ‘the life of mankind,’’’ her language ‘‘sometimes falls into banality.’’ Yet, he acknowledges, ‘‘the attempt, the order of inclusiveness, the mythopoetic reach are a contribution to that profound ongoing process of poetry which. . .continues the self-transformative aims of our alchemical fathers.’’ For the past 20 years, DiPrima has lived in Northern California, where she has written, taught, and practiced Buddhism and healing arts. From 1980 to 1986 she taught hermetic and esoteric traditions in poetry at New College of California’s short lived but important program. She now resides in San Francisco, where she is a cofounder and teacher at the San Francisco Institute of Magical and Healing Arts. Her works in progress currently include a book on Percy Bysshe Shelley as both poet and magician; a satire of life in California titled Not Quite Buffalo Stew, whose narrator is a drug smuggler named Lynx; and an autobiographical memoir called Recollections of My Life as a Woman.

OTHER WORKS: Murder Cake (1960). Like (1960). Paideuma (1960). The Discontent of a Russian Prince (1961). Dinners and Nightmares (1961, reprints 1974, 1977). The Monster (1961). Poets Vaudeville (1964). Like (1964). Combination Theater Poem and Birthday Poem for 10 People (1965). Spring and Autumn Annals (1966). Some Haiku (1966). Haiku (1967). Earthsong: Poems, 1957-1959 (1968). Audre Lord, The First Cities (1968). Monuments (1968). Hotel Albert: Poems (1968). New Mexico Poems, June-July 1967 (1968). War Poems (1968). Revolutionary


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Letters (1969). L.A. Odyssey (1969). Notes on a Summer Solstice (1969). The Book of Hours (1970). Kerhonkson Journal 1966 (1971). New As 1966 (1971). Prayer to the Mothers (1971). So Fine (1971). XV Dedications: Poems (1971). The Calculus of Variation (1972). Discovery of America (1972). Freddie: Poems (1974). North Country Medicine (1974). Brass Furnace Going Out: Song after an Abortion (1975). Whale Honey (1975). Selected Poems, 1956-1975 (1975). Loba as Eve (1975). Loba, Part 2 (1976). Revolutionary Letters, etc. (1979). Pieces of a Song: Selected Poems (1989). Zipcode: The Collected Plays of Diane DiPrima (1992). Manuscripts of Diane DiPrima are housed in the Manuscript Collection of the Southern Illinois University, in Carbondale, Illinois.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Knight, A. W., ed., The Beat Road (1984). Reference works: CANR (1984). CP (1980, 1991). DLB (1980, 1983). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Book Review 2 (May 1980, June/ July 1991). LJ (Aug. 1998). MELUS (Fall-Winter 1987). NYTM (5 Nov. 1995). Rocky Ledge (Feb.-Mar. 1981). VV (13 June 1974, 9 May 1989). Web site: ‘‘Diane DiPrima Interview,’’ available online at http://www.rahul.net/joem/works/i-DiPrima.html (22 Sept. 1993). —MARY BURGER, UPDATED BY LEAH J. SPARKS

DISNEY, Doris Miles Born 22 December 1907, Glastonbury, Connecticut; died 9 March 1976, Fredericksburg, Virginia Daughter of Edward L. Hart and Elizabeth Malone Miles; married George J. Disney, 1936 (died); children: one daughter Doris Miles Disney was a prolific, versatile writer of mystery and suspense; she has been praised for never repeating herself, and for skillfully varying her approaches. Disney created three detectives; each is a fully realized and distinct character. Jim O’Neill, a county detective; Jefferson DiMarco, an insurance claim adjuster, the most famous; and David Madden, a U.S. postal inspector. In Disney’s fiction, suspense evolves from both plot and character. Her characters are round and consistently portrayed, their relationships and motivations often creating complex plots. She was particularly adept at characterizing children. For example, Jenny, an eight-year-old girl in Don’t Go into the Woods Today (1974), and Sandy, a sevenyear-old boy recuperating from rheumatic fever in Heavy, Heavy Hangs (1952), are sometimes cranky, frequently confused by the

grown-up world, occasionally disobedient, but often charming and always believable. Disney began with true mysteries, in which the criminal’s identity is withheld until the climax (see, for example, A Compound for Death, 1943, and Murder on a Tangent, 1945, both Jim O’Neill mysteries). Dark Road (1946), a Jeff DiMarco story, is an inverted mystery, in which the murderer’s identity and motivation are revealed early. Hazel Clements causes her husband’s death because of her desire to be reunited with an old lover. Her greed and ambition are clearly shown, but so is the awful background that helps to explain her actions. At the end, the question of responsibility is paramount, her lover recognizing he has been her unwitting accomplice. Freely adapted, this novel was the basis of a film called Fugitive Lady (released through Republic in 1951). Straw Man (1951; filmed by United Artists, 1953), a Jeff DiMarco novel, begins a true mystery but reveals the criminal’s identity midway. Loosely paralleling Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (which is alluded to), it movingly shows the alienation and withdrawal of a man wrongly convicted of murder. For several novels Disney turned to the past. At Some Forgotten Door (1966), a variation on gothic romance, has a partly predictable plot but builds suspense gradually, as the heroine fits together clues to help her understand both her origins and her present danger. Both mysteries are clarified in a powerful climactic scene. Dark Lady (1960) blends past and present; a young professor rents a cottage in which the wife of a gifted young writer had been murdered 75 years earlier. Becoming obsessed with the writer’s beautiful sister-in-law, he solves the old mystery and learns to see his own present more clearly. Disney skillfully manipulated tone as well as plot, as in Family Skeleton (1949), a Jeff DiMarco story, showing what happens when a family first conceals the accidental killing of a cantankerous uncle and then frantically tries to reclaim his body in order to collect his insurance. Their macabre misadventures were filmed by Fox as Stella (1950). More gently comic is Room for Murder (1955), set in a boarding house run by Irish spinsters, one of whom is addicted to true crime magazines and tries to solve the case for the police. The Day Miss Bessie Lewis Disappeared (1972) is more purely comic but also more astringent; Miss Bessie is an elderly termagant, and her former husband, an unsuccessful opportunist, is almost as comically inept as the two goons who trail him. Disney’s novels are consistently interesting and readable— the originality of her plots, the effectiveness of her characterizations, and her skill in controlling tone made her a leader among mystery writers. In addition, her ability to show how victims sometimes precipitate their own fates and how the commission of a crime affects the criminal gives her work a depth often lacking in this genre.

OTHER WORKS: Who Rides a Tiger (1946). Appointment at Nine (1947). Enduring Old Charms (1947). Testimony by Silence

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(1948). That Which Is Crooked (1948). Count the Ways (1949). Fire at Will (1950). Look Back on Murder (1951). Do Unto Others (1953). Prescription: Murder (1953). The Last Straw (1954). Trick or Treat (1955). Unappointed Rounds (1956). Method in Madness (1957). My Neighbor’s Wife (1957). Black Mail (1958). Did She Fall or Was She Pushed? (1959). No Next of Kin (1959). Mrs. Meeker’s Money (1961). Find the Woman (1962). Should Auld Acquaintance (1962). Here Lies. . . (1963). The Departure of Mr. Gaudette (1964). The Hospitality of the House (1964). Shadow of a Man (1965). The Magic Grandfather (1966). Night of Clear Choice (1967). Money for the Taking (1968). Voice from the Grave (1968). Two Little Children and How They Grew (1969). Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate (1970). The Chandler Policy (1971). Three’s a Crowd (1971). Only Couples Need Apply (1973). Cry for Help (1975). Winifred (1976). Papers of Doris Miles Disney can be found in the Mugar Memorial Library of Boston University.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996). LJ (15 May 1966). NYHTB (31 Oct. 1948, 21 Oct. 1951). NYTBR (13 Jan. 1946, 22 May 1949, 15 Dec. 1968). WLB (June 1954). —MARY JEAN DEMARR

DIVAKARUNI, Chitra Banerjee Born 29 July 1956, Calcutta, India Daughter of Tatini and R. K. Banerjee; married S. Murthy Divakaruni, 1979; children: Anand, Abhay Born in India, living in America, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, as one of the new authors of Indian-American life, uses her poetry and prose to form a bridge from Calcutta to California. As quoted in an interview in India Currents, ‘‘We, Indian-Americans, are still an early immigrant culture. We remember the old country and lament the loss of our roots, which adds poignancy to our writing.’’ In the same interview she spoke of crossing the boundaries from prose to poetry: ‘‘Writing poetry has taught me how to craft language carefully, whereas fiction writing has made me aware of the elements of story, characters, and drama that must exist even in poetry.’’ Divakaruni was born in Calcutta and, though Hindu, was educated at a convent school. She received her B.A. in English at the University of Calcutta and then immigrated to the United States at the age of twenty. She continued her English literature studies at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and then at the University of California at Berkeley, where she wrote her Ph.D. thesis (1985) on the plays of Christopher Marlowe. In the late 1990s she was a creative writing professor at Foothill College in

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Los Altos Hills, California, and a writer whose works have won many awards and are translated into many languages. Divakaruni wrote three books dealing with issues of Indian women: arranged marriages, immigration, domestic violence, racism, interracial relationships, abortion, divorce, and often ultimate independence for the women. Her writings come from her own experience as well as her encounters with South Asian women through Maitri (Friendship), a helpline she was instrumental in starting in 1991. The service offers counseling and referral to women suffering from domestic violence, depression, and cultural alienation. After enrolling in a fiction writing class, she produced a book of short stories, Arranged Marriage (1995), which won the Bay Area Book Reviewers and PEN/Oakland awards for fiction, as well as the prestigious 1996 American Book Award for Fiction. These stories, according to Francine Prose, ‘‘are full of the details of Indian and Indian-American life: . . .the marriage dots on the forehead, the saris, the curries, the Hindi musical films, the marriages contracted after just a few modest minutes of ‘brideviewing,’’’ indeed the ‘‘characters are performing the strenuous balancing act of having one foot in one country, the other foot in another.’’ Ultimately, as Elaine Kim wrote in a review, these women ‘‘find out what ‘being themselves’ means, learn to take care of themselves in a new country,’’ and by doing so, ‘‘discover and understand their complex womanhood.’’ One story, ‘‘The Ultrasound,’’ about two female cousins and their subsequent pregnancies, has been expanded into her most recent novel, Sister of My Heart (1999). Divakaruni’s first novel, Mistress of Spices (1997), was wildly successful and translated into many different languages. The narrator is an ageless woman who learns the magical properties of spices and treats the people in the Oakland, California, neighborhood she inhabits as a storekeeper. Then she falls in love and must choose between her customers or her own life. As Lara Merlin put it, ‘‘Addressing the immigrant experience in particular, she [Divakaruni] asks how to negotiate between the needs of each [the self and the community] under the earth-moving stress of desire. . . .She conjures up a new American identity.’’ Mistress of Spices was shortlisted for the Orange Prize in England and called by the Los Angeles Times one of the best books of 1997. Sister of My Heart has already won praise from reviewers. It is the story of two Indian women who are born in the same home and regard themselves as sisters. They grow up, have arranged marriages, and one moves to the U.S. while the other stays home in India. This novel encompasses many of the issues women face, such as abortion, love affairs, class issues, and emotional involvement between two women. In India Currents, Divakaruni answers a question about romance in the following way: ‘‘In Sister of My Heart I wanted to show how romance complicates the lives of Anju and Sudha, though, ultimately it doesn’t destroy their bond. Our [women’s] friendships are just as important as our marriages and we should make every attempt to nurture them.’’ Divakaruni has also compiled and edited multicultural anthologies, which include stories from immigrant perspectives, for


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her students to widen their knowledge about the world and the women that inhabit a particular space in it.

OTHER WORKS: ‘‘Searching for the Goddess,’’ Woman Of Power (1990). Searching for the Goddess (1990). The Reason for Nasturtiums (1990). Black Candle: Poems about Women from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (1991). Leaving Yuba City: New and Selected Poems (1997). English 1302 Fiction Reader: Thinking Critically About the Short Story (coeditor, 1994). Multitude: Cross-Cultural Readings for Writers (editor, 1997). We, too, Sing America: A Reader for Writers (editor, 1998).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: India Currents (interview, Feb. 1999). Reference works: Asian American Almanac (1995). Who’s Who Among Asian Americans (1994). Other references: Amerasia Journal (Spring 1996). Black Issues in Higher Education (18 Sept. 1997). Confrontation (Spring-Summer 1996). English Journal (Sept. 1997). Ethnicity and the American Short Story (1997). Ms. (July-Aug. 1995). Poets & Writers (Sept.-Oct. 1998). NYTBR (13 Apr. 1997, 1 Mar. 1998). TLS (21 Mar. 1997). Virginia Quarterly Review (Spring 1998). World Literature Today (Winter 1998). WRB (Mar. 1996) —JACQUELYN MARIE

DIX, Beulah Marie Born 25 December 1876, Kinston, Massachusetts; died 25 September 1970, Hollywood, California Daughter of Henry and Marie Dix; married George M. Flebbe Descended from Puritan settlers of Plymouth, Beulah Dix studied literature, the classics, and English history at Radcliffe College, which may have suggested the themes and events that dominated her dramas, comedies, novels, historical romances, and juvenile stories. She graduated summa cum laude and was the first woman to be awarded Harvard’s prestigious George B. Sohier Literary Prize. The date of her marriage is not known, but it was before she moved in 1916 to Hollywood, where she wrote movie scripts for the next 30 years. Dix’s popularity as a novelist derived from Hugh Gwyeth (1899), based on the English civil war between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads. Thereafter, the history of the 17th century provided settings for much of Dix’s work. The juvenile novels Merrylips (1906), Fighting Blade (1912), Maid Melicent (1914), and Blithe McBride (1916), center around a hero or heroine maturing in England during the Cromwell period or in America during the settling of the Puritan colonies. Human dignity poised against the ruthless demands of war, as well as authentic heroism

against popular notions of bravery, also constitute a central theme in Dix’s work. Dix’s first success in drama was A Rose o’Plymouth Town (1903), on which she collaborated with Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland. A romantic comedy taking place in the home of Miles Standish in Plymouth, it was popular on Broadway and introduced Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., to the New York stage. With the advent of World War I, Dix turned from war as a physical setting for individual assertions of heroism toward unmitigated condemnations of it. Her characters are not always superior to mass violence and genocide, but are often corrupted by opportunities to unleash their predatory and sadistic proclivities. Across the Border (1915) is a one-act drama that opens with the gunning down of an idealistic young soldier risking his life to save his battalion. Awakening, he finds himself in a pleasant and impressive house, where he is received cordially, and gradually he realizes he is ‘‘across the border’’ in the spiritual realm of the dead. He is told gently that he must soon leave, for the other inhabitants are fearful of his past willingness to murder women and children, and to bomb cities and villages without warning. The soldier requests a return to the battlefield to convince those still fighting to put down arms, but, though this is granted, his words of admonishment to other soldiers are dismissed as the gibberish of a seriously wounded man. Returning ‘‘across the border’’ in defeat, the protagonist is jubilant his efforts have qualified him to remain in the House of God. Although one individual repents of his aggression, the war continues. An intensely vituperative condemnation of patriotic declarations that war can be fought for the sake of humanity is found in Moloch (1916). The prologue of this drama presents a professor’s family, characterized by warmth, intelligence, harmony, familial love, and cordiality. The epilogue exposes the disastrous effects of war upon this family, now reduced in number, with conjugal, paternal, and romantic ties severed. The greatest irony, however, is the anticipation of some members toward a second imminent war in which their former enemy is now their ally. Whether in drama, the novel, or historical romance, Dix’s style is swiftly paced and concise, replete with skillfully drawn characters who confront the challenges of political and historical realities. These same qualities, accompanied by a vigorous and lively style and poignant dramatic confrontations, made Dix a successful screenwriter in Hollywood, where she wrote scripts for such silent movies as Black Magic, Their Own Desire, The Hostage, Hidden Pearls, and They Made Me a Criminal.

OTHER WORKS: Cicely’s Cavalier (1897). The Beau’s Comedy (with C. A. Harper, 1902). The Life, Treason, and Death of James Blount of Breckenhow (1903). The Breed of the Treshams (with E. G. Sutherland, 1903). Fair Maid (1905). Soldier Rigdale (1905). The Fair Maid of Graystones (1905). Young Fernwald (1906). Allison’s Lad and Other Martial Interludes (1910). Friends in the End (1911). Betty Bide-at-Home (1912). The Gate of Horn

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(1912). Mother’s Son (1913). The Legend of St. Nicholas (1913). Little God Ebisu (1914). The Enemy (1915). The Making of Christopher Ferringham (1915). A Pageant of Peace (1915). The Battle Months of George Daurella (1916). Clemency (1916). The Glorious Game (1916). Where War Comes (1916). Hands Off! (1919). The Captain of the Gate (1921). Turned About Girls (1922). The Road to Yesterday (1925). A Little Captive Lad (1926). The Girl Comes Home (1927). Pity of God (1932). Ragged Enemy (1934). Wedding Eve Murder (1941).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Logan, M. S., American Women: Images and Realities (1972). Scott, E. F., Hollywood When Silents Were Golden (1972). Other references: NYT (30 Sept. 1902, 18 Oct. 1914, 21 Sept. 1915, 3 Dec. 1916). —MIRIAM FUCHS

DIX, Dorothea Lynde Born 4 April 1802, Hampden, Maine; died 17 July 1887, Trenton, New Jersey Daughter of Joseph and Mary Bigelow Dix Dorothea Dix was early acquainted with both poverty and privilege. Her father had become estranged from his family by dropping out of Harvard to marry Mary Bigelow, a poorly educated woman 20 years his senior, and by moving to the frontier territory of what was then northern Massachusetts to pursue his preferred vocation as itinerant Methodist minister. ‘‘I never knew a childhood,’’ Dix was later to write, and in the grim wilderness settlement she spent her early years stitching religious tracts for her father and caring for her two younger brothers. Occasional visits with her grandparents in Boston whetted her appetite for education and culture, however, and at the age of twelve she ran away from home to live with her widowed grandmother, a strict disciplinarian who initiated Dix’s formal education. In 1816 Dix began her career as a teacher by opening a school for young children, a precocious endeavor which lasted for three years until she returned to Boston to be with her aging grandmother. Between 1824 and 1836, Dix devoted herself to teaching when she was physically able and to writing when she was not. On the advice of her physician, Dix spent more than a year in England. For four years after her return to America Dix traveled, visited with friends, and studied as she searched for a vocation that would provide the stimulation and sense of purpose she had lost. In 1841, asked by a young Harvard divinity student to teach a Sunday school class for the female inmates of the East Cambridge jail, Dix discovered her mission. Incarcerated with the criminals, deprived not only of dignity but of even the most elemental

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necessities of warmth and adequate clothing, were the indigent insane. Horrified by what she observed that Sunday, Dix waged a campaign, using the newspaper as her primary forum, and aroused enough public indignation to alleviate the abuses at the jail. This was the first such victory for the woman who was to write in one of her memorials: ‘‘I am the hope of the poor crazed beings who pine in cells and stalls and cages and waste rooms—shut out, cut off from all healing influence, from all mind-restoring cures.’’ In ‘‘Memorial to the Legislature of Massachusetts,’’ Dix enumerated in considerable detail conditions in jails, asylums, poorhouses, and private homes in which the insane were housed. Her catalogue of appalling abuses was direct, concrete, logical, persuasive—impassioned only in eloquent appeals to the humanitarian impulses of the legislators, who, as a result of her investigation, voted to expand the state facility for the mentally ill at Worcester. From Massachusetts, Dix proceeded to Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, and on, in each state anticipating her pleas for reform by a thorough, keen-sighted study of existing facilities. In 1845, a hospital was established at Trenton, New Jersey, the ‘‘first-born child’’ of a woman who was to bear many such offspring. In 1848 Dix began a crusade for national legislation to set aside a tract of land (ultimately, 12.5 million acres) for care of the impoverished insane, and during the next six years, she lobbied, met with congressmen, and worked on her memorial for the proposal. In 1854 Dix’s bill finally passed both houses of Congress, only to be vetoed by President Franklin Pierce. Discouraged by this defeat, Dix returned to England. This excursion, however, to the Old World was no vacation: rather, the ‘‘American Invader,’’ as she was called, persisted in her efforts for reform, making forays into Scotland to promote better care for the insane, moving on to the continent to Italy, Russia, and Turkey. Returning to America in 1856, Dix, now well known and in much demand, resumed her travels for five years. Interrupted by the chaos of war, she was made superintendent of nurses for the Union forces in 1861. In 1866, the war over, Dix continued her tours of hospitals and penal institutions, concentrating for a time on the ravaged South. In 1881 she retired to Trenton Hospital, where she died, six years later. Although Dix never associated herself with the women’s movement, judging any such involvement a distraction from her humanitarian efforts on behalf of the mentally ill, her achievements did much to reveal what one woman could accomplish. By working contrary to accepted mores of the feminine role and destiny, Dix fought for the humane and fair treatment of a powerless minority. She helped to establish 32 state institutions and 15 training schools, and provided the inspiration for numerous other facilities, both public and private, thereby earning the encomium conferred upon her at her death by a friend: ‘‘. . .the most useful and distinguished woman America has yet produced.’’ OTHER WORKS: Conversations on Common Things (1824). Hymns for Children (1825). Evening Hours (1825). Meditations for


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Private Hours (1828). Garland of Flora (1829). American Moral Tales for Young Persons (1832). Remarks on Prisons and Prison Discipline (1845). Letter to the Convicts in the Western State Penitentiary of Pennsylvania, Allegheney (1848). On Behalf of the Insane Poor: Selected Reports (Poverty, U.S.A.: The Historical Record Series, edited by D. J. Rothman, 1971). The papers of Dorothea Lynde Dix are housed in the Houghton Library of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brooks, G., Three Wise Virgins (1957). Dain, N., Concepts of Insanity in the United States, 1789-1865 (1964). Hurd, H. M., ed., Institutional Care of the Insane in the United States and Canada (4 vols., 1916-1917). Marshall, H. E., Dorothea Dix: Forgotten Samaritan (1937). Tiffany, F., Life of Dorothea L. Dix (1890). Tuke, D. H., Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles (1882). Tuke, D. H., The Insane in the United States and Canada (1885). Wilson, D., Stranger and Traveler: The Story of Dorothea Dix, American Reformer (1975).

The literary style of Gail Hamilton, Dodge’s pen name, is characteristically lively, opinionated, and often argumentative. Several of her books are feminist in tone. Dodge often proclaims her personal and professional independence, and encourages a similar spirit in others. Country Living and Country Thinking (1861), based upon Dodge’s experience as a woman running her family’s farm, urges women to consider careers other than marriage, and especially to consider writing, despite the ‘‘fine, subtle, impalpable, but real’’ prejudice against ‘‘female writers.’’ The economic argument for independence appears again in Woman’s Worth and Worthlessness (1872), in which Dodge notes that a woman is not ‘‘supported’’ by a man ‘‘when she works as hard in the house as he does out of it.’’ For many years, Dodge was closely associated with Blaine: she worked with him on his Twenty Years of Congress (1884-86) and many believed that she also drafted his speeches. Her biography of Blaine, undertaken as a tribute, is eulogistic and nonanalytical. Her verse, collected and published posthumously by her sister H. Augusta Dodge, in Chips, Fragments and Vestiges (1902), is derivative.

—KRISTIN MCCOLGAN

DIX, Dorothy See GILMER, Elizabeth Meriwether

DIXON, Franklin W. See ADAMS, Harriet Stratemeyer

DODGE, Mary Abigail Born 31 March 1833, Hamilton, Massachusetts; died 17 August 1896, Hamilton, Massachusetts Wrote under: Gail Hamilton Daughter of James B. and Hannah Stanwood Dodge Mary Abigail Dodge spent her early adult years teaching, and in 1858 she became governess to the children of Gamaliel Bailey, editor of the antislavery National Era in Washington, D.C. With his help she established herself as a writer. From 1865 to 1867, she was an editor of Our Young Folks. After 1871 she spent much of each year in Washington in the home of Congressman James G. Blaine, whose wife was Dodge’s first cousin. Blaine was Speaker of the House and a frequent presidential hopeful. In his household, Dodge met politicians, writers, and numerous famous persons of the day. In these years, she wrote on political issues, especially civil service reform.

Dodge’s most characteristic theme, derived from her own experience as a writer, is the need to train woman for spiritual and economic independence. Given her insistence on the need for independence, it seems ironic that Dodge’s own career, as well as her social contacts, depended to a great degree upon her association with Blaine, and that much of her work for him cannot be recognized as independent from that framework.

OTHER WORKS: Courage! (1862). Gala Days (1863). A Call to My Countrywomen (1863). Stumbling-Blocks (1864). A New Atmosphere (1865). Scientific Farming (1865). Skirmishes and Sketches (1865). Red Letter Days in Applethorpe (1866). Summer Rest (1866). Wool Gathering (1868). Woman’s Wrong (1868). Memorial to Mrs. Hannah Stanwood Dodge (1869). A Battle of the Books (1870). Little Folk Life (1872). Child World (1873). Twelve Miles from a Lemon (1874). Nursery Noonings (1875). Sermons to the Clergy (1876). First Love Is Best (1877). What Think Ye of Christ (1877). Our Common School System (1880). Divine Guidance (1881). The Spent Bullet (1882). The Insuppressible Book (1885). A Washington Bible Class (1891). English Kings in a Nutshell (1893). Biography of James G. Blaine (1893). X-Rays (1896). Gail Hamilton’s Life in Letters (edited by H. A. Dodge, 1901).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Beale, H. S., ed., Letters of Mrs. James G. Blaine (1908). Dodge, M. A., Memorial to Mrs. Hannah Stanwood Dodge (1869). Spofford, H. R., A Little Book of Friends (1916). Tryon, W. S., Parnassus Corner: A Life of James T. Fields (1963). Reference works: A Woman of the Century (1893). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —JANE BENARDETE

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DODGE, Mary Mapes

DOMAN, June

Born 26 January 1830, New York, New York; died 21 August 1905, Onteora Park, New York Daughter of James J. and Sophia Furman Mapes; married William Dodge, 1851 (died); children: two sons

Born 23 April 1930, Bath, England Writes under: Meryle Secrest Daughter of Albert E. and Olive Edith May Love Doman; married David W. Secrest, 1953 (divorced 1965); Thomas G. Beveridge, 1975; children: Cary, Martin, Gillian

Mary Mapes Dodge’ family moved often, finally settling in Irvington, New Jersey, where, on a large farm overlooking Staten Island and Manhattan, her father conducted horticultural experiments and edited a magazine called the Working Farmer. When Dodge rejoined her family at the farm after the death of her husband, her father started her writing for his magazine in order to occupy her time and assuage her grief. Dodge also began telling stories to her two young sons, and thus, with natural talent and great devotion, a long and successful career of one of America’s first and best women writers and editors was inaugurated. In 1864 Dodge was prompted to write a children’s book. She had been reading Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic, and her boys had been captivated by the Dutch sport of skating, which was just becoming popular in the United States. Dodge was also acquainted with a Dutch family whom she visited often, listening to their memories and stories of Holland. Putting all this together, she wrote Hans Brinker (1865), which is still a bestseller after more than 100 years and many translations. From 1865 on, Dodge helped to edit a magazine called Hearth and Home, until asked by Roswell Smith of the Century Company to start a children’s magazine for them. So in 1873, Dodge became the editor of St. Nicholas, the greatest children’s magazine of all time. Hans Brinker and St. Nicholas established Dodge’ top-notch reputation, but she also produced a number of other books: A Few Friends (1869), Rhymes and Jingles (1874), Theophilus and Others (1876), Along the Way (1879), Donald and Dorothy (1883), and The Land of Pluck (1894). St. Nicholas set a new and lasting pattern for children’s literature: Kipling wrote The Jungle Books and Frances Hodgson Burnett Little Lord Fauntleroy for the magazine. Other top authors, among whom were Robert Louis Stevenson, Samuel Clemens, Alfred Tennyson, eager to be published in this vital periodical also sent Dodge their work. Many reputations were made in these pages. St. Nicholas was still thriving when, at age seventy-five, Dodge died at her summer residence in Onteora Park, New York. OTHER WORKS: Irvington Stories (1864). When Life Is Young (1894). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: American Women (1897). DAB (1892). NCAB (1892). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Century (Nov. 1905). Critic (Oct. 1905). Current Literature (Oct. 1905). NYT (22 Aug. 1905). St. Nicholas (Oct. 1905). —CATHERINE MORRIS WRIGHT

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June Doman is a writer of lengthy biographies of prominent artists and art critics, beginning with fairly obscure ones but quickly moving on to world-famous personages such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Salvador Dali. When dealing with people from the early 20th century, Doman’s writing is a tribute to extensive research of personal documents. When writing about people of the late 20th century, she relies on extensive interviewing, not only of the person themselves, but also every conceivable connection they might have. Despite the possibility of having too many corroborated details in her biographies, Doman rejects the view that the writer’s style should take second place in the struggle for accuracy. Instead, she believes that the biographer should be interesting to read as she writes in a way that reflects her own point of view. While growing up in Bath, England, as an only child, Doman found herself in a college-bound curriculum after being tested at the age of eleven. At the age of eighteen, however, she emigrated to Canada with her parents. Immediately she began working on the Hamilton, Ontario, newspaper, writing about city politics before being named editor of women’s news. After a brief return to England in 1950, Doman married David W. Secrest on 23 September 1953 and moved to Columbus, Ohio, where she raised three children while working as the food editor for the Columbus Citizen. In the late 1950s, she moved to Washington, D.C. because her husband had secured a political science fellowship. For a time, she wrote freelance for the Washington Post before being signed on as a full-time reporter. At first she remained a writer of women’s news; then in 1969 she was granted the privilege of writing for the arts and entertainment page. At last she had found her niche. Doman wanted to be a novelist, but after a single attempt, she gave it up. Fascinated by the life of a fairly obscure early 20th-century Italian portrait painter by the name of Romaine Brooks, she decided to try to write a biography. Between Me and Life: A Biography of Romaine Brooks (1974) received superb reviews in both the United Kingdom and the U.S., but did not sell well. Despite this, Doman quit her job to be a full-time freelance writer in 1975. Still enamored with art and people connected with it, Doman selected the noted Russian-American art critic and appraiser of Italian Renaissance art, Bernard Berenson, as the subject of her next book. Being Bernard Berenson (1979) was praised for its psychological acuity and vivid portraiture. It was nominated for both the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. While


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researching for her book about Berenson, Doman met with Sir Kenneth Clark, a British baron also known for his knowledge of Italian Renaissance art. For two years during his youth he studied under Berenson. Doman was so impressed with his personality that she chose him as the subject of her next biography. Kenneth Clark: A Biography (1985) was beset with many problems, most notably by the fact that Clark objected to what was written about him, forcing a rewrite that did not remain true to Doman’s intent. After writing a biography of the world’s best-known surrealist painter called Salvador Dali (1986), Doman chose to write Frank Lloyd Wright (1992). For the first time, a biographer of the famous architect had access to the complete microfiche Wright archives, and Doman was praised for producing a definitive one-volume biography that could only be superseded by a multivolume scholarly study. Next Doman turned to music to write Leonard Bernstein: A Life (1994), a biography of the famous American conductor and composer. In 1998 she remained in the field of music to write Stephen Sondheim, a biography about the famous American composer and lyricist for the Broadway stage. For this book, Doman received Sondheim’s cooperation and massive amounts of information from his friends, family, and colleagues. Critics noted that the book was exemplary in its attention to detail and its successful portrayal of Sondheim’s inner life. The revelation of his homosexuality drew the most notice, to Doman’s surprise. In addition to awards from the Canadian Women’s Press Club and the Hamilton Press Club in 1950 and 1951, respectively, Doman was selected for a Guggenheim fellowship for the years 1981-82.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CANR (1996). —ROSE SECREST

DOMINI, Rey See LORDE, Audre

DOMINIC, R. B. SeeLATHEN, Emma

DONOVAN, Frances R. Born 1880; died 1965 For years, the places and dates of birth and death of this American sociologist were a mystery, though a birthdate of 1880

and death in 1965 are now accepted as fact. Until recently, she was not listed in the usual or even the more obscure sources; biographical information was often obtained from personal correspondence or from the Special Collections of the University of Chicago library. From 1923 to 1927, Frances R. Donovan attended some classes at the University of Chicago as well as evening meetings of the Society for Social Research. At these meetings, which were open to students, faculty, and those outside the formal university network, some kind of presentation of research was given with informal discussion following. The distinguished sociologist Robert Park was nearly always present at these gatherings and talked with Donovan then as well as later discussing her books in his classes. During this period the urban behavior research emphasis was particularly strong in Chicago, culminating in almost two dozen books in less than two decades. Many of these were published as part of the University of Chicago Sociological Series. Donovan’s second book, The Saleslady (1929), became part of this series. She also wrote The Woman Who Waits (1920) and The Schoolma’am (1938), but except for these three books (all of which were reprinted in the 1980s), Donovan’s work has disappeared. Ryan’s Womanhood in America (1975) makes scattered references to her books, although there are minor inaccuracies regarding dates and places of her research. Donovan was a qualitative sociologist who focused on three social worlds in her writings: that of the waitress, salesperson, and teacher. Her major contribution is in the area of the sociology of work occupations, particularly those held traditionally by women. She moves from the largely descriptive The Woman Who Waits and The Saleslady to a greater analytical emphasis in The Schoolma’am. She was a keen observer, with a sense of humor, and her perceptions of women as a devalued group are particularly incisive. The Woman Who Waits is based on Donovan’s experiences as a waitress from the ‘‘hash houses’’ in the Loop to tea rooms and department store lunchrooms, to some of the more fashionable places in other parts of the city. Throughout this work the following threads prevail: (1) a perceptive analysis and recognition of the lowly, nonprestigious occupation of waitress; (2) a recognition that the problems of waitresses must be solved from within by organizing, and, when necessary, from the outside by legislation. Within this context, Donovan discusses the Waitresses Alliance, formed in 1915, whose objectives included trying to obtain proper working conditions for members as well as protecting them from unjust treatment; (3) general observations on the status of women in this occupation (many are equally germane today): the lack of security, ‘‘the sex game,’’ the ‘‘costs’’ of emancipation. The Saleslady is based on two summers Donovan spent in New York playing the role of ‘‘saleslady’’ or ‘‘salesgirl.’’ Although pseudonyms are used, evidence points to prominent New York department stores as places of employment. While this role is somewhat more prestigious than that of waitress, the salesperson has, nonetheless, little bargaining power in her interactions

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with employees and customers. Donovan’s conceptualization of the store as theater is an insightful one; subtle distinctions and hierarchies both within the role of ‘‘saleslady’’ as well as in her interaction with others in her world are noted. The Schoolma’am, Donovan tells the reader, is largely ‘‘personal testimony’’ from one ‘‘who has spent 19 years as a teacher’’ and ‘‘three years as a department manager of a large teachers’ agency.’’ Her trenchant observations on women in the teaching occupation include the following: the preponderance of male administrators; the discriminatory practices against hiring or retaining married women (they neglect home and children, and are not as prompt or regular in school attendance); the view of women as poor marriage risks by some men ‘‘who insist upon gentle, appealing, little girls like Copperfield’s Dora who can’t add up the grocery bills.’’ With the reappearance of Donovan’s books it is to be hoped that her circle of readers will be considerably enlarged.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Kurent, H. P., ‘‘Frances R. Donovan and the Chicago School of Sociology: A Case Study in Marginality’’ (dissertation, 1982). Ryan, M., Womanhood in America (1975). Other references: Nation (23 Oct. 1929). NR (21 Sept. 1938). Survey (5 Feb. 1921). —VIRGINIA K. FISH

DOOLITTLE, Antoinette Born Mary Antoinette Doolittle, 8 September 1810, New Lebanon, New York; died 31 December 1886, Mt. Lebanon, New York Daughter of Miles and Esther Bennett Doolittle A middle child in a family of five girls and five boys, Antoinette Doolittle lived from age ten to thirteen at an aunt’s home, with her maternal grandmother, a religious woman and ‘‘a strong magnet’’ for her. After Doolittle’s conversion to Shakerism at age fourteen, she did routine work for 10 years at the Shakers’ major community, Mt. Lebanon, and was then appointed assistant deaconess. Two years later, at twenty-six, she was made second (or assistant) eldress. At thirty-eight, she attained the highest office, eldress, and held this post at Mt. Lebanon until her death. In 1873, she became coeditor of the Shaker and Shakeress, the official Shaker periodical. Doolittle had important executive responsibilities, such as traveling to New York City to buy supplies to be shipped to the South Union (Kentucky) Society, then beleaguered by the Civil War. A practical administrator, Doolittle was also deeply involved in mystical and emotional Shaker experiences: spiritualism and speaking in tongues. The Autobiography of Mary Antoinette Doolittle (1880) provides a vivid picture of Doolittle’s growing commitment to a

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religious vocation. In it, she also promotes Shaker feminism by presenting Shaker principles with parenthetical feminist comments added to them. For example, in explaining the system of trusteeship for Shaker property, she writes: ‘‘the laws of the land were framed and executed by men exclusively—women having no part nor lot in the matter, except to be taxed without representation.’’ In her journalism, too, Doolittle supported feminism. When she became coeditor of the official Shaker periodical, its title was changed from the Shaker to the Shaker and Shakeress. Doolittle also advanced feminism outside Shaker communities. In a letter to the Brooklyn Eagle, republished in the Shaker Manifesto, Doolittle wrote in 1881: The voice of woman is not heard in legislative halls. . . . Why this bondage and servitude on the part of woman?. . . Is she destitute of reasoning powers, and unable to plead her own cause, and the cause of her downtrodden and oppressed sisters, who do not find redress from wrongs inflicted upon them at the tribunals, where male rulers alone preside, judge and decide? A change must and will come in this respect. Women possess latent powers that need to be brought into action, both for her own benefit and the good of the community. Apart from her feminism, Doolittle’s autobiography is notable in parts I and II for its fresh, concrete detail as she describes her childhood and conversion. The growth of her commitment, her adolescent struggle, and her final choice of a life antithetical to her family’s views elicit sympathy and sustain interest. Part III, added for a second edition, is more didactic and polemical, a public rather than a private document, advocating Shaker principles. Its purpose seems to be to educate and possibly convert the public. Nevertheless, Doolittle’s is the best-known and best-written autobiography of a Shaker woman. BIBLIOGRAPHY: White, A., and L. S. Taylor, Shakerism: Its Meaning and Message (1904). Other references: In Memoriam, Affectionately Inscribed to the Memory of Eldress Antoinette Doolittle, by Her Loving and Devoted Gospel Friends (1887). The Shaker Manifesto (1881). —HELEN DEISS IRVIN

D(OOLITTLE), H(ilda) Born 10 September 1886, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; died 27 September 1961, Zurich, Switzerland Daughter of Charles L. and Helen Wolle Doolittle; married Richard Aldington, 1915 (divorced 1938) Hilda Doolittle was the daughter of a professor of astronomy and the granddaughter of the principal of a local Moravian


seminary, who was a descendant of a member of the original 18th-century mystical order known as the Unitas Fratrum, or Moravian Brotherhood. Since the founding of the order, the concept of Unitas Fratrum has been identified with ‘‘the Mystery which lay at the center of the world.’’ Young Doolittle participated in Moravian religious exercises and rituals, all of which had a profound effect upon her. In Tribute to Angels (1945), more than 40 years after her childhood experiences, she returned to the enigmatic ‘‘Mystery,’’ the essence of Moravian belief, describing it as ‘‘the point in the spectrum / where all light becomes one / . . .as we were told as children.’’ Educated chiefly in private schools, Doolittle spent a year and a half at Bryn Mawr, withdrawing in 1906 due to a ‘‘slight breakdown.’’ She became engaged briefly to Ezra Pound, who encouraged her to pursue her classical studies and to continue to write serious poetry. Soon after, Doolittle left for London to begin the life of an expatriate, and rarely returned to America. In 1913 Doolittle married the British poet Richard Aldington. Later (1917) she assumed the editorship of the Egoist while she earnestly pursued her career as a poet. The period between 1915 and 1920 was filled with personal crisis: a miscarriage in 1915, the death of her older brother in combat in 1918, separation from Aldington (final divorce in 1938), and the death of her father in 1919. She found herself essentially alone, seriously ill, and pregnant. She wrote from her flat in war-torn London: ‘‘Death! Death is all around us!’’ The foregoing events precipitated a severe breakdown, and Doolittle eventually sought the help of Sigmund Freud, whom she refers to as the ‘‘blameless physician’’ in her brilliant psychobiography, Tribute to Freud, published in 1956. Following World War I, Doolittle wrote 13 volumes of poetry, along with translations, essays, dramas, film criticism, and novels. When her Collected Poems, the volume that established her reputation, was published in 1925, many of the vital experiences that tempered her writing had occurred. The early tightly honed, discrete Imagist poems are familiar to most readers. In them with clarity, precision, and control, Doolittle described pear trees with ‘‘flower-tufts / thick on the branch,’’ with sea poppies ‘‘spilled near the shrub pines / to bleach on the boulders,’’ or grapes ‘‘red-purple / their berries dripping / with wine.’’ Doolittle’s final, major modern poetic sequences, Helen in Egypt (1961), is less well known. Throughout her work, however, from the slender Imagist verse to the final monumental poetic sequence, Doolittle was in search of what she dimly defined as ‘‘a myth, the one reality.’’ This would permit her not only to articulate her emotions but would also allow her the freedom to create an ‘‘organizing structure’’ in which she could function as both a woman and an artist. Related to the search for ‘‘structure which permits freedom’’ was an acute awareness on the part of Doolittle of the importance of identity to survival. Identity, self-definition, a ‘‘signature,’’ were imperative. Doolittle emphasized this in a letter to her friend

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Amy Lowell on 5 March 1917: ‘‘My signature is H. D. for poetic purposes. Please let it be just that. I have always wanted to keep R.’s [her husband] and my literary personalities absolutely distinct. . . . I must keep H. D. clear from R. A.’’ Later she expressed her conviction in this way: ‘‘I have something I own. I own myself.’’ The search for personal identity and self-definition was contemporaneous with Doolittle’s realization of her own creative talents, and eventually her poetry became, in a sense, a projection of herself. Doolittle ingeniously shaped the classical world to her own temperament, weaving and reweaving the legends of the past into modern form, emulating myth in order to gain a sense of the spiritual, the timeless. For Doolittle, events, emotions, experiences, became continuations of a simpler, more structured mythic past, which she found more manageable than the immediate, chaotic contemporary scene. As she developed her skills, Doolittle was able to transfer mythic patterns from one culture to another, as reflected in her wide-ranging vision of Woman throughout the ages, which is included in Tribute to Angels. More notable, however, in The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), she comfortably mingles classical allusions with observations of the shell-shocked, bombed-out, devastation of London: ‘‘There as here, ruin opens / the tomb, the temple. . . / the shrine lies open to the sky / the rain falls. . . / sand drifts, eternity endures.’’ Typically Doolittle emphasizes once again her concept of identity and self-possession in the lines: ‘‘living within / you beget, self-out-of-self / . . .that pearl-of-great-price.’’ Inevitably, as the woman artist strives for self-fulfillment, tension develops. In Doolittle’s case, tension was generated gradually between physical love and artistic performance; it manifested itself in a conflict between desire and creativity. Doolittle compares this experience to a tableau vivant with two wrestlers standing ready for a match, with muscles and tendons taut and motionless. In her effort to deal with the tension and conflict in both her personal and artistic life, Doolittle reveals on the one hand her complete awareness of the need for love and compassion as she writes, ‘‘I was not unaware. . .I was not dull dead.’’ On the other hand, she firmly maintains that even love itself should be resisted if it threatens to diminish one’s creative talent. Notwithstanding the contradictions inherent in this situation, Doolittle was determined, as she stated, to control her ‘‘very modest possessions of mind and body.’’ Resolution, reconciliation, control, she realized could be achieved, perhaps by means of some ‘‘intermediate ground’’: an organizing structure, mythical patterns, legends, and symbols. These were all part of her ‘‘classical repertoire,’’ and methods for making meaningful use of them had been reinforced during her experience as ‘‘student-analysand’’ with Dr. Freud. The search for ‘‘a myth, the one reality,’’ was successfully achieved by means of the pervasive, legendary figure of Helen in Doolittle’s last major work. In the earlier Imagist poem, ‘‘Helen,’’

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the heroine, a wan maiden with ‘‘still eyes in [a] white face’’ is clouded with subtle ambiguities—she is the Helen Greece could love ‘‘only if she were laid / white ash amid funereal cypresses.’’ In Helen in Egypt, the mature, intelligent, confident Helen struggles for self-definition following the cataclysmic Trojan War. With ‘‘things remembered forgotten / remembered again,’’ Helen assembles and reassembles her thoughts and emotions and resolves: ‘‘I must fight for Helena.’’ In this long poem, Doolittle artfully weaves and reweaves the mythic pattern until the legendary figure of Helen (the Woman who will not now be denied) achieves her identity: ‘‘I am awake / . . .I see things clearly at last, / the old pictures are really there.’’ With Helen in Egypt, Doolittle herself achieves self-definition and brings to a close her search for an identity, ‘‘the one reality,’’ for which she had been striving all her life. Strong-willed, self-possessed, inherently female, the American expatriate Doolittle’s poetic realm has been described as ‘‘the perfect, timeless hieroglyph world.’’ Whatever the realm, Doolittle realized the sense of her own worth as a woman and as an artist; and concedes in her ‘‘Epitaph’’ that she ‘‘died of living / . . .soliciting illicit fervor / . . .following intricate song’s lost measure.’’ For more than five decades, Doolittle devoted her life to the writing of poetry. Though she has regrettably been labeled ‘‘the perfect Imagist’’ and ‘‘the Greek publicity girl,’’ her poetry defies classification. Tending on occasion to an obscurantism typical of modern poetry, Doolittle’s work transcends the limitations and prescriptions of the Imagist movement, for which she allegedly was not only the inspiration but, together with Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington, also a formulator of its principles. Currently she is, and justifiably so, identified as a modern. Norman Holmes Pearson, Doolittle’s literary executor, contends that Doolittle is in ‘‘the very center of the modern poetic movement. . .and will increasingly be recognized’’ when her audience not only learns how to read her poetry but becomes familiar with classical mythology.

OTHER WORKS: Sea Garden (1916). Hymen (1921). Heliodora, and Other Poems (1924). Hippolytos Temporizes (1927). Hedylus (1928). Red Roses for Bronze (1932). The Flowering of the Rod (1946). By Avon River (1949). Selected Poems of H. D. (1957). Hermetic Definition (1958). Bid Me to Live (1960).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Alfrey, S., The Sublime of Intense Sociability: Emily Dickinson, H. D., and Gertrude Stein (1999). Burnett, G., H. D. Between Image and Epic: The Mysteries of Her Poetics (1990). Chisholm, D., H. D.’s Freudian Poetics: Psychoanalysis in Translation (1992). Coffman, S. K., Imagism—A Chapter for the History of Modern Poetry (1951). DuPlessis, R. B. H. D.: The Career of That Struggle (1986). Freidman, S. S., Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H. D.. (1981). Freidman, S. S. and R. B. DuPlessis, eds., Signets: Reading H. D. (1990). Guest, B., Herself

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Defined: The Poet H. D. and her World (1984). Hughes, G., Imagism & the Imagists (1931). King, M., ed., H. D.: Woman and Poet (1987). Mearns, H., H. D. (1926). Monroe, H., Poets & Their Art (1932). Quinn, V., H. D. (1968). Swann, T. B., The Classical World of H. D. (1962). Taupin, R., L’influence du symbolisme français sur la poésie Américaine (1929). Vigier, R., Women, Dance, and the Body: Gestures of Genius (1994). Waggoner, H. H., American Poets—From the Puritans to the Present (1968). Zilboorg, C., ed., Richard Aldington and H. D. (1992). Reference works: FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Contemporary Literature (Autumn 1969). H. D. Newsletter (1987- ). Poetry (June 1962). —CLAIRE HEALEY

DORR, Julia (Caroline) Ripley Born 13 February 1825, Charleston, South Carolina; died 18 January 1913, Rutland, Vermont Wrote under: Julia C. R. Dorr, Caroline Thomas Daughter of William Y. and Zulma Thomas Ripley; married Seneca M. Dorr, 1847 Julia Ripley Dorr’s mother’s family fled from Santo Domingo to the U.S. during a slave uprising. Her father was a bank president, and she spent most of her formative years in Vermont receiving her education there at Middlebury Seminary. Dorr enjoyed the friendship of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edmund Clarence Stedman, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, among others. She was a founder of the Rutland Library, and received a Litt.D. from Middlebury College in Vermont. Dorr’s first novels, Farmingdale (1854), Lanmere (1856), and Sibyl Huntington (1869), deal with young women living in New England villages who are subject to a grinding routine of home chores. These novels are noteworthy for their realistic depiction of family bitterness and the round of household activities: tubs filled with laundry, milk pans to be scalded, rag rugs to be pieced, work baskets piled with mending. Each novel contains pointed discussions on books, learning, literature, and libraries, offered as the heroines’ reprieve from woman’s toil. Expiation (1873) views domestic tragedy from the stance of a neighborly female narrator who is middle-aged, tranquil, unmarried. The plot involves hereditary insanity, its concealment by a young wife, an adolescent son’s attempt to kill his mother, a coffin that yields up its supposed corpse. Gothic horrors come to light amidst the beauties of the Vermont countryside, descriptions of which Dorr excels in: the riot of green, the meadows and uplands, brawling trout streams, the barefoot boy and the singing thrush, wild roses and honeysuckles under a sapphire sky.


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Dorr’s poetry appeared in newspapers and magazines such as Scribner’s, Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, and Sartain’s Union Magazine of Literature and Art. Her poems were anthologized in Emerson’s Parnassus (1874), and Stedman’s An American Anthology (1900). Dorr experimented with a variety of forms— narratives, dramatic monologues, patriotic and war verses, historic celebrations, sonnets, hymns, and ballads. Poems (1872) includes themes of women’s isolation or loss (‘‘Vashti’s Scroll’’), a lament by a fallen queen (‘‘Elsie’s Child’’), and prayers and poems about death. A book lover, Dorr acknowledges in ‘‘My Friends’’ the influence of authors from Dante and Shakespeare to the Brontës and Mrs. Browning. ‘‘The Cherry Tree’’ introduces the recurrent theme that maturity is richer, more resonant than youth. The titles of Dorr’s subsequent poetry volumes reflect this view: Afternoon Songs (1885), Afterglow (1900), Beyond the Sunset (1909). Dorr’s travel books are companionable, anecdotal, and historically informative. Bermuda appeared in 1884. The Flower of England’s Face; Sketches of English Travel (1895) takes the reader from Wales to Scotland with a long stop at Haworth to collect firsthand reminiscences about the Brontës. A Cathedral Pilgrimage (1896) revels in rustic gardens, chapels, spires, ‘‘ruined arches, forsaken courts open to all the sky, and columns ivy-grown and lichen clad.’’ It imaginatively recreates medieval life and recounts legends of martyrs and warriors. Despite Dorr’s dislike of suffering women poets as expressed in Farmingdale, she was not able to keep lachrymose strain out of her own last works. Her poetic diction includes the formalized lyrical utterance of her shorter poems, as well as the colloquial forthrightness of her dramatic monologues. The same chatty directness is evident in her books of travel and advice, and recalls the vigor of her early domestic novels. Her interest in family problems arising from cruelty, pride, or error enters into her narrative poems. Like many women poets of her time, she tended to give them exotic, medieval, Germanic, or oriental settings; however, the regional locales of her New England fiction bestow a more enduring value on her portrayals of family life. OTHER WORKS: Bride and Bridegroom (1873). Friar Anselmo and Other Poems (1875). Poems (1892). The Fallow Field (1893). In Kings’ Houses; A Romance of the Days of Queen Anne (1898). Poems, Complete (1901). Last Poems (1913). W.Y.R. A Book of Remembrance BIBLIOGRAPHY: Baym, N., Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870 (1978). Carleton, H., Genealogy and Family History of Vermont (1903). Crockett, W. H., Vermont the Green Mountain State (1921). Morse, J. J., ed., Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes (1896). Ripley, H. W., Genealogy of a Part of the Ripley Family (1867). Stedman, L., and G. M. Gould, eds., Life and Letters of E. C. Stedman (1910). Reference works: American Authors: 1600-1900 (1938). American Women (1897). DAB (1929). —MARCELLE THIÉBAUX

DORR, Rheta Childe Born 2 November 1866, Omaha, Nebraska; died 8 August 1948, New Britain, Pennsylvania Daughter of Edward and Lucie Childe; married John P. Dorr, 1892; children: one son The daughter of Episcopalian parents, Rheta Childe Dorr joined the National Woman Suffrage Association at twelve, attended the University of Nebraska for one year, and enrolled at the Art Students’ League in New York City in 1890. She took her first reporting job on the New York Evening Post and was a muckraker at Everybody’s Magazine and Hampton’s from 1907 to 1912. Briefly a member of the Socialist Party, she became active in the Republican Party in 1916. A militant suffragist, she edited the Suffragist, and from 1913 to 1916 was a member of the Heterodoxy, an early feminist discussion group. As a foreign correspondent, she covered the Pankhursts’ suffrage struggle in England, the Russian Revolution, World War I, and Mussolini’s march into Rome. Dorr was the author of several books, most of which (aside from her autobiography) consisted of materials previously published in newspapers and magazines. As an autobiography, A Woman of Fifty (1924) represented both a highly successful creative act and a ‘‘self-revelation.’’ Illustrating the traditional effort of an American intellectual to relate personal experience to the pattern of cultural change, Dorr sketched a political journey— one that led from a progressive vision of cooperative millenialism to a conservative faith in a ‘‘sane, practical democracy,’’ with the ‘‘Great War’’ acting as the important transforming experience. However, Dorr was firm in her commitment to feminism; the chronological narrative revolves around her own early awakening to feminism and her struggle as a journalist to support herself and her son. Throughout her lifetime, Dorr worked to bring others from a perception of women as a ‘‘ladies’ aid society to the human race’’ to an affirmation of their ‘‘breaking into the human race’’ with ‘‘full freedom.’’ In What Eight Million Woman Want (1910), Dorr dealt with ‘‘woman’s invasion of industry’’ as a permanent factor in the American economy, carefully employing data obtained from reporting on all social classes of women in Europe and America. Having investigated various employments by working as a laundress, seamstress, department store clerk, and assembly-line worker, Dorr sympathetically revealed the ‘‘intimate lives of the factory workers in order to tell their story as they would tell it themselves if they had a chance.’’ She also emphasized the social-reform activities of educated middle-class women’s organizations, concluding that the fulfillment of their demands for women’s economic, social, and political freedom was in the best interest of a democratic society. Dorr reiterated these beliefs in Susan B. Anthony (1928), a witty and sympathetic biography and history of women’s life in America that dramatically situated Anthony within the social context of the post-Civil War era.

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Dorr was a war correspondent from 1917 to 1918. Inside the Russian Revolution (1917) condemned Bolshevik politics and marked her break with New York socialist friends. Interpreting events in terms of ‘‘excesses’’ of an ‘‘unruly, unreasoning, sanguinary mob’’ intent on disengaging from the ‘‘Great War,’’ Dorr recommended a large dose of American economic aid and the ‘‘help and guidance’’ of strong leaders with pragmatic republican values. Dorr ably captured the feeling of a country at war in her description of the July Revolution and the ‘‘women’s battalion of death’’—but Inside the Russian Revolution was marred by its strong ethnocentric bias. Dorr was among the first journalists to report ‘‘hard news’’ about all classes of women, and she was among the best of the muckraking journalists. While her war correspondence was not consistently outstanding, she was among only a few women who obtained western-front reporting assignments during World War I. Her autobiography must be considered not only an ‘‘extraordinarily revealing’’ document but also a provocative commentary on American culture.

OTHER WORKS: A Soldier’s Mother in France (1918). Drink: Coercion or Control? (1929).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Banner, L. W., Woman in Modern America: A Brief History (1974). Filler, L., Crusaders for American Liberalism (1939). Marzolf, M., Up from the Footnote: A History of Women Journalists (1977). Ross, I., Ladies of the Press (1936). Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Bookman (11 Mar. 1911). Books (21 Oct. 1928). —JENNIFER L. TEBBE

DORSETT, Danielle See DANIELS, Dorothy

DORSEY, Anna (Hanson) McKenney Born 12 December 1815, Washington, D.C.; died 26 December 1896, Washington, D.C. Daughter of William and Chloe Lanigan McKenney; married Lorenzo Dorsey, 1837; children: five Descended from prominent Maryland colonists on both sides of her family, Anna McKenney Dorsey was always much involved in both governmental affairs and moral and religious

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questions. Educated entirely at home, she published verse in magazines even before her marriage in 1837. Both she and her husband converted to Catholicism in 1840 as a result of the influence of the English Oxford Movement in America. Their marriage produced five children, and the youngest daughter, Ella Loraine, became as popular a Catholic writer as her mother. Though well received in their day, Dorsey’s highly melodramatic, Catholic novels are now out of print. An early novel, The Student of Blenheim Forest (1847), is an account of the alienation of a Catholic son from his anti-Catholic father, an important Virginian. Secretly baptized by his Catholic mother, the student reflects the author’s own conversion to Catholicism. The plot is typically Victorian with its discovery of hidden relationships, and the point of view is blatantly pro-Catholic. The book is noteworthy, however, for its presentation of the history of Catholicism in Maryland as well as the detailed but readily understandable explanations of various Catholic traditions, such as confession, the Virgin Mary, high Mass, vestments, benediction, and convents. Zoe’s Daughter (1888), another historical tale, is set in the days of Lord Baltimore in Maryland. Other historical novels, noteworthy for their use of dialect, describe the Irish in Ireland or Boston: Nora Brady’s Vow (1869), Mona the Vestal (1869), and The Old House at Glenara (1887) trace the history of Christianity in Ireland from the time of the druids through the time of the British landlords to the Irish immigration to America. The intricate plots stress the joys of conversion to Christianity from paganism. Palms (1887), though set in ancient Rome with a wealth of historical detail, follows the same basic scheme. Although most of Dorsey’s stories are predictable in their Catholic bent, she manages to maintain suspense through a clever handling of the plot complications. For example, in Coaina, Rose of the Algonquins (1867), which has twice been dramatized and translated into German and Hindustani, a beautiful young Native American maiden, Coaina, is thwarted in her romance with a young chief through the machinations of her slanderous aunt, a jealous cousin Winonah, and a would-be suitor from another tribe. They are ultimately stymied and confess their guilt because of Coaina’s charity and forgiveness. While Christianity predictably triumphs, the marriage is not between Coaina and the young chief but between Coaina and Christ. In other tales, such as The Old Gray Rosary and Tangled Paths (1879), Dorsey mocks the contradiction between Catholic belief and racial prejudice. Dorsey’s tales are sentimental and nostalgic as well as edifying, especially for young people. Consequently, she twice received special blessings from Pope Leo XIII, and the University of Notre Dame awarded her the Laetare Medal. OTHER WORKS: A Tale of the White and Red Roses (1846). Oriental Pearl (1848). Flowers of Love and Memory (1849). Guy, the Leper (1850). Woodreve Manor (1852). May Brooke (1856). ‘‘They’re Coming, Grandad!’’ A Tale of East Tennessee (1865). The Flemings or Truth Triumphs (1869). The Heiress of Carrigmona (1887). Beth’s Promise (1887). Adrift (1887). Ada’s Trust (1887). Warp and Woof (1887). The Fate of the Dane and Other Stories


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(1888). Tomboy (1891). The Two Ways (1891). Tears on the Diadem: or, The Crown and the Cloister BIBLIOGRAPHY: Donnelly, E. C., Round Table of Representative American Catholic Novelists (1897). Reference works: Catholic Encyclopedia (1976).

Arapaho’s celebration of the spring sun because the dance contained ferocious tests of courage and endurance. The account is beautifully explicit and describes movingly ‘‘the long ceremony, of praise and prayer to that Lord of the white men and the Native American whom the Arapaho calls The Man Above.’’

—SUZANNE ALLEN

Other articles, ‘‘Women in the Patent Office,’’ ‘‘Women in the Pension Office,’’ and ‘‘Women in the Land Office,’’ recognize the contributions of usually unacclaimed women who work in governmental offices. All of Dorsey’s work is now out of print and difficult to find.

Born 2 March 1853, Washington, D.C.; died 1935, Washington, D.C. Daughter of Lorenzo and Anna McKenney Dorsey

OTHER WORKS: Midshipman Bob (1887). Jet, the War-Mule (1894). The Taming of Polly (1897). Pickle and Pepper (1898). Pocahontas (1906). A Biographical Sketch of James Maccubbin, One of the Original Proprietors (1909). The Census and Its Lesson (1924). The Children of Avalon, n.d. Da-h-pi-ki, n.d. The Jose-Maria, n.d. Saxty’s Angel, n.d. The Two Tramps, n.d.

DORSEY, Ella Loraine

A descendant of old and illustrious Maryland colonists and, like her mother, a pioneer of light Catholic fiction, Ella Lorraine Dorsey showed great interest in both political and religious concerns, which continually surface in her writings. From early childhood she was inundated with political literature and history. All of her relatives supported the Confederacy except her only brother, who fought and died for the Union cause, and her father. Educated at Madame Burr’s School and Visitation Convent in Georgetown, Dorsey began writing in 1871 as ‘‘Vanity Fair’’ for the Washington Critic and worked for 10 years on Washington newspapers. Later she was a special correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and for papers in Boston and in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1886 at the urging of Catholic magazine editors, Dorsey began writing Catholic children’s fiction. Her first stories, ‘‘The Knickerbocker Ghost,’’ ‘‘The Tsar’s Horses,’’ and ‘‘Back from the Frozen Pole,’’ were published in Catholic periodicals such as Ave Maria and Catholic World but also in secular publications such as Harper’s. They were praised for their accuracy of detail. During the Spanish-American War, Dorsey served as a volunteer assistant in the Hospital Corps for the Daughters of the American Revolution. The experience gained there resulted in several other pieces of edifying juvenile boys’ fiction that became very popular. Like her mother’s melodramatic Catholic writings for adults, Dorsey’s children’s fiction is pro-Catholic, clever in plot manipulation, and accurate and fascinating in historical detail. In her work, conversion to Christianity is always a great joy. Dorsey demonstrated her historical acumen and moral concern in the societies to which she belonged. She was on the board for Trinity College, the first Catholic college for the higher education of women in America, a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Marquette League, the Pocahontas Memorial Association, corresponding secretary of the Club of Colonial Dames, and an honorary member of the Association of Spanish-American War Nurses. Many of her writings, not meant only for children, grew out of these affiliations. ‘‘The Forbidden Dance,’’ published in the Messenger in 1908, deals with the lack of understanding of the Native American culture by the U.S. government in banning the

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Donnelly, E. C., et al., Round Table of Representative American Catholic Novelists (1897). Reference works: A Woman of the Century (1893). —SUZANNE ALLEN

DORSEY, Sarah (Ann) Ellis Born 16 February 1829, Natchez, Mississippi; died 4 July 1879, New Orleans, Louisiana Wrote under: Filia Ecclesiae, Filia Daughter of Thomas G. Percy and Mary Routh Ellis; married Samuel W. Dorsey, 1853 (died 1875) Sarah Ellis Dorsey was descended from the leading planting families of Louisiana and Mississippi. Her father died when she was nine years old, and her mother married another wealthy planter. Dorsey’s childhood education was extensive; she had private tutors to teach her foreign languages and the fine arts, and a European grand tour capped her formal training. In 1853 she married a lawyer and the overseer on one of the family plantations. The young couple moved to Tensas Parish, Louisiana, and Dorsey settled into the life of a Southern wife and plantation mistress. During the Vicksburg campaign of 1863, the Dorsey home was raided by Grant’s men. After the city fell and the area was overrun by the Union army, the Dorseys took their slaves and trekked to Texas. Samuel Dorsey died in 1875 and Dorsey moved to their summer home, Beauvoir, near Biloxi, Mississippi. One of Dorsey’s childhood friends had been Varina Howell Davis, the wife of the former Confederate president. Jefferson Davis was Dorsey’s guest at Beauvoir in 1876 while visiting near Biloxi and later settled into a cottage on the estate to write his memoirs, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881). Dorsey served as his secretary and confidante, transcribing his notes, keeping his correspondence, and entertaining his

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guests. Mrs. Davis, who was in Europe with her daughter, somewhat resented Dorsey’s close association with her husband and refused to visit the house for several months after her return. Eventually, though, she joined them. The Davises were so enchanted with the estate Dorsey sold it to them in 1879. She also bequeathed two Louisiana plantations to Davis in her will. Dorsey’s writing career had begun in the 1850s with a series of articles on the religious education of her slaves for the New York Churchman. Her first book was a biography of Louisiana’s Confederate governor, Henry Watkins Allen, published in 1866. A family friend, Allen had left notes and personal papers with Dorsey before his flight into exile in Mexico. The biography is very complimentary toward the late governor, stressing his cooperation with the Confederate government and his attempts to relieve the distress of the state’s civilian population during wartime. In Lucia Dare (1867), a novel dealing with the adventures of an English heiress during the Civil War, Dorsey used her own experiences as a refugee in Texas as the basis for the narrative. Dorsey’s most famous novel was Panola, a Tale of Louisiana (1877). The heroine of this romance was a young, ‘‘proud, shy, slowly-maturing, half-Indian maiden. The chastity and continence of her blood through long lines of famous warriors had kept cool and as yet unwarmed by passion.’’ The novel is set in the home of Dr. Canonge just before the Civil War. Panola, who is related to the doctor in some way, yet is also a servant in the household, falls in love with Victor, the doctor’s grandson. The plot revolves around the marriage, separation, and reunion of the lovers. True love, not unexpectedly, conquers all. Panola is typical of Dorsey’s fiction. Sentimental and heavily romanticized, it is also poorly plotted. Characters disappear from the stage only to be resurrected, usually in disguise, for dramatic effect. The writing is stilted and peppered with French pseudodialect. Its appeal was to a generation of readers who wanted pretty illusions in the face of the grim realities of Reconstruction. OTHER WORKS: Recollections of Henry Watkin Allen, Brigadier-General Confederate States Army, Ex-Governor of Louisiana (1866). Agnes Graham (1869). Athalie; or, A Southern Villeggiatura (1872). On the Philosophy of the University of France. First Paper Prepared for the Academy of Sciences of New Orleans, April 13, 1874 (1874). The Aryan Philosophy. Second Paper Prepared at the Request of the Academy of Sciences of New Orleans (circa 1875). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Davis, V., Jefferson Davis, Ex-President of the Confederate States of America: A Memoir by His Wife (1890). Strode, H., Jefferson Davis: Tragic Hero (1964). Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Other references: BJRL (1954). Journal of Mississippi History (1944). —JANET E. KAUFMAN

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DOUBLEDAY, Nellie Blanchan (De Graff) Born 23 October 1865, Chicago, Illinois; died 21 February 1918, Canton, China Wrote under: Neltje Blanchan Daughter of Liverius and Alice Fair De Graff; married Frank N. Doubleday, 1886 Author of several very popular bird and nature books, Nellie Blanchan Doubleday was educated at St. John’s School in New York and the Misses Masters’ School in Dobbs Ferry. In 1886 she married Frank N. Doubleday (1862-1934), who later founded the publishing firm of Doubleday, Doran and Company. An exuberant, enthusiastic woman, Doubleday was no great authority on birds, but her work was part of the foundations of the conservation movement made during the early years of the 20th century. She died in Canton while on an assignment for the Red Cross. Nature enthusiasts at the turn of the century often mixed interest in Native American lore, birds, plants, and camping skills. Although Doubleday’s first book was a study of the Piegans, one of the Blackfoot tribes of the West, her bird writing soon took precedence. Bird Neighbors (1897), her first bird book, is an elementary field book including information on habitats and bird families. Introduced by John Burroughs, the volume went through many printings. The following year (1898), she published Birds That Hunt and Are Hunted: Life Histories of One Hundred and Seventy Birds of Prey, Game Birds and Water-Fowls, again not a work of important new observations but a book for the amateur. In the preface, Doubleday points out that when the public learns about birds, they will willingly back laws to protect them. Her writing style in these two books is informative and lively. In her chapter on the bob white, in Birds That Hunt, for example, she portrays in very effective scenes the devastation of the little families by ‘‘sportsmen.’’ Doubleday was not against limited hunting but favored proper conservation laws. Another of her popular nature guides was on plants, Nature’s Garden (1900), which is a guide to wildflowers arranged by their color. This work also includes information about insects associated with the flowers. Doubleday lists all the common names of a given plant and has short essays of appreciation about each one; in these she quotes poetry, cites folk beliefs, and explains the relationship between the flower and its insect visitors. Another of Doubleday’s enthusiasms was gardening. The American Flower Garden (1909) appeared in many editions over a period of 25 years. Well illustrated with photographs, and beautifully printed, this book covers the topic of American gardening from a decidedly upper-class point of view. Chapters on various garden topics (such as ‘‘The Naturalistic Garden’’) and chapters of plant advice (such as one on annuals) made this a practical handbook for those with enough money to garden on Doubleday’s scale. In one chapter, ‘‘The Formal Garden,’’ Doubleday extols Italian gardening and the sophisticated delights of continental garden skill. In another, she writes: ‘‘When we remember that the masses of our population are but lately landed


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immigrants, it is scarcely surprising that crowds gaze with rapture upon a life-sized elephant, done in uniform cactus rosettes, on the greensward of a public park.’’ Although Doubleday is a minor figure in American nature writing, her books are typical of those associated with the conservation movement of the turn of the century. At that time, nature study of both flora and fauna became more than just a proper pastime for a genteel country woman; it became part of a growing national consciousness to preserve a magnificent natural heritage.

OTHER WORKS: The Piegan Indians (1889). How to Attract the Birds (1902). Birds Every Child Should Know (1907). Birds Worth Knowing (1917).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: McFarland, M., Memoirs of a Rose Man (1949). Swanberg, W. A., Dreiser (1965). Dreiser, T. A., Letters (1959). Reference works: DAB (1891). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). —BEVERLY SEATON

DOUGLAS, Amanda Minnie Born 14 July 1831, New York, New York; died 18 July 1916, Newark, New Jersey Daughter of John N. and Elizabeth Horton Douglas Amanda Douglas was educated at the City Institute in New York City, and in 1853 moved to Newark, New Jersey, where she spent the rest of her life. At one time she considered a career as a designer and engraver, but illness in her family forced her to remain at home and she began to write for publication. She soon established herself as a prolific author of both short stories and book-length fiction. Her first novel, In Trust, was published in 1866. From then until almost the end of her life, she produced steadily, frequently publishing more than one book a year. She was a member of the New Jersey Woman’s Press Club and the Ray Palmer club, a women’s literary organization. In 1893 her novel Larry won a prize from Youth’s Companion for the year’s best piece of fiction for young people. As an author Douglas developed several commercially successful series, two of which are distinctly juvenile. The Kathie stories, popular in the 1870s and 1880s, concern a ‘‘sunshiny’’ little girl who in a childish way exemplifies popular conceptions of womanly virtue—cheerful industry, love of ‘‘home life,’’ and the desire to exert an improving influence on boys about her. The Little Girl books (from A Little Girl in Old New York, 1896, to A Little Girl in Old Pittsburg, 1909) are saccharine tales built around references to local and national history, reflecting the buoyant patriotism of the Teddy Roosevelt era.

The later Helen Grant series (beginning with Helen Grant’s Schooldays in 1903) is designed for slightly older girls and offers an idealized version of the ‘‘new woman’’—Helen is a noble, intelligent girl, universally admired, who educates herself, attends college, chooses a profession, and becomes a teacher. She is interested in politics in a high-minded nonpartisan way, ‘‘now that suffrage is an issue,’’ and she finds higher education is no barrier to aesthetic refinement and elegant womanly taste. Douglas’ final series, the long-running Sherburne series (beginning with Sherburne House, 1892) projects a conventional domestic romance through several generations in one wealthy family. Through her novels, Douglas (like her friend Louisa May Alcott in Little Women) often compares life to the ‘‘progress’’ of Christian in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and describes human trials as ‘‘burdens’’ to be borne for their moral instruction. Though never explicitly feminist, Douglas repeatedly enjoins her readers to respect ‘‘single women,’’ remembering they too may lead ‘‘good and useful lives’’ and that marriage is not the only career of service for a woman. Her stories, though repetitive and obviously commercial, are lively and well plotted, effectively designed to entertain and instruct.

OTHER WORKS: Stephen Dane (1867). Sydney Adriance (1867). Claudia (1868). With Fate Against Him (1870). Kathie’s Stories (1871). Kathie’s Summer at Cedarwood (1871). Lucia: Her Problem (1872). Seven Daughters (1874). There’s No Place Like Home (1875). Drifted Asunder (1876). Nelly Kinnard’s Kingdom (1876). From Hand to Mouth (1878). Hope Mills (1880). Lost in a Great City (1880). Kathie’s Aunt Ruth (1883). Kathie’s Soldiers (1883). Kathie’s Three Wishes (1883). The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe (1883). Whom Kathie Married (1883). Floyd Grandon’s Honor (1884). Out of the Wreck (1884). A Woman’s Inheritance (1886). Foes of Her Household (1887). The Fortunes of the Faradays (1888). In the Ranks (1888). Heroes of the Crusades (1889). Osborne of Arrochar (1890). Bertha Wray’s New Name (1893). Lyndell Sherburne (1893). In the King’s Country (1894). Sherburne Cousins (1894). A Sherburne Romance (1895). In Wild Rose Time (1895). A Little Girl in Old Washington (1896). The Mistress of Sherburne (1896). The Children at Sherburne House (1897). Hannah Ann (1897). Her Place in the World (1897). A Little Girl in Old Boston (1898). Sherburne Girls (1898). The Heir of Sherburne (1899). Kathie’s Harvest Days (1899). A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia (1899). Almost as Good as a Boy (1900). A New ‘‘Sherburne’’ Book (1900). Home Nook (1901). A Little Girl in Old New Orleans (1901). A Question of Silence (1901). A Sherburne Inheritance (1901). A Little Girl in Old Detroit (1902). A Sherburne Quest (1902). How Bessie Kept House (1903). A Little Girl in Old St. Louis (1903). Helen Grant’s Friends (1904). Honor Sherburne (1904). A Little Girl in Old Chicago (1904). The Heirs of Bradley House (1905). Helen Grant at Aldred House (1905). A Little Girl in Old San Francisco (1905). An Easter Lily (1906). A Little Girl in Old Quebec (1906). Helen Grant, Senior (1907). A Little Girl in Old Baltimore (1907). In the Sherburne Line (1907). Helen Grant, Graduate (1908). A

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Little Girl in Old Salem (1908). Helen Grant, Teacher (1909). Helen Grant’s Decision (1910). Helen Grant’s Harvest Year (1911). The Red House Children at Grafton (1913). The Red House Children’s Year (1915).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: A Woman of the Century (1893). DAB (1929). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Book News Monthly (Sept. 1893, Jan. 1898). On Critical Analysis (video, 1995). —JANE BENARDETE

DOUGLAS, Ann Born 1942, Morristown, New Jersey Also writes under: Ann Wood Daughter of Malcolm D. Watson and Margaret Wade Taylor; married Peter H. Wood, 1965 (to 1974) Ann Douglas received her B.A. degree in English literature in 1964 from Harvard College, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. From 1964 to 1966, she studied Victorian literature at Linacre College, Oxford, England. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1970, writing her dissertation on ‘‘Piers Plowman and the Monastic Vision Tradition.’’ In 1974, she became a member of the faculty at Columbia University, where she currently teaches American literature and culture. She has been a member of the editorial boards of Women’s Studies since 1972 and of American Quarterly since 1974. The Feminization of American Culture (1977) is Douglas’ first book and her major work, although she has published widely in periodicals. The first two sections (‘‘The Sentimentalization of Status’’ and ‘‘The Sentimentalization of Creed and Culture’’) present her dominant thesis. Douglas maintains that the many similarities between women and clergy in America from 1820 to 1875 constituted an alliance that nurtured a popular literature and a sentimental society—in both of which we can see the beginnings of modern mass culture. In the book’s third section (‘‘Protest: Case Studies in American Romanticism’’), Douglas explores the work of Margaret Fuller and Herman Melville and suggests alternative responses to ‘‘feminization’’ (a rather arbitrary and even sexist term), however, ultimately unsuccessful. Douglas’ appendices suggest the solidity of a sociological study, and in the lengthy scholarly notes she reveals both her extensive reading of 19th-century popular literature and her familiarity with secondary sources. But Douglas’ thesis—the most innovative aspect of her study—seems tenuous in the end. Despite the similar plight of clergy and women at the time, a

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forceful alliance is not convincingly substantiated, although the economic, political, and intellectual parallels are compelling evidence of a shared ‘‘disestablishment.’’ Similarly, the author’s perceptive exploration of clerical and female ‘‘self-denial’’ is enlightening, while not quite persuading the reader of the larger connections for which Douglas argues. As Gerda Lerner notes, however, ‘‘the textual richness and methodological sophistication of this intellectual and literary history compensate for its overstatement, its lack of historical perspective, and its excessive display of erudition.’’ For the most part strikingly well written, The Feminization of American Culture draws attention to important aspects of 19thcentury life all too frequently ignored by the student of literature. Douglas introduces the reader to many writings (particularly those by women) undeservedly overlooked and to others worth probing—if not for their literary excellence, for their significance as part of the main body of American letters. Douglas’ treatment of the two ‘‘case studies’’ with which the book concludes is persuasively astute and profits greatly from the contexts she suggests in the rest of her work. Her examination of Margaret Fuller is particularly perceptive; she analyzes Fuller’s difficulties as a writer and a woman whose central problem is the absence of an audience and whose options become increasingly limited. At her best when dealing at some length with individual writers—Fuller, Melville, Stowe, Buckminster, Park, Henry Ward Beecher—Douglas is always provocative in The Feminization of American Culture, which has gone through several subsequent editions (1978 and 1988) since its 1977 publication. The book’s ultimate value lies in the wide range of materials she examines and in Douglas’ fresh view, whose coherence is at once a weakness and a strength. After The Feminization of American Culture, Douglas went on to write articles for a myriad of publications as well as the introduction for a new edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1981. Douglas’ next book, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s was published in 1995, and she wrote the introductions to Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader in 1998, and Joyce Johnson’s Minor Characters in 1999. Douglas celebrated 25 years of teaching at Columbia University in 1999. OTHER WORKS: Articles in: Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Los Angeles Times, Modernism/Modernity, New Republic, New York Times, Raritan,Vogue and others. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing (1995). Atlantic (May 1977). Other references: CSM (2 Aug. 1977). LJ (Aug. 1977). Nation (30 May 1977). Newsweek (13 June 1977). NYRB (14 July 1977). NYTBR (26 June 1977). On Critical Analysis (interview on video, 1995). —CAROLINE ZILBOORG, UPDATED BY NELSON RHODES


DOVE, Rita Born 28 August 1952, Akron, Ohio Daughter of Ray and Elvira Hord Dove; married Fred Viebahn, 1979; children: Aviva As the second African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the only African American to serve as Poet Laureate of the United States, Rita Dove has acquired an eager following among critics and the general public alike. Dove was born and grew up in Akron, Ohio, and early distinguished herself as a scholar. She attended Miami University of Ohio as a National Merit Scholar and graduated with her B.A. summa cum laude. She subsequently received a Fulbright Fellowship, which she used to study at Germany’s University of Tubingen. Returning to the U.S., she earned an M.F.A. from the well-known University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. Her other awards include grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a General Electric Foundation award for Younger Writers, a National Book award, and several honorary doctorates. She has taught at Arizona State University and is currently on the faculty at the University of Virginia. Dove’s early publications include two chapbooks published soon after she graduated from the University of Iowa. Her first full-length poetry collection was The Yellow House on the Corner (1980); many of the poems in this book achieve their effects through precise imagery and detail. Like many first collections, The Yellow House on the Corner addresses a variety of subject matter, from personal coming-of-age narratives, to more political descriptions of historically significant events, including the American slave trade. In her second collection, Museum (1983), Dove continues this trend, relying on sensual imagery to examine such historical figures as Catherine of Alexandria, Catherine of Siena, and Boccaccio. To the extent that readers are familiar with the lives of the figures Dove evokes and the events to which she refers, her poems are generally accessible. Her language itself is direct and occasionally deceptively simple. Ironically, Dove has been criticized both for focusing too much on race and for failing to focus enough on race. And in a climate when confessionalism has become the easiest of targets, Dove has nevertheless been criticized for not revealing enough of her personal characteristics. These contradictory criticisms reveal Dove is comfortable working among several traditions, that she is familiar with both her African heritage and with the traditional Western literary and cultural canon. To the extent her poetry erupts from personal experience, the content of her poems, in other words, reveal the complicated nature of identity in the late 20th century. Dove is probably most well known for Thomas and Beulah (1986). This book, which won the Pulitzer Prize, consists of two sequences, one from either character’s perspective, which together explore the individual lives of Thomas and Beulah, Dove’s maternal grandparents, as well as their life together. Like many sequences, this book is most effectively read in its entirety. More decidedly narrative than some of Dove’s work, Thomas and Beulah has the effect of multigenerational novels. It is nevertheless a work of its time, for the characters are more antiheroic than

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classically heroic, more disappointed than fulfilled, more ordinary than extraordinary. Yet the book also addresses many of the major events in America’s 20th century, most especially World War II and its aftermath. Thomas is a man disappointed not to be a soldier and disappointed to be the father exclusively of daughters rather than sons, although he hopes to fulfill this longing with a son-in-law and grandson. Thomas’ stroke in the driver’s seat of his automobile and his subsequent death are among the most poignant scenes in the book. Beulah, on the other hand, longs for solitude, quiet. When her children are napping, she sits out behind her garage, relishing her time to herself. Together, the lives of Thomas and Beulah exemplify not only the details of racial struggles but also of gendered struggles during the middle of this century. To some extent, Dove continued this attention to ordinary lives, and more specifically to her own experience in Grace Notes (1989). A recent collection is Mother Love(1995), dedicated to her daughter and relying on the myth of Demeter and Persephone; and her latest is On the Bus with Rosa Parks published in 1999. Throughout her work, Dove elevates ordinary experience to memorable event through her use of striking detail. She has yet to write a book of poetry that has not been well received. Dove has also written in other genres. She has published one novel, Through the Ivory Gate (1992), and a play, The Darker Face of the Earth: A Verse Play in Fourteen Scenes (1994). Critics continue to treat her primarily as a poet, however, not only because the bulk of her work is in that genre, but also because even in her prose she attends to language with the precision of a poet. OTHER WORKS: Ten Poems (1977). The Only Dark Spot in the Sky (1980). Mandolin (1982). Fifth Sunday (1985). Selected Poems (1993). The Poet’s World (1995). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CANR (1998). —LYNN DOMINA

DREW, Elizabeth Born 16 November 1935, Cincinnati, Ohio Daughter of William J. and Estelle Jacobs Brenner; married J. Patterson Drew, 1964 (died 1970); David Webster, 1981. Upon graduation from Wellesley College in 1957, Elizabeth Drew worked for two years as an associate editor at the Writer, and then went on to write for the Congressional Quarterly. In 1967, she became the Washington editor for the Atlantic Monthly, and by 1973 was a regular contributor to the New Yorker with her ‘‘Letter from Washington.’’ In 1971, Drew began interviewing public figures on her radio program ‘‘Thirty Minutes With. . . ,’’ and since 1973 has been a commentator for the Washington PostNewsweek stations and a panelist for ‘‘Inside Washinton’’ (formerly ‘‘Agronsky and Company’’). Among other honors, Drew

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has received the Society of Magazine Writers Award for Excellence (1970), the Dupont-Columbia Award for Broadcast Journalism (1972-73), The Newswomen’s Club of New York Award (1983), the Washington Monthly Political Books Award (1984), and the Edward Weintal Prize for Diplomatic Reporting (1988). As a political journalist, Drew has been described as ‘‘the American Boswell’’ and ‘‘the Samuel Pepys of Washington.’’ Drew has often directed her attention to the ‘‘complexities of governing’’ and the ‘‘protracted, strange, disturbing and somewhat comic process of choosing a president.’’ Her articles and books have focused on specific topics such as presidential campaigns, congressional ethics, lobbying, regulatory commissions, foreign policy, and the events of the Watergate period. Drew combines a consistently understated tone with a restrained style and often organizes a series of focused interviews around a central question. Using the journal form of expression, she carefully describes what has happened and why, as well as providing a feeling for the atmosphere surrounding the events. Drew deftly juxtaposes the ludicrous and the profound on the American political scene. Her analytical and critical stance is tempered by her ironic and humorous sensibility. Drew’s highly praised Washington Journal: The Events of 1973-1974 developed from a journal which she kept during the Watergate years. Drew felt that ‘‘being a journalist in Washington [during Watergate] was like being at the battlefront,’’ and her text depicts daily confrontations with ‘‘one stupefying event after another.’’ Recognizing early in 1973 that the nation would have to deal with the question of impeaching a president, Drew meticulously observed key figures on the Judiciary Committee and developed an evocative case study of the process of decisionmaking during crisis. Drew interprets Watergate abuses in the context of a modern representative democracy confronted with unaccountable executives, reactive congresses, and citizens too easily prone to ‘‘acquiescence, inattention, [and] cynicism.’’ Washington Journal graphically recalls to mind the ‘‘difficult, frightening and fumbling struggle’’ to resolve the question of ‘‘whether our constitutional form of government would continue.’’ Drew’s second book, American Journal: The Events of 1976 (1977), was drawn from material previously published in the New Yorker. Written in journal form, it examines the process of choosing a president during the nation’s bicentennial year. Based on firsthand observation of the pressured candidates during the election period, Drew offers evidence that the big question of how candidates would be at governing is given insufficient consideration in the American political process. With the focus ‘‘on such things as a candidate’s smile, and his affability and how he is doing in Illinois,’’ candidates have accepted a process that prohibits any possibility of articulating a ‘‘broad and worthy vision of the American future.’’ Drew is unique in her ability to discern and pursue the ‘‘important questions facing the country.’’ Her interviews with national leaders reveal their personalities as well as their process of thought. Drew explores the complexity behind and below the surface realities of the contemporary political experience. For

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future scholars who seek a sense of national politics since 1960, her work proves invaluable. In Senator (1979), Drew recounts 10 days in the congressional life of John Culver in the Senate and in his home state, Iowa. The book is written as a case study, realistically detailing the trivial and morally problematic aspects of political life without offering synthesis or analysis. The book is frequently excerpted in anthologies assigned for college political science courses. In Portrait of an Election: The 1980 Presidential Campaign (1981), Drew explains that she is taking a journalistic approach that ‘‘constitutes a history of the period—an account of the realities of the time, unguided, and also undistorted, by hindsight.’’ The goal is to show ‘‘how people in politics think, calculate, react’’ and to capture how it looks and feels. One reviewer applauded her ‘‘cool, lucid style’’ and ‘‘reasoned fairminded approach’’ to her interviews with political actors and their advisors. Another reviewer, however, sees Drew spending time ‘‘lovingly describing Democratic programs or tearing apart Republican rhetoric.’’ A perception by Drew’s colleagues that she is a ‘‘serious, humane, responsibly liberal, one-track-minded, mildly workaholic veteran’’ Washington insider, is especially borne out in Politics and Money: The Road to Corruption (1983). Drew carefully synthesizes the intricacies of the role of money in the American political system and provides a specifically argued analysis of what should be done to ‘‘bring the nation back closer to the fundamental principles of democracy.’’ Her investigation into the ‘‘great rivers of money that were essentially unaccounted for, and legally questionable, flowing into both our congressional and presidential elections’’ has been consistently credited as one of the first journalistic attempts to document the problems inherent in the process of reforming campaign finance laws. With Campaign Journal: The Political Events of 1983-1984 (1985), Drew returns to the detailed diary entries, recording a presidential election campaign with much of the focus on strategies used by Democratic Party candidates trying to win back the White House. Election Journal: Political Events of 1987-1988 (1989) offers more discursive judgements of events and people than her previous books on presidential campaigns, assigning to Ronald Reagan, for instance, the role of ‘‘dominant figure’’ in the 1988 election. Both books reflect what a reviewer called her ‘‘extraordinary capacity for eliciting the informed observations of insiders.’’ Since 1989 Drew has continued to contribute the ‘‘Letter from Washington’’ for the New Yorker as well as to write articles for such publications as the New York Times Sunday Magazine. Her subjects have included the role of Congress in the post-Cold War era, politics in the Soviet Union, the 1992 presidential election campaign, and the politics of campaign finance reform. In 1993 she began work on a book about the first year of the Clinton administration. For On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency (1994), Drew interviewed every high official in the White House, along with


Cabinet officers, Capitol Hill staff, and other Washington insiders. Although criticized for the number of anonymous quotes, this method allowed her to deliver an accumulation of painstaking detail that enhances the book’s credibility and paints one of the fullest pictures of the Clinton Administration’s creation of its ambitious but ill-fated health care proposal. Showdown: The Struggle Between the Gingrich Congress and the Clinton White House (1996) offers a similarly detailed portrait, this time of then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. The exhaustive work—a journalist colleague described her ‘‘lichen-like attachment’’ to Gingrich—followed the Speaker’s fall from triumph to failure within the space of one year. The book highlights a criticism of the type of journalistic reportage Drew utilizes; it creates an accurate picture of a moment in time but lacks the potential for the kind of reliable analysis that a historical work can provide. In Whatever It Takes: The Real Struggle for Political Power in America(1997), Drew was applauded for her insight that the interests of a political party may conflict with those of its candidate: Bob Dole’s presidential campaign was abandoned by the Republicans to increase their chances of winning the House and Senate. The book, a look at the activities and ethics of several powerful conservative lobbies, was panned by some for shining light on the conservatives at the same time that the Clinton Administration’s ethical difficulties were coming to light. Yet critics agreed that Whatever It Takes offers Drew’s usual fair—if slightly left-leaning—portrait, teeming with insider information. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Marzolf, M., Up from the Footnote: A History of Women Journalists (1977). Reference works: CA 104 (1982). WWAW (1997/1998). Other references: American Spectator (July 1996). BW (26 May 1997). CSM (9 Nov. 1977). JAS (Aug. 1983). National Review (9 Aug. 1985). NR (30 Dec. 1981, 13 Mar. 1995). NYRB (21 Jan. 1982, 6 June 1996, 14 Aug. 1997). NYTBR (14 Sept. 1975, 9 Nov. 1977, 13 May 1979, 8 Nov. 1981, 11 Sept. 1983, 17 March 1985, 2 April 1989, 27 Nov. 1994). Newsweek (18 Dec. 1971, 13 Oct. 1975). PW (26 Sept. 1994). Reason (Dec. 1997). Washington Journalism Review (Dec. 1981). —JENNIFER L. TEBBE, UPDATED BY KAREN RAUGUST

DREXLER, Rosalyn Born 26 November 1926, New York, New York Also writes under: Julia Sorel Daughter of George and Hilda Sherman Bronznick; married Sherman Drexler, 1946; children: one daughter, one son Rosalyn Drexler, who writes under both her own name and her pseudonym Julia Sorel, offers readers plays and novels that share pathos and satiric wit, mundaneness and magic, comedy and

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the blunt grimness of newspaper tragedy. She describes her feminist blend of ‘‘reality and fantasy’’ as ‘‘in the tradition of the Russian absurdists/surrealists such as Zamyatin, Gogol, and Bulgakov.’’ Her writing is structured by plot development motivated by character, located in a world like ours—though the rules differ, and characters sometimes follow the spotlight or turn into angels. Drexler’s drama has been well received critically, and three of her plays (Home Movies, 1967; The Writer’s Opera, 1979; Transients Welcome, 1984) were awarded Obies. Her short story ‘‘Dear’’ won a Paris Review humor prize (1966), and in 1974 she received an Emmy Award for writing a television special for comedian Lily Tomlin. Drexler has been the recipient of fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation (1965, 1968, 1974, 1986), Guggenheim Foundation (1970), and Yaddo (1980); she has also received grants from the NEA (1989, 1991), the New York Foundation for the Arts (1990), and the New York State Commission on the Arts (1993). Her creative interest in both literature and art has led to membership in numerous dramatic and theatrical organizations, including the Dramatists Guild, the New York Theatre Strategy, and Actors Studio. Drexler’s artistic versatility has translated into a successful career as a painter. She has presented one-women art shows at New York and Boston galleries, among others, and has been a part of group shows in such prestigious venues as the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum. Her visual work Rosalyn Drexler: Intimate Emotions appeared in the Grey Art Gallery at New York University in 1986. In addition to her own creative outlets, Drexler employs her critical and scholarly command by contributing to such periodicals as Esquire, Village Voice, and Mademoiselle, and by reviewing films for Vogue. Largely self-educated, Drexler has worked as a wrestler, singer, college teacher, director, and sculptor; as well as a noted painter. All of these occupations are preoccupations to her writing, which she describes as ‘‘very much concerned with the artist, creativity, and the relationship of the artist to life,’’ with ‘‘human relationships’’ and questions of ‘‘what is real life and who’s trying to squelch it.’’ Critics have compared her to the Marx Brothers (whose movies she saw as a child), commenting on her honesty and the playfulness of her sight gags, song, silliness, and puns. But Drexler’s writing is not just farcical, as critics who have likened her to Kafka, Joyce, and Pynchon recognize. Drexler ‘‘loves Beckett’’ and Ionesco, and her worlds’ darker ironies and isolation reflect this. Her irreverence is iconoclastic. Her use of streamof-consciousness reveals characters who are not having fun, whose desires lead only to loss. Her writing focuses on the theatricality of life, the ways characters script each other and adopt roles, revealing in the process that much of human identity is artificial and implying that these roles are inadequate or damaging. Verbal and physical violence are also important technical and thematic issues in Drexler’s work, animating her interest in dysfunctional families, gender relations, and the impact of the arts and media. Her later work includes Bad Guy (1982, 1988), a novel about a therapist who uses dream interpretation and psychodrama

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to treat a teenage rapist/murderer whose role models have all been television characters. Drexler’s work is art and entertainment, and her characters resemble circus grotesques, paradoxically evoking tenderness and laughter. Her style is both compassionate toward them and merciless in detailing their lives. These criminals and victims, healers and patients, social misfits and apparently normal characters—whose psychological deformities and scars Drexler reveals—are both archetypal and idiosyncratic. Her writing is memorable for these characters and their wordplay; it is poignant when we see them achieve a momentary self-awareness or transcend their fragmentation in an act of intimacy or kindness— perhaps because the meanings of self and action remain ambiguous. Drexler’s writing is almost always political. The point of view is often feminist, as when she focuses on the commodification of the female body (Line of Least Existence, 1967; Cosmopolitan Girl, 1975) or mythologizes male rule as the rape/murder of a queen who incarnates her country (She Who Was He, 1973). But Drexler’s social critiques are broader than any label, ranging from parodies of class and racial stereotypes and witty indictments of commercialism, materialism, and egotism to trenchant satire of such topical issues as the American involvement in Panama (Cara Piña, 1992). OTHER WORKS: I Am the Beautiful Stranger (1965). The Investigation & Hot Buttered Roll (1967). One or Another (1970). To Smithereens (1972). Starburn: The Story of Jenni Love (1979). Art Does (Not!) Exist (1996). Dear (1997). Fiction as Julia Sorel: Unwed Widow (1975). Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway (1976). Rocky (1976). Alex: The Other Side of Dawn (1977). See How She Runs (1978). Essays, short stories and essays in Arts & Antiques, Black Ice, Esquire, Los Angeles Times, Mademoiselle, Ms., New American Revue, New York Times, Paris Revue, Sports Illustrated, Vogue, Village Voice, Viva and others. Included in the following anthologies: Theater Experiment (1967), Collision Course (1968), The Off-Off Broadway Book (1972), 100 Monologues (1989), Women on the Verge (1993), From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Drama, 1960-1995 (1998). Unpublished plays in Drexler’s possession (dates are for first production): The Ice Queen (1965). Was I Good? (1972). Vulgar Lives (1979). The Writer’s Opera (1979) Graven Image (1980). The Mandrake (1983). Starburn (1983). Delicate Feelings (1984). A Matter of Life and Death (1986). The Heart That Eats Itself (1987). The Flood (1992). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Abraham, T. T., ‘‘Carnivalesque and American Women Dramatists of the Sixties.’’ (dissertation, 1990). Betsko, K., and R. Koenig, Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights (1987). Brown, J., Feminist Drama: Definition and Critical Analysis (1979). Dasgupta, G., and B. Maranca, eds., American Playwrights: A Critical Survey (1981). Gottfried, M., A Theater Divided: The Postwar American Stage (1967). Keyssar, H.,

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Feminist Theatre (1984). Sontag, S., ‘‘Going to Theater, Etc.’’ in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (1966). Reference works: American Women Dramatists of the Twentieth Century (1982). CA (1979, 1999). CD (1988). CLC (1974, 1976). Notable Women in the American Theater (1989). . Other references: American Theatre (1993). Art in America 74 (Nov. 1986). Art News (March 1964; interview, Jan. 1971). george jr. (1996). Mademoiselle (interview, Aug. 1972). Massachusetts Review (interview, Winter 1972). New Yorker (23 May 1964). NYT (interview, 27 Feb. 1978). Plays and Players 17 (April 1970). PW (1996). Theater (Winter 1985) —DANA SONNENSCHEIN, UPDATED BY JULIET BYINGTON

DRINKER, Elizabeth Sandwith Born 1734, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 24 November 1807, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Daughter of William and Sarah Jervis Sandwith; married Henry Drinker, 1761 Born to a successful merchant family, Elizabeth Sandwith Drinker was educated by Anthony Benezet at a girls’ school that offered a curriculum similar to that available to boys in other schools. Such an education was so unusual in colonial America that Drinker’s obituary in 1807 made note of it. In October 1758 Drinker began her diary, a record which she kept faithfully until shortly before her death. Never intended for publication, the diary filled 36 manuscript volumes with almost daily entries. Drinker chronicled births, deaths, visits, price lists, travels, illnesses, medical advice, character sketches, family matters, religious activities, military movements, and political developments. In fact, she recorded thousands of Philadelphia events, both trivial and momentous. A series of entries made in 1777 and 1778, for example, detailed the British occupation of Philadelphia during the American Revolution. True to her Quaker pacifism, Drinker seems to have maintained a careful neutrality: her cryptic judgements spared neither side in the controversy. On May 18, 1778, she commented on the lavish celebration with which the British marked the departure of General Howe from Philadelphia: ‘‘This day may be remembered by many from the scenes of folly and vanity, promoted by the officers of the army under pretense of showing respect to Gen. Howe. . . .How insensible do these people appear, while our land is so greatly desolated, and death and sore destruction has overtaken and impends over so many.’’ Yet the Continental Army hardly merited Drinker’s higher esteem either. On 2 September 1777, Henry Drinker and other Friends had been arrested and exiled to Virginia for refusing on religious grounds to swear allegiance to the new government and contribute to its support. Due to his prominence, Henry was released after eight months without ever coming to trial, but


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Drinker’s diary entries for April 1778 document her trip to George Washington’s headquarters at Valley Forge to secure his release. After the Revolution, Drinker quite consciously directed her attention away from politics. In 1795, with one of the many verse entries in her diary, she characterized her interests as homebound: ‘‘I stay much at home, and my business I mind,/ Take note of the weather, and how blows the wind.’’ But although Drinker describes her interests as limited, the variety and detail of her 36-volume diary suggest wider concerns; her record has yet to be fully explored by scholars of early America. Elizabeth Drinker’s diary (kept from 1758 to 1807) is in the possession of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

OTHER WORKS: Extracts from the Journal of Elizabeth Drinker (edited by H. D. Biddle, 1889).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cowell, P., Women Poets in Pre-Revolutionary America, 1650-1775 (1981). Drinker, C. K., Not So Long Ago: A Chronicle of Medicine and Doctors in Colonial Philadelphia (1937). Other references: PMHB (1889, 1891). —PATTIE COWELL

DuBOIS, Shirley Graham See GRAHAM, Shirley

DuJARDIN, Rosamond Neal Born 1902, Fairland, Illinois; died 27 March 1963 Daughter of Edgar and Ida May Neal; married Victor DuJardin, 1925 Rosamond Neal DuJardin, a popular writer best remembered for her honest, direct novels about teenagers, began her career as a fiction writer for the Chicago Daily News in 1930, but soon moved on to sell more than 100 stories to magazines such as Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, and McCall’s. DuJardin’s first novels, published between 1935 and 1946, were written for adults and often appeared first in magazine serial form. Honorable Estate (1943), like many of DuJardin’s works, takes place in a small town in Illinois. A young man brings his bride of a day home to the unwelcoming astonishment of his mother and tyrannical grandfather. Although the year is 1940, their lives revolve around petty, small-town gossip, not world events. The narrowness of convention destroys the newly formed

marriage contract by demanding suffocating sacrifices that the young wife cannot accept. Malicious tongues also account for two unnecessary deaths and the destruction of a doctor’s previously unblemished reputation. Only those who are able to break out from social bonds find love and happiness, leaving those behind locked in a suspicious prison of their own making. DuJardin writes a solid and engaging narrative that may lack depth but nonetheless brings the value of skepticism and open-mindedness within popular reach. Her characters are easy to identify with, her language is vivid, and her plots are filled with the unpredictable. In 1949 DuJardin wrote her first book for teenagers entitled Practically Seventeen, and she enjoyed the experience so much that she never went back to writing for adults. She followed this first young adult novel with 16 others, all of which were greeted with enthusiastic reviews. DuJardin takes teenage novels beyond their usual insipid level of romance and morality to create natural, authentic fiction that deals honestly with the problems of adolescence. She stresses the need for teenagers to lend a helping hand to each other themselves, understanding that there are some aspects of being 17 that adults know nothing about. In Double Wedding (1959), DuJardin writes a tale of believable romance. The novel does not end with the finding of true love, but begins with it. Pam and Peggy have already found their prospective husbands, and DuJardin explores the challenges and problems that come up in every serious relationship. There is no starry-eyed romance here. It is rather the awakening of two young girls learning to cope with love, learning how to fit it into their individual career dreams, their need for personal space, and their need for friends. DuJardin is writing for teenagers but she is dealing with the adult problems adolescence is all about; she understood and respected her audience as individuals and there is no condescension in her narratives.

OTHER WORKS: All Is Not Gold (1937). Only Love Lasts (1943). Brief Glory (1944). Tomorrow Will Be Fair (1946). Wait for Marcy (1950). Class Ring (1951). Double Date (1952). Marcy Catches Up (1952). Boy Trouble (1953). Double Feature (1953). A Man for Marcy (1954). Showboat Summer (1954). The Real Thing (1956). Senior Prom (1957). Wedding in the Family (1958). Junior Year Abroad, with J. DuJardin (1960). One of the Crowd (1961). Someone to Count on (1962). Young and Fair (1963).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: More Junior Authors (1963). Other references: Chicago School Journal (14 May 1951). PW (8 Apr. 1963). WLB (June 1953, May 1963). —CHRISTIANE BIRD

DUNLAP, Jane See DAVIS, Adelle

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DuPLESSIS, Rachel Blau Born 14 December 1941, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Joseph L. and Eleanor Weslock Blau; married Robert Saint-Cyr DuPlessis, 1968; children: Richard, Kore Feminist literary critic and poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, and teaches at Temple University. She describes herself as ‘‘an off-white feminist, resisting even ‘enlightenment’ Judaism, a radical but middle-class U.S. inhabitant in a professional job category.’’ Well known for her poetry in such collections as Gypsy/Moth(1984) and Drafts (3-14) (1991), DuPlessis is also the editor of the recently published Feminist Memoir Project (1998). DuPlessis attended Barnard College and Columbia University. She received her Ph.D. in 1970. She taught at Rijksuniversiteit te Gent in Ghent, Belgium, and Universite de Lille III in Lille, France, in the early 1970s. She then taught at Rutgers University and began teaching at Temple University in 1974. She received a Fulbright professorship in 1985 and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1986 and 1988. She was awarded a poetry fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts in 1990. Feminism infuses all of DuPlessis’ work. She contends that ‘‘if I had not become a feminist, I would not have been able to write much or to think anything especially interesting in any original way.’’ She sees her work in literary criticism as the psychosocial analyses of literary production. DuPlessis’ own writing seeks to invent an endless number of forms, structures, and ‘‘linguistic ruptures’’ in order to cut through and beyond the ‘‘narrative-business-as-usual.’’ Her engagement in experimental writing is part of a larger task of cultural change and revolution. While writing alone cannot bring about change, DuPlessis is adamant that writing exerts a continuous destabilizing pressure. Language and textual structures must help cause and support the changes in consciousness. Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (1985) defines one major project of 20th-century women writers: the critique of the (heterosexual) romance plot. DuPlessis challenges the classic relation of romance and quest; she seeks to invent narrative strategies to erode and replace the heterosexual couple as an adequate fictional ending. This book was written as a cross between feminist humanism and the neo-Marxist analysis of Raymond Williams. DuPlessis is also known as an authority on the life, work, and influences of Hilda Doolittle. In H. D.: The Career of That Struggle (1986), she wrote a critical exploration of Doolittle. DuPlessis collaborated with Susan Stanford Friedman on Signets: Reading H. D. (1990), a collection spanning two decades of Hilda Doolittle criticism by the most influential critics. Well reviewed, the anthology is a representative collection of essays, some classics and others more recent, including bibliographies, chronology, and photographs. Meryl Altman in a review for the Women’s Review of Books wrote,‘‘More easily available than

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Michael King’s H. D. Woman and Poet (1986), which it partly supersedes, and in all respects superior (of course) to Harold Bloom’s H. D., this comprehensive and balanced gathering of clearly written articles is the one critical anthology anyone writing about or teaching H. D. should certainly buy.’’ DuPlessis collected a decade of her essays for inclusion in The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (1990). She examines such questions as: Isn’t ‘‘feminist aesthetic’’ a contradiction in terms? And why has feminist criticism throughout its brief history searched so diligently for an aesthetic? Since literary study as an intellectual and institutional practice can’t seem to manage without these measuring rods, how can there be a feminist literary criticism at all? The volume starts with her famous essay ‘‘For the Etruscans,’’ and critics claim the power of this essay derives from its borderline status, described as coming from the two author positions that DuPlessis delineates for herself, ‘‘part sisterhood is powerful, part meaning is constructed through discursive practices.’’ Throughout the essays in The Pink Guitar, DuPlessis marshals her feminist anger through a radical writing practice that constantly questions its own discursive status while upending issues of language, women, and authority. As one reviewer remarked, ‘‘DuPlessis’ sentences dart, rest, turn, twist, reveal, and disappear.’’ In 1998 DuPlessis collaborated with Ann Snitow on an anthology called the Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women’s Liberation. As she did in The Pink Guitar, DuPlessis once again exhibits her abiding commitment to giving voice to the widest range possible of women’s expression. In this case, the focus is a collection of memoirs from feminism’s ‘‘second wave’’ of the 1960s and 1970s. While assembling the collection, the editors were lectured by a member of a younger feminist generation about the need to move forward. ‘‘It is time for the old to let go of ’70s politics. To practice a little strategic forgetfulness.’’ Contrary to this stance, DuPlessis sees the history of feminism as a necessary building block for further activism. ‘‘Ignorance of that time. . .is also an odd handicap,’’ the editors wrote in the Feminist Memoir Project, ‘‘like running a relay race with no ideas of what’s being handed on to you from the runner just behind.’’ Through all of her work, poetry, and criticism, DuPlessis constantly engages the past in order to create not cultural revision but revolution. She seeks to create and preserve a narrative of feminism that stands against historical forgetting.

OTHER WORKS: Poetry Wells (1980). Tabula Rosa (1987). Draft X: Letters (1991).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). American Book Review (Apr./May 1991). CA (1993). Choice (1992). WRB (July 1991, July 1992). —CELESTE DEROCHE


DUNCAN

DUNBAR-NELSON, Alice (Ruth Moore)

an unknown plane of life to avoid work,’’ and reassures readers that an independent, intelligent woman, a lawyer or doctor, does not lose her ability to love when she gains a vocation.

Born 19 July 1875, New Orleans, Louisiana; died 18 September 1935, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Also wrote under: Alice Dunbar, Alice Ruth Moore Daughter of Joseph and Patricia Wright Moore; married Paul L. Dunbar, 1889 (divorced); Robert J. Nelson, 1916

During the period of her marriage to Dunbar, Dunbar-Nelson published her second collection, The Goodness of St. Rocque, and Other Stories (1899), 14 local-color stories of New Orleans life. These are crisply written sketches, portraying struggling, heroic characters trapped in difficulties. Most have a surprise twist at their conclusions.

The younger of two daughters of middle-class working parents, Alice Dunbar-Nelson attended public schools and Straight College, New Orleans. After graduation, she began to teach and to submit poetry to the Boston Monthly Review. One of these poems and the accompanying photograph attracted Paul Dunbar, then a young poet. He wrote her, conversationally raising literary issues, and enclosed a copy of his ‘‘Phyllis.’’ This began a friendship that led to marriage. Dunbar-Nelson separated from Dunbar after a quarrel in 1902, and returned to teaching—she had taught kindergarten at Victoria Earle Matthews’ White Rose Mission in New York— becoming head of the English Department at Howard High School in Wilmington, Delaware. She retained this position for 18 years until she was fired for defying an order to abstain from political activity. During World War I, Dunbar-Nelson became involved in organizing black women on behalf of the U.S. Council of National Defense. She was the first black woman to serve on Delaware’s Republican State Committee. She became associate editor of the Wilmington Advocate, a weekly newspaper published by her second husband and dedicated to the achievement of equal rights for blacks. She also wrote a weekly column for the Washington (D.C.) Eagle and contributed occasional pieces to the American Methodist Episcopal Church Review. Her later years were devoted to social work, especially with delinquent black girls, and to the cause of world peace. Dunbar-Nelson’s reply to Dunbar’s first letter to her set forth her views on the literary use of ‘‘the Negro problem’’: ‘‘I haven’t much liking for those writers that wedge the Negro problem and social equality and long dissertations on the Negro in general into their stories. It is too much like a quinine pill in jelly. . . .Somehow when I start a story I always think of my folk characters as simple human beings, not of types of a race or an idea, and I seem to be on more friendly terms with them.’’ Dunbar-Nelson’s letter also mentioned the forthcoming publication of her first book, Violets, and Other Tales (1895). In accord with her philosophy, the book presents ‘‘simple human beings’’ caught in universal dilemmas such as poverty and love betrayed. While many of the 12 and 17 tales and sketches in Violets, and Other Tales are romantic and slight, they give evidence of a fresh, lively style. Noteworthy in this collection for their sprightliness and originality are the humorous ‘‘In Unconsciousness,’’ a mock epic inspired by a tooth extraction, and ‘‘The Woman,’’ a lively meditation on the independent woman. This piece decries ‘‘this wholesale marrying of girls in their teens, this rushing into

While teaching at Howard High School, Dunbar-Nelson edited two collections of poems and prose for oratory students, Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence (1914) and The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer (1920). Included in the latter are several pieces by Dunbar-Nelson, many of them (such as the one-act play Mine Eyes Have Seen) expressing conventional patriotic sentiments and racial pride. The short lyric ‘‘I Sit and Sew,’’ while sharing the conventional patriotism of the others, is also a statement of a woman chafing at the limited range of appropriate female activity; it has an intensity, freshness, and power that the other pieces lack. Dunbar-Nelson was a pioneer in the black short story tradition. Her second volume shows an increase in power, which promised further development, had she continued to write in this genre. Instead, an energetic woman of diversified talents, she devoted her later life to journalism and political and social activism. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bernikow, L. The World Split Open: Four Centuries of Women Poets in England and America (1974). Brawley, B., Paul Laurence Dunbar (1936). Brown, H. Q., Homespun Heroines, and Other Women of Distinction (1926). Hull, G. T., ed., The Works of Alice Dunbar-Nelson (3 vols., 1988). Kerlin, R. T., Negro Poets and Their Poems (1935). Loggins, V., The Negro Author (1931). Martin, J., ed., A Singer in the Dawn (1975). Shockey, A. A., Afro-American Writers, 1746-1933 (1989). Stetson, E., ed., Black Sister (1981). Whiteman, M., A Century of Fiction by American Negroes, 1853-1952: A Descriptive Bibliography (1955). Reference works: NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Delaware History (Fall—Winter 1976). —KAREN F. STEIN

DUNCAN, Isadora Born 26 May 1877, San Francisco, California; died 14 September 1927, Nice, France Daughter of Joseph and Dora Gray Duncan; married Sergei Essenin, 1922 (separated by 1924); children: two, both died in 1913 One of the great originators of modern dance and an articulate proponent of her art, Isadora Duncan grew up in circumstances which encouraged her independent spirit. Her father abandoned

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his family when Duncan was an infant, and her mother was forced to support the family by giving music lessons. Duncan left school at age ten to study dance and perform in the natural, graceful, and seemingly improvisational manner that later made her famous. Although she always considered her dance American in spirit, Duncan never met with much success on the stage in her own country. She lived most of her life in Europe, where she achieved enormous critical and popular acclaim, began the first of several schools of the dance, and bore two children. The ghastly deaths of her children in 1913 in an automobile accident haunted the dancer throughout her life and lent a tragic dimension to her highly personal art. In 1921 Duncan was invited to found a school of dance in Russia, where before the Revolution her tours had inspired innovations in the Russian ballet. During this Russian visit, Duncan met and married Russian poet Sergei Essenin, an unstable man much younger than she. But by 1924, the economically troubled Soviet government had withdrawn support for the school, and Duncan had separated from Essenin and left Russia. Thereafter she lived precariously, performing less often but creating a lasting impression when she did. In 1927 Duncan died tragically when the fringe of her shawl caught in a wheel of a sports car, breaking her neck. Duncan’s memoirs up until her 1921 departure for Russia were written during her last months and published posthumously in 1927 as My Life. There have been claims Duncan did not write these unaided, but the exuberant style is that of her essays and of the impromptu speeches she made at the end of every dance recital. (Her miscellaneous writings are collected in The Art of the Dance, 1928.) There are inaccuracies in My Life, and the writing is marred by a banality of expression—Duncan’s medium was movement, not words—but Duncan did have storytelling ability and a gift for putting herself in exalted mythical contexts. Paperback editions of the autobiography, prompted by a popular 1968 film about Duncan’s life, have introduced a new generation of readers to the innovative dancer. In My Life and elsewhere Duncan articulates the conflict between art and life for the woman artist, and there is ample evidence she suffered greatly from these opposing demands. Her biographers have tended to stress the disparity between the dancer’s exquisite art and her untidy personal life, but Duncan’s unconventional and at times irresponsible lifestyle helped make possible her innovative art. The dance she created was a response to her need to express herself as a woman. Although My Life appears to have been commissioned by Duncan’s publishers because of the author’s notoriety, and although many complained it tells the story of her loves rather than of her art, the book does reveal the interdependence of Duncan’s life and her work. In her personal life Duncan demanded freedoms usually granted only to men, but nonetheless her image of herself was conventionally feminine. In My Life she describes herself as an instrument inspired to movement by great works of music, poetry, and painting (always created by men) and she revels in her role as the darling muse of male artists. At times Duncan betrayed an understandable ambivalence about the feminine role, as was

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revealed in her occasional neglect of her pupils. But in general, it appears Duncan was able to use her very feminine version of the woman artist as a more or less culturally permissible way of achieving her own autonomy. Duncan’s version of the woman genius was powerful: she considered herself to be not merely a performer or muse but an artist whose movements came from her soul. Thus she never practiced with mirrors, as do ballet dancers whose mechanical and prescribed movements Duncan rejected. Duncan found her model in the concepts of self-reliance, inner inspiration, and American transcendental romanticism. Like Whitman, she rejected the duality of soul and body, which is potentially damaging to the integrity of women. She called on women to learn about and take control of their own bodies: to become the sculptors, painters, and architects of themselves. Social commentator and novelist Floyd Dell was correct when he included Duncan in his 1913 book about feminists, and he was also correct when he labeled her feminism an extension of the feminine role itself. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dell, F., Women as World Builders: Studies in Modern Feminism (1913). Duncan, I., Duncan Dancer: An Autobiography (1966). Duncan, I., and A. R. Macdougall, Isadora Duncan’s Russian Days and Her Last Years in France (1929). Getz, L. Dancers and Choreographers: A Selected Bibliography (1995). Macdougall, A. R., Isadora: A Revolutionary in Art and Love (1960). Schneider, I. I., Isadora Duncan: The Russian Years (1968). Seroff, V., The Real Isadora: A Biography (1971). Steegmuller, F., ed., ‘‘Your Isadora’’: The Love Story of Isadora Duncan and Gordon Craig (1974). Terry, W., Isadora Duncan: Her Life, Her Art, Her Legacy (1963). Vigier, R., Gestures of Genius: Women, Dance, and the Body (1994). Reference works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1991). International Dictionary of Modern Dance (1998). —LINDA PANNILL

DUNIWAY, Abigail Scott Born 22 October 1834, Groveland, Illinois; died 11 October 1915, Portland, Oregon Daughter of John T. and Ann Roelofson Scott; married Benjamin C. Duniway, 1853 The second daughter among 12 children, Abigail Scott Duniway grew up on the Illinois frontier. At seventeen, she accompanied her family on the overland trail to Oregon, keeping a journal of their 1852 crossing that is one of the best of the genre. Her mother and baby brother died of cholera on the way, and the family arrived virtually destitute in Oregon. Duniway’s first novel, Captain Gray’s Company (1859), is a fictionalized account of her wagon trail journey to Oregon and her early life in an Oregon town. It reveals as much about its author and her attitudes as about her milieu. Agrarian as well as feminist


in principle, Duniway was writing for ‘‘the world’s workers, the stay and strength of our land,’’ and hoped her book would ‘‘be instrumental in causing the sterner to look more to the welfare of the weakest of the tried and suffering of the weaker sex.’’ More realistic than many other women’s novels of the time, the book was nevertheless criticized by Duniway’s political and religious opponents for being too romantic. It remains of interest for its pervasive wit and its historical detail. Between May 1871 and January 1887, Duniway published and edited a weekly newspaper called the New Northwest. It advocated both women’s rights and human rights and circulated throughout the Pacific Northwest and to women in other parts of the country. Its lively style, strong opinions, revelations of political and social scandals, and fervent advocacy of legal reforms and woman suffrage made it a particularly influential and controversial publication. In it Duniway also serialized 16 more of her own novels. These were essentially polemical, featuring strong, mistreated female heroines who suffer numerous adversities and finally triumph over refined ladies and antisuffragist enemies. Though flawed as literature, the stories include extraordinary details of frontier family life and social relationships. Many passages show a fine gift for writing dialogue and humor. Duniway also lectured extensively, bringing her message to isolated women and men with fervor and courage. Each year she averaged 200 lectures, and traveled 3,000 miles by steamboat, mud wagon, stagecoach, horseback, and railroad. She lectured her way across the country six times and became vice president of the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1884. Duniway’s ‘‘editorial correspondence’’ now constitutes a unique historical record of the people and places she saw. Though Duniway almost succeeded in winning woman suffrage in Oregon and Washington during the 1880s, the closing of the frontier led to changes that delayed it for another generation. From 1887 until her death, Duniway continued to write and lecture, publishing in the Portland Oregonian, the Pacific Empire (which she edited), and the Coming Century. When woman suffrage was declared in 1912, she wrote the official proclamation of victory and became the first woman voter in Oregon.

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to 1915’’ (TV script, Wilderness Women Project, University of Montana, 1978). Morrison, D. N., Ladies Were Not Expected: Abigail Scott Duniway and Women’s Rights (1977). Moynihan, R. B., Abigail Scott Duniway of Oregon (dissertation, 1979). Roberts, L. M., ‘‘Suffragist of the New West: Abigail Scott Duniway and the Development of the Oregon Woman Suffrage Movement’’ (thesis, 1969). Richey, E., Eminent Women of the West (1975). Ross, N. W., Westward the Women (1944). Smith, H. K., The Presumptuous Dreamers (1974). —RUTH BARNES MOYNIHAN

DUPUY, Eliza Ann Born ca. 1814, Petersburg, Virginia; died December 1880, New Orleans, Louisiana Wrote under: Annie Young Daughter of Jesse and Mary Sturdivant Dupuy Eliza Ann Dupuy’s fiction, designed to appeal to popular tastes, has few literary pretensions. Combining elements from the domestic novel, the melodramatic romance, and the Richardsonian novel of sentiment, her works abound with coincidences and stock characters and situations. Some favorite subjects, such as the young heiress forced to marry against her will, appear regularly over a 30-year span from The Conspirator (1843) to The Gypsy’s Warning (1873). Dupuy’s narrative ingredients remain constant whether the novel is based on the traditions of her own family (The Huguenot Exiles, 1856), Corsican vendettas (All for Love; The Outlaw’s Bride, 1873), or the life of Marshal Ney (Michael Rudolph, 1870). Their frequent twists of plot, through 500 pages of dark adventures, teetering suspense, long-hatched vengeances, consumptive heroines, providential heroes, and descents into lurid crime and sordid mystery, recall the exigencies of their original serial publication. Her products are carefully adjusted to the desires and expectations of her readers.

OTHER WORKS: My Musing (1875). David and Anna Matson (1876). From the West to the West: Across the Plains to Oregon (1905). Path Breaking (1914).

The Planter’s Daughter (1857) is described by a contemporary critic as ‘‘in an eminent degree sensational.’’ With all their alluring depictions of vice, however, Dupuy’s works conform to and enforce accepted mores. Although entire novels, such as The Country Neighborhood (1855), are said to be based on ‘‘actual life’’ in Mississippi or Louisiana (where Dupuy herself had lived and where she wrote many of her works), stock elements such as persecuted or seduced females, glittering rakes, and avaricious parents, supernatural devices, and the heavy use of coincidence strain the reader’s belief in her realism. In general, however, Dupuy’s Southern characters are presented with less of the heavy-handed satire that attends her descriptions of the ‘‘high society’’ of the nouveaux riche in New York City or in Newport.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bandow, G. R., ‘‘In Pursuit of a Purpose: Abigail Scott Duniway and the New Northwest’’ (thesis, 1973). Capell, L., ‘‘Biography of Abigail Scott Duniway’’ (thesis, 1934). McKnight, J., and J. M. Ward, ‘‘Abigail Scott Duniway, 1834

Many of Dupuy’s works remain satisfying as sensational light fiction, though modern readers will probably object to the extreme credulity of her heroines and the regularity with which young men and women in her novels allow filial duty to persuade them into acts against all reason or probability.

Duniway’s ambition and achievement as a writer was undoubtedly affected by her lack of formal education. Her historical role is more significant than her literary achievements because she never had the leisure, economic means, or intention to write for art’s sake. Nevertheless, the quality of Duniway’s vigorously amusing polemics is worthy evidence of her strong convictions and forceful, talented personality.

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OTHER WORKS: Morton: A Tale of the Revolution (circa 1828). Celeste: The Pirate’s Daughter (1845). The Separation; The Divorce; And the Coquette’s Punishment (1851). Adventures of a Gentleman in Search of Miss Smith (1852). Florence; or, The Fatal Vow (1852). Emma Walton; or, Trials and Triumph (1854). Annie Selden; or, The Concealed Treasure (1854). Ashleigh: A Tale of the Olden Time (1854). The Mysterious Marriage: A True Romance of New York Life (1858). The Hidden Sin (1866). Why Did He Marry Her (1870). How He Did It; Was He Guilty (1871). The Canceled Will (1872). Who Shall Be Victor? (1872). The Dethroned Heiress (1873). The Mysterious Guest (1873). The Clandestine Marriage (1875). The Discarded Wife; or, Will She Succeed (1875). A New Way to Win a Fortune (1875). The Shadow in the House; A Husband for a Lover (1881). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Davidson, J. W., The Living Writers of the South (1869). Forrest, M., Women of the South Distinguished in Literature (1861). McVoy, L. C., and R. B. Campbell, A Bibliography of Fiction by Louisianians and on Louisiana Subjects (1935). Raymond, I., Southland Writers (1870). Tardy, M. T., ed., The Living Female Writers of the South (1872). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH

DURANT, Ariel Born Ida Kaufman, 10 May 1898, Proskurov, Russia; died 25 October 1981, Hollywood Hills, California Daughter of Joseph and Ethel Appel Kaufman; married William J. Durant, 1913 Ariel Durant emigrated with her mother, three sisters, and one brother to New York City in 1900 and became a naturalized citizen in 1913. She attended public schools and the Ferrer Modern School in New York. At the latter institution she fell in love with her twenty-seven-year-old teacher, William James Durant. The couple were married in a civil ceremony in 1913, when Ida was fifteen years of age. In 1927 Ida Durant was affectionately and informally renamed Ariel by her husband because, he claimed, ‘‘she was as strong and brave as a boy, and as swift and mischievous as an elf.’’ Ariel later became Ida Durant’s legal name. After the publication of The Age of Napoleon (vol. XI) in 1975, the U.S. Senate, on a motion by Senator Hubert Humphrey, voted the Durants a scroll of recognition and applause. The French government presented them with two medallions in appreciation of their recording of French civilization and, in January 1977, Ariel and Will each received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Durant herself received several honorary doctoral degrees; in 1965, she was named Woman of the Year in Literature by the Los Angeles Times. Ariel and Will’s marriage in 1913 launched a dual career as the two began collaborating on the series The Story of Civilization. Volumes I, III, and V (Our Oriental Heritage, Caesar and Christ,

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The Renaissance) were dedicated to Ariel, but Will alone was named as the author. In his introduction to The Age of Reason Begins (vol. VII, 1961) Will noted that Ariel’s contributions to the series had become so substantial that both their names had to appear on the title page. In succeeding years, Ariel coauthored with Will four additional volumes: The Age of Louis XIV (1963), The Age of Voltaire (1965), Rousseau and Revolution (1967), and The Age of Napoleon (1975). In their dual autobiography, Ariel characterized her work on the early volumes of The Story of Civilization—Our Oriental Heritage and The Life of Greece—as serving the subsidiary but immensely important function of organizing and classifying Will’s material. In addition to performing these tasks, Ariel began, with volume IV, The Age of Faith, to gather data for the manuscript. She describes how, while collating material for The Age of Faith, an enthusiastic interest in the history of the Middle Ages was awakened within her. Ariel was largely responsible for encouraging Will to overcome his antipathy for this historical period and for convincing him of the need to portray the medieval Jews in a full and lively manner. Published materials about the couple stress the importance of Ariel’s contribution to the entire Story of Civilization series. While she initially served largely as a proofreader and moralelifter to Will, by 1961 Ariel was coauthor of the seventh and Pulitzer Prize-winning volume. Ariel is credited with checking Will’s tendency to romanticize women’s roles in history, and, in 1965, Will asserted in an interview that Ariel was certainly capable of finishing the rest of their work (volumes X and XI) alone. The Story of Civilization series is generally regarded as good, solid popular history. The writing style is genial and relaxed; the series is, on the whole, reliable and thoroughly researched. Certain volumes have been criticized for some factual errors and for a fondness for anecdotes which can blur perspective. The work is recognized, however, as a massive universal history, one carrying Western civilization from its very beginnings through the Age of Napoleon. The reader who wishes to encounter the personality of Ariel would be well advised to read Will and Ariel Durant: A Dual Autobiography. In this work, Ariel speaks for herself, and the reader is able to compare her views with Will’s, since each writes separate and clearly delineated sections. Ariel’s strength, wit, and astonishing candor about all matters, especially the sexual, infuse the portions written by her. Her accounts of her married life, including times of crisis and conflict, reveal her to be an independent woman with a refreshing sense of humor and perspective. Readers of a feminist bent might be wont to criticize Ariel for the apparent submersion of her unique identity in her husband’s life and work. It is true that if one concentrates exclusively on The Story of Civilization, Ariel, however unfairly, certainly seems to play a secondary role in the evolution of this work. The reader who consults the autobiography, however, will find an astonishingly complex and assertive woman who, from her early youth, exhibited an unusual sensitivity to women’s needs, problems, and struggles.


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In the first chapter of the autobiography, entirely written by Ariel, she recounts her childhood allegiance to her mother, Ethel Appel. Ariel’s comments about her mother’s personal ambitions reveal a sympathy for the struggles of this immigrant woman who helped support a family by selling newspapers but who ultimately chose an independent life of her own. Ariel tells, with sensitivity and candor, how her mother, worn out by childbearing and ignorant of contraceptives, discouraged her husband’s attentions and caused a lasting alienation between them. After absorbing the radical views of lecturers and reading Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Ethel Appel cried, ‘‘Am I never to have any freedom, never a day of happiness or rest?’’ Ariel’s mother then moved from the family apartment and established a separate residence and, soon, a full life of her own. Ariel we are told, ‘‘was the only one in the family who sympathized with her.’’ Ariel, asserts that her mother was ‘‘stranger than fiction. . . aggressive and strong’’ and that she, Ariel, takes after her mother alone. The strength and determination of Ariel are implicit in The Story of Civilization’s evolution and explicit in her portions of the autobiography. The full dimension of Ariel’s remarkable personality will only be revealed, when the papers of the Durants are opened for general scrutiny. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Johnson, D., Practical History: A Guide to Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization (1990). Other references: Life (18 Oct, 1963). National Review (16 Jan. 1968). NYT (7 May 1968). Reader’s Digest (Oct. 1969). Time (13 Aug. 1965). Will and Ariel Durant: The Famous Historians Discuss Their Life and Career with James Day (audio cassette). —SUSAN E. SIEFERT

DWORKIN, Andrea Born 26 September 1946, Camden, New Jersey Daughter of Harry and Sylvia Spiegal Dworkin; married 1969 (divorced) As a child, Andrea Dworkin aspired to be a writer or lawyer to ‘‘really change society.’’ Arrested at eighteen for demonstrating for civil rights, she was held four days in the New York Women’s House of Detention and forced to undergo a painful internal examination. She hemorrhaged vaginally for two weeks, then went to the media to publicize the atrocity. The experience informed her later passionate feminist militancy and polemical writing. Retreating to Crete (1965-66), Dworkin published her first book, Child (1966). She completed her B.A. in literature and philosophy at Bennington College in 1968. Dworkin then left for five years in Amsterdam, where she began Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality (1974), aiming to incite revolution in conventional sex roles and cultural institutions by tracing the roots of sexism through psychology and pornography as a means by which men control and possess

women. Her generalizations about all men as neurotically dominant brutes and all male-female relationships as pathological led critics to lambaste her extremist separatist ideology. Dworkin emerged as one of the most strident voices of radical feminism, calling in a speech at a National Organization for Women (NOW) Conference on Sexuality for heterosexual sex without erection or penetration, leading opponents to coin the term ‘‘castrating feminists.’’ Dworkin developed this argument in the book Intercourse (1987). Radical lesbians criticized her bisexuality, and Dworkin rejected political lesbianism as a personal politic reminiscent of biological determinism. She said of the latter that it ‘‘justified atrocity’’ and attacked the militancy of ‘‘prescribers’’ who ‘‘enforce sexual conformity’’ that impels the search for new enemies, dividing women from women in the name of sexuality. While denying a biological basis for sexism, the ‘‘essentialist’’ Dworkin universalizes concepts of women and motherhood, misogyny and sexism. She favors the concept of androgyny. The nine essays in Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourse on Sexual Politics (1976) describe destructive male dominance and the artificial sex roles permeating cultures in Asia, Europe, and America, citing manifestations of ‘‘gynocide’’ in fairytales, customs, religion, pornography, and other literature as leading to deprivation of women’s rights. Dworkin focuses on pornography as the chief agency perpetuating the violent male power system. Her essay in the volume Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography (1980) and her Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981) reject the notion that pornography creatively expresses eroticism, seeing it as a violent instrument by which men subjugate women, deprive them of individuality, and keep them safe, secure, but subservient. Putting theory to practice, Dworkin teamed with attorney Catharine MacKinnon in 1983 to draft a controversial model civil ordinance defining pornography as illegal sex discrimination. It passed in Indianapolis; but despite Dworkin’s testimony before the Minnesota attorney general, published as Pornography Is a Civil Rights Issue for Women (1986), the law was overturned in Minneapolis as violating freedom of speech. Dworkin and MacKinnon coauthored Pornography and Civil Rights: A New Day for Women’s Equality (1988), outlining the history of women’s legal status and describing their ill-fated law. New organizations like Women Against Pornography drew upon Dworkin for the slogan ‘‘Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice.’’ Dworkin remained in the forefront of the antipornography movement with public appearances and Letters from a War Zone, 1976-1987 (1988, revised 1989). Right-Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females (1983) argues that the 1970s antifeminist backlash from the political right stemmed from status anxiety, fear of personal consequences resulting from feminism’s questioning of traditional roles in which many American women had invested a sense of self, and even greater fears of what their status would be outside the home. The political right ‘‘makes certain metaphysical and material promises to women that both exploit and quiet some of women’s deepest fears. These fears originate in the perception

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that male violence against women is uncontrollable and unpredictable. Dependent on and subservient to men, women are always subject to this violence. The right promises to put enforceable restraints on male aggression, thus simplifying survival for women.’’ Dworkin worries about a ‘‘coming gynocide,’’ a grim future for all women but particularly for the poor and elderly. Dworkin’s short stories in New Woman’s Broken Heart (1980) as well as her novel Ice and Fire (1986) are, like much new women’s fiction, autobiographical, polemical, and experimental in style, sometimes finding black humor in the dilemmas of women’s lives voiced from a militant feminist perspective. Critics faulted Ice and Fire for graphically describing sex, drugs, and urban violence, seeing her ‘‘calculated nastiness’’ as akin to pornography. Her intent was to shake up her readers’ consciousness, contrasting the contemporary squalor to a woman’s origins in a typical American childhood to underscore the impact of pornography on lives. Mercy (1991), her second novel, is equally caustic. With Sexual Harassment: Women Speak Out (1993), Dworkin returned to nonfiction with an anthology of sexual harassment stories published in the wake of the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings. Dworkin cointroduces this volume, in which over 70 women share their sexual harassment experiences and the ways they responded. In Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War Against Women (1997), Dworkin offers a collection of speeches and essays drawing upon her experiences as a victim of both rape and spousal abuse. The harrowing pieces relate tragedies as diverse as the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson, the oppression Orthodox Jewish women face in Israel due to strict religious laws, and sexual assault in Bosnian refugee camps. Dworkin alternately pleads and demands for justice, while arguing that not only the acts themselves, but also the impulses which gave rise to them, must be addressed. Dworkin has contributed to periodicals such as Ms., Heresies, Social Policy, Village Voice, America Report, Gay Community News, and Christopher Street. She served for a time as an editor of Ms. magazine and lectures frequently around the country. OTHER WORKS: Morning Hair (1967). Marx and Gandhi Were Liberals: Feminism and the ‘‘Radical’’ Left (1977). Why So-called Radical Men Love and Need Pornography (1978). The Reasons Why: Essays on the New Civil Rights Law Recognizing Pornography as Sex Discrimination (1985). In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearing (with C. MacKinnon, 1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Assiter, A., Pornography, Feminism and the Individual (1989). Reference books: CA (1979). CANR (1986, 1992). CLC (1987). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Choice (Oct. 1974). Ms. (Feb. 1977, June 1980, Mar. 1981, June 1983, Apr. 1985). NR (21 Feb. 1983, 15 June 1984). New Statesman (6 Nov. 1981, 29 July 1983). NYTBR

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(12 July 1981, 3 May 1992). TLS (1 Jan. 1982). VV (15-21 July 1981). WPBW (21 June 1981). WRB (May 1986). —BLANCHE LINDEN-WARD, UPDATED BY LEAH J. SPARKS

DYKEMAN, Wilma Born 20 May 1920, Asheville, North Carolina Also writes under: Wilma Dykeman, Wilma Dykeman Stokely Daughter of Willard J. and Bonnie Cole Dykeman; married James R. Stokely, Jr., 1940 (died 1977) Wilma Dykeman’s works betray a twofold love of Southern Appalachia: the fervid love of an immigrant for the new land, and the comfortable, well-rooted love of one whose forebearers have shaped a region’s history. Her father came from New York state but married into a long-established Asheville family, thus partially removing the ‘‘newcomer’’ stigma. After graduating from Northwestern University, Dykeman returned home to marry poet/ writer James Stokely. They remained in Appalachia, writing, teaching, raising a family, and lecturing. Stokely died in 1977. Dykeman continued her work, living in the village of Newport, Tennessee, as well as in Asheville, North Carolina. The South—but most especially the Appalachian South—is Dykeman’s subject. Her novels, biographies, histories, and regional landscapes explore such themes as the mountain woman’s unique social role, technology and ‘‘progress’’ as threats to mountain environments, the interconnectedness of blacks and whites, the crucial impact of Protestantism. Dykeman’s first work, The French Broad (1955, yet which remains in print today), nicely showcases her talent for social history. The French Broad River rises in the mountains of Transylvania County, North Carolina, changes directions through the region several times, and finally joins the Holston to form the Tennessee River at Knoxville. A river study, says Dykeman, is the best kind of travel book, for it enables one to get the feel of the region. The French Broad is structured both chronologically and thematically; central figures of the region’s past and present are detailed, as anecdotes illuminate such topics as the divisiveness of the Civil War, Appalachian religiosity, the fashionable watering places of the 19th century, or the prototypical mountain midwife. Dykeman’s other social histories combine the same informality and personal engagement. Neither Black nor White (1957), coauthored with husband James Stokely, responded to the Brown school desegregation decision of 1954. It tried to understand ‘‘the many Souths’’ and ‘‘discover, record and interpret a republic of the human mind.’’ For its contribution to race relations, the book received the Hillman Award. Dykeman and Stokely later produced The Border States (1968), and in 1975 Dykeman’s bicentennial history of Tennessee appeared. The book depicts that state’s three geographical regions and shows how Tennessee remains in many ways a frontier area.


Dykeman’s storytelling knack is apparent in her novels, all of which explore regional themes. Centering on the character Lydia McQueen, The Tall Woman (1962, in its 39th printing in 1999) portrays the special functions mountain women performed during the Civil War and Reconstruction. The Far Family (1966) delineates the mountain woman’s importance in preserving tradition and family; sociologically, her role resembles both that of the heroically strong black woman and the southern plantation wife. Return the Innocent Earth (1973) explores the impact of industrial development on the region. Dykeman’s biographies manifest her talent for social history and strong characterization. Seeds of Southern Change (1962), coauthored with Stokely, traces the life of Will Alexander (1884-1956), a Southern white liberal who, as director of the ‘‘Commission on Interracial Cooperation,’’ and later as chief of Roosevelt’s Farm Security Administration, did as much as any one person to direct the South toward economic and racial justice. Prophet of Plenty (1966) explores the life and work of W. D. Weatherford (1875-1970), a champion of Appalachia whose fundraising work at Berea College gave it national renown. Edna Rankin McKinnon is the subject of Dykeman’s third biography, Too Many People, Too Little Love (1974). The younger sister of Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress, Edna began lobbying in Washington in 1936 for birth control and then worked in Appalachia and around the world, establishing birth control and family planning clinics. Dykeman says Edna’s story interested her because it combined the three most important issues of the 20th century—the population explosion, the changing status of women, and the necessity for world peace. Dykeman, not often given a careful reading because of her ‘‘regionalism,’’ deserves a wider critical audience. She uses an easy and flowing style, perfectly suited to the anecdotal character of much of her work. She excels in describing folkways and vividly captures mountain speech. Her themes—though regional at base—are in the best sense universal human concerns. OTHER WORKS: Look to This Day (1968). Tennessee, a Bicentennial History (1976). At Home in the Great Smokies (with J.

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Stokely III, 1977). With Fire and Sword: The Battle of Kings Mountain (1978, reprinted 1991). The Appalachian Mountains (with D. Stokley, 1980). Tennessee (1983, reprinted 1993). Explorations (1984). Haunting Memories (with C. Patterson’s paintings, 1996). Tennessee Woman: An Infinite Variety (1993). Essay ‘‘The Past is Never Dead: It’s Not Even Past’’ in Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brosi, G., Contemporary Appalachian Writers (1988). Crouse-Powers, A. J., ‘‘Ecofeminist Theory and Appalachian Literature: A Praxis?’’ (thesis, 1995). Gantt, P. M., Appalachia in Context: Wilma Dykeman’s Search for the Souths (dissertation, 1992). Gantt, P. M., ‘‘A Mutual Journey: Wilma Dykeman and Appalachian Regionalism’’ in Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women’s Regional Writing (1997). Jones, O. K., ‘‘Social Criticism in the Works of Wilma Dykeman, with a Primary and Secondary Bibliography of Her Work’’ (thesis, 1989). McGhee, J. H., ‘‘The Appalachian Feminist Vision of Wilma Dykeman’s The Tall Woman’’ (thesis, 1992). Nash, L. R., ‘‘The Presence of Land in the Novels by Wilma Dykeman’’ (thesis, 1992). Nelson, S. L., ‘‘The Space They Love: Reconstruction in the Works of Appalachian and African-American Women Writers’’ (thesis, 1997). Other reference: A Conversation With Wilma Dykeman (video, 1992). A Writer’s Life: It Began with the French Broad (video, 1993). An Evening with Wilma Dykeman, 16 November 1993 (video, 1993). Chicago Sunday Tribune (29 July 1962). CSM (5 May 1955). Local Color: A Conversation Between Wilma Dykeman and Richard Marius (audiocassette, 1978). Higgs, R. J., Transcendentalism in the Hills Three Appalachian Novelists (video, 1981). Local Color: A Conversation Between Wilma Dykeman and Richard Marius (audiocassette, 1978). NYHTB (1 May 1955). NYTBR (1 July 1962, 3 June 1973, 8 Sept. 1974). Pembroke Magazine (tributes, 1993). Saturday Evening Post (April 1974). Tell It On the Mountain: Appalachian Women Writers (audiocassette, 1995). Wilma Dykeman (videocassette, 1995). Wilma Dykeman: Prose Reading (videocassette, 1983). —MARGARET MCFADDEN-GERBER

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E EARLE, Alice Morse Born Mary Alice Morse, 27 April 1851, Worcester, Massachusetts; died 16 February 1911, Hempstead, New York Daughter of Edwin and Abigail Clary Morse; married Henry Earle, 1874 (died); children: four Alice Morse Earle, antiquarian and social historian, was a descendant of men important in the history of New England and Massachusetts. She was educated at Worcester High School and at Dr. Gannett’s boarding school in Boston. After her marriage, Earle moved to Brooklyn Heights and remained there her entire life. Her early life was devoted to her husband and the care of her four children, with little thought to a career in writing or history. After the death of her husband, Earle traveled extensively through Europe with her sister. It was about this time that family members, particularly her father, began urging her to write professionally. True to her heritage, Earle was an active member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Society of Colonial Dames. She was also a supporter of the woman suffrage movement. The publication of The Sabbath in Puritan New England (1891) marked the beginning of Earle’s writing career, and during the next 12 years, she authored, edited, and contributed to the publication of 17 books and over 30 articles describing various aspects of early American history. All of Earle’s works deal with the human, domestic side of American history. Utilizing primary source materials—wills, letters, journals, newspapers, court records—Earle pieced together an accurate picture of what everyday life was like in colonial America. Earle had a particular interest in the role played by women in early America. All of her books contain a great deal of information on the economic and social activities of women in families and their respective communities. In The Diary of Anna Green Winslow: A Boston School Girl of 1771 (1894) and Margaret Winthrop (1895), Earle views her subjects as representative women of their times and utilizes them as focal points for discussing the everyday lives, duties, and responsibilities of women in the colonial era. Earle’s articles and books were widely read and appreciated by her contemporaries. Celebration of the Revolutionary centennial in 1876 had reawakened popular interest in early American history. This popular interest demanded a new kind of historical literature devoted to the life of American society, and Earle’s books and articles found a welcoming audience. She never sacrificed her scholarship and historical integrity to meet the demands of her public, however. Her research was always of the highest quality, and she shared an interest in unearthing historical truths with professionally schooled historians. As the early New England Puritans’ lives were centered around their religion and church attendance, so too is The Sabbath

in Puritan New England. A compendium of material on the Puritan sabbath, it ranges from a discussion of the New England meeting house to the duties of the church deacon; from the history of music in Puritan services to a commentary on the seating arrangements of our forefathers. In her discussion of the Puritans, Earle reveals the human side of their lives and of their religion. She utilizes the diaries, letters, sermons, and writings of men like Judge Sewall and Cotton and Increase Mather for material on the customs of New England religion and the daily lives of the Puritans. Humorous anecdotes and tales also fill the book’s pages, and we are clearly reminded that our Puritan forefathers were much more than the two-dimensional figures of history textbooks. Colonial Dames and Good Wives (1895) deals with the roles played by women in America from first settlement to the American Revolution. Primarily devoted to investigation of the women of New England, Earle also makes reference to notable women who lived in the middle and southern colonies. As a general work on the history of women in America, it is a valuable and informative book even today. Earle begins Colonial Dames and Good Wives with a discussion of the importance of women, both economically and socially, in the settlement process. Women were vital both as workers in a labor-scarce economy and as transmitters of English culture and civilization to the North American wilderness. Various devices were used to lure women to the New World: Maryland’s proprietors provided women with free lands if they would voyage to their colony, while other entrepreneurs recruited and sometimes kidnapped young women for service in the colonies. Once in America, however, Earle states, these women played elemental roles in the development of the American colonies. A considerable portion of Colonial Dames and Good Wives is rightfully devoted to recreating the domestic and social lives of colonial women. Beginning with her chapter ‘‘Boston Neighbors,’’ Earle attempts to reconstruct the Boston of Governor Winthrop’s time as seen through the eyes of his wife, Margaret. Using a variety of diaries and journals written by women of all regions in America, Earle describes the lifestyles of later colonial women. As expressed in their own words, these women come alive for the reader and add a new dimension to our knowledge of the life of women in this period. Colonial Dames and Good Wives is an important work for the student of American women’s history. It was written at a time when little scholarly interest was paid to the activities and function of women in American history. Yet the devotion of Earle to her subject and her high standard of scholarship made the book valuable for the people of her age as well as ours. Margaret Winthrop is, in theory, a biography of the third wife of Governor John Winthrop of Massachusetts. In reality, the book is a history of the Puritans prior to their departure to America, of their settlement in Massachusetts, and an account of their domestic and religious life in the colony. Relying primarily upon the journal of Governor Winthrop and his correspondence

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with his wife for information on Margaret Winthrop’s life, Earle also utilized diaries, letters, wills, and religious tracts written by other men and women to provide a setting for the book. Margaret Winthrop illustrates the changes Puritan colonists faced as a result of their movement from England to America in search of religious freedom. Earle devotes two chapters to the lives of Puritans in England under the reign of James I. We learn the details of life in the English country manor Margaret inhabited with her husband. Her experiences exemplify the duties and economic responsibilities of country women, as well as the customs and fashions of the age in which she lived. This picture contrasts sharply with life in early Massachusetts. Facing the harsh physical conditions of life on the Massachusetts frontier, it is little wonder many women were hesitant to leave the relative comforts of their English homes to join their husbands in the New World. The most widely read and referred to book written by Earle, Home Life in Colonial Days (1898) is an informative and entertaining account of daily life in colonial America. It remains ‘‘the most detailed and comprehensive account of the life and customs of those times—how the colonists made their homes, raised their families, worked and worshiped—that we have to this day.’’ Beginning with an account of the variety of homes lived in by the early settlers and how they were constructed, Earle devotes chapters to the histories of such subjects as the lighting, food, drink, clothing, and gardens of the first settlers of America. After Earle discusses the evolution of lighting in colonial homes from pine-knots to whale-oil lamps, we can better appreciate the religious dedication of Puritan ministers who wrote hundreds of their sermons by the flickering light of candlewood torches. We can also understand the pride colonial women had in their tallow and bayberry candles when we realize the work that went into their making. The examples presented in Home Life in Colonial Days make it quite evident why the Puritans considered laziness a sin. In colonial America, survival depended upon industry. In the book, Earle pays particular attention to the domestic tasks of the American settlers. The bulk of the volume encompasses the domestic duties of colonial women. Earle considered Two Centuries of Costume in America, 1620-1820 (2 vols., 1903) her finest work. A classic study of the fashions of America from the settlement of New England to the early years of the American republic, these two volumes are invaluable to students of American history, design, and art history. In the 77 years since its publication, no other work of its accuracy and detail has been published. With her in-depth knowledge of the lifestyles and activities of early Americans, Earle was better able to discuss and convey the significance of the costumes worn by the American colonists with respect to their lives. Her gift of description is at its best here. Readers can truly see the fine ladies and gentlemen ‘‘ruffling in Silks, Velvets, Satins, Damaske, Taffetas, Gold, Silver and what not’’ walking down the muddy streets of colonial Jamestown or Boston. Earle begins Two Centuries of Costume in America, 1620-1820 with a discussion of the apparel of Puritan and Pilgrim men and women. Although these men and women professed purity and

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simplicity in their religion, their dress was as opulent as their purses and station in life would allow. While changes in style did occur in colonial times, they did not take place with such rapidity as they do today. As Earle notes, clothing was an important part of a man or woman’s estate, the more valuable pieces being willed to a succession of generations until they wore out. Thus knowledge of the clothing of early Americans is a key to understanding their way of life and their attitudes about themselves. Reviewers of Two Centuries of Costume in America, 1620-1820 saw its principal value as a glossary of terms. Earle did an excellent job of researching the names of various obsolete items of clothing and searching out articles of costume for which she had names but had no idea what they were. But perhaps the most helpful aspect of this book is its illustrations. The work contains over 350 illustrations, some presenting details of specific articles and items like lace, gloves, sedan chairs, or gowns. The most outstanding are the portraits that Earle uses to illustrate examples of clothing worn by the colonists and to note gradual changes in styles as the years progressed. It is a very effective use of illustration that broadens the scope of the book to include the history of art and portraiture from 1620 until 1820. Considered together, all of Earle’s works are remarkable for the careful insight they give us of life in colonial America. She was able to take advantage of the many fine collections of documents acquired or unearthed by American historical societies as a result of the revival of interest in the American past during the last decade of the 19th century. Yet, because she was a woman working in the male-dominated field of history, Earle’s scholarship did not receive the professional appreciation it deserves. If there is any flaw in Earle’s work in general, it is that perhaps she was too prolific. She published 17 books and over 30 articles in 12 years. The popularity of her books with the reading public was certainly a factor in this amazing rate of productivity. Yet, unfortunately, Earle’s works suffer for it. If one reads all of her books, and not just selected volumes, one notes there is often repetition of materials and subject matter. Perhaps because of her own heritage and her familiarity with the archives of New England libraries and antiquarian societies, Earle tends to emphasize the history of New England and New York in her writings. Though she is too responsible a historian to state that the customs of all the American colonies were the same, the less informed reader might be misled into believing the Cavaliers of Virginia lived like the Puritans of Boston or the Dutch of New York. It is unfortunate Earle did not see fit to devote more time to rigorous investigation of the social development of the southern as well as the northern colonies of America. Despite this criticism of Earle’s works on the customs and everyday life in colonial America, they are, with few exceptions, valuable books. Though first written in the 1890s and early 1900s, they still enjoy a popular readership, which is apparently growing, as public interest in social and women’s history increases. Many of Earle’s volumes are currently in print. Certainly this is proof enough that as a writer and a historian, Earle contributed greatly to expanding our knowledge of colonial America and colonial Americans.


EARLE

OTHER WORKS: China Collecting in America (1892). Customs and Fashions of Old New England (1893). Costume of Colonial Times (1894). Colonial Days in Old New York (1896). Curious Punishments of Bygone Days (1896). Historic New York (1897). Chap Book Essays (1897). In Old Narragansett: Romances and Realities (1898). Child Life in Colonial Days (1899). Stage Coach and Tavern Days (1900). Old Time Gardens (1901). Sun Dials and Roses of Yesterday (1902). The papers of Alice Morse Earle are housed in the American Antiquarian Society of Worcester, Massachusetts, and in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, Massachusetts. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: DAB (1929). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: NYT (18 Feb. 1911). NYHT (18 Feb. 1911). Old Time New England (Jan. 1947). Worcester (Mass.) Telegram (18 Feb. 1911). —PAULA A. TRECKEL

EARLE, Sylvia A. Born 30 August 1935, Gibbstown, New Jersey Daughter of Lewis R. and Alice Earle; married Graham Hawkes (divorced) When Sylvia Earle was a little girl, her mother would show frogs to Earle and her brothers. As Earle recounted to Scientific American, ‘‘I wasn’t shown frogs with the attitude ‘yuk,’ but rather my mother would show my brothers and me how beautiful they are and how fascinating it was to look at their gorgeous golden eyes.’’ The affinity for the outdoors that both parents encouraged in their daughter continued to develop when they moved the family to the west coast of Florida. With the Gulf of Mexico as her laboratory, Earle received her B.S. degree in the spring of 1955 from Florida State University. She obtained a master’s degree in botany from Duke University. Her master’s thesis, a detailed study of algae in the Gulf, is a project she still follows. While her parents totally supported her interest in biology, they also wanted her to get her teaching credentials and learn to type, ‘‘just in case.’’ As a former chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and a leading American oceanographer, Earle’s abilities have moved her well beyond her parents’ early trepidations. Earle stayed at Duke University and earned her Ph.D. in 1966. She immediately accepted a position as resident director of the Cape Haze Marine Laboratories in Sarasota, Florida. The following year, she moved to Massachusetts to accept dual roles as research scholar at the Radcliffe Institute and research fellow at the Farlow Herbarium at Harvard University, where she was named researcher in 1975. Earle moved to San Francisco in 1976

and became a research biologist at and curator of the California Academy of Sciences. During that same year, she was named a fellow in botany of the Natural History Museum at the University of California at Berkeley. Earle could have pursued a purely academic career, but her deep love of the ocean and life within it was too strong. In 1970 she and four other oceanographers lived in an underwater chamber for 14 days as part of the government-funded Tektite II project, designed to study undersea habitats. Underwater technology would play a major part in Earle’s future. Thanks to underwater breathing apparatus developed in part by Jacques Cousteau and refined during the time Earle was involved in her scholarly research, she was one of the first researchers to don a mask and oxygen tank. Expanding her research from the ocean’s surface to literally new depths, she was able to observe the various forms of plant and animal habitats beneath the sea. She identified many new species of each. Earle’s mission in her research and underwater explorations was to expose the necessity for living in harmony with the earth’s oceans. One of her earliest books, Exploring the Deep Frontier: The Adventure of Man in the Sea (1980) chronicled the history of diving, from the most primitive forms, such as the Japanese Ama fisherwomen, to today’s advanced submarines and other underwater habitats. Accompanied by compelling underwater photography, Earle argues that the habits and life forms of plants and animals beneath the ocean’s surface must be understood and preserved from the destruction caused by human intrusion. Understanding these deep-water habitats and gaining access to their complexities continued to occupy a great deal of Earle’s intellectual energy. She recognized the serious depth limitations to SCUBA diving. Her goal, to study deep-sea marine life, required the assistance of a submersible craft that could dive far deeper than diving equipment allowed. Earle and her former husband, British-born engineer Graham Hawkes, founded Deep Ocean Technology, Inc. and Deep Ocean Engineering, Inc. in 1981 to design and build submersible craft. Earle and Hawkes rough-sketched the design for a submersible they called Deep Rover, which would serve as a viable tool for ocean scientists. Earle told Discover magazine; ‘‘In those days we were dreaming of going to thirty-five thousand feet. The idea has always been that scientists couldn’t be trusted to drive a submersible by themselves because they’d get so involved in their work they’d run into things.’’ Driving accidents notwithstanding, Deep Rover was built and continues to operate as a mid-water machine in underwater depths ranging to 3,000 feet. Over the course of her career, Earle has logged more than 6,000 hours underwater. She has been an unflagging proponent of the critical importance of public education regarding the importance of the oceans as an essential environmental habitat. As the first woman to serve as chief scientist at NOAA, Earle spent 18 months leading the agency that conducts underwater research, manages fisheries, and monitors marine spills. She left the position because she felt more could be accomplished working independently of the government.

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Calling for more research money to be spent on deep-sea studies, Earle wishes the U.S. government would make as substantial a commitment to ocean technology and science as the Japanese government. In 1993 she worked with a team of Japanese scientists to develop the equipment to send first a remote, then a manned submersible to 36,000 feet. Earle has plans to lead the $10,000,000 deep-ocean engineering project, Ocean Everest, to take her to a similar depth. Earle’s message to scientist and nonspecialist alike is that the biodiversity of the world’s marine habitats needs greater protection. In Sea Change: A Message of the Oceans (1995), she eloquently reviews the history of ocean exploration and makes an impassioned plea for conservation of the world’s marine resources. As she has done throughout her career as marine biologist, diver, high-level government scientist, political activist, and businesswoman, Earle seeks to dispel human ignorance about the oceans. The magnitude of our unawareness of marine ecosystems is the biggest obstacle to their protection. OTHER WORKS: Humbrella, a New Red Alga of Uncertain Taxonomic Position From the Juan Fernandez Islands (with Joyce Redemsky Young, 1969). Results of the Tektite Program, Coral Reef Invertebrates and Plants (with Al Giddings, 1975). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1998). Other references: Who’s Who in America (1999). Discover (1986). Scientific American (1992). —CELESTE DEROCHE

EASTMAN, Crystal Born 25 June 1881, Marlboro, Massachusetts; died 28 July 1928, Erie, Pennsylvania Daughter of Samuel and Annis Ford Eastman; married Wallace Benedict, 1911; Walter Fuller, 1916 Crystal Eastman was the daughter of feminist parents. Her mother was a Congregationalist minister and a prominent suffragist. After graduation from Vassar College in 1903, Eastman received a master’s degree in sociology from Columbia University and a law degree from New York University. In 1907 she was hired by the Russell Sage Foundation to investigate work accidents in Pittsburgh. This study, the first systematic analysis of industrial accidents, established her reputation as a social investigator. In 1909 she was appointed to be the sole woman member of the New York State Employers Liability Commission, which, between 1909 and 1911, wrote the New York Workman’s Compensation Law. In 1912 Eastman joined the Congressional Union (later the Women’s Party) in advocating a federal suffrage amendment. When World War I began in 1914, she helped found the New

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York Women’s Peace Party, becoming its president in 1915. She also became the executive secretary of the American Union against Militarism. In 1917 Eastman’s socialism and support of conscientious objectors caused a split in the AUAM. Eastman, with Roger Baldwin and Norman Thomas, organized the Civil Liberties Bureau, which later became the American Civil Liberties Union. She also became coeditor, with her brother Max, of the Liberator, a literary magazine dedicated to revolutionary ideas. In 1922 Eastman moved to London and devoted the next five years to writing about the feminist movement. Dissatisfied with the course of her writing career there, she returned to New York in 1927. After helping to organize the 10th anniversary celebration of the Nation, her health failed and she died at the age of forty-seven. Eastman’s first published works were reports of her investigations into work accidents in Pennsylvania. She demonstrated the frequency of industrial accidents and the insufficient compensation received by workers. Eastman proposed that workers be compensated for accidents according to a fixed rate regardless of responsibility. In these articles, she showed a familiarity with and respect for workers that reinforced her growing revolutionary consciousness. The subject of most of Eastman’s writing was feminism. She felt that the vote was only the first step toward women’s liberation. True liberation also depended on birth control, nonsexist education for children, state support of mothers, and an Equal Rights Amendment. To Eastman, domestic labor was oppressive because the home was a symbol of resignation to male will. She advocated independence within marriage, urging wives to retain their own names and pointing out the advantages of separate residences. Eastman also opposed special industrial protection for women. In articles written between 1922 and 1927, she charted the increasing tension between equal rights advocates and protectionists, which eventually split the feminist movement. Another major concern of Eastman’s was the spread of militarism, which she felt was inimical to democracy. In her view, women could contribute much toward the abolition of war because of their greater respect for human life. This respect stemmed from the experience of childbirth and childrearing, which were the largest roles of a woman’s life. Eastman’s pacifism was an integral part of her feminism. As a Marxist and a critic of the dilatory reformism of the American socialist movement, Eastman’s report on communist Hungary showed, however, that she had few illusions about revolutionary governments. She described the bleakness and repression of Hungary in 1919, but was heartened by the abolition of class structure and private property and by the lack of crude nationalism in appeals for army recruits. At the same time, she noted sadly that war and starvation gave birth to revolution and revolutionary governments were conditioned by these factors as well as by idealism. Eastman also recognized that communist movements and states were not automatically feminist. Feminism, though not hostile to the workers’ struggle, was different in its


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objects and methods. Eastman justified both feminist reforms and separate women’s organizations on these grounds. She wanted the social revolution to be a woman’s as well as a worker’s victory.

married Santee Sioux Dr. Charles A. Eastman (Ohiyesa), and resigned her position, dedicating herself to her husband and his people.

Eastman’s feminism conditioned both her Marxism and her pacifism. In her recognition of the inherent oppressiveness of home labor and the ideological causes of woman’s position, and in her effort to raise the feminist consciousness of the socialist movement, Eastman foreshadowed the concerns of modern feminists. She found the weakness in both Marxist theory and in socialist politics when she pointed out the inadequacies of the purely materialist analysis of woman’s oppression. Eastman intended to write a theoretical work on women but died before she could begin. This work could have been a significant contribution to the ongoing attempts to synthesize feminist and socialist theory.

Thirty years of marriage brought Eastman six children, and frequent relocations due to her husband’s fluctuating career. Eastman attempted to augment her family income by writing, editing Carlisle Indian School’s newspaper and her husband’s works, arranging his lectures, and running a summer camp. Financial tension, editorial resentment, and her husband’s rumored infidelity ended Eastman’s marriage in 1921, although both kept their separation secret. Eastman returned to the Berkshires, continuing to write until shortly before her death at ninety.

OTHER WORKS: Work Accidents and the Law (1911). Some of Crystal Eastman’s papers from World War I are housed in the Swarthmore College Peace Collection. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cook, B. W., Toward the Great Change (1976). Cook, B. W., ed., Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution (1978). Cott, N., The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987). Eastman, M., Enjoyment of Living (1948). Eastman, M., Love and Revolution (1964). Showalter, E., ed., These Modern Women: Autobiographical Essays from the Twenties (1978). Sochen, J., The New Woman: Feminism in Greenwich Village, 1910-20 (1972). Sochen, J., Movers and Shakers (1973). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Nation (8 Aug. 1928). NYT (29 July 1928). Survey (15 Aug. 1928). —JUDITH S. LOHMAN

EASTMAN, Elaine Goodale Born 9 October 1863, Mount Washington, Massachusetts; died 22 December 1953, Hadley, Massachusetts Also wrote under: Elaine Goodale Daughter of Henry S. and Dora H. Read Goodale; married Charles A. Eastman, 1891 (separated 1921); children: six For her first 18 years, Elaine Goodale Eastman’s world was Sky Farm, the Goodales’ Berkshire homestead. There she learned about literature from her mother, about nature from her father, and started combining these lessons in poetry at the age of seven. In 1883, after the single year of boarding school that family finances allowed, Eastman began teaching Native American students at Hampton Institute in Virginia. Visiting Dakota convinced Eastman reservation schools would accelerate Native American assimilation, and she established a government day school among the Sioux in 1886. Her teaching success earned her appointment in 1890 as Supervisor of Education in the Dakotas. In 1891 Eastman

Eastman’s literary career began early, when three volumes of poetry she and her younger sister Dora had written for family gatherings were published and enthusiastically received. Eastman’s development of death and rejuvenation themes, her love imagery, and her deft use of language and rhyme belie her youth. In Journal of a Farmer’s Daughter (1881), she romantically celebrates in prose and poetry an annual cycle of rural life. Nearly 50 years later, Eastman collected her subsequently published verse in The Voice at Eve (1930), which reflects the broadened interests and insight of her maturity. Her dominant themes include woman as giver, the painful joy of loving, the noble vanishing Native American, and intercultural understanding. When Eastman embraced the cause of Native American education, she moved from poetry to polemics, writing many articles and pamphlets urging establishment of reservation day schools and Protestant missions. Although she admitted everyone could learn ‘‘Some Lessons from Barbarism’’ (1890) regarding women’s dress, equality, and generosity, she constantly emphasized the goal of assimilating Native Americans into American culture. In her biography of Carlisle boarding school’s founder, Pratt: The Red Man’s Moses (1935), Eastman praises his efforts, but voices her preference for day schools and condemns policies contrary to the assimilationist philosophy she and Pratt shared. Consistent with this emphasis, Eastman appraised the value of Native American oral traditions narrowly, as stories for children. With her husband, she published two collections of Sioux tales, and she simplified folklore selected from various anthropological collections in Indian Legends Retold (1919). Eastman’s first works of sentimental prose fiction were also intended for children, despite their sophisticated vocabulary. In Little Brother o’ Dreams (1910), a lonely, crippled boy finds a friend. A land-poor Yankee family’s united effort establishes a successful summer camp in The Luck of Oldacres (1928). In Yellow Star (1911), a Sioux girl orphaned at Wounded Knee, adopted and raised in New England, returns to the reservation as field matron, teaching domestic skills to Sioux women. Eastman’s only adult novel, Hundred Maples (1935), focuses upon Ellen Strong who, regretting her early marriage, wanders in search of herself. She eventually accepts her complicated ties to family, and to the Vermont landscape hallowed by her foremothers. A growing awareness of life’s complexity infuses Eastman’s autobiographical writings. In ‘‘All the Days of My Life’’ (The

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Voice at Eve), Eastman emphasizes her idealistic dedication to motherhood and Native Americans, and the difficult adjustment required of the poet as reformer and wife. Eastman’s posthumously published memoirs, Sister to the Sioux (1978), describe her childhood and reservation years, stressing her appreciation of the Sioux people as well as her determination to educate them. Eastman’s writings provide much insight into the ambiguities of intercultural relations and of the female sacrifice of career for motherhood. Eastman’s inability to reconcile both her sincere regard for the Sioux with her ethnocentrism, and her need for selfexpression within her marriage, describes one women’s experience of the eternal conflict between ideals and reality. OTHER WORKS: Apple Blossoms: Verses of Two Children (with D. R. Goodale, 1878). In Berkshire with the Wild Flowers (with D. R. Goodale, 1879). All Round the Year: Verses from Sky Farm (with D. R. Goodale, 1881). The Coming of the Birds (1883). Wigwam Evenings: Sioux Folktales Retold (with C. A. Eastman, 1909). Smoky Day’s Wigwam Evenings: Indian Stories Retold (with C. A. Eastman, 1910). The Eagle and the Star: American Indian Pageant Play in Three Acts (circa 1916). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Graber, K., ed., Sister to the Sioux: The Memoirs of Elaine Goodale Eastman (1978). Wilson, R., ‘‘Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman (Ohiyesa), Santee Sioux’’ (dissertation, 1977). Reference works: NCAB (1904). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Atlantic (Aug. 1928). Great Plains Quarterly (Spring 1988). Mississippi Valley Historical Review (March 1936). NYT (23 Dec. 1953). NYTBR (26 May 1935). —HELEN M. BANNAN

EASTMAN, Mary Henderson Born 1818, Warrenton, Virginia; died 24 February 1887, Washington, D.C. Daughter of Thomas and Anna Truxton Henderson; married Seth Eastman, 1835 Mary Henderson Eastman spent her youth, ‘‘that calm, pleasant period of my life,’’ in her birthplace in Virginia until her mother and army surgeon father moved the family of nine children to Washington, D.C. At seventeen she married a West Point drawing teacher from Maine, who had already begun the sketching of Native Americans that was to lead to his illustrations for his wife’s Native American studies. Six years later they moved to his new military command, Fort Snelling, Minnesota, where Eastman learned the Sioux language, attended Sioux ceremonies, and patiently questioned their chiefs and medicine men about ‘‘their religion, laws, and sentiments.’’ She published the results of her seven years of research in 1849,

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the year the family returned to Washington. From 1855 to 1867 her husband was sent to various military outposts, and Eastman remained for the most part in Washington with their children. Unable to continue her research, but resolved not to be ‘‘condemned to babies, dust, and puddings,’’ she produced several more collections of Native American studies, a proslavery novel, a collection of short stories and personal reminiscences, and two volumes of poetry. Aunt Phillis’s Cabin (1852), one of many novels written in reply to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, uses a romantic plot to present an idealized picture of slave life and to introduce stock defenses of slavery. Curiously, Eastman’s sentimental and blatantly unrealistic picture of the loving treatment of slaves includes an elderly woman’s story of being kidnapped in Guinea and chained to a dead woman on the slave ship. Of historical interest as a proslavery novel, the work is also biographically interesting in its revelation of Eastman’s obsessive need to justify what she uneasily termed a ‘‘necessary evil.’’ Dahcotah (1849), Eastman’s first work, recounts the legends of the Dahcotah, or Sioux, told to her by her friend Chequered Cloud, a ‘‘medicine woman and legend-teller.’’ Eastman writes in a flowery, sentimental style and fictionalizes the legends by adding conversations and thoughts, but she also includes detailed first-hand observations of Sioux life, in particular the violence, the poverty, and the ‘‘degraded state’’ of the women, who did most of the work. Eastman wrote 15 selections for an edition of The Iris (1852), an annual magazine, and along with her Sioux pieces, she included historical accounts of other tribes based on secondary sources. The American Aboriginal Portfolio (1853) continues to add pieces based on secondary sources, and Chicora (1854) presents only a few Sioux works. Fashionable Life (1856) contains two moralistic romances, a Chequered Cloud legend, an anecdote of Eastman’s failure to prove to a ‘‘woman-hater’’ that ‘‘a literary life did not unfit a woman for domestic duty,’’ and a story about a woman who rejects ‘‘fashionable life’’ in the East and goes off to become ‘‘the first female teacher’’ in St. Paul, Minnesota. In this story Eastman insists ‘‘when a woman breaks down the bars of conventionalism that society has put up, to shut her out from energy, from hope. . .she is a heroine.’’ Eastman’s literary career reveals her to be that sort of heroine, particularly in her research among the Sioux. She sees the Sioux as human beings, both in their strengths and in their weaknesses, and she recognizes the value of their history, legends, and religious beliefs. Her pleas for their conversion to Christianity often appear to be merely a conventional way of introducing her demands for legislative action to save ‘‘the original owners of the country’’ from starvation. Eastman’s accounts are weakened by her sentimental language and fictional embroidering, but they preserve the legends she heard and present in realistic detail the events and customs she saw. Although her later collections rely increasingly on secondary sources, they contain some of the legends and firsthand observations giving Dahcotah its historical and literary value.


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OTHER WORKS: The Iris, an Illuminated Souvenir (1852, reprinted as The Romance of Indian Life, 1853). Jennie Wade of Gettysburg (1864). Easter Angels (1879). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brown, H. R., The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789-1880 (1940). McCracken, H., Portrait of the Old West (1952). McDermott, J. E., Seth Eastman (1961). Mott, R. L., Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the U.S. (1947). Tardy, M. T., The Living Female Writers of the South (1872). Reference works: A Critical Dictionary of English Literature, and British and American Authors (1858). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995).

Eaton felt at odds with both mainstream American culture and Chinese culture. As a Chinese woman she was not accepted by American society, yet Americanized Chinese did not accept her as a member of their race. Rather than synthesizing the two cultures in herself, Eaton felt caught between East and West. Realizing that she could not survive this liminal existence, she claimed her mother’s heritage as her own. While a champion of her people, Eaton wrote about the universality of human experience. She was convinced that in the nature-versus-nurture argument, nurture or the environment was more influential than nature. She did not accept that differences in human beings were inherently due to race; rather, she believed the individual had the power to control his own behavior and that, in the end, all human beings were basically the same.

—MARTHA CHEW

EATON, Edith Maud Born 1865, England; died 7 April 1914, Montreal, Canada Wrote under: Sui Sin Far Daughter of Edward and Grace Trefusius Eaton The daughter of an English father and a Chinese mother, Edith Maud Eaton neither spoke nor wrote Chinese. According to her autobiography, ‘‘Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of a Eurasian,’’ published in the Independent, 21 January 1909, she could have passed as Caucasian. At a time when it was not advantageous to be Chinese, Eaton embraced her missionary mother’s nationality and through her writings in magazines in Canada and the U.S., became the champion of Chinese-American culture, taking the pen name Sui Sin Far. Her younger sister, Winnifred (1875-1954), adopted the Japanese pen name of Onoto Watanna; she published several popularly successful romances set in Japan and also wrote for films. Eaton was the first Chinese-American to publish fiction. Her writing was widely read and, for the most part, received favorable reviews. Unlike her contemporaries, she did not create stereotypical Chinese characters. Instead, her characters are based on the people she met as a newspaper woman enlisting subscribers in Chinatown throughout the western United States. Eaton wrote sketches and vignettes about common Chinese Americans, many of which were collected in Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912). Others appeared in a variety of popular magazines. Her purpose in writing was to bridge the gap between Chinese immigrants and their descendants and North Americans by allowing Americans to see the Chinese as real people. She wrote about universal themes such as love between man and woman, parent and child, and the forces that attempt to obstruct this love. Some of her stories are intentionally charming and spirited, while others are ironic or bitter. She is most ironic when expressing her outrage at the conditions of the Chinese in the U.S. and especially the condition of the Chinese woman. In such pieces as ‘‘The Inferior Woman,’’ (1910) and in stories of marriage, her interpretation is frequently feminist.

OTHER WORKS: Stories and sketches in: Overland (Jul. 1899). Century Magazine (Apr. 1904). The Chataquan (Oct. 1905). Delineator (Feb. 1910, Jul. 1910). Dominion Illustrated (1888, 7 Jun. 1890). Good Housekeeping (Mar. 1909, May 1909, May 1910). Hampton (Jan. 1910, May 1910). Independent (21 Jan. 1909, 2 Sept. 1909, 10 Mar. 1910, 18 Aug. 1910, 3 Jul. 1913). Land of Sunshine (Jan. 1897, Jul. 1900). New England Magazine (Aug. 1910, Sept. 1910, Dec. 1911, Jan. 1912, Feb. 1912). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ammons, E., Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century (1991). Bloom, H., ed., Asian American Women Writers (1997). Chiu, M. E., Illness and Self-Representation in Asian American Literature by Women (dissertation, 1998). Ferens, D., ‘‘Edith and Winnifred Eaton: The Uses of Ethnography in Turn-of-the-Century Asian American Literature’’ (dissertation, 1999). Ling, A., Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry (1990); ‘‘Chinese American Women Writers,’’ in Redefining American Literary History (1990). Moser, L. T., ‘‘Chinese Prostitutes, Japanese Geishas, and Working Women: Images of Race, Class and Gender in the Work of Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far and Winifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna’’ (dissertation, 1997). Patterson, M. H., ‘‘Survival of the Best Fitted: The Trope of the New Woman in Margaret Murray Washington, Pauline Hopkins, Sui Sin Far, Edith Wharton and Mary Johnston, 1895-1913’’ (thesis, 1996). Song, M., ‘‘The Height of Presumption: Henry James and Sui Sin Far in the Age of Nation-Building’’ (dissertation, 1998). Spaulding, C. V., ‘‘Blue-Eyed Asians: Eurasianism in the Work of Edith Eaton/Sui Sin Far, Winnifred Eaton/Onoto Watanna, and Diana Chang’’ (dissertation, 1996). White Parks, A., Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography (1995). White-Parks, A., Sui Sin Far: Writer on the Chinese-Anglo Borders of North America, 1885-1914 (dissertation, 1991). Reference works: CLHUS (1988). Dictionary of North American Authors Deceased Before 1950 (1968). FC (1990). Macmillan Dictionary of Canadian Biography (1963, 1978). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the Untied States (1995). Other references: American Literary Realism (Autumn 1983). Arizona Quarterly (Winter 1991). MELUS (Spring 1981). —AMY D. STACKHOUSE

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EBERHART, Mignon G(ood) Born 6 July 1899, Lincoln, Nebraska; died 8 October 1996 Daughter of William Thomas and Margaret Hill Good; married Alanson C. Eberhart, 1923, 1948 (twice); John H. Perry, 1946 (died) Mignon G. Eberhart attended Nebraska Wesleyan University and received a Litt. D. from that same institution in 1935. Although she published plays (Eight O’Clock Tuesday, 1941, with Robert Wallsten; 320 College Avenue, 1938, with Frederick Ballard) and short stories during the first half of her career, Eberhart later wrote only novels of suspense, for which the Mystery Writers of America named her their Grand Master in 1970 (the second woman to receive such an honor after Agatha Christie in 1954). In more than 60 of her novels and short stories, mystery is linked with romance, and the reissue of many of her earlier works attests to her continued popularity. A reviewer of Escape the Night (1944) best summed up Eberhart’s approach to mystery writing as an ‘‘expertly wrought combination of murder, thrills by night, and fervid romance with a well-hidden killer and an exciting finish.’’ Although several of Eberhart’s novels are historical (The Cup, the Blade or the Gun, 1961, and Family Fortune, 1976, set during the Civil War; Enemy in the House, 1962, set during the American Revolution), the majority are contemporary in setting and display considerable patriotism, particularly during the war years (The Man Next Door, 1943, Wings of Fear, 1945, Five Passengers from Lisbon, 1946). Although Eberhart has traveled widely in the U.S. and in foreign countries, she rarely chooses a setting other than the continental U.S. or the West Indies. Her settings offer the additional advantage of variable climate, with the result that most of her novels feature some sort of inclement weather as a commentary to the human conflicts. Eberhart’s style is leisurely, with dialogue that serves to reiterate rather than advance the plot; these techniques not only increase the atmosphere of suspense that is her trademark, but also buy time for character development. Eberhart’s main characters are women who find antagonists in jealous female rivals or relatives and show respect to older women. With only one exception (Another Man’s Murder, 1957), Eberhart’s novels are told from a female character’s point of view. Her heroines are primarily cast in the roles of marriageable young women suddenly confronted with love triangles bound up in death or financial ruin (Dead Men’s Plans, 1952). They may work for their living (The White Dress, 1945, Danger Money, 1974), but they rarely hold positions of power. Eberhart’s murderers are, with few exceptions, male. If the murderer is female, as in The White Dress, she is described as possessing traditional stereotypical masculine characteristics. Eberhart’s heroines are not always virginal but they are always passive. They are often married to older men who physically abuse them (Strangers in Flight, 1941, Woman on the Roof, 1963) or to men who practice a type of psychic torture (Fair Warning, 1936). Sometimes the husband exercises crippling

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control even in his absence (Message from Hong Kong, 1969, The Unknown Quantity, 1953, Never Look Back, 1950). Invariably, these husbands become the victims of murder, and the progress to their various deaths goes hand-in-hand with awakening on the part of their wives. The path to a newfound consciousness in a married Eberhart heroine is twofold: the woman initially learns to understand and reject her present subordinate position to her husband, but in the second stage of the process she voluntarily begins to rely upon another man—generally younger and always more physically attractive than her spouse. This man usually becomes her husband at the conclusion of the novel. In the characters of Susan Dare in The Cases of Susan Dare (1934) and Nurse Sarah Keate in The Patient in Room 18 (1929), however, Eberhart develops a different type of female protagonist, a woman who relies more on her brains than on her ability to be attractive to a man. Dare and Keate are not sexless beings, but they value their own quick thinking and prefer not to play the helpless female. The romantic element is not absent entirely but it is underplayed. Susan Dare and reporter Jim Byrne are coworkers and do not march off to the altar at the end of a case; Sarah Keate routinely assembles evidence that she and policeman Lance O’Leary will evaluate. The difference between these two heroines and the prototype Eberhart heroine lies in intelligence as well as in professionalism; Dare and Keate may not relish being caught up in murder plots, but they work to dispatch the problems as quickly as possible. Furthermore, Dare and Keate deal with murder repeatedly, whereas other Eberhart heroines confront murder as a one-time rite of passage to true love and marriage. Moreover, Dare and Keate are not humorless creatures; unlike their confused counterparts in the other novels, they have a feel for the good joke, for the ludicrous situation, and for comedy in tragedy. Man Missing (1954) provides an excellent example of what an Eberhart heroine can do in this respect. While Eberhart’s novels lack the compassion of those of Charlotte Armstrong, the plotting of those of Agatha Christie, or the lively literacy and profundity of those of Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, or Ngaio Marsh, they offer a blend of mystery, suspense, and romance not found in the works of those other authors, as well as an appeal to a different audience. In this light, Eberhart noted in an interview with Jean Mercier (who called Eberhart ‘‘the doyenne of American mystery writers’’), ‘‘I have always felt liberated and I am in sympathy with women’s demands for equality. But oh, I do believe in marriage. Marriage is forever, or should be.’’ Eberhart’s novels speak to this conviction and garnered her a wide and continuing readership. Many of her works were reissued throughout the mid- and late-1990s.

OTHER WORKS: While the Patient Slept (1930). The Mystery of Hunting’s End (1930). From This Dark Stairway (1931). Murder by an Aristocrat (1932). The Dark Garden (1933). The White Cockatoo (1933). Murder of My Patient (1934). The House on the Roof (1935). Danger in the Dark (1936). The Pattern (1937). The Glass Slipper (1938). Hasty Wedding (1938). The Chiffon Scarf


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(1939). Brief Return (1939). The Hangman’s Whip (1940). With This Ring (1941). Wolf in Man’s Clothing (1942). Unidentified Woman (1943). Sisters (1943). Another Woman’s House (1947). House of Storm (1949). Five of My Best: Deadly Is the Diamond, Bermuda Grapevine, Murder Goes to Market, Strangers in Flight, Express to Danger (short story collection, 1949). Hunt with the Hounds (1950). Deadly Is the Diamond (1951). Postmark Murder (1956). Deadly Is the Diamond and Three Other Novelettes of Murder: Bermuda Grapevine, The Crimson Paw, Murder in Waltz Time (1959). The Crimson Paw (1959). Melora (1959). Jury of One (1960). Run Scared (1963). Call After Midnight (1964). R.S.V.P. Murder (1965). Witness at Large (1966). El Rancho Rio (1970). Two Little Rich Girls (1971). The House by the Sea (1972). Murder in Waiting (1973). Nine O’Clock Tide (1978). The Bayou Road (1979). Casa Madrone (1980). Family Affair (1981). Next of Kin (1982). The Patient in Cabin C (1983). Alpine Condo Crossfire (1984). A Fighting Chance (1986). Three Days for Emeralds (1988). The papers of Mignon G. Eberhart are housed in the Muger Memorial Library of Boston University.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Haycraft, H., Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story (1941). Reference works: Detecting Women (1994). Ecyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996). TCA (1942). Other references: PW (16 Sept. 1974, 1995). —SUSAN L. CLARK

EBERHART, Sheri S. See TEPPER, Sheri S.

ECKSTORM, Fannie Hardy Born 18 June 1865, Brewer, Maine; died 31 December 1946, Brewer, Maine Daughter of Manly and Emeline F. Wheeler Hardy; married Jacob A. Eckstorm, 1893 (died 1899); children: two Fannie Hardy Eckstorm devoted her life to preserving the heritage of the Penobscot region in Maine—its wildlife, folkways, ballads and stories. She absorbed the lore of lumbermen and trappers, of Native Americans and old settlers, of river and forest. From her father she learned to see with the precise eyes of the naturalist, to revere wilderness and the Native American, and to battle for resource conservation. At Smith College, Eckstorm refined her interest in bird observation and began her study of Native Americans. After

graduation in 1888, she returned to Brewer as superintendent of schools, but resigned over the issue of inadequate funding. Thereafter she devoted herself to writing as a means of persuasion and livelihood. Wed at age twenty-eight to an Episcopalian clergyman, Eckstorm bore two children before her husband died six years after their marriage. She returned to her old home in Brewer and continued writing. Her works treat three subject areas: birds, ballads and stories, and native Americans. Eckstorm’s first book-length works were on ornithology. Birdwatching had become an acceptable avocation for women. The Woodpeckers (1901) introduces the techniques of birdwatching, using the woodpecker family because these birds are so easily identified and studied. A larger, more philosophic concern informs the book, as well. She argues that evolutionary theories do not eliminate God but rather strengthen theistic faith. By 1904 Eckstorm had turned her attention to recording various aspects of traditional culture in northern Maine. She saw this culture as threatened by technology, expanding population and industry, and unconcerned young people. She joined her father in campaigns to save wildlife and commenced research on ballads, place-name history, and folktales. The Penobscot Man (1904) was the first published book in this vein—a collection of tales of the daring men who ran the Penobscot River, men who kept the logs rolling downstream from the time the ice broke up in the spring until midsummer. The tales are of heroic, almost mythic figures whom Eckstorm observed as a child when they worked for her father. The Penobscot man, be he Native American or Irish or Italian, always puts his work first; lives for the ideals of honor, friendship, duty, sport, and ‘‘grim, stern, granite obstinacy’’; and dies cheerfully—according to Eckstorm. The stories themselves are fascinating evocations of the region and period. Collaborating with well-known scholars, she published two important works: Minstrelsy of Maine (1927) and British Ballads from Maine (1929). The latter work, based on Child’s classification of English and Scottish ballads, collects both texts and airs from traditional singers in Maine. Before this pioneering work, it had been thought that New England had no ballad tradition like southern Appalachia and illiteracy was a necessary factor in the continued existence of balladry. The collaborators discovered that the Maine texts were preserved in the oldest British forms, often identical to those already collected in the southern Appalachians. They theorized that the Maine settlers and the southern highlanders had arrived at about the same time from the same locale in the British Isles. Both groups were relatively isolated until the 20th century, thus maintaining the more traditional forms. Eckstorm’s career as a regionalist culminated in her publication of the scholarly Indian Place-Names of the Penobscot Valley and the Maine Coast (1941). In this work she listed all the variants for place names and the histories of name changes, using the comparative analytic method as well as her own vast knowledge of the region. The work (reprinted several times) is still significant in the field. Eckstorm’s last work, also about the Native Americans of Maine, was published when she was eighty-one. Old John Neptune and Other Maine Indian Shamans (1945) is a narrative of a

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family of Penobscot Native Americans Eckstorm and her family had known for generations. These shamans or wizards were known for their clairvoyance. Eckstorm’s own interest in psychic phenomena, as well as her fierce loyalty to Native American traditions, explains her belief in the shamans’ powers. With this and her other works, Eckstorm left an invaluable written legacy that will long preserve the cultural traditions of northern Appalachia.

OTHER WORKS: The Bird Book (1901). David Libbey, Penobscot Woodman and River-Driver (1907). The Handicrafts of the Modern Indians of Maine (1932). The papers of Fannie Hardy Eckstorm are at the Bangor (Maine) Public Library and at the Smith College Archives.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Who Was Who in America (1950). Woman’s Who’s Who of America (1914-15). Other references: Bangor Daily News (10 Dec. 1910, 1 Jan. 1947). CSM (20 Oct. 1945). Nation (14 March 1928). NEQ (March 1953). SRL (19 April 1930). TLS (6 Feb. 1930). YR (Sept. 1928). —MARGARET MCFADDEN-GERBER

EDDY, Mary Baker (Glover) Born 16 July 1821, Bow, New Hampshire; died 3 December 1910, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts Daughter of Mark and Abigail Ambrose Baker; married George W. Glover, 1843; Daniel Patterson, 1853; Asa G. Eddy, 1877 Founder of the Christian Science movement and of the Church of Christ, Scientist, Mary Baker Eddy was originally a member of the Congregational church. In 1862 she received treatment for a nervous ailment from Phineas P. Quimby, noted Massachusetts practitioner of ‘‘animal magnetism,’’ and became interested in mind cure. In 1866 Eddy sustained a serious spinal injury, from which she recovered through what she later described as the total conviction that her life was in God and God was Life. In the same year, her husband deserted her and for the next three years she lived with various friends and relatives. In 1870 she wrote a textbook, The Science of Man, and began teaching in Lynn, Massachusetts. She published the first edition of Science and Health (1875, revised and expanded, 1983) and organized the Christian Science Association in 1876. The year 1879 saw the establishment of the Church of Christ, Scientist, and 1881 the chartering of the Massachusetts Metaphysical College. Both were dissolved in 1889 in preparation for the founding in Boston of the Mother Church in September 1892. By 1900 a network of 600

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churches existed, and Christian Science was no longer a sect but an organized religion. Known chiefly for its emphasis on psychical healing, Christian Science embraces a full theology. Though Eddy firmly professed herself and her religion to be Christian, orthodox Christianity rejected both. Basic to Christian Science is the doctrine that God is All, Life, and Mind. Since God is Spirit, the only manifestation of life is in Spirit, not in matter. Matter, sin, pain, and death are all erroneous concepts, part of the great error, the belief in evil. Healing, then, is an important part of overcoming the error involved in the belief in the ills of the flesh. The unreality of evil is believed to have been demonstrated in the life of Jesus, whose acts of love cast out error. Jesus, who illustrated the spiritual agreement between God and man, is the Christ only in the sense that he alone demonstrated the spiritual nature, which is the true nature of every man but which is veiled by the belief in man’s materiality. Though not a part of godhead, Jesus is believed to be true Man, the man of Spirit. Christian Science rejects all anthropomorphic and personal ideas associated with God; thus the Trinity becomes Life, Truth, and Love, a trinity in unity known through the three offices: God the Father-Mother; Christ, the spiritual idea of sonship; and divine Science, or the Holy Comforter. Eddy’s identification of Christian Science as the Holy Comforter linked it to the aspect of God that she saw as feminine. At one point in the evolution of Science and Health, she went so far as to speak of God as ‘‘She,’’ but the reference was dropped from succeeding editions. Eddy, who claimed her teaching was a divine revelation, never considered her religion as extrabiblical. She intended it to be understood as a scientific demonstration of universal divine law, the spiritual truth behind the literal scriptural accounts. As organizer and leader of the only American religious movement founded by a woman, Eddy’s contributions to feminism were chiefly her own accomplishments. In addition, her emphasis on the Motherhood as well as the Fatherhood of God forced a new consciousness on her followers. In Science and Health, the textbook of Christian Science, she advocates equality of the sexes, female suffrage, and the right of a woman to independently hold and dispose of property. Eddy recognized the power of the written word in disseminating doctrine. In her life there were close to 400 editions of Science and Health published. The monthly Christian Science Journal began in 1883; in 1898 the weekly Christian Science Sentinel appeared; and in 1908 the daily newspaper Christian Science Monitor was established. The Monitor continues to be one of the most respected among international periodicals. At one time the object of severe criticism (McClure’s magazine’s 1906-07 series of articles, among others) and of direct ridicule (Mark Twain’s Christian Science, 1907), Christian Science is now a recognized part of the religious institution in America, a denomination whose members maintain more than


2,500 churches. Eddy served as pastor of the Mother Church in Boston for many years and never relinquished leadership of the movement until her death. Her Manual of the Mother Church (1895) still provides the framework of government for the churches, and Science and Health remains the religion’s basic text. Thus Eddy’s imprint on Christian Science is as strong now as it was when she founded it.

OTHER WORKS: Christian Healing (1880). The People’s God (1883). Historical Sketch of Metaphysical Healing (1885). Defense of Christian Science (1885, 1983). Christian Science: No and Yes (1887). Rudiments and Rules of Divine Science (1887). Unity of Good and Unreality of Evil (1888, 1994). Retrospection and Introspection (1891). Miscellaneous Writings (1896). Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1910, 1994). The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany (1913). Letters of Mary Baker Eddy to Augusta E. Stetson, C.S.D., 1889-1909 (1990). Mary Baker Eddy: The Concord Years, 1889-1908: A Chronology (1993).

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of Christian Science (1991). Thomas, R. D., ‘‘With Bleeding Footsteps’’: Mary Baker Eddy’s Path to Religious Leadership (1994). Tomlinson, I. C., Twelve Years With Mary Baker Eddy: Recollections and Experiences (1996). Von Fettweis, Y. C., Mary Baker Eddy: Christian Healer (1998). Wilbur, S., The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (1913). Williams, J. K., Christian Scientists (1997). Wills, G., Certain Trumpets: The Call of Leaders (1994). Wright, H. M., If Mary Baker Eddy’s Manual Were Obeyed (1989). Wright, H. M., Mary Baker Eddy, Leader Forever (1992). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Literature (1998). Christian Century (November 1991). Church History (1996, 1997). Comparative Drama (Winter 1995). Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (June 1994). Journal of American History (1995). NYRB (1996). —JOANN PECK KRIEG

EGAN, Lesley BIBLIOGRAPHY: Carpenter, G. C., Mary Baker Eddy: Her Spiritual Footsteps (1990). Cather, W., ed. The Life of Mary Baker Eddy and the History of Christian Science (1971). Dyck, L. L.Darwin and Mary: Redemption and Evolution in Christian Science (dissertation, 1993). Gardner, M., The Healing Revelations of Mary Baker Eddy: The Rise and Fall of Christian Science (1993). Gill, G., Mary Baker Eddy (1998). Gottschalk, S., The Emergence of Christian Science in American Religious Life (1973). Hansen, P., Woman’s Hour: Feminist Implications of Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science Movement, 1885-1910 (dissertation, 1982). Keyston, D. L., ed., The Healer: The Healing Work of Mary Baker Eddy (1996). Knee, S. E., Christian Science in the Age of Mary Baker Eddy (1994). Meyer, D. B., The Positive Thinkers: Popular Religious Psychology from Mary Baker Eddy to Norman Vincent Peale and Ronald Reagan (1988). Miller, R. M. and P. A. Cimbala, eds., American Reform and Reformers: A Biographical Dictionary (1996). Morgan, J. L., Mary Baker Eddy’s Other Writings (1984). Nenneman, R. A., Persistent Pilgrim: The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (1997). Oakes, R., The Story of the Chicago Addresses of Mary Baker Eddy (1988). Oakes, R., Mary Baker Eddy’s Lessons of the Seventh Day (1989). Orcutt, W. D., Mary Baker Eddy and Her Books (1913). Peel, R., Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery, 1821-1875 (1966). Peel, R., Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial (1971). Powell, L. P., Mary Baker Eddy: A Life-Size Portrait (1991). Rolka, G. M., 100 Women Who Shaped World History (1994). Sass, K., Mary Baker Eddy: A Special Friend (1983). Satter, B., Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875-1920 (1999). Smaus, J. S., Family, the Carolina Years: A Six-Part Series About Mary Baker Eddy and Her First Husband, George W. Glover (1991). Smith, C. P., Historical Sketches, From the Life of Mary Baker Eddy and the History of Christian Science (1992). Smith, L. A., Mary Baker Eddy: Discoverer and Founder

See LININGTON, Elizabeth

EHRENREICH, Barbara Born 26 August 1941, Butte, Montana Daughter of Ben Howes and Isabel Oxley Isley Alexander; married John H. Ehrenreich, 1966; Gary Stevenson, 1983; children: Rosa, Benjamin Lecturer, journalist, feminist critic, and socialist activist Barbara Ehrenreich is the daughter of ‘‘blue-eyed, Scotch-Irish Democrats’’ whom she credits as the ‘‘ultimate sources’’ of much of her radicalism and feminism. She graduated from Reed College (1963) with a B.S. in chemistry and physics and completed her Ph.D. in cell biology at Rockefeller University (1968). Ehrenreich began her career as a writer and social justice activist as a research analyst for the Health Policy Advisory Center (Health-PAC) in New York City. Among the first social critics to speak of the ‘‘health-care crisis’’ in the late 1960s, Ehrenreich spent much of the 1970s writing about women’s health issues and teaching in the Health Sciences department at the State University of New York (SUNY) College at Old Westbury (1971-74) and at New York University (1979-81). During the 1980s she became a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities (1980-82) and the Institute for Policy Studies (1982-present) and broadened the scope of her social activism to encompass an analysis of the whole of American culture and society. Ehrenreich has received a number of awards and honors including the National Magazine Award for Excellence in Reporting (1980), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1987), and honorary degrees from Reed College and

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SUNY, Old Westbury. She has held offices and board memberships in activist organizations including the Democratic Socialists of America, the National Women’s Health Network, and the National Abortion Rights Action League, and has been on the editorial board of Ms., Mother Jones, Sociology of Health and Illness: A Journal of Medical Sociology, and Radical America. Long March, Short Spring: The Student Uprising at Home and Abroad (1969, with John Ehrenreich), the first of a number of coauthored books or ‘‘pamphlets’’ with a social activist agenda, focuses on student movements in Germany, England, France, Italy, and the United States. Eschewing any human interest or first person accounts, her book analyzes student life in the late 1960s on a general level, including the ‘‘substratum of discontent’’ and the reasons why external issues, such as the Vietnam War, ‘‘set off the struggle,’’ both violent and nonviolent. The American Health Empire: Power, Profits, and Politics (1970, with John Ehrenreich) grew out of her work with HealthPAC. The book offers a critical analysis of such dramatic changes in the health care system as the collapse of public hospitals, the rise of the ‘‘medical-industrial complex,’’ the quest for national health insurance, and consumer attacks on the health system for its inhumanity. While careful in their analysis of data, the authors are clear in their polemical stance that the American health care system is ‘‘not in business for people’s health.’’ In the debate over health care reform that erupted in the 1970s and 1980s, The American Health Empire was consistently referenced as a starting point by academics and the media. For Her Own Good: 150 Years of Experts’ Advice to Women (1978) grew out of Ehrenreich’s experiences as a college teacher and activist in the early women’s health movement. ‘‘Working from a kitchen table office,’’ Ehrenreich and Deirdre English coauthored a booklet, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers which they paid to have printed and mailed to people who asked for it. The Feminist Press published the booklet as a pamphlet along with Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness in 1973. Reader response was diverse and enthusiastic. In For Her Own Good Ehrenreich and English went on to develop a new ‘‘conceptual framework,’’ demonstrating how ‘‘rationalist’’ scientific experts gained power over women’s lives through their defense of sexual romanticism, a ‘‘systematic ideology’’ whereby women in the home became refuge and consolation to men engaged in the ‘‘savage scramble’’ of the marketplace. The book looks at 19th century medical theory, the development of the domestic science movement, and 20th century notions of scientific motherhood within the context of a ‘‘sexual politics of health.’’ It forces readers to look at the genre of ‘‘advice literature’’ from the new perspective of preventing women from competing with men in the larger world of economic labor, and urges them to ‘‘frame a moral outlook which proceeds from women’s needs and experiences but which cannot be trivialized, sentimentalized, or domesticated.’’ The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (1983) is ‘‘about the ideology that shaped the

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breadwinner ethic and how that ideology collapsed as a persuasive set of expectations, in just the last 30 years’’ as men themselves revolted against their breadwinner roles. Examining documents from popular and elite cultural sources Ehrenreich argues men began rejecting ‘‘commitment’’ during the 1950s. Subsequently, the psychology of the human potential movement, the ‘‘do-yourown-thing’’ philosophy of the Age of Aquarius, as well as the search for a ‘‘liberated heart’’ by blue collar men who abandoned ‘‘machismo’’ to achieve health and upward mobility outside their family, all reflected a new ‘‘moral climate that endorsed irresponsibility, self-indulgence, and an isolationist detachment from the claims of others.’’ Ehrenreich warns readers against nostalgia: ‘‘Even if we wanted to return to the feminine mystique, to the tenuous protection of the family wage system, there is no going back. . .there is no male breadwinner to lean on—and probably not much use in waiting for one to appear.’’ She hopes for a ‘‘reconciliation between men and women,’’ resting on the ‘‘ethical basis’’ of feminism. Also in 1983, Ehrenreich worked with coauthors on two pamphlets sponsored by the Institution for New Communications. Women in the Global Factory (with Annette Fuentes) and Poverty in the American Dream: Women and Children First (with Karen Stallard and Holly Sklar), aimed at getting people involved in grassroots political organizations, to document and analyze the problems of exploitation of women and children and propose ways for women to unite and resist government and business powers that exploit. Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex (1986) grew out of an article Ehrenreich coauthored with Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs for Ms. in 1980 to explore the subject of women’s sexual liberation. Based on interviews with middle class women and men and on popular media documents, the authors examine the sexual revolution not from the more predictable perspective of male sexuality, but as a revolution ‘‘of, by, and to a great extent, for women.’’ Exploring the ways in which dramatic changes occurred in ‘‘women’s sexual expectation and experience,’’ they point to the increasing success from the 1960s on of purveyors in the marketplace who ‘‘institutionaliz[ed]’’ the sexual revolution, offering women from all classes and political persuasions left and right, numerous opportunities to become ‘‘consumers of sexual pleasure.’’ In the context of feminist ideology similar to that which Ehrenreich articulates in The Hearts of Men, the authors of Re-Making Love conclude contemporary American women recognized that the women’s sexual revolution had become ‘‘unraveled from the larger theme of women’s liberation. For women, sexual equality with men has become a concrete possibility, while economic and social parity remains elusive.’’ As a political goal, women need to reunite sexual liberation and women’s liberation for their mutual benefit. Ehrenreich contributed a lengthy essay on the subject of ‘‘The New Right Attack on Social Welfare’’ to The Mean Season: An Attack on the Welfare State (1987, with Fred Block, Richard


Cloward, and Frances Fox Piven). She describes the New Right as presenting an ‘‘odd and even self-contradictory blend of themes and issues,’’ trying at once to support the interests of the rich while also ‘‘champion[ing] the ‘little man’ against forces that would destroy his way of life,’’ advocating ‘‘unfettered free market capitalism’’ while also representing ‘‘a kind of moral authoritarianism that is reminiscent of European fascism.’’ Ehrenreich advocates ‘‘a reformed and expanded welfare state’’ that affirms ‘‘alternative values. . .the old small-R republican values of active citizenship, democratic participation, and the challenge and conviviality of the democratic process.’’ Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (1989) focuses on the journey of the professional middle class from the ‘‘generosity and optimism’’ of the 1960s to the ‘‘cynicism and narrowing self-interest’’ of the 1980s. As in previous books, Ehrenreich examines popular media artifacts—television, books, magazines, and movies. She argues that class tension had grown stronger between the professional middle class and the working class and that ‘‘nervous’’ professionals had isolated themselves from contact with those outside their ranks, turning to an increasingly conservative right-wing politics and adopting postures protective of their privileges and defensive of their status. Possibilities for ‘‘creating new opportunities or strengthening the U.S. economic system as a whole’’ have thus been lost, and Ehrenreich encourages professionals to have faith in a ‘‘more egalitarian future,’’ to pursue a ‘‘revival of conscience and responsibility’’ toward public life. She also urges that an allegiance to crass consumerism and economic growth be replaced with an effort to develop jobs across classes that offer ‘‘good and pleasurable and decent work: the work of caring, healing, building, teaching, planning, learning.’’ Reviewers praised Fear of Falling but differed in their perceptions of the book’s ideological stance. While a critic from the right called her ‘‘anti-business bias’’ a ‘‘form of snobbery,’’ a review from the left credited the author for ‘‘asserting the value of pleasurable work’’ for the professional and middle class as a ‘‘modest, humane and (I’m tempted to say) neoconservative suggestion.’’ In The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed (1990), Ehrenreich presents a selection of reprinted articles from publications as diverse as Mother Jones, Ms., the Nation, the New Republic, the New York Post, the New York Times, and New York Woman. Essays with titles such as ‘‘The Unbearable Being of Whiteness,’’ ‘‘The Unfastened Head of State,’’ ‘‘Stop Ironing the Diapers,’’ ‘‘Profile of a Welfare Cheat,’’ and ‘‘How to Help the Uptrodden’’ illustrate Ehrenreich’s analysis of the 1980s as a decade of greed, neglect, pain, racism, and class polarization as well as her ability to depict it in language that one critic described as ‘‘elegant, trenchant, savagely angry, morally outraged and outrageously funny.’’ Ehrenreich has written numerous columns for newspapers and magazines, including the weekly ‘‘Hers’’ column for the New York Times, and monthly columns in Ms., New York Woman, and

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Mother Jones. In the 1990s, her essays have also appeared regularly in Time. Frequently engaged as a public speaker at colleges and universities in the U.S. and abroad, Ehrenreich also often appears on radio and television. A novel, Kipper’s Game, appeared in 1993. In the mid- and late 1900s, Ehrenreich has continued to write both as a journalist and as, in her words, an ‘‘amateur scholar.’’ Her essays—sometimes humorous, sometimes not—still appear regularly in Time and the Progressive as well as Nation, Harpers, Ms., Life, Working Woman, and an edited volume titled Debating PC: The Controversy over Political Correctness on College Campuses (1992). With titles such as ‘‘Sex and the Married Woman,’’ ‘‘Real Babies, Illegitimate Debates,’’ and ‘‘Confessions of a Recovering Statist,’’ Ehrenreich frequently focuses on issues of gender, sexuality, family life, class, and economic and social policy. She also regularly comments on topical matters of media interest—from Lorena Bobbitt to drug policy to the Starr Report. Often written with a wry sense of humor, these essays place the enthusiasms of the moment in a larger historical and cultural context. In 1995 Ehrenreich published a collection of her essays under the title The Snarling Citizen. Ehrenreich’s early training as a biologist is evident in her study of the passions of war, Blood Rites (1997). Human beings, she points out, are vulnerable creatures and were probably prey to large carnivores during most of our evolutionary history. Only gradually did we—or at least some of us—make the transition from prey to predator. Early humans who gathered together in the face of threat, making noise and challenging the predator, were more likely to survive than those who scattered. Human predators therefore selected other humans who felt a strong sense of solidarity, even thrill, in the face of danger. As a result, Ehrenreich suggests, war can evoke some of the most sublime emotions known to humanity. The first half of Blood Rites examines early humans’ ecological, social, and psychological experiences of human and nonhuman violence. Hunting, it concludes, probably became a predominantly male activity only after large game animals became rare, due at least in part to human predation. The second half of the book ambitiously examines changing patterns of war since the beginning of written history. Social structures, Ehrenreich argues, reflect the ‘‘means of destruction.’’ For example, the development of missile weapons gave rise to larger armies, since only a large barrage of arrows or bullets was effective. These larger armies required larger geographical territories to support them, so they helped generate the modern nation-state. In a final, subtly argued, chapter, Ehrenreich suggests war has become a predator beast with ‘‘a life of its own.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY: Apple, R.D., ed., Women, Health, and Medicine in America: A Historical Handbook (1990). Reference works: CA 73-76. CANR (1986, 1992). CB (1995). CLC 110. Other references: Atlantic Monthly (Sept. 1986). Commentary (Jan. 1990, Apr. 1994). Humanist (Jan./Feb. 1992). Journal

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of American History (Sept. 1990). Journal of Marriage and the Family (May 1984). LATBR (2 Apr. 1995, 21 Apr. 1996). LJ (15 Apr. 1995, 1 May 1997).Ms. (May/June 1997). Nation (24 Dec. 1983, 28 Feb. 1987). NR (11 July 1983). New Statesman and Society (17 May 1991). NYRB (1 July 1971). NYT (16 Aug. 1983).NYTBR (7 March 1971, 5 June 1983, 14 Sept. 1986, 6 Aug. 1989, 20 May 1990, 28 May 1995, 25 May 1997, 7 Dec. 1997). Progressive (Feb. 1995, Oct. 1997). Psychology Today (Aug. 1986, Oct. 1989). PW (26 July 1993, 20 Feb. 1995, 7 Apr. 1997). Signs (Spring 1986). TLS (10 Apr. 1998). VV (5 Feb. 1979, 23 Aug. 1983). Vogue (Sept. 1986). WWA (1992-93). WRB (Oct. 1995, Dec. 1997).

young man’s worship. The ruthless dowager justifies her character with amused self-knowledge, but the literal-minded bride conscientiously sacrifices her chivalrous lovers to a false ideal of her own perfection. Eiker plots The Brief Seduction of Eva (1932) like a tidy drawing room farce. Irked that her husband adores the details of patent law and substitutes a big, belated check for thoughtful birthday flowers, beautiful Eva welcomes an admirer whose suit is contrived by her amused sister-in-law. When her husband shows no jealousy. Eva abandons the lover, who elopes with her daughter. Eva shares more affection with her knowing sister-inlaw than with either of the men who have social forms for their commitments. The novel is Eiker’s clever spoof on romantic love.

—JENNIFER L. TEBBE, UPDATED BY LORI KENSCHAFT

EIKER, Mathilde Born 5 January 1893, Washington, D.C.; died January 1982 Also wrote under: March Evermay Daughter of John T. and Mattie Etheridge Eiker The eldest of four children born to a chief clerk of engineers in the U.S. War Department and an Episcopalian of long American ancestry, Mathilde Eiker was reared in the embassy section of northwest Washington, D.C. After earning her B.A. from George Washington University in 1914, she published short stories pseudonymously with her father’s encouragement, and in 1922 had a play accepted for production. From 1924 to 1926, Eiker taught in Washington but, disappointed with the public schools’ misunderstanding of gifted children, she resigned after her first novel’s success. Mrs. Mason’s Daughters (1925) portrays three bourgeois sisters freed by their mother’s death from strict emotional restraints to realize their own natures. A devoted spinster joins a Catholic convent; a young mother wins a divorce; and F. Mason, high school teacher, leaves her well-disciplined class to become Fernanda, an unwed mother and successful restaurateur. Through Fernanda, Eiker studies the complex personality of the female teacher who deliberately arms her sensitivity against the thoughtless barbarities of children and adults. Eiker’s accurate vignettes of a bickering Sunday supper or an obedient child’s guilt at her classmates’ deceit redeem clumsy plotting. In The Lady of Stainless Raiment (1928), Eiker wittingly depicts the humor and anguish caused by fashionable social hypocrisy. Artist Julian Haldane, the pleased heir to a Washington mansion, idolizes an artful, aging Carolina belle and woos her artless granddaughter. Through glittering dimmer party dialogue and muted tone poems about women among flowers, Eiker contrasts two generations of self-centered ladies who demand a

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The Heirs of Mrs. Willington (1934) investigates a psychological legacy with the plot control of detective fiction. Forbidden remarriage by her husband’s will, a bold dowager takes her chauffeur as her lover, guardian, and heir. At her death, three stepchildren discover they have lost their father’s wealth; two grow vicious, but a third, Avis, shyly hires the chauffeur and overcomes her frigidity toward her husband. With polished style, Eiker dramatizes the vile pettiness and timorous love which deflect each other in a wealthy family. Eiker’s last psychological novel, Key Next Door (1937), portrays a successful woman writer. Safely ensconced in her family home, Agnes Thomason brings the nurse Ernestine, her close, jealous friend, through the anguish of betrayed love, but loses her to marriage with a wealthy employer. The object of Agnes’s own controlled devotion is a printer strangled by domestic ties. Every character feels locked away from the ideal happiness next door. The printer’s meditation on offices emptied by the Depression, or Agnes’s on the fierce beauty of an airplane or a lion’s roar, marks Eiker’s best, suggestive style. Modern writers fail, Agnes says epigrammatically, because they write in first person or too easily explain behavior through economics. As March Evermay, Eiker wrote three detective novels. Like British contemporaries, she minimizes brutality to emphasize motive and intellectual process. In They Talked of Poison (1938), scrupulous, sentimental Inspector Glover patiently solves a murder for a university seminar of expert suspects. In This Death Was Murder (1940), he explains three suspicious deaths despite the jealous quarrels and loyal deceptions of five sibling heirs. A final mystery, Red Light for Murder (1951), ended Eiker’s writing career. Eiker’s novels explore the complexities of power, pettiness, love, and guilt in suburban American families. Eiker is so alert to the psychological suggestiveness in clothing, phrasing, furnishing, and eating that the domestic minutiae which reveal character almost overwhelm the lines of action. Careful to motivate every event, Eiker overplots her novels, but abandons their conclusions to awkward coincidences. Although she is a witty parodist of romantic love, Eiker prefers to represent seriously the restrained happiness of practical persons learning to abandon unmanageable ideals.


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OTHER WORKS: Over the Boat-Side (1927). Stranger Fidelities (1929). My Own Far Towers (1930). The Senator’s Lady (1932). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Authors Today and Yesterday (1934). TCA (1942). Other references: NR (29 April 1925). NYHTB (9 Oct. 1927). NYT (12 Aug. 1934). SR (1 Nov. 1930). —GAYLE GASKILL

ELDER, Susan Blanchard Born 9 April 1835, Fort Jessup, Louisiana; died 3 November 1923, Cincinnati, Ohio Wrote under: Hermine Daughter of Albert G. and Susan Thompson Blanchard; married Charles D. Elder, 1855 Daughter of Captain Albert G. Blanchard of the U.S. Army (later a brigadier general in the Confederate Army), Susan Blanchard Elder attended the Girls’ High School and St. Michael’s Convent of the Sacred Heart in New Orleans. In 1855, at the time of her marriage, Elder converted to Catholicism. Even before then, writing under the name Hermine, she was contributing to Southern newspapers stories and poems such as ‘‘Babies’’ and ‘‘First Ride,’’ young outpourings of love and admiration of the beauty of life. During the Civil War, she expressed her sympathy for the Southern cause in vivid and indignant patriotic war lyrics and in the establishment of a hospital in her home in Selma, Alabama, where the Elders had fled after the capture of New Orleans by Union troops. After the war, they returned to New Orleans. From 1882 through 1890, Elder was on the editorial staff of the Morning Star as well as a literary critic and editorial contributor for other Catholic publications. Her work includes historical and literary criticism, biographies, stories, poems, and plays written especially for Catholic colleges. The primary themes in Elder’s work are love for the South, particularly New Orleans and Louisiana, and love for the church. Though acclaimed in her own time, Elder’s verse now seems dated because of its melodrama and forced rhymes. For example, in ‘‘Cleopatra Dying,’’ once called ‘‘her most admired poem,’’ the excess emotion of the persona Cleopatra is expressed mainly through the use of 33 exclamation points. ‘‘Chateaux en Espagne,’’ noted as a ‘‘pleasantly turned lyric of the times,’’ claims the South will never really be defeated because of its imagination. Southerners all possess castles in the air, ‘‘Which they never can lose by tyrannical power, / And where Hope smiles serene through the gloomiest hour!’’ A novel, Ellen Fitzgerald (1876), portrays events in the life of Dr. R. D. Williams, Irish patriot and poet, who died at her home at Thibodeaux, Louisiana, before the war. This work was quite popular in the South because it is filled with Southern scenes and sentiments. Probably Elder’s most noteworthy contribution, however, is her careful biographical study, The Life of Abbé Adrien

Rouquette (1913), which reverently traces the history from childhood to death of the poet-priest and missionary to the Louisiana Choctaw Native Americans. In it she describes the beauty of the natural environment of Louisiana, the political and religious history of the Crescent City, the literary works of Abbé Rouquette, and the customs and history of the Choctaw Native Americans. Elder’s scholarship in the biography keeps her for the most part from the excessive emotion of her verse, allowing her to create an inspiring portrait of a man of faith.

OTHER WORKS: James the Second (1874). Savonarola (1875). The Leos of the Papacy (1879). Character Glimpses of the Most Reverend William Henry Elder, D.D. (1911). Elder Flowers (1912). A Mosaic in Blue and Gray (1914).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Davidson, J. W., The Living Writers of the South (1869). Tardy, M. T., ed., The Living Female Writers of the South (1872). Other references: Cincinnati Enquirer (4 Nov. 1923). —SUZANNE ALLEN

ELGIN, Suzette Haden Born Patricia Anne Suzette, 18 November 1936, Louisiana, Missouri Daughter of Gaylord and Hazel Lewis Lloyd; married Peter Haden, 1955 (died); George Elgin, 1964; children: Michael, Rebecca, Christopher, Patricia, Benjamin Suzette Haden Elgin is a retired professor of linguistics and the author of numerous nonfiction works on linguistics and communication as well as a number of science fiction novels. In addition to her writing, Elgin has founded several associations devoted to the study of linguistics, including the World Verbal Self-Defense League and the Linguistics & Science Fiction Network. Elgin also founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association and served for a time as the editor of its newsletter, Star*Line. She runs the Ozark Center for Language Studies, which she founded in 1980. The Ozark Center provides information on linguistics to the public and publishes the bimonthly newsletter of the Linguistics & Science Fiction Network. Elgin grew up in Missouri, the daughter of a lawyer and a teacher. She attended the University of Chicago from 1954 to 1956, but quit after her marriage to Peter Haden, who died several years later. While at the University of Chicago, Elgin won an Academy of American Poets award. She also received a Eugene Saxon Memorial Trust fellowship in poetry from Harper’s magazine in 1958 and was a corecipient of the Rhysling Award from the Science Fiction Poetry Association.

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Elgin remarried in 1964 and obtained her B.A. in linguistics from Chico State College (now California State University at Chico) in 1967. She received her M.A. (1970) and her Ph.D. (1973) in linguistics from the University of California at San Diego. While in school, Elgin held a variety of jobs, from folk guitar instructor to French teacher to writer for a local California news station. She became an associate professor of linguistics at San Diego State University in 1972 and retired as associate professor emeritus in 1980. Elgin’s first book, Syntax and Semantics, was published in two volumes in 1972. This title was quickly followed by a number of other nonfiction works on linguistics, including What is Linguistics? (1973), Beginning Linguistics Workbook (1974), and Pouring Down Words (1975). The Grandmother Principles (1998) is a departure from Elgin’s previous nonfiction works. This title seeks to instruct today’s young women in proper behavior by urging them to imitate their grandmothers. The 21 principles Elgin pushes in this low-key title range from ‘‘The grandmother way is the easy way’’ to ‘‘Grandmothers don’t have to be politically correct.’’ Elgin’s best-known nonfiction work may be The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense (1980) and its successors, which include Success With the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense (1989), Genderspeak: Men, Women, and the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense (1993), and The Martial Art of Verbal Self-Defense (1997). Elgin has written and lectured frequently on the topic of verbal self-defense. Her books on this topic deconstruct such familiar verbal attacks such as ‘‘If you REALLY loved me, you wouldn’t want to leave’’ and ‘‘Don’t you even CARE about your health?’’ Elgin uses linguistic techniques from her years of study and research in applied psycholinguistics to show how native English speakers automatically use techniques such as emphasis on certain words, particular word orders, and body language when trying to hurt someone’s feelings. She teaches readers how to avoid taking the bait in a verbal attack by a spouse, colleague, or boss, and instead recognize, avert, or turn around a verbal attack in an attempt to have a productive conversation. The Gentle Art of Communicating with Kids (1996) teaches parents how to express thoughts and feelings to children using appropriate language behavior and communications skills. Elgin instructs parents in the skills needed to defuse verbal battles in order to create a healthy home environment in which both parents and children are treated with respect. She provides models of appropriate language using modern, hot-button issues like dating, sex, and cyberspace. Elgin believes ‘‘language is our best and most powerful resource for bringing about social change [and] that science fiction is our best and most powerful resource for trying out social changes before we make them, to find out what their consequences might be.’’ She views science fiction as a laboratory in which writers and linguists can experiment with language in a way not possible in the real world. Elgin points to the Klingon language that evolved from Star Trek and the Láadan language

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she created for her Native Tongue novels as examples of linguistic experimentation through science fiction. Elgin has written two science fiction series in addition to her Native Tongue novels. The Communipaths (1970), Furthest (1971), At the Seventh Level (1972), and Star-Anchored, Star-Angered (1979) center around Coyote Jones, an agent for the Tri-Galactic Intelligence Service, which is responsible for maintaining communications for the Three Galaxies universe. Jones’ ‘‘mind-deafness,’’ or lack of telepathy, and ability to project powerful hallucinations upon others ensure his success in a variety of adventures. The Ozark Fantasy Trilogy (1981), which consists of Twelve Fair Kingdoms, The Grand Jubilee, and And Then There’ll Be Fireworks, tells the story of 12 Ozark families who abandon the dying Earth for another planet. Their new planet, named Ozark, runs on a magical, grammar-based system of governance. Yonder Comes the End of Time (1986) is a crossover between the world of Coyote Jones and Planet Ozark. Native Tongue (1984), Native Tongue II: The Judas Rose (1987), and Native Tongue III: Earthsong (1993) are set in an alternate near-future United States in which a group of linguists and their families are the only ones capable of communicating with the alien civilizations that trade on Earth. The conflict between the linguists and the government form one plotline that runs throughout the books, as does the female linguists’ attempts to create Láadan, a language that will express the thoughts of women more effectively than existing languages. Elgin has written A First Dictionary and Grammar of Láadan (2nd ed., edited by Diane Martin,1988) to provide formal instruction in this fictional language. Elgin’s short fiction includes a novella, Lest Levitation Come Upon Us (1982), and pieces published in Alternative Histories (1986), Space Opera (1996), and the annual Fantasy and Science Fiction (multiple years). A short story called ‘‘Weather Bulletin’’ is available online, as are excerpts from various articles she has written for the Linguistics & Science Fiction Network. Also available online is the first chapter of an in-progress textbook version of The Martial Art of Verbal Self-Defense. Other nonfiction works in progress include The Gentle Art of Verbal Defense at Work, an extensively revised and updated second edition of Success With the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense and The Language Imperative, a book on multilingualism and the power of language. Elgin is also writing a new, as yet untitled novel, and attempting to market The Peacetalk Solution, which she calls ‘‘an inspirational novel [or] extended parable.’’ She is also working ‘‘in fits and starts’’ on an autobiography and a book of psalms. Elgin is a self-taught artist who enjoys playing the guitar, singing, drawing, embroidery, and making gourd art in her spare time.

OTHER WORKS: A manuscript collection of Suzette Haden Elgin’s papers is housed in the Chater Collection of the Love Library of


ELLET

San Diego State University; additional papers are in the University of Oregon Library in Eugene, Oregon. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CANR (1983). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers (1996). Other References: Booklist (1 Feb. 1996). PW (10 May 1993, 12 Dec. 1994). Whole Earth Review (Winter 1989). Web page: http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin. —LEAH J. SPARKS

ELLET, Elizabeth (Fries Lummis) Born circa 1812, Sodus Point, New York; died 3 June 1877, New York, New York Daughter of William N. and Sarah Maxwell Lummis; married William H. Ellet, circa 1835 Overlooked in traditional chronicles of military and political events, Elizabeth Ellet is the first historian of American women. She is also important as an early social historian. Her first significant work was The Women of the American Revolution in two volumes (1848), supplemented by a third volume (1850), and by the Domestic History of the American Revolution (1850, the two original volumes were reprinted in 1974 as The Eminent and Heroic Women in America). Noting a dearth of sources, fragmentary anecdotes, meager correspondence and documents, the distortions of reminiscences, and other scholarly handicaps, Ellet also observed that ‘‘women’s sphere is secluded’’ and ‘‘in very few instances does her personal history, even though she may fill a conspicuous position, afford sufficient incident. . .and salient points for description,’’ in contrast to the actions of men. Ellet’s work, then, is primarily episodic, and the methodology of it a result of the limitations she recognized. Scrupulous in the use of reliable accounts, Ellet provides contexts and settings for the remarkably varied activities of women in the ‘‘heroic age of the republic.’’ While she concentrates on the wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters whose existence was devoted to the men fighting the war of American independence and forming a new nation, Ellet also presents many remarkable instances of the independent exploits of women. Beyond the pervasive sympathies for the American cause by which the subjects are measured in contrast to British and Native American ‘‘depredation,’’ Ellet speculates on whether the matrons of the republican era were intrinsically superior in strength and spirit to ‘‘those of the present,’’ or whether the same circumstances would ‘‘now create such heroines.’’ She dares one generalization: almost all the women were ‘‘noted for piety. The spirit that exhibited itself in acts of humanity, courage, magnanimity, and patriotism was a deeply religious one.’’

Achieving success with the histories, Ellet further explored the lives of American women by writing three books that obviously reflect the range and vigor of a developing country: Pioneer Women of the West (1852), The Queens of American Society (1867), and The Court Circles of the Republic (1869). Having grown up on the Lake Ontario frontier and having lived in both the South and the North, Ellet took a broad, liberal view of regional and human diversities. She also had an eye for the specific: she reported on food (sometimes boiled acorns); furnishings (the first carpet on the floor or the first piano west of the Alleghenies); the oppressive silence and the influence of solitude (appropriate for reading the Bible and hearing wild birds sing or Native Americans powwow); and the chores (making cartridges, grinding wheat, splitting wood, looking for lost children—the responsibilities of pioneer women). But what of the queens of American society? A Boston woman entertained 300 officers of the French fleet at breakfast; others shaped or controlled public events and fashions, ‘‘although never desirous of the distinctions of the female politician.’’ Some were patrons of public or private charities—and one of them, Marcia Burns Van Ness, who founded the Washington City Orphan Asylum, was the first American woman to be buried with public honors, in 1832. The thesis of Court Circles is that ‘‘a fair idea’’ of a political administration can be gained from the fashionable life and everyday habits of a president and those who surround him. Consequently, Ellet describes the attitudes, practices, and influence of successive social circles from Washington to Grant. Antics and the ambience of entertainments, conversations and orations, balls, teas, weddings, funerals, and inaugurals suggest differences in the character and spirit of the nation’s leaders. Perhaps the best written of Ellet’s books, Court Circles is based on letters, journals, and gossip with a bold and easy style. There are good moments—one president has his butcher to dinner, another a country merchant; the black servant of an American foreign minister speaks French or German or Russian so guests will feel at home; a president’s wife reports that Charles Dickens looked bored when he visited her, and she preferred the company of Washington Irving; two suffragettes argue on the street about whether women should wear pantaloons. It is ironic Ellet is often remembered as a gossip; she was expert at putting together true stories for the historical record.

OTHER WORKS: Poems, Translated and Original (1835). Rambles About the Country (1847). Family Pictures from the Bible (1849). Summer Rambles in the West (1853). The Practical Housekeeper (1857). Women Artists in All Ages (1859).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bayless, J., Rufus Wilmot Griswold (1943). Beard, C., and M. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (1927). Conrad, S. P., Perish the Thought (1976). Conway, J. K., The Female Experience in Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century

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America (1982). Moss, S. P., Poe’s Literary Battles (1963). Poe, E. A., The Complete Works of Poe (1902). Reference works: Cyclopedia of American Literature (1855). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —ELIZABETH PHILLIPS

ELLIOT, Elisabeth Born 21 December 1926, Brussels, Belgium Daughter of Philip E. and Katharine Dillingham Howard; married James Elliot, 1953 (died); Addison Leitch, 1969 (died); Lars Gren, 1977 Born of American missionary parents in Belgium, Elisabeth Elliot graduated from Wheaton College, Illinois, in 1948. After attending Prairie Bible Institute, she went as a missionary to Ecuador in 1952. Her first husband was also a graduate of Wheaton College and a missionary in Ecuador. When he and four of his colleagues were killed by the Auca Indians, Elliot decided to follow her call and to carry out her husband’s unfinished mission to pacify the Aucas. With her baby daughter Valerie and sister of one of the slain men, she entered the Aucas’ village in 1958, the first white person to do so. She kept meticulous notes of her observations of the Aucas’ lifestyle and recorded their language. Since her return to the U.S. in 1963, Elliot devoted her life to writing, lecturing, and teaching. After losing her second husband in the early 1970s, she became visiting professor at the GordonConwell Theological Seminary in Hamilton, Massachusetts. The Savage My Kinsman (1961, reprinted in 1981 and a 45th anniversary edition in 1996) is an oversize book, with photographs by Elliot and Cornell Capa. It is a verbal and pictorial record of her day-by-day life among the Aucas. Here the 20th century met head-on with the stone age, the process observed and interpreted by a sensitive and perceptive woman. While Elliot was impressed by the skills of the Aucas in filling the needs of their daily lives, they in turn were puzzled by her lack of them. She did not know how to make fishnets or pots, or how to plant manioc. She could not even snare a bumblebee for the children to fly on a palm fiber. Elliot’s sharp perception for the slightest nuances in the natives’ behavioral patterns opened unknown vistas into the psyche of primitives. She comprehended and was capable of communicating the divergencies between their concepts and those of the civilized world. While telling the Aucas about Christ, she also established a written form for their writing. Among Elliot’s evangelical writings, Let Me Be a Woman— Notes on Womanhood for Valerie (1976) stands out as a crisply written, down-to-earth bouquet of advice not only to her daughter, but to all young Christian women. Elliot analyzes the male-female

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relationship from several angles, examining discipline and submission in marriage. Her ever-present logic and her faith do not seem to clash in her credo: ‘‘You can’t make proper use of a thing unless you know what it was made for, whether it is a safety pin or a sailboat. To me it is a wonderful thing to be a woman under God—to know. . .that we were made for something.’’ Let Me Be A Woman is a conscious analysis of Christian womanhood. Elliot firmly adheres to the intellectual and spiritual equality of the sexes except in marriage, where women must carry out their predestined fate; only one partner leads in the dance. This type of submission Elliot does not see as a weakness, but as obedience to the voice of God. For her missionary activities, Elliot gained world fame of a sensational nature. As an evangelical writer, she has a wide audience of readers. Several of her books have been translated into foreign languages. They are both inspiring and provocative, in an easy flowing style, and always testifying to her ‘‘mature bedrock of faith.’’ Elliot has a felicitous gift of blending the factual with the spiritual, matters of the mind with those of the soul, not missing the quaintness and humor of a situation. She can detect as few others, the bond between all creatures of God. Where a lesser believer would acknowledge only a common denominator of birth, joy, sorrow, and death, Elliot sees with the eyes of a true believer that ‘‘all of us. . .were created by the same God, all of us were broken by the same Fall, and all of us might be redeemed by the same Grace.’’

OTHER WORKS: Through Gates of Splendor (1957, 1996). Shadow of the Almighty (1958). No Graven Image (1966). Who Shall Ascend (1968). Furnace of the Lord (1968). The Liberty of Obedience (1968). A Slow and Certain Light (1973). These Strange Ashes (1975). Twelve Baskets of Crumbs (1976). Discipline: The Glad Surrender (1983, 1998). Loneliness: It Can Be a Wilderness, It Can Be a Pathway to God (1988). On Asking God Why: Trusting God in a Twisted World (1989, 1997). A Path Through Suffering (1990, 1997). Passion and Purity: Learning to Bring Your Love Life Under Christ’s Control (1994). Keep a Quiet Heart (1996). Quest for Love (1996). Gateway to Joy: Reflections That Draw Us Nearer to God (1998). The Stay-atHome Mom (1995). Other: A Balanced Family (audiocassette, 1995). A Peaceful Home (video, 1994). Family Management (audiocassette, 1995). Forget Me Not: A Grandmother’s Influence (video, 1992). Glenda’s Story (audiocassette, 1995). Growing Through Loneliness (audiocassette, 1999). Obedience (audiocassette, 1998). Spiritual Opposition (audiocassette, 1994). Suffering Is Not for Nothing (audiocassette, 1988). Teaching Your Child Self-Discipline (1995). The Shaping of a Christian Family (audiocassette, 1958, 1995).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Chicago Sunday Tribune (3 Dec. 1961). Christian Century (21 May 1969). LJ (1 May 1961, 15 May 1969). NYHTB (23 July 1961). —VERA LASKA


ELLIOTT, Maude Howe Born 9 November 1854, South Boston, Massachusetts; died 19 March 1948, Newport, Connecticut Wrote under: Maude Howe Daughter of Samuel G. and Julia Ward Howe; married John Elliot, 1887 Maude Howe Elliott was born at her father’s Perkins Institute for the Blind in South Boston and grew up in the midst of the literary and reform worlds of Boston, with Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Florence Nightingale, and John Brown as family friends. After two years of publishing short stories, travel notes, and art reviews in the popular press, Elliott published A Newport Aquarelle in 1883. She often used travel as inspiration and setting for her works, producing San Rosario Ranch (1884) after a trip to Southern California, Atalanta in the South (1886) after a stay at the New Orleans Cotton Centennial, and a series of travel books after several European trips. Elliott also wrote a syndicated letter for several American papers during her European travels of 1894-1900 and 1906-1910. She was active in the suffrage movement as president of the Newport Woman Suffrage Association. Elliott’s first novel, A Newport Aquarelle (1883), was published anonymously as part of the Roberts Brothers’ No Name Author series. The novel establishes what was to become the pattern of Elliott’s novels: a young woman without female relatives to raise and advise her finds herself caught between two suitors, one a struggling artist sensitive to the heroine, and the other a dandy who covets the heroine’s fortune. An older woman enters the scene to guide the heroine, and the outcome is almost as predictable as the plot: the heroine marries the artist, or, rejected by him, she pines away. Margaret Ruysdale, heroine of Atalanta in the South, (1886) is a stranger from the North. A sculptor, she is as hard of heart as the Atalanta she creates, a ‘‘maiden, in whose veins flowed the pure cool blood of the Puritans.’’ The Southern setting is important to the novel, as Elliott uses it to initiate her judgments of the South and of the Civil War (‘‘a mistake’’). Margaret’s two suitors are Dr. Philip Rondelet, a soft-spoken physician, gentle to women, composed of ‘‘the stuff of which martyrs are made,’’ and Robert Feuardent, a passionate Creole. In a complicated subplot of murder, intrigue, and secret marriages, Philip is accused of murder; when acquitted, he leaves New Orleans to help fight the plague in nearby Thebes. Like her own Atalanta, Margaret is caught by the fruit rolled at her feet by Robert. They marry at her family farm in New England. Philip dies of the plague shortly thereafter. Although Margaret’s friends feel she made an unwise choice (Elliott’s sympathies obviously lie with Philip), it is clear that by following her heart, Margaret Ruysdale has made the right choice. Elliott’s Art and Handicraft in the Woman’s Building (1893) remains the definitive description of women’s activities at the World’s Columbian Exposition. In it, Elliott collected essays by Mrs. Potter Palmer, Julia Ward Howe, Candace Wheeler, and

ELLIOTT

others describing all the exhibits in the building and the women’s congresses held there. A history of women’s participation in the World’s Columbian Exposition is also included. Elliott’s biographies of her family are recognized as her best work. Life and Letters of Julia Ward Howe (1915), which she wrote with her sisters, Laura E. Richards and Florence M. Howe Hall, won the Pulitzer Prize. Her autobiographies Three Generations (1923) and This Was My Newport (1944) offer views of Newport society at the turn of the century. Elliott’s novels provide important insights into American women of the 19th century. She presents the strong and independent American girl on her own in society. Forced to depend on herself for moral guidance, Elliott’s American girl is not completely sure of herself until she has met her mate. Elliott’s ambivalence about independent women leads her first to exalt the freedom of self-sufficiency and then to deflate this freedom with doubts and insecurity. Elliott’s resolution to this insecurity is invariably a loving marriage with a sensitive, artistic man. Elliott’s biographies of her remarkable family and her detailed description of women’s activities at the World’s Columbian Exposition are important contributions to American letters. As both a member and a chronicler of one of America’s most important families, Elliott was aware of her role in history. OTHER WORKS: Phillida (1891). Honor (1893). The Story of Laura Bridgman, Dr. Howe’s Famous Pupil; and What He Taught Her, with F. M. Howe Hall (1903). Roma Beata (1904). Two in Italy (1905). Sun and Shadow in Spain (1908). Sicily in Shadow and Sun (1910). The Eleventh Hour in the Life of Julia Ward Howe (1911). Lord Byron’s Helmet (1927). My Cousin, F. Marion Crawford (1934). John Elliott, the Story of an Artist (1930). Uncle Sam Ward and His Circle (1938). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Deland, M., Golden Yesterdays (1941). Reference works: NCAB. NAW (1971). —VIRGINIA DARNEY

ELLIOTT, Sarah Barnwell Born 29 November 1848, Beaufort, South Carolina; died 30 August 1928, Sewanee, Tennessee Daughter of Stephen and Charlotte Barnwell Elliott The youngest of five children, Sarah Barnwell Elliott was born at her grandparents’ plantation on the South Carolina coastal plains while her father, an Episcopal bishop, toured with his Georgia diocese. Leading a liberal, aristocratic family, Elliott’s father resisted hostile antebellum politics and helped to found the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, where Elliott lived most of her life. In 1866 she enrolled at Johns Hopkins, and by 1895 was supporting herself by writing in New York, where

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she became a suffragist. In 1902 she returned to Sewanee to rear orphaned nephews in the family home. A polite duty to Episcopal dogmatism restrains Elliott’s first novel, The Felmeres (1879). Virtually isolated in a mansion on the desolate coastal marshes, beautiful Helen Felmere swears to her father’s agnostic creed, studies logic instead of sewing, and lovelessly marries her cousin instead of supporting herself as an artist. A visiting painter stirs her repressed spirit with instruction and respect for her art, and a black servant urges charity work, but Helen joins her husband in New York society. Helen attacks conventional piety in the Gilded Age until a long-lost brother baptizes her baby, and she casts herself beneath carriage wheels. Dialogues on doctrinal controversy intrude on gloomy, gothic settings. A Simple Heart (1887), which portrays a self-sacrificing frontier ministry, is Elliott’s tribute to her brother, the Episcopal missionary bishop of west Texas. In a dialect study, she shows an itinerant carpenter fulfilling his dream of building a church, only to be rejected as his congregation grows more sophisticated. The carpenter’s wife teaches him to read the Book of Common Prayer and invites a passing Episcopal bishop to ordain him deacon before she dies gazing at a man-sized cross. A quiet, ‘‘naytral’’ grasp of scripture contrasts the preacher with both wild prayer meetings and fashionable church raffles, but her pious pathos diminishes her local color. No longer restrained by denominationalism, Elliott returns to the frontier setting for her longest, most successful novel, Jerry (1891). Young Jerry escapes a brutal home in the Tennessee mountains to be reared by an isolated Western miner and educated by a guilt-driven doctor, who inspires him to be a gentleman. Founding a school, holding off railroad speculators, and organizing a mining collective, Jerry is a folk hero until an unexpected inheritance corrupts his ambition. Serializing Jerry for Scribner’s magazine, Elliott shifts her attitude repeatedly. Frontiersmen are innocent yet disgusting; wealth is corruptive yet the entrance to gracious society; leadership is self-serving yet self-sacrificing. Jerry’s closing shootout does not decide Elliott’s romantic dilemma in favor of either heroic force or social compassion. Elliott compares two smug, isolated societies of Sewanee in The Durket Sperret (1898). In their ancient pride of family spirit, Cumberland mountaineers scorn the fastidious new university people, but young Hannah rejects her drunken mountain suitor to become a lady’s maid in town. Defying the Durket matriarch leaves Hannah vulnerable to her employer’s patronizing improvement projects and to her vengeful suitor’s gossip until she escapes both through a farming career. The elaborate rituals of a mountain death, ‘‘buryin’,’’ and will-reading show Elliott as anthropologist, and Hannah’s silent attention to a professor’s discourse on the Sewanee caste system displays Elliott’s psychological acumen. In Hannah and the Durket matriarch, Elliott builds her two strongest character studies. Elliott’s strongest novel, The Making of Jane (1901), challenges the womanly self-sacrifice that defines heroism in her early books. Fighting her childhood homesickness in New York, young Jane lets her aunt’s strict tutelage repress all personality until she

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rebels into maturity by returning to the South for a business career. Investments supplant a lost love, and Jane’s millionaire proposes well after she has discarded her dependence on him. Though she exaggerates Jane’s stoicism and success, Elliott naturalistically exposes facets of a lady discovering her power of self-reliance. By traveling, working, and investing earned income with her own authority, Jane makes herself into a satisfied, independent person. Retired in Sewanee, Elliott championed the South and woman suffrage while writing criticism for the Sewanee Review and Forensic Quarterly Review. In 1907 she praised Ibsen’s stress on individual will restricted in a Norway mirroring the South. In a sentimental literary period, Elliott’s measured transition from romanticism to naturalism portrays the local color of Texas frontiersmen and Tennessee mountaineers before it confidently realizes a self-sufficient womanly ideal. Disciplining her insights to make a significant statement, Elliott turns from family doctrines and regional viewpoints to her own experience as a sensitive woman in turbulent times. Through all the expansive plots and symbolic settings, Elliott’s distinctive character is a lonely outsider earnestly working to build a new home in a puzzling, hostile world.

OTHER WORKS: John Paget (1893). An Incident and Other Happenings (1899). Sam Houston (1900).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mackenzie, C. C., Sarah Barnwell Elliott (Dissertation, 1971). Maness, D. G., The Novels of Sarah Barnwell Elliott.: A Critical Study (Dissertation, 1974). Wiggins, B. L., Library of Southern Literature (1909). Reference works: AA (1938). DAB (1931). NAW, 1607-1950 (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: NYT (31 Aug. 1928). —GAYLE GASKILL

ELLIS, Anne Born 1875, Missouri; died August 1938, Denver, Colorado Daughter of Albert L. and Rachel Sweareangen Heister; married G. Fleming, 1895; Herbert Ellis, 1901 When still a child, Anne Ellis traveled with her family behind an oxen team to Silver Cliff, Colorado. As Ellis remembers: ‘‘I went up the gulch at the age of six and came down at the age of sixteen.’’ When she came down, a seasoned veteran of life in Colorado’s mining towns, it was with the first batch of experiences that would make her a writer. Soon after the family’s move from Missouri, Ellis’ father left his wife for a job in Buffalo and never came back. One of Ellis’


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earliest memories is of the abject poverty that drove her mother to take one of her pieced quilts door to door trying to trade it for food. In 1882 her mother married a miner and the family moved to Bonanza. Here, though never free of want, they survived the ups and downs of the mining business chiefly through her mother’s ingenuity as a cook and seamstress. Miners (with names like ‘‘Si Dore’’ and ‘‘Picnic Jim’’), fancy women, cliff-climbing, first love, a first milk cow, dances, tales of women’s rights, and dresses made of cabin curtains—all these filled Ellis’ life and later her writings. Though school consisted primarily of home mastery of a fifth grade reader, Ellis remarked that ‘‘when one cannot read, one thinks a lot.’’ Shortly after her mother’s death in 1893, Ellis married and moved to a new mine, the Only Chance, to stake a claim. Living from hand to mouth most of these years, Ellis spent much of her spare time writing. In 1938, her friends rallied to pay for the necessary clothes and traveling expenses, when she received a telegram invitation to appear at the University of Colorado to receive an honorary Master of Letters degree. At that time, she had published her three autobiographical works: The Life of an Ordinary Woman (1929), Plain Anne Ellis (1931), and Sunshine Preferred (1934). The Life of an Ordinary Woman gives a valuable firsthand description and analysis of the mining West. It focuses on the variety of characters and activities characteristic to a mining town: ‘‘A New Mine,’’ ‘‘The Baby’s First Bed,’’ ‘‘Theatricals,’’ ‘‘Seeing a Prize Fight,’’ ‘‘Cripple Creek Troubles,’’ and ‘‘The First Telephone.’’ In Plain Anne Ellis, Ellis details house-building, contracting with the government to travel with and cook for a telephone gang, sheep shearing, race relations, Indian maneuvers, county politics, and equal rights conventions. Sunshine Preferred, though not as interesting as Ellis’ earlier works, nevertheless offers a rare insight into sanitariums of the 1920s and 1930s and a few glimpses of life in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, New Mexico. One of the most refreshing rewards of reading Ellis’ books is the abundant humor that characterizes her style. She also has a talent for putting herself in perspective, which greatly enhances the psychological insight that her works provide. Ellis’ observations are often straightforward accounts of an active mind and a vibrant body for whom the Victorian mores of her era fell by the wayside. Of her political experiences, she writes: ‘‘These men, who were supposed to be my friends, tried to make it hell for me; but I, who recognize no hell, was neither worried, frightened nor disturbed; in fact, I rather enjoyed it; holding the whip hand was for me a new experience.’’ It’s no surprise that this is the same woman of whom Irene McKeehan, professor of English at the University of Colorado, said: ‘‘Out of hardships and limitations she had made comedy and tragedy, touching the commonplace with the magic of interest, transmuting ordinary life into literature.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY: Colorado Quarterly (Summer 1955). NYT (30 Aug. 1931, 19 Aug. 1934). NYTBR (29 Sept. 1929). —SHELLEY ARMITAGE

ELLIS, Edith Born 1876, Coldwater, Michigan; died 27 December 1960, New York, New York Also wrote under: Edith Ellis Baker, Edith Ellis Furness Daughter of Edward C. and Ruth McCarthy Ellis; married Frank A. Baker (died 1907); C. Beecher Furness Ellis began her stage career as a child of three, performing with her parents’ touring company in the Midwest and South. Before she was twelve, three plays were written with starring roles for ‘‘Little Edith Ellis, the Rising Star.’’ Her varied theatrical experience on the road included everything from performing in vaudeville to heading her own stock companies. Ellis and her first husband leased the Park Theater and later the Criterion Theater, both in Brooklyn, where she directed plays for several years before her audacious move to the Berkeley Lyceum in New York as director and leading lady of her own play, The Point of View (1903). According to a New York Times reviewer, it could ‘‘not be said that at present she shines in any of her three capacities.’’ After her husband’s death in 1907, Ellis resumed her maiden name to avoid confusion with actress Edith Barker. She acted less frequently, but continued to write and direct. Of her approximately 35 plays, eight of them produced in New York, the best was Mary Jane’s Pa (1908). A resourceful mother of two girls runs a smalltown printing press and struggles to make ends meet. When the scholarly ne’er-do-well who had abandoned her and their daughters 10 years earlier turns up, down on his luck, she hires him out of compassion as a cook and household help, without revealing his identity to their children. The town gossips are scandalized at the idea of a male live-in servant in a household of women. In Act III, he is almost tarred and feathered by rioting townspeople who have destroyed her press because of the politics of her newspaper. This moment of danger determines her true feelings. She acknowledges her husband, relinquishing a promising relationship with a young politician. Laurette Taylor starred in Ellis’ Seven Sisters (1911), adapted from the Hungarian of Ferencz Herczegh. The play was criticized for a situation that depended too heavily upon customs and manners considered alien to American audiences. Ten years later, in Betty’s Last Bet, Ellis transparently attempted to transfer the plot of the Hungarian play, which involves getting four sisters married off to men of means and ideals, to an American milieu. But the situation is even more strained in that Ellis reduced the time span of the action—introductions, courtships, and engagements—from nine months to one day. A forceful and outspoken personality, Ellis felt she had been handicapped by her sex. Her favorite character type, like the mother in Mary Jane’s Pa, was a mature woman. ‘‘After all,’’ said Ellis, ‘‘she is the only person about whom a play or a story can be written. This is the day of the mature woman in real life and on the stage.’’

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Speaking of her own work, Ellis told an interviewer: ‘‘I know the forms of drama. I have eaten and drunk and slept them, but I don’t believe in being hampered by them. I belong to a club of women dramatists, but I do not feel akin to them, for they discuss the forms and how to remain within the forms. I try to get on without them. I remember the forms, but am controlled by the impulse of character and the impetus of action.’’ However, Ellis’ instinct for the dramatic was not as sure as that of her model, G. B. Shaw, and she too often fell back on tired contrivances. OTHER WORKS: A Batch of Blunders (1897). Mrs. B. O’Shaughnessy (Wash Lady) (1900). Because I Love You (1903). Ben of Broken Bow (1905). Contrary Mary (1905). Mary and John (1905). The Wrong Man (1905). He Fell in Love with His Wife (1910). My Man (with F. Halsey, 1910). Partners (1911). The Love Wager; Vespers; Fields of Flax; The Man Higher Up (1912). The Amethyst Ring (1913). Cupid’s Ladder; Make-Believe; Man with the Black Gloves; The Devil’s Garden (1915). Making Dick Over (1916). Mrs. Clancey’s Car Ride (with Edward Ellis, 1918). Bravo, Claudia (1919). Whose Little Bride Are You? (1919). Mrs. Jimmie Thompson (with N. S. Rose, 1920). The White Villa (1921; produced in London as The Dangerous Age, 1937). The Illustrious Tartarin (1922). The Judsons Entertain (1922). The Moon and Sixpence (1924). White Collars (1924). The Last Chapter (with Edward Ellis, 1930). Open the Door! by W. Brandon (dramatization by Ellis, 1935). Incarnation; a Plea from the Masters by W. Brandon (dramatization by Ellis, 1936). The Lady of La Paz (1936). We Knew these Men by W. Brandon (dramatization by Ellis, 1943). Love in the Afterlife by W. Brandon (dramatization by Ellis, 1956). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Björkman, E., ed., Mary Jane’s Pa (1914). Patterson, A., ‘‘Edith Ellis—A Woman Insurgent Dramatist,’’ in Theatre Magazine (May 1909). Other references: New York Dramatic Mirror (19 Feb. 1913). —FELICIA HARDISON LONDRÉ

EMBURY, Emma (Catherine) Manley Born 1806, New York, New York; died 10 February 1863, New York, New York Wrote under: Emma C(atherine) Embury, Ianthe Daughter of James Manley; married Daniel Embury, 1828 After her marriage to Daniel Embury, president of the Atlantic Bank of Brooklyn, Emma Embury lived in Brooklyn the rest of her life. She established a salon and published tales, poems, and essays in prodigious quantity. Embury’s work appeared in the leading popular magazines of the day for a period of years, and she was on the editorial staff of Godey’s, Graham’s, and Ladies’ Companion. In 1848 a serious illness ended her writing career and rendered her an invalid the rest of her life.

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Embury’s first collection, Guido: a Tale; Sketches from History and Other Poems (1828), contains some of her more interesting poetry, as well as much which is conventional in rhyme, subject matter, and expression. Poems with titles such as ‘‘Love,’’ ‘‘Absence,’’ ‘‘Friendship,’’ and ‘‘I Loved Thee Not’’ reflect Embury’s adherence to the standard rhyme schemes and idealized sentiments of her day. At times, however, especially when her narrative skill comes to her aid, her poems can command respect. Although hampered by its inflexibly rhymed couplets and stereotyped ‘‘pale and shrunken’’ poet-protagonist, Guido captures the attention. The occasional variation of the rhyme pattern and the sometimes moving, sometimes exasperating story of Guido’s unrequited love for the beautiful Floranthe overcome the poem’s defects. Unrequited love and silent suffering are two of Embury’s favorite themes; they are also in evidence in the other interesting experimental work in this collection, the ‘‘Sketches from History.’’ Generally in the form of a monologue and preceded by an explanatory headnote, these poems often have a power and vitality not found in her more abstract ones. ‘‘Jane of France’’ records that queen’s cry of despair when her husband divorces her and she hears ‘‘the harsh decree that robbed her of a throne.’’ ‘‘Scenes in the Life of a Lover’’ are scenes in the life of Henry Percy, lover of Anne Boleyn. Embury often does her best work when she takes on a male persona or when a man is the protagonist, as occurs in this successful poem. Embury was well known for her poetry, but her best work is in her tales and short stories. The collection Constance Latimer, or the Blind Girl, with Other Tales (1838) contains some energetic and compelling prose, although the title story is not one of Embury’s best efforts. Her abilities are better displayed in two shorter tales from the collection, ‘‘The Son and Heir’’ and ‘‘The Village Tragedy.’’ Her use of male protagonists provide her with a range of emotions and actions she seems unable to allow her women. Two other collections of short stories were published during Embury’s lifetime—Pictures of Early Life, or Sketches of Youth (1830) and Glimpses of Home Life, or Causes and Consequences (1848). These stories demonstrate the same strengths and weaknesses as her earlier ones. Unrequited love, silent suffering of various kinds, and the moral lessons to be learned when material wealth departs, are her most persistent themes, generally presented in a conventional manner. Her description and characterization of women is essentially drawn from one conventional model, that of the blond, pale, liquid-eyed maiden, causing a certain lack of distinction among her heroines. At times, Embury suggests to the reader that she is capable of portraying a wider range of characters and situations. ‘‘Flora Lester,’’ for example, a story about a reformed belle, provides some tantalizing hints that Embury understood human behavior better than she generally cared to reveal. The Poems of Emma Catherine Embury (1869) and Selected Prose Writings of Mrs. Emma Catherine Embury (1893) were published posthumously. The latter is notable chiefly for Embury’s essay on American literature, which pleads for financial support for artists so America may have ‘‘a literary class in society and a


EMSHWILLER

national literature.’’ Embury’s ‘‘Female Education,’’ an 1831 address, was published in Anna C. Brackett’s Woman and the Higher Education (1893). Although Embury is a proponent of education for women, she attacks Wollstonecraft and other feminists and finds education’s benefits to be in creating the best mothers possible. In this, Embury is typical of a time when women writers were exalting and perpetuating the values and ideas that limited them most. Nevertheless, in her work Embury at times goes beyond the restrictions of her culture. OTHER WORKS: American Wild Flowers in Their Native Haunts (1845). Love’s Token Flowers (1845). The Waldorf Family, or Grandfather’s Legend (1848). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Griswold, R. W., The Female Poets of America (1848). Poe, E. A., article in Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book (Aug. 1846). Rollins, J. A., Mrs. Emma C. Embury’s Account Book: A Study of Some of Her Periodical Contributions (1947). Reference works: American Authors, 1600-1900 (1938). Cyclopedia of American Literature (1855). DAB (1934). Other references: Catherine Graham’s Magazine (Aug. 1843). —JULIA ROSENBERG

EMSHWILLER, Carol Born 12 April 1921, Ann Arbor, Michigan Daughter of Charles C. and Agnes Carswell Fries; married Edmund Emshwiller, 1949 (died 1990); children: Eve, Susan, Peter Carol Emshwiller, an adjunct assistant professor in continuing education at New York University, is the author of three books of short stories and three novels. Her writings borrow elements from science fiction and fantasy to conceive highly original and often outrageous plots. Told from a feminist perspective, Emshwiller’s works comment upon the state of women in contemporary society. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction states that ‘‘in her hands science fiction conventions become models of our deep estrangement from ourselves (especially women) and from the world.’’ Raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Emshwiller earned a B.A. in music from the University of Michigan in 1945 and another B.A. in design four years later. She then attended Ecole nationale superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France. This was followed by marriage to filmmaker Edmund Emshwiller (who died in 1990), with whom she had three children. Emshwiller has taught workshops at the Clarion Science Fiction Writing Workshop in East Lansing, Michigan, and the Science Fiction Bookstore in New York, and taught at New York University since 1978. Joy in Our Cause (1974), Emshwiller’s first book, is comprised of short stories previously published in literary and science fiction magazines. This was followed by Verging on the Pertinent: Stories (1989) and The Start of the End of It All (1990,

revised in 1991), two more collections of short stories. The latter won the World Fantasy Award for the best short story collection of 1991. In ‘‘Yukon,’’ a woman abandons her husband and home in order to live with a bear in the forest. In the title story, aliens determined to conquer the Earth form an alliance with divorced women to fight the ruling male establishment. In ‘‘Looking Down,’’ a half-bird, half-man is transformed by the power of love. Love, whether or not it triumphs in the end, is a theme throughout this book as Emshwiller’s motley collection of bizarre characters defy their mundane existence by embracing the unexpected and extraordinary. Carmen Dog (1990), Emshwiller’s first novel, also incorporates elements of the fantastic. The novel is set in a world in which human women are degenerating into various animals, while animals are developing the characteristics of human women. Although critics panned this as silly, formulaic, and confusing, most praised the humor in Emshwiller’s allegorical tale. Her second novel, Ledoyt, was a departure from her usual reliance on plot elements from science fiction and fantasy. Instead, Ledoyt is a realistic novel set in the American West of the early 1900s. In the novel, Oriana Cochran and her hired man, Beal Ledoyt, fall in love and marry despite their radically different backgrounds and personalities. The story focuses on Lotti, Oriana’s daughter, who tries to break up her mother’s marriage. The first person narrative switches between the main characters and allows the reader an intimate knowledge of each. Leaping Man Hill (1998) is the sequel to Ledoyt. Venus Rising (1992), a novella about an exiled alien who falls in love with a being with a very different lifestyle, was shortlisted for the 1992 James Tiptree Jr. Award, an award given to science fiction novels and short stories that explore and expand gender. Venus Rising was also published in Flying Cups and Saucers, an anthology of Tiptree award winners and nominees. Among Emshwiller’s other awards are a MacDowell Colony fellowship in 1973, a New York State Creative Artist Public Service grant in 1975, a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1980, two New York Council grants, the Pushcart Prize, and the 1999 Gallun award from the ICON Science Fiction Convention. In addition to her position at NYU, Emshwiller makes frequent appearances at science fiction conventions around the country and offered writing workshops like the one at Clarion West in Seattle during the summer of 1998. Emshwiller is also a contributor of short stories to literary and science fiction magazines, including Omni, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Century, Crank, Epoch, Croton Review, and TriQuarterly. Her stories have also appeared in various anthologies like the seventh annual The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and the Penguin Book of Erotic Stories by Women. Works in progress include Boots, a novel combining fantasy with horses and the Old West. OTHER WORKS: Pilobolus and Joan (1974). Family Focus (1977). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CANR (1992). Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993). Oxford Companion to the Women’s

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Writing in the United States (1995). St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers (1996). Other references: PW (26 Jan. 1990, 26 Apr. 1991, 28 Aug. 1995, 15 Apr. 1996). —LEAH J. SPARKS

EPHRON, Nora Born 19 May 1941, New York, New York Daughter of Henry and Phoebe Wolkind Ephron; married Dan Greenburg, 1967 (divorced); Carl Bernstein, 1976 (divorced 1979); Nicholas Pileggi, 1987; children: Jacob, Max Nora Ephron’s career has been a diverse one. She has worked as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter, as well as a film director and producer. In doing so she has brought humor, romance, and her own personal story to her audiences. Born the first of four daughters to stage- and screenwriters Phoebe and Henry Ephron of Carousel, Desk Set, and Take Her, She’s Mine fame, she grew up with the understanding that ‘‘everything is copy.’’ Her childhood was spent in Beverly Hills. After graduating from Wellesley College in 1962, Ephron worked as a journalist, writing for the New York Post, Esquire, New York magazine, and Good Housekeeping, as well as numerous other national publications. She wrote freelance articles and became a contributing editor for New York and a senior editor for Esquire in the 1970s. Her work as a journalist led her to publish several books of essays. In 1970 she published Wallflower at the Orgy, which explores her clever interpretation of topics relating to the ‘‘popular culture’’ of the times. In 1975 she compiled 25 pieces on the women’s movement. This work, Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women, irreverently approaches the feminist movement from the perspective of the everyday frustrations of women in their quest for freedom. The year 1978 brought yet another set of witty words in her Scribble, Scribble: Notes on the Media, in which she presents lively profiles, parodies, anecdotes, and interviews on the written and broadcast media and how it ought to work. In 1983 Ephron published her first novel, Heartburn. This poignant and humorous story of a well-known cookbook author, who is seven months pregnant with her second child and discovers her journalist husband is having an affair, was met with critical controversy and acclaim when it was released. Material for the story came directly from Ephron’s own divorce from Washington Post investigative reporter Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame. Although it was a bestseller, critics questioned Ephron’s choice of mixing fiction with reality. At the time of her divorce from Bernstein in 1979, Ephron realized she needed to get a job that would support her and her two

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young sons. She chose screenwriting, which was not entirely unfamiliar to her. In 1978 she had written a CBS television movie called Perfect Gentlemen about four women hotel thieves. She had also written an episode of the ABC series Adam’s Rib in 1973. Her first film writing assignment came when she cowrote Silkwood with Alice Arlen, about real-life union activist Karen Silkwood. The film’s conclusion, about Silkwood’s controversial death in an automobile accident, became the focus for much discussion when it was released in 1983. It also won Ephron and Arlen an Academy Award nomination. Ephron’s screenwriting took many forms. In 1986 Mike Nichols directed Ephron’s screenplay of Heartburn, which starred Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson in the well-received but not highly acclaimed movie version of her book. In 1989 she wrote the lighthearted romance about friendships between males and females, When Harry Met Sally, which again earned her an Oscar nomination and began her reputation as a writer of romantic comedies. Her second collaboration with Arlen, Cookie (1989), and her 1990 My Blue Heaven (both critical failures) are funny gangster films that taught her the importance of directing one’s own script. She and her sister Delia then wrote her first directorial effort, the under-attended This Is My Life (1992), the comic story of a single mother juggling her show business career with bringing up two girls. In 1993 she cowrote (with David S. Ward and Jeffrey Arch) and directed the highly acclaimed comic love story Sleepless In Seattle (starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan), which won her a third Oscar nomination for screenwriting. Ephron’s next project was a script (again written with her sister Delia) called Mixed Nuts (1994), a black comedy about volunteers at a suicide hot line. This was followed by the box office hit Michael (1997), written with Delia, Peter Dexter, and Jim Quinlan and starred John Travolta as an imperfect angel traveling with three tabloid reporters. Ephron’s latest highly acclaimed work, You’ve Got Mail, is another romantic comedy based on the Ernst Lubitsch comedy The Shop Around the Corner. The film (the result of another cooperative script produced with Delia) reunites Sleepless in Seattle stars Hanks and Ryan, who now portray warring bookstore owners in an e-mail love affair. Ephron’s writing career has led her where few women have tread. In journalism and fiction she was frank, witty, and unafraid to say what she thought; in film she took control of her writing and became one of the few women directors in Hollywood. It is difficult to say where her writing will lead her next, but it is pretty certain it will be a place touched by her brand of humor and ‘‘copy’’ from her life.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: ANR 39 (1992). CBY (1990). Contemporary Theatre, Film and Television 15 (1996). Other References: Maclean’s (9 Mar. 1992). New Republic (3 Mar. 1997). NYT (13 Dec. 1998, 18 Dec. 1998). Rolling Stone (8 July 1993). Time (27 Jan. 1992, 21 Dec. 1998). —PAULA C. MURPHY


ERDRICH, Louise Born 6 July 1954, Little Falls, Minnesota Daughter of Ralph L. and Rita Joanne Gorneau Erdrich; married Michael Dorris, 1981; children: Reynold, Jeffrey, Madeline, Persia, Pallas, and Aza Louise Erdrich continues to be one of our most important contemporary writers. She writes poetry and some of the most sophisticated fiction and nonfiction being produced in the United States. Many of her characters grow out of her own background as a Native American woman who grew up off the reservation. Yet her writing is accessible to any reader willing to put forth a bit of effort. Erdrich covers the range of human experience in her work: accidents of birth and parentage, falling in love, generosity, greed, psychological damage, joy, alienation, vulnerability, differentness, parenting, aging, and dying. Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Tribe, grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her German-American father and her Chippewa mother were teachers for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The eldest of seven children, Erdrich spent much time on the nearby Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation visiting her maternal grandmother and learning about the conflict between the white and native cultures from which she had sprung. She attended the Wahpeton Indian Boarding School where both her parents taught, and throughout her childhood she wrote stories for which her father paid her a nickel and her mother bound into books. In 1972 Erdrich entered Dartmouth College, where she met her future husband, Michael Dorris, also part Native American, who later became her agent and collaborator. After her graduation in 1976, she returned to North Dakota and conducted poetry workshops for the Poetry in the Schools Program. She attended Johns Hopkins University and received an M.F.A. in creative writing in 1979. In 1981 she was named writer-in-residence in Dartmouth’s Native American Studies Program, which Dorris directs. Erdrich credits her ability to address both sides of her heritage to her collaboration with her husband. Erdrich has published poetry, short stories, and three novels that have won critical acclaim. A series of short stories won the Nelson Algren award in 1982 and a Pushcart Prize in 1983; one was anthologized in Best Short Stories in 1983. She also won an O. Henry award in 1985. Her first volume of poetry, Jacklight (1984), shows the same narrative force and sense of place that make her fiction so powerful. Erdrich’s poems have a mythic sense, gained from her Chippewa and German ancestry; they pay particular attention to the details of family, tribal history, and nature in connecting the individual to the universal experience. Writing about both her maternal grandmother and her Chippewa ancestors, Erdrich attempts to integrate the two sides of her own experience in the poems. A second volume of poems, Baptism of Desire, appeared in 1989. While the poems have strength, humor, and a sense of the past in the present, it is in the series of family chronicles, Love Medicine (1984), The Beet Queen (1986), and Tracks (1988), that

ERDRICH

Erdrich fills in the canvas of Native American/Anglo experience. As Alice Walker made a crazy quilt of black women’s experience, Erdrich weaves a tapestry of Native American, half-breed, and Anglo experience. Tracks, chronologically the earliest (1912-24), sets much of the background for Love Medicine. The conflict between Native American and Anglo beliefs in Tracks is highlighted by Fleur Pillager and Pauline Puyat. Fleur, who possesses life-giving and creative powers granted her by the water god for having twice drowned, acts as a counterbalance to the destructive power of the Catholic church as represented by Pauline, a part-Canadian, part-Chippewa, who has forsaken her Native American past and her grasp on reality; she studies to become a nun with an order that does not take Native American girls. When the loggers of the Anglo logging companies, helped by the government, defraud the Native Americans of their land, Fleur disappears into the wilderness with her shamanic possessions and Pauline takes her final vows. Tracks, like Erdrich’s other novels, is told by several narrators, adding light and shadow to the story of loss of the land, loss of loved ones, and loss of heritage. The Beet Queen focuses mainly on the white settlers of Argus, North Dakota, but there is a connection with the other books and with Erdrich’s own past. The central action takes place in the town where Fleur Pillager had worked briefly, and much of the story revolves around a butcher shop like the one in which Fleur worked. The shop also recalls Erdrich’s own German ancestors who were butchers. Further, ancillary, characters from Love Medicine populate the center of The Beet Queen, which covers the years from 1932, when the 11-year-old abandoned Mary Adare hops on a freight train to find her aunt and uncle who are butchers in Argus, to 1972, when her grandniece is elected Beet Queen of the town. More than the other two novels, The Beet Queen is a woman’s book. The men father children, die, or have strokes, but essentially lack the enduring power of Mary, her friend Celestine, and their child, Wallacette (Dot) Adare. Love Medicine, Erdrich’s first novel, has a cast of characters who have endured, despite the deprivations of reservation life, and have become, like many of the poor the world over, rich in humanity. The large extended families of the Kashpaws, the Lamartines, and the Morrisseys add color to the North Dakota landscape. The novel begins with the death of June Kashpaw and proceeds through a series of minor tragedies to the announcement by Lulu Lamartine that Lipsha Morrissey is June Kashpaw’s son. All the characters are interconnected. Erdrich finds a humorous vantage point that takes the despair out of her characters’ lives. It is, as she says, survival humor. She also has a mythic perspective that enriches even the smallest acts. Like Leslie Marmon Silko and James Welch, Erdrich portrays the painful and destructive side of Native American life, but she is also able to create those moments of true love and enrichment that give people’s lives meaning—the moment when Lipsha finds his mother, or when Grandma Kashpaw serves up the Love Medicine with a garnish of lettuce and peas. Within the prose of the novels the characters can escape the alcohol sold to them by whites, the convents forced upon them in place of their gods, the wars they

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have been sent to by the army, and the ever-present prisons to which they are taken by their white jailers. Sometimes painful, sometimes surrealistic, and always honest, Erdrich’s language frees all her characters from the death that whites would impose upon them—the denial of their heritage.

stretches over 100 years, centers on two Ojibwa families living in modern-day Minneapolis, and covers themes familiar to Erdrich’s readers: love, family, history, and the complex ways these forces both bind and separate the generations. Erdrich offers pain and exhilaration in equal measure.

In Tracks and Love Medicine, Erdrich successfully began to chronicle the tragedy and the glory of the Chippewa nation. The Beet Queen shows Erdrich is also well aware of the special tragedies that befall strong and enduring women no matter what their race, and her writing gives a lasting voice to them all.

In the first of a cycle of novels partly based on her own family history, The Birchbark House (1999) is a story told from the point of view of a young Ojibwa girl on an island in Lake Superior in 1847. Her novel Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse will be available in 2000.

Erdrich’s collaboration with Michael Dorris on The Crown of Columbus (1991) is the culmination of her own critical approach to her work. The story of two Dartmouth professors, the novel seems in many ways to parallel the lives of its authors, although both have insisted that the narrators, Roger Williams and Vivian Twostar, are the products of a truly collaborative effort. Both writers wrote sections for both characters, read each other’s drafts, and worked, revised, and edited together to create a seamless whole. The tone of the book quite closely resembles both Erdrich’s Beet Queen and Dorris’s A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, so it might be argued that the two authors have submerged their individual voices into one voice that speaks for both. Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, Erdrich’s work has grown in depth and luminosity. Readers of her North Dakota saga were rewarded with its continuation in The Bingo Palace (1994), as well as more poetry with Baptism of Desire (1989). Many of the poems were written, according to an author’s note, ‘‘between the hours of two and four in the morning, a period of insomnia brought on by pregnancy,’’ and several of the poems refer to pregnancy, birth, growth, and loneliness. Erdrich more fully explored the rhythms of pregnancy in The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year (1995). Using essays, thoughts, reflections, recipes, and assorted snippets, Erdrich chronicles her thoughts about being pregnant and raising her three daughters. The title piece is about a blue jay who audaciously faces or ‘‘dances’’ down an attacking hawk to win its own right to life. Erdrich writes a captivating account of her attempt to juggle the joys and demands of selfhood, writerhood, and motherhood. She says,‘‘A woman needs to tell her own story, to tell the bloody version of the fairy tale.’’

OTHER WORKS: Route Two (with Michael Dorris, 1991).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: ‘‘A Bibliography of Writing by Louise Erdrich,’’ in American Women Writing Fiction: Memory, Identity, Family, Space (1989). Coltelli, L., ed., Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak (1990). Reference works: CA (1985).CANR (1997). CB (1989). CLC (1984, 1989). CLCY (1985). DLB (1997). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Audio Prose Library (1986). Booklist (15 Feb. 1995, 1 May 1996). LJ (15 Apr. 1996). Missouri Review (1988). Mother Jones (May/June 1991). Nation (26 Nov. 1990). NYT Magazine (21 Apr. 1991). North Dakota Quarterly (1985, 1987). Western American Literature 22 (1987). —MARY A. MCCAY, UPDATED BY CELESTE DEROCHE

ESTES, Eleanor Born 9 May 1906, West Haven, Connecticut; died 15 July 1988 Daughter of Louis and Caroline Gewecke Rosenfeld; married Rice Estes, 1932

Tales of Burning Love (1996) is comprised of 46 stories, all revolving around Jack Mauser and his four wives. Yet, by the design of the novel, Erdrich keeps the point of view of women in the forefront of her reader’s consciousness. The novel is far less about Jack than it is about the reactions of women to him. Erdrich creates women who are quirky, passionate, and unpredictable. She sometimes pushes her sensuous descriptions over the top, yet the resulting near-parody is always entertaining. Also in 1996 Erdrich published the 30-page Grandmother’s Pigeon, with lush illustrations by Jim LaMarche. An almost-mythical children’s story, Erdrich draws on her range as poet and novelist to create for children the magic her adult readers have come to expect.

After high school, Eleanor Estes served as a librarian in the children’s department of the New Haven Public Library, of which she became head in 1928. For her outstanding work, in 1931 she was awarded the Caroline M. Hewins scholarship for library study at Pratt Institute, subsequently serving as a children’s librarian with the New York Public Library. After the publication of her first book, The Moffats, in 1941, Estes devoted full-time to her writing, eventually producing fifteen books for children, one novel for adults, The Echoing Green (1947), and a number of magazine articles.

When The Antelope Wife (1998) opens, a cavalry soldier pursues a dog with an Ojibwa baby strapped to its back. The story

The most highly regarded of Estes’ writings are her amusing stories of everyday family life, the earliest and best of which are

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the books about the Moffat family: The Moffats, The Middle Moffat (1942), and Rufus M. (1943), none of which is a proper novel. Set in Cranbury, Connecticut, just before and during World War I, each book consists of a series of episodes told from the child’s point of view and are presented as a whole with neither climax nor suspense. The Moffats introduces Sylvie, Joey, Jane, Rufus, and their widowed, dressmaker mother; the family is hard pressed for money, but rich in affection for one another. The tie that binds the various adventures together is the threat of the sale of their yellow house on New Dollar Street. Next came The Middle Moffat, and it mainly concerns Jane’s involvement with Mr. Buckle, the oldest inhabitant of Cranbury, and his 100th birthday celebration, while Rufus M. focuses on the doings of the youngest Moffat and has World War I as its background. Although scarlet fever, lack of money, and similar problems trouble the family occasionally, the books are never gloomy. Mostly, the children have simple adventures at school, about the town, or in their own neighborhood, usually distinguished by some fresh and original twist. Characterization is full and deep, strengthened by the accumulation of details as the books proceed, so that the Moffats appear today as one of the best-loved families in literature for children. Warm, cozy stories which have been translated into several languages, the Moffat books hold out the assurance that good times will inevitably follow bad and people of good will and perseverance will eventually win through. Another family story, Ginger Pye (1951), won the John Newbery Award from the American Library Association in 1952. The Alley (1964) succeeds with characterization but never fulfills its potential for interest, even though it offers the mystery of who burglarized the Ives’ home in the alley on the campus of Grandby College. Its sequel, The Tunnel of Hugsy Goode (1972), one of Estes’ last books, plods along, characters fail to engage the emotions, and conversation seems seriously anachronistic and inept. Among Estes’ other, less successful writings are her short realistic pieces and her fantasies, all of which lack the freedom, spontaneity, and believability of her longer family stories. Of the short realistic writings, the most highly regarded is The Hundred Dresses (1944), about a Polish immigrant girl who is teased about her foreign name and old, blue dress. Although skillfully told from the child’s point of view, it is too obvious an attempt at promoting intercultural understanding and tolerance.

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The Witch Family (1960). Miranda the Great (1967). The CoatHanger Christmas Tree (1973). The Lost Umbrella of Kim Chu (1978). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hopkins, L. B., More Books by More People (1974). Lowe, C., ‘‘Eleanor Estes: A Bio-Bibliographical Study’’ (thesis, 1958). Townsend, J. R., A Sense of Story (1971). Reference works: The Junior Book of Authors (1951). Newbery Medal Books 1922-55 (1955). SAA (1975). Other references: Children’ Literature Review (1976). Eleanor Estes (videocassette, 1991). Eleanor Estes and Margaret K. McElderry (video, 1975). Horn Book Reflections (1969). —ALETHEA K. HELBIG

EVANS, Abbie Huston Born 20 December 1881, Lee, New Hampshire; died October 1983 Daughter of Lewis D. and Hester Huston Evans Abbie Huston Evans grew up in Maine where she learned to love nature. The sparse but tenacious vegetation of the Maine mountains and seacoast was to form the principal subject of her poetry. Evans’ father, who had been a coal miner in Wales as a boy, was a congregational minister in Camden where Evans taught Sunday school. Among her pupils was Edna St. Vincent Millay. Millay (whose poetry was known earlier and more widely) wrote in the foreword to Evans’ first volume, Outcrop (1928): ‘‘These are the poems of one more deeply and more constantly aware than most people are, of the many voices and faces of lively nature. . . . In reading them, you will find yourself stock-still before some object with which you have rubbed elbows all your life but which you have never truly seen until that moment.’’ Evans received her B.A. (1913, Phi Beta Kappa) and M.A. (1918) from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was a social worker in a Colorado mining camp during World War I, and later taught dancing, art, and dramatics at the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia (1923-53), and College Settlement Farm-Camp in Horsham, Pennsylvania (1953-57).

Estes was at her best in her earliest books, those about real people in warm, close, family situations. In the Moffat books particularly, she revealed her talent for writing about the world of children from their point of view in language typical of children, without nostalgia, condescension, cuteness, or sentimentality. After the Moffats, she was never able to achieve quite the same degree of authenticity and inventiveness, and it is generally conceded that the Moffats built her reputation and that it rests upon them.

Like the tenacious, slow-growing junipers Evans celebrated, her output has been small and slow, yet her talent is substantial and enduring. Author of a total of four widely spaced volumes of poetry, Evans received many awards and honors such as the Guarantor’s Prize (Poetry, Chicago) in 1931, the Loines Memorial Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1960, and the New England Poetry Club Golden Rose Award in 1965. She received an honorary Litt.D. from Bowdoin College, Maine, in 1961, and she served as a member of the Advisory Board of Contemporary Poetry from 1940 onward. Her poems appeared in the Nation and the New Yorker, and were recorded for the Library of Congress in 1964.

OTHER WORKS: The Sun and the Wind and Mr. Todd (1943). The Sleeping Giant (1948). A Little Oven (1955). Pinky Pye (1958).

Celebrating craggy hills, storms, the seasons, rocks, icebergs, and even dinosaurs, Evans’ poems share the hard, austere beauty

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of the subjects they evoke. ‘‘The Mineral Collection’’ flashes with color; even the flinty rocks are part of the living earth. Evans wrote in a spare, alliterative style. In her Collected Poems (1970), Evans, at age ninety, was still exploring new facets of natural science, such as the Martian landscape. She rejoiced in the sheer pleasure of sensory experience and of life itself: This is what it is To be alive;. . . . No edge but is lit, no cobble but glows. Wakings beset; wherever I turn Flarings play close within reach of my hand. OTHER WORKS: The Bright North (1938). The Poems of Jean Batchelor (edited by Evans and F. S. Esdall, 1947). Fact of Crystal (1961). Abbie Huston Evans Reading Her Poems in the Recording Laboratory (audio recording, 1964). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brandon, G., Quintet: Essays on Five American Women Poets (1967). Saul, G. B., Quintet: Essays on Five American Women Poets (1967). Reference works: CA (1976). Contemporary Poets (1975). —KAREN F. STEIN

EVANS, Mari Born 16 July 1923, Toledo, Ohio children: William, Derek Poet, dramatist, short story writer, and author of children’s books, Mari Evans has made significant contributions to the tradition of 20th-century African American literature. Influenced as a child by the writing of Langston Hughes, her own poetic voice emerged out of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, exploring both personal and political struggles within the black community. Dedicated to the promotion of black pride, Evans uses vibrant images and powerful language to analyze, inform, and inspire. Her first story, written when she was in the fourth grade, appeared in her school newspaper. Her father, an upholsterer who was Evans’ primary caretaker after the death of her mother when Evans was seven, saved the story, showing her ‘‘an impressionable black youngster, . . .the importance of the written word.’’ She discovered Langston Hughes’ The Weary Blues when she was ten and was greatly inspired by his words. He later became a mentor and a friend who, with her father, encouraged her to aspire to become part of the black American literary tradition. As an undergraduate at the University of Toledo, Evans wrote a column for a black-owned weekly. Her discipline as a writer was further enhanced by an apprenticeship as an editor at a predominantly white manufacturing plant, despite the racism that plagued her while there. Her first published poetry appeared in

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1963 in Phylon, Negro Digest, and Dialog. In 1965 Evans received the John Hay Whitney Fellowship, the first of her many writing awards. The poems in Where Is All the Music? (1968), Evans’ first collection, explore individual struggles for human closeness in direct language and powerful images. Her second and best-known poetry collection, I Am a Black Woman (1970), shows a shift in theme from personal struggles to the wider political issues of the African American community and asserts black pride: ‘‘Who can be born / black / and not exult.’’ Highly praised for its sense of realism and authentic voice, the book received many awards, including the Black Academy of Arts and Letters First Poetry award (1970). Like Hughes, Evans draws on African American oral traditions to make her poems speak to and for the community. A third collection, Nightstar: Poems from 1973-1978 (1981), contains powerful explorations of earlier themes and contemporary tragedies. While primarily a poet—with poems appearing in over 200 anthologies, textbooks, and periodicals—Evans is also known for her stories and contributions to theater, television, and other media. She has written six children’s books and seven plays including Eyes (1979), a musical adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Much of her writing has appeared on record albums and in television specials and off-Broadway productions. In 1968 Evans began to produce, direct, and write a highly acclaimed weekly television series The Black Experience. The series, which focused on political and social issues from an African American perspective, aired on WTTV, Indianapolis, from 1968 to 1973. It was one of the first television shows produced by an African American woman. Evans is also known as editor of an extensive anthology of biographical and critical essays entitled Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation (1984). This collection highlights 15 black women poets, novelists, and playwrights, including Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. Black Women Writers was welcomed by critics as a much-needed addition to African American literary study. Since 1969 Evans has taught or been writer-in-residence at a number of colleges and universities, including Purdue, Indiana University, Northwestern, Washington University at St. Louis, Cornell, State University of New York at Albany, and Spelman College. Besides editing her own anthology, Evans has contributed her poetry to numerous collections gathered by others, particularly in the late 1960s and the 1970s. Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America (1968) and Black Voices: An Anthology of Afro-American Literature (1968) were the earliest of her career, while The Premier Books of Major Poets: An Anthology, Anthology of Children’s Literature, and 3000 Years of Black Poetry: An Anthology followed in 1970. The year 1972 brought contributions to Afro-American Writing: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry, New Black Voices: An Anthology of Contemporary Afro-American Literature, and The Magic of Black Poetry. Understanding the New Black Poetry: Black Speech and Music as Poetic References (1973) and Black Out Loud: An Anthology of Modern Poems by Black Americans (1975) completed the series.


In 1975 Evans received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Marion College. Among her other awards and honors are a Woodrow Wilson Foundation grant, 1968; Indiana University Writers Conference Award, 1970; Outstanding Woman of the Year (Bloomington, Indiana), 1976; and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Award, 1981-82. Evans’ recent book, A Dark and Splendid Mass (1992), further explores social issues in the context of the African American culture. While not widely known, the book reinforces her strength and depth as an author on this subject. An anniversary edition of Singing Black, published in 1998 as Singing Black: Alternative Nursery Rhymes for Children, is a poetry book for children aimed at encouraging young African Americans to take pride in their heritage. Evans currently lives in Indianapolis. Although not as active publishing as in the past, she continues to draw the respect of the literary community for her contributions to African American writing. OTHER WORKS: J. D. (1973). I Look at Me! (1974). Rap Stories (1974). River of My Song (1977). Jim Flying High (1979). Whisper (1979). New World (children’s musical, 1984). Boochie (one-woman performance, 1985). Portrait of a Man (1985). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CANR (1989). CP (1991). DLB (1985, 8 May 1999). FC (1990). Negro Almanac (1989). NBAW (1992). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). WW in Black Americans (1992). WW in Writers, Editors and Poets (1992). —MARY E. HARVEY, UPDATED BY CARRIE SNYDER

EVANS, Sarah Ann Born circa 1800; died date unknown Wrote under: A Lady Married Mr. Lemonoskey Sarah Ann Evans is the supposed author of Resignation: An American Novel, By a Lady (1825). The National Union Catalogue Pre-1956 Imprints reports that ‘‘Miss Evans’’ later became ‘‘Mrs. Lemonoskey,’’ but beyond this there are no published details about her life. Like many sentimental novels, Resignation focuses on private lives and how people interact with one another. It is the story

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of Elizabeth Ellison and the intertwining lives of her numerous friends and relatives. Throughout the novel, family and friends are of primary importance and much time is spent together in rural retreats. Although public events like the Revolution, slave uprisings, and English indenture practices occur, they only affect the characters incidentally. Events of the private, domestic world carry much more import. Resignation is filled with remarkable coincidences and cases of poetic justice. It dramatizes the vicissitudes of fate, and those characters who maintain appropriate moral behavior throughout all changes are ultimately rewarded. Consequently, the honorable Elizabeth regains her lost family estate and is free to marry her true love. Christianity is a primary theme in Resignation. In her preface, Evans justifies the publication of the novel by stating its aim is to ‘‘direct the eye of youth to heaven.’’ Therefore, the story narrative illustrates a necessity for piety, fortitude, cheerfulness, and abstinence. Elizabeth demonstrates the appropriate response to the inexplicable nature of life is resignation to God’s will— hence, the novel’s title. To woman is given the role of preserving Christian morality, and Evans is concerned with defining the female’s ‘‘proper sphere.’’ In addition to being religious guides, women are to be teachers and pleasant companions to men. They should cultivate simplicity and gentleness. Women can fill their proper sphere by learning the ‘‘accomplishments of their sex’’ (singing, painting, versifying), as well as useful skills (cooking, sewing, tending the sick). A female writer’s work should show sweetness, dignity, elegance, and piety. She should concentrate her descriptive talent on knowledge of the heart and on moral and religious lessons. Resignation is a patriotic novel. During the story, loyal Americans support the Revolution, praise the virtues of the young nation, and utilize American-made products. Both men and women are interested in discussing the republic’s future, and they generally agree that Christianity and the elevated sphere of woman are central to America’s glory. Resignation does not display literary genius but it is an interesting cultural document. The novel is conventional in content and form, bound by the definition of the sphere of the female writer. Nevertheless, Resignation illustrates the interests of many writers and readers of the early 19th century. —SUSAN COULTRAP McQUIN

EVERMAY, March See EIKER, Mathilde

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F FAHS, Sophia (Blanche) Lyon

director of the experimental Union School of Religion until it closed in 1929.

Born 2 August 1876, Hangchow, China; died 14 April 1978, Hamilton, Ohio Also wrote under: Gertrude Helen Marshall Daughter of David and Mandana Lyon; married Charles H. Fahs, 1901; children: five, two of whom died young

In 1937 Fahs began her long association with the Unitarian denomination (which became the Unitarian Universalist Association in 1961). She served as editor of curriculum, assuming less responsibility in 1954, and finally retiring fully in 1964, when she was eighty-eight years old. During those years she wrote and edited the religious education materials known as the New Beacon Series in Religious Education. These materials, books for children and adults, and guide books for teachers and parents, revolutionized religious education in the liberal churches, including branches of the Quakers, the Ethical Culture Society, several Jewish groups, and some of the more liberal mainline Protestant denominations, as well as the Unitarian-Universalists for whom they were produced. During all these years Fahs was a frequent and effective speaker at churches and conferences. In 1959, at the age of eighty-two, she was ordained into the liberal ministry.

The fourth child of missionary parents, Sophie Lyon Fahs returned to the U. S. with her family in 1880. Her mother remained in America when her husband returned to China, so that Fahs grew up in Wooster, Ohio, and graduated from Wooster College in 1897. Fully intending to go out as a Christian missionary soon after college, Fahs first taught high school and then worked in the Student Volunteer Movement recruiting other students for the missionary cause. In 1898 she became engaged to Charles Harvey Fahs, who also expected to follow a missionary career, but for reasons of health these plans did not materialize. Before the marriage, Fahs did graduate work at the University of Chicago studying the higher criticism of the Bible; thus began a broadening of her orthodox religious beliefs which continued for the rest of her long life. When she died in 1978 at the age of 101, she had become a symbol of the most progressive, liberal position in the field of religious education. In 1904, following her marriage and a move to New York City, Fahs received her M.A. from Columbia University, where she studied in an atmosphere charged with excitement from the ideas of the great progressive educator, John Dewey. Fahs began at once to apply the methods of the progressives to the message of Christian orthodoxy, and during the next 20 years the method completely transformed the message. The articles and books she wrote between 1906 and 1976 reflected the progression of her beliefs, which moved like the colors of the rainbow from the pallid, somber purples of orthodoxy through to the brilliant reds of radical unorthodoxy. Fahs was the mother of five children, three of whom grew to adulthood. The process of educating these children was another major liberalizing force in her thinking. During the childrearing years she was torn between her role as wife and mother and the dream that possessed her of transforming the Sunday schools of America into educationally significant institutions. She once wrote: ‘‘I tremble before the task I am trying to make for myself.’’ During these years Fahs worked as a teacher and director of religious education in various churches. In 1927, she graduated with a B.D. from Union Theological Seminary and was the

Fahs’ book, Today’s Children and Yesterday’s Heritage: A Philosophy of Creative Religious Development (1952), is a summary of her matured philosophy and examines the ideas behind the many children’s books she produced. The books she wrote and edited all display her hard-won conviction that ‘‘we cannot give our children a growing and creative religious life. A fine religion is a personal achievement.’’ A person’s religion is built on experience, primarily, and this experience can be enriched and interpreted through books, Fahs believed. Her style of writing was deeply influenced by a course she took in 1904 with Dr. Walter Pitkin at Columbia University, which emphasized that when writing for children every sentence should be composed of concrete words rather than of descriptions and summaries, and the younger the child for whom one was writing the more specific the concrete detail should be. For this reason, Fahs demanded of herself and all who worked under her painstaking research and fidelity to the facts.

OTHER WORKS: Uganda’s White Man of Work (1907; revised edition, 1970). Red, Yellow, and Black (1918). Racial Relations and the Christian Ideal (1923). Exploring Religion with Eight Year Olds (with H. F. Sweet, 1930). Beginnings of Earth and Sky (1937). Beginnings of Life and Death (with D. T. Spoerl, 1938; revised edition, with Beginnings of Earth and Sky, 1958). Martin and Judy in Sunshine and Rain (with V. Hills, 1940). Consider the Children: How They Grow (with E. Manwell, 1940). Growing Bigger (with E. Manwell, 1942). Leading Children in Worship (1943). Jesus: The Carpenter’s Son (1945). The Church Across the Street (with R. D. Manwell, 1947; revised edition 1962). From Long Ago and Many Lands (1948). The Old Story of Salvation

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(1955). Worshipping Together with Questioning Minds (1965). George Fox: The Man Who Wouldn’t (1971). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hunter, E. F., Sophia Lyon Fahs: A Biography (1966). Other references: Religious Education (Sept.-Oct. 1956, July-Aug. 1966, Jan-Feb. 1968, Nov.-Dec. 1976). —EDITH F. HUNTER

FAIRBANK, Janet Ayer Born 7 June 1878, Chicago, Illinois; died 28 December 1951, Wauwautosa, Wisconsin Daughter of Benjamin F. and Janet Hopkins Ayer; married Kellogg Fairbank, 1900 The older sister of novelist Margaret Ayer Barnes, Janet Ayer Fairbank was educated in private schools and attended the University of Chicago. A dedicated worker for woman suffrage, Fairbank was a member of the executive committee of the Democratic National Committee (1919-20), served as Illinois Democratic national committeewoman (1924-28), and was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1932. During World War I she was a member of the Woman’s National Liberty Loan Committee and of the Illinois Committee of the Woman’s Division of the Council for National Defense. Before World War II, she was a national officer of the America First Committee, and in 1940 she campaigned for Willkie. Fairbank’s most notable philanthropic activity was her 24 years on the board of the Chicago Lying-in Hospital, including service as its president. Three of Fairbank’s novels form a trilogy. The Cortlandts of Washington Square (1922) introduces Ann Byrne, ten-year-old ward of a wealthy New Yorker, and follows her growing up in the years prior to and during the Civil War. The novel concludes with her marriage to Peter Smith, a young worker from Chicago who promises they will be ‘‘partners.’’ The Smiths (1925), set in Chicago, stretches from the Civil War almost to World War I, the story of a marriage: Ann’s shattering discovery that to Peter being ‘‘partners’’ does not mean involving her in his business; the birth and rearing of children; and Peter’s growth in wealth and status. Throughout, Ann’s increasing strength and wisdom parallel the rise of the city. Rich Man, Poor Man (1936) centers on Ann’s grandson, Hendricks Smith, and his wife, Barbara, tracing their involvement in Roosevelt’s Progressive Party, World War I, and the suffragist movement. Though sometimes described as a ‘‘suffrage novel,’’ the book does not depict the movement fully, and the portrayal of Barbara, the suffragist, is not completely sympathetic. Fairbank’s interest was in character delineation, not in propaganda. Her two other novels of note both bear thematic relationships with the trilogy. The Lions’ Den (1930), a political novel, has as its protagonist an idealistic young Wisconsin congressman. His

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disillusionment, partial corruption, and eventual courageous behavior when tested make up the substance of the novel. The Bright Land (1932), perhaps Fairbank’s finest novel, tells the life story of Abby-Delight Flagg, child of New England Puritans, brought up in a world where women face hard work and, all too often, early death in childbirth. Partly to escape her dour father, she elopes, and the second half of the novel tells of her married life in Galena, Illinois, during its years first as a boom town and then in decline. Like Ann Smith, Abby-Delight grows in strength and wisdom, but she has more humor and is less idealized than Ann. Once popular, Fairbank’s fiction is neglected now. Her favored Illinois settings during the 19th and 20th centuries are objectively presented, and her characters, particularly her women, are sharply and believably delineated. The novels move at a leisurely pace, sometimes with little action, although Fairbank occasionally attempted even battle scenes. In The Cortlandts of Washington Square, her impressionistic presentation—from the point of view of a young woman caught up in it—of the Battle of Gettysburg is gripping. Her studies of historical trends and political issues are serious and perceptive. Although the quantity is not great, the quality of her work is high; her claim upon our attention is greater than has been recognized in recent times. OTHER WORKS: At Home (1910). In Town, & Other Conversations (1910). Three Days More (1910). Report of National Woman’s Liberty Loan Committee for the Victory Loan Campaign, April 21st to May 10th, 1919 (compiled by Fairbank, 1920). Idle Hands (1927). The Alleged Great-Aunt by H. K. Webster (completed by Fairbank, with M. A. Barnes, 1935). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: NCAB, 39. TCA. Other references: Chicago’s Authors Celebrate Chicago (cassette, 1988). The Grolier Library of Women’s Biographies (1998). Literary Digest International Book Review (Sept. 1925). NYTBR (15 Oct. 1922, 28 June 1925, 7 Dec. 1930). SR (7 Jan. 1933, 12 Dec. 1936). —MARY JEAN DEMARR

FAIRFIELD, A. M. See ALCOTT, Louisa May

FARLEY, Harriet Born circa 18 February 1813, Claremont, New Hampshire; died 12 November 1907, New York, New York Daughter of Stephen and Lucy Saunders Farley; married John I. Donlevy, 1854 The sixth of 10 children of a congregational minister and his wife, who became ‘‘harmlessly insane’’ after bearing the children, Harriet Farley began contributing to her family’s support when she was fourteen. After plaiting straw for hats, binding


shoes, and engaging in other home manufacturing, she made a brief and unrewarding attempt to teach, and then went to work in the Lowell textile mills in 1837. In Lowell, as the autobiographical ‘‘Letters from Susan’’ show, she felt free to attend lectures, sample different churches, and join an improvement circle. In spite of the 13-hour working day and the crowded corporation boardinghouse, she felt that the work offered the best economic rewards for women and didn’t require ‘‘very violent exertion, as much of our farm work does.’’ When the two products of the improvement circles, the Lowell Offering and the Operatives Magazine, were bought by a local Whig newspaper in 1842 and combined under the name of the Lowell Offering, Farley and Harriott Curtis, assisted by Harriet Lees, became editors and, later, owners. Under attack from Sarah G. Bagley and others, Farley denied that her magazine was supported by the corporations, but Farley’s father and brother both received help from mill-owner Amos Lawrence, and the Hamilton Company bought up $1,000 worth of back numbers during the Lowell Offering’s last year. Determinedly genteel and noncontroversial, the Lowell Offering lost its audience as the 10-hour movement gained in strength, and its appeal waned even further when the well-written labor paper, the Voice of Industry, appeared in Lowell in October 1845. The Offering ceased publication in December, but after the failure of the 10-hour movement in 1847, it was revived as the New England Offering, with Farley as both editor and publisher. Her efforts, however, again proved unsuccessful with the operatives. After the failure of the Offering in 1850, Farley moved to New York City, where she became a contributor to Godey’s Lady’s Book. After her marriage, Farley gave up her writing, since her husband did not approve. Farley’s avowed intention in the publications she edited was to bring a little ‘‘cheer’’ into the lives of female operatives, and the literary nature of the magazines was, she thought, above sordid issues. Her first signed editorial said of the operatives: ‘‘We should like to influence them as moral and rational beings. . . .Our field is a wide one. . . .With wages, board, etc., we have nothing to do—these depend on circumstances over which we have no control.’’ Farley assumed her readers were too ladylike to press for reforms by surrounding ‘‘City Hall in a mob, but, if wronged, would seek redress in some less exceptionable manner.’’ Farley’s essays and stories, though sometimes self-consciously literary and ‘‘tiresomely inspirational,’’ often provide insights into the lives and aspirations of the female factory workers. Her most interesting sketches—because most realistic and closely based on her own experience—are the ‘‘Letters from Susan,’’ which appeared in the 1844 editions of the Lowell Offering. ‘‘Susan’’ gives her first impressions of Lowell, of the crowding and noise as well as the economic and intellectual independence. Such stories as ‘‘The Sister’’ and ‘‘Evening before Pay-Day’’ use factory and boardinghouse backgrounds for sentimental homilies of self-sacrificing sisters or daughters. In ‘‘Abby’s Year in Lowell,’’ the dutiful daughter returns home with ‘‘some little books for the children, and a new calico

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dress for mother’’ and ‘‘a nice black silk handkerchief’’ for her father to wear around his neck on Sundays. All of the rest of her savings have been deposited in the bank, and her father bursts into tears over the bankbook—proud of her prudence, self-command, and filial affection. Farley’s poetry, like most of the poetry in her magazines, is undistinguished: lacking true details, it is more removed than her other writing from the real experience of the workers’ lives. OTHER WORKS: Shells from the Strand of the Sea of Genius (1847). Operatives Reply to. . .Jere. Clemens (1850). Happy Nights at Hazel Nook; or, Cottage Stories (1854). Fancy’s Frolics; or, Christmas Stories Told in a Happy Home in New England (1880). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Eisler, B., The Lowell Offering: Writings by New England Mill Women (1977). Foner, P. S., The Factory Girls (1977). Josephson, H., The Golden Threads: Near England’s Mill Girls and Magnates (1949). Robinson, H. H., Loom and Spindle; or, Life Among the Early Mill Girls (1898). Reference works: DAB. NAW. NCAB. —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH

FARMER, Fannie Merritt Born 23 March 1857, Boston, Massachusetts; died 15 January 1915, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of John F. and Mary Watson Farmer An attack of paralysis, which maimed her for life, prevented the seventeen-year-old Fannie Farmer from attending college. For a time, she worked in the family kitchen, where her interest in cooking found an outlet in the preparation of meals for boarders in the home. Her health improved, and, at twenty-eight, she enrolled in the Boston Cooking School. After her graduation in 1889, she was appointed assistant to the principal, Carrie M. Dearborn. Upon the latter’s death in 1891, Farmer became director of the Boston Cooking School. In 1902 she established her own school, Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery. The school’s curriculum emphasized the practice rather than the theory of cooking, and it specialized in cooking for the sick and convalescent. In addition to her work at the school, Farmer wrote a popular cookery column for the Woman’s Home Companion and lectured to such diverse groups as nurses, women’s clubs, and the Harvard Medical School. In 1908 Farmer suffered a stroke that completely paralyzed her legs, but she continued to fulfill her professional commitments up to the time of her death. Just 10 days before she died, Farmer delivered her final lecture. One of Farmer’s chief contributions to the art of cooking was the standardization of measurements. In an age when haphazard measurements prevailed and cookbooks listed the vaguest of

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rules—a ‘‘pinch,’’ a ‘‘lump the size of an egg’’ or ‘‘walnut’’ were common terms—Farmer insisted upon exact proportions. In her books, quantities are accurately stated. While women were still considered emotional and unscientific, Farmer transformed cookery from mere guesswork into a science. The style of Farmer’s writing is lucid, concrete, and clear. She assumes nothing and takes pains to educate the reader regarding elementary cooking terminology and measurements. In Food and Cookery for the Sick and Convalescent (1904), her recipes for invalids are accompanied by advice and recommendations regarding their care. Although Farmer considered her life’s work to be the development of cooking and diets for the sick, including the diabetic, she is best known today for her immensely popular first work, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896). This work ran into 21 editions before her death, and continues to be a standard work today. Although H. L. Mencken, in 1930, criticized the work for its ‘‘provinciality’’ and Yankee practicality and simplicity, most readers would agree with K. Smallzried’s assessment in The Everlasting Pleasure: ‘‘It is doubtful whether any home or any food company has escaped the influence of Fannie Merritt Farmer, indirect if not direct.’’ OTHER WORKS: Chafing Dish Possibilities (1898). What to Have for Dinner (1905). Catering for Special Occasions, with Menus and Recipes (1911). A New Book of Cookery (1912). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hopkinson, D., Fannie in the Kitchen (1999). Smallzried, K. A., The Everlasting Pleasure (1956). Vare, E. A., Women Inventors & Their Discoveries (1993). Reference works: DAB. NAW. NCAB 22. Other references: American Mercury (July 1944). Time (29 May 1978). —SUSAN E. SIEFERT

FARNHAM, Eliza Woodson (Burhans) Born 17 November 1815, Rensselaerville, New York; died 15 December 1864, New York, New York Wrote under: Eliza W. Farnham Daughter of Cornelius and Mary Wood Burhans; married Thomas Jefferson Farnham, 1836; William Fitzpatrick, 1852 While her first husband was away on exploring expeditions in the Far West, Eliza Woodson Farnham developed her interests in reform. Her most controversial work was at Sing Sing prison where, as matron from 1844 to 1848, she revolutionized the treatment of female prisoners through her phrenological approach to the problem of rehabilitation. She resigned after frequent conflicts with conservative staff members who denounced her environmentalism and determinism. In California, where she went in 1849 to settle her first husband’s estate, she visited and criticized San Quentin prison and lectured on various subjects. In 1858 she addressed the New York Women’s Rights Convention

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on her theory of female biological and moral superiority. During the Civil War, she became involved in the Women’s Loyal National League, which sought a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. She also nursed the wounded at Gettysburg. Farnham’s writing shows the independence of mind, the curiosity, and the strength that she exhibited in her life. Life in Prairie Land (1846) is a vivid account of her experiences in Illinois. The account of her life in the West, California, In-Doors and Out (1856), is colorful and compelling. The reader is drawn into the world of California after the Gold Rush, when a woman’s appearance brought crowds of gaping men to the street. In this very fluid, primitive society, Farnham bought her own ranch, built her own house, and traveled on horseback unchaperoned. The last part of the book, which describes and evaluates California society and culture, tends to be moralistic, although Farnham’s analysis of the particular problems of women in frontier society is penetrating. Eliza Woodson (1864; a revision of My Early Days, 1859) is an autobiographical novel treating Farnham’s life as a foster child in a home where she was treated as a household drudge and denied the benefits of a formal education. The fictional heroine reflects Farnham’s own character as a tough, determined individual who works hard to achieve her goals, overcoming all obstacles. Clearly, Farnham’s independence of thought and her interest in biological evolution originated in her childhood. Woman and Her Era (1864), Farnham’s major work, argues that women are not only morally superior to men but biologically superior as well. Her position is based on the following syllogism: ‘‘Life is exalted in proportion to its Organic and Functional complexity; Woman’s Organism is more complex and her totality of Function larger than those of any other being inhabiting our earth; Therefore her position in the scale of Life is the most exalted, the Sovereign One.’’ Reproductive functions, commonly cited to demonstrate female inferiority, are used in Farnham’s philosophy to place woman far above the male. The same idea dominates The Ideal Attained (1865). This novel’s heroine, Eleanora Bromfield, is an ideal, superior woman who tests and transforms the hero, Colonel Anderson, until he is a worthy mate who combines masculine strength with the nobility of womanhood and is ever ready to sacrifice himself to the needs of the feminine, maternal principle. In a society that defined the true woman as submissive, pure, and weak, Farnham forged her own definitions of female selfhood and lived by her own standards. Both her theory and practice (sometimes contradictory) provided alternatives for women unsatisfied with the narrow lives laid out for them by their culture. OTHER WORKS: Rationale of Crime by M. Sampson (introduction by Farnham, 1846). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bower, K. S., Eliza Farnham, Western Adventurer, 1815-1865 (slideshow, 1982). Dawes, J. A., Women Writers and the American Wilderness: Responses to the Frontier in Caroline Kirkland’s ‘‘A New Home Who’ll Follow?’’ and Eliza Farnham’s ‘‘Life in Prairie Land’’ (thesis, 1997). Davies, J. D.,


FARRAR

Phrenology, Fad and Science (1955). Kirby, G. B., Years of Experience (1887). Lewis, W., From Newgate to Dannemora: The Rise of the Penitentiary in New York, 1796-1848 (1965). Mount Pleasant State Prison Annual Report of the Inspectors (1846). Prison Association of New York First, Second and Third Reports (1845, 1846, 1847) and First Report of the Female Department (1845). Woodward, H. B., The Bold Women (1953). Reference works: DAB. HWS. NAW. NCAB. Other references: Atlantic (Sept. 1864). New York Tribune (16 Dec. 1864). NYT (18 Dec. 1864). —KAREN SZYMANSKI

FARNHAM, Mateel Howe Born 1883, Atchison, Kansas; died 2 May 1957, Norwalk, Connecticut Daughter of Edgar W. and Clara Frank Howe; married Dwight T. Farnham, 1910 Daughter of an editor and novelist, and named after a character in her father’s most famous novel, The Story of a Country Town (1883), Mateel Howe Farnham wrote a number of popular novels herself. Little is known about her education, except that she attended Mount Vernon Seminary in Washington, D.C. She married an engineer who wrote three humorous autobiographical books about their country home and garden. Her first novel, published rather late in life, won a $10,000 prize. Of her novels, the three set in the Midwest are her best work. Rebellion (1927), her prize-winning first novel, has an interesting background and the fascination of autobiographical revelations. Dedicated to her mother, ‘‘whom I have never known to do a selfish or an unkind thing,’’ the novel clearly exposes some of the tensions and morbidity of the Howe family life. Like Howe, the father in the novel is a depressed and bitter man who takes out his unhappiness on his family. While the family sketched in this book, the Burrells, does not parallel the Howe family in many outward circumstances, the central conflict of the story also pits the strongminded girl Jacqueline against her domineering father. Set in New Concord, Kansas, the novel champions the right of the daughter to live her own life—go to college, get a job, and marry the man of her choice. Her vain, egotistical father would like her to be a Southern belle. After many conflicts, she marries suitably, despite her father’s abnormal jealousy, and gets her inheritance by blackmailing him. Farnham’s two other Midwest novels, Lost Laughter (1933) and Great Riches (1934), both focus on the rise of young men in country towns, with a suitable complement of domineering parents and scheming women. Farnham’s work is shot through with gothic elements— family secrets, letters withheld from dependents, and rich, eccentric visitors—in the same way that her father’s work is. Her novels also share with her father’s a tendency to preach, as is most

evident in Ex-Love (1937), an exposé of the ‘‘alimony racket.’’ Here, a greedy and jealous woman gratuitously divorces her loving husband and then holds him to a large alimony settlement, although she is wealthy herself and he has been ruined by the Depression. Again, blackmail saves the day, but does not save the hero from a stint in jail and the loss of his new wife’s child. Three other novels are set in the Susquehanna valley. MarshFire (1928) is the story of another scheming woman, who gets ahead in business by abject flattery of males. Wild Beauty (1930), made into a movie (Wayward) in 1932 by Paramount, is another tale of domineering parents and children seeking their own lives. Farnham’s last novel, The Tollivers (1944), mixes social comedy with eccentric characters. These novels by Farnham are not very well written, and perhaps most of their interest lies in their autobiographical elements. In their depiction of marriage, small-town society, and business adventures, they are fairly typical of their times. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bucco, M., E. W. Howe (1977). Farnham, D. T., A Place in the Country (1936). Farnham, D. T., Be It Ever So Humble (1942). Farnham, D. T., The Embattled Male in the Garden (1941). Sackett, S. J., E. W. Howe (1972). Other references: NYT (3 May 1957). Saturday Evening Post (25 Oct. 1941). —BEVERLY SEATON

FARQUHARSON, Martha See FINLEY, Martha

FARRAR, Eliza (Ware) Rotch Born 12 July 1791, Dunkirk, France; died 22 April 1870, Springfield, Massachusetts Wrote under: Eliza Farrar Daughter of Benjamin and Elizabeth Barker Rotch; married John Farrar, 1828 (died 1853) Daughter and granddaughter of Nantucket Quakers who had emigrated to France to establish a tax-free whaling port, Eliza Rotch Farrar went with her family to England during the Reign of Terror. At her father’s estate near Milford Haven she received an excellent education and grew up among eminent European and American visitors. When her father lost his fortune in 1819, she went to live with her grandparents in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Disowned as too liberal by the Quaker meeting there, she became a Unitarian. Except for trips to England to visit her parents, she spent the rest of her life in Massachusetts. In her ‘‘Address to Parents’’ at the beginning of The Children’s Robinson Crusoe (1830), Farrar praises Defoe’s work for its ‘‘spirit’’ and ‘‘naturalness’’: ‘‘It seems to be exactly what it

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purports to be, the narrative of a profane, ill-educated, runaway apprentice of the 17th century.’’ Farrar then asks, ‘‘Can such a tale, though perfect in itself, be suited to children who have been carefully guarded from all profaneness, vulgarity, and superstition?’’ Her version of Crusoe is accordingly cleansed of such faults as his ‘‘disobedience to his parents, and his inordinate love of adventure’’ and endowed with qualities parents would wish their children to admire and cultivate: ‘‘industry, perseverance, resignation to the will of God.’’ To increase the utility of her hero’s adventures, Farrar adds ‘‘as much information about domestic arts as could well be interwoven with the story’’ and makes Friday into a native ‘‘of a mild, affectionate, and tractable nature.’’ Farrar presented another proper hero to be emulated by children in The Story of the Life of Lafayette as Told by a Father to His Children (1831). Henry Moreton tells his father he wishes he lived in the days of Alexander or Caesar and could see these great men; his father takes issue with Henry’s idea of these men as great, and reminds him that he has seen on Boston Common ‘‘one of the most extraordinary men that ever lived!’’ Again, the hero’s life acquires value as an example and lesson, but his actions are generally left to speak for themselves without intrusive moralizing. The tale takes 17 evenings. Stirring events are briskly and clearly related, the moral intent doesn’t interfere with the often exciting story and interesting anecdotes, and many vignettes of Moreton family life provide humor. A manual of advice, The Young Lady’s Friend (1836), was Farrar’s most important work, widely popular in England and America and reprinted as late as 1880. Farrar addresses her work to middle-class girls who have finished school. It opens with a brisk chapter of warning to those who assume that their intellectual life ends when they leave the schoolroom and a second chapter ‘‘On the Improvement of Time.’’ It closes with a chapter on ‘‘Mental Culture’’ and impressive lists of books for a ‘‘course of reading’’ on history, biography, and travel. In between, she holds to an essentially conservative view of ‘‘woman’s peculiar calling,’’ but emphasizes practical details of behavior and treats these with gentle amusement and, above all, common sense. The Young Lady’s Friend provides valuable insight into the activities and preoccupations of the 19th-century American middle class. Recollections of Seventy Years (1865), Farrar’s last book, furnishes fascinating glimpses of life in England and France between 1783 and 1819. Her method is anecdotal, and many of her lively anecdotes seem, in themselves, to furnish enough material for entire novels. Farrar cared for her invalid husband for 14 years before his death in 1853. These are the tales she told to enliven his sickroom. They remain beguiling entertainment today. OTHER WORKS: John Howard (1833). The Youth’s Letter-Writer (1834). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Carson, G., The Polite Americans (1966). Hopkins, V. C., Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon (1959). Lynes, R. J., The Domesticated Americans (1963).

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Schlesinger, E. B., ‘‘Two Early Harvard Wives: Eliza Farrar and Eliza Follen,’’ in NEQ (June 1965). Reference works: Female Prose Writers of America, with Portraits, Biographical Notices, and Specimens of Their Writing (1852). NAW. NCAB. —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH

FAUGERES, Margaretta V. (Bleecker) Born 11 October 1771, Tomanick, New York; died 14 January 1801, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of John J. and Ann Eliza Schuyler Bleecker; married Peter Faugeres, 1792 Margaretta V. Faugeres was an heiress to both the wealth and the intellectual traditions of two of the most respected families in New York. Against her father’s wishes, she married a French physician, Peter Faugeres. Called an ‘‘infidel,’’ Faugeres was actually a member of the popular Jacobin circles. Margaretta was an enthusiastic supporter of what she took to be the new millenium of human freedom; her choice of Bastille Day as marriage day shows the whole bent of her alliance; she was marrying a movement rather than a man. Unfortunately, her husband abused her and quickly ran through the fortune left to her by her father. Faugeres and her infant daughter were reduced to living in a granary for some time in 1796. Her husband died of yellow fever in 1798, and Faugeres thereafter supported herself by teaching school in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Brooklyn, New York. Broken in health and spirit, she was only twenty-nine years old when she died. The majority of Faugeres’s work was produced before she was twenty. In 1793, Faugeres prepared The Posthumous Works of Ann Eliza Bleecker, a collection of her mother’s work supplemented with Faugeres’s own poetry and prose, including an affecting ‘‘Memoir.’’ After 1795, she wrote some pieces for the New York Monthly Magazine and the American Museum and, in 1797, published ‘‘The Ghost of John Young,’’ but her literary output was hampered by her family problems. Her tendency towards sentimental melancholy, the sadness sincere, is expressed in highly artificial language in the early poems included in The Posthumous Works. Although rendered fairly obscure by an abundance of private references, her poetic language is very formal, with few naturalist touches. There is an excessive use of the infelicitous neoclassical poetical devices: ‘‘fleecy tribe’’ is substituted for sheep, birds are the ‘‘feather’d choir,’’ personifications are overabundant. The unhappy and short life of her mother, acting upon an immature imagination, to which the pose of melancholy seemed the height of human delicacy, contributed to the themes that would now seem morbid for an eighteen-year-old girl. Supplementing these sad strains are several lively patriotic poems. Faugeres was genuinely convinced of the noble renewal of


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human liberty embodied by the American and French revolutions. In her long topographical poem, ‘‘The Hudson’’ (1793), one of the few pieces in which she employs natural description, Faugeres’s primary purpose is to give an account of the political history of the Hudson River during the American Revolution. In 1795 she offered Belisarius: A Tragedy to the John Street Theatre. It was refused, but published by subscription the same year. Written simply and tastefully in blank verse, the message of pacifism, antimaterialism, and the vanity of power is extraordinary for the times. In a clear analogy with French politics, Belisarius is the just man caught between corrupt courtiers on the one hand, and heartless and cruel revolutionists on the other. Belisarius represents uncompromising human values. The play quietly exposes the vanity of fame and pomp and maintains the sacredness of ordinary human life. The further development of Faugeres’s maturity of mind and political opinion can be seen in ‘‘The Ghost of John Young,’’ a monody opposing capital punishment, ‘‘shewing how inconsistent sanguinary Laws are, in a Country which boasts of her Freedom and Happiness.’’ Faugeres appears to have been an extraordinarily fair and good woman, ‘‘a favorite among her literary acquaintances’’ whose life of early genius and promise so quickly disintegrated into ruin. Her political idealism is typical of many talented women of this era; so is the personal tragedy that prevented many of them, Faugeres included, from living long enough to develop maturity of literary judgement and production. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bleecker, A. E.,The Posthumous Works of Ann Eliza Bleeker in Prose and Verse to Which is Added a Collection of Essays, Prose and Poetical (1993). Reference works: Biographie Universelle, M. Michaud (1855). CAL (article on Ann Eliza Bleecker, 1877). FPA. NAW (article on Ann Eliza Bleecker by L. Leary). Nouvelle Biographie Generale, J. C. F. Hoefer (1958). —L. W. KOENGETER

FAUSET, Jessie Redmon Born 27 April 1882, Camden County, New Jersey; died 30 April 1961, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Daughter of Redmon and Annie Seamon Fauset; married Herbert Harris, 1929 Jessie Redmon Fauset was the youngest of seven children born to an African Methodist Episcopal minister in Philadelphia. Fauset’s family was poor, but her father’s black church position and interest in books and art kept the family ‘‘working, aspiring, and discussing.’’ The children were educated as much as biases would permit. With opportunities nearer to home shut off because of her race, Fauset, the first black woman at Cornell University,

graduated Phi Beta Kappa and spent many years teaching French at an all-black high school in Washington, D.C. Correspondence from 1903 with W. E. B. DuBois, the black sociologist, led Fauset to early involvement with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1919 DuBois persuaded her to move to New York City to work with The Crisis, of which he was the editor. As its literary editor from 1919 to 1926, Fauset discovered and published Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, and other ‘‘Harlem Renaissance’’ writers. She also published her own work, held and attended innumerable literary soirees with black and white writers, and traveled abroad with DuBois’s Pan-African conferences. Fauset edited and did most of the writing for the Brownies’ Book, a delightful monthly magazine for black children. Fauset also contributed to black American literature a large body of her own creative writing. Her poetry, frequently anthologized, her short stories, and her essays—which show sensitivity to racism and sexism worldwide—were published primarily in The Crisis, 1912-29, and in the Brownies’ Book, 1920-21. It is for her novels, however, that Fauset is primarily remembered. There Is Confusion (1924) was written in response to the picture drawn of black life by a white writer, T. S. Stribling, in Birthright. Fauset believed she could more accurately and honestly depict characters of her own race. Through the story of Joanna Marshall and Peter Bye, from childhood to marriage, she makes clear her themes and concerns. History, heredity, and environment impinge on the free will of Fauset’s characters, and their roles as women and black Americans come close to limiting and defining them. Joanna and Peter’s growth is seen in their being freed of their obsessions with bitterness, respectability, and success. Fauset’s execution is often weak in her first novel, but the subjects she explores make the book worthwhile. Fauset’s second novel, Plum Bun (1929), deals with a topic frequent in black literature: Angela Murray, the lighter of two sisters, ‘‘passes’’ for white. Attention by critics to the subject matter of the book has led to their ignoring its formal strengths, which represent a distinct improvement over the writing in Fauset’s first novel and which make Plum Bun the best of her four novels. The Chinaberry Tree (1931) concentrates in a rather nostalgic way on black home and community life in a small New Jersey village. Formally, it takes Greek mythology and drama as its most immediately recognizable analogue. The comparison with Greek drama is evident, from a tragically inescapable family curse with overtones of incest, to the seasonal pattern of death and rebirth. Fauset’s last published novel zeroed in on the ironies of American black life with more directness and less sentimentality than any of her earlier work. In Comedy: American Style (1933), racial discrimination is internalized in the black characters, particularly in the destructive power of Olivia Carey. Themes have not changed much from Fauset’s 1924 novel, but what has changed is her willingness to unstintingly depict those who are destroyed by their environments, as well as those who overcome

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them. Olivia’s actions, destructive to her children, are motivated entirely by her desire to be white and her hatred of blacks. At the same time, Comedy: American Style discusses a strong, positive black culture, supporting those characters, such as Olivia’s husband and oldest son, who embrace it. Formally, the novel is divided into dramatic elements: ‘‘Plot,’’ ‘‘Character,’’ ‘‘Teresa’s Act,’’ ‘‘Oliver’s Act,’’ ‘‘Curtain.’’ The bitter comedy of American life is played out to a bitter end. Fauset’s literary strengths are those of her own character. Intelligence and curiosity are supplemented by kindness, generosity, graciousness, and tolerance. She had no dominating passion, no driving opinions which scattered all else before them. Her books are more exploratory than dogmatic, more searching than protesting. The facts of her life and her time make clear the struggle and hard work which gave her strength.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Aptheker, H., ed., The Correspondence of W. E. B. DuBois (1973). Bone, R., The Negro Novel in America (1966). Bontemps, A., The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (1972). Braithwaite, W., in The Black Novelist (1970). Davis, A., From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers, 1900-1960 (1974). Gayle, A., The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America (1976). Huggins, N., Harlem Renaissance (1971). Hughes, L., The Big Sea (1940). Sylvander, C. W., Jessie Redmon Fauset, Black American Writer (1980). Reference works: Black American Writers Past and Present: A Biographical and Bibliographical Dictionary (1975). Profiles of Negro Womanhood (1966). TCA, TCAS. Other references: CLAJ (1971, 1974). Freedomways (Winter 1975). Phylon (June 1978). Southern Workman (May 1932). —CAROLYN WEDIN SYLVANDER

FELTON, Rebecca Latimer Born 10 June 1835, DeKalb County, Georgia; died 24 January 1930, Atlanta, Georgia Also wrote under: Mrs. W. H. Felton Daughter of Charles and Eleanor Latimer; married William H. Felton, 1853 Rebecca Latimer Felton’s father, a tavern keeper and the local postmaster, believed his daughters should be as well educated as boys and helped build a school in the community. Felton graduated from the Madison Female College in 1852, and the following year married a widowed physician and Methodist minister. The first years of Felton’s married life were uneventful. She devoted herself to caring for her stepdaughter and raising her own three children. During the Civil War, the Feltons were in the path of Sherman’s invading army and were forced to flee to

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Macon, Georgia. When the war ended, they returned to Cartersville to find their home and fields destroyed. Undaunted, Felton and her husband rebuilt their property and acquired more land. To bring in money, they ran a school for young children. In 1874 Dr. Felton entered politics as the congressional candidate of the Independent Democrats, those revolting against the conservative Bourbons, who dominated state politics. Felton was in her element in the rough-and-tumble world of politics. Because it was considered improper for a woman to participate openly in politics, Felton worked behind the scenes, writing her husband’s speeches and attacking the Bourbons in newspaper articles. Felton won the election and they moved to the capital. Felton was so skillful a politician and publicist that her husband’s opponents claimed the Seventh District had two representatives in Congress, both husband and wife. Dr. Felton was reelected in 1876 and 1878, but was defeated in his bid for a fourth term. In 1884 he was elected to the state legislature, where he served three terms. After her husband’s retirement from politics, Felton began a career as a reformer. She spoke out against the brutal convict lease system, both because of the institution’s barbarity and because most of the contracts were held by her Bourbon enemies. A devout Methodist, she joined the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and became one of its most effective speakers. She appealed to women to work to have liquor outlawed, citing the shame and brutality visited on innocent women whose men drank. She also shrewdly utilized racism by raising the spectre of drunken black men lusting after white women. Her efforts were rewarded in 1908 when Georgia passed statewide prohibition. Later, Felton campaigned for woman suffrage and against the League of Nations. Felton’s literary career began while her husband was in politics. She enjoyed her verbal duels with the Bourbon leadership, playing a sort of hit-and-run game by attacking them unmercifully and then hiding behind her dignity as a woman when they responded in kind. In 1885 she and Dr. Felton purchased the Cartersville Free Press as a campaign organ. They renamed it the Courant, and Felton ran it singlehandedly for over a year. For 28 years she wrote a column for the Atlanta Journal, offering household hints and advice on personal problems and etiquette, and publicizing her reforms. Felton had a long memory and never forgave her enemies. Her first book, My Memoirs of Georgia Politics (1911), pays tribute to Dr. Felton and the Independents and denounces the Bourbons, most of whom had died years ago. While her accusations of fraud and corruption were true, they were presented in a partisan manner and with little attempt to check the accuracy of the sources. Country Life in Georgia in the Days of My Youth (1919) is primarily a record of her middle years and her husband’s political campaigns. The Romantic Story of Georgia’s Women (1930) offers brief biographies of Revolutionary War heroines and contemporary reformers and an extended autobiography of herself.


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Felton achieved a lifelong dream to hold political office herself in 1922, when she was appointed to fill the brief term of the late Senator Thomas E. Watson. By special arrangement with Walter George, Watson’s elected successor, Felton was allowed to appear on the floor of the Senate, present her credentials, and be sworn in. The next day, she made a brief speech and retired, allowing George to take his seat. She returned to Georgia, the first woman U.S. senator, if only for a day. Felton should be remembered more for what she did than for her writing. In many ways, she was the prototype for such modern women activists as Bella Abzug. Though forced by the conventions of the postwar South to use her literary talents in traditional areas, she managed to extend these conventions to include politics and social reforms. If Felton’s autobiographical writings were somewhat self-serving, this may be forgiven, for she had much of which to be proud. OTHER WORKS: On the Subjugation of Women and the Enfranchisement of Women (1915). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Talmadge, J. E., Rebecca Latimer Felton: Nine Stormy Decades (1960). Thompson, C. M., Reconstruction in Georgia; Economic, Social, Political 1865-1872 (1915). Vann Woodward, C., Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (1951). Reference works: NAW. Other references: Georgia Historical Quarterly (March 1946, June 1946). Georgia Review (1955).

critically ill at death’s door, but God had sent her back to finish her work. She compares her book to the pebble with which David slew Goliath, hoping its religious attitudes will ‘‘be so slung as to smite one philistine.’’ Fenno’s subjects in both poetry and prose are mostly traditional and religious. Her religious tone is one of sweet selfassurance; her persona expresses neither tension nor doubt about the state of her soul or God’s mercy. Some poems exhibit an early romanticism; however, each nature poem ends conservatively with praise of the Deity. Indeed, graveyard romanticism is prevalent in many of Fenno’s ostensibly religious verses. Occasionally a feeling of sweetness and languor, enhanced by her smoothrhymed couplets, invades a poem, contradicting the harsh tones of traditional New England religious expression. Unfortunately, her childish metrics often devalues the serious ideas which she expresses. The last third of her collection is organized as a series of short sermonic essays. Many of these subjects duplicate those found in her sentimental and religious verse. As in her poetry, the tropes in Fenno’s prose reflect the influence of early romanticism. Fenno’s verse and prose reveal a dedicated attempt to experiment with the sophisticated and complicated literary modes and ideas of her age while remaining within a religious context. Her simple but often skillfully atmospheric works show that by the late 18th century, American women had begun to consider themselves as serious writers and had consciously accepted their expanding roles as spiritual and moral guides for the young republic.

—JANET E. KAUFMAN

—JACQUELINE HORNSTEIN

FENNO, Jenny FERBER, Edna Born circa 1770; died death date unknown Jenny Fenno, a resident of Boston, Massachusetts, and a Baptist by religious persuasion, wrote during the last quarter of the 18th century. Biographical information is practically nonexistent, but Fenno’s choice of subject, style, and diction reflects a fairly substantial education and indicates the influence of the diversified middle class cultural ambience flourishing in postrevolutionary New England. Original Compositions in Prose and Verse; on Subjects Moral and Religious (1791) reveals a dedicated, ambitious writer. Subjects range from the simply religious to areas of contemporary philosophical and literary interest. Typical of most early American women writers, Fenno’s preface attempts to draw attention away from her evident ambition and sophistication as a writer. She presents an image of feminine piety and shy modesty; she insists she avoided public exposure of her ‘‘private thoughts’’; and she finds in an act of Providence her excuse for such an aggressively unfeminine act as publishing: once she had been

Born 15 August 1887, Kalamazoo, Michigan; died 16 April 1968, New York, New York Daughter of Jacob C. and Julia Neuman Ferber Edna Ferber began her writing career as a newspaper reporter in Appleton, Wisconsin, as well as in Milwaukee, and Chicago, but wrote her first novel, Dawn O’Hara (1911), during a prolonged illness. She earned sudden success and great popularity with her stories of Emma McChesney, a traveling saleswoman. In 1925 Ferber won the Pulitzer Prize for So Big (1924), her best novel, and a few years later saw her novel Show Boat (1926) transformed into a classic American musical. Her love of the theater was further indulged through her successful collaboration with George S. Kaufman, with whom she wrote such popular plays as Royal Family (1928), Dinner at Eight (1932), and Stage Door (with G. S. Kaufman, 1936, film version 1937). Royal Family was successfully revived in 1975. Ferber was seriously

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disillusioned by World War II; her postwar novels were more idea-laden and contrived, although she remained a popular novelist to her death. In So Big, Selina Peake, the properly raised daughter of a gambler, is forced to make her own way in the world after her father is accidentally killed. She takes a teaching position in High Prairie, a Dutch farming community outside Chicago, and spends the rest of her life there. After the death of her husband, Selina struggles by herself to run their truck farm and to raise her son, Dirk, nicknamed ‘‘So Big.’’ Dirk’s youth is the counterpoint in every respect of Selina’s. Where she cherishes life, he cherishes success; where she reveres beauty, he reveres money. By the novel’s end, Dirk is an immensely wealthy, successful, miserable young man. Show Boat deals with three generations of women—Parthenia Ann Hawks, Magnolia Hawks Ravenal, and Kim Ravenal—but the novel centers on Magnolia, her bizarre childhood on her father’s showboat, her idyllic love affair with Gaylord Ravenal, her marital difficulties as she learns that her husband is a confirmed gambler, and her determination to provide for her daughter after Gaylord’s desertion. As in many Ferber novels, the heroine’s daughter is not nearly her mother’s equal. Also as in most Ferber novels, there is a subplot concerned with racist attitudes, here about the mulatto showboat actress Julie, whose role was expanded in the musical. Cimarron (1929) is Ferber’s most overtly feminist novel. Sabra Venable Cravat moves with her husband Yancey to the recently opened territory of Oklahoma. Despite his many talents, Yancey is impractical and irresponsible and seems unable to stay in one place longer than five years at a time. In addition to the housework and the raising of her children, Sabra finds herself helping with Yancey’s newspaper—the first in Oklahoma—and, on those occasions when Yancey abandons her, running it herself.Yancey is the dreamer; Sabra the doer. She becomes Oklahoma’s first U.S. congresswoman. Clio Dulaine Maroon, the protagonist of Saratoga Trunk (1941, film version 1945), is as close as Ferber ever came to creating an antiheroine. Clio, the illegitimate daughter of an established Creole family (the Dulaines) on her father’s side and a series of ‘‘loose’’ women (including a free woman of color) on her mother’s, returns from France to New Orleans to avenge herself on the Dulaines and to make her fortune by marrying a millionaire. Clio realizes at the last minute that love is more important than money, but luckily Clint Maroon, a Texan adventurer who has been making his fortune among the detested railroad men while Clio tries to marry one of them, can now provide both love and money. Giant (1952) is much like Cimarron in its treatment of place: Texas. Leslie Lynnton Benedict, genteel Virginian, who must adapt to her amazing husband Bick (a male of mythic proportions), is believable and engaging, particularly as a young bride in rebellion against the Texan gentry’s lifestyle. But she matures too

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quickly, and Ferber switches the conflict from Virginian vs. Texan lifestyles to a conflict between cattle and oil. Giant contains devastating portraits of wealthy Texans and acid social criticism of their treatment of Mexican Americans. Ferber’s writing remained untouched by the innovations of her contemporaries. She was neither responsible for any innovations of her own, nor did her own work appreciably evolve in terms of style, content, or structure. Still, her work deserves serious consideration for her treatment of the land, her feminism, and her egalitarianism. Even when Ferber writes about the land, her novels are first and foremost about women—strong women, pioneer women, women determined to hold on to the land and to keep their families together. The women always triumph and often survive their men; the visionaries see their dreams come true, and the practical ones see the present inexorably improving toward the future. Although Ferber is not in the tradition of the great American literary experimenters, she is a solid member of another tradition, that of the celebrators of America.

OTHER WORKS: Buttered Side Down (1912, recording, 1995). Roast Beef, Medium: The Business Adventures of Emma McChesney (1913). Personality Plus: Some Experiences of Emma McChesney and Her Son, Jock (1914). Emma McChesney and Co. (1915). Fanny Herself (1917, recording, 1995). Cheerful by Request (1918, recording, 1995). Half Portions (1920). $1200 a Year (with N. Levy, 1920). The Girls (1921). Gigolo (1922, film version, 1926). Eldest (1925). Minick (with G. S. Kaufman, 1925; film versions, 1925, 1932). Mother Knows Best: A Fiction Book (1927, film version, 1928). American Beauty (1931, reissue, 1997). They Brought Their Women: A Book of Short Stories (1933, Braille, 1998). Come and Get It (1935, film version, 1936, recording, 1998). Nobody’s in Town (1938). A Peculiar Treasure (1939). The Land is Bright (with G. S. Kaufman, 1941). Great Son (1945). One Basket: Thirty-One Short Stories (1947). Bravo (with G. S. Kaufman, 1949). Ice Palace (1958, film version, 1960). A Kind of Magic (1963). Saratoga: Roman (1993). Edna Ferber: Stories (1996). One Basket, 31 Short Stories (1996). Personality Plus (recording, 1997).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Anderson, G. T., Edna Ferber’s ‘‘Showboat’’: As Literature and as Film (1991). Freytag, B. A., The Tip of the Iceberg (1988). Shaughnessy, M. R., Women and Success in American Society in the Works of Edna Ferber (1976). Reference works: CA (1969, 1971). TCA, TCAS. Wisconsin Writers: Sketches and Studies (1974). Other references: A Christmas Sampler: Classic Stories of the Season, from Twain to Cheever (1992). Chicago’s Authors Celebrate Chicago (cassette, 1988). Chicago Jewish Forum 13. MTJ 13. NYTBR (5 Oct. 1952). Six Prairie Authors Biographies (audiovisual, 1991). —CYNTHIA L. WALKER


FIELD, Kate Born Mary Katherine Keemle Field, 1 October 1838, St. Louis, Missouri; died 19 May 1896, Honolulu, Hawaii Daughter of Joseph M. and Eliza Riddle Field The daughter of an actor and newspaper publisher and an actress, Kate Field became the ward of a millionaire uncle, Milton L. Sanford, following her father’s death when she was eighteen. The Sanfords financed her education at Lasell Seminary in Auburndale, Massachusetts, and took her to Italy, where she was the darling of Anthony Trollope and other members of the writers’ colony in Florence. Her support for the Union in the Civil War caused Sanford, a Southern sympathizer, to change his mind about making her his heir. To support herself she turned to journalism, writing travel letters for the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican and other newspapers. She lectured on the lyceum circuit, wrote humorous accounts of various journeys to Europe, and undertook a mildly successful theatrical career. She also did commercial publicity. The Drama of Glass (n.d.) was a slick advertisement for the Libby Glass Company disguised as a brief ‘‘history’’ of glassmaking. Although she received valuable stock for publicizing the newly invented telephone, she lost the proceeds in an unsuccessful dressmaking venture to promote simpler styles. Desiring a platform for her views, she founded a weekly newspaper, Kate Field’s Washington, which lasted from 1890 to 1895. She died a year later in Hawaii, where she had gone to regain her health after the newspaper failed. Her literary work reflected her eclectic interests. She published scores of articles in journals such as Atlantic Monthly; Pen Photographs of Charles Dickens’s Readings (1868) contains flattering descriptions of Dickens’s readings on his lecture tour of America and served as the basis of her own successful lecture on Dickens; and Planchette’s Diary (1868) presents a shallow account of her experiences with the Victorian forerunner of the Ouija board. Genuine gifts of humor and social satire characterize HapHazard (1873), a collection of letters from the New York Tribune featuring the trials of a lady lecturer and poke fun at both the British monarchy and the nouveau riche American tourists. Ten Days in Spain (1875) bristles with her American middle-class prejudices displayed on travels through Spain during a political upheaval. Kate Field’s Washington focused on her own personality and special interests. It featured book reviews, theatrical news, novelettes, and drawing-room comedies, often written by Field herself. Although slight in content, several of her plays were produced. Her kaleidoscopic opinions championed numerous causes: temperance (not abstinence); the right of the rich to conspicuous consumption; cremation; prohibition of Mormon polygamy; international copyrights; the arts; and tariff and civil service reform. She weakly endorsed woman’s suffrage.

FIELD

Although Field demonstrated considerable literary talent, her importance lies less in what she wrote than in what she represented—the accomplishments of an intelligent and independent American woman in the late Victorian era. Her significance as a journalist stems from her views on the news, including reform efforts and politics, in an era when it was unusual for a woman to found and run a newspaper.

OTHER WORKS: Adelaide Ristori (1867). Mad on Purpose: A Comedy (1868). Charles Albert Fechter (1882).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Beasley, M. H., The First Women Washington Correspondents (George Washington University Studies, 1976). Field, K., Kate Field: Selected Letters (1996). Moss, S. P., American Episodes Involving Charles Dickens (1999). Sadlier, M., Anthony Trollope (1927). Trollope, A., An Autobiography (1883). Whiting, L., Kate Field: A Record (1899). Woodward, H., The Bold Women (1953). Telling Travels: Selected Writings by Nineteenth-Century American Women Abroad (1995). Reference works: DAB, III, 2. NAW. NCAB, 6. Other references: NYT (31 May 1896). Records of the Columbia Historical Society (1973-74). —MAURINE BEASLEY

FIELD, Rachel Lyman Born 19 September 1894, New York, New York; died 15 March 1942, Beverly Hills, California Wrote under: Rachel Field Daughter of Matthew D. and Lucy Atwater Field; married Arthur S. Pederson, 1935 Descended from a distinguished family, Rachel Lyman Field was educated in public schools. She attended Radcliffe College and later wrote synopses for a silent film company. For about the first two-thirds of Field’s writing career, she was primarily a writer of juvenile literature for children of varying ages. Her oneact plays (many separately published in acting versions) include farces, comedies, serious and poetic dramas, modern reinterpretations of old stories, and nostalgic period pieces. Lacking literary pretension, they are nevertheless stageworthy. Field’s juvenile poems also show her versatility, for she worked in a number of forms and types, but tendencies toward sentimentality and rhythmic monotony lessen their effectiveness. The best of Field’s work for young people is to be found in three juvenile novels. Hitty: Her First Hundred Years (1929) was awarded the Newbery Medal for children’s literature. Set in the 19th century, it is the history of a wooden doll, narrated by herself.

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The parts depicting the Maine Field loved are especially vivid and evocative. Calico Bush (1931) covers one year (1743-44) in the life of a French girl indentured to an English family who settle in Maine. Her sense of isolation, both as a foreigner and as a pioneer, is well conveyed, as are the terrors and delights of frontier life. Hepatica Hawks (1932) has as its protagonist a fifteen-yearold girl who is 6′4′ tall and a member of a freak show. The novel takes her from an early acceptance of her differentness through a period of desperate yearning for friends of her own age and participation in normal society. Eventually she finds a place (as a Wagnerian soprano) where her size is not a hindrance. Told with restraint, the novel movingly conveys its message, that it is all right to be different. In her last years, Field turned to writing novels for adults. To See Ourselves (1937), written with her husband, is a comic Hollywood novel of little significance. More ambitious are two historical novels: Time Out of Mind (1935), set in Maine, shows the decline of a shipbuilding family as seen by a young woman intimately connected with it. It is a story of family conflict, pitting young against old and artistic against materialistic values. All This, and Heaven Too (1938) is Field’s imaginative and sympathetic reconstruction of the experiences of a young Frenchwoman who was involved in a celebrated 19th-century murder trial and later came to the U.S. and married Field’s great-uncle. Less substantial is And Now Tomorrow (1942), the story of a wealthy young woman temporarily afflicted with deafness; it is played out against the contemporary background of the Depression and labor strife. The female protagonists of the three latter novels are all forced by circumstances to find in themselves strength, endurance, and breadth of sympathy and understanding. They learn, in an image Field uses several times, to become trees and not vines. Field’s work, in many genres, shows her concern for craftsmanship and her broad sympathies. The single most frequently occurring image in her work, the patchwork quilt, is indicative: peculiarly a woman’s image, it suggests women’s creativity, nostalgia for the past, and the creation of something new, beautiful, and useful from old and heterogeneous materials. Field tended toward sentimentality, and her three major works are all oldfashioned ‘‘romantic’’ novels. Nevertheless, they are mature studies of human relationships and of suffering and growth. These novels, with the best of her work for young people, should secure for her a lasting, if modest, literary reputation.

OTHER WORKS: Six Plays (1922). The Pointed People: Verses & Silhouettes (1924). An Alphabet for Boys and Girls (1926). Eliza and the Elves (1926). Taxis and Toadstools: Verses and Decorations (1926). A Little Book of Days (1927). The Magic Pawnshop: A New Year’s Eve Fantasy (1927). The Cross-Stitch Heart, and Other One-Act Plays (1928). Little Dog Toby (1928). Polly Patchwork (1928). The White Cat and Other Old French Fairy Tales by Mme. d’Aulnoy (arranged by Field, 1928). American

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Folk and Fairy Tales (edited by Field, 1929). Pocket-Handkerchief Park (1929). A Circus Garland (1930). Patchwork Plays (1930). Points East: Narratives of New England (1930). The Yellow Shop (1931). The Bird Began to Sing (1932). Fortune’s Caravan by L. Jean-Javal (adapted by Field, 1933). Just Across the Street (1933). Branches Green (1934). God’s Pocket: The Story of Captain Samuel Hadlock, Junior, of Cranberry Isles, Maine (1934). Susanna B. and William C. (1934). People from Dickens: A Presentation of Leading Characters from the Books of Charles Dickens (1935). Fear Is the Thorn (1936). All Through the Night (1940). Ave Maria: An Interpretation from Walt Disney’s ‘‘Fantasia,’’ Inspired by the Music of Franz Schubert (1940). Christmas Time (1941). Prayer for a Child (1944). Christmas in London (1946). Poems (1957). The Rachel Field Story Book (1958).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CB (May 1942). Junior Book of Authors (1951). NAW. Newbery Medal Books, 1922-1955 (1955). TCA, TCAS. Other references: NYHTB (31 May 1942). NYTBR (13 Nov. 1932, 7 April 1935, 30 Oct. 1938, 31 May 1942). SR (15 Nov. 1930, 22 Oct. 1938). —MARY JEAN DEMARR

FIELDS, Annie Adams Born 6 June 1834, Boston, Massachusetts; died 5 January 1915, Boston, Massachusetts Wrote under: Annie Fields, Mrs. James T. Fields Daughter of Zabdiel B. and Sarah Holland Adams; married James T. Fields, 1854 Daughter of a distinguished Boston physician, Annie Adams Fields established a literary salon in her Boston home after her marriage. Most of the literary celebrities of the day were entertained there—Hawthorne, Longfellow, Holmes, Emerson, Whittier, Dickens—as well as theatrical stars such as Ole Bull and Charlotte Cushman. Fields also enjoyed the friendship of several women writers, who formed an informal literary circle of their own. Among them were Sarah Orne Jewett, Celia Thaxter, Louise Imogen Guiney, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. In her later years, Fields became heavily involved in Boston charity work and wrote a social-welfare manual, How to Help the Poor (1883). Fields’ intimate friendship with Jewett began in the early 1880s and lasted until Jewett’s death in 1909. During this time the two women were virtually inseparable companions; their travels together included four trips to Europe and two to the Caribbean. Jewett considered Fields’ Charles Street house her second home and lived part of each year there. She dedicated The Mate of the Daylight, and Friends Ashore (1884) to Fields, and Fields edited the Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett (1911).


FINLEY

Fields’ literary importance lies primarily in two areas: one is the influence she exerted over her husband in the selection of works to be published by Ticknor & Fields, the major publishing house of the time. He valued her judgement as reflecting a woman’s point of view. Second, Fields edited important collections of letters and biographical sketches. Her subjects included James T. Fields, John Greenleaf Whittier, Celia Thaxter, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, as well as the Jewett letter collection. While these are not critical, scholarly works (the Jewett collection, especially, is heavily edited), they do provide primary material for the researcher. Her Authors and Friends (1896) is a series of sketches, the best of which are of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Celia Thaxter. Fields’ diaries remain unpublished, except for excerpts published by Mark DeWolfe Howe in 1922.

FINLEY, Martha

Fields remains a somewhat puzzling figure. Her writings reflect a traditional orientation toward sentimentalism and the cult of true womanhood. However, she was a supporter of ‘‘women’s emancipation,’’ and her association with Jewett, Cushman, and others suggests a less traditional side. She left for posterity a carefully polished public persona, that of the perfect hostess, the genteel lady, and it is difficult to find the real person underneath.

Popular success and financial security came with Elsie Dinsmore (1867). The tremendous popularity of this book, both in America and in England, led Finley to write a series of juvenile novels exploring the life of her heroine from childhood to old age. In 28 volumes, Elsie captured the religious and feminine devotion of the 19th-century reading public. By 1876 Finley was able to buy her own home in Elkton, Maryland, where she lived out her 80 years comfortably. The Elsie books alone earned her a $250,000. None of Finley’s other works can compare in importance with the Elsie Dinsmore series, which has challenged psychologists and literary historians to define its formula of success. Despite what critics have seen as Finley’s ‘‘amateurish craftsmanship, superficial moralizing, and lame scholarship,’’ despite even the character of the heroine who, in the eyes of one critic, is ‘‘a nauseous little prig,’’ Elsie Dinsmore captured the attention of more than 25,000,000 readers.

OTHER WORKS: Ode (1863). Asphodel (1866). The Children of Lebanon (1872). James T. Fields, Biographical Notes and Personal Sketches (1881). Under the Olive (1881). Whittier, Notes of His Life and of His Friendship (1883). A Week Away from Time (written anonymously, with others, 1887). A Shelf of Old Books (1894). The Letters of Celia Thaxter (edited by Fields with R. Lamb, 1895). The Singing Shepherd, and Other Poems (1895). Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe (edited by Fields, 1897). Nathaniel Hawthorne (1899). Orpheus: A Masque (1900). Charles Dudley Warner (1904). Memories of a Hostess (edited by M. D. Howe, 1922). The unpublished diaries of Annie Adams Fields are at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cather, W., Not Under Forty (1936). Davis, A. E., ‘‘A Recovery of Connectedness in Annie Adams Fields’ Authors and Friends and A Shelf of Old Books’’ (thesis,1998). Howe, H., The Gentle Americans, 1864-1960: Biography of a Breed (1965). Howe, A. D., Memories of a Hostess (1922). Fields, A., Microfilm Edition of the Annie Adams Fields Papers, 1852-1912 (microfilm, 1981). Matthiessen, F. O., Sarah Orne Jewett (1929). Nigro, C. L., ‘‘Annie Adams Fields: Female Voice in a Male Chorus’’ (thesis,1996). Richards, L., Stepping Westward (1931). Roman, J., Annie Adams Fields: The Spirit of Charles Street (1990). Spofford, H. P., A Little Book of Friends (1916). Tryon, W. S., Parnassus Corner: A Life of James T. Fields (1963). Winslow, H. M., Literary Boston of Today (1902). Reference works: AA, DAB. NAW. NCAB. Other references: Atlantic (July 1915). —JOSEPHINE DONOVAN

Born 26 April 1821, Chillicothe, Ohio; died 30 January 1909, Elkton, Maryland Also wrote under: Martha Farquharson Daughter of James Brown and Maria Brown Finley Both of Martha Finley’s parents, first cousins of Scotch-Irish descent, died before she was twenty-five. Finley supported herself by teaching and writing. Beginning in 1856, Finley published more than 20 Sunday-school books under the name of Martha Farquharson for the Presbyterian Board of Publication in Philadelphia. (Farquharson is Gaelic for Finley.)

Some of the elements that attracted young readers to the Elsie books are easy to explain: This fairytale heroine is a blonde heiress, unjustly mistreated by the relatives who take her in while her father is in Europe and after her beautiful mother has died. Uncompromisingly moral, unfailingly sweet, Elsie reminds us of Cinderella and Snow White. The fundamentalist religious values that emerge in her meditations and the Biblical quotations render the fairytale acceptable to the Christian society of 19th-century America. With Elsie’s Southern heritage, Finley also provided a topical attraction. What could be more glamorous to her predominantly Northern audience immediately after the Civil War than the echo of a lost world—the world of plantations and delicate Southern ladies such as Elsie’s mother had been, the world of black mammies such as ‘‘poor old Aunt Chloe,’’ with her heavy dialect and unswerving devotion to young Elsie? Ruth Suckow, writing for an October 1927 Bookman article, goes so far as to suggest that when Elsie saves her Southern father, she is really saving the whole South and committing the rebels to the fundamentalist religious values of her creator, Finley herself. The father-daughter theme which permeates the Elsie books has been seen as psychologically excessive. Elsie worships her

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father, and even though she does marry (a friend of her father’s who is himself much older than she), after her husband’s death she is once again with her devoted parent. Some have seen this theme as reinforcing the ‘‘father knows best’’ attitude prevalent in Victorian society, but in fact, Elsie gains power over the most powerful person in her life, her own father, by her religious devotion. One might argue, as Suckow does, that Elsie represents the truth that ‘‘a woman craves a master,’’ yet within the religious framework Elsie Dinsmore controls the lives of all around her. The 19th-century woman could hardly hope to achieve more than Elsie held out to her: beauty, riches, the love of her father, a husband, and children. Best of all, she exemplified victory after victory over the oppressors of the world, even over that all powerful demigod, her father. Only God was more powerful than Elsie Dinsmore—and He was on her side.

OTHER WORKS: Cassella; or, The Children of the Valleys (1867). Elsie’s Holidays (1869). An Old Fashioned Boy (1870). Wanted: A Pedigree (1870). Elsie’s Girlhood (1872, 1997). Our Fred; or, Seminary Life at Thurston (1874). Elsie’s Womanhood (1875, 1997). Elsie’s Motherhood (1876, 1998). Elsie’s Children (1877, 1998). Mildred Keith (1878, 1996). Signing the Contract and What it Cost (1878). Mildred at Roselands (1879, 1996). Elsie’s Widowhood (1880, 1998). The Thorn in the Nest (1880). Mildred and Elsie (1881). Grandmother Elsie (1882). Mildred’s Married Life (1882, 1998). Elsie’s New Relations (1883). Elsie at Nantucket (1884). Mildred at Home (1884). The Two Elsies (1885). Elsie’s Kith and Kin (1886). Mildred’s Boys and Girls (1886). Elsie’s Friends at Woodburn (1887). Christmas with Grandma Elsie (1888). Elsie and the Raymonds (1889, 1997). Elsie Yachting with the Raymonds (1890, 1997). Elsie’s Vacation (1891, 1997). Elsie at Viamede (1892, 1997). Elsie at Ion (1893). The Tragedy of Wild River Valley (1893). Elsie at the World’s Fair (1894). Elsie’s Journey on Inland Waters (1894). Mildred’s New Daughter (1894). Elsie at Home (1897). Elsie on the Hudson (1898). Twiddledetwit: A Fairy Tale (1898). Elsie in the South (1899). Elsie’s Young Folks (1900). Elsie’s Winter Trip (1902). Elsie and Her Loved Ones (1903). Elsie and Her Namesakes (1905).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brown, J. E., ‘‘The Saga of Elsie Dinsmore,’’ in University of Buffalo Studies (1945). Ely, W. A., The Finleys of Bucks (1902). Suckow, R., ‘‘Elsie Dinsmore: A Study of Perfection, or How Fundamentalism Came to Dixie,’’ in Bookman (Oct. 1927). Zahn, B.,On the Banks of Big Elk Creek: The Life of Martha Finley, Beloved Author of the Elsie Books (1997). Reference works: American Authors (1894). DAB, III, 2. Indiana Authors and Their Books, 1816-1916, ed. R. E. Banta (1949). NAW. NCAB, II. Ohio Authors and Their Books, edited by W. Coyle (1962). Other references: Baltimore Sun (31 Jan. 1909). NY (14 March 1936). —THELMA J. SHINN

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FISHER, Dorothea (Frances) Canfield Born 17 February 1879, Lawrence, Kansas; died 9 November 1958, Arlington, Vermont Also wrote under: Dorothy Canfield Daughter of James H. and Flavia Camp Canfield; married James R. Fisher, 1907 After extensive formal education (Ph.B., Ohio State; Ph.D., Columbia; graduate work at the Sorbonne), Dorothea Canfield Fisher and her husband traveled widely, eventually settling in Vermont, home of Fisher’s ancestors. During World War I, Fisher did relief work in France, and she remained active in public life throughout her career, serving as secretary of New York’s Horace Mann School; as the first woman on the Vermont Board of Education; and on the editorial board of the Book-of-the-Month Club (1926-51). Fisher’s interest in education and her love of the U.S. and of Vermont are steadily reflected in her works, which include textbooks, commentaries on education (A Montessori Mother, 1912; The Montessori Manual, 1913), patriotic reflections (American Portraits, 1946; Our Independence and the Constitution, 1950), translations (Papini’s Life of Christ, 1923; Tilgher’s Work, 1930), Vermont, poetry (Another Night for America, 1942), and fiction. Perhaps Fisher’s most lastingly popular work, Understood Betsy (1917), is the story of a fearful, sickly little girl who, through a change of guardians and environments, becomes an independent, capable child. Written in a pleasant conversational tone, the book codifies some of Fisher’s major ideas: the importance of early training, the value of work, the necessity for self-confidence, and the virtues—as she perceived them—of the American heritage. These ideas, as well as attacks on big business and materialism, are central to The Bent Twig (1915), the story of Sylvia and Judith Marshall. Tested sorely, the sisters grow from their experiences, primarily through an awareness of their mother’s dictum that if life is to be good, both joys and sorrows must be accepted. In an episode about a mulatto family passing for white, Fisher makes a plea for racial understanding without glossing over the biases and limitations of the period. Seasoned Timber (1939) sets Fisher’s attack on anti-Semitism within the narrative frame of Timothy Hulme’s romance in middle age. The relationship between Timothy and his Aunt Lavinia illustrates Fisher’s realism. Both characters are as capable of selfdelusion as they are of self-sacrifice. Flashbacks based upon oral tradition vivify the Vermont setting. Marriages in transition are a frequent plot device. The Brimming Cup (1921) compares and contrasts the marital relationships of Neale and Marise Crittenden and of Gene and Nelly Powers. Both women are mothers, both are clearly at the hub of their families, and both are tempted by attractive, sensual, single men.


While the resolution of the Powers’ difficulty is melodramatic, Marise’s decision that sexual union is valid only when it nourishes personal growth is a convincing presentation of a basic Fisher theme. Another theme, the importance of woodland reclamation, appears here also, and regional customs are well drawn. The Home-Maker (1924) vividly depicts the tensions arising from Evangeline Knapp’s distaste for housework and from her husband’s inability to succeed in business. When circumstances dictate an exchange of roles, the family achieves happiness, and Fisher’s frequent point—that nurturing is vital work—is made neatly and unconventionally. Fisher’s The Deepening Stream (1930) traces the growth of Matey Gilbert from childhood through motherhood. Damaged by faulty understanding of her parents’ flawed marriage, Matey is a good example of the Fisher protagonist whose character strengthens throughout adulthood. Integrated with the story of Matey’s maturation is Fisher’s splendid evocation of World War I Paris. Two of Fisher’s short story collections, Hillsboro People (1915) and The Real Motive (1916), join with the nonfiction Vermont Tradition (1953) as tributes to her home state. The latter traces Vermont history by means of anecdotes drawn from the state’s written and oral histories and stresses individual freedom. For Fisher, this principle was the key to real maturity and crucial to successful childrearing. A woman of extraordinary energy, Fisher was one of the most popular writers of her day and is considered particularly adroit at exploring the drama of everyday life, portraying the inner growth of thoughtful, sensitive characters, and employing skillful variations of the interior monologue.

OTHER WORKS: Emile Augier, Playwright-Moralist-Poet (1899). Corneille and Racine in England (1904). Elementary Composition (with G. B. Carpenter, 1906). Gunhild: A Norwegian American Episode (1907). The Secret of Serenity (1908). The Squirrel Cage (1912). Mothers and Children (1914). A Peep into the Educational Future (1915). Fellow Captains (with S. N. Cleghorn, 1916). Self-Reliance (1916). Home Fires in France (1918). The Day of Glory (1919). Rough-Hewn (1922). What Grandmother Did Not Know (1922). The French School at Middlebury (1923). Raw Material (1923). Made-to-Order Stories (1925). Her Son’s Wife (1926). Why Stop Learning? (1927). Learn or Perish (1930). Basque People (1931). Our Children: A Handbook for Parents (edited by Fisher, with S. M. Gruenberg, 1932). Vermont Summer Homes (1932). Bonfire (1933). Moral Pushing and Pulling (1933). Tourists Accommodated (1934). Fables for Parents (1937). On a Rainy Day (with S. F. Scott, 1938). The Election on Academy Hill (1939). A Family Talks about War (1940). Liberty and Union (with S. N. Cleghorn, 1940). Nothing Ever Happens and How It Does (with S. N. Cleghorn, 1940). In the City, and In the City and on the Farm (with E. K. Crabtree and L. C. Walker, 1940). My First Book (with E. K. Crabtree and L. C. Walker, 1940). Runaway Toys (with E. K. Crabtree and L. C. Walker, 1940). Tell

FISHER

Me a Story (1940). To School and Home Again (with E. K. Crabtree and L. C. Walker, 1940). Under the Roof (with E. K. Crabtree and L. C. Walker, 1941). Under the Sea (with E. K. Crabtree and L. C. Walker, 1941). Our Young Folks (1943). BookClubs (1947). Highroads and Byroads (with E. K. Crabtree and L. C. Walker, 1948). Four-Square (1949). Something Old, Something New (1949). Paul Revere and the Minute Men (1950). A Fair World for All (1952). Dorothy Canfield Fisher on Vermont (1955). A Harvest of Stories (1956). Memories of Arlington, Vermont (1957). And Long Remember (1959). Report on Old Age (n.d.).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: McCallister, L., Dorothea Canfield Fisher: A Critical Study (dissertation, 1969). Yates, E., Pebble in a Pool (1958). Reference works: NCAB, 44. TCA, TCAS. Other references: Educational Forum (Nov. 1950). SatR (11 Oct. 1930, 29 Nov. 1958). —JANE S. BAKERMAN

FISHER, M(ary) F(rances) K(ennedy) Born 3 July 1908, Albion, Michigan; died 22 June 1992, Glen Ellen, California Also wrote under: Mary Frances Parrish, Victoria Berne Daughter of Rex B. and Edith Holbrook Kennedy; married Alfred Fisher, 1929 (divorced); Dillwyn Parrish, 1939 (died); Donald Friede, 1945 (divorced); children: Anne, Kennedy M. F. K. (Mary Frances Kennedy) Fisher was two years old when she moved with her family from Albion, Michigan, to Whittier, California, the state she would come to think of as her native home. In Among Friends (1971), she chronicles her growing up in Whittier, a predominantly Quaker community. Her Quaker neighbors—the Friends referred to ironically in her title— never accepted the Kennedys, who were Episcopalian, and she learned early on what it meant to be an outsider. She also learned what it meant to survive the condition with resiliency and humor—what she called ‘‘my inner jaunty detachment’’—a bent of personality that would serve her well through an eventful and often difficult life. The reason for the move to Whittier was the purchase of the Whittier News by Fisher’s father, a fifth-generation newspaperman. Her mother also came from five generations of journalists and was a cultured woman in her own right, having studied and traveled widely in Europe before her marriage. From her parents Fisher absorbed a love of literature and ideas. She also developed an avid interest in culinary books and food preparation, which she learned from the family cook. By the age of ten, she was thinking up dishes and preparing meals for the household.

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After graduating from high school in 1927, she attended several colleges, including Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois, Occidental College in Los Angeles, and the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1929 she married Alfred Fisher, a doctoral candidate in literature at UCLA, and they went to live in Dijon, France, where he was working on his dissertation. The move proved to be a particularly fortunate one, since Dijon, regarded as the gastronomic center of France, inspired her to pursue her interest in food more seriously and begin putting her thoughts down on paper in the form of journals, letters, and stories.

Friede and went with her daughters to the Kennedy ranch in Whittier, where they lived with her father. After his death in 1953 they moved to the Napa Valley, a locale that would serve as Fisher’s home base for the rest of her life.

In 1932 she returned with her husband to California and they had as their neighbor the painter Dillwyn Parrish, who encouraged her writing on culinary themes. Her first book, Serve It Forth, came out in 1937 and included her pieces on cooking and dining experiences, along with her historical essays based on old cookbooks she had researched at the Los Angeles Public Library. Serve It Forth introduced the public to Fisher’s amalgam of food writing, personal anecdotes, and storytelling, a lively and distinctive style she would continue to hone during the course of a long career.

In 1971 she moved to her final home, a Napa Valley house designed to her specifications and located on the grounds of the Bouverie ranch in Glen Ellen. For the two decades until her death in 1992, it provided her with a congenial place to write, cook, and entertain fellow authors and culinary enthusiasts. Despite the encroachment of Parkinson’s disease during her last years, Fisher pursued her engagement with the world nearly to the end. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1991 and is generally acknowledged to be one of the nation’s finest writers and also one of the most unusual, taking the humble theme of food and casting it as a metaphor for the great mysteries of human hunger and desire.

The friendship with Parrish had deepened by 1937 into the great love of Fisher’s life. She moved with him to Vevey, Switzerland, and they were married after she obtained her divorce from her first husband in 1938. Her days in Switzerland with Parrish were filled with tending their house and vineyard, entertaining friends, and collaborating on a romantic novel, Touch and Go (1939), which was published under the joint pseudonym of Victoria Berne. The happiness of this period was cruelly disrupted when Parrish was stricken with Buerger’s disease in 1939. They returned to America and purchased a ranch in Hemet, California, where Fisher cared for him. In 1941, pain-ridden and terminally ill, he committed suicide. The grief that followed was made all the greater by the suicide of her brother David a year later. As a way of contending with tragedy and as a means of supporting herself, Fisher turned to her writing and produced a succession of culinary works: Consider the Oyster (1941), How to Cook a Wolf (1942), The Gastronomical Me (1943), and An Alphabet for Gourmets (1949). These four books were collected with her first book and published in 1954 as The Art of Eating, a classic in its field and a perennial favorite with readers. In 1945 Fisher married the literary agent Donald Friede. She had two daughters, Anne, born in 1943, and Kennedy, born in 1946. At Friede’s urging, she wrote the novel Not Now But Now (1947), even though she did not consider extended fiction to be one of her strengths, a view that is shared by most critics. During the same period, she also produced an acclaimed translation of The Physiology of Taste (1949) by Brillat-Savarin and wrote articles and stories for such magazines as Gourmet, House Beautiful, and McCall’s. The pressure of work, deadlines, and child care, along with the death of her mother, contributed to the deterioration of her health and her marriage. In 1949 she separated from

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In 1958 she decided to pay a lengthy visit to Europe as a way of broadening her children’s education and helping them become proficient in French and Italian. During the four years they lived in Aix-en-Provence and Lugano, she wrote a book of folk remedies, A Cordiall Water (1961), and composed sketches and stories that would serve as a basis for later work, including many pieces published in the New Yorker.

OTHER WORKS: Here Let Us Feast (1946). The Story of Wine in California (1962). Maps of Another Town: A Memoir of Provence (1964). The Cooking of Provincial France (1968). With Bold Knife and Fork (1969). A Considerable Town (1978). As They Were (1982). Sister Age (1983). Spirits of the Valley (1985). The Standing and the Waiting (1985). Dubious Honors (1988). Answer in the Affirmative and The Oldest Living Man (1989). Boss Dog (1990). Long Ago in France: The Years in Dijon (1991). Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me (1993). Last House (1995). M. F. K. Fisher: A Life in Letters (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ferrary, J., Between Friends: M. F. K. Fisher and Me (1991). Lazar, D., Conversations with M. F. K. Fisher (1992). Mooney, L., ed., The Annual Obituary 1992. (1993). Reference works: CANR (1994). CLC (1993, 1995). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Scholar (Spring 1998). Biblio (Feb. 1999). —MARLENE M. MILLER

FISKE, Sarah Symmes Born 1652, Charleston, Massachusetts; died 2 December 1692, Braintree, Massachusetts Daughter of Williams Symmes; married Moses Fiske, 1671; children: 14 Sarah Symmes Fiske was the granddaughter of the noted minister Zachariah Symmes and the daughter of a justice of the


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peace for the county of Middlesex. Her mother, whose name is unknown, died when she was very young. Her husband was ordained minister of the Braintree (now Quincy), Massachusetts, congregation. He had a profitable ministry, which included a house and six acres, as well as a substantial yearly income. Fiske and her husband had 14 children, which probably contributed to her early death. Fiske’s only published work is her spiritual autobiography, a document which she prepared for admission to church membership. A Confession of Faith; or, A Summary of Divinity (1704) was written in 1677, when Fiske was twenty-five years old. The manuscript circulated among her acquaintances for many years after her death, until it was printed. Such posthumous publication was common for works by early American women writers. Whereas most spiritual autobiographies of the 17th century express the inner turmoil of the writer in the struggle for salvation, Fiske’s confession is notable for its impersonal tone and religious erudition. Its highly structured form evidences her familiarity with Ramist logic, the system of reasoning used by the New England Puritans in their theological discourses. The form and content which Fiske chose for her confession reflect intense religious study. Each topic she discusses is broken into subtopics or subsets for definition and analysis; then each subset is further analyzed. Fiske’s topics include the truth of the Bible, God’s creation of the natural world, the Fall and its consequences, sin and death, grace and predestination, and the nature of Christ. She also discusses the organization of the church and the significance of the sacraments. She concludes with a brief but striking apocalyptic vision. Puritan historiography—that is, history viewed as God’s redemptive scheme—provides the organizing principle for her beliefs, as she discusses events from the beginning of time to the end of the world. Fiske’s work is not outstanding for its originality of thought or style, but the purpose of the document—admission to church membership—precluded creativity. The posthumous publication of her theological discussion and review is important because it indicates an early recognition of women’s ability to contribute to religious subjects in an intellectual and educative manner. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Pierce, F. C., Fiske and Fisk Family (1896). Vinton, J. A., The Symmes Memorial (1873). —JACQUELINE HORNSTEIN

FITZGERALD, Frances Born 21 October 1940, New York, New York Daughter of Desmond and Mary E. Peabody FitzGerald Born into an old Boston family that included scholar and explorer Francis Parkman, FitzGerald spent her childhood in America and Europe. Her mother was an urban planner and a former U.S. representative to the United Nations, and her father was a former deputy director of the CIA. With Middle Eastern

studies as her major, FitzGerald graduated magna cum laude from Radcliffe in 1962. After graduation, during a two-year stay in Paris, she worked on a novel and published magazine articles for the Congress for Cultural Freedom. After her return to New York in 1964, she wrote a series of profiles, including one about Amelia Peabody—her maternal grandmother who had been jailed for participation in a civil rights demonstration at the age of seventytwo—for the New York Herald Tribune Magazine. In 1966 she went to South Vietnam as a freelance journalist, publishing articles on politics in Saigon during the following year for the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Village Voice, and Vogue, receiving the Overseas Press Club award for interpretative reporting in 1967. Returning to America, FitzGerald spent the next five years researching and writing Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (1972, reissued 1984). Informed by study with the Indochinese scholar Paul Mus at Yale, historical research at Harvard, reading in sociology and psychology, and another five-month trip to South Vietnam, Fire in the Lake earned FitzGerald (among other awards) the Pulitzer Prize for contemporary-affairs writing (1973), the National Book Award (1973), and the Bancroft Prize for History (1973). After the book’s publication, FitzGerald made a speaking tour on behalf of the Indochina Peace Campaign. Since 1973 FitzGerald continued to write about American society and culture. Most of her articles (appearing in the New Yorker, Redbook, the New York Review of Books, Ms., Harper’s, and the New Republic) have focused on social conflicts in terms of historical and cultural origins, political leadership, and effects on ordinary people in such areas as the Middle East, Ireland, and Cuba. Fire in the Lake was greeted with widespread critical acclaim not simply because it was the best scholarly effort by an American to interpret Vietnamese culture and the American presence in Vietnam for a general audience, but also because of its superior analysis of the political and social nature of the Vietnamese response to foreign occupation, particularly the Saigon governments’ ‘‘desire for, and hostility to, the American presence.’’ Not interested in being a war correspondent ‘‘attached to the U.S. government forces,’’ FitzGerald focuses on the political activity of the war and on the people and the country. Dividing her study into two parts, she first explores Vietnamese culture and national character within a historical perspective, relying—too much at times—on Western sociological and psychological modes of analysis in explaining national behavior. Second, FitzGerald examines the politics of leadership practiced by the National Liberation Front, the Saigon governments, and the Americans, effectively illustrating a ‘‘complete circle of self-deception.’’ Within the double frame, FitzGerald presents a compelling explanation of the American sense of ‘‘righteous mission’’ in Vietnam, an attitude originating in a ‘‘definite historical and mythological perspective.’’ At the same time she depicts the particular effects on human lives of the American attempt to fulfill their mission. She carefully builds an awareness of the perspectives of both soldiers from small American towns finding themselves ‘‘among people with whom they could make no human

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FITZGERALD

contact’’ and the Vietnamese in isolated villages, refugee camps, and cities seeing one another separated from ‘‘family, friendship, our manner of expressing ourselves.’’ FitzGerald’s prose is restrained rather than detached. Her empathy for the Vietnamese is apparent, yet she does not sentimentalize. While some generalizations concerning national character seem to have been too easily inferred, her analysis, especially as it is supported by carefully chosen and well-drawn anecdotal illustrations, makes the study a major source for a deeper understanding of the Vietnam conflict. In 1979 FitzGerald again explored changing representations of American culture and national identity through a study of elementary and secondary American history textbooks. In America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (1980), she focuses on the special functions and traditions of schoolbooks for American children during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, emphasizing how texts of the 1960s and 1970s were not ‘‘written’’ but ‘‘developed’’ within a context of conflict and compromise among publishing, educational, and political institutions. She concludes that contemporary efforts to present ‘‘the world, or the country, as an ideal construct,’’ or a ‘‘utopia of the eternal present’’—a place ‘‘without conflicts, without malice or stupidity’’—rather than achieving the purpose of ‘‘creating good citizens’’ may ‘‘give young people no warning of the real dangers ahead.’’ FitzGerald published Cities on a Hill: A Journey Through Contemporary American Culture (1986, reissued 1987) in an effort to understand change in America since 1960 by looking at four ‘‘communities or cultural enclaves’’ in which individuals ‘‘deny the power of the past’’ by seeking to ‘‘cut all ties.’’ These include the ‘‘first gay neighborhood in the country,’’ the Castro in San Francisco; the ‘‘separatist’’ Liberty Baptist Church ministered by Jerry Falwell in Lynchburg, Virginia; the retirement community of Sun City Center in Tallahassee, Florida, ‘‘radical in the sense that never before in history had older people taken themselves off to live in isolation from the younger generation’’; and Rancho Rahneesh, an eastern Oregon ‘‘New Age Commune’’ of ‘‘doctors, lawyers, accountants, and the like led by an ‘Indian guru.’’’ The book studies the complexities of everyday life and moral conflicts for individuals in each community and illustrates FitzGerald’s consistent focus on the role of family in the relationship of individuals and communities in American life. While critics saw the book as a contribution to the study of the changing ‘‘American Dream,’’ they often disagreed with her efforts to find similarities among the four groups in their expression of ‘‘quintessentially American behavior and values,’’ or to discover valid roots in nineteenth-century utopian social experiments. For the remainder of the 1980s and throughout the 1990s FitzGerald continued to write regularly for the New Yorker, as well as Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Harper’s, the New York Review of Books, the Nation, Rolling Stone, and Vogue on diverse subjects. A sampling of FitzGerald’s Vietnam-era journalism appears in Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism (1998), a twovolume set from the Library of America presenting pieces written

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in and about Vietnam by several journalists, spanning the years 1959 through 1975. On 31 January 1999, FitzGerald appeared on the C-Span television program, Booknotes along with Peter Kann (another Vietnam-era journalist) to discuss Reporting Vietnam and the era’s reporting in general. FitzGerald discussed her trips to Vietnam in 1969, 1971, 1973, and 1974, and her now-classic book, Fire in the Lake. On the subject of reporters in Vietnam expressing biased views, Fitzgerald observed a progression or development closely tied to the war effort itself. The journalists who went to Vietnam in 1959 went there with assumptions formed in World War II as to the actions required of journalists reporting U.S. involvement in wars. Their style was reconstructed, says FitzGerald, by Neil Sheehan and others who found themselves playing the roles of critics as a result of the lies they were told by American representatives in Vietnam. They were unpopular with the embassy, their investigative efforts were deemed threatening, and they were perceived as being either Hawks or Doves when in fact, it was the difficulty in getting an accurate story that made them appear so. In 1999 FitzGerald continued her work on a book about Ronald Reagan, Star Wars, and the end of the Cold War, a project she’s been researching for several years and hopes to complete in the near future. OTHER WORKS: A Reporter at Large: A Disciplined, Charging Army (1981). America’s Spirit Dream, Myth and Reality (recording, 1982). School Book Banning (recording, 1983). Vietnam Reconsidered (recording, 1984). Cultural Dimensions of U.S. Foreign Policy (audiovisual, 1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barker, W. P., ‘‘Literary Techniques Employed by Three Writers on the Vietnam War: Norman Mailer, Michael Herr, Frances Fitzgerald’’ (thesis, 1981). Elwood-Akers, V., Women War Correspondents in the Vietnam War, 1961-1975 (1988). Estrangement: America and the World (1985). Frederick, J., ‘‘Textbook Shock’’—A Critique of Frances Fitzgerald’sAmerica Revised (1980). Proceedings of Ralph Nader’s Second Annual Journalism Conference on Investigative Reporting, Mar. 19-21, 1982, Washington, D.C. (recording, 1982). The Vietnam Reader (1991). 1984 Revisited: Walter Cronkite Looks at Orwell’s Novel, and Interviews Anthony Burgess, William Lutz, David Burnham, Anthony Pole, Jose Delgado, Richard Riel, Jonathan Sanders, Phillip Goetz, Ronald Plesser, Malcolm Muggeridge, James Thornwell, Inge Kempkehefke, Frances Fitzgerald, Marvin Rosenbloom, Bernard Crick, and Jacobo Timmerman (recording,1983). To Reason Why: The Debate about the Causes of U.S. Involvement in the Vietnam War (1990). Reference works: CA (1974). CANR (1991). CBY (1987). WW of Writers, Editors, and Poets (1989). Other references: Journal of American Studies (1973). Life (27 Oct. 1972). Nation (8 March 1993). NR (16 Sept. 1972, 29 April 1985, 20 Oct. 1986). NYRB (5 Oct. 1972, 29 Jan. 1987). NYTBR (27 Aug. 1972, 12 Oct. 1986). PW (16 Oct. 1972). Redbook (March 1975). Vogue (Jan. 1973, Oct. 1986).Who Will


Protect the Family? With Reporter Frances FitzGerald (audiovisual, 1981). Booknotes web site: http://www.booknotes.org. CSpan web site: http://www.c- span.org. —JENNIFER L. TEBBE, UPDATED BY REBECCA C. CONDIT

FITZGERALD, Zelda Sayre Born 24 July 1900, Montgomery, Alabama; died 10 March 1948, Asheville, North Carolina Daughter of Anthony and Minnie Machen Sayre; married F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920; children: daughter, Frances Scott ‘‘Scottie’’ Fitzgerald Smith Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, the youngest of six children, was the daughter of a distinguished legislator and judge. She attended Montgomery public schools, graduating from Sidney Lanier High School in 1918. She married novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald and had one daughter. The Fitzgeralds lived in Europe and were part of the expatriate group including Ernest Hemingway and Gerald and Sara Murphy. From 1928 to 1930, Fitzgerald struggled to develop her talent in dancing, writing, and painting. Her obsessive determination to become a professional dancer contributed to her first psychological collapse in 1930. A pattern of insanity followed by periods of calm continued throughout Fitzgerald’s life. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Fitzgerald wrote a number of articles and short stories for various periodicals. Some of these were revised by or written in collaboration with her husband, and some appear under a joint byline. Others were printed under Scott Fitzgerald’s name alone, but in his ledger he credits Fitzgerald with the authorship. Save Me the Waltz (1932), Fitzgerald’s only published novel, was written while she was at a psychiatric clinic in Baltimore, Maryland. It is a fictional account of Fitzgerald’s experiences, first as a vivacious Southern belle, then as the glamorous wife of a flamboyant, popular writer. Fitzgerald makes little attempt to disguise the autobiographical elements of her novel. Her protagonist, Alabama Beggs, is determined to escape her father’s suffocating morality and adopts a lawless philosophy. She marries David Knight, a professional artist who achieves a phenomenal success, but by retreating to the citadel of his art, he is as inaccessible to Alabama as was the impregnable fortress of her father’s idealism. Alabama feels excluded by her lack of accomplishment and therefore attempts to emulate her husband’s success through the medium of dance. A few days before her debut as a dancer, Alabama’s foot becomes seriously infected and she is told she will never dance again. As the novel ends, Alabama and David, united only in their physical proximity, face a restless and unfulfilling future together. Alabama, however, becomes at last the choreographer of her own destiny. Accepting the emptiness of her future with her husband, she resolves to whip the ‘‘broken staccato’’ of their lives into the ordered configurations of the dance. Save Me the Waltz is not a good novel. Fitzgerald’s writing is pretentious, turgid, and sometimes unintelligible. Fitzgerald’s

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descriptions are fraught with disjointed images and strained comparisons, and the imagery is strange, even grotesque. When Alabama falls in love with David, she imagines herself crawling ‘‘into the friendly cave of his ear’’ and stumbling hysterically through the ‘‘vast tortuous indentations’’ of his medulla oblongata! ‘‘It is more the expression of a powerful personality,’’ wrote Scott Fitzgerald, ‘‘than the work of a finished artist.’’ The novel nevertheless occupies a unique place in literary history. Rarely has a marriage been so well documented as the Fitzgeralds’, both in biography and fiction. In Tender is the Night (1934), Fitzgerald presents the deterioration of a brilliant young doctor as a direct result of his marriage to a beautiful madwoman, who saps her husband’s energies as she gradually regains her equilibrium. This novel is considered, in part, to be Fitzgerald’s response to the oblique charges made against him through the character of David Knight in Fitzgerald’s novel, published two years earlier. In Save Me the Waltz, Fitzgerald reveals the agonizing insecurity and the futile grasping for self-expression underlying the spectacle and drama of her marriage. Despite serious technical flaws, the novel memorably recreates the searing experiences of a tortured soul. Fitzgerald may have fallen short of imposing artistic form upon her material, but her sensitive presentation of the tragedy of blighted lives makes absorbing reading. OTHER WORKS: Bits of Paradise: Uncollected Stories of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (edited by S. F. Smith and M. J. Bruccoli, 1974). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bruccoli, M. J., F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Descriptive Bibliography (1972). Bruccoli, M. J., et al., eds., The Romantic Egoists (1974). Callaghan, M., That Summer in Paris (1963). Colum, P., and M. Cabell, eds., Between Friends (1962). Cooper, D. M., ‘‘Form and Function: The Writing Style of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald’’ (thesis, 1986). Gabriel, C. A., ‘‘Social and Personal Conflicts in the Lives and Works of the Fitzgeralds’’ (undergraduate research paper, 1996). Hemingway, E., A Moveable Feast (1964). Love Letters to Remember: An Intimate Collection of Romance and Passion (1996). Mayfield, S., Exiles from Paradise: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald. Milford, N., Zelda (1970). Mizener, A., The Far Side of Paradise (1965). Piper, H. D., F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait (1965). Shafer, C., ‘‘To Spread a Human Aspiration: The Art of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald’’ (thesis, 1994). Smith, S. F., ‘‘The Maryland Ancestors of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald’’ in Maryland Historical Magazine (1983). Tomkins, C., Living Well is the Best Revenge (1972). Turnbull, A., Scott Fitzgerald (1962). Vigier, R., Women, Dance, and the Body: Gestures of Genius (1994). Volkert, G., An Assessment of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald’s Novel Caesar’s Things (thesis, 1989). Other references: Catalogue of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Manuscript Material (1982). Milford, N., Zelda (recording, 1982). Bookman (Oct. 1932). SR (Oct. 1932). —ROSE ADRIENNE GALLO

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FLANDERS


FLANDERS, G. M.

FLANNER, Hildegarde

Born no information found; died date unknown

Born 3 June 1899, Indianapolis, Indiana; died May 1987 Daughter of Frank W. and Mary-Ellen Hockett Flanner; married Frederick Monhoff, 1926

No information about G. M. Flanders’ life, background, or views has survived; only one novel, The Ebony Idol (1860, reprinted 1969), remains of her work. The combination of sentimental romance with biting social satire, however, makes the novel of special interest as a literary and cultural document. Set in a small New England town, The Ebony Idol shows how the Reverend Mr. Carey divides his congregation and his community by preaching militant abolitionism. His followers, mostly women, are either impractical do-gooders or swinish Jacksonian egalitarians. Chief among Mr. Carey’s supporters are Miss Dickey, an elderly feminist schoolmarm, and Mr. and Mrs. Hicks, a loutish farm couple. Flanders characterizes the abolitionist position as hysterical, impractical, and uncharitable. Mr. Carey’s pro-slavery opponents, on the other hand, are sensible, practical, and discerning in their concern for others. Represented by Squire Bryan, a wealthy lawyer and landholder, the pro-slavery faction supports both a Jeffersonian democracy and the orderly relations, advocated by St. Paul, between slave and master, man and woman, husband and wife. Like Squire Bryan, the pro-slavery supporters argue the South, which is, after all, run by gentlemen and Christians, is entitled to its own customs and economy. Into this turbulent controversy comes Caesar, a runaway slave who is at first idolized by Mr. Carey’s abolitionists. Caesar’s huge size and appetite and his laziness, vanity, and dishonesty lead to a series of comic episodes which illustrate that abolitionists hypocritically fear and despise the blacks with whom they profess equality. A sentimental subplot revolves around Frank Stanton, a Southern dandy who is studying law with Squire Bryan, and Mary, the beautiful, gentle, and ladylike adopted daughter of the loutish Mr. and Mrs. Hicks. As The Ebony Idol ends, the lovers are united, the North is reconciled with the South, the town’s pro-slavery status quo is restored, Caesar gratefully returns to his master, and a sadder but wiser minister learns to leave politics out of the pulpit in the interests of peace and social order. While Flanders’ unflattering characterizations of feminists, abolitionists, and blacks may be offensive to a modern reader, they illustrate an important issue in women’s literature of the period: woman’s role as a submissive Christian allowed her spiritual beauty and transcendence, hence also spiritual authority and superiority. If women (temperamentally inferior to men) could and should accept their lot in order to create domestic harmony, slaves (temperamentally inferior to whites) could and should accept their lot in order to create social harmony in the South. Similar pro-slavery and antifeminist arguments appear in contemporary works by Caroline Lee Hentz, Mary Eastman, and Caroline Rush. —KATHERINE STAPLES

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Sister of author Janet Flanner (Genêt), Hildegarde Flanner attended Sweet Briar College, Virginia, from 1917 to 1918, and then the University of California at Berkeley until 1923. She lived in California after her marriage to Frederick Monhoff in 1926. Flanner’s first book of poems, Young Girl (1920), published when she was twenty-one, won the Emily Chamberlain Cook prize at the University of California. In addition to books of poetry, she published several plays (Mansions, 1920, and The White Bridge, 1938), essays on poets and poetry, and articles about the Southwest. Poems written out of Flanner’s own experience or about other women are extraordinary but rather few in number. Two of these are found in the aforementioned Young Girl. In ‘‘Dianthus’’ the narrator recalls that her grandmother, who picked Dianthus (commonly called Sweet William), ‘‘Did Vergil into French / And then had seven children.’’ ‘‘I shall not pick you, / Dianthus,’’ the narrator concludes. ‘‘Discovery’’ tells of a girl whose aunts have praised her ‘‘mild’’ and ‘‘gentle soul,’’ but who finds, when looking in a mirror for this phenomenon, ‘‘a joyful little sin’’—a female body with sexual desires. The subtle, understated rejection of traditional female roles in ‘‘Dianthus’’ and the open, honest treatment of female sexuality in ‘‘Discovery’’ are rare to poetry of this period; both poems portray the realistic, feminist persona of a kind that Edna St. Vincent Millay and other women poets of the 1920s were to choose. Flanner’s one-act play Mansions is another feminist work. Lydia, twenty-seven, and her younger brother Joe are dominated by their Aunt Harriet, who is trying to make Lydia like herself, a recluse dedicated to the memory of all the old, dead men of the family, and to making Joe follow their profession. Lydia is resentful and rebellious in a childlike manner, until Joe, who is mysteriously dying, teaches her one must have one’s own work— that she must be strong and leave her aunt in order to live her own life. If There Is Time (1942) contains successful poems involving women and the female experience. In ‘‘Hawk is a Woman’’ and ‘‘Rattlesnake,’’ wild creatures are the ostensible subjects, but they become metaphors for human behavior. The two poems are actually attacks on certain kinds of women—they are hate poems, revenge poems—but they are strong and powerful. ‘‘Never Ask Why,’’ which uses the same metaphorical technique, is on the surface a poem about cruelty in nature—a lion killing a doe—but on another level it expresses rage and sorrow for the helpless condition of women, for the use of them as sexual objects: the doe is ‘‘gentle meat’’; ‘‘the riding lion’’ feeds on her ‘‘soft loin.’’


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Flanner’s poetic subjects include nature, love, city and surburban life, patriotism, and religious faith. Her prosodic techniques range from free verse to traditional forms. Critical reception of her work has been as varied as her subjects and styles; at her best she is, as one critic put it, ‘‘right and honest.’’ OTHER WORKS: This Morning (1921). A Tree in Bloom and Other Verses (1924). Time’s Profile (1929). In Native Light (1972). The Harkening Eye (1979). A Vanishing Land (1980). A Christmas Keepsake (1983). For A Clean House (1984). Brief Cherishing: A Napa Valley Harvest (1985). At the Gentle Mercy of Plants: Essays and Poem (1986). Different Images: Portraits of Remembered People (1987). Poems (1988). The Berkeley Fire: Memoirs and Mementos. . . (1992). Various short stories, ‘‘Arrived’’ on The Ahsahta Cassette Sampler (audiocassette, 1983), ‘‘What Is That Sound?’’ (broadside, 1986), ‘‘Bamboo: An Honest Love Affair’’ in Roots and Branches: Contemporary Essays by West Coast Writers (1991), and ‘‘A Vanishing Land’’ in Natural State: A Literary Anthology of California Nature Writing (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Other references: Janet Lewis Talks to Hildegarde Flanner (video, 1995). Nation (13 Nov. 1929), NYT (23 Aug. 1942). Poetry (Sept. 1942). —JEANNINE DOBBS

FLANNER, Janet Born 13 March 1892, Indianapolis, Indiana; died 7 November 1978, New York, New York Also wrote under: Genêt Daughter of Francis and Mary-Ellen Hockett Flanner Born to Quaker parents, Janet Flanner attended preparatory school in Tudor Hall, Indianapolis, spent a year in Germany with her parents, then entered the University of Chicago in 1912. After being expelled from the university as a ‘‘rebellious influence’’ in the dormitory, she returned to Indianapolis and began writing for the Indianapolis Star, becoming, in her own words, ‘‘the first cinema critic ever invented.’’ A trip to Greece, Crete, Constantinople, and Vienna ended with her settling down in Paris in 1922. Harold Ross, a former New York acquaintance, asked her to write a small ‘‘Paris Letter’’ for a newly conceived magazine called the New Yorker. For 14 years Flanner wrote all of the New Yorker’s Paris letters, and in the 1930s, all of its London letters, under the pseudonym of ‘‘Genêt.’’ When Flanner returned to the U.S. in 1939, she continued writing her profiles and sketches for the New Yorker. After the fall of France, her articles became more overtly political; she also began speaking and writing extensively on France and French culture and politics. She then wrote for the New Yorker a more

ambitious series (under her own name) on conditions in unoccupied France, on the ‘‘bitter civil war of words’’ between the generations of the two world wars, and on the revival of the Church in the wake of the poverty and deprivation suffered by postwar France. In February 1941 she broadcast a hortatory speech to the French by shortwave radio, and in a radio address for Columbia’s Lecture Hall that same year, told an audience of American women: ‘‘There isn’t a woman in France today who wouldn’t work herself to the bone to earn the rights which every American woman enjoys, yet which so many of them let go to waste.’’ Flanner’s books include a novel, The Cubical City (1926), which she describes as ‘‘really a character sketch and not a novel at all.’’ Three volumes—An American in Paris (1940), Paris Journal, 1944-65 (1966, reissued 1988), Paris Journal, 1965-71 (1971, reissued with former volume in 1988)—comprise the collected New Yorker ‘‘Paris Letters’’ and represent, in many ways, the best of Flanner’s achievement. She invented the formula for her Paris letters: a mixture of incisive epigram, personal and political profiles, and news, mixed with critical reviews of cinema, theater, opera, and gallery openings. Flanner wrote of this form: ‘‘Because I was easily intimidated by and distrustful of French officialdom and because, as at first a fortnightly correspondent, I was in no condition to compete with daily cable New York newspapers, in my helplessness I invented for my New Yorker letters a formula which dealt not with political news itself but with the effect public political news had on private lives.’’ Always it is the characteristic blend of the personal and the political, the temper of the times and the mood of the streets, that marks her writing. The ripening of the mushrooms called les trompettes de la mort is detailed no less meticulously than the rise and decline of General de Gaulle’s political fortunes. Details become significant in a way that mere reportage is not. Current fashions in the streets and shops, vegetables in the market, holiday celebrations, and even a run of good weather signal, as stockmarket reports could not do, France’s economic recovery from the war. And the death of Colette, a nationally loved figure, is in Flanner’s hands more than the occasion for reporting the funeral of a noted author; it is, quite literally, the end of an era in literary and social history. Paris Journal exemplifies, at its best, the blend of memoir and reportage, as well as the keen sense of irony, that Flanner had by then perfected. Flanner’s honors included the French Legion of Honor in 1947 for the ‘‘Letter From Paris’’ columns as well as a Litt. D. from Smith College (1958) and a National Book Award (1966) for Paris Journal: 1944-1965. She died in 1978. OTHER WORKS: Chéri by Collete (translated by Flanner, 1929). Maeterlinck and I by G. Leblanc (translated by Flanner, 1932). Souvenirs; My Life with Maeterlinck by G. Leblanc (translated by Flanner, 1932). Petain: The Old Man of France (1944). Men and Monuments (1957, 1990). Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939 (edited by I. Drutman, 1972, translated into French, 1981, original reprint, 1990). London Was Yesterday, 1934-1939 (edited by I. Drutman, 1975). Janet Flanner’s World: Uncollected Writings,

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FLETCHER


1932-1975 (edited by I. Drutman, 1979, 1981). Darlinghissima: Letters to a Friend (1985, reissued 1988).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ames, K. B., ‘‘American Voices in Paris: Kay Boyle, Djuna Barnes, and Janet Flanner’’ (thesis, 1985). Colette, Cheri (1983). McWilliams, M. E.D., ‘‘Janet Flanner’s 1945 Blue Radio Broadcasts from Paris: This is the Time for Speaking More Than for Writing’’ (thesis, 1994). Morath, I., Photographer Inge Morath Comments on Her Subjects: Janet Flanner, Alexander Calder, Arthur Miller, Marilyn Monroe, William Styron, Jayne Mansfield, Lola Picasso, Eleanor Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson in a Double Portrait, Isaac Stern and Vladimir Horowitz Together (recording, 1987). Wineapple, B., Genêt, A Biography of Janet Flanner (reissue, 1994). Wineapple, B., Janet Flanner & the New Yorker (1991). Wright, C. M., ‘‘Novel Women: Literary Expatriates of the 1920s’’ (thesis, 1988). Reference works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1987). CB (May 1943). Indiana Authors and Their Books, 1816-1916 (1949). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). WA. Other references: Chanteusen: Stimmen der Grossstadt (1997). Lost Generation Journal (Winter 1976). New York Post (3 Oct. 1941). New York World Telegram (21 Jan. 1941). Time (22 April 1940, 9 Nov. 1942). Women Come to the Front: Journalists, Photographers, and Broadcasters (1985). —VALERIE CARNES, UPDATED BY SYDONIE BENET

FLETCHER, Inglis Clark Born 20 October 1879, Alton, Illinois; died 30 May 1969, Charleston, South Carolina Daughter of Maurice W. and Flora Deane Chapman Clark; married John G. Fletcher, 1909 Inglis Clark Fletcher was widely traveled, but the home of her maternal ancestors—coastal North Carolina—provided the stuff of her successful fiction and the home of her later years. The eldest of three children, Fletcher grew up in Edwardsville, Illinois, a small town populated by many displaced Southerners. As a child she preferred reading, debating, and writing novels to other pastimes, but it was her drawing talent that sent her to study as a teenager at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts at Washington University. Fletcher displayed some aptitude, but frankly said she was more interested in marriage than sculpture. Her marriage to a mining engineer sent her directly to some of the roughest of the mining camps in California, Nevada, Colorado, and Alaska. Like many pioneer women isolated on male-dominated frontiers, Fletcher turned to writing as a way of coming to terms with experience. She sold film synopses and wrote poetry, articles, and reviews. When the Fletcher family

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moved to Oakland (1911) and San Francisco (1925-38), Fletcher found she enjoyed running a lecture bureau. In 1944 the Fletchers moved to historic Bandon Plantation, near Edenton, North Carolina. When Bandon burned in 1963, Fletcher retired to Charleston, South Carolina. In 1928, Fletcher began her much-publicized tours of Africa, which she had wanted to see, she said, since she had been a child of twelve reading about Livingstone and Burton. From those tours came Fletcher’s first novels: The White Leopard (1931) and Red Jasmine (1932). Both offer excellent observation of native craft, culture, and ritual. The documents she found while researching her Tyrrel County ancestors and the Carolina campaigns of British General Cornwallis sparked her interest in the history of eastern North Carolina. Further research in Carolina libraries and extensive reading in public and private records of the period produced Raleigh’s Eden (1940). The novel, the first of Fletcher’s meticulously researched Carolina series of historical fiction, uncovered long-forgotten cultural facts of coastal Carolina settlement: Moorish architecture and Arabic residents, Oriental settlers and great estates. Many contemporary readers insisted that much of the novel’s setting and events was imaginary, when in fact the novel was faithful to history. Each novel of Fletcher’s Carolina series studies a specific era, beginning with the first attempted settlement in the 1580s. The past provided Fletcher with plots, settings, and characters; it was also the inspiration for her themes. Through individual characters, Fletcher articulates her recurring theme: Land represents freedom and life, especially for Americans. Fletcher was intrigued by the possibility for altering identity that settling the colonies offered Europeans; she also studied the complex interaction of person and environment. The process of settlement provided a metaphor for individual experience: to attain knowledge of land is to attain knowledge of self. This focus on the individual is circumscribed, however, by Fletcher’s greater interest in—and skill in using as narrative— historical detail and fact. Thus, her works are most accurately titled historical romances; and melodramatic as some of her stories are, they attract readers decades after first publication, probably because they imaginatively recreate historical events—a form of fictional verisimilitude that comforts the average reader. OTHER WORKS: Men of Albermarle (1942). Lusty Wind for Carolina (1944). Toil of the Brave (1946). Bennett’s Welcome (1950). Queen’s Gift (1952). The Scotswoman (1954). The Wind in the Forest (1957). Cormorant’s Brood (1959). Pay, Pack, and Follow: The Story of My Life (1959). Wicked Lady (1962). The papers of Inglis Clark Fletcher are in the manuscript collection of East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Green, J. W., ‘‘Inglis Fletcher: A Personal Perspective’’ (thesis, 1984). Hester, E., ed., Cultural Change in Eastern North Carolina As Reflected in Some of the Novels of I.


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Fletcher and Ovid Pierce. Platt, H., I. Fletcher of Bandon, Chronicler of North Carolina. Walser, R., I. Fletcher of Bandon Plantation. Wilcox, S. K., ‘‘The American Revolutionary War in Fiction: An Evaluation of the Works of Winston Churchill, Inglis Fletcher, and John Jakes’’ (research paper, 1983). Wooten, S., ‘‘Identification of African Ritual in the Writings of I. Fletcher’’ (thesis, 1976). Reference works: CA (1969). CB (1947, July 1969). Other references: North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame (audiovisual, 1995). North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame Proudly Presents Inglis Fletcher, 1879-1969, Novelist, Tyrell County, North Carolina (1996). —SALLY BRETT

FLEXNER, Anne Crawford Born 27 June 1874, Georgetown, Kentucky; died 11 January 1955, New York, New York Daughter of Louis G. and Susan Farnum Crawford; married Abraham Flexner, 1898; children: two daughters After her graduation from Vassar College in 1895, Anne Crawford Flexner supported herself by tutoring for two years in Louisville, Kentucky, until she had saved enough money to go to New York City. There, she attended the theater regularly and began writing plays. After a two-year engagement, she married Abraham Flexner, a prominent educator. In his 1940 autobiography, he wrote of their union: ‘‘We agreed at the outset of our married life that her interest and work were as sacred as mine; and for over 40 years we have tried to respect each other’s individuality and that of our two daughters.’’ Encouraged by Flexner, her younger daughter Eleanor Flexner also became a writer and published books on American drama and the woman suffrage movement in America. In 1901, Harrison Grey Fiske opened his Manhattan Theater with Flexner’s first professionally produced play, Miranda of the Balcony, which featured Minnie Maddern Fiske in the title role. The New York Times review stated ‘‘Mrs. Flexner has written a strong emotional drama of modern style and the audience of last night was quick to recognize its value.’’ This success enabled Flexner to obtain the rights to dramatize Alice Hegan Rice’s Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch in 1904. Flexner took a number of liberties with the original plot in order to sustain a narrative line throughout the three-act play structure, but she preserved all the flavor of the novel in her sprightly, humorous dialogue and characterizations. It became Flexner’s most frequently performed play. The Marriage Game (1913) was set on a yacht during a threeday cruise, for which Flexner brought together three married

couples and a charming ‘‘other woman,’’ Mrs. Oliver, invited by one of the husbands who didn’t realize the wives would be aboard. Flexner’s flair for writing good dialogue and her unhackneyed treatment of a standard farcical situation lifted the play out of the ordinary. It is, however, rather heavy-handed in the manner in which Mrs. Oliver teaches the three wives all about marriage, about how they should work at their marriages as if they were jobs. Aged 26, Flexner’s last play, was produced in 1936. In the 17 years since her latest produced play, Flexner had traveled extensively in Europe with her husband. Her abiding interest in British literature is reflected in this interpretation of the romance of John Keats and Fanny Brawne. The action spans the year between the publication of Keats’ Endymion and his departure for Italy, where he was to die six months later at age twenty-six. There is an artificial quality to the opening scene in which Keats, Byron, Shelley, Gifford, Lockhart, and Fanny’s mother are all brought into the reception room of Keats’ publisher. The audience is won over in subsequent scenes, however, by Flexner’s deft characterization, and by dialogue in which even the incorporation of familiar lines from Keats’s poetry is made to sound natural. Flexner departed from the traditional view of Fanny Brawne by treating her as sensitive and sincere in her love for Keats, even to the point that she spends the night with him on the eve of their separation. The sympathetic interpretation of her character was vindicated by the publication a few months later of Fanny Brawne’s letters to Keats’ sister. Flexner’s plays included comedy, mystery, and biographical drama. All Soul’s Eve (1920), a sentimental drama about spiritualism, was enlivened by the device of having one actress play both the role of the young mother who dies and that of the Irish maid into whom the mother’s soul passes. Flexner’s plays were audience-pleasers and might be summed up, in the words of one reviewer, as ‘‘crisp, clean, wholesome, and refreshing fun.’’ Seven of Flexner’s plays were produced in New York over a 35year period. They reveal a variety of interests and a better-thanaverage talent as a dramatist for the pre-World War I period. OTHER WORKS: A Man’s Woman (1899). A Lucky Star (dramatization of the novel, The Motor Chaperone, by C. N. and A. N. Williams, 1909). Wanted—An Alibi (1917). The Blue Pearl (1918). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Flexner, A., I Remember: An Autobiography (1940). Other references: Nation (2 Jan. 1937). Theatre Arts Monthly (Feb. 1937, June 1937). —FELICIA HARDISON LONDRÉ

FLEXNER, Eleanor Born 4 October 1908, New York, New York; died 25 March 1995 Daughter of Abraham and Anne Crawford Flexner Eleanor Flexner grew up in an intellectual world; her father was an educator and writer, her mother a playwright. After

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graduation from Swarthmore College (1930) she spent a year at Somerville College, Oxford (1930-31). Although Flexner’s first book, American Playwrights, 1918-1938 (1939), survives as a substantial piece of research and criticism, her prominence derives chiefly from writings on the women’s movement. Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States (1959), with 13 paperback printings followed by revised editions in 1975 and 1996 (expanded, with E. Fitzpatrick), is often used as a basic text for the history of the modern American feminist movement. Flexner said that in 1954 she looked for a book about the women’s rights movement in the U.S. and, unable to find an adequate one, she decided to write one. The book’s dedication to the memory of her mother is apt: she describes Anne Crawford Flexner as one whose ‘‘life was touched at many points by the movement whose history I have tried to record. . . . She marched in the New York suffrage parades. She made her mark as a playwright at a time when such an achievement was still unusual for a woman.’’ Flexner’s Century of Struggle chronicles much that her mother either knew or hoped for. Comparisons of the original preface with that of the revised edition reveal both Flexner’s concern with women’s rights in 1959, at a time when such concerns were virtually unvoiced, as well as searching questions about the status and prospects of the movement in the 1970s. There she speaks of ‘‘a host of new issues’’ and reflects on their origins and their implications for historians today and women in the future. As in all her work, her informal narrative style in Century of Struggle holds the reader while she conveys a textbook’s burden of information. Early in the book, as Flexner approaches the famous Seneca Falls Convention, her participants become a cast of characters. The event itself comes vividly alive as these women launch their new movement to ‘‘leave its imprint on the lives of their daughters and of women throughout the world.’’ Century of Struggle covers well the intellectual progress of women, the battles and achievements of suffrage, and most impressive, women in American labor. As Flexner says in her own bibliographical summary of the six-volume History of Woman Suffrage, it ‘‘stands in a class by itself’’; so these words apply, if more modestly, to her own work. Century of Struggle established Flexner’s stature as a historian of feminism; her Mary Wollstonecraft: A Biography (1972) adds to her prestige in that area. The reader is carried through a ‘‘life of struggle’’ in the psychological study of a woman, externally a feminist, internally dependent on men for love and approval, sometimes so beaten by circumstances that suicide attempts and irrational behavior seem expected; yet she is brilliant and strong enough to rise above the turbulence of her life in order to create what remains a classic, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Flexner portrays a living woman, Mary, as she refers to her, who struggles for independence, for love, for family life, for a place in her society, for stability perhaps, so clear when one notices, as Flexner does, that she can also write Maria, a quasiGothic work replete with the sentimentality of her times.

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With Mary, Flexner draws a parallel between the life of the woman she portrays and her own, having been ‘‘kicked around the job market’’ in World War II. Thus, in feeling and in its value as social history, Mary Wollstonecraft emerged as one of the feminine biographies receiving excellent reviews. Though Flexner is best known for her work as a feminist historian, she goes beyond this definition in her writing and scholarly interests: she contributed, for example, to Volume I of Shelley and His Circle, from which her interest in Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of Mary Shelley, may have grown. From her home in Northampton, Massachusetts in the early 1980s, she described herself as ‘‘a moderate’’ who believes strongly in equal opportunities and equal pay for women; and, in personal terms, as a scholar, writer, and woman who would continue, until 1995 when she died, to follow the affairs of women. OTHER WORKS: Women’s Rights: Unfinished Business (Public Affairs Committee pamphlet, 1971). Journey: Poems (1984). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1974). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: A Century of Struggle & Enterprising Women (audiocassette, 1976). —LOIS FOWLER

FLINT, Margaret (Leavitt) Born 22 December 1891, Orono, Maine; died 27 February 1960, West Baldwin, Maine Daughter of Walter and Hannah Ellis Leavitt; married Lester W. Jacobs, 1913, children: six Margaret Flint was educated at Tome Institute in Port Deposit, Maryland, and attended the University of Maine. After raising a family of six children, she began to write at the age of forty-four. Her first novel, The Old Ashburn Place (1936), won the Dodd Mead-Pictorial Review prize for the best first novel of 1935. During the 1930s there was, as in all times of serious economic depression in America, considerable interest in returning to the land. The times were right for novels about farm life and country values, and thus Flint began her career at a time especially disposed to value her material. All of her novels, except her second, Valley of Decision (1937), concern rural life in the fictional town of Parkston, Maine. Her last published work, Dress Right, Dress! (1943), is not so much a novel as a piece of propaganda, written for the Women’s Army Corps, in the form of a recruit’s diary. The Old Ashburn Place is probably Flint’s best novel. The hero, Charles Ashburn, a fifty-year-old bachelor, recalls his life as he wonders how it happened that he’s lonesome and old. There


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were six children in his family, and the chronicle of their fortunes makes up this book. At the heart of the plot is Charles’s love for a neighboring rich girl, Marian Parks, who of course marries someone in her own class, and his affair with his brother Morris’ wife. This novel is a family chronicle seen from the point of view of the least successful of the family, a bachelor who raises Rhode Island Reds and lives by a code set down by his mother (who had been a schoolteacher) that all must be clean and good in his life. While Flint’s novels do not have happily-ever-after endings, they do uphold traditional values: the land, the home, marriage, children. Her best people are solid, responsible types who flirt with other ways but come back to the land. Charles Ashburn, for instance, should have married a woman like himself, but he was attracted to another type and could not compromise. In Deacon’s Road (1938), young Eph Squire should marry Lois Ashburn, Charles’s niece, but first falls in love with her cousin Shirley Wells, a city girl. He comes to his senses, however, gets the family farm, marries Lois, and thus does not end up like Charles Ashburn. Two female leading characters, Thurlow Parks in Breakneck Brook (1939) and Judith Squire in Enduring Riches (1942), have to face difficult decisions on whom to marry. Thurlow finally realizes that her childhood sweetheart, Henry Witham, is the man for her; her older, harder sister, a city person, gets the man Thurlow thought she wanted. Judith Squire marries at thirty-four, stays in her rural family home, has children, and, like Charles Ashburn raises chickens, but has a real struggle to manage her impossible, exuberant husband. Flint makes it clear men are expected to be difficult, but a real woman doesn’t want a nambypamby man (like the minister who falls in love with Judith). The land serves as the background for the values of Flint’s characters, but her major focus is on individuals coming to terms with what life has brought them. Her novels do not offer the reader escape into pastoral retreats. She takes the country life as it is, and writes about people living it. OTHER WORKS: Back o’ the Mountain (1940). Down the Road a Piece (1941). October Fires (1941). BIBLIOGRAPHY: NYT (28 Feb. 1960). —BEVERLY SEATON

FLYNN, Elizabeth Gurley Born 7 August 1890, Concord, New Hampshire; died 5 September 1964, Moscow, USSR Daughter of Thomas and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn; married Jack A. Jones, 1908 (separated 1910, divorced 1920) The daughter of first-generation Irish immigrants, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was raised in an atmosphere of concern for social

and political issues. Her parents were both members of the Socialist Party, and her mother was a strong women’s rights advocate. When the family moved to the South Bronx, New York, in 1900, Flynn was introduced to city poverty and to radical political activity. At twelve she won the prize in a Socialist Party debate, and at sixteen gave her first public speech, ‘‘What Socialism Will Do for Women,’’ at the Harlem Socialist Club. Later that year she was arrested in New York City (the first of many arrests) for speaking without a public permit. In 1906 Flynn joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and a year later quit school to travel throughout the U.S. as one of the IWW’s most effective speakers and organizers. Flynn had a son in 1910, and in that same year she separated from her husband (with formal divorce notice in 1920) because she was not prepared to give up her political activity to settle into a more limited domestic life. Both her mother and her sister Kathie provided an important home base for Flynn and her son after the separation. During World War I and in the postwar years, as government arrests of radical political leadership increased, Flynn was the moving force in several labor defense leagues. She became seriously ill in 1927 and for about 10 years lived in semiretirement with a friend in Portland, Oregon. Against the advice of her doctor, she returned to the East Coast in 1936, joined the Communist Party of the U.S., became a columnist for the Daily Worker in 1937, and in 1938 was elected to the party’s national committee. In 1952, she was arrested for subversive activities under the Smith Act and served from January 1955 to May 1957 at the women’s prison in Alderson, West Virginia. Upon her release she returned to party activity and was elected to the national chair in 1959, a post she held until her death while on a visit to the USSR. All of Flynn’s writing relates directly to her political activism and focuses on the rights and problems of workers, on the status and corresponding activities of working women, and on civil liberties in general. Underlying all these works is the attempt to acquaint future generations with the historical legacy of the workers’ struggle in the U.S. and with the role of working-class leadership in this struggle. Referring to a speech made to the party in 1945, Flynn noted that it had been ‘‘partly biographical, partly confessional, and partly an evaluation of our weaknesses.’’ The perspective expressed in this statement—combined with a continued advocacy of working-class rights and a belief in socialism as the solution to economic, social, and political problems—characterizes all of her writing. Flynn’s strength as a writer rested on her ability to present ideas with clarity, simplicity, and personal fervor. In addition to numerous pamphlets, journal and newspaper articles (in Political Affairs and Solidarity, for example), and regular columns in the Daily Worker and Sunday Worker from 1937 to 1964, Flynn also wrote two major works that are primarily autobiographical. I Speak My Own Piece (1955, reprinted in 1973 as The Rebel Girl, incorporating Flynn’s own editorial comments) describes her life, her contemporaries, and the events of radical

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working-class history from 1906 to 1926, using amusing and pertinent anecdotal material. At times the events and people are idealized, in keeping with her purpose to insure that the heroic struggle of those early days would not be lost to history. At the time of her death, Flynn had completed only the notes and outlines for the sequel to this volume, to cover what she called her ‘‘second life.’’

1964, Nov. 1964). Radical America (Jan.-Feb. 1975). Women Who Dared: 1992 Calendar (1992).

The Alderson Story (1963) details the experiences of Flynn’s 1952 trial and the following period of imprisonment. It is of more than autobiographical significance because Flynn tries to record, in a series of prison poems, the voices and emotions of other women with whom she associated in the prison. The book thus becomes a document on women’s prison experience in addition to a chapter in her life.

FOLLEN, Eliza (Lee) Cabot

Flynn’s associates and friends considered her a ‘‘great political leader and a great human being.’’ Her ability to express complex issues in simple, unassuming, yet convincing language made her one of the most effective popular leaders of her time. Her autobiographical and political writings are among the best sources available for the history of women’s involvement in radical U.S. politics.

OTHER WORKS: Women in the War (1942). Women Have a Date With Destiny (1944). Women’s Place in the Fight for a Better World (1947). The Twelve and You (1948). The Plot to Gag America (1950). Communists and the People (1953). Horizons of the Future for a Socialist America (1959). Freedom Begins at Home (1961). The McCarran Act: Fact and Fancy (1963). The largest collection of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s writings and personal records is located at the American Institute for Marxist Studies in New York City.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Camp, H. C., ‘‘Gurley’’: A Biography of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, 1890-1964 (1984). Camp, H. C., Iron in Her Soul: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and the American Left (1995). Cole, S. C., ‘‘Elizabeth Gurley Flynn: A Portrait’’ (thesis, 1991). Dixler, E. J., The Woman Question: Women and the American Communist Party, 1929-41 (dissertation, 1974). Hardy, G. J., American Women Civil Rights Activists: Biobibliographies of 68 Leaders, 1825-1992 (1993). Holzkamper, C. O., Rebel Girl, Radical Woman: A Biography of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1980). Joyce, M. H., ‘‘Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Irish Nationalism’’ (thesis, 1995). Maupin, J., Labor Heroines: Ten Women Who Led the Struggle (1974). Motherland: Writings by Irish American Women about Mothers and Daughters (1999). Post, D. ‘‘The Crucible: The Heresy Trial of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Within the American Civil Liberties Union’’ (1991). Trautmann, W. E., Direct Action & Sabotage: Three Classic IWW Pamphlets from the 1910s (1997). Wertheimer, B. M., We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America (1977). Words on Fire: The Life and Writing of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1987). Other references: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the Rebel Girl (audiovisual, 1993). Nation (17 Feb. 1926). Political Affairs (Oct.

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—JANE SLAUGHTER

Born 15 August 1787, Boston, Massachusetts; died 26 January 1860, Brookline, Massachusetts Wrote under: Eliza Lee Follen, Mrs. Follen, Mrs. C. T. C. Follen Daughter of Samuel and Sally Barrett Cabot; married Charles T. Christian Follen, 1828 (died 1840) One of 13 children, and assured by her family’s prominence of a stimulating social and intellectual environment, Eliza Cabot Follen early became a friend and follower of William E. Channing and taught in his Unitarian Sunday school. She married a German political refugee who, from 1830 to 1835, was professor of German literature at Harvard. A son was born in 1830. During the Harvard years, the couple became friends of Harriet Martineau and worked actively in the antislavery cause. Because Follen had previously written two works of fiction, edited the Christian Teachers’ Manual, and composed poems and stories for children, it was natural for her, after her husband’s death in 1840, to turn to her pen for a livelihood. She edited Gammer Grethel (1840), the first American edition of Grimm’s fairy tales, and the Child’s Friend, a juvenile periodical, from 1843 to 1850. In addition to writing a biography of her husband, she composed poetry, plays, and stories for children. Until her death she remained active in the abolition movement, working on committees and writing numerous tracts. The first and most popular of Follen’s stories for children was The Well Spent Hour (1827-28), in which nine-year-old Catherine Nelson learns through benevolence and self-control the meaning of a sermon text: ‘‘Let them show their piety at home.’’ Although this didactic tale, suitable for the Sunday school library, substitutes conversations for action and episodes for plot, its kindly tone and benign view of childhood are winning. The Birthday (1832) takes up the history of Catherine just before her fourteenth year, when her father’s financial losses force the mother and children to move to a country cottage. The ensuing idyll of family life, which includes stories told during a party, suffers from a contrived plot and the heavy-handed contrast of good and evil so typical of early 19th-century children’s literature. Simpler in content and more graceful in execution are Follen’s short tales, such as True Stories about Dogs and Cats (1855), The Old Garret (1855), and The Peddler of Dust Sticks (1855), later collected with other tales in the 12-volume Twilight Stories (1858). In The Old Garret, where discarded objects—a


FOOTE

wig, a musket, a broadsword, a tea kettle—give their biographies, Follen adopts the technique associated with Hans Christian Andersen of having inanimate objects assume a narrator’s role. Although her children’s poetry is now almost forgotten, Follen was a pioneer who turned from the harsh, morbid verse characteristic of early 19th-century American children’s poetry to rhymes frankly meant to give more pleasure than instruction. Little Songs (1833 and 1985), reprinted as the final volume of Twilight Stories, was intended, she tells us, ‘‘to catch something of that good-natured pleasantry and musical nonsense which makes Mother Goose so attractive to children of all ages.’’ Even though the verse in this volume lacks the vigor of traditional nursery rhymes, it is remarkable both for its response to children’s tastes and for its gentle vision of childhood. Follen’s adult fiction, The Skeptic (1835) and Sketches of Married Life (1838), deals ostensibly with marriage. The first work, however, resembles a religious tract both in the account of Alice Grey’s efforts to save her husband from the influence of his freethinking cousin and in Follen’s recommendations of Dr. Channing’s Unitarian writings. In the second work, a domestic novel, Follen creates a heroine who demonstrates, as Helen Papashvily points out, ‘‘the marked ability of women in the practical concerns of everyday life.’’ Follen’s Life of Charles Follen (1840), for which she traveled to Germany to obtain additional material, is a sympathetic but unsentimental treatment of her husband’s life. A woman of conviction, both in her support of religion and in her opposition to slavery, Follen is notable for bringing to American children’s literature of the pre-Civil War period a sensitive concern for the feelings and tastes of her young readers.

OTHER WORKS: Selections from the Writings of Fénelon (edited by Follen, 1829). Hymns, Songs, and Fables for Children (1831). Words of Truth (1832). Hymns and Exercises for the Federal Street Sunday School (1839). Nursery Songs (1839). Poems (1839). Sacred Songs for Sunday Schools, Original and Selected (1839). The Liberty Cap (1840). The Works of Charles Follen with a Memoir of His Life (1841-1842). Made-up Stories (1855). Poems (1855). To Mothers in the Free States (1855). Conscience (1858). May Morning and New Year’s Eve (1858). Piccolissima by A. Montgolfier (translated by Follen, 1858). Travellers’ Stories (1858). What Animals Do and Say (1858). Home Dramas for Young People (compiled by Follen, 1859, reissued 1989). Our Home in the Marsh Land; or, Days of Auld Lang Syne (1877).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Meigs, C., A Critical History of Children’s Literature (1969). Papashvily, H. W., All the Happy Endings (1956). Wright, L. H., American Fiction, 1774-1850 (1969). Reference works: AA, DAB. NAW. NCAB. Other references: ElemEngR 8 (1931). NEQ 38 (1965). —PHYLLIS MOE

FOOTE, Mary Hallock Born 19 November 1847, Milton, New York; died 25 June 1938, Hingham, Massachusetts Daughter of Nathaniel and Anne Burling Hallock; married Arthur De Wint Foote, 1876; children: three The youngest child of Quakers, Mary Hallock Foote was raised on the family farm in the Hudson River valley. After completing her schooling in 1864, she took the step, unusual for a young lady of her era, of enrolling at New York City’s Cooper Union to study art. Over the course of three years at Cooper, she prepared herself for a career in black-and-white illustration. Her professional debut came in 1867 with the publication of four of her drawings in A. D. Richardson’s Beyond the Mississippi. During the following 25 years, Foote enjoyed fame as one of the most accomplished of American illustrators. She executed drawings for many of the prominent giftbooks of the period, including Longfellow’s The Skeleton in Armor, Whittier’s Mabel Martin, and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Her illustrations were published regularly in St. Nicholas and Century magazines; ‘‘Pictures of the Far West,’’ her most celebrated series, appeared in the latter during 1888 and 1889. By the 1890s, Foote’s position as ‘‘the dean of women illustrators’’ was secure, and she was elected to the National Academy of Women Painters and Sculptors. Foote’s success as an illustrator was ultimately eclipsed by her achievements as an author. After her marriage to a civil engineer, she spent much of her life in Western mining camps, whose picturesque aspects invited literary as well as visual interpretation. Her first attempt at serious prose, ‘‘A California Mining Camp,’’ appeared in Scribner’s in 1878 and highlighted her experiences in New Almaden, California; it was followed by descriptive sketches of other locales where her husband’s profession took them. From a stay in Leadville, Colorado, came The Led-Horse Claim (1883), Foote’s first novel and a modest bestseller. Between 1883 and 1925, Foote published 11 more novels and four volumes of short stories; she also wrote an excellent autobiography and numerous uncollected tales and sketches. Most of her fiction derived from material rooted deeply in her own experience: in particular, the tension between the urbane East and the boisterous West—between the genteel security of the East Coast and the pioneer existence beyond the Rockies—informed her writing. Foote, approaching her material more sympathetically as her appreciation for the West grew, made the frontier a subject of realistic interest and of romance. As Owen Wister observed, hers was the first voice ‘‘lifted to honor the cattle country and not to libel it.’’ Foote’s finest writing came after 1895, once she had retired from professional illustration and had settled comfortably with her husband and three children in Grass Valley, California. Especially noteworthy is The Desert and the Sown (1902), a novel

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inspired in part from Foote’s experiences in Idaho between 1884 and 1894. Although the plot covers only the three years between the arrival of Emily Bogardus in Idaho and the death of her estranged husband Adam in New York, the tale spans the family fortunes for three generations. A biblical framework reinforces the story’s symbolic reconciliation of East and West, past and present. Two other significant works by Foote are Edith Bonham (1917) and The Ground-Swell (1919). Both are poignant tributes to the past—the former dedicated to the memory of Foote’s best friend, Helena Gilder, and the latter designed as a tribute to Agnes Foote, the author’s youngest daughter, who died in 1904. After 1919 Foote ceased to publish, although during the 1920s she undertook a project that served as the capstone to her career. Written when she was nearing eighty, Foote’s Reminiscences (1972) is a truly distinguished autobiography of interest to historians as well as to literary scholars. From the quiet milldams of Milton to the noisy mining stamps of Leadville, from the frustration and disappointments of Idaho to the comforts and acclaim of the Grass Valley years, this personal account of a genteel Quaker ‘‘irretrievably married into the West’’ makes compelling reading. In 1932 Foote returned with Arthur to the East, living in Hingham, Massachusetts, until her death six years later. To her 20th-century successors Foote bequeathed a legacy of Western fiction which, at its best, provided fresh perspectives, substituted sensitivity for sentimentality, and strove for fidelity. At a time when the West was still subject to humorous exploitation, Foote was the first to achieve the stance of a discerning literary observer, while as a gifted illustrator she also contributed memorable interpretations of the frontier.

OTHER WORKS: John Bodewin’s Testimony (1886). The Last Assembly Ball and The Fate of a Voice (1889). The Chosen Valley (1892). Coeur d’Alene (1894). In Exile, and Other Stories (1894). The Cup of Trembling, and Other Stories (1895). The Little FigTree Stories (1899). The Prodigal (1900). A Touch of Sun, and Other Stories (1903). The Royal Americans (1910). A Picked Company (1912). The Valley Road (1915).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bickford-Swarthout, D., Mary Hallock Foote: Pioneer Woman Illustrator (1996). Cothern, L., ‘‘Becoming Western: Gender and Generation in Mary Hallock Foote’s Dual Career’’ (thesis, 1997). Edwards, C., ‘‘That Violent and Promiscuous Birth’’—A History of the West in Four Voices: Roosevelt, Turner, Foote and Rolvaag (1995). Hatheway, D. M., ‘‘The Last Remove: Women, Mourning, and the American West’’ (thesis, 1994). Johnson, L. A., Mary Hallock Foote (1980). Maguire, J. H., Mary Hallock Foote (Boise State College Western Writers Series #2, 1972). Marschean, A. L., ‘‘Romance and Reality on the Mining Frontier: The Life of Mary Hallock Foote’’ (thesis, 1985). Milowski, C. P., Revisioning the American Frontier: Mary Hallock Foote, Mary Austin, Willa Cather, and the Western Narrative (1996). Northwest Passages: A Literary Anthology of the Pacific

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Northwest from Coyote Tales to Roadside Attractions (1994). Parra, J. M., ‘‘Altered Vision: Three Nineteenth-Century Western Authors: Caroline Kirkland, Mary Hallock Foote and Mary Austin’’ (thesis, 1995). Stegner, W., Angle of Repose (1971). Taft, R., Artists and Illustrators of the Old West, 1850-1900 (1953). Reference works: DAB. NAW. NCAB. Other references: Colorado Magazine (April 1956). Idaho Yesterdays (Summer 1976). University of Wyoming Publications (15 July 1956). WAL (May 1975). —LEE ANN JOHNSON

FORBES, Esther Born 28 June 1891, Westborough, Massachusetts; died 12 August 1967, Worcester, Massachusetts Daughter of William T. and Harriette Merrifield Forbes; married Albert L. Hoskins, 1926 (divorced) Esther Forbes was the youngest of five children; her father was a judge, her mother a historian. She graduated from Bradford Academy in 1912 and studied at the University of Wisconsin (1916-18) before serving as a farmhand in Virginia in response to the war effort. Returning to New England, she became an editor from 1920 until her marriage. During her marriage, Forbes traveled extensively abroad and continued to write. At the time of her divorce in 1933, she had already made a literary reputation as a historical novelist with O Genteel Lady! (1926) and A Mirror for Witches (1928). The height of her fame came in the 1940s when she won first the Pulitzer Prize in History for Paul Revere and the World He Lived In (1942) and then the Newbery Medal for Johnny Tremain: A Novel for Young and Old (1943). Forbes was the first woman member of the American Antiquarian Society and received seven honorary degrees. The self-consciously historical area in which she grew up, family legends (especially those about an ancestor named Esther, an accused witch who died in a Salem prison), and Forbes’ mother’s professional interest in old gravestone inscriptions, diaries, and logs all contributed to making Forbes ‘‘a novelist who wrote like a historian and a historian who wrote like a novelist,’’ as the New York Times described her. All of Forbes’ works are set in New England; both her short novels and her longer fiction and nonfiction exhibit the same meticulous attention to historic details—culinary, artistic, legal, and others. Forbes’ earliest works are brief and focused upon the development of their heroines, who are of various types and fates. Several of these early novels explore the expression of female sexuality and its psychological connection with the attraction to


the demonic in a repressive society that is part of, or heir to, the Puritan tradition. Lanice Bardeen in O Genteel Lady! is a sensual and intellectual Boston editor and writer of the late 19th century who gives up both her passion for a Lawrence-of-Arabia type and for writing in order to marry a staid Harvard professor. In A Mirror for Witches, set in the late 17th century, Doll Bilby has a love affair with the ‘‘devil’’ and dies in childbirth, an accused witch, in a Salem prison. The novel is purportedly written by an 18th-century apologist for the Salem witchcraft trials. In Miss Marvel (1935), the title character is an eccentric spinster of Forbes’ mother’s era; she leads an uneventful outer life and an eventful, romantic inner one, depicted in letters to an imaginary lover. The novel examines her total acceptance and romanticizing of sexual repression. Side by side with the story of Miss Marvel’s social and emotional development is an extensive, contrasting description of physiological changes, at a cellular level, taking place in her body. The contrast between the central Miss Marvel and her less colorful maiden sister, another Miss Marvel, illustrates Forbes’ concern with the individuality of her characters. She avoids stereotypes of either historical periods or the people who dwell in them. Johnny Tremain is the briefer, focused, and fictionalized outgrowth of Paul Revere and the World He Lived In, on which Forbes and her mother collaborated. Both the life of the real silversmith and the now-famous story of the silversmith’s apprentice who adjusts to the handicap of a maimed hand and participates in the Boston revolutionary movement, display Forbes’s intense interest in the part that individuals, significant or insignificant, play in historical events. Both books clearly owe their immediate inspiration to Forbes’ concern with the meaning and nature of human freedom in the context of World War II. Rainbow in the Road (1954), which was made into a musical in 1969, is Forbes’ last published work. It is a lyric lament for the unspoiled New England countryside before the coming of the railroad, and for the ephemeral popular arts practiced by itinerant artists, ‘‘limners’’ (portrait painters), like its hero, Jude Rebough, and his ballad-making friend, Mr. Sharp. Although she was working on a study of witchcraft at the time of her death, Rainbow in the Road seems an appropriate swan song for Forbes herself, whose own choice of a rather popular art form, the historical novel, helped her to win immediate but perhaps transient recognition. Even in her nonfiction, Forbes’ sole analytical thrust is psychological and somewhat Freudian. Forbes considers personalities and social relationships among personalities, rather than broader social, political, or economic issues. She saves her sharp sense of irony, expressed often in wry comments, for individual foibles and generally accepts learned but conventional interpretations of events. Perhaps only in A Mirror for Witches, with its craftily delineated narrator, and in Johnny Tremain, where the problems of an adolescent and of a new society reflect upon each other, do her talents as a novelist and a historian mesh artistically enough to transcend the limits of her genre. Here her efforts to depict the human universal in a particular period and place will probably earn her longer-lasting aesthetic esteem.

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OTHER WORKS: Paradise (1937). The General’s Lady (1938). The Boston Book (with A. Griffin, 1947). The Running of the Tide (1948). America’s Paul Revere (with L. Ward, 1948).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Addington, L. E., Patriot Games: A Curriculum of Democratic Principles in American History as Seen in Children’s Literature (1997). Bales, J., Esther Forbes: A Bio-Bibliography of the Author of Johnny Tremain (1998). Dobrow, V., Johnny Tremain:A Study Guide (1995). Forbes, E., America’s Paul Revere, Esther Forbes (1991). Frazier, A. S., Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes: Curriculum Unit (1997). Haack, J. L., A Literature Unit for Johnny Tremain, by Esther Forbes (1994). Kingsland, T., I Want to Know More About Good Books (audiovisual, 1980). Krueser, C. M., Johnny Tremain:By Esther Forbes (1989). Power, G., Johnny Tremain: Study Guide (1993). Snodgrass, M. E., Johnny Tremain: Esther Forbes (1995). Troy, A., Johnny Tremain (Esther Forbes): Teacher Guide (1988). Novel Guide to Johnny Tremain, by Esther Forbes (1991). Study Guide for Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes: Strategies for Teaching the Novel Based on an Unabridged Version (1989). Reference works: CA (1971, 1975). Newbery Medal Books 1922-55 (1955). SAA (1971). TCA, TCAS. Other references: LJ (15 May 1944). NYT(13 Aug. 1967). —LOIS R. KUZNETS

FORCHÉ, Carolyn Born 28 April 1950, Detroit, Michigan Writes under: Carolyn Sidlosky Daughter of Michael Joseph and Louise Nada Blackford Sidlosky; married Harry Mattison, 1984; children: Sean Christoph. Poet, translator, essayist, activist, and teacher, Carolyn Forché was raised in rural Michigan and educated at Justin Morell College of Michigan State University (B.A., 1972) and Bowling Green State University (M.F.A., 1975). She won the Yale Younger Poets Award the year of her graduation from Bowling Green, for Gathering the Tribes (1976), a ceremonial, sometimes-cosmic collection of lyrics about people and places, written in a densely simple language centered on nouns and names. She has published frequently and fairly steadily since then—poems, translations, essays, reviews, interviews, and prefaces—and won many prizes and fellowships, including the Lamont Poetry Selection Award for her bestselling second book of poetry, The Country Between Us (1981). Appropriately for a distinguished translator and reader of many languages, her own poetry has been translated into German, Swedish, Russian, Spanish, Czech, Greek, Dutch, and Japanese. Forché’s status as an international figure in the arts and politics is based in her identification as a ‘‘poet of witness’’: she has lived in and written about many areas of the world where

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poverty and oppression are social norms, from the Mojave Desert to Johannesburg and, perhaps most crucially for her work, El Salvador. After spending the summer of 1977 on Mallorca with the self-exiled Salvadoran poet Claribel Alegria, translating Alegria’s poems for the volume Flowers from the Volcano (1982), Forché was encouraged by Alegria’s cousin to go to El Salvador as a journalist and to bring back testimony to North America. This she did, in many forms: in magazine articles; in speeches, radio programs, panel discussions, international conferences; in her teaching; and in the poems of The Country Between Us. Forché’s interest in other languages and other cultures has been a constant, starting perhaps from the important childhood relationship with her grandmother Anna, an immigrant Slovak peasant about whom Forché has written regularly since her death in 1968 (see especially ‘‘Burning the Tomato Worms’’ in Gathering the Tribes). Her first book of poems includes a long section based on her experiences living close to Native Americans in the Southwest and British Columbia. This urge toward contact and empathy with those outside her own region, nation, and native tongue, took on the focus of a mission once she began the ‘‘moral and political education’’ (‘‘El Salvador’’) offered by her harrowing years in El Salvador. As she put it in a 1987 essay (‘‘Letters to an Open City’’), ‘‘there are. . .two human worlds and the bridges between them are burning.’’


authorship in 13 years, and it marked a departure from her previous style. The book is divided into five numbered sections, dealing with war in France, Japan, and Germany as well as her own experiences in war-torn Beirut and El Salvador. She focuses on Hiroshima and the Holocaust as two defining events of our generation and assumes that past atrocities predict current ones. Angel of History is placed within the contexts of history, art, and philosophy. It reflects the poet’s personal vision, incorporates the words of characters both real and fictional, and is influenced by Forché’s reading, taking in snatches of texts by the likes of Elie Wiesel, Franz Kafka, Elias Canetti, Georg Trakl, and Ren Char. The experimental style, which received mostly favorable reviews from critics, is characterized by long lines as well as a combination of finished and unfinished thoughts and a lack of closure. A review in Publishers Weekly noted that ‘‘though Forché’s previous books have been groundbreaking works of political and moral depth, this new volume may be the most remarkable.’’ Don Bogged, writing in the Nation, agreed: ‘‘The collection represents a deeper and more complex engagement with her political concerns and a startling departure in style to achieve this. It’s clearly a breakthrough.’’ Intended not to explain but to prevent forgetting, Angel of History has been described as powerful but not easily understandable. Despite its difficulty and the horrors inherent in the subject matter, critics praise the book as poetry of exceptional beauty.

Two of these bridges are poetry and translation: in addition to that of Claribel Alegria, Forché has also brought the poet Robert Desnos into English (The Selected Poems of Robert Desnos, with William Kulik, 1991) and completed an anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (1993). She has also written prefaces and forewords to a number of books by lesserknown poets as well as translations. Photography is another important, if problematic, medium of ‘‘translation.’’ Forché, who is married to the war photographer Harry Mattison, has written prose texts for two collections of photographs, El Salvador: Work of Thirty Photographers (1983) and Shooting Back: Photography by and about the Homeless (1991). Her poem, ‘‘In the Garden of Shukkei-en,’’ provided the text for a 1991 exhibit of photographs at the Arizona State University School of Art.

OTHER WORKS: Women in American Labor History, 1825-1935: An Annotated Bibliography (with Martha Jane Soltow, 1972). History and Motivations of U.S. Involvement in the Control of the Peasant Movement of El Salvador (with Rev. Philip Wheaton, 1980). Essays (selected): ‘‘El Salvador: An Aide Memoire,’’ American Poetry Rev. (July-August, 1981). ‘‘A Fantasy of Birches,’’ Singular Voices: American Poetry Today, (ed. by Stephen Berg, 1985). ‘‘A Lesson in Commitment,’’ The Writer in Our World; ( ed. by Reginald Gibbons, 1986). Foreword to Janet Levine, Inside Apartheid (1988).

Among her talents, Forché is also a teacher. Like many contemporary poets she has held visiting positions at colleges and universities across the country. Since 1989 she has been a tenured faculty member at George Mason University, where she teaches the literature of witness as well as the craft of writing. In her public life Forché has claimed every available forum for her testimony: speeches, conferences, readings, classrooms, radio, television, film, photography, arts journals, newspapers, and newsweeklies. Hers is a voice apparently compelled to speak, coming from the heart of one who has seen much that is unspeakable in places where, often enough, speech is against the law. Her Angel of History (1994), begins with a long poem, ‘‘The Recording Angel,’’ which aptly names the function Forché has come to share with other ‘‘poets of witness’’ in the global village of a genocidal century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA 109 (1983), 117 (1986). CAN 50 (1996). CLC 25 (1983), 83 (1994). Contemporary Poets 4 (1985). DLB 5 (1980), 193 (1998). FC (1990). WWAW, 11th ed. (1979). Other references: APR 22:2 (March/April 1993). Book Forum 2:3 (1976). Carolyn Forché (film, 1990). Commonweal (Nov. 1977). Five Fingers Review 3 (1985). Library Journal (1 Feb. 1996). Ms. (Jan. 1980, Sept. 1982). Nation (May 1982, Oct. 1982, Oct. 1994). Nightsun 9 (Fall 1989). NYRB (24 June 1993). Progressive (Oct. 1993). PW (31 Jan. 1994). Rolling Stone (April 1983). Salmagundi (Spring 1984). TVAR: Literarni Tydenik 10 ([Prague] 1990). Time (March 1982). Whole Earth Review (Spring 1996). Witness in El Salvador (film, 1982).

Angel of History, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry, was Forché’s first full-length book of sole

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—MARY B. CAMPBELL, UPDATED BY KAREN RAUGUST


FORD, Harriet Born 1863, Seymour, Connecticut; died 12 December 1949, New York, New York Daughter of Samuel and Isabel Stoddard Ford; married Fordé Morgan, 1930 Harriet Ford’s earliest goal was to become an actress—not an entirely respectable pursuit for a young lady whose New England ancestors ran to, in her own words, ‘‘theologians and college presidents, a long, grim, wonderful line of unusual men.’’ Buoyed by her ambition and by the conviction she too was unusual, Ford left home to train at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where David Belasco was one of her teachers. Her difficulties in getting an acting engagement after graduation were later to impel her, as a successful playwright, to make protégées of numerous hopeful young actresses and bring them, like homeless kittens, to her producers. Ford’s 10-year struggle to become known as an actress culminated in a season in London, where she appeared in several plays by her friend William Gillette. Reviewers acknowledged the American ingenue’s attractiveness, but deplored her acting. Her ambition switched to writing that year, when she won the prize in a British competition for the best poem celebrating the return of Henry Stanley from Africa. The poem was printed on silk and read at a banquet for the heroic explorer. After her return to New York, Ford’s first produced play, The Greatest Thing in the World (1900), brought stage stardom to Sarah Cowell LeMoyne, for whom it was written. Popular performers Eleanor Robson and Kyrle Bellew assured the gallery’s approval of A Gentleman from France (1901), which Ford later ruefully described as ‘‘the last of the swashbucklers’’ and ‘‘the slaughter of eighteen.’’ In 1923, Ford collaborated on a mystery play, In the Next Room, with Eleanor Robson. The most flourishing period in Ford’s quarter-century as a produced playwright on Broadway was 1912 through 1914, when she collaborated with Harvey O’Higgins on, among their many jointly authored plays, two murder-mystery comedy-thrillers, The Argyle Case (1912) and The Dummy (1914). To research the first, she and O’Higgins relentlessly pursued nationally prominent detective William J. Burns, who was at the time, said Ford, ‘‘in continual danger, as the people against whom he was working were particularly bitter against him.’’ They grilled Burns in daily interview sessions about his real-life experiences, eking out the play’s improbable plot with ‘‘interesting details in crime detection, playful little bits of business with thumbmarks and the like to pique curiosity and satisfy a craving for the unusual.’’ Ford described to interviewer Ada Patterson her methods of work with her two major collaborators: ‘‘When Mr. Patterson and I wrote The Fourth Estate we equally divided our labor. He wrote the first act while I was working on the second. Then he wrote the third while I was writing the fourth. Mr. O’Higgins and I have a slower and more satisfactory method. . . . We talk over a scene until we decide upon the lines. If he thinks of one upon which we

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agree he writes it, or if I hit upon one that pleases us I write it. I sit at my desk and Mr. O’Higgins does a great deal of walking around.’’ Ford felt her particular skill as a dramatist lay in her ‘‘constructive faculty, the power to build.’’ Because of this technical acumen, producers frequently called upon her to ‘‘doctor’’ scripts by other writers. Although 1924 was the year of her last professionally produced play, Sweet Seventeen, Ford continued to write plays, mostly innocuous one-act comedies, published by Samuel French. OTHER WORKS: Audrey (with E. F. Boddington, 1902). The Honour of the Humble (1902). A Little Brother of the Rich (with J. M. Patterson, 1909). Dickey Bird (with H. O’Higgins, 1914). Polygamy (with H. O’Higgins, 1914). Mr. Lazarus (with H. O’Higgins, 1916). The Land of the Free (with F. Hurst, 1917). On the Hiring Line (with H. O’Higgins, 1919). Main Street (with H. O’Higgins, 1921). The Bride (1924). Where Julia Rules (with C. K. Duer, 1924). The Happy Hoboes (with A. S. Tucker, 1928). Mrs. Susan Peters (1928). Wanted—Money (with A. S. Tucker, 1928). What Imagination Will Do (1928). Christopher Rand (1929). Mysterious Money (1929). What Are Parents For? (1930). The Divine Afflatus (1931). Are Men Superior? (1933). Heroic Treatment (1933). Youth Must Be Served (1934). With no date: The Hold-up, Old P. Q., Orphan Aggie, Under Twenty, When a Feller Needs a Friend. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Current Opinion (Nov. 1916). Green Book Magazine (May 1912, Aug. 1913). Strand Magazine (May 1915). Theatre Magazine (July 1914). —FELICIA HARDISON LONDRÉ

FORD, Sallie Rochester Born 1 October 1828, Rochester Springs, Kentucky; died 1910 Daughter of James H. and Demoretta Pitts Rochester; married Samuel H. Ford, 1855; children: five (two died in early childhood) The Baptist faith and theology that inform Sallie Rochester Ford’s novels were an integral part of her life from early childhood. After her mother’s death, Ford, then four, was brought up by her maternal grandmother, a strong farm woman who, Ford recalled, cherished ‘‘those principles which, in orphan childhood, I learned from her lips.’’ Continuing her early interest in reading and theology, Ford graduated at the head of her class from the Female Seminary in Georgetown, Kentucky; two years later she publicly professed her faith in Christ and was baptized. At twenty-six Ford married a Baptist minister and editor of the monthly Christian Repository, which she began to coedit and in which she serialized her first novel, Grace Truman (1857). Living in St. Louis, Missouri, Mobile, Alabama, and Memphis,

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Tennessee, where he held pastorates and she was president of two missionary societies, they had five children, the second and third of whom died in early childhood. Ford produced several more religious novels, a fictionalization of the ‘‘raids and romances’’ of a Confederate Army band, and in her old age, a memorial volume on Rochester, her firstborn son.

Ford’s religious romances are flawed by her sentimental style, wooden characterization, and weak plots. But the suspense, the analysis of theology, and the emotional power of Fannie’s baptism scene make Ford’s first novel, Grace Truman, worth reading.

Grace Truman dramatizes Grace’s conflict between her love for her Presbyterian husband and her belief in Baptist theology, a conflict echoed in two romantic subplots. Her husband’s family, who believe in ‘‘sprinkling,’’ try to ‘‘make a Presbyterian’’ of Grace, who believes in ‘‘dipping,’’ and her troubles increase when her husband begins to backslide. All ends well when the husband, his sister Fannie, the fiancé of Grace’s best friend, and even the Presbyterian minister become Baptists and are dipped in the river.

OTHER WORKS: The Battle of Freedom, Including Seven Letters on Religious Liberty, Addressed to Bishop Spaulding (with S. H. Ford, 1855). Raids and Romances of Morgan and His Men (1863, reissued 1980). Evangel Wiseman; or, The Mother’s Question (1874). The Inebriates: A Story of Love, Suffering and Triumph (1884). Rochester Ford: The Story of a Successful Christian Lawyer (with S. H. Ford, 1904).

Although Ford partially compensates for the limitations of the plot by creating suspense over each stage of Grace’s dilemma, her style is sentimental, her dialogue stilted, and the long-suffering Grace is merely a cardboard figure in both her romantic and her theological trials. Ford’s theological arguments show an analytical mind; a knowledge of scripture, doctrine, and historical and contemporary scholarship; and in the homely analogies made by Aunt Peggy, the black servant, a knack for the concrete illustrations that characterize Puritan sermons.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Lamb’s Biographical Dictionary of the U.S. (1900). Living Female Writers of the South (1872). NCAB. Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary of Notable Americans (1904). Women of the South Distinguished in Literature (1865).

What makes the novel more than a theological discourse tacked onto a romance is the baptism of Fannie, who incurs her father’s ‘‘sore displeasure’’ when she becomes a Baptist. Although the occasion is one of spiritual rejoicing, Fannie is ‘‘severing herself from all of her early associations’’ and she is ‘‘racked beneath the conflict of contending emotions.’’ The conflict between love and principle so unconvincingly treated in Grace’s trials is here movingly portrayed, largely because the scene is psychologically realistic in its suggestion of the emotional consequences of parent-child conflict. The theme of happiness mixed with pain is underlined by Ford’s device of ending the novel, as it began, with a wedding, for the second bride wonders if her life will be ‘‘full of alternating joy and sorrow.’’

FORESTER, Fanny

Mary Bunyan, the Blind Dreamer’s Daughter (1860, reissued 1990) also combines romance and religion, this time in a historical novel focusing on Mary’s devotion to her imprisoned father and her romance with a dissenter, whose execution causes her to die of grief. Religion and romance alike come off as sentimental and insipid; the only readable passages are the brief ones giving biographical information about Bunyan and quotations from his works. Ernest Quest (1878) chronicles Ernest’s dual quest for salvation and a wife. He avoids the snares of Spiritualists and Masons to become a Baptist, and he marries Alice, whom he has rescued from a divorced man. Ernest finds both ‘‘the truth’’ and ‘‘all of earthly happiness’’ in an ending ushered in by the flurry of weddings climaxing the subplots. In spite of occasional moments of suspense (the villainous divorced man plots with the cunning of a Lovelace to trap Alice into marriage), Ernest Quest, like Mary Bunyan, has all of the faults and none of the virtues of Grace Truman.

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—MARTHA CHEW

See JUDSON, Emily Chubbuck

FORNÉS, María Irene Born 14 May 1930, Havana, Cuba Daughter of Carlos L. and Carmen H. Collado Fornés María Irene Fornés has been a powerful moving force in the experimental theater scene since the early 1960s. ‘‘A major voice in American drama,’’ according to Scott Cummings, and ‘‘the truest poet of the theater,’’ according to Erika Munk. Born and educated in Cuba, Fornés came to the U.S. in 1945 and became a naturalized citizen in 1951. Since then, her work has earned her such accolades as official citation as a ‘‘national treasure’’ by the American National Theatre, which commissioned her to write a play. She has received awards from the Rockefeller (1971) and Guggenheim (1972) foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts (1974, 1984, 1985), and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1985). She has also won seven of her eight Obies since 1977, including one (1982) for Sustained Achievement. She also won the Playwrights U.S.A. award in 1986 for her translation of ‘‘Cold Air.’’ Fornés was a founding member of the Women’s Theatre Council and the New York Theatre Strategy, an organization of off-off Broadway playwrights; she served as president of Theatre Strategy from 1973 until it disbanded in 1980. Although never explicitly feminist, Fornés’ plays explore women’s role in society, examining power relations inherent in


sexuality, households, and in all human relationships. Trained early in American Method acting under Lee Strasberg in the Playwrights’ Unit of the Actors Studio, Fornés soon began developing plays in collaboration with performers, often in workshop. She decided that it was important to direct her own works, a part of a natural, continuing process that she likens to cooking and then eating the same meal. ‘‘I never saw any difference between writing and directing,’’ she said in a 1985 interview. ‘‘Of course, they are different things, but they are sequentially and directly connected.’’ The workshops Fornés designs and leads are aimed at ‘‘inducing inspiration.’’ As she told David Savran, ‘‘I have invented exercises that are very effective and very profound.’’ Her own work ‘‘does not present a formulated thesis,’’ but rather arrives as ‘‘messages that come’’ to her out of the inarticulate parts of her consciousness or unconsciousness. Fornés’ plays do not revolve around clear plots but instead present moments of intense engagement among characters. Fefu and Her Friends (1977) was performed, under Fornés’ direction, with the audience divided into groups to move around a loft that served as theater space, seeing the scenes in different sequences. ‘‘From the first,’’ John Kuhn writes, ‘‘Fornés’ broad and playful sense of attention and of verbal and visual images poked audiences with freakishly or theatrically exalted characters, both innocent and experienced.’’ These characters are often limited by constricted environments or by their inability to articulate their experience, but even her simplest characters have a wisdom that transcends these limitations. And whatever their limitations, one senses in Fornés a great compassion and deep respect for the characters. Fornés says her plays become ‘‘crystallized’’ when she ‘‘feels the presence of a character or person. . . . I get it like click.’’ Then she sees ‘‘a picture of the set with the characters in it.’’ Having begun as a painter and textile designer, she says, ‘‘The colors are very, very important for me. And the clothes that people wear. When it finally happens, the play exists; it has taken on its own life.’’ The result is a style most often described as realism, a realism Susan Sontag says eschews both the ‘‘reductively psychological’’ and ‘‘sociological explanations’’ and Bonnie Marranca characterizes as ‘‘emphasizing the interior lives of her characters, not their exterior selves.’’ Fornés’ plays often present an unromanticized sexuality, raw and violent and at the same time casual. Sexuality is rarely the subject, however. The subject is rather the ramifications of sexuality on human relationships, sexuality as power and as a fact of life, another part of her characters’ natural existence. Her recent play, The Summer in Gossensass (produced 1998), is another piece very different from the expected. In it, the two main characters play American actresses living in England who are trying to piece together a play that they have not yet read. Performed through the Women’s Project and Productions at the Judith Anderson Theatre in Manhattan, it received mixed reviews for its unusual perspective. College theater troupes continue to produce the plays of Fornés, and she has been known to travel from her home in New York to visit college campuses for lecture

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and discussion of her work. She also remains an active teacher of the subject at home and abroad. As interest in Fornés’ work continues to surface in the theatrical community, the playwright has been the subject of three books: Fornés: Theater in the Present Tense by Diane Lynn Moroff (1996), Maria Irene Fornés and her Critics by Assunta Bartolomucci Kent (1996), and The Theater of Maria Irene Fornés, edited by Marc Robinson (1999). All are noteworthy for students, directors, and actors exploring American theater and cultural and women’s studies. Her best-known plays include Promenade (1969), Fefu and Her Friends (1977), described by the playwright as ‘‘a breakthrough for me,’’ and Mud (1983), which Bonnie Marranca calls a play centering on ‘‘the act of a woman coming to thought.’’ Largely because they are products of workshops and have been performed off-and off-off-Broadway, Fornés’ plays are often difficult to come by, many never having made it to publication. OTHER WORKS: The Widow (produced 1961, published as La Viuda). Tango Palace (also produced as There! You Died, 1963, published 1966). The Successful Life of 3: A Skit for Vaudeville (produced 1965, published 1971). The Office (produced 1966). A Vietnamese Wedding (produced 1967, published 1971). The Annunciation (produced 1967). Dr. Kheal (produced 1968, published 1971). The Red Burning Light; or, Mission XQ3 (produced 1968, published 1971). Molly’s Dream (produced 1968, published 1971). Promenade and Other Plays (published 1971, includes Dr. Kheal; The Successful Life of 3; A Vietnamese Wedding; The Red Burning Light; and Molly’s Dream). The Curse of the Langston House (produced 1972). Dance (produced 1972). Aurora (produced 1974). Cap-a-Pie (produced 1975). Washing (produced 1976). Lolita in the Garden (produced 1977). In Service (produced 1978). Eyes on the Harem (produced 1979). Evelyn Brown (a Diary) (produced 1980). Blood Wedding (translation and adaptation of García Lorca, 1980). Life Is a Dream (translation and adaptation of Calderón, 1981). A Visit (produced 1981). The Danube (1982, published 1986). Sarita (1984, published 1986). Abingdon Square (produced 1984). No Time (produced 1985). The Conduct of Life (1985, published 1986). Cold Air (translation and adaptation of Pinera, 1985). Drowning (1985, published 1986). Lovers and Keepers (produced 1986). The Trial of Joan of Arc on a Matter of Faith (produced 1986). The Mother (title later changed to Charley, produced 1986). Art (produced 1986). María Irene Fornés: Plays (1986, includes The Danube; Mud; Sarita; The Conduct of Life). Hunger (produced 1985). Three Pieces for a Warehouse (produced 1988). Springtime (1989, published 1991). The manuscript collection of María Irene Fornés is in the Lincoln Center Library of the Performing Arts in New York City. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brater, E., ed., Feminine Focus (1989). Chen, L., ‘‘Violence in the Spotlight: Exploring the Violent and Violated Female Characters in Selected Plays of Marsha Norman and María Irene Fornés’’ (thesis, 1993). Kent, A. B., María Irene Fornés and her Critics (1996). Moroff, D. L., Fornés: Theater in

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the Present Tense (1996). Robinson, M., ed., The Theater of María Irene Fornés (1999). Redmond, J., ed., Theatrical Space (1987). Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights (1987). Reference works: American Women Dramatists of the Twentieth Century (1982). CA (1977, Online, 1999). CANR (1990). CLC (1986, 1990). Contemporary Dramatists (1973, 1977, 1982, 1988). DLB (1981). FC (1990). Hispanic Writers (1990). MTCW (1991). Notable Women in American Theatre (1989). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: NR (25 Feb. 1978). Newsday (9 Apr. 1998). Newsweek (4 June 1969). New York (18 Mar. 1985). NYT (5 June 1969, 14 Jan. 1978, 22 Jan. 1978, 25 Oct. 1983, 13 Mar. 1984). Performing Arts Journal (1983, 1984). Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present (1989). Theater (Winter 1985). VV (25 Jan. 1973, 23 Mar. 1977, 23 Jan. 1978, 29 Aug. 1986). Wisconsin State Journal (7 Nov. 1998). —MARCIA HEPPS AND WILLIAM KEENEY, UPDATED BY CARRIE SNYDER

FORREST, Katherine V. Born 20 April 1939, Windsor, Ontario, Canada Daughter (adopted) of Leland W. and Mary Gilhuly McKinlay Katherine V. Forrest has written novels and short fiction in a wide variety of genres, all dealing with lesbian protagonists and intended primarily for lesbian readers. Although she is best known for a series of mystery novels involving a lesbian police detective, she has also written science fiction, erotica, and romances. Forrest is also a noted editor of lesbian fiction, holding the position of senior fiction editor for Naiad Press, the largest publisher of lesbian fiction in the United States. Forrest was adopted as a young child. Her adoptive parents both died while she was in high school. In 1957 she moved from Canada to the U.S., where she attended Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. She later moved to California and attended the University of California at Los Angeles. She eventually became an American citizen and continued to live in California, primarily in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Forrest worked a variety of jobs before becoming a full-time writer in 1979. Within five years, she established herself as one of the most popular authors of lesbian fiction in the U.S. Her first novel, Curious Wine (1983), was an erotic romance detailing the relationship between two women, Diana Holland and Lane Christianson. Curious Wine sold more than 100,000 copies and is said to be the most widely read lesbian novel since Radclyffe Hall’s early classic The Well of Loneliness (1928). In 1994 Curious Wine became the first lesbian novel to be recorded on audiotape. In 1984 Forrest published two more bestselling novels, in very different genres. Daughters of a Coral Dawn was a science fiction novel in which a group of women leave Earth and establish a lesbian utopia on the planet Materna. Amateur City introduced

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Kate Delafield, a detective for the Los Angeles Police Department. In addition to dealing with the challenges of investigating murder cases, Delafield must keep her lesbianism a secret in order to avoid jeopardizing her career in a field dominated by heterosexual males. Amateur City was the first lesbian novel to be offered by the Century Book Club of Los Angeles, the first book club for gay and lesbian readers. Although Forrest continued to write short stories and novels in many different genres, the novels about Kate Delafield quickly became her most famous works. The second novel in the series, Murder at the Nightwood Bar (1987), was one of the most popular. It has been frequently used as a text in college classes dealing with mystery fiction, women writers, or gay and lesbian literature. The novel involves the murder of Dory Quillin, a young woman who had been rejected by her family because she was a lesbian. Plans commenced in 1996 to adapt Murder at the Nightwood Bar into a motion picture. All the Delafield novels use realistic, suspenseful mystery plots to deal with serious social issues. In The Beverly Malibu (1990), the long-term effects of the political repression of the McCarthy Era of the 1950s are seen in a case involving the murder of movie director Owen Sinclair. Murder by Tradition (1991) deals directly with homophobia as Delafield investigates the murder of Teddie Crawford, an openly gay young man. In addition to confronting the homophobia of her police partner, Ed Taylor, Delafield faces the possibility that her lesbianism may be exposed. Both The Beverly Malibu and Murder by Tradition won the Lambda Literary award for lesbian fiction. The Beverly Malibu was the first hardcover book published by Naiad Press, winning it greater attention from mainstream reviewers than previous novels in the series. While remaining in the suspense genre, Forrest’s fiction took a new direction with the publication of Flashpoint in 1994. A political thriller set in California in the early 1990s, this novel again succeeded in discussing controversial topics while entertaining readers with a fast-paced, carefully plotted story. By the late 1990s, the popularity of Forrest’s novels had increased to the point where they began to be published by mainstream publishers in addition to Naiad Press. As an editor, Forrest collaborated with Barbara Grier on three anthologies of lesbian fiction. The Erotic Naiad (1992), The Romantic Naiad (1993), and The Mysterious Naiad (1994) proved there were many talented authors writing for a lesbian audience. The success of Forrest’s work also encouraged many writers of lesbian fiction, particularly in the genre of mystery fiction. OTHER WORKS: An Emergence of Green (1986). Dreams and Swords (1988). Liberty Square (1996). Apparition Alley (1998). Sleeping Bones (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: CA (1991). Completely Queer (1998). Gay and Lesbian Literature (1993). Great Women Mystery Writers (1994). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996). —ROSE SECREST


FORTEN, Charlotte L. Born 17 August 1837, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 23 July 1914, Washington, D.C. Wrote under: Charlotte Forten, Lottie Daughter of Robert B. and Mary Virginia Forten; married Francis J. Grimké, 1878; children: one, who died in infancy Charlotte L. Forten, a member of Philadelphia’s most prestigious black family, was tutored at home until 1854, when she went to live with black abolitionist Charles Lenox Remond, in Salem, Massachusetts, where she attended Higginson Grammar School. She graduated from Salem Normal School in 1856 and taught white students at Epes Grammar School. Despite ill health, Forten was a member of the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society. She read widely, studied French and German, and wrote occasional poems and essays. In 1862 Forten secured employment in a Port Royal, South Carolina, school for the children of ex-slaves. She also taught adults and thus contributed to the success of the Port Royal Experiment, an effort to prove ex-slaves were educable and could be trained as soldiers. Forten returned to Philadelphia in 1864 and published an account of her Southern experience in the Atlantic Monthly. Forten married a Presbyterian minister and abolitionist. They had one child, who died in infancy. Except for a brief period in Florida, Forten lived in Washington until her death. Forten’s poetry, sometimes published under the pseudonym ‘‘Lottie,’’ expresses the sentimentality and piety characteristic of poetry catering to the poorest of popular Victorian tastes. Her essays generally lack literary merit. The best is ‘‘Life on the Sea Islands’’ (Atlantic Monthly, May/June 1864), which presents material also contained in the Journal account of her years in the South. Only Forten’s Journal entitles her to a place among significant women writers of the 19th century. Forten’s dedication to the abolitionist cause brought her into contact with all the leading abolitionists; so the Journal contains personal responses to Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Jonathan Parker, and William Wells Brown. Her record of literary figures whom she knew includes Whittier, who became her valued friend, and Lowell and Emerson, whose lectures she attended. The first half of the Journal is useful as a record of the day-to-day activities of a genteel, young black woman of the 19th century. The entire journal is pervaded by Forten’s racial awareness. Though her family has been free for three generations, Forten identified with the slaves. For her, the Fourth of July was a mockery of the principle of democracy as no man, white or black, could be free in a land where slavery existed. She deplored the transatlantic telegraph because it brought England ‘‘so very near this wicked land.’’ Similarly, she preferred Salem to Philadelphia because of the indignities blacks experienced in Pennsylvania, where they were barred from restaurants and denied seats on public conveyances and where captured slaves were dragged

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through the streets. Yet she was so sensitive to the lack of total acceptance in Salem that she made no friends among her schoolmates, who could not accept her wholeheartedly. The final sections of the Journal are valuable for their picture of the transition of ex-slaves into free people. There are anecdotes about slave experience, about precarious escapes from masters evacuating their homes in the face of Union advances, and accounts of children dying from whooping cough. But the closing entries also tell the story of Forten’s appreciation of the music of the freed slaves; of her satisfaction at seeing children and adults learn to read and write, though their spoken language was Gullah; and of her pride while watching field hands become brave soldiers determined to defend their freedom. The language of the Journal is informal except for the convention of addressing it as ‘‘dear A.’’ It seldom lapses into colloquialisms, and the only example of such freedom is in the use of ‘‘Secesh’’ for the secessionists or an occasional military expression. Its tone is made personal by such private observations as Forten’s wondering if Browning—or any man—could really merit the devotion in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry; her thoughts about her ill health and its interference with her ambitions; and the realistic descriptions of her hospital experience, with her sincerely expressed response to death and injury. The Journal ends on 15 May 1864, when Forten made her last entry at the Oliver Fripp Plantation in Port Royal. The Journal is written with candor and clarity. The New England entries reveal a sensitive person determined to study and learn all that she can in order to be a living demonstration of the capabilities of black people. The Journal is the record, as well, of a talented and gracious young woman as outsider—because she is black. OTHER WORKS: The Journal of Charlotte Forten: A Free Negro in the Slave Era (reissue, 1981). The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimké (reissue, 1989). The Poetry of Charlotte L. Grimké (database, 1995). A Free Black Girl Before the Civil War: The Diary of Charlotte Forten, 1854 (2000). The papers of Charlotte L. Forten are at Howard University in Washington, D.C. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barksdale, R., and K. Kinnamon, Black Writers of America (1972). Braxton, J. M., Charlotte Forten Grimké (18371914) and the Search for a Public Voice (1985). Burchard, P., Charlotte Forten: A Black Teacher in the Civil War (1995). Hughes Wright, R., A Tribute to Charlotte Forten, 1837-1914 (1993). Katz, W. L., ed., Two Black Teachers during the Civil War (1969). Longsworth, P., Charlotte Forten, Black and Free (1970). Oden, G., The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten, the Salem-Philadelphia Years (1854-1862) Rexamined (1983). Rider, J., ‘‘Charlotte Forten and the Port Royal Mission’’ (thesis, 1995). Rose, W. L., Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (1964). Wilson, E., Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962). Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays

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on Women’s Diaries (1996). Woman’s ‘‘True’’ Profession: Voices from the History of Teaching (1981). Reference works: Black American Writers Past and Present (1975). NAW. Other references: African-American Poetry of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology (1992). African American Profiles in History Volume Three (recording, 1995). Charlotte Forten’s Mission Experiment in Freedom (audiovisual, 1991). Half Slave, Half Free Part 2: Charlotte Forten’s Mission (audiovisual, 1992). Historic Black Abolitionists (audiovisual, 1996). Richard Allen Story; Charlotte Forten (recording, 1987). —GWENDOLYN A. THOMAS

FOSTER, Hannah Webster Born 10 September 1758, Salisbury, Massachusetts; died 17 April 1840, Montreal, Canada Wrote under: A Lady of Massachusetts Daughter of Grant and Hannah Wainwright Webster; married John Foster, 1785 Little is known of either Hannah Webster Foster’s childhood or education, but the numerous historical and literary allusions in her books suggest she was well-educated for her time and sex. Foster is best known for her novel The Coquette; or, The History of Eliza Wharton (1797). After the publication of her second book, The Boarding School; or, Lessons of a Preceptress to Her Pupils (1798), Foster wrote only short articles for newspapers. Upon her husband’s death she moved to Montreal to live with two of her five children, two daughters who also wrote. The Coquette, which is ‘‘founded on fact,’’ was based on the life of Elizabeth Whitman of Hartford, Connecticut, a distant cousin of Foster’s husband. It is a seduction novel in epistolary form (obviously much influenced by the novels of Samuel Richardson, such as the epistolary seduction novel, Clarissa Harlowe) with the typical strengths and weaknesses of this genre. Incidents are reported several times by different people, a technique that reveals character through a comparison of points of view. Many of the letters seem natural and spontaneous. Others, however, suffer from excessive length, didactic digressions, and an overemphasis on sentiment and sensibility. From the novel’s beginning Eliza emerges as a strongwilled young woman delighting in a newly found freedom from her parents and a dull fiancé. She is convincingly indecisive about her two new suitors, the admirable Mr. Boyer, a clergyman, and Major Sanford, who, she is warned, is ‘‘ a second Lovelace’’ (the seducer in Clarissa). Sanford, too, is a convincing and complex character. Seduction to Sanford is a game; he sees Eliza as a coquette and determines to ‘‘avenge [his] sex by retaliating the

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mischiefs she meditates.’’ He writes: ‘‘If she will play with a lion, let her beware the paw, I say.’’ Sanford is confident of his powers, but his pride is hurt by her friends’ warnings against him and by her attraction to Boyer. These make him even more determined to win Eliza, which he does eventually, even though he has, in the meantime, married for money. Justice appropriate to the seduction-novel genre is meted out to Eliza and Sanford, accompanied by lengthy confessions and moral lectures. The lessons are taught by the characters themselves, however, and their contrition seems real enough, a fact which makes The Coquette one of the better American examples of the genre and the book went through 13 editions in its first 40 years. The Boarding School was not so popular. It is dedicated to ‘‘the young ladies of America’’ and demonstrates how a clergyman’s widow, Mrs. Williams, educates young girls to fulfill their future roles as well-bred ladies, wives, and mothers. Lacking plot, the letters in The Boarding School can only be read as a series of thinly disguised lectures on female education and deportment that repeat the accepted wisdom of 18th-century America. A contemporary critic reproached Foster for having failed to establish at least a model of good letter-writing, since she had said nothing original in the book. The book does, however, contain the warning, implied in The Coquette, against the accepted maxim that ‘‘reformed rakes make the best husbands.’’ Foster argues society has been too lenient with seducers and pleads for more tolerance for their victims.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Akgun, D. A., ‘‘Expressions of Oppression or Power?—Reconsidering the Texts of Hannah Webster Forster and Tabitha Gilman Tenny’’ (thesis, 1996). Bornstein, S., ‘‘Masquerading as the Decrees of Fate: The Fate of Society and the Will of Law in The Coquette and The Awakening’’ (thesis, 1994). Brown, H. R., The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789-1860 (1940). Groves, S. M., ‘‘Machiavels in Petticoats: Feminist Messages in Three Didactic Sentimental Novels: Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte: A Tale of Truth, Hannah Foster’s The Coquette, and Helena Wells’ The Step-mother’’ (thesis, 1990). Hikel, J., ‘‘Educating the ‘Republican Daughter,’ Early American Novels and Conduct Literature, 1789- 1800’’ (thesis, 1995). Matzke, C. K. B., ‘‘The Woman Writes as if the Devil Was in Her: A Rhetorical Approach to Three Early American Novels’’ (thesis, 1993). Mott, F. L., Golden Multitudes (1947). Osborne, W. S., ed., The Power of Sympathy and The Coquette (1970). Petter, H., The Early American Novel (1971). Stern, J. A., The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (1997). Tassoni, J. P., ‘‘A Thousand Conversations: Genre Placement and Social Relations in American Sentimental Narratives’’ (thesis, 1992). Telfer, T. A., ‘‘Writing as a Revolutionary Activity: Five Writers of the American Revolutionary Era’’ (thesis, 1992). Reference works: AA, DAB. NAW. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: AL (Nov. 1932). —ELAINE K. GINSBERG


FOX, Helen Morgenthau Born 27 May 1884, New York, New York; died 13 January 1974, Mt. Kisco, New York Daughter of Henry and Josephine Sykes Morgenthau; married Mortimer Fox, 1906; children: three Helen Morgenthau Fox, one of America’s foremost garden writers, was the daughter of the immigrant financier/philanthropist/politician Henry Morgenthau. Encouraged by her family to become involved in some serious lifework, she spent some time in social work (with the Henry Street Settlement and such institutions) after her graduation from Vassar College and marriage to an architect. However, as she explains in Adventure in My Garden (1965), from the time she was fourteen she believed her vocation was to work with plants. ‘‘In my social work I learned a good deal about human nature and human problems, but gradually I realized this work was not for me. It did not fill me with joy, as if music were playing in my heart, which is how I always felt when I worked in my garden,’’ she wrote. Along with raising three children, Fox studied botany at Columbia University and worked at the New York Botanical Garden with Dr. A. B. Stout, who encouraged her to write her first garden book, a study of lilies, Garden Cinderellas (1928). Thereafter she devoted her life to the study of plants and the writing and translating of garden books. Fox frequently lectured on horticulture and appeared on radio and television broadcasts. She held membership in many horticultural associations, receiving the distinguished service award from the New York Botanical Garden in 1960. In a 1928 article in the National Horticultural Magazine, Fox stated that ‘‘the best garden book’’ should ‘‘give one a sense of gardening as an art and make us feel its relation to the other arts.’’ Her books do just that. A cultured woman, with a background of travel, study, and work, Fox always presented gardening as one of the popular arts, setting it in a historical and cultural context. Most of her work falls into two groups: studies of European gardening (including translations from the French) and practical treatises with an informal, autobiographical emphasis. Fox translated a book of essays and sketches by the 20th-century garden designer Jean Forestier, who was an expert in restoring the lost gardens of Moorish Spain. Fox’s study of Spanish gardens, Patio Gardens (1929), relates to his work. Yet characteristically, she made her book more than the usual study of foreign gardens. The history, culture, and lifestyle of the people became part of the study; in addition, the book offers practical suggestions, particularly for the modern gardener in America’s Southwest. André Le Notre (1962) is a biography of the landscape architect who created Versailles, an introduction to his work, and a piece of cultural history. Fox is best known for works about her own gardens and gardening experiences. Gardening with Herbs for Flavor and Fragrance (1933), an introduction to herb growing, is still in print, although it has had many imitators. A similar book about

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growing vegetables, Gardening for Good Eating (1943), was no doubt encouraged by the victory-garden campaign. In both, Fox presumes that the reader takes a scholarly interest in the subject and includes chapters on historical considerations and literary associations. In The Years in My Herb Garden (1953), a more personal account of her herb gardens, Fox again combines historical, horticultural, and literary material. Organized mainly by plant families (‘‘The Mints and Their Relatives’’), with an emphasis on garden design, this book is an American classic for herb growers. Fox’s last garden book, Adventure in My Garden, contains the most complete descriptions of her own gardens. To Fox, gardening was a lifetime ‘‘adventure’’ that she shared with others through her books. OTHER WORKS: Gardens by J. C. N. Forestier (translated by Fox, 1924). The Dancing Girl of Shamakha by J. A. Gobineau (translated by Fox, 1926). A Delectable Garden by B. Palissy (translated by Fox, 1931). Abbé David’s Diary by D. Armand (translated by Fox, 1949). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Morgenthau, H. All in a Lifetime (1922). Other references: NYT (14 Jan. 1974). —BEVERLY SEATON

FOX, Paula Born 22 April 1923, New York, New York Daughter of Paul H. and Elsie de Sola Fox; married Richard Sigerson (divorced); Martin Greenberg, 1962 A ‘‘traveling child,’’ Paula Fox seldom lived any place longer than a year or two and seldom saw either of her parents. Following high school, she worked at a variety of jobs before she married, had two sons, then obtained a divorce. After attending Columbia University, Fox taught elementary school for several years. She began to write seriously after her second marriage. Fox has written television scripts, short stories, and novels, but she is known chiefly for her children’s books. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (1972), an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1972), and the Hans Christian Andersen Award in recognition of her entire body of writing (1978). For readers under ten, Fox pictures a stable society administered by solicitous adults who lavish restrictive attention on imaginative and venturesome little boys. These stories are spiced with dry humor, witty but realistic dialogue, and fanciful but improbable characters or episodes. In Maurice’s Room (1966), the parents of a dedicated junk collector finally move to the country after their son’s possessions overcrowd his bedroom in their city

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apartment. When Lewis’s parents (A Likely Place, 1967) take a trip to Chicago, he gains greater freedom and acquires self-confidence by helping an elderly Spanish shoemaker communicate with his overly protective son-in-law. For older juvenile readers, Fox explores the terror and loneliness of preadolescent youths who must prove themselves in the mysterious world outside the home. In How Many Miles to Babylon (1967), The Stone-Faced Boy (1968), Portrait of Ivan (1969), Blowfish Live in the Sea (1972), and The Slave Dancer (1973), a journey of adventure and self-discovery tests ingenuity, courage, comprehension, or endurance and culminates in personal growth as well as increased understanding of, or achievement in, the adult world. Skillful blending of the actual and the symbolic entices the reflective reader to delve beneath the surface story and ponder such perennial puzzles as illusion and reality or the enigma of human behavior. These are Fox’s best books. The Slave Dancer, Fox’s only historical novel, won the Newbery Medal in 1974. Thirteen-year-old Jessie is kidnapped, taken aboard a slave ship, and forced to play the fife while the slaves dance for exercise. The revolting picture of the brutality of the seamen and the inhumanity of the slave trade is softened slightly by Jessie’s compassion for the captives. In her adult novels, Fox portrays lonely, confused, rootless New Yorkers ensnared in the misery of unfulfilling work, unrewarding relationships, and unsatisfying marriages. She offers astute, sensitive observation, but only tentative resolution and cheerless conclusion. She has been praised for her original talent, lucid style, technical skill, incisive wit, and penetrating analysis of character. Since 1980 Fox has produced six books for young readers and two novels for adults. Reviewers and critics have continued to praise her ability to depict the inner life of young protagonists, to create realistic characters and authentic settings, and to write clear, graceful prose. Fox excels in portraying the emotions and perceptions of children and adolescents as they grow in understanding themselves, their peers, and the adults around them. In A Servant’s Tale (1984), Fox skillfully records the childhood experiences and relationships of Luisa de la Cueva while evoking the locale and lore of the West Indies. The adult Luisa, however, is less interesting and less believable than the child. In her juvenile fiction, Fox never stints on complexity nor avoids difficult, even tragic, themes. The novels of this period explore guilt, grief, divorce, alcoholism, and death. In each book, the protagonist confronts a complicated individual who exhibits attractive qualities but who also causes another discomfort, unhappiness, humiliation, injury, or loss. Each carefully crafted plot leads to a resolution in which the young person comes to terms with this individual in a manner that will foster future growth and happiness. The ‘‘difficult’’ person in A Place Apart (1980) is a talented, arrogant, and wealthy high school student who befriends newcomers—and attempts to control their lives. Victoria Finch escapes his manipulation, but another student, who tries to regain his self-respect by driving up a dangerous, snow-covered mountain

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road, is seriously injured. In One-Eyed Cat (1984), eleven-year-old Ned believes he has injured a wildcat when he disobeyed his father and fired his new air rifle. Fox examines how Ned’s burdened conscience affects his relations with his parents, his friends, an elderly neighbor, and the cat. On one level, the discordant character in the novel is the housekeeper, but the tale also demonstrates that a genuinely good person (Ned’s father, Reverend Wallis) can cause discomfort for those who exhibit less patience and forbearance. When fifteen-year-old Catherine Ames (The Moonlight Man, 1986) spends a month in Nova Scotia with her charming but irresponsible alcoholic father, she gains insight into her parents’ divorce and realizes she cannot change her father’s behavior. While the Corey family (Lily and the Lost Boy, 1987) is living on a Greek island, twelve-year-old Lily feels left out when her older brother becomes friends with Jack, a rootless American youth whose father dances superbly but drinks too much. While riding his bicycle near the edge of a cliff, the reckless Jack causes the death of a Greek child. Despite her dislike for Jack, Lily overcomes her fear and goes out alone at night to befriend him. Obsessed with old family jealousies, ten-year-old Emma’s acid-tongued Aunt Bea (The Village by the Sea, 1988) has an unkind word for everyone. At the climax of the novel, the elderly woman destroys the miniature village Emma and her friend have painstakingly built from debris found on the beach. Emma’s uncle restrains her from immediate retaliation, and she later gains greater understanding of her unhappy aunt. Considered one of America’s outstanding writers for young readers, Fox continued to receive numerous literary awards, including an American Book Award for A Place Apart and Newbery Honor awards in 1985 and 1989. Her sensitive treatment of tough subjects in juvenile literature continues in The Eagle Kite (1995), where she tackles a tremendously weighty subject for individuals of any age—AIDS. Liam’s father is dying of AIDS; he is told by his family this is a result of a recent blood transfusion, but the educational system’s efforts at sex education have made it impossible for Liam to accept this explanation. Forced to recall an incident he has tried his best to forget—seeing his father embracing a young man on a beach several years before—he finds his shame and anger at his family’s well-intentioned lies difficult to live with. His father withdraws to a cabin by the sea where Liam is able to spend time alone with him and where both their wounds can begin to heal. Western Wind (1993) presents the story of Elizabeth, who has been sent away for the summer to stay with her aging grandmother, an artist living on a secluded island off the Maine coast. Elizabeth’s family has recently had a new addition—a baby boy who she is certain has become more important to her parents than she, causing her banishment for the summer. The island, itself a character in this story, is brooding, stark, and inhabited only by Elizabeth’s grandmother and one other family, the Herkimers, who have an eccentric, overprotected son named Aaron. During her month on the island, Elizabeth learns a good deal about friendship, relationships in general, and the real reason for her trip—to spend some final time with her grandmother, who is quite ill.


Radiance Descending (1997) involves a particularly painful situation for children and an often popular subject of children’s literature—the mentally disabled sibling. Paul Coleman’s younger brother Jacob has Down’s syndrome. Paul attempts to ignore him, becomes an overachiever in class, and refuses to discuss his ‘‘retard’’ brother with his friends. When he is given responsibility for taking Jacob to the doctor for weekly allergy shots, he is forced to work within Jacob’s limitations and finds his brother has a wonderful circle of caring friends. Paul learns compassion, begins to notice the trials of those around him, and discovers that he is not alone in his struggle to blend Jacob into his life. OTHER WORKS: Poor George (1966). Dear Prosper (1967). Hungry Fred (1969). The King’s Falcon (1969). Desperate Characters (1970). Good Ethan (1973). The Western Coast (1973). The Widow’s Children (1976). The Little Swineherd and Other Tales (1978). Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1984). The God of Nightmares (1990). Monkey Island (1991). Azmat and His Brothers: Three Italian Tales Remembered (1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Arbuthnot, M. H., and Z. Sutherland, Children and Books (1972). Kingman, L., ed., Newbery and Caldecott Medal Books, 1966-1975 (1975). Short Shorts: An Anthology of the Shortest Stories (1983). Townsend, J. R., A Sounding of Storytellers (1979). Reference works: CLR (1976). CA (1978). CANR (1987). CLC (1974, 1978). Dictionary of American Children’s Fiction, 1960-1984 (1986). DLB (1986). Fourth Book of Junior Authors and Illustrators (1978). SATA (1979, 1990). Values in Selected Children’s Books of Fiction and Fantasy (1987). Other references: Alan Review (Winter 1987). Booklist (1 Feb. 1995, 1 Sept. 1997). Good Conversation! A Talk with Paula Fox (audiovisual, 1992). Horn Book (April 1984, Mar.-Apr. 1994). Interracial Books for Children (1974). NYRB (27 June 1985). NYTBR (8 Oct. 1972, 20 Jan. 1974, 9 Nov. 1980, 11 Nov. 1984, 18 Nov. 1984, 5 Feb. 1989, 8 July 1990, 10 Nov. 1991). Paula Fox (recording, 1993). Paula Fox (audiovisual, 1987). Paula Fox Interview with Kay Bonetti (recording, 1986). PW (6 Apr. 1990, 23 Aug. 1993, 20 Feb. 1995, 21 July 1997). TLS (21 Feb. 1986, 15 Jan. 1988). —ALICE BELL, UPDATED BY REBECCA C. CONDIT

FRANKAU, Pamela Born 1908, London, England; died 9 June 1967, London, England Also wrote under: Eliot Naylor Daughter of Gilbert and Dorothea Black Frankau; married Marshall Dill, Jr., 1945 (divorced) Pamela Frankau and her older sister were raised by their mother, who was separated from their novelist father. At eighteen,

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Frankau took a job as copywriter with a London publisher. She published her first novel at nineteen. During the war she served in the army, entered the Catholic church in 1942, and moved to the U.S. in 1945 with her husband, from whom she was divorced in 1961. Frankau’s fiction divides into two distinct groups, separated by the war and her conversion to Catholicism. In her literary autobiography, Pen to Paper (1962), she ruthlessly assesses the earlier works, describing the style as a ‘‘carefully erected screen of words,’’ where ‘‘descriptions became longer and fancier.’’ Her extremely popular first novel, Marriage of Harlequin (1927), portrays a young girl trapped in role-playing relationships in the amoral atmosphere of London in the 1920s. Subsequent novels often concentrate on love affairs, with flirtatious and witty dialogue, never frank sexuality. In She and I (1930) and Born at Sea (1932), Frankau attempts psychological complexity (split personality, neuroticism) without notable success, and in The Devil We Know (1939) her main character is a young Jewish writer struggling with feelings of inferiority and persecution. Most of these novels have negligible plots. The best gently satirize the superficiality and hypocrisy of British high society, but when the satire fails we are left with the superficiality alone. Frankau, aware of the shortcomings in her writings of this period, explains the ease and enjoyment with which she wrote, and the attraction of money, encouraged her to publish prolifically. The books written after the war and Frankau’s conversion are stylistically and thematically different. Written in what Frankau calls ‘‘straight English,’’ they often have an overt religious message, frequently portraying the emptiness of life without religious faith. Several of these novels use clumsy religious symbolism. The Offshore Light (1952) contrasts consecutive chapters of third-person realism with first-person symbolism presented as the notebooks of a divorced and dying statesman. His notebooks represent the religious viewpoint as an ‘‘island,’’ of which he is ‘‘The Guardian,’’ with his close friend ‘‘Peter.’’ Wreath for the Enemy (1954) is the story of a young girl’s confused search for values in the social sophistication of the Riviera. The three parts of the book are each told by a separate narrator attempting to interpret the same events, but these separate viewpoints are never successfully resolved. The search for spiritual values is also the subject of The Bridge (1957), but again the viewpoint, in which the main character reviews his life from an otherworldly perspective, is unconvincing. Road Through the Woods (1961) is more successful. It introduces a young amnesiac who, looking exactly like his father, arrives in the Irish town where his father grew up, causing varied responses from the parish priest, the woman his father jilted, and an old man searching for a mysterious manuscript. Through mystical remembrances of events that occurred before his birth, the boy acquires a sense of Catholic heritage and decides to stay on in the town, even after his nihilistic father comes to bring him home. He rights the older generation’s wrongs, choosing the church and a girl from the parish. Frankau’s most ambitious effort, a trilogy called Clothes of a King’s Son (1964, 1965, 1967), has a similar young man as hero,

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distracted by worldliness but retaining a mysterious clairvoyance and the power to heal. The three volumes trace his history from boyhood to his miraculous return home after he has been assumed dead during the war. Frankau’s last novel, published posthumously, is her best. Colonel Blessington (1969) is a quickly paced suspense mystery, almost Shakespearean with its riddles, disguises, twins seemingly separated, a close father-daughter relationship, and even a death by water. Here Frankau’s attraction to the occult is incorporated into a genre that uses psychological enigmas to their best literary effect. Her work has been admired for its wit and stylistic charm by many critics, including Noel Coward and Orville Prescott. OTHER WORKS: Three (1929). Letters from a Modern Daughter to Her Mother (1931). I Was the Man (1932). Women Are So Serious (1932). Foolish Apprentices (American title: Walk Into My Parlour, 1933). Tassell-Gentle (American title: Fly Now Falcon, 1934). I Find Four People (1935). Fifty-Fifty, and Other Stories (1936). Jezebel (1937). A Democrat Dies (American title: Appointment with Death, 1940). Shaken in the Wind (1948). The Willow Cabin (1949). To the Moment of Triumph (1953). Ask Me No More (1958). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Catholic Authors (1952). TCA, TCAS. Other references: NY (29 Nov. 1958, 25 Feb. 1967). NYT (24 March 1957, 9 June 1967). NYTBR (22 Jan. 1961, 18 Feb. 1962, 26 Feb. 1967, 15 June 1969). SR (1 Jan. 1966). Time (29 Dec. 1958). —SUZANNE HENNING UPHAUS

FRANKEN, Rose Born December 1898, Gainesville, Texas; died 1988 Also wrote under: Margaret Grant, Franken Meloney Daughter of Michael and Hannah Younker Lewin; married Sigmund Franken, 1915 (died 1933); William B. Meloney V, 1937 Rose Franken’s parents were separated when she was a few years old, and her mother took the four children to New York City to live with Franken’s grandparents and several aunts, uncles, and cousins in a large house in Harlem. She attended the Ethical Culture School, but, having failed a sewing course, did not obtain a high school diploma. At sixteen, she married a prominent oral surgeon 10 years her senior. Two weeks later, they learned that he was tubercular. Their first year of marriage was spent in a sanitarium. To take her mind off constant worrying about her husband’s health, Franken began writing short stories. After the publication of a novel, Pattern (1925), her husband suggested she try playwriting. Her first dramatic effort, Fortnight, was optioned but never produced or published. Her second play, first presented

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under the title Hallam Wives in a summer 1929 production in Greenwich, Connecticut, later became the very successful Another Language (1932). After Sigmund Franken’s death in 1933, Franken moved with her three sons to California. She married and collaborated with her second husband on a number of screenplays, then moved the family to a Connecticut farm. Using the pen name Franken Meloney, they regularly published novels and magazine serials, to which he contributed the plots and she wrote the dialogue. Another Language is a comedy-drama about the dangerously self-righteous attitudes of a middle-class family dominated by a possessive matriarch who encourages their tasteless and materialistic instincts. When Franken brought the same family back to the stage in 1948 with her sixth and last professionally produced play, The Hallams, the characters had not changed. Beginning with her dramatization of Claudia (1941), Franken directed all of her own plays. Her second husband produced her third Broadway play, Outrageous Fortune (1943), and all subsequent ones. The latter play departed from her established style by raising questions about such social concerns as homosexuality, the treatment of black servants, marital difficulties in middle age, and anti-Semitism. Despite misgivings about Franken’s attempt to handle so many themes in one play, some critics believed it to be her best work for the stage. Her ‘‘Claudia’’ novels, begun in 1939 as a series of stories for Redbook magazine, became the basis for a play, a radio series, and two motion pictures, and they were widely published in translation abroad. It was Claudia that made Franken’s name familiar to the public for two decades. Beginning with the first days of Claudia’s marriage at eighteen to David Naughton, the series of novels chronicles, with humor and sentimental appeal, the gradual maturation of a child-wife. Eternally artless, impulsive, and charming, Claudia comes to grips with such problems as hiring servants, testing her sex appeal, becoming a mother, shopping in a posh dress salon, and coping with her own mother’s death. Although the Claudia novels rely heavily upon illness, accidents, and death for the emotional upheavals that lead Claudia toward increasing self-awareness, they are essentially the saga of a blissful marriage. Referring to her 20-year involvement with Claudia, Franken wrote in her autobiography, When All Is Said and Done (1963), that ‘‘the sheer technical task of remaining within her consciousness became increasingly onerous and demanding.’’ Franken, however, was able to draw upon her own notably successful marriages. Her particular skill as a novelist and playwright is the ability to inject sparkle into trivial nuances of everyday life, and to unfold a narrative action largely through dialogue. The formula is suggested in the second chapter of Claudia: ‘‘They were all bestsellers, but for the life of her, Claudia couldn’t see why. She wished petulantly, that somebody would write a plain story about ordinary people like herself, with as little description as possible, and a lot of everyday conversation.’’ As an inexperienced screenwriter in Hollywood, Franken acquitted herself honorably for several years in that rarefied


atmosphere, perfecting the formula for light fiction from which she later rarely deviated. The ease with which Franken achieved success as a writer of popular fiction and plays could well be attributed to the spontaneity and freshness of her style. OTHER WORKS: Mr. Dooley, Jr.; a Comedy for Children (with J. Lewin, 1932). Twice Born (1935). Call Back Love (with W. B. Meloney, 1937). Of Great Riches (1937). Claudia and David (1939, screenplay by Franken, 1946). Strange Victory (with W. B. Meloney, 1939). When Doctors Disagree (with W. B. Meloney, 1940, dramatization by Franken, 1943). American Bred (with W. B. Meloney, 1941). The Book of Claudia (containing Claudia and Claudia and David, 1941). Another Claudia (1943). Beloved Stranger (with W. B. Meloney, 1944). Soldier’s Wife; a Comedy in Three Acts (1944). Young Claudia (1946). The Marriage of Claudia (1948). From Claudia to David (1950). The Fragile Years (also published as Those Fragile Years; a Claudia Novel, 1952). Rendezvous (English title, The Quiet Heart, 1954). Intimate Story (1955). The Antic Years (1958). The Complete Book of Claudia (1958). Return to Claudia (1960). You’re Well Out of a Hospital (1966). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Mantle, B., Contemporary American Playwrights (1938). Reference works: American Novelists of Today (1951). CB (1947). TCA, TCAS. Other references: NYT (8 Jan. 1933). NYTMag (4 May 1941). Players Magazine (Spring 1974). —FELICIA HARDISON LONDRÉ

FREEDMAN, Nancy Born 4 July 1920, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of Hatley F. and Brillianna Hintermeister Mars; married Benedict Freedman, 1941; children: Johanna, Michael, Deborah Nancy Freedman has written numerous books, each distinct from the others. Besides writing five plays and several novels with her husband, Benedict, including the worldwide bestseller Mrs. Mike (1947), Freedman has also written a number of novels on her own. Her most famous books include Joshua, Son of None (1973), a story about the cloning of John F. Kennedy, and Prima Donna (1981), a story of the trials and tribulations of an opera star. Freedman’s childhood until the age of ten was a lonely one. Although a recipient of dancing lessons at the age of seven, she was a sickly child who was forbidden to go to school. A succession of tutors was enlisted to teach her a variety of elementary school subjects, but the insistent child usually persuaded them only to read fiction to her. The lonely child would also invent stories based on children whose tombstones she discovered during visits to a graveyard with her grandmother.

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While still a teenager, Freedman landed acting jobs, working in summer stock in Maine during the years 1937 and 1938. She also was granted the opportunity to act in famous plays such as Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello under the guidance of the great Austrian theatrical director, Max Reinhardt. Freedman credits him for teaching her subtlety that she could apply to her style of writing. After attending the Chicago Art Institute, Los Angeles City College, and the University of Southern California, where she usually would not complete courses, Freedman met and married Benedict Freedman on 29 June 1941. He was the son of David Freedman, a successful Broadway playwright. Benedict, although a professor of mathematics in his chosen career, followed in his father’s footsteps, writing for radio as well as writing novels, plays, textbooks, and scholarly works. Freedman began to join her husband in his writing ventures in the early 1940’s. An early success was Mrs. Mike. Set in northwest Canada, it is the story of Katherine Mary Flannigan, an invalid married to a Mountie. A bestseller, the novel was translated into 27 languages and made into a motion picture in 1949. Subsequent hardcover editions continued to sell well into the 1990s, and it could be found on reading lists for high school students 50 years after its publication. Freedman continued writing novels with her husband until well into the 1960s, when she decided to write about her family history in the novel Cyclone of Silence (1969). An accident led to her being in the hospital with a broken back. As she lay in bed with a body cast, she remembered John F. Kennedy had once broken his back and had recovered. Encouraged, once out of bed she attended classes in genetics at the California Institute of Technology to research a novel about cloning that eventually became Joshua, Son of None. Achieving a novel on the forefront of current events both politically and scientifically, Freedman’s novel concerns the cloning of the assassinated president. Exploring the ethics of creating a being identical to another, Freedman presented the dilemma of a clone who needs to search for his identity once he learns of his true origins. With a daughter who, as an opera singer, wrote voluminous letters to her mother about life backstage, Freedman felt that she had the makings of a novel that detailed the sacrifices in relationships a woman must make in order to succeed in her career, and hence Prima Donna was born. Around the same time, she felt compelled to write a novel depicting the life of Sappho, the Lesbian poet of 6th century B.C. Greece. For five years Freedman researched for her new novel, studying archaeological evidence and reading history books as well as literature of the period. When the book was completed, Freedman, who had never experienced rejection of her work before, had to face the fact that no publisher would take it. She placed the manuscript in the Benedict and Nancy Freedman collection at the Mugar Memorial Library of Boston University in hopes it might be published someday. In 1998 Sappho: The Tenth Muse was published. Critics have noted that Sappho’s lesbianism is downplayed while her rebellious nature is emphasized. The book, they claim, is mostly faithful to its era, but parts of the narrative read like modern feminist theory.

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OTHER WORKS: Back to the Sea (with Benedict Freedman, 1942). This and No More (with Benedict Freedman, 1950). The Spark and the Exodus (with Benedict Freedman, 1954). Lootville (with Benedict Freedman, 1957). Tresa (with Benedict Freedman, 1958). The Apprentice Bastard (with Benedict Freedman, 1966). The Immortals (1977). Crescendo (1980). The Seventh Stone (1992).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CANR (1987). Other references: Booklist (Nov. 1973). Booksellers (Oct. 1973). CSM (Feb. 1947). Commonweal (March 1947). KR (15 May 1998). LAT (Feb. 1981). NYHTBR (March 1947). NYT (1947). TLS (Aug.1947). WP (Feb. 1981). —ROSE SECREST

FREEMAN, Mary E(leanor) Wilkins Born 31 October 1852, Randolph, Massachusetts; died 15 March 1930, Metuchen, New Jersey Also wrote under: Mary E. Wilkins Daughter of Warren E. and Eleanor Lothrop Wilkins; married Charles M. Freeman, 1902 (legally separated 1921) Mary Wilkins Freeman was an attractive, rather introspective child. In 1867 her father, a builder, moved his family to Brattleboro, Vermont. Freeman attended the Brattleboro high school; she also attended Mt. Holyoke Seminary and Mrs. Hosford’s Glenwood Seminary in West Brattleboro, for one year each. In 1883 she returned alone to Randolph, her mother, father, and only sister all having died. Here she lived with friends, the Wales family. She did not, however, confine herself to Randolph, but visited friends in the U.S. and traveled in Europe. After her marriage, Freeman settled in Metuchen, New Jersey. In 1921 Freeman obtained a legal separation from her husband, who had become an alcoholic requiring institutionalization. The year 1926 brought honors to Freeman: she was awarded the Howells medal for distinction in fiction by the American Academy of Letters, and she was elected to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Freeman established herself as a children’s author in the early 1880s. Decorative Plaques (1883) collected in an ornamental format 12 of her poems from the children’s magazine, Wide Awake. In 1882 the first adult story she sold won a prize in a contest sponsored by the Boston Sunday Budget. ‘‘A Shadow Family’’ has been lost, but Freeman said later it was ‘‘quite passable as an imitation of Charles Dickens.’’ Winning the contest caused her to concentrate on adult fiction, and her stories began to appear frequently in Harper’s Bazaar and Harper’s Weekly. Freeman’s capacity for work was enormous, and in the years that followed she became an exceedingly popular author of both adult and juvenile short stories (including some eerie tales of the supernatural), novels, and poetry for children.

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Her best stories and novels are about New England people and deal with several themes characteristic of them: stoical endurance in the face of hopeless poverty and adversity, unshakeable pride, and the fierce flame of Calvinistic religion. A typical short story is ‘‘Calla-Lilies and Hannah,’’ in which a girl, shielding her lover, courageously bears the villagers’ reprobation for a theft she has not committed. Another is ‘‘A Taste of Honey,’’ in which a young woman denies herself everything in the way of comfort and luxury to pay off a mortgage, even losing her fiancé because of the length of time involved. Of the novels, Pembroke (1894) is Freeman’s greatest achievement, a novel that deserves to be recognized as an American classic. It is densely peopled, with every facet of the New England character in evidence: greed, parsimony, tenacity of purpose, industriousness, sexuality, fanaticism, unselfishness, even heroism. Symbolism is occasionally employed in a way that has reminded critics of Hawthorne’s fiction. An early play, Giles Corey, Yeoman (1893), is based on a true incident in the Salem witchcraft trials. Here Freeman skillfully tells the story of a farmer and his wife who are put to death; she does it so well the drama, as she wrote it, may be effectively performed, though it has not often been produced on the stage. As Freeman wrote more voluminously and her work appeared constantly in magazines, her style changed. Losing its distinctive New England flavor, it became increasingly elaborate, elegant, and, at times, unbearably precious. Although she continued to use New England locales and characters, she began to write also of prosperous suburban life in New Jersey. In addition, she tried to keep in step with fashions in fiction, writing a historical romance set in Virginia (The Heart’s Highway, 1900), and a labor novel (The Portion of Labor, 1901). Both were embarrassing failures. Freeman’s significance lies in those of her stories and novels portraying a deglamorized New England life. She never wrote anything one could call sordid, but her early work conveys the appalling poverty of remote New England farms and villages, the constriction of the lives there, the suffering, the meanness, and the occasional flashes of real nobility. Granville Hicks has said that ‘‘her stories made the record of New England more nearly complete.’’

OTHER WORKS: The Adventures of Ann; Stories of Colonial Times (1886). A Humble Romance, and Other Stories (1887). A New England Nun, and Other Stories (1891). The Pot of Gold, and Other Stories (1892). Young Lucretia, and Other Stories (1892). Jane Field (1893). Comfort Pease and Her Gold Ring (1895). Madelon (1896). Jerome: A Poor Man (1897). Once Upon a Time, and Other Child-Verses (1897). The People of Our Neighborhood (1898). Silence, and Other Stories (1898). In Colonial Times (1899). The Jamesons (1899). The Love of Parson Lord, and Other Stories (1900). Understudies; Short Stories (1901). Six Trees; Short Stories (1903). The Wind in the Rose-Bush, and


FREMANTLE

Other Stories of the Supernatural (1903). The Givers; Short Stories (1904). The Debtor (1905). By the Light of the Soul (1906). ‘‘Doc’’ Gordon (1906). The Shoulders of Atlas (1908). The Fair Lavinia, and Others (1909). The Winning Lady, and Others (1909). The Green Door (1910). The Butterfly House (1912). The Yates Pride; a Romance (1912). The Copy Cat, and Other Stories (1914). An Alabaster Box (with F. M. Kingsley, 1917). Edgewater People (1918).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Avila, C. M. ‘‘A Study of Socio-Economic Issues in the Novels of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’’ (thesis, 1980). Barnes, M. H., ‘‘Realism in the Early Works of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’’ (thesis, 1986). Critical Essays on Mary Wilkins Freeman (1991). Donner, R. S. ‘‘Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: Techniques and Themes’’ (thesis, 1989). Donovan, J., New England Local Color Literature: A Woman’s Tradition (1983). Dullea, G. J., ‘‘Two New England Voices: Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman’’ (thesis, 1996). Ellsworth, M. E. T., ‘‘Two New England Writers: Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mary Wilkins Freeman’’ (thesis, 1981). Elrod, E. R., ‘‘Reforming Fictions: Gender and Religion in the Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose Terry Cooke, and Mary Wilkins Freeman’’ (thesis, 1991). Evans, M. A., ‘‘Deep Havens and Ruined Gardens: Possibilities of Community and Spirituality in Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman’’ (thesis, 1992). Fishinger, S. M. B., ‘‘The Life of Her Work the New Jersey Years of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’’ (thesis, 1991). Foster, E., Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1956). Glasser, L. B., In a Closet Hidden: The Life and Work of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1996). Hamblen, A. A., The New England Art of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1966). Hicks, G., The Great Tradition (1935). Kendrick, B. L., The Infant Sphinx: The Collected Letters of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1985). Kim, I., The Revolt of Mother: A Life of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1982). McGrew, S. E., ‘‘Reweaving the Scripts: Feminist Elements in the Short Stories of Mary Wilkins Freeman’’ (thesis, 1994). O’Boyle, W. P., ‘‘Objective Optimism: The Vision of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’’ (thesis, 1981). Pattee, F. L., The New American Literature (1930). Pattee, F. L., Sidelights on American Literature (1922). Quinn, A. H., American Fiction (1936). Reichardt, M. R., Mary Wilkins Freeman: A Study of the Short Fiction (1997). Reichardt, M. R., A Web of Relationship: Women in the Short Stories of Mary Wilkins Freeman (1992). Sparks, L. V., Counterparts: The Fiction of Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Kate Chopin (1993). Terryberry, K. J., ‘‘Cultural Feminism in the Works of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’’ (thesis, 1989). Westbrook, P.D., Mary Wilkins Freeman (1967). Reference works: DAB. Modern American Women Writers (1990). NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing (1995). TCA. Other references: Atlantic (May 1899). Local Color—Bret Harte and Mary Wilkins Freeman (audiovisual, 1983). Westbrook, P. D., Mary Wilkins Freeman: Twayne’s Women Authors on CDROM (CD, 1995). —ABIGAIL ANN HAMBLEN

FREMANTLE, Anne (Jackson) Born 15 June 1910, Tresserve, Savoie, France Daughter of Frederick H. and Clara Duff Jackson; married Christopher Fremantle, 1930; children: three sons Anne Fremantle belonged to a prominent English family and grew up in an atmosphere of social, artistic, and political awareness. Three-Cornered Heart (1970) provides a richly detailed, affectionate account of the Victorian girlhood of Fremantle’s mother and of her own Georgian childhood, with some references to her adult life. Fremantle attended Cheltenham Ladies College, and was a scholar of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she obtained an M.A. in history. With her artist husband, Christopher Fremantle, she had three sons. Her career as a journalist began in 1931 in London, where she worked on the London Mercury and New Statesman and reviewed regularly for the Times Literary Supplement. She was defeated as a Labour Party candidate in the 1935 general election. At the beginning of World War II, Fremantle drove an ambulance for the London County Council and made broadcasts in French and German for the BBC. In 1940 she came to the U.S. and worked in the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., becoming an American citizen in 1947. Fremantle worked for 10 years at the United Nations as an editor. Fremantle combined journalism with academic positions at Fordham University in New York (1948-61) and New York University (1971-79) and was a fellow at Wesleyan University Center for Advanced Studies in Connecticut (1966). She has been an editor for the Catholic Book Club and Commonweal, and made frequent radio and television broadcasts, for NBC’s The Catholic Hour and CBS’ Invitation to Learning, among others. Religion has always been central in Fremantle’s life. She was baptized in the Church of England, became a Muslim at age nine under the influence of Marmaduke Pickthall and a Catholic catechumen while a girl living in France. Fremantle converted to Roman Catholicism in 1943. Her Catholic interests are reflected in two novels, Come to Dust (1941) and By Grace of Love (1957); and in Desert Calling (1949), a biography of Charles de Foucauld exploring the effect of religious conviction; and in the many anthologies she edited. Fremantle early showed her skill at editing. Volumes edited by her include selections from the Church Fathers, medieval philosophy, Bible stories, papal encyclicals, Christmas stories, and Catholic thoughts, as well as selections from such diverse sources as the Protestant mystics, Mao Tse-tung, and contemporary Latin American writers. Among her translations are two hagiographies, Face of the Saints (1947) and Lives of the Saints (1951). Fremantle’s European background informs her writing, which is rich in literary and historical allusions. Widely read herself, she

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provides easy access into many areas. Europe: A Journey with Pictures (1954) and Holiday in Europe (1963) introduce Americans to complex cultures by explaining the past but emphasizing present vitality. Fremantle’s knowledge of and fascination with the Middle Ages appears in James and Joan (1948), a semifictional study of a 14th-century Scottish poet-king. Without sentimentalizing, Fremantle’s widely disseminated The Age of Faith (1957), like her collection of philosophy, The Age of Belief (1955, 1984), convincingly argues that the European Middle Ages have significance today. In Pilgrimage to People (1968), Fremantle combines travel information with international sympathy and Catholic awareness. Joining the historian’s grasp of detail with a delight in words, Fremantle writes in a clear and fluent style, frequently enlivened by wit. She makes accessible to the nonspecialist complex ideas, attitudes, and experiences drawn from her own extensive reading and wide range of interests.

OTHER WORKS: Poems, 1921-1931 (1931). George Eliot (1933). Sicily by F. H. Jackson (edited by Fremantle, 1935). The Wynne Diaries, 1789-1820 (edited by Fremantle, 1936, 1937, 1939). Loyal Enemy: The Life of Marmaduke Pickthall (1938). The Commonweal Reader (edited by Fremantle, 1949). The Greatest Bible Stories: A Catholic Anthology from World Literature (edited by Fremantle, 1951). Mothers: A Catholic Treasury of Great Stories (edited by Fremantle, 1951). Christian Conversation: Catholic Thought for Every Day of the Year (edited by Fremantle, 1953). A Treasury of Early Christianity (edited by Fremantle, 1953). Visionary Novels: Lilith and Phantastes by G. Macdonald (edited by Fremantle, 1954). Christmas Is Here: A Catholic Selection of Stories and Poems (1955). The Papal Encyclicals in Their Historical Context (edited by Fremantle, 1956). Oddsfish! by R. H. Benson (edited by Fremantle, 1957). Fountain of Arethusa by M. Zermatten (translated by Fremantle and C. Fremantle, 1960). This Little Band of Prophets: The British Fabians (1960). Mao Tse-tung: An Anthology of His Writings (edited by Fremantle, 1962). The Social Teachings of the Church (edited by Fremantle, 1963). The Island of Cats (1964). The Protestant Mystics (edited by Fremantle, 1964). A Primer of Linguistics (1973). The Misused Love Letters and Regula Amrain and Her Youngest Son by G. Keller (translated by Fremantle, 1974). Latin American Literature Today (edited by Fremantle, 1977). Woman’s Ways to God (1977). Saints Alive: The Lives of Thirteen Heroic Saints (1978). In Love with Love (edited by Fremantle, 1978). ‘‘St. Basil’’ in Saints and Ourselves (1981).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Censorship and Sense: Authorities Discuss Conflicting Views on the Banning of Books (audiocassette, 1971). Other references: NYTBR (22 June 1941, 29 Feb. 1948, 27 Nov. 1949, 6 March 1960, 29 Nov. 1970). SR (24 Feb. 1968). TLS (19 Nov. 1964). —VELMA BOURGEOIS RICHMOND

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FRENCH, Alice Born 19 March 1850, Massachusetts; died 9 January 1934 Wrote under: Octave Thanet Alice French, writing under the pseudonym Octave Thanet, was widely read at the turn of the 20th century. She was one of the highest paid writers of her time. Considered to be a Midwestern regional writer, she wrote some of the most significant novels and short stories in the regional and local color genres. French wrote during the post-Reconstruction era in America, a time of expansion, economic prosperity, and industrial growth that included America’s Gilded Age. Populists and suffragists were the newsmakers of the day, replacing the hawks and doves of the Civil War and Reconstruction years. The huge increase in immigrants, coupled with black enfranchisement debates, led to new kinds of racism. All of these issues factor into French’s novels and short stories. The relationship between labor and capital also figures often in her works. French was a modernist in terms of her writing as well as her contemporaries, and was well respected as an author. French was born in Massachusetts and later moved to Arkansas and Iowa, splitting her time between her homes in both states. Many of her stories take place in either Arkansas or Iowa. Her life partner, with whom she lived for 50 years, was Jane Crawford. During World War I, French was politically active as the chairman of the Committee on Patriotic Meetings for the Women’s Committee of the Council of National Defense of Iowa. She was also the Regent of the Colonial Dames of Iowa. She was instrumental in organizing meetings of German Americans in Iowa, helping them to identify the duties of German American citizens during World War I. A collection of 684 of French’s papers, dating from 1871 to her death in 1934, can be found at the Newberry Library in Chicago, Illinois. Among these papers are correspondence (including some with Edith Roosevelt, the widow of Theodore Roosevelt), diaries, manuscripts of her novels, plays and short stories, copies of her speeches, and miscellaneous souvenirs of her life. The majority of French’s work is short story collections such as Knitters in the Sun (1887). Some of the stories in this collection are ‘‘The Bishop’s Vagabond,’’ ‘‘Schopenhauer on Lake Pepin,’’ ‘‘Half a Curse,’’ ‘‘A Communist’s Wife,’’ and ‘‘Mrs. Finlay’s Elizabethan Chair.’’ Stories of a Western Town (1893) includes ‘‘The Face of Failure,’’ ‘‘An Assisted Providence,’’ ‘‘The Besetment of Kurt Lieders,’’ and ‘‘Mother Emeritus.’’ A Captured Dream, and Other Stories (1897), like Stories of a Western Town, is a collection of stories dealing with frontier and pioneer life in Iowa and Arkansas. The Missionary Sheriff (1897) was illustrated by A. B. Frost and Clifford Carleton and includes ‘‘The Cabinet Organ,’’ ‘‘The Hypnotist,’’ and ‘‘The Defeat of Amos Wickliff.’’ These are stories of an ordinary man simply trying to do his duty. A Book of True Lovers (1897) is another collection of French’s earlier stories with locations in Arkansas and Iowa.


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Short stories included in this book are ‘‘The Judgment on Mrs. Swift’’ and ‘‘The Dilemma of Sir Guy the Neuter.’’ The Heart of Toil (1898) is a book of short stories dealing with social life and customs of the 19th century, including ‘‘The Way of an Election,’’ ‘‘Johnney’s Job,’’ and ‘‘The Conscience of a Business Man.’’ Business themes are found in some of her writing. For example, The Man of the Hour (1905) is historical fiction about the strikes and lockouts of railroads and the ensuing Chicago Strike of 1894. Later works include Stories That End Well (1911) and A Step on the Stair (1913). French’s stories appeared in several popular magazines of the time: ‘‘The Canada Thistle’’ in Midland Monthly (1894); ‘‘The Defeat of Amos Wickliff’’ in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (Christmas 1896); and ‘‘The Next Room’’ in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (November 1896). Today French’s stories are in reprint editions. Her short story ‘‘My Lorelei: A Heidelberg Romance’’ can be found in Two Friends and Other Nineteenth Century Lesbian Stories by American Women Writers, edited by Susan Koppelman. Other books in reprint are Heart of Toil (1969), The Missionary Sheriff (1969), A Book of True Lovers (1969), Stories of a Western Town (1972), The Man of the Hour (1977), My Name is Masak (1992), and The Restless Nomad (1992). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dougan, M. B. and C. W. Dougan, By the Cypress Swamps: The Arkansas Stories of Octave Thanet (1980). Rushton, L. E.,‘‘The Arkansas Fiction of Alice French’’ (thesis, 1988). Tigges, S. A. H., ‘‘Alice French, A Noble Anachronism’’ (thesis, 1988). Web sites: information available online at: http://cavern.uark.edu/hbnio/speccon/brochoct.html; http://h-net2.msu.edu/~shgape/discllist/busfict.html; http://twist.lib.uiowa.edu/8-247-f97/queries.html; http://www.eskimo.com/~demian/famous.html; http://www.geocities.com/Wellesley/7327/modernism.html; http://www.kanebooks.com/web144.html; http://www.scry.com/ayer/WOM_HERO/4404819.htm; http://www.traverse.com.com/people/dot.regs.html. —HEIDI HARTWIG DENLER

FRENCH, Anne Warner Born 14 October 1869, St. Paul, Minnesota; died 3 February 1913, Dorset, England Wrote under: Anne French, Anne Richmond Warner French, Anne Warner Daughter of William P. and Anna Richmond Warner; married Charles E. French, 1888 Anne Warner French’s paternal and maternal family roots could be traced back to Massachusetts in the 1630s. French was

educated at home by her mother, a clever, widely read woman, and a French tutor. During her childhood she associated almost entirely with adults, and in the quiet scholarly atmosphere imposed by her father, she developed a love of reading and selfexpression. At the age of eighteen, French married a Minneapolis flour manufacturer who was 25 years her senior. Four years later, after the death of her infant daughter, she began her literary career by compiling a genealogy—An American Ancestry (1894)—for her son, Charles. French traveled to Europe in 1901 to experience firsthand the places she had read about. She spent two years in Tours, France, with her two children and published His Story, Their Letters (1902). French returned to St. Paul in 1903, but finding it difficult to write there, she chose to live in Europe for the rest of her life, making several brief visits to America. She published novels and several collections of short stories. In His Story, Their Letters, an unnamed young man recounts the conversations of himself and a young woman, identified as A., over several days as they walk through Tours. They flirt, finally declare their love, and talk of marriage before he gets a telegram stating he must come home because his father has lost the family fortune in the stock market. They promise to write, but while he is on the way home he gets word his father has made another fortune and decides to marry a girl he has met on the boat. Meanwhile, A.’s cousin returns from a trip to Russia and she marries him. They both decide not to write to each other, and their story ends. A Woman’s Will (1904) tells the story of a young American widow traveling through Europe who is courted by a German musical genius. In The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary (1905), Mary Watkins disinherits her carefree nephew Jack after he is expelled from college for the second time. In an effort to reestablish himself in his aunt’s good graces (and in her will), Jack and his friends escort Aunt Mary around town. She is grateful for having discovered there is more to life than her old farm; Jack is reinstated and able to marry his true love. As was true with His Story, Their Letters, the dialogue in both A Woman’s Will and The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary is bright, charming, and humorous. In 1904 French published Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop. Susan Clegg’s homely humor was a great success, prompting French to write four more collections of Susan Clegg stories. Each of the stories is a series of conversations in which Susan relates the local gossip and the adventures and misadventures of the other residents of the town to her friend Mrs. Lathrop, who spends most of her time asleep in her rocking chair. Although the plots and characterizations in these stories are slight, they are original and amusing, and the dialogue is especially well written. French excelled at writing light novels that successfully blended comedy with a satisfying love story, and A Woman’s Will and The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary are excellent examples of her work. French’s Susan Clegg stories are a refreshing contribution to American humorous literature.

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OTHER WORKS: Seeing France with Uncle John (1906). Susan Clegg and Her Love Affairs (1906). Susan Clegg and Her Neighbors’ Affairs (1906). Susan Clegg and a Man in the House (1907). An Original Gentleman (1908). The Panther: A Tale of Temptation (1908). Seeing England with Uncle John (1908). In a Mysterious Way (1909). Your Child and Mine (1909). Just Between Themselves: A Book About Dichtenberg (1910). Susan Clegg, Her Friend and Her Neighbors (1910). How Leslie Loved (1911). When Woman Proposes (1911). The Gay and Festive Claverhouse: An Extravaganza by Anne Warner (1914). Sunshine Jane (1914). The Taming of Amaretti: A Comedy of Manners (1915). The Tigress (1916). My Name is Masak (reissue, 1992). The Restless Nomad (1992).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Rushton, L. E., ‘‘The Arkansas Fiction of Alice French’’ (thesis, 1988). Tigges, S. A. H., ‘‘Alice French, A Noble Anachronism’’ (thesis, 1988). Warner, L. C., and J. G. Nichols, The Descendants of Andrew Warner (1919). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —DOMENICA BARBUTO

FRENCH, Lucy (Virginia) Smith Born 16 March 1825, Accomac County, Virginia; died 31 March 1881, McMinnville, Tennessee Wrote under: L. Virginia French, L’Inconnue, Lucy Smith Daughter of Mease W. and Elizabeth Parker Smith; married John H. French, 1853 Lucy Smith French was born into a wealthy and cultured family. After her mother’s death, she went to live with her maternal grandmother in Washington, Pennsylvania, where she was educated at Mrs. Hannah’s School. She and her sister returned to their father in 1848, but, unhappy with his remarriage, they left within the year for Memphis, Tennessee, where both taught and French began publishing pieces in the Louisville Journal under the name ‘‘L’Inconnue.’’ In 1852 French became editor of the Southern Ladies’ Book, and in the following year she married Colonel French, who had sought her out after reading her poetry. Her later literary career included editing several newspapers and magazines (most notably, the Crusader and Ladies’ Home in Atlanta, Georgia), and writing poetry, one play, and two novels, as well as a collection of legends, before she died in her husband’s home town. French’s first collection of poetry, Wind Whispers (1856), is romantic and sometimes sentimental. It was followed in the same year by a five-act tragedy in blank verse, Istalilxo: The Lady of Tula (1856), set in Mexico. French’s collection, Legends of the South (1867), was also written in verse for the most part, and one legend reveals her interest in exploring the position of women. In

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‘‘The Legend of the Lost Soul,’’ she tells of an Indian woman whose husband leaves their child alone to look for her and both come back to find it gone: ‘‘It is the cry of Woman, / And hers the really lost and wandering soul, / Seeking, amid the god-like, yet the human, / To find her destined goal.’’ Despite romantic trappings, the novel My Roses (1872) realistically explores the plight of the prostitute. The heroine, Henriette de Hauterive, is an independent young woman who, because of her ‘‘woman’s faith in women,’’ risks social condemnation (‘‘I am content to be ‘unnatural’ semi-occasionally if I only can be true to nature!’’) by disguising herself as a man and entering a brothel to save a woman she doesn’t know. She recognizes ‘‘the world judges us all, and to women it is a bitter censor,’’ but her courage to act saves two women from a life they have either been forced into or have chosen through disillusionment and economic deprivation. As one of these, Marguerite, asserts: ‘‘By your woman’s faith, your woman’s courage, and your woman’s love, you have redeemed a wayward and erring nature, although you intended it not. If ever there is any good accomplished for women like me, it will be done by women like you.’’ In French’s fiction, the exploration of woman’s position takes prominence. French’s sophisticated treatment calls for the sisterhood of women to provide alternatives for women victimized by society. OTHER WORKS: Darlingtonia (1879). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: DAB. LSL. The Living Female Writers of the South (1872). The Living Writers of the South (1869). NCAB, 7. Other references: American Illustrated Methodist Magazine (July 1900). Nashville Daily American (3 April 1881). —THELMA J. SHINN

FRENCH, Marilyn Born 21 November 1929, New York, New York Also writes under Mara Solwoska Daughter of D. Charles and Isabel Hazz Edwards; married Robert M. French Jr., 1950 (divorced 1967); children: Jamie, Robert M. III Marilyn French worked her way through Hofstra University (in Hampstead, New York) to a B.A. and M.S. in English (1951-64), regretting that she did not major in philosophy. While supporting her husband through law school, she began to write seriously. After her divorce, she returned to Harvard University for her doctorate (1972) and taught at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts (1972-76).


In The Book as World: James Joyce’s Ulysses (1976), literary criticism adapted from her dissertation, French suggests a new reading of Ulysses focusing on its deliberately diverse successive styles and the role of the ‘‘scandalously unreliable’’ narrator as malevolent, contemptuously refusing ‘‘to mediate the events in the book for the reader who is thereby forced to engage in that process himself.’’ French’s argument is schematic, focusing on Ulysses’ rhetorical effect. Her first political novel of ideas, The Women’s Room (1977), was a bestseller, called representative of the 1970s’ ‘‘women’s renaissance’’ and the major novel of the women’s liberation movement. Although a bitter, cynical, semiautobiographical fiction and polemic about how heterosexual relations exploit and manipulate women, it touched a chord in a generation of women disillusioned by the failure of early marriages, the suburban ideal, and problems of motherhood in a changing age. The Women’s Room details its protagonist’s struggle over four decades for identity, intellectual independence, and a career, from the conformity and submissiveness of 1950s New Jersey suburbanites to the difficulties of a divorced older woman coming to Harvard as a graduate student, struggling to be taken seriously, liberated but lonely. Mira expresses the author’s own perspective: ‘‘Sometimes I get as sick of writing this as you may be in reading it. . . . I get sick because, you see, it’s all true, it happened, and it was boring and painful and full of despair.’’ The Cambridge feminist Val voices a more militant feminist rhetoric informed by consciousness raising. Male characters are one-dimensional, revealing French’s belief ‘‘that the white middle-class male is really hollow: a sort of walking uniform, making the expected jokes, maintaining the expected postures.’’ She believes there is a chasm of exploitation, incomprehension, and mistrust between women and men; while women were ‘‘expentant in the 1940s, submissive in the 1950s, enraged in the 1960s, they have arrived in the 1970s independent but somehow unstrung, not yet fully composed after all they’ve been through.’’ The Women’s Room was made into a movie for television in 1980. In French’s novels, the reader hopes for a happy ending despite her powerfully stated thesis that there is little future for coexistence between men and women. The narrative rambles as characters appear and disappear. French deliberately loosens control over her narrative, seeing her books as more documentary than fiction, thus strengthening their political impact, making them more autobiographical than creative, and confronting the reader’s preconceptions mercilessly. The Bleeding Heart (1980) is a polemical story about an affair between two Americans living in Britain for a year, overcoming their individual barriers for mutual growth yet separating in the end. French returned to literary criticism with Shakespeare’s Division of Experience (1981), examining his ‘‘horror at female sexuality.’’ She has also provided introductions for reprints of novels by Edith Wharton. In Beyond Power: On Women, Men, and Morals (1985), French shifted to an encyclopedic, interdisciplinary, feminist theoretical analysis of the demise of matriarchy, the origins of social organization, and the rise of patriarchy lusting for power and its consequences over the last 2,400 years. French

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draws on anthropology, philosophy, and history as well as literature ‘‘to urge the creation of a new morality,’’ based on feminism’s ancient origins: ‘‘A new ‘world’ does not imply that we will invent new values.’’ It is a jeremiad, predicting dire economic, environmental, and even criminal consequences unless the value system is revised. A later novel, Her Mother’s Daughter (1987), probes the experience of four generations of women over half a century, examining the relationships of mothers and daughters and the desire to overcome fears to be autonomous. Like French’s more theoretical works, it calls for a reassessment of values. French also published books in Israel in 1980, 1989, and 1991. The War Against Women (1992) continues French’s analysis of the inevitable conflict between women’s needs and societal norms with a catalog of the religious, sociological, institutional, and physical oppression of women throughout the world. In 1994 French published Our Father, a novel about four daughters of a privileged and famous man, Stephen Upton, longtime adviser to Republican presidents. The daughters, each by a different woman, three of whom were Upton’s wives, come together when their father suffers a debilitating stroke and discover that they each had been sexually abused by him in their childhood. The novel continues French’s practice of weaving polemical feminism with an analysis of social evils, yet through her characterization of the four sisters, and especially of the illegitimate and lesbian youngest, Ronnie, and her exploration of how they are all redeemed by learning to love each other, French produces a moving and powerful work. A fourth novel, My Summer With George, appeared in 1996. Here French again, as one reviewer put it, ‘‘refuses to renounce her insurrectionist ways,’’ by telling the story of sixtyish Hermione Beldame, a twice-divorced and twice-widowed successful romance novelist who has a short-lived intense relationship with George Johnson, a newspaper editor in his mid-fifties. The book has ‘‘an invigorating new wryness’’ for French (so says the New York Times reviewer). And, accordingly, the affair ends with the end of summer. In 1998 came A Season in Hell, A Memoir. Six years after the ordeal, the book chronicles French’s battle with esophageal cancer, and how she was cured by simultaneous radiation and chemotherapy. Subsequently, and possibly with the treatment as cause, she suffered a six-week coma, life-threatening kidney infections, pneumonia, compression fractures of her back, and a heart attack. At the end of the book she describes herself, not as an invalid, but as one who ‘‘has less strength,’’ taking life very easy, with limited energies, yet happy. ‘‘[I am at] a better place than I have been before. I am grateful to have been allowed to live long enough to experience it.’’ Since her illness she has completed a work which had been in progress for more than 10 years, Women’s History of the World for publication in 1999. French has been one of the important thinkers and writers of the feminist movement of the last half of the 20th century. She has distinctive skills, including the notable one of being able to encapsulate in a few pages or even a few paragraphs the completeness of a problem, as she did in Her Mother’s Daughter with a

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lesson against racism provided by Anastasia for her children; in Our Father with a brief but all-inclusive catalogue of good manners; and in A Season in Hell with an account of a ‘‘magnificent period in American history’’ when ‘‘[m]y country had begun to forge a world more people could breathe in’’ but which was then ‘‘shattered by greed and mendacity’’ under a succession of Republican presidents who ‘‘lazily let the new right-wing thrust continue.’’ Every one of French’s ten books is still in print, two decades after The Women’s Room was first published.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1978). CLC (1979, 1981, 1990). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). Other references: Harper’s (Nov. 1995). LJ (15 Nov. 1977, 1 May 1992, 15 Nov. 1993, Aug. 1996). Modern Language Review (Jan. 1979). Modern Philology (May 1979). Ms. (Jan. 1978, Apr. 1979, July 1985, May 1992, Sept. 1996). NYT (17 Oct. 1977, 9 March 1980, 10 Mar. 1980, 17 Jan. 1990, 9 July 1995). NYTBR (16 Oct. 1977, 13 Nov. 1977, 5 July 1992, 21 Mar. 1993, 16 Jan. 1994, 2 July 1995, 9 July 1996, 13 July 1997). People (20 Feb. 1978). TLS (18 Feb. 1977, 21 Apr. 1978, 9 May 1980). WPBW (9 Oct. 1977, 9 March 1980, 28 Mar. 1993, 23 Jan. 1994). —BLANCHE LINDEN-WARD, UPDATED BY JOANNE L. SCHWEIK

FRIEDAN, Betty Born 4 February 1921, Peoria, Illinois Daughter of Harry and Miriam Horowitz Goldstein; married Carl Friedan, 1947 (divorced 1969); children: Daniel, Jonathan, Emily Credited with having begun the current women’s movement with her earliest book, The Feminine Mystique (1963), Betty Friedan represents a middle ground in the various ideological differences in the movement since the 1970s and remains a devoted advocate for a more equitable society. She describes the different stages of the movement as part of an evolutionary force. Writing in 1983 in her introduction to the 20th-anniversary edition of The Feminine Mystique, she claims that she has become ‘‘increasingly convinced that the whole process [the women’s movement]. . .is not really a revolution at all, but simply a stage in human evolution, necessary for survival.’’ One of three children of parents who encouraged neither her reading nor her feminism, Friedan attributed her later awareness of oppression partly to being Jewish. In high school Friedan founded a literary magazine and graduated as class valedictorian. At Smith College she studied psychology with noted Gestalt psychologist Kurt Coffee and graduated summa cum laude in 1942. After winning her second research fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley, she realized that to go on would commit her to a doctorate and a career as a psychologist. She gave

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in to what she called the pressure of the feminine mystique, quit Berkeley for a nonprofessional job in New York City, and soon married and began raising her three children. By the mid-1950s Friedan was deeply dissatisfied with her life. Approaching the resulting crisis thoughtfully, she wondered if other women shared her dissatisfaction. Through a questionnaire sent to her Smith College classmates, she discovered her ailment was widespread, and she began several years of research which culminated in The Feminine Mystique. She analyzed the post-World War II pressures that forced promising young women out of colleges and into suburbs to raise children. Its central thesis is that those forces supposed to be ‘‘the chief enemies of prejudice’’—that is, education, sociology, psychology, and the media—have, in effect, conned American women into believing their entire identity and worth could be derived from being wives and mothers. Her revolutionary book focused national attention on ‘‘the problem that has no name.’’ After publishing The Feminine Mystique, Friedan actively campaigned against the feminine mystique in its variety of guises. She founded NOW, the National Organization for Women, in 1966. NOW has remained the largest and most visible feminist organization in the U.S., although it has been criticized since its start by more radical women’s groups who believe it is too middle class, hierarchically structured, and conservative in its aims. After leaving the presidency of NOW in 1970, Friedan continued her activism through writing, lecturing, and teaching. She wrote a column for McCall’s, ‘‘Betty Friedan’s Notebook,’’ and contributed to many magazines, including Saturday Review, Harper’s, the New York Times magazine, Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal, and Working Women. In 1976 Friedan published It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement. In a series of essays and open letters, Friedan assesses the progress of the women’s movement and her relationship with it. The book provides a personal as well as a movement history. While arguing that women have demanded and received new opportunities and more equality, she warns that their gains are threatened by divisiveness among themselves. Friedan sees that a necessary change in the women’s liberation movement is needed: it must transcend polarization and become ‘‘human liberation.’’ She has been attacked not only as a radical but for not being radical enough by those who want her to speak out strongly against men and in support of lesbians, and for black and working women. Friedan feels that to denounce men and to have the issues involving homosexuals become a major concern of the women’s movement is counterproductive, that ‘‘an overfocus on sexual issues, on sexual politics, as opposed to the condition of women in society in general, may have been accentuated by those who wish to immobilize the movement politically.’’ In The Second Stage (1981), Friedan further pursues the goal of human liberation. She states that the failures of the women’s movement are due to ‘‘our blind spot about the family.’’ After years of activism, research, and observation of women’s lives, she concludes many women are now caught in a new ‘‘feminist mystique,’’ where they’re doing two demanding jobs: the work of


the family and the work of a career. They are forced to be ‘‘superwomen,’’ juggling two roles and feeling guilty about both. The solution, she argues, is to take control of the family policy agenda and restructure family and work so both men and women are freer to share roles. She insists men will become allies when they see that changing outmoded institutions will also improve their lives. Citing the specific issues of flexible work schedules, parental leave, and child care as the new agenda for the women’s movement, she calls for reclaiming the family as ‘‘the new feminist frontier.’’ Reaction to her new agenda ranged from calling her a ‘‘repentant feminist’’ to reaffirming her importance in the movement and to recognizing, as Marilyn French did in an Esquire article in December 1983, that the affirmation of the family in The Second Stage was a ‘‘passionate plea for general awareness of the inclusive nature of feminism.’’ In the 1983 anniversary edition of The Feminine Mystique, Friedan angrily denies the media’s pronouncements that the ‘‘postfeminist generation’’ has abandoned feminist ideas: ‘‘Of course the postfeminist generation is in a different place. The women’s movement put it there.’’ Sounding the theme of evolutionary change, she wrote, ‘‘It’s hard to go on evolving, as we all must, just to keep up with a revolution as big as this when some. . .want to lock it in place forever, as an unchanging ism.’’ In this stage of her life, she sees the importance of linking the redefinition of the family with issues and interests of single women and older women. In The Fountain of Age (1993), Friedan urges older people to draw on their strengths and not ‘‘forfeit these years with a preoccupation with death.’’ She also notes her feelings of déjà vu when she hears geriatric experts talk about the aged ‘‘with the same patronizing, ‘compassionate’ denial of their personhood’’ she heard 20 years before when the experts talked about women. During the 1980s Friedan saw the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in Congress, but despite the setback she was hopeful about the new political power of women represented by the vice presidential nomination of Geraldine Ferraro at the 1984 Democratic National Convention, to which she was a delegate. In ‘‘Back to the Feminist Mystique,’’ published in the Humanist in 1991, Friedan notes that the decade of the 1980s had made it more difficult to move to the ‘‘second stage’’ because the support systems and social programs so necessary to restructure work and home had been almost destroyed in a political environment hostile to change. In Beyond Gender: The New Politics of Work and Family (1997), Friedan focuses her attention on the plight of American workers. While a guest scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Institute in 1994, Friedan brought together in the New Paradigm Seminars a diverse assortment of leaders in labor, women’s organizations, business, social movements, and other groups. Participants tackled important issues facing American workers, including corporate downsizing, options for flexible work schedules, welfare reform, and changes in affirmative action programs. Using direct quotations of seminar participants and her own commentary, Friedan again argues in Beyond Gender that society must go

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beyond issues of men vs. women and sexual politics if it wants to create a ‘‘new community.’’ Equality of opportunity, care for children, and economic restructuring to reduce income inequality remain cornerstones of Friedan’s vision for a better society, but she now emphasizes their importance for the American worker in general, not solely for women. Despite the wide-ranging and often conflicting opinions shared within the seminar itself, Friedan steadfastly believes a consensus on these important issues is necessary and possible. OTHER WORKS: Contributed to Anatomy of Reading (ed. by L. L. Hackett and R. Williamson, 1966). Voices of the New Feminism (ed. by M. L. Thompson, 1970). ‘‘The Mystique of Age’’ in Productive Aging: Enhancing Vitality in Later Life (1989). The papers of Betty Friedan are in the Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dubin, M., ‘‘At 75, Betty Friedan Remains an Independent Thinker Who Has More to Write,’’ in Knight-Ridder/ Tribune News Service (6 Mar. 1996). Gardels, N., ‘‘The New Frontier of Feminism’’ in New Perspectives Quarterly (Winter 1998). Janeway, E., Man’s World, Woman’s Place (1971). Lerner, G., The Female Experience: An American Documentary (1977). Ryan, M. P., Womanhood in America from Colonial Times to the Present (1975). Sochen, J., Herstory: A Woman’s View of American History (1974). Sochen, J., Movers and Shakers: American Women Thinkers and Activists, 1900-1970 (1973). Reference works: CANR 18 (1986). CB (1970, 1989). Other references: Esquire (Dec. 1983). Feminist Review (Autumn 1987). LAT (26 Apr. 1992). Nation (14 Nov. 1981, 1 Dec. 1997). National Review (5 Feb. 1982). NR (20 Jan. 1982). NYT (5 July 1981, 25 Apr. 1983, 27 Feb. 1983). NYTBR (22 Nov. 1981). TLS (30 July 1982). —BILLIE J. WAHLSTROM AND MARY GRIMLEY MASON, UPDATED BY JANETTE GOFF DIXON

FRINGS, Ketti Born Katharine Hartley, 28 February 1909, Columbus, Ohio; died February 1981 Daughter of Guy H. and Pauline Sparks Hartley; married Kurt Frings, 1938; children: two Ketti Frings is the daughter of a paper box salesman. During Frings’ childhood the family lived in 13 different cities, but after their mother’s death, Frings and her two sisters stayed with an aunt in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she attended Lake School for Girls. Frings enrolled at Principia College for one year, then left to take a job as advertising copywriter at a Newark, New Jersey, department store. After several years of writing radio scripts, movie magazine articles, and advertising copy for New York agencies, Frings

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decided to spend a year in the south of France and write a novel. There she met her future husband, a German-born lightweight boxer who gave her the nickname Ketti, a diminutive for Katharine, which became her professional name. The painful two-year hiatus before Frings was allowed to enter the U.S. is chronicled fictionally in Frings’s first novel, Hold Back the Dawn (1940). The setting is Tijuana, Mexico, where a German husband resides while waiting for an immigration quota number. His American wife commutes between the immigrant colony, on weekends, and her one-room Hollywood apartment, where she writes the fan magazine stories to support them both. The book is an early indication of Frings’ flair for the dramatic because she succeeds in bringing the tension of life to an essentially static situation. Once settled in Beverly Hills, Frings’ husband became an actors’ agent and they had two children. She continued to produce numerous magazine stories, as well as screenplays. With her second novel, God’s Front Porch (1944), Frings said she hoped ‘‘to try to dispel some of the world’s gloom, to make those who are frightened a little less frightened.’’ The arrival in Heavenly Bend Junction of a young soldier killed in the war is the occasion for Frings’s sentimental fantasizing about how God might welcome those who have unwillingly left the world of the living and how He might even perform a little miracle for the war-ravaged earth. Frings’s first play, Mr. Sycamore, based on a 1907 short story by Robert Ayre, was produced by the Theater Guild in 1942. Critical reaction was more favorable toward leading players Stuart Erwin and Lillian Gish than toward the young dramatist. Brooks Atkinson, however, said of this gentle fantasy about a postman who turns himself into a tree: ‘‘Give Mrs. Frings credit for having tried something original and having stirred up some unhackneyed humor.’’ Mr. Sycamore closed after 19 performances. In contrast, Frings’s next venture onto Broadway had a solid run of 564 performances and remains her best-known work. Her dramatization of Thomas Wolfe’s novel, Look Homeward, Angel, opened in 1957 and was unanimously praised by the critics. Richard Watts, Jr., called it ‘‘a rich, beautiful, moving and fullbodied play.’’ John McClain thought it was ‘‘quite simply, one of the best evenings I’ve ever had in the theater,’’ and said Frings ‘‘should receive the loudest praise, for she has most ingeniously telescoped a few chapters from the long autobiographical novel into an overpowering consideration of a young man’s escape from adolescence.’’ Frings has discussed (Theatre Arts, Feb. 1958) the difficulties she experienced in paring down the overflowing images and speeches of the novel. Professional recognition for Look Homeward, Angel included the Pulitzer Prize in Drama and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and she was selected as the Los Angeles Times ‘‘Woman of the Year.’’ A 1960 dramatization of Richard Wright’s novel about racial discord, The Long Dream, was poorly received. Mixed reactions greeted Walking Happy, a 1966 musical adaptation of Harold Brighouse’s play, Hobson’s Choice. In 1978 Frings collaborated with Peter Udell on a musical version of Look Homeward, Angel.

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Frings’s style might best be described as unpretentiously workmanlike. It is competent, direct, and always appropriate to her material, the range of which includes suspense melodrama, fictional treatments of topical issues, fantasy, and, her staple, romance. OTHER WORKS: Let the Devil Catch You (1947). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Grubbs, J. G., ‘‘The Role of Eliza Gant in Ketti Frings’ Look Homeward, Angel: A Production Thesis in Acting’’ (thesis, 1993). Reference works: CB (Jan. 1960). Ohio Authors and Their Books (1962). Other references: Collier’s (26 April 1947). Newsweek (6 March 1944). Saturday Evening Post (20 Nov. 1943). SR (26 Feb. 1944, 6 Sept. 1958). —FELICIA HARDISON LONDRÉ

FRITZ, Jean Born 16 November 1915, Hankow, China Daughter of Arthur M. and Myrtle Chaney Guttery; married Michael Fritz, 1941; children: David, Andrea Jean Fritz has been heralded for her work in several genres of children’s literature, but she is best known for her lively, engaging biographies. She has won numerous prestigious awards including the Children’s Book Guild Nonfiction Award for ‘‘total body of creative writing’’ (1978), and Boston Globe/Horn Book awards in 1984 for The Double Life of Pocahontas (1983), and in 1990 for The Great Little Madison (1990). Fritz graduated from Wheaton College in 1937 and continued with graduate studies at Columbia University. She worked as a researcher, book reviewer, and editor while her husband served in the army during World War II. A prolific writer, Fritz began late; her first book was published when she was thirty-nine. In 1952 while working as a children’s librarian at her local library in New York she discovered she not only wanted to read children’s books, but write them as well. Fritz’s first picture book, Fish Head (1954), had its genesis in the fantasies of escape she invented when feeling overwhelmed by the task of caring for her two young children. Fritz expected to continue writing picture books, but simple curiosity along with her awareness of textbook inadequacies motivated her to begin writing biographies. ‘‘Textbooks are so often both inaccurate and dull, a place where dead people just stay dead,’’ she told an interviewer. ‘‘I think of my job as bringing them back to life.’’ Critics have praised her for her success at this task; she is noted for her ability to captivate a young audience not only by focusing on the accomplishments of historical figures, but


also by revealing them as the idiosyncratic, imperfect, and often humorous people that they were. Fritz shares interesting anecdotes and reveals weaknesses while still paying meticulous attention to accuracy and maintaining the integrity of both the reader and the subject. In her biographies she is ‘‘always looking for outof-the-way details, for the little things that seem so trivial but throw such light on a personality.’’ Fritz’s devotion to the exploration of American history stems from her childhood, which she shares in one of her most critically acclaimed novels, Homesick: My Own Story (1982). Fritz lived in China with her missionary parents until the age of eleven. Despite her loneliness and isolation during this unstable time in China, Fritz was a thoughtful, often precocious child, writing once in a letter to her grandmother, ‘‘I’m not always good. Sometimes I don’t even try.’’ She was also extremely patriotic. On one occasion, she sang the words to America while all of the other children in her British classroom sang God Save the King. Reflecting on this experience in 1988, she explained: ‘‘No one is more patriotic than the one separated from his country; no one is as eager to find roots as the person who has been uprooted.’’ Over a long career, Fritz has translated that eagerness into biographies for children of such quintessential American figures as George Washington, Ben Franklin, Sam Houston, and Theodore Roosevelt.

OTHER WORKS: 121 Pudding Street (1955). Hurrah for Jonathan (1955). Growing Up (1956). The Late Spring (1957). The Cabin Faced West (1958). Champion Dog, Prince Tom (1958). The Animals of Doctor Schweitzer (1958). How to Read a Rabbit (1959). Brady (1960). Tap, Tap Lion, One, Two, Three (1962). San Francisco (1962). I, Adam (1963). Magic to Burn (1964). Early Thunder (1967). George Washington’s Breakfast (1969). And Then What Happened, Paul Revere? (1973). Why Don’t You Get a Horse, Sam Adams? (1974). Where was Patrick Henry on the 29th of May? (1975). Who’s That Stepping on Plymouth Rock? (1975). Will You Sign Here, John Hancock? (1976). What’s the Big Idea, Ben Franklin? (1976). Can’t You Make Them Behave, King George? (1976). Brendan the Navigator (1979). Stonewall (1979). The Man Who Loved Books (1980). Where Do You Think You’re Going, Christopher Columbus? (1980). Traitor: The Case of Benedict Arnold (1981). The Good Giants and the Bad Pukwudgies (1982). China Homecoming (1985). Make Way for Sam Houston (1986). Shh! We’re Writing the Constitution (1987). China’s Long March (1988). Bully for You, Teddy Roosevelt! (1991). George Washington’s Mother (1992). The Great Adventure of Christopher Columbus (1992). Surprising Myself (1992). Around the World in a Hundred Years (1993). Just a Few Words, Mr. Lincoln (1993). Worlds of Childhood: The Art and Craft of Writing for Children (contributing editor, 1990). The World of 1492 (contributor, 1992).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bradford, H., ‘‘The Move Toward Identity in the Juvenile Biographies of Jean Fritz, F. N. Monjo, and Milton Meltzer’’ (thesis, 1989). Hostetler, E., Jean Fritz: A Critical Biography (1982). Pillar, A. M., A Resource Guide for Jean

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Fritz’s American History Books (1982). Senick, G. J., ed., Children’s Literature Review (1988). Other references: Boston Sunday Globe (6 Jan. 1991). A Talk with Jean Fritz (video, 1993). A Visit with Jean Fritz (video, 1987). Jean Fritz (audiocassette, 1991). —DIANE E. KROLL

FULLER (MARCHESA D’OSSOLI), (Sarah) Margaret Born 23 May 1810, Cambridgeport, Massachusetts; died 19 July 1850, off Fire Island, New York Wrote under: S. M. Fuller, S. Margaret Fuller, J. Daughter of Timothy and Margaret Crane Fuller; married Giovanni Angelo, Marchese d’Ossoli, 1850; children: Angelo Margaret Fuller’s father was a lawyer and politician; her mother bore nine children, seven of whom survived infancy. Having hoped for a son, Fuller gave his oldest child a masculine education. Pushed by her father’s ambitions and by her own growing sense that she could achieve greatness, Fuller read Horace, Ovid, and Virgil in the original at seven and continued reading widely in her father’s library until she first attended school at fourteen. Two unhappy years at school in Groton, Massachusetts, made clear the social problems caused by what she herself considered her lack of a normal childhood. Back in Cambridge, she studied French, German, Italian, Greek, and philosophy, and made friends with future transcendentalists Frederick Henry Hedge and James Freeman Clarke. In 1833 Fuller’s father retired from public life and moved his family to a farm at Groton, 40 miles from Boston. For two years, Fuller took care of the house and of her younger brothers and sisters while teaching four of the children five to eight hours a day. She also continued her ambitious ‘‘self-culture,’’ reading widely in history, literature, philosophy, and religion. When Fuller’s father died in 1835, she became breadwinner and head of the family. She taught at Bronson Alcott’s school in Boston (1836-37) and the Greene Street School in Providence, Rhode Island (1837-39). In 1839 she moved her family to Jamaica Plain and began her ‘‘Conversations’’ in Boston and Cambridge, which continued until 1844. In 1836 Fuller had begun her friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson. A passage from Emerson’s 1837 journal typifies the mixture of affection and exasperation she could arouse: ‘‘Margaret Fuller left us yesterday morning. Among many things that will make her visit valuable and memorable, this is not the least that she gave me five or six lessons in German pronunciation never by my offer and rather against my will, each time, so that now spite of myself I shall always have to thank her for a great convenience— which she foresaw.’’ From July 1840 until July 1842, at the urging of Emerson and other transcendentalist friends, Fuller edited the Dial.

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In 1843 Fuller accompanied James and Sarah Clarke on a trip to Illinois and Michigan. In December 1844 she went to New York City as a correspondent for Horace Greeley’s Daily-Tribune. In part because of an unfortunate romantic involvement with James Nathan, Fuller sailed in August 1846 for Europe and subsequently traveled in England, Scotland, and France, still acting as a Tribune correspondent. In Rome in 1847 she met her future husband, the Marchese d’Ossoli. Her son Angelo was born in September 1848. Ossoli supported the Roman Republic, and the family stayed in Rome throughout the French siege. Fuller directed a hospital and cared for the wounded. After the republic fell, the family went to Florence and then sailed for America. All three were drowned when their ship broke up in a storm off Fire Island. Fuller began writing with translations of Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe (1839) and the Correspondence of Fräulein Günderode and Bettina Von Arnim (1842); some unhappy attempts at fiction; and rhapsodic, sentimental verse of little merit. Her first successful and original work, Summer on the Lakes (1844), used the frame of her Western visit with the Clarkes for a mixture of realistic reporting, autobiography, historical and philosophical musings, and literary criticism. The result resembles Thoreau’s later A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). Using a journal she had kept on the trip, Fuller provides fresh and perceptive comments on places and people from Chicago and the prairie settlements of Illinois to Milwaukee and Mackinaw. Whatever is rhapsodic or overly Romantic in her approach to the West usually succumbs before her own observations and her commonsense good will. Fuller admires the spirit of the new land, even as she recognizes the cruelty with which the Native Americans had been forced from their country. She mourns the vanished romance and vanishing beauties, but admires the new democracy: ‘‘In the West, people are not respected merely because they are old in years. . . . There are no banks of established respectability in which to bury talent there; no napkin of precedent in which to wrap it. What cannot be made to pass current, is not esteemed coin of the realm.’’ Fuller pities the loneliness of the settlers, particularly the women, whose training she feels has made them less able to bear solitude. She observes that the desire to be fashionable can only slow progress toward adjustment and enjoyment. Educational methods ‘‘copied from the education of some English Lady Augusta, are as ill-suited to the daughter of an Illinois farmer, as satin shoes to climb the Indian mounds.’’ Fuller herself adapted admirably. In Pawpaw Grove, Illinois, she slept on the supper table in a barroom ‘‘from which its drinking visitors could be ejected only at a late hour.’’ She captures the incongruities and cruelties of the Western scene in vignettes—the daughter of a famous ‘‘Indian fighter’’ playing the piano at the window of a boarding house in Milwaukee as Native Americans pass by selling baskets of berries; 2,000 Chippewas and Ottawas encamped at Mackinaw to receive their annual payments from the American government—or in a single sentence: ‘‘Whenever the hog comes, the rattlesnake disappears.’’

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Horace Greeley admired the book enough to offer Fuller a job on his Tribune, and Evert Duyckinck wrote in his diary for 1844 that Summer on the Lakes was the only genuinely American book he had seen published. Papers on Literature and Art (1846) collected Fuller’s critical pieces, but the only other book she wrote was Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), a revision and amplification of her July 1843 Dial article, ‘‘The Great Lawsuit—Man versus Men; Woman versus Women.’’ Fuller’s transcendental tract endorses above all the idea that the powers of each individual should be developed through his or her apprehension of an ideal. Her insistence on the godlike possibilities of all humans differs little from the same radical idealism in the writings of Emerson and Thoreau, but Fuller emphasizes that the fullest possible development of man will not come without the fullest possible development of woman. Fuller also feels that woman has so far been given fewer chances to realize her possibilities: ‘‘The idea of Man, however imperfectly brought out, has been far more so than that of Woman; that she, the other half of the same thought, other chamber of the heart of life, needs now to take her turn in the full pulsation, and that improvement in the daughters will best aid in the reformation of the sons of this age.’’ Fuller says that women must not wait for help from men, continuing their old, bad habits of dependence, but must help themselves; self-reliance and independence are the best ways of aiding themselves and their sisters. The capacity for economic independence is prerequisite to moral and mental freedom, and the freedom to choose celibacy over a degrading or unequal and merely convenient marriage is essential. Late in her book, she makes her famous statement that women should be able to do anything for which their individual powers and talents fit them— ‘‘let them be sea-captains if they will.’’ Woman in the Nineteenth Century thus mixes transcendental idealism and insistence on an economic basis for equality; it discusses prostitution and property rights for women along with the true ends and aims of the ideal marriage. Fuller’s broad social sympathies lead her to point out that the degradation of white women in 19th-century America equals that of red and black men and women. But, she says, what women want is not ‘‘poetic incense,’’ not ‘‘life-along sway,’’ ‘‘not money, not notoriety, not the old badges of authority which men have appropriated to themselves,’’ but ‘‘the freedom, the religious, the intelligent freedom of the universe to use its means, to learn its secret, as far as Nature has enabled them, with God alone for their guide and judge.’’ Fuller is radical because she argues that ‘‘Man’’ encompasses both man and woman, and that both should be allowed equal opportunity to develop. The myths that have grown up around Fuller’s brief life and her relatively small oeuvre make her contributions difficult to assess. Some contemporary and many later critics have maintained that the genius she displayed in conversation, whether natural or guided, never became fully evident in her writings: ‘‘Ultimately she should be remembered for what she was rather than what she did’’ (Blanchard). The Dial has always been seen as central to the transcendentalist movement; some contend that the


magazine reflects Fuller more than it does ‘‘the generality of transcendentalist thought’’ (Rosenthal). Fuller’s writings for the Dial and the Tribune gave her a chance to introduce European culture to America, to promote American literature, and to diffuse her social ideals while contrasting them with harsh reality. With Poe she must be considered America’s first major literary critic, but her reporting gives evidence of a livelier, more supple prose that might have matured given time. Undoubtedly, she contributed much to American Romanticism and the feminist movement. OTHER WORKS: Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (edited by R. W. Emerson, et al., 1852). At Home and Abroad (edited by A. B. Fuller, 1856). Art, Literature, and the Drama (edited by A. B. Fuller, 1860). Life Without and Life Within (edited by A. B. Fuller, 1860). Margaret and her Friends (edited by C. W. H. Dall, 1895). Love-Letters of Margaret Fuller, 1845-1846 (1903). The Writings of Margaret Fuller (edited by M. Wade, 1941). The papers of Margaret Fuller, Marchesa d’Ossoli, are housed in the Boston Public Library and the Houghton Library, of Harvard University. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Blanchard, P., Margaret Fuller: From Transcendentalism to Romanticism (1978). Boller, P. F., American Transcendentalism 1830-1860: An Intellectual Inquiry (1974). Brown, A. W., Margaret Fuller (1964). Buell, L., Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance (1973).

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Chevigny, B. G., The Women and the Myth: Margaret Fuller’s Life and Writing (1976). Cooke, G. W., An Historical and Bibliographical Introduction to Accompany the Dial (1961). Deiss, J. J., The Roman Years of Margaret Fuller (1969). Durning, R. E., Margaret Fuller, Citizen of the World (1969). Gilman, W. H., et al., The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1960- ). Harding, W., and C. Bode, The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau (1958). Hudspeth, R. N., ed., The Letters of Margaret Fuller (5 vols., 1983-88). Miller P., The American Transcendentalists (1957). Miller, P., The Transendentalists (1950). Myerson, J., Margaret Fuller: A Descriptive Bibliography (1978). Myerson, J., Margaret Fuller: A Secondary Bibliography (1977). Simpson, C. M., ed., The American Notebooks (1972). Spender, D., ed., Feminist Theorists: Three Centuries of Key Women Thinkers (1983). Stern, M. B., The Life of Margaret Fuller (1942). Swift, L., Brook Farm (1900). Urbanski, M. M. O., Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century: A Literary Study of Form and Content, of Sources and Influence (1980) Wade, M., Margaret Fuller: Whetstone of Genius (1940). Wilson, E., Margaret Fuller: Bluestocking, Romantic, Revolutionary (1977). Reference works: AA. The Female Prose Writers of America (1855). NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: ELN (Sept. 1970). SAQ (Autumn 1973). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH

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G GAGE, Frances Dana (Barker) Born 12 October 1808, Marietta, Ohio; died 10 November 1880, Greenwich, Connecticut Wrote under: Aunt Fanny, F. D. Gage, Frances Gage, Mrs. Frances Dana Gage Daughter of Joseph and Elizabeth Dana Barker; married James L. Gage, 1829; children: eight Frances Dana Gage, whose parents emigrated from New Hampshire to Ohio in 1788, was born on a farm, the fifth daughter and the ninth of 10 children. Although her education was limited to that of most rural children in a large, hard-working family, she gained the habit of independence of thought and an interest in reform. Her mother, daughter of an educated New England family, encouraged her to learn as much as she could under the difficult circumstances of frontier life in Ohio; the parents’ aid to fugitive slaves underscored their concern with social issues. Gage drew from her background a toughness that served her well in life. After her marriage to a lawyer and businessman, she managed to rear eight healthy children while educating herself further, gaining respect as a prolific journalist and writer, and becoming increasingly active in reform. Gage’s concern over slavery extended to the problems of slaves freed during the Civil War. She spent some time during 1862 in a part of South Carolina controlled by the Union; here she worked with freed slaves who needed help in starting new lives. After the war, when she became better known as a journalist, she continued to urge northerners to give aid to the freedmen. Here, as in all her speaking and writing, she drew on her vigorous homely style to make telling points and to make the unfamiliar acceptable. Her impact on audiences was especially dramatic in her appeals for temperance, in which she used case histories to move women to tears and men to new resolutions. Her spontaneous, conversational manner helped her to win her audiences. These gifts served her well in the women’s rights movement. So eloquent was Gage at the important Akron Convention (1851), she unanimously won the election as president of the convention. Gage’s reminiscences (in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, May 1866) provide the tone and feeling of the dramatic episode in which Sojourner Truth (a former slave, unable to read or write, but a moving speaker) rose to speak at the Akron convention, against the advice of some of the participants. Gage’s own language does not lack color as she describes the importance of woman suffrage: she speaks of ‘‘war cries,’’ the ‘‘advance-guarde,’’ the ‘‘rebellion,’’ and in a somewhat less militant tone, ‘‘most unwearied actors.’’ Gage also wrote to support her large family. Under the pseudonym of Aunt Fanny (whose real identity was no secret) she wrote letters of advice to women in Amelia Bloomer’s Lily, Jane Grey Swisshelm’s Saturday Visiter, and other papers, especially

feminist ones. Aunt Fanny’s words about practical household matters often contained shrewd wit, especially in her reflections on the roles of men and women in daily life. As she counsels her readers on the making of soap, the use of practical clothing, the churning of butter, the efficient use of time, Aunt Fanny amuses herself and them with (often satiric) replies to antisuffrage male correspondents about female frailty. For a time Gage also served as associate editor of both the Ohio Cultivator and Field Notes, farmers’ weekly papers that disappeared after the Civil War. With eight children and an ailing husband, Gage’s need for money grew. She wrote a novel, Elsie Magoon (1867), in which the heroine suffers as victim of an intemperate husband who, though he has the best of intentions, is weak and unable to sustain a job. He succumbs easily to the drinking habits of his friends who take him to bars (Gage, like her sisters, sees the bar as an evil place), and tragedy, really melodrama, results in his death and the suffering of his family. The moral seems to be that a woman must be careful not to marry a ‘‘drunkard,’’ but if she inadvertently does, then she should have no children. She also wrote a volume of poems in 1867—sentimental verse to be sure, but they were accurate descriptions of farm life especially as it reflects the position of women. Gage stands as one of those active, resourceful 19th-century women, who—without the formal education of some of her contemporaries, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Susan B. Anthony—succeeded in becoming an influential writer and a force in the women’s rights movement. She exerted her influence through work in antislavery, temperance, and women’s organizations, but even more through the homely, pithy writing with which she spread her ideas. Her work had perhaps its greatest impact on rural women, with whom she could easily establish rapport because of her similar background. OTHER WORKS: Christmas Stories (1849). The Man in the Well: A Temperance Tale (1850). Fanny’s Journey (1866). Fanny at School (circa 1866). Poems (1867). Gertie’s Sacrifice; or, Glimpses at Two Lives (1869). Steps Upward (1870). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brockett, L. P., and M. C. Vaughn, Woman’s Work in the Civil War (1867). Hanson, E. R., Our Woman Workers (1882). Yellin, J. F., and J. C. Van Horne, eds., An Untrodden Path: Antislavery and Women’s Political Culture (1993). Reference works: AA. AW. DAB. Eminent Women of the Age (1869). HWS. NAW (1971). NCAB. Ohio Authors and Their Books (1962). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: New York Tribune (13 Nov. 1884). —LOIS FOWLER

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GALE, Zona Born 26 August 1874, Portage, Wisconsin; died 27 December 1938, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of Charles F. and Eliza Beers Gale; married W. L. Breese, 1928 An only child, Zona Gale grew up in the sheltered smalltown environment that became the setting for her fiction. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1895. After working as a journalist in Milwaukee, Gale went on to New York in 1900 and began selling stories and poems. She returned permanently to Wisconsin after winning the 1910 Delineator short story prize of $2,000. A longtime friend of Jane Addams, Gale was active with the Women’s Peace Party, woman suffrage, La Follette Progressivism, the Wisconsin Dramatic Society, and the growing community theater movement. Throughout the 1930s, she continued to write fiction and to work for social reform and peace. She saw to the publication and wrote the introduction to The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1935. The women in Gale’s work are remarkable for the consistency of their development. Calliope Marsh, the leading personality of the Friendship Village stories, was based on Gale’s mother and represents the wisdom that Gale saw as basic to an ideal maternal model. Heart’s Kindred (1915) and A Daughter of the Morning (1917) are declarations of Gale’s own feminist awareness. Her most successful novel is Miss Lulu Bett (1920), an unsentimental look at family and marriage customs. Lulu Bett, family ‘‘beast of burden,’’ is shown in rebellion against the life her time and place have thrust upon her: this is a story of growth. There is no overt moralizing to interrupt the flow of the plot. Gale adapted this novel herself for the stage, and in 1921 won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. There was some controversy about the changes Gale made in the ending of the play after a trial run, but in a letter to the editor of the New York Tribune, Gale made it clear she understood the feelings that keep many Lulus locked in their shells for years until a dramatic emotional event sets them free. Gale’s short stories appeared in popular magazines and were then put out in book form; her novels were often serialized before appearing in complete form. She was a regular contributor to magazines, often on feminist topics. Besides adapting some of her other novels for the theater, she wrote a one-act play, The Neighbors (1914), which had great success with college and community groups across the country. Gale published one book of poetry, The Secret Way (1921), which reveals her search for deeper-than-surface reality. Working from life as she observed it, Gale took ordinary occurrences and invested these events with power to affect the inner lives of her characters. Gale expressed her own basic philosophy as ‘‘life is more than we can ever know it to be.’’ Consequently, some of her work is flawed by too heavy a reliance on mysticism: the stories cannot always sustain the transcendent

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events within their framework. When Gale is successful, however, she touches a response in the reader that rises above the sentimental. OTHER WORKS: Romance Island (1906). The Loves of Pelleas and Etarre (1907). Friendship Village (1908). Friendship Village Love Stories (1909). Mothers to Men (1911). Christmas (1912). Civic Improvement in the Little Towns (1913). When I Was a Little Girl (1913). Neighborhood Stories (1914). Birth (1918; dramatization by Gale, Mister Pitt, 1915). Peace in Friendship Village (1919). Uncle Jimmy (1922). What Women Won in Wisconsin (1922). Faint Perfume (1923; dramatization by Gale, 1934). Preface to a Life (1926). Yellow Gentians and Blue (1927). Portage, Wisconsin, and Other Essays (1928). Borgia (1929). Bridal Pond (1930). The Clouds (1932). Evening Clothes (1932). Old Fashioned Tales (1933). Papa La Fleur (1933). Light Woman (1937). Frank Miller of Mission Inn (1938). Magna (1939). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Derleth, A., Still Small Voice: The Biography of Zona Gale (1940). Gard, R., Grassroots Theater: A Search for Regional Arts in America (1955). Herron, I., The Small Town in American Literature (1939). MacDougall, P., Some Will Be Apples (film, 1974). Simonson, H. P., Zona Gale (1962). Sochen, J., Movers and Shakers: American Women Thinkers and Activists 1900-1970 (1974). Reference works: DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA. Other references: American Magazine (June 1921). Madison (Wisconsin) Capital Times (29-31 May 1974, 3- 4 June 1974). Turn of the Century Women (Winter 1984). Yale Review (March 1987). —NANCY BREITSPRECHER

GALLAGHER, Tess Born 21 July 1943, Port Angeles, Washington Daughter of Leslie O. and Georgia Marie Morris; married Lawrence Gallagher, 1963 (divorced 1968); Michael Burkard, 1973 (divorced); Raymond Carver, 1988 (died 1988) Tess Gallagher was born and raised between the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Olympic Mountains in northwestern Washington, the oldest of five children of a logger turned longshoreman. Her early writing was born during the rise of feminist awareness and the emergence of feminist literature in the United States. Gallagher’s writing, however, moves beyond feminine words to express the journey of what it means to be merely human. Like many authors, her poetry reflects back to her childhood memories of the natural beauty of Washington and fishing with her father on the ranch the family owned. Gallagher began her writing career at an early age, working as a reporter for the Port Angeles Daily News at the age of sixteen. She wanted to continue her career as a journalist and enrolled at


the University of Washington. Yet while attending a poetry writing class taught by Theodore Roethke, she found this kind of writing very satisfying. She left school to marry Lawrence Gallagher, a sculptor, in June 1963, but the marriage ended in 1968. That part of her life sparked new poems, many of which are included in her most well-known collection, Instructions to the Double (1976). Her first poem was published in the Minnesota Review in 1969. She received her B.A. in English from the University of Washington in 1968 and her M.A. in 1970, then graduated from the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop with an M.F.A. in 1974. In 1973 she married Michael Burkard, a poet, but this marriage also ended in divorce. In 1979 she began living with writer Raymond Carver, whom she married shortly before his death in 1988. Instructions to the Double reflects a woman in transition and change, just as Gallagher’s own life was going through a change. The four sections of the book are rather autobiographical, defining four distinct phases of growth in her life: her traditional upbringing, her uncertain rejection of the traditional values of her youth, the new offerings the literary world can offer, and her new identity as a poet. The book is divided by many doubles, the first being the kind of poems: at once very literal and written in a testimonial or confessional manner, reflecting on childhood to adulthood memories; and later very philosophical and abstract, more surreal and focusing more on the inner self. Another example of a double is her use of discussing general subjects versus more real subjects from her past. Poems such as ‘‘Breasts’’ and ‘‘Black Money’’ explore her youth, specifically her blossoming into womanhood and her relationship with her father, respectively. The title poem of the collection, ‘‘Instructions to the Double,’’ brings the author to her acceptance of her role as a poet. It is symbolic of her liberation from her past and a fitting theme to the collection. Gallagher wrote six other volumes of poetry, including Under Stars (1978), a further exploration of discovery through the relationships of the writer. This volume is divided into two sections. The first, ‘‘The Ireland Poems,’’ finds Gallagher writing descriptions of the Irish landscape, searching the land of her ancestors for identity in a land she really knows nothing about. The second section, ‘‘Start Again Somewhere,’’ lays a foundation for examining her relationships with men in later poems and collections. In subsequent volumes she studies the themes of morals, death (in Willingly [1984] following the death of her father), travel, and again, family memories. Her poetry is mostly a reflection of herself, yet it is a reflection of self through the love of others. In this way she is able to emphasize the human experience. At one time Gallagher admitted, ‘‘I feel most at home writing poems, but not now.’’ She shifted to fiction, short stories, and essays as a way to ‘‘get out into foreign and surprising waters.’’ After Moon Crossing Bridge and Portable Kisses, she began to dig deeply into writing short stories, realizing that writing prose has a very different ‘‘tempo’’ than writing poetry. She had to become more acutely aware of human nature. And she did, and finds she feels at ease writing both prose and poetry: ‘‘Writing

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fiction is more like sitting in a clearing and waiting to see if the deer will come. . . . Poetry to me is lightning of the moment. It’s second nature.’’ Gallagher has had a long, noteworthy career as both a writer and a teacher, teaching at both St. Lawrence University and Kirkland College, among others. She said, ‘‘It is wonderful to be able to go into a classroom and talk about what you love. To read poems and to listen to young people recite them from memory. In that way I’m like the Poetry Baron—I make students memorize poems. But they love it.’’ ‘‘The Poetry Baron’’ is part of her short story collection, At the Owl Woman Saloon (1997). Gallagher’s career and life as a writer of prose and poetry has been recognized through a number of awards, including a Creative Artist Public Service Grant from the New York State Arts Council (1976), the Elliston Award (1976), National Endowments for the Arts Grants (1976 and 1981), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1978-79), and the Chancellor’s Citation from Syracuse University, where she also taught.

OTHER WORKS: Stepping Outside (1974). On Your Own (1978). Dostoevsky: A Screenplay (with Raymond Carver, 1985). A Concert of Tenses: Essays on Poetry (1986). The Lover of Horses (1986). Amplitude: New and Selected Poems (1987). My Black Horse (1995).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bolick, K., ‘‘A Conversation with Tess Gallagher,’’ in Atlantic Unbound (July 1997). Reference works: Contemporary Poets (1996). DLB: American Poets Since World War II, Third Series (1992). Writers Directory (1997). —DEVRA M. SLADICS

GARBER, Marjorie Born 11 June 1944 Daughter of Allen H. and Rhoda Kanner Garber English professor and Shakespeare scholar Marjorie Garber graduated with the highest honors from Swarthmore College in 1966 and received a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1969. She served as assistant professor of English at Yale University from 1969 to 1975 and associate professor from 1975 to 1979. Garber then accepted a position as professor of English at Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania, and worked there for two years before moving to Harvard University’s English Department in 1981. In her current position, Garber is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English at Harvard, the Associate Dean for Affirmative Action, and a member of the Academic Deans’ Council.

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Garber has also been the director of Harvard’s Center for Literary and Cultural Studies (CLCS) since 1986. The CLCS was founded in 1984 with an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant and provides a place for interdisciplinary study and discussion on topics ranging from history to philosophy to archaeology. The CLCS sponsors ongoing faculty-graduate student seminars as well as lectures, conferences, and workshops for Harvard and Boston-area graduate students and scholars. Among Garber’s awards and honors are a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in 1966, a Morse Fellowship for Younger Scholars in the Humanities in 1972, and American Council of Learned Societies Fellowships in 1977 and 1989. Garber is well known at Harvard for her popular Shakespeare courses, and the Bard also formed the subject of her first three books: Dream in Shakespeare: From Metaphor to Metamorphosis (1974), Coming of Age in Shakespeare (1981), and Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Casualty (1987). Shakespeare has also been the subject of many of Garber’s articles, which have been published in journals and newspapers like Harper’s, the New York Times, Shakespeare Quarterly, Renaissance Drama, Hebrew University Studies in Literature, Yale Review, and Mosaic. Garber has also contributed essays on Shakespeare and other topics to works edited by other scholars. In Garber’s fourth book, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (1992), she explores the practice of cross-dressing by discussing examples from films, history, popular culture, music, literature, and anthropology. The vast quantity of data and her theories support her assertion that ‘‘the definition of the grounds of human gender will always involve more, and less, than any clearly decidable bottom line.’’ Garber notes that cross-dressing blurs the dresser’s gender, challenging the natural human tendency to categorize individuals as male or female. She cautions against dwelling on the reasons for cross-dressing (economic, social, cultural) in order to explain it away. Instead, she argues for a recognition of the cross-dresser as a ‘‘figure that disrupts’’ because it cannot always be explained with logic. As David Kaufman wrote in his review of Vested Interests in Nation: ‘‘Garber suggests that the transvestite is rather symbolic of an Otherness, ‘a third term’ with the inherent capacity—if not necessarily the ambition—to upset more normal or regimented assignments imposed by social and cultural structures as well as by political systems. This is what the ‘cultural anxiety’ in her subtitle alludes to and what her recurring focus on a ‘category of crisis’ is about.’’ Garber manages the difficult task of making her theoretical arguments accessible to the lay reader not only through her clear prose, but through the tie-ins with popular culture. Her examples—from Yentl to Tootsie to Phantom of the Opera—are familiar ones and ground her arguments in a way accessible to the layperson. Garber’s next work, Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life (1996), continues some of the arguments advanced in Vested Interests but focuses primarily on the concept of

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bisexuality. Once again, she cautions against the tendency to classify individuals into one of two categories—in this case heterosexual or homosexual. She does not believe, however, that bisexuality is a third category on a par with heterosexuality or homosexuality. She asserts instead that bisexuality can be an acceptable, adult way of living one’s sexual life rather than a period of confusion or experimentation, as is often supposed. Garber believes that bisexuality reveals the continuum of sexuality from heterosexual to homosexual along which many individuals move throughout their lives. Garber uses examples from her own experiences as a bisexual and from the lives of musicians, actors, artists, and writers to show the ways individuals can move along this continuum of sexuality. After discussing the marriage of a well-known bisexual actor, for example, Garber writes that ‘‘bisexuality is not a fixed point on a scale but an aspect of lived experience, seen in the context of particular relations.’’ Although most critics praised the accessibility of Vested Interests and Vice Versa, some complained that it presupposed a knowledge and experience of literary criticism beyond the layperson’s grasp. Other critics believed that Garber too easily dismissed the human tendency to categorize individuals as something that can be easily vanquished from the reader’s mind. Garber switched gears with her next title, Dog Love (1996), which focuses on the cultural obsession with canines. Garber— the owner of two golden retrievers—looks at the myths and misconceptions about dogs and the human-dog bond. She discusses the seldom-asked question of why humans spend so much money keeping their dogs healthy and happy when there is so much suffering elsewhere that could command our attention. Garber also traces the dog’s relatively recent rise in popularity and looks at some famous canines in literature and film. Her general argument is that society relies on dogs to bring out its humanity. Although not a new argument, Garber’s wit and clear prose make for enjoyable reading. Garber’s latest work, Symptoms of Culture (1998), is yet another departure from her earlier books. Each chapter presents a new look at an American cultural phenomenon or ‘‘symptom’’ representative of American culture. Garber writes that each symptom reveals ‘‘a fantasy of control. . .of a powerful agency, divine or other. . . .The political logic of this is as disturbing as its psychology.’’ Among the chapters or ‘‘symptoms’’ Garber discusses are Richard Nixon, the Wizard of Oz, Charlotte’s Web, anti-Semitism, the Promise Keepers, and the theory of evolution from the Scopes trial to the present. Although too theoretical for a mainstream audience, Garber’s light touch with these difficult and touchy subjects has appeal for the scholarly reader.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Boston (June 1995). Nation (24 Feb. 1992, 17 July 1995). PW (24 Apr. 1995, 23 Sept. 1996, 13 Apr. 1998). —LEAH J. SPARKS


GARDENER, Helen Hamilton (Chenoweth) Born Alice Chenoweth, 21 January 1853, Winchester, Virginia; died 26 July 1925, Washington, D.C. Daughter of Alfred G. and Katherine Peel Chenoweth; married Charles S. Smart, 1875; Selden A. Day, 1902 The initial impetus to Helen Hamilton Gardener’s public career as an author, freethinker, suffragist, and political lobbyist came from her father, whose abolitionist activities and rejection of formal Episcopalian thought instilled in Gardener a strong commitment to independent scientific inquiry, sociological analysis, and concomitant activism. Gardener acknowledged this debt to her father in her last novel, An Unofficial Patriot (1894), a slightly fictionalized biography focusing on her father’s conversion to the Methodist church and on his Civil War activities. After an extensive education at various private schools in the Washington, D.C., area and two years of school teaching, Gardener moved with her husband to New York City, where she studied biology at Columbia University and lectured in sociology at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. In 1884, prompted by her friendship with the prominent agnostic and skeptic, Robert G. Ingersoll, Gardener gave a series of lectures devoted to the principles of free thought and a discussion of the relationship between heredity and environment. Her first book-length publication, Men, Women, and Gods (1885), contains many of these lectures. It was published under the name Helen Hamilton Gardener, a name that she subsequently adopted in both her personal and professional life. It is not known whether she rejected her given name and her married name to further her assertion of individual independence, to shield her family from the uproar which accompanied many of her publications, or to underscore a growing dissatisfaction with her marriage. From 1885 to 1890, Gardener published numerous essays and short stories in a wide variety of periodicals. Many of these pieces were collected in Pushed by Unseen Hands (1890) and A Thoughtless Yes (1890). In the former, Gardener describes the scope of her subject matter as ‘‘unanalyzed varieties of mental, moral, social, industrial, or other aberrations of what is by courtesy called civilized society.’’ Here, as in all of her writings, Gardener insists that her readers formulate independent conclusions, conclusions invariably counterposed to their previous passivity. Gardener continued this work in two essay collections, Pulpit, Pew, and Cradle (1892) and Facts and Fictions of Life (1893). Exploring such diverse topics as insurance fraud, penal reform, labor disputes, hypocrisy in religion and philanthropy, the subservient position of women, and tenement living conditions, these two books make Gardener one of the earliest of the American muckrakers. The most significant and widely discussed of

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these essays was ‘‘Sex in Brain,’’ the result of a 14-month biological study conducted to refute the contention of Dr. W. A. Hammond, surgeon general of the U.S., that the brains of men and women are structurally different. Gardener originally presented the conclusions reached through this research to the International Council of Women in Washington, D.C., in 1888. During the 1890s, when she served as contributor, associate editor, and, briefly, coeditor of B. F. Flower’s reform-oriented magazine, The Arena, she was chiefly responsible for the journal’s progressive stance on a wide variety of feminist issues. Gardener’s two novels, Is This Your Son, My Lord? (1891) and Pray You Sir, Whose Daughter? (1892), explicitly confront and condemn the sexual double standard. The first of these attacks the hypocritical upbringing of young American men, especially with respect to the emphasis on external respectability rather than moral convictions and independent thought. Gardener’s condemnation of institutionalized Christianity as abettor of this false social system figures heavily in her argument. The companion novel, Pray You Sir, Whose Daughter?, focuses on the lives of three young women. Here Gardener writes a strident but effectively argued denunciation of an attempt by the New York state legislature to lower the age-of-consent law; she also condemns the low wages paid to working women, and attacks the inferior position of women in the marital relationship. The novel is especially significant for its memorable portrait of a ‘‘new-woman’’ heroine, Gertrude Foster. Although Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s prediction that Gardener’s writings would do for the women’s rights movement what Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for the abolitionist cause was not fulfilled, the two novels were frequently reprinted and were the subject of widespread controversy. Gardener traveled extensively in Europe and Asia during the first six years of her marriage to Selden Day. Although she no longer wrote for publication, after her return to Washington in 1907 she became active in the agitation for woman suffrage and drafted many platform papers in conjunction with her work with Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt. In 1920, President Wilson nominated Gardener to the U.S. Civil Service Commission. She was the first woman to hold such a high federal position. Throughout her long and varied career, Gardener’s commitment to feminism was a prominent aspect of her self-proclaimed separation from conventional thought and action. Possibly Gardener’s most significant contribution lay in her attack on the standards of propriety and respectability imposed upon the woman writer. In her essay, ‘‘The Immoral Influence of Women in Literature’’ (Arena, February 1890), for example, Gardener cites the need for an uncensored and distinctly female literary voice. She claims such a voice depends upon the gains of the women’s rights movement, gains which she celebrated repeatedly and saw as part of an ongoing struggle, inseparable from wider social advancement and reform.

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OTHER WORKS: The papers of Helen Hamilton Gardener are in the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Flexner, E., Century of Struggle (1959). Gordon, L., Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right (1976). H. H. G. (Alice Chenoweth Day) 1853-1925 (privately printed memorial booklet, 1925). Hill, V. L., ‘‘Strategy and Breadth: The Socialist-Feminist in American Fiction’’ (1979). Park, M., Front Door Lobby (1960). Putnam, S., 400 Years of Freethought (1894). Reference works: A W. DAB HWS NAW NCAB. Other references: American Journal of Physical Anthropology (Oct.-Dec. 1927). Arena (Jan. 1891, June 1892, Dec. 1894). Business Woman (Jan. 1923). Free Thought Magazine (Jan. 1890, Jan. 1897, March 1901, July 1902). Independent (8 Sept. 1892). Literary World (13 Aug. 1892, 9 Sept. 1893). Nation (16 June 1892). Woman Citizen (2 May 1925). —VICKI LYNN HILL

GARDNER, Isabella Born 7 September 1915, Newton, Massachusetts; died 7 July 1981, New York, New York Daughter of George Peabody and Rose Grosvenor Gardner; married Harold van Kirk, 1938 (marriage ended); Maurice Seymour, 1943 (divorced 1947); Robert H. McCormick Jr., 1947 (divorced 1957); Allen Tate, 1959 (divorced 1966); children: Rose, Dan In the poetically rich quarter century between 1950 and 1980, Isabella Gardner earned a wide-ranging and considerable reputation in poetry, her chosen vocation. She was raised in Boston, one of six children of a wealthy society family with a strong New England heritage. She was a cousin of poet Robert Lowell and was often confused with the other Isabella Stewart Gardner, the Boston art patron and collector, who was her great-great-aunt and godmother. At one time in her life she even lived in her godmother’s house, and, according to many, with her red hair and snub nose, she also looked like her. Gardner’s education included the Foxcroft School in Middleburg, Virginia, from 1931 to 1933, the Leighton Rollins School of Acting in East Hampton, New York, and in 1937, the Embassy School of Acting in London, England. For a few years she pursued an acting career, specializing in character roles ‘‘where her shy stutter would be less liable to obtrude.’’ After marriage and the birth of her children, she resumed the writing of poetry, which she had begun in her early teens and had given up because she believed herself to be ‘‘too facile’’ at the craft. Once renewed, however, her position as a poet-contemporary of such writers as Howard Shapiro, John Logan, Richard Eberhardt, John Frederick Nims, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop was secured. Although her output was comparatively slim (about 100 published poems), her work appeared in such prestigious literary

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journals and magazines as Poetry magazine, Partisan Review, Paris Review, the New Yorker, Nation, and Atlantic Monthly. There were five books of poetry: Birthdays from the Ocean (1955), Un Altra Infanzia (in Italy, 1959), The Looking Glass (1961), West of Childhood: Poems 1950-1965, and posthumously, The Collected Poems (1985). Her work was anthologized in, among others, A Pocket Book of Modern Verse (1955), Imagination’s Other Place (1955), Erotic Poetry (1963), Eight Lines and Under (1967), and Honey and the Gall (1967). Sound and rhythm are crucial elements in Gardner’s poetry. She makes extensive use of rhyme, including internal rhyme and ‘‘near-rhyme,’’ and there is an exuberant musicality in her poems, even while many of them explore death-related themes. There are echoes of Gerard Manley Hopkins and similarities to Dylan Thomas, but these are not so much derivative as independently original. According to one biographer, ‘‘Gardner’s early work is often compared to that of Dylan Thomas, particularly in terms of her vital, unself-conscious love for words.’’ She has also been compared to Muriel Rukeyser and Sylvia Plath in her ability to use words with significant import. According to Marian Janssen, author of a major biographical article in Kenyon Review on Gardner, ‘‘She controlled the chaos of life by end rhyme, alliteration, assonance, and, often, strictly metered iambic lines, as well as [in Gardner’s words] ‘symbology, inter-relating, universal + associative, of Christianity + myth + magic (+ Freud).’’’ All of her poems were inspired by the incidents of her life—both happy and tragic, as indeed her life became. In her earlier years she often used forms—the sestina, terza rima, triolet, even the obligatory sonnet. After the breakup of her marriage to the difficult Tate (at his instigation, not hers), she withdrew to a somewhat reclusive existence in the Chelsea Hotel in New York City and a self-imposed poetic silence of 15 years. Her later poems, in a slight nod to changing poetic fashions and trends, went to longer lines and even an abandonment of the brilliant end rhyme that had been so characteristic of her. From 1951 to 1956 Gardner was associate editor of Poetry, while Karl Shapiro was editor. There she became known for her caring concern for the success of younger poets she worked with, even providing monetary help in some cases. Shapiro praised her first volume of poetry and thought the second (The Looking Glass) was even better: ‘‘Nearly every poem in the volume deserves applause,’’ he wrote in the New York Times Book Review. ‘‘It is an outstanding book. If I had anything to do with it, I would nominate it for the Pulitzer Prize.’’ In fact, both Birthdays from the Ocean and The Looking Glass were nominated for the National Book Award (Birthdays was runner-up in the year that W. H. Auden won the award), That Was Then was nominated for the 1980 American Book Award, and in 1981 Gardner was selected as the first recipient of the New York State Walt Whitman Citation of Merit for Poetry. In ‘‘The Fellowship with Essence: An Afterword’’ to her last book, Gardner wrote: ‘‘If there is a theme with which I am particularly concerned, it is the contemporary failure of love. I don’ t mean romantic love or sexual passion, but the love which is the specific and particular recognition of one human being by


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another—the response by eye and voice and touch of two solitudes. The democracy of universal vulnerability.’’ During her poetry years Gardner gave poetry readings throughout the U.S. and in Europe. The Library of Congress has three tapes of her readings, one with John Logan. Her manuscript papers are at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference Works: CA 97-100 (1975), 104 (1982). CP (1970, 1975). Other References: Booklist (15 Mar. 1955, 1 Mar. 1966). Carroll, P., The Poem in Its Skin (1968). Harper’s (6 Aug. 1966). Kenyon Review (Summer 1991). LJ (1 Apr. 1955). Modern Age (Winter 1961-62). NYT (10 July 1981). NYTBR (22 May 1950, 21 Sept. 1980). Poetry (Oct. 1966). Poulin, A. Jr., ed., Contemporary American Poetry, 4th ed. (1951). Saturday Review (9 July 1955). Sewanee Review (Jan.-Mar.1956). Virginia Quarterly Review (Spring 1966). Yale Review (Sept. 1955). —JOANNE L. SCHWEIK

GARDNER, Mariam See BRADLEY, Marion Zimmer

GARDNER, Mary Sewall Born 5 February 1871, Newton, Massachusetts; died 20 February 1961, Providence, Rhode Island Daughter of William Sewall and Mary Thornton Gardner As a girl, Mary Sewall Gardner moved with her well-to-do family from Massachusetts to Providence, where she lived and worked all her life. Gardner credited her father and half-brother, both of them lawyers and judges, with teaching her to think clearly and to feel a sense of civic responsibility. In 1890, Gardner graduated from Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut. She entered the Newport Hospital Training School for Nurses when she was over thirty. In 1905, soon after graduating, Gardner became director of the Providence District Nursing Association, which she headed until her retirement in 1931. Worried that the boom in publichealth work was leading to employment of poorly trained nurses, Lillian D. Wald, Gardner, and others prodded the two national nurses’ groups to establish a standard-setting body. The result was the National Organization for Public Health Nursing (NOPHN), founded in 1912. Gardner helped draft its constitution, was active on its first board of directors, and succeeded Wald as NOPHN president from 1913 to 1916. Like the NOPHN, Gardner’s first book, Public Health Nursing (1916), aimed to guide, restrain, and standardize the efforts of

nurses and lay people caught up in the enthusiasm for public health. The first systematic treatment of the subject, it was revised in 1924 and 1936 and was in print until 1945. In a demonstration of the worldwide influence of American nursing methods it was translated into French, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese. Although used in classrooms, the book served a wider audience by offering advice on how to found and manage a district nursing association, how to run a one-woman public-health program, and how to deal with lay boards of managers. After she retired, Gardner published two works of fiction. So Build We (1942) presents episodes in the life of Mary Melton, director of a district nursing association. Episodes inculcate proper procedures and awareness of social factors, and conversations sometimes degenerate into lifeless expositions of administrative problems, but the book transcends didacticism in its portrayal of an all-female world. Melton benevolently guides her women subordinates, giving each the guidance she needs. So Build We depicts a world where women’s good intentions, intelligence, professionalism, and nurturance suffice to create harmony. The absence of conflict and of more-than-fleeting references to suffering—astonishing in a study of nursing—weaken the book but suggest Gardner’s vision of the ideal life. Katharine Kent (1946), a better book, follows a nurse from graduation to middle age. Like Gardner, Katharine Kent is an upper-class New Englander, a daughter and sister of lawyers who eventually heads a public-health nursing association in her own city. Like Gardner, she writes an influential book while sick and sets up a program to train public-health nurses in Italy. (Gardner used parts of letters she wrote after World War I when she served with the American Red Cross Commission for Tuberculosis in Italy in her account of Kent’s European nursing ventures.) Other elements in the book apparently derive less from autobiography than from Gardner’s conception of an ideal career. This book ends, as did So Build We, with its heroine affirming her delight in her chosen work. Gardner’s fiction and many of her speeches, articles, and reports celebrate the value of work in women’s lives. Professional work creates cherished ties of comradeship and discipleship between women, and egalitarian relationships between women and men or women and their families. Gardner tried to portray women who are happy as stay-at-home wives and mothers, but they remain shadowy figures, alive only in their volunteer service to public-health nursing. In her books it is participation in nursing’s ‘‘long war against disease and suffering and death’’ which makes women happy. Gardner’s writings, although sometimes amateurish and preachy, are valuable documents in the history of nursing, professional women, and American civic conscience. No other leader in the effort to make American nursing a profession wrote so openly about her motives and rewards. Despite its wooden dialogue, its narrow, upper-class perspective, and its easy resolution of conflicts, Katharine Kent offers a moving portrait of a woman who pursues autonomy and a fundamentally maternal and Christian ideal of service.

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OTHER WORKS: The papers of Mary Sewall Gardner are at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts. BIBLIOGRAPHY: American Journal of Public Health 36 (Oct. 1946). Providence Journal (22 Feb. 1961). Nursing Outlook (Dec. 1953, Jan. 1954, March 1961). NYTBR (28 July 1946). Survey (July 1942). —SUSAN ARMENY

GARRIGUE, Jean Born Gertrude Louise Garrigus, 8 December 1914, Evansville, Indiana; died 28 December 1972, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of Allan Colfax and Gertrude Heath Garrigus. Jean Garrigue was a respected poet, critic, and teacher of poetry. Born in Evansville, Indiana, she received her B.A. from the University of Chicago and M.A. from the University of Iowa, where she subsequently taught creative writing. Iowa was just one of the institutions where Garrigue instructed during her career. Others included Bard College, Queens College, The New School for Social Research, the University of Colorado, the University of Connecticut, Smith College, and the University of Washington. She was poet-in-residence at both the University of California at Riverside and Rhode Island College during the year preceding her 1972 death, at age fifty-nine, of Hodgkin’s disease. Garrigue was first published in 1941 in the Kenyon Review. In 1944 her initial large collection, ‘‘Thirty-Six Poems and a Few Songs,’’ appeared in an anthology called Five Young American Poets. Her book-length debut was The Ego and the Centaur, a collection released in 1947. As a poet, Garrigue—who changed her name from Gertrude Louise Garrigus in 1940, both to acknowledge the French roots of her last name and to assume what many viewed as a deliberately gender-ambiguous first name—was known for her complicated, technically excellent works. Most centered on the themes of love and the heart, but many also incorporated other interests, such as music, architecture, nature, and especially travel. She was reputed for her ability to craft unique phrasing from a precise choice of words. She wrote in a passionate, lyrical style that drew generously from the influence of poets before her, but remained her own. Laurence Lieberman wrote in Poetry that Garrigue was ‘‘perhaps more skilled than any other poet writing today with the power to dramatize emotional thresholds between jeopardy and renewal. . . . In poem after poem her subject is the failure of events in daily life ever to measure up to her spirit’s esthetic craving for perfectability.’’ In American Poetry Since 1945, Stephen Stepanchev noted that ‘‘although her commitment to verbal magic sometimes draws her into a forest of rhetoric from which too much contemporary reality is banned, she succeeds in conveying, in her best poems, a sense of the world’s danger and delights.’’ Babette

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Deutsch, in Poetry in Our Time, wrote, ‘‘Miss Garrigue finds her subject matter in the give-and-take between the physical presence and the ideas, or more often, the emotions that attach to it. If she wears her feelings upon her sleeve, the embroidery can dazzle.’’ Garrigue’s earliest works were generally considered her best. Her later collections each contained masterful individual poems but were not viewed as being as solid in their entirety as past efforts. Some critics were annoyed by her mannerisms and circuitous language, which was sometimes called ‘‘Jamesian’’ or ‘‘Wordsworthian.’’ Some felt that her strong emotions were excessive, although all agreed that her confidence in her ability to manipulate language was warranted. Her lengthy travel poems represent some of her most highly commended work. These include ‘‘Pays Perdu’’ from Country Without Maps (1964) and ‘‘The Grand Canyon’’ from Studies for an Actress and Other Poems (1973), published posthumously. Other book-length collections include The Monument Rose (1953), Chartres and Prose Poems (1958), A Water Walk by Ville d’Este (1959), and New and Selected Poems (1967). After Garrigue’s death, her poetry gradually went out of the public consciousness until two decades later, when Selected Poems: Jean Garrigue (1992) was published and revived her reputation. The book contained four previously uncollected poems in addition to reprinted works from each of her earlier books. Phoebe Pettingell pointed out in the New Leader that Garrigue was a hyper-romantic who believed that an artist should be completely passionate in all aspects of life, even when that passion leads to hurt. The latter is an emotion that recurs throughout her poems. Selected Poems illustrates Garrigue’s evolution from the beginning to the end of her career: in the early days she focused mainly on internal issues, but she later examined some of the political matters of her time. Examples include ‘‘Lead in the Water’’ and ‘‘Resistance Meeting: Boston Common,’’ both first published in Studies for an Actress. In addition to writing her own collections, Garrigue contributed poems to Cross-Sections, edited by Edwin Weaver (1947). She was the editor of Translations by American Poets (1970) and compiled Love’s Aspects: The World’s Great Love Poems (1975). She wrote a novella, The Animal Hotel (1966), and a work of nonfiction, Marianne Moore (1965). Garrigue was also a poetry critic, essayist, and fiction reviewer, contributing to the New Leader, the New Republic, Saturday Review of Literature, Kenyon Review, and Tomorrow. Among the other publications to which she contributed poems or prose were Botteghe Oscure, Poetry, Commentary, Arts magazine, and the New York Herald Tribune. During her career Garrigue won a number of awards and honors, including Rockefeller Foundation, Guggenheim, National Academy of Arts and Letters, Hudson Review, and Radcliffe Institute fellowships and grants. She also won a Union League Civic and Arts Foundation prize, a Longview award, an Emily Clark Balch first prize, and a Melville Cane award, as well as being nominated for a National Book award for Country Without Maps.


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BIBLIOGRAPHY: Thompson, D. E., ed., Indiana Authors and Their Books, 1917-1966 (1974). Reference works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature (1991). CA, 37-40 (1973). CANR 20 (1987). CLC 2 (1974), 8 (1978). World Authors 1900-1950 (1996). Other references: LJ (15 Apr. 1992). New Leader (29 Jan. 1968, 13-27 July 1998). NR (2 Nov. 1953). NYRB (4 Oct. 1973). NYT (28 Dec. 1972). Parnassus (Winter 1975). Poetry (Dec. 1953, May 1960, June 1965, May 1968). SR (19 June 1948, Spring 1954). YR (Autumn 1973).

Peter, but since she is a eugenist and plans to have seven perfect children, she cannot love him and maintain her principles. While acting as escort Peter discovers that Diantha’s aunt’s secretary is bilking her of money, reveals the crime, and, as a result, reveals himself as a healthy, sound, ‘‘ideal’’ father-to-be of seven children. We Are Seven was dramatized by the author from her short story ‘‘Agatha’s Escort,’’ contained in The Justice of Gideon (1910). Gates was a popular novelist and dramatist in the first decades of this century, but her novels and plays can today be characterized as little more than sentimental schlock.

—KAREN RAUGUST

GATES, Eleanor Born 26 September 1875, Shakopee, Minnesota; died 7 March 1951, Los Angeles, California married Richard Walton Tully, 1901; Frederick F. Moore, 1941 The title of Eleanor Gates’ most famous novel, The Poor Little Rich Girl (1912), has become a cliché. In the novel, sevenyear-old Gwendolyn is at the mercy of her servants, because her businessman father and socialite mother have no time for her. Midway through the novel she falls ill and hallucinates an encounter in which all of her previously unanswered questions are answered, her bullying servants banished, and her parents brought to her side. Although initially cute, the 200-page hallucination is far too long and quickly cloys. Naturally, Gwendolyn’s dream comes true. Ten years later, Gates attempted to cash in on her previous success with The Rich Little Poor Boy (1922). Almost as good as The Poor Little Rich Girl is bad, the novel covers the horrid early life of Johnny Smith/Blake, who had been kidnapped by Tom Barber, a selfish brute, to provide free geriatric care for Tom’s father. Johnny is forced to stay in the apartment all day, wears Tom’s made-over clothes (woefully too large for him), and is not permitted to attend school. In fact, any rotten thing that could happen to a child (except child molesting) happens to Johnny, but he has a heart of gold, a spine of steel, and a diamond-in-the-rough mind, which is why he’s a rich little poor boy. His friends and saviors are his stepsister, a one-eyed cowboy, a priest, and a Boy Scout leader. As it turns out, Johnny’s father was a hero, and because he is a hero’s son, Johnny has been given a large scholarship by Dale Carnegie. But, a hero himself, Johnny decides to postpone using the scholarship while his ‘‘Grampa’’ (Barber’s father) needs him. We Are Seven (1915) is typical of Gates’s plays. Subtitled a three-act whimsical farce, it is built around Diantha Kerr, an independent young woman who is writing a master’s thesis in sociology and who is forced by her aunt to accept an escort for her research expeditions. Enter Peter Avery, a practical joker, who, after one glimpse of Diantha, pretends to be deaf and dumb, a prerequisite for the escort job. Diantha begins to fall in love with

OTHER WORKS: The Biography of a Prairie Girl (1902). Buenas Noches (1906). The Plow-Woman (1906). Cupid: The Cow-Punch (1907). The Justice of Gideon (1910). Swat the Fly (1915). Apronstrings (1917). Phoebe (1919). Piggie (1919). Pa Hardy (1936). Fish-Bait(n.d.). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: NCAB, 15. —CYNTHIA L. WALKER

GATES, Susa Young Born 18 March 1856, Salt Lake City, Utah; died 27 March 1933, Salt Lake City, Utah Wrote under: Amelia, Maggie Farnham, Mary Foster Gibbs, Homespun, Mary Howe, Dr. Snuffbottle Daughter of Brigham and Lucy Bigelow Young; married Alma Dunford, 1872; Jacob F. Gates, 1880, children: 13, but only five survived to adulthood An aristocrat among the Mormons in the intermountain West, Susa Young Gates was raised in the Lion House, polygamous household of territorial governor and church leader Brigham Young. Educated beyond the usual for the time and place, at fourteen she was editor of the University of Deseret (now Utah) literary magazine, and at twenty-two she established the music department at the newly founded Brigham Young University, as well as instituting classes there in phonography (shorthand). A mixed career of writing and editing began in 1889 with her publication of the Young Woman’s Journal, which lasted until 1929. In the interim she also directed the founding of the Relief Society Magazine. Both were monthly magazines aimed at Mormon women. Gates contributed heavily to both, generally under one of her several pseudonyms. She also wrote for the North American Review, the Pacific Bureau Service, and the Utah Genealogical and Historical Magazine. Her involvement with women’s issues, including the successful campaign to include universal suffrage in the Utah constitution, 1896, took Gates as far afield as London (1889) and Copenhagen (1902) as a speaker and participant in conventions of

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the International Council of Women. By no means a radical feminist, she reflected a conservative position of human rights within a patriarchal hierarchy. Her early marriage ended in divorce after the birth of two children. A subsequent marriage produced eleven more children, whose births and deaths were interspersed among the heavy professional schedule Gates maintained. Of the 13 children, only five survived to adulthood. Her literary output is varied. Two novels, one full biography, a genealogical handbook, a play, a raft of short stories, and countless short personal essays are in print; her papers contain manuscripts of a history of women and several other unfinished projects. Her commitment to the Mormon belief is the unifying thread through all, a commitment expressed most effectively through her characters’ adherence to basic 19th-century Christian morality, or their defiance thereof, with the subsequent, and predictable, dire consequences. Her own favorite of the novels, John Stevens’ Courtship (1909), tells of two young Mormon women of the 1850s and the clash with ‘‘the world outside’’ in the form of eastern soldiers stationed in Utah. The book is often didactic, its message of ‘‘virtue rewarded’’ very openly acknowledged in the disgrace and death of the morally careless Ellen and the happily-ever-after marriage of the steadfast Diantha to Mormon stalwart Stevens. Superior to the earlier work, however, is the imaginative Prince of Ur, published posthumously in 1945. Through the travails of Hebrew Abram the book presents conflicts of love and religion. The protagonist is a virile statesman-priest, set off against the bestial Nimrod and the cunning Mardan. Sarai is saintly, but markedly less interesting than the provocative, determined Ischa, whose warmth and a certain pathetic quality save her from a stereotyping that would have marred the book. It was through her short stories, however, that Gates won her reputation among her contemporaries. Didactic, moralistic pieces, they often ran as serials in the journals she edited. Slanted at an audience immature in age or in literary sophistication, they reflected nothing so much as Gates’s religious conviction. More effective in the moralistic purpose for which she wrote were the personal essays Gates often included as editorials or notes in the magazines. Often impassioned, they ranged far afield from religious tenets, though they retained a gloss of Christian, more specifically Mormon, mores. Her dramatic writing and her poetry generally were not significant beyond their moment. The Life Story of Brigham Young (1930), Gates’s biography of her father, though no longer standard, was appraised by contemporaries as, understandably, written ‘‘in the nature of a vindication, but indeed polygamy is the only thing. . .that needs vindicating.’’ Not Mormonism’s nor Utah’s finest writer, Gates was in several aspects a worthy pioneer: as novelist, essayist, short fiction writer, and editor-journalist, she set some models which long survived her in the mountainous West.

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OTHER WORKS: Lydia Knight’s History (1883). Heroines of Mormondom (1884). History of Young Ladies’ Mutual Improvement Association. . . (1911). Surname Book and Racial History (1918). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Burgess-Olson, V., ed., Sister Saints (1978). Bushman, C., ed., Mormon Sisters: Women in Early Utah (1876). Cracroft, R. P., ‘‘Susa Young Gates’’ (thesis, 1951). Reference works: Latter-Day Saint Biographical Encyclopedia, A. Jensen, ed. (1901). NCAB. Other references: Dialogue (1971). —MAUREEN URSENBACH BEECHER

GEARHART, Sally Miller Born 15 April 1931, Pearisburg, Virginia Daughter of Kyle M. and Sarah Gearhart A feminist utopian novelist and professor of speech and communication studies, Sally Miller Gearhart describes her politics as lesbian-feminist and her religion as Philogyny. She received her B.A. in English from Sweet Briar College in Sweet Briar, Virginia (1952) and continued her education at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, where she received an M.A. in public address in 1953. In 1956 she was awarded a Ph.D. in theater from the University of Illinois and completed additional study at the University of Kansas from 1969 to 1970. In 1974 Gearhart edited and coauthored with William R. Johnson a piece entitled Loving Women/Loving Men: Gay Liberation in the Church. Her only novel, The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women, was published in 1978 and has been reprinted several times. Wanderground depicts a lesbian utopian society of ‘‘hill women’’—a group of antiviolent people who have escaped ‘‘in City’’ in a revolt against technology and male domination. Offering an essentialist portrayal of men and women as polar opposites, Gearhart writes of the hill women’s relationships to each other and to the planet Earth, which is depending on them for its survival. Critic Bonnie Zimmerman calls the novel ‘‘an extreme example of the idealization of the lesbian myth of community.’’ She regrets the occasional artistic lapses that result from Gearhart’s idealism, but notes the strength with which Gearhart ‘‘and those inspired by her revere the virtues of equality, balance, harmony, and complete respect for all entities.’’ Gearhart has held a variety of teaching positions, including assistant professor of speech at the Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas (1956-59) and associate professor of speech and drama and department head at Texas Lutheran College from 1960 to 1970. She became a lecturer and associate professor at San Francisco State University before becoming a professor of speech from 1972 to 1992. She is now retired and a professor emerita at San Francisco State.


Gearhart has contributed short stories and essays to numerous anthologies. She has also served as a member of the board of directors of the San Francisco Family Service Agency; as cochairperson of the Council on Religion and the Homosexual; as lecturer and consultant for the national Sex Forum; and as a member of the San Francisco Women’s Centers, PETA, the ACLU, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and the San Francisco Women’s Centers. OTHER WORKS: A Feminist Tarot: A Guide to Intrapersonal Communication (1977). Questioning Technology: Tool, Toy, or Tyrant (1991). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Rosinsky, N., Feminist Futures: Contemporary Women’s Speculative Fiction (1987). Zimmerman, B., Safe Sea of Women (1990). Reference works: CA (1976). CANR (1998). FC (1990). Feminist Writers (1996). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Alternatives (Oct.-Nov. 1989). —MARY E. HARVEY, UPDATED BY LEAH J. SPARKS

GELLHORN, Martha Born November 1908, St. Louis, Missouri; died 15 February 1998, London, England Daughter of George and Edna Fischel Gellhorn; married Bertrand de Jouvenel, 1933; Ernest Hemingway, 1940 (divorced 1945); T. S. Matthews, 1953; children: George. By the time she was twenty-one, Martha Gellhorn had already begun the journalistic career that would, during the next 60 years, make her ‘‘an unscathed tourist of wars.’’ Rather than return to Bryn Mawr College for her final year of studies, Gellhorn began writing for the New Republic in the summer of 1929 and then, following a short stint as a cub reporter for the Albany Times Union, bartered her passage to Europe in February 1930 by writing a brochure for the Holland America Line. Returning to the U.S. during the dark years of the Depression, Gellhorn convinced Harry Hopkins, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s confidant, to hire her as an investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. She transformed her year’s experience in the field reporting on the plight of ordinary people whose industry and respectability had been debased by hunger, disease, and despair into the stories published in her first collection, The Trouble I’ve Seen (1936). Gellhorn discovered her true subject, however, in 1937 when she arrived in Madrid with nothing but a knapsack and $50 during the height of the Spanish Civil War. There she met veteran war correspondents Ernest Hemingway (whom she married in 1940

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and divorced in 1945) and Robert Capa, and submitted an unsolicited article to Collier’s Weekly. From that point on, Gellhorn won acclaim for her ability to convey the face of war, to render the suffering of ordinary people in spare prose and powerful imagery, defying convention to become one of the first female war correspondents. By 1939 Gellhorn had reported on Nazi encroachment into Czechoslovakia and the Russo-Finnish war. A year later she trekked across China with Hemingway, in all likelihood the ‘‘Unwilling Companion’’ of the often humorous recollections of excursions to the Caribbean, Asia, and Russia published in her autobiographical Travels with Myself and Another (1978). During World War II she defied military regulations and stowed away on a hospital ship to witness the Normandy invasion and even accompanied British pilots on night bombing raids over Germany. When the Allies liberated Dachau, Gellhorn was there to record the truth. During the Cold War, when the arena of combat shifted, she reported on the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Vietnam War, the Nicaraguan contras, and at the age of eighty-one, the U.S. invasion of Panama. Only when war came to Bosnia did she admit she was ‘‘too old’’ to bear witness. Military tactics and the exploits of generals, as the title of her collection of front-line dispatches, The Face of War (1959, 1988), suggests, held little interest for Gellhorn. As a war correspondent she focused instead on the common soldier and civilians, on the telling details by which to make real their lives and experiences. While her cool, detached prose and almost photographic delineation of person, place, and event suggested utter objectivity, Gellhorn’s personal perspective was never in doubt. In fact for Gellhorn journalism, carefully written, was a ‘‘form of honorable behavior.’’ Although she made her reputation as a journalist, Gellhorn also achieved her goal of becoming a successful fiction writer, publishing six novels and seven short fiction collections, many of which depicted the same events and explored the same issues covered when she was a reporter. While the lines between fiction and nonfiction were seemingly blurred in her work, fiction clearly afforded Gellhorn the freedom to transform subjects into characters, events into plot, and to invest both with her decidedly personal perspective. Ranging widely like their author in physical geography, Gellhorn’s stories, novellas (a form at which she was particularly adept), and novels examine political and personal conflicts to illustrate her recurring themes: the human cost of poverty and war, the necessary struggle to invest life with meaning, the cruelty of oppression, the delicate balance between freedom and responsibility. Gellhorn’s first two novels, What Mad Pursuit (1934) and A Stricken Field (1940), loosely transformed autobiography into fiction, dramatizing in the first instance her three years at Bryn Mawr and her subsequent experiences in Europe’s pacifist youth movement, and her exploits as a journalist in Czechoslovakia on the eve of Nazi occupation in the second. The publication of Liana (1944), however, a novel about the oppressive marriage of a powerless mulatto woman to a wealthy white man set in the

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French Caribbean, demonstrated Gellhorn’s ability to imagine herself into the lives and minds of others. In 1948 she published her most accomplished novel, The Wine of Astonishment (reissued in 1989 as Point of No Return), the parallel stories of two American soldiers involved in the Battle of the Bulge who must confront not only their own terror, sorrow, and prejudices but also the insanity of a world at war. Gellhorn’s mature fiction is among her most artistic and complex. The stories collected in The Honeyed Peace (1953) and Pretty Tales for Tired People (1965), the novellas published in Two by Two (1958) and The Weather in Africa (1978), and the novel His Own Man (1961) are dramas of social, cultural, and psychological dislocation that expose the complexities of modern life. Like her dispatches in war and in peace (collected in 1988 as The View from the Ground), Gellhorn’s fiction bears witness to the human predicament, simultaneously commanding her readers’ sympathy and outrage. Taken together, her fiction and nonfiction offer persuasive evidence that Gellhorn did indeed keep faith with her journalistic credo to ‘‘write what you see and how it is.’’ OTHER WORKS: The Heart of Another (1941). Love Goes to Press (with Virginia Cowles, 1947). Vietnam: A New Kind of War (1966). The Lowest Trees Have Tops (1969). The Novellas of Martha Gellhorn (1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Kert, B., The Hemingway Women (1983). Lassner, P., ‘‘‘Camp Follower of Catastrophe’: Martha Gellhorn’s World War II Challenge to the Modernistic War,’’ in MFS 44 (1998). Rollyson, C., Nothing Ever Happens to the Brave: The Story of Martha Gellhorn (1990). Reference works: CA 77-80. CLC 14, 60. DLBY (1982). Other references: NYT (17 Feb. 1998). —LINDA C. PELZER

GENÊT See FLANNER, Janet

GEORGE, Jean Craighead Born 2 July 1919, Washington, D.C. Also writes under: Jean Craighead, Jean George Daughter of Frank and Carolyn Johnson Craighead; married John L. George, 1944 (divorced 1963); children: three Jean Craighead George, writer, illustrator, and naturalist, attended Pennsylvania State University and edited its literary magazine. During World War II she worked as a reporter for the International News Service (1941-43) and the Washington Post and Times-Herald (1943-45). She worked as an artist for Pageant

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magazine (1945-46) and as reporter-artist for the Newspaper Enterprise Association (1946-47). George married a conservationist and ecologist with whom she had three children; they were divorced in 1963. In the 1960s and 1970s alone, George wrote 33 books (and illustrated some of them), mostly for children. She also published many articles on nature subjects in Reader’s Digest, for whom she was a roving editor, and in other magazines. An unusual characteristic of George is that, if at all possible, she lives with the animals she writes about; she reports having raised at least 173 wild pets. Vulpes, the Red Fox (1948) begins with the birth of Vulpes in a chill spring rain and ends with his death. The book is steeped with details about the foxes’ lives, the seasons, and the locale; the dangers and deaths that occur are handled calmly and matter-offactly as part of nature’s cycle. My Side of the Mountain (1959, film version 1969) is the story of adolescent Sam Gribley, who is tired of living with his large family in a cramped city apartment and wants to go live in the Catskills on his great-grandfather’s homestead. He does so for 13 months, where he collects and cooks his own food, makes himself a home inside a tree trunk, and figures out a source of heat for protection against the cold mountain winters. He has a variety of animal friends, including Frightful, a young falcon he trains. The life is difficult and sometimes lonely, but Sam succeeds, and the story is told so realistically and with such detail it all seems very credible. The conflicts of adolescence are further explored in many of George’s books, including The Summer of the Falcon (1962), a story that seems to incorporate some of George’s own biography. It is told through the cycle of a family’s return, three summers in a row, to the grandfather’s Victorian house in the mountains. The heroine struggles toward self-discipline; in one scene she uses her wits to complete a cave rescue only after she has admitted her nearly overwhelming fear. Perhaps the ending is too pat, but this is more than outweighed by the book’s basic strengths, including fascinating hawk lore. Julie of the Wolves (1972) is the story of an adolescent Eskimo girl who is befriended by a wolf pack while searching for her lost father and a lost cultural tradition. George captures the conflict of Eskimo life, the desire on the part of some to retain the old ways of living in harmony with the earth, and the desire of others to enjoy some of the luxuries of ‘‘civilization’’—such as radios, refined foods, alcohol, and high-powered rifles. Julie of the Wolves, with its sections of fine naturalistic writing, won the 1973 Newbery Medal and was voted among the 10 best children’s books of the last 200 years by members of the Children’s Literature Association. Hook a Fish, Catch a Mountain (1975), like the earlier Who Really Killed Cock Robin? (1971), are ecological mysteries, but like many other books by George, it is also a story of an adolescent trying to be accepted as an individual. Again, the protagonist is female, and again she is trying to shake off her lack of experience


and her fears in order to become an able and independent outdoorsperson. George’s successful mixing of nature stories with novels centering on adolescents and their concerns works to the advantage of both genres. The adolescent concerns of learning to manage physical danger and fear, to take responsibility, to discipline oneself and to become a part of a group, as well as to develop independence, are set against the backdrop of the need for all humans to be aware of the interconnectedness of all the ecosystems of this earth. A deep understanding of nature’s harmonies— beautiful and death-causing alike—pervades each of the books. George is a fine writer who has chosen to write books primarily appropriate for young people, but at her best she is equally interesting to adults. Still going strong in the 1980s and 1990s, George created several new series, like her perennially popular Moon series from the 1960s. The Moon books (The Moon of the Owls, The Moon of the Salamanders, The Moon of the Wild Pigs, etc.) totaled 13 animal-and-nature tales from 1967 to 1969, all of which were reprinted in the early 1990s. Her next large-scale series was the One Day books, which included journeys into a myriad of natural settings, including One Day in the Desert (1983) and One Day in the Alpine Tundra, as well visits into the prairie, woods, and tropical forest, all published between 1983 and 1990. Yet one of her most enduring protagonists, Julie, was also brought back in two additional books: Julie (1995) and Julie’s Wolf Pack (1997). Eagerly awaited, the former begins shortly after the 1972 novel left off with Julie finding her father and the loss of Amaroq; she must now deal with the realities of community life and the breakdown of Eskimo traditions. The latter title finds Julie older and wiser, with a wolf pack led by her beloved Amaroq’s son, Kapu. George has also written several cookbooks and guidebooks, as well as her autobiography, Journey Inward (1982). Though she is now in her eighties, there is little doubt the award-winning George will continue to produce well-written, fascinating books for children of all ages. If and when she does slow down, her books will remain on the shelves, for they are continually reprinted and will entertain generations to come. OTHER WORKS: Vision, the Mink (with J. L. George, 1949). Masked Prowler: The Story of a Racoon (with J. L. George, 1950). Meph, the Pet Skunk (with J. L. George, 1952). Bubo, the Great Horned Owl (with J. L. George, 1954). Dipper of Copper Creek (with J. L. George, 1956). The Hole in the Tree (1957). Snow Tracks (1958). Red Robin, Fly Up (1963). Gull Number 737 (1964). Hold Zero (1966). Spring Comes to the Ocean (1966). The Moon of the Bears (1967). The Hole in the Tree (1967). Coyote in Manhattan (1968). The Moon of the Chickadees (1968). The Moon of the Fox Pups (1968). The Moon of the Monarch Butterflies (1968). The Moon of the Mountain Lions (1968). The Moon of the Alligators (1969). The Moon of the Deer (1969). The Moon of the Gray Wolves (1969). The Moon of the Moles (1969). The

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Moon of the Winter Bird (1969). All Upon a Stone (1971). Beastly Inventions: A Surprising Investigation into How Smart Animals Really Are (1971). Everglades Wildguide: The Natural History of Everglades National Park, Florida (1971). All Upon a Sidewalk (1974). Walking Wild Westchester (1974). Hook a Fish, Catch a Mountain (1975). Going to the Sun (1976). Wentletrap Trap (1977). American Walk Book: An Illustrated Guide to the Country’s Major Historical and Natural Walking Trails from the Northeast to the Pacific Coast (1977). Dirty Work, Inc. (1978). The Wounded Wolf (1978). River Rats (1979). Wild Wild Cookbook (1982). The Grizzly Bear with the Golden Ears (1982). The Cry of the Crow: A Novel (1982). The Wild, Wild Cookbook: A Guide for Young Wild-Food Foragers (1982). Exploring the Outof-Doors (1983). The Talking Earth (1983). How to Talk to Your Animals (1986). How to Talk to Your Cat (1986). How to Talk to Your Dog (1986). Water Sky (1987). Shark Beneath the Reef (1988). One Day in the Woods (musical, 1989). On the Far Side of the Mountain (1990). The Summer of the Falcon (1990). The Missing Gator of Gimbo Limbo: An Ecological Mystery (1992). The Firebay Connection: An Ecological Mystery (1993). The First Thanksgiving (1993). Dear Rebecca, Winter is Here (1993). The Fire Bug Connection: An Ecological Mystery (1993). The Everglades (1995). Animals Who Have Won Our Hearts (1994). There’s an Owl in the Shower (1995). To Climb a Waterfall (1995). Acorn Pancakes, Dandelion Salad, and 38 Other Wild Recipes (1995). The Wild, Wild Cookbook: A Guide for Young Wild-Food Foragers (1982). Exploring the Out-of-Doors (1983). The Tarantula in My Purse (1996). The Case of the Missing Cutthroats (1996). Look to the North: A Wolf Pup Diary (1997). Arctic Son (1997). Giraffe Trouble (1998). Dear Katie, the Volcano is a Girl (1998). Gorilla Gang (1998). Elephant Walk (1998). Rhino Romp (1998). Morning, Noon, and Night (1999). Incredible Animal Adventures (1999). Frightful’s Mountain (1999). Snow Bear (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cary, A., Jean Craighead George (1996). Greenberg, M. H., and Waugh, C., eds., A Newbery Zoo: A Dozen Animal Stories by Newbery Award-Winning Authors (1995). Huck, C. and D. Kuhn, eds., Children’s Literature in the Elementary School (1968). Lyon, T. J. and Stine, P., eds., On Nature’s Terms: Contemporary Voices (1992). Minor, W., On Illustrating Everglades (1995). Sutherland, Z., and M. H. Arbuthnot, Children and Books (1977). Vick, D., Favorite Authors of Young Adult Fiction (1995). White, J., ‘‘Novel’’ Enrichment (1984). Reference works: Authors of Books for Young People (1964). CA (1963). More Junior Authors (1963). SATA (1971). WW in Children’s Books: A Treasury of the Familiar Characters of Childhood (1975). Other references: A Visit with Jean Craighead George (audiovisual, 1994). Adventurous Spirit: Jean Craighead George on Journal Writing (audiovisual, 1990). Good Conversation! A Talk with Jean Craighead George (audiovisual, 1992). Elementary English (Oct. 1973). Horn Book (Aug. 1973). Writers Digest (March 1974). —LINDA A. CARROLL

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GEROULD, Katharine Fullerton Born 6 February 1869, Brockton, Massachusetts; died 27 July 1944, Princeton, New Jersey Daughter of Bradford M. and Julia Ball Fullerton; married Gordon H. Gerould, 1910; children: two Educated at Miss Folsom’s School and at Radcliffe College (B.A. 1900, M.A. 1901), Katharine Fullerton was a reader in English at Bryn Mawr from 1901 to 1910, when she married Gordon H. Gerould, the distinguished medieval scholar. They settled in Princeton, where he was teaching, and they had two children. For many years, Gerould an extremely successful woman of letters. In 1900 she won the Century prize for the best short story by an undergraduate, and throughout her career she wrote for Century, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and Scribner’s. In 1923 she lectured at Yale, in 1927 at the University of California at Berkeley. Her stories were included in The Best Short Stories of 1917, 1920, 1921, 1922, and 1925. Gerould’s 1925 story, ‘‘An Army with Banners’’ appeared in The Fifty Best Short Stories, 1915-1939. Gerould’s essays perhaps deserve the obscurity which time brings to all but the very best of periodical literature; nor are the novels entirely successful. But it is unfortunate the stories, too, go now unnoticed. Gerould worked in the tradition of James, Wharton, Kipling, and Conrad, and her stories display a mastery of her craft. Gerould was from an old New England family, and her attitudes were influenced by the clerical and academic puritanism of the privileged classes. In the essays her style is graceful, at times witty, always concrete and straightforward, but the toofrequent displays of snobbishness repel more than the genuine insights attract. She deplores the consequences of democracy, especially the state universities, and she finds Louisa Alcott’s little women ‘‘under-bred.’’ The best of Gerould’s essays are in Hawaii (1916) and The Aristocratic West (1925). She is better with ‘‘scenes and impressions’’ than with criticism and arguments; she is more effective, finally, in fiction than in exposition. Her talent for storytelling is apparent in the novels, for they contain memorable scenes and characters, even though they fail as a whole. The short stories, however, are a real achievement. Generally, they were praised for their power, sincerity, and realism. Some critics, not surprisingly, complained they offered no solution, had no ‘‘soul,’’ but it is to the credit of the serious artist not to offer solutions where none are plausible. Gerould is honest in her examination of human nature and the human condition, as well as in her analyses of conduct. Many of the stories hinge upon an act of sacrifice. A father, for example, rejects a unique opportunity for success and happiness for the sake of his son (‘‘The Bird in the Bush’’). There is no joy in the act; the mother reflects unhappily that the son, though loved, will not be the man his father is, that he is not, in short, worth the sacrifice. ‘‘Vain Oblations’’ and ‘‘The Great Tradition,’’ similarly, demonstrate that great acts of self-sacrifice may be required of superior natures, even though virtue often goes unrewarded and suffering is not alleviated. The world of the

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stories is often harsh, and so are many of the characters; but there is tenderness, too, in ‘‘The Miracle’’ of Rosina Sayle’s love for her stepchild, forced and conventional at first, spontaneous and genuine at last. Most often Gerould’s stories are of careful lives led in accordance with complex rules, or of difficult moral choices analyzed by intelligent and detached narrators. Her characters tend to be consistent and strong, whether good or evil. But she is also capable of writing about people who simply botch things, as does Sadie Lampson Chadwick in ‘‘Wesendonck.’’ She attended what Gerould considers one of those deplorable state universities and she lacks ‘‘the constructive sense.’’ Unable to cope with giving a dinner for an eminent visiting scientist—her general ineffectiveness is compounded by poverty and plain bad luck— she abruptly and without warning flees to her Midwestern home for a visit. Upon her return she gradually draws from her now uncommunicative husband the information that by her flight she delivered the coup de grace to his hope for advancement and thereby to her own hope for a better life. Gerould is of historical interest as a successful woman writer and as an essayist whose work reflects the attitudes of a relatively small segment of early 20th-century society. By the mid-1930s, her work was regarded as dated. The stories, however, are another matter, for they are not dated. Their value is literary, and they should be better known. OTHER WORKS: The Great Tradition (1915). Vain Oblations (1915). A Change of Air (1917). Modes and Morals (1920). Lost Valley (1922). Valiant Dust (1922). Conquistador (1923). The Light That Never Was (1931). Ringside Seats (1937). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Sherman, S. P., ‘‘The Superior Class,’’ in The Genius of America (1923). Reference works: NAW (1971). TCA, TCAS. —WILLENE S. HARDY

GERSTENBERG, Alice Born 2 August 1885, Chicago, Illinois; died 28 July 1972, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of Erich and Julia Wieschendorff Gerstenberg Alice Gerstenberg’s grandparents on both sides of the family were Chicago pioneers. From her father she inherited endurance, and from her mother a love of theater. She attended the Kirkland School in Chicago and Bryn Mawr College. Before writing plays, Gerstenberg was interested in writing novels. Her first full-length play, a three-act version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, opened in 1915 at both the Fine Arts Theatre and the Booth Theatre in New York. Gerstenberg’s next play, the one-act Overtones, her most original and best known work, was produced


in 1915 by the Washington Square Players at the Bandbox Theatre, New York, under the direction of Edward Goodman. It also played in London, starring Lily Langtry. In 1922 Gerstenberg wrote a three-act version of Overtones which she directed herself at Powers Theater in Chicago. In Overtones Gerstenberg created two lines of action to tell the story of Harriet and Margaret. Harriet has married for money and longs for the man she loves, while Margaret has married for love (the same man Harriet, too, had loved) and now longs for money. The surface action of the play, which reveals only the ‘‘civilized’’ selves of these women, is shown in conventional dramatic form, while the action below the surface reveals the subconscious selves of the two women in two characters named Hetty and Maggie. Harriet and Margaret exist in the present in a world as it appears to be; Hetty and Maggie speak of the past and life as they honestly feel them. The two actions placed side by side create not just a conventional conflict between two women, but a compelling irony and a conflict within each character, HarrietHetty and Margaret-Maggie. Overtones was heralded as representing a new formula in theater. Today it is still seen as a forerunner of later psychological drama by major playwrights, including Eugene O’Neill, who acknowledged its influence on his work. This same concern for the dramatic ‘‘representation’’ of the subconscious is obvious in Strange Interlude (1928) and in Days Without End (1932), both of which use masks to draw the conflict between the false outer self and the painfully honest subconscious self. The Pot Boiler (later titled Dress Rehearsal), a comedy about the pretensions of conventional theater, and Fourteen, a light satire on the pettiness of high society dinner parties, along with Overtones—all appearing in Gerstenberg’s second collection, Ten One-Act Plays (1921)—are Gerstenberg’s most popular plays. They have appeared in numerous anthologies of one-act plays and have been produced by little theaters all over the U.S., England, and Australia. In Gerstenberg’s next collection of short plays, Comedies All (1930), the most forceful is The Puppeteer. In this play, the grandmother is a Strindbergian vampire who sucks the creative individuality out of her own family but discovers in her grandson Walter a will stronger than her own. Most of Gerstenberg’s one-act plays reflect her role in the little theater movement, which popularized the one-act experimental play that could be played in the home as well as on the stage. The Puppeteer, for example, takes place on a staircase. Gerstenberg saw these plays, which could be produced without much expense, as a means of fund raising for communities wanting to found little theaters. Gerstenberg was one of the original members of the Chicago Little Theatre, the first little theater in the U.S., which was founded by Maurice Browne in 1912. In 1921, she and Annette Washburne founded the Chicago Junior League Theatre for children. For two years Gerstenberg was this theater’s director. Using her early model for children’s theater, junior leagues have developed in communities all over the country.

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Gerstenberg’s most significant contribution to the little theater movement is her founding of the Playwright’s Theatre of Chicago (1922-45), which was designed to offer the local playwright an opportunity to produce plays. For her work as playwright and producer, Gerstenberg won the Chicago Foundation for Literature Award in 1938. Her articles on little theater appear in Townsfolk Magazine, The Little Theatre Monthly, and The Drama. Gerstenberg has also enjoyed a modest career as an actress. Gerstenberg’s characters, mostly women, inhibited by outworn institutions and by their own fears, make choices that lead to honest self-expression. Needing new dramatic forms to express the daring of her unconventional characters, Gerstenberg took the comic form and gave it not only a variety of structures but a modern psychological dimension as well. Gerstenberg’s dramaturgy reflects her own vitality as a woman and as a playwright dedicated to a new theater which placed artistic integrity as its highest goal. OTHER WORKS: A Little World (1908). Unquenched Fire (1912). The Conscience of Sarah Platt (1915). Four Plays for Four Women (1924). The Land of Don’t Want To by L. Bell (dramatization by Gerstenberg, 1928). Water Babies by C. Kingsley (dramatization by Gerstenberg, 1930). Star Dust (1931). When Chicago Was Young (with H. Clark, 1932). Glee Plays the Game (1934). Within the Hour (1934). Find It (1937). London Town (dramatization by Gerstenberg, 1937). The Queen’s Christmas (1939). Time for Romance (with M. Fealy, 1942). Victory Belles (with H. Adrian, 1943). The Hourglass (1955). Our Calla (1956). On the Beam (1957). The Magic of Living (1969). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Barlow, J., Plays By American Women: 1900-1930 (1981). Dean, A., Comedies All (1930). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Sievers, D., Freud on Broadway (1955). Other references: NR (20 Nov. 1915). —BEVERLY M. MATHERNE

GESTEFELD, Ursula N(ewell) Born 22 April 1845, Augusta, Maine; died 22 October, Kenosha, Wisconsin Married Theodore Gestefeld; children: four Little biographical information about Ursula Newell Gestefeld’s early life is available. By the 1880s, Gestefeld, her husband, and four children were living in Chicago. During these years, Gestefeld, a survivor of many childhood illnesses and several difficult pregnancies, became intrigued by the principles of Christian Science elaborated by Mary Baker Eddy in Science and Health. Gestefeld’s involvement with Christian Science is the most significant factor in any evaluation of her career. Not only did she find her own health markedly improved by the application

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of this philosophy, but her writings all advocated ideas that developed as a consequence of her initial support of Eddy’s religion.

rights movement, and it is especially significant for its frank discussion of sexuality, prostitution, and marriage.

In 1884, Gestefeld studied personally with Eddy, who considered Gestefeld one of her most able students and active supporters. In 1888, under her own authority, Gestefeld published Ursula N. Gestefeld’s Statement of Christian Science, a book which she considered a logical explanation and continuation of Eddy’s thought, omitting Eddy’s rhetorical embellishment. Eddy saw the book as a direct attack on her absolute and inviolable authority, and she had Gestefeld dismissed from the church. Gestefeld responded with a clever pamphlet, Jesuitism and Christian Science (1888), which attacked Eddy’s claim to unquestioned spiritual and scriptural authority. Gestefeld’s emphasis on the right and duty of individual questioning and searching became central to all of her later works.

OTHER WORKS: Which Shall It Be? Mind or Medicine? A Plea for the Former (1886). What Is Mental Medicine (1887). The Science of Christ (1889). A Chicago Bible Class (1891). A Modern Catechism (1892). The Leprosy of Miriam (1894). And God Said (1895). The Breath of Life (1897). How We Master Our Fate (1897). The Metaphysics of Balzac (1898). Reincarnation or Immortality (1899). How to Control Circumstances (1901). The Science of the Larger Life (1905). The Master and the Man (1907).

Gestefeld gradually codified her separation from Christian Science and eventually elaborated her own system of philosophy, which she named the ‘‘Science of Being.’’ In addition to founding the Gestefeld Publishing Company in Pelham, New York, and publishing a monthly magazine, Exodus (1896-1904), she founded the Church of New Thought, the College of the Science of Being, and her own religious, social, and educational organization, the Exodus. The Builder and the Plan (1901) is the most significant and fully developed of Gestefeld’s philosophical writings. It contains a point-by-point comparison of the key tenets of Christian Science and the Science of Being, in which Gestefeld demonstrates the superiority of her own system as founded upon reason and logic, independent from the absolute authority of any individual or church. An introduction to Gestefeld’s thought is most readily accessible in her novel, The Woman Who Dares (1892), an explicitly feminist work. Gestefeld’s heroine, Murva Kroom, moves from dependence upon her tyrannical father to a similar, if less painful, dependence upon her husband, a man who wants a wife to be no more than an echo of his own ideas and needs. Her manifesto-like declaration that her identity as a woman must be given precedence over her identity as a wife is the catalyst for most of the action in the novel. Eventually Murva sees woman’s sexual subservience as the most crippling aspect of her identity. She demands the right to abstain from sexual intercourse, believing the excessive emphasis on physical intimacy impedes true union between men and women. She links this demand to a critique of established religions and of the economic inequality of women, and she makes sweeping demands for women’s rights. Certain that one day her husband will accept and benefit from her vision, Murva leaves his house and establishes a refuge for abused women. In this asylum, she teaches other women the principles of freedom and selfrespect she has learned, and sees in this work the beginning of a widespread program for social reform. This novel, more than any other text in Gestefeld’s generally forgotten oeuvre, deserves renewed attention. It is among the most vigorously argued and perceptive of the 19th-century novels devoted to the popularization of issues important to the women’s

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BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bates, E., and J. Dittemore, Mary Baker Eddy (1932). Braden, C., Spirits in Rebellion: The Rise and Development of New Thought (1963). Dakin, E., Mrs. Eddy (1929). Hill, V. L., ‘‘Strategy and Breadth: The Socialist-Feminist in American Fiction’’ (dissertation, 1979). Reference works: American Blue-Book of Biography (1915). NAW (1971). Other references: Arena (Dec. 1892). Catholic World (Jan. 1893). Literary World (11 Feb. 1893, 23 Feb. 1895). Mind (Jan. 1902). Picayune (9 Oct. 1892). —VICKI LYNN HILL

GIBBONS, Kaye Born 5 May 1960, Nash County, North Carolina Daughter of Charles Bennett and Alice Gardner Batts; married Michael Gibbons (divorced); children: Mary, Leslie, Louise. Born and raised in North Carolina, Kaye Gibbons attended Rocky Mount High School and started college on a scholarship at North Carolina State University. She transferred to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she studied American literature with Louis Rubin and began writing her first novel. While she never finished her degree at Chapel Hill, she did receive the university’s Distinguished Alumna Award. She became writer-in-residence at the Library of North Carolina State University in 1993. All of Gibbons’s novels are steeped in a sense of place and history, revealing an understanding of women’s struggles to ‘‘shoulder extraordinary burdens’’ and to maintain their compassion, humor, and self-esteem in a culture that values those qualities very little in women. Understanding, strong, resourceful, and independent, all the women in Gibbons’s fiction represent what one critic has called ‘‘a fictional oral history of female wishes [and] hopes.’’ Generations of Gibbons’s women share the vision of finding a place for themselves in the world without compromising their sense of self. Ellen Foster (1987), which Gibbons herself says is ‘‘emotionally autobiographical,’’ won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and


Letters and a special citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation. Its particular strength lies in the resilient character of Ellen herself, who endures the suicide of her mother, her father’s sexual advances, and the meanness of her grandmother and aunt to emerge triumphant in a happy home. Her quest for place is determined and persistent: she will find a safe harbor. In her search she is forced to throw off her own racial prejudice and realize that, despite her poverty, her black friend Starletta has something she envies—a loving family. Women are the center of all of Gibbons’s novels, and A Virtuous Woman (1989) carefully orchestrates past and present so that the voice of a dead woman becomes the center of the novel. Ruby Pitt Woodrow has left her freezer stocked with food for her husband, Blinking Jack Ernest Stokes. She knew that, while some would think it morbid, men cannot really do all that much for themselves, and ‘‘if you want to see a man afraid just put him in a room with a sick woman who was once strong.’’ Women’s strength resonates throughout the pages of Gibbons’s work, from the strength of eleven-year-old Ellen Foster to the power of Charlie Kate, medicine woman of Charms for the Easy Life (1992). Gibbons grounds her fiction in the knowledge that ‘‘this world is built up on strong women, built up and kept up by them too, them kneeling, stooping, pulling, bending, and rising up when they need to go and do what needs to get done.’’ Women talking to each other, remembering the talents of their foremothers, surviving—all of Gibbons’s women endure and pass on their power to the next generation: Charlie Kate, midwife and healer, leaves her legacy of herbs and cures with her granddaughter, Margaret, the narrator, who chooses her grandmother’s calling as part of her heritage. A Cure for Dreams (1991), which won the Pen/Revlon Award for the best work of fiction by a writer under thirty-five, is, like her fourth book, Charms for the Easy Life, a generational novel. Grandmothers, mothers, and daughters all share the same hopes for themselves. Their struggles to endure hard times are given meaning by their stories. Told as gossip, recounted as family history, and preserved as the marrow of family life, these stories are the lives of the Randolph women. Marjorie Polly Randolph cherishes the stories told by her mother, Betty Davies Randolph, and her grandmother, Lottie O’Cadhain Davies. Marjorie need only say to her mother:‘‘‘Tell me about your mother and you, and Kentucky and Virginia and the wild way I was born. Tell me about the years that made you.’ Then she would talk. Talking was my mother’s life.’’ The women in Gibbons’s novels represent a large extended family of Southerners who have not been defeated; their stories represent a history of the South that deconstructs the history of Southern womanhood and revitalizes the traditions of independence and self-reliance. Sights Unseen (1995) is, like Ellen Foster, written from the perspective of a child, in this case twelve-year-old Hattie, whose mother struggles with mental illness. It deals with the central role of the disease on the family’s life, as Hattie experiences a lack of mothering and endures the reactions of friends and neighbors. Gibbons, who has been diagnosed as a manic-depressive herself,

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has told interviewers she wrote this story to imagine what her daughters might think of her if the disease overtakes her. Gibbons’ lack of sentimentality and tenderness toward her characters and their complex situation are typical of her work. In On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon (1998), narrator Emma Garnet Tate sums up her life from old age. As a child she protected her mother from her violent and racist father—he murdered one of the family’s slaves in 1842, when Emma was twelve—but ultimately married a loving, even martyr-like, husband, in part to escape her father. When she departed, she brought with her the slave Clarice. Yet after Clarice and Emma leave, Emma’s mother dies, and Emma spends the rest of her life facing her guilt. On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon is vintage Gibbons in its strong portrayal of a child heroine, in the way the narrator loses her mother and then courageously faces her difficult life, and in the lively portrayal of Southern life. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA 151 (1996). CLC 50 (1988), 88 (1996). Other references: Christian Century (23 Sept. 1992). English Journal (Nov. 1996). Entertainment Weekly (4 Aug. 1995). Kenyon Review 10 (Winter 1988). LJ (1 Nov. 1996). New Yorker (21 June 1993, 21 & 28 Aug. 1995). NYTBR (30 April 1989, 12 May 1991, 11 April 1993, 24 Sept. 1995, 19 July 1998). People (15 June 1998). PW (Feb. 1993, 29 Apr. 1998). School Library Journal (Nov. 1995). Southern Quarterly 30:2-3 (Winter/Spring 1992). Time (12 Apr. 1993). —MARY A. MCCAY, UPDATED BY KAREN RAUGUST

GILBERT, Fabiola Cabeza de Baca See CABEZA de BACA, Fabiola

GILBERT, Sandra M(ortola) Born 27 December 1936, New York, New York Daughter of Alexis J. and Angela Caruso Mortola; married Elliot L. Gilbert, 1957 (died 1991); children: Roger, Katherine, Susanna Sandra M. Gilbert is a widely published and influential feminist literary critic; she is also a poet with four collections of poetry. Her major critical works, beginning in 1979 with Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets and The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination, have been written in collaboration with Susan Gubar. The collaboration has been a fruitful one. Shakespeare’s Sisters marked the beginning of Gilbert’s wide-ranging examination of what it has meant to be a woman writing in English in a culture whose literary values have been determined by men, and in which ‘‘woman poet’’ has been considered a

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‘‘contradiction in terms.’’ The book is a compilation of 19 essays about women poets, from pre-19th-century writers to contemporary. The effort is to recover lost poets, to reassess women’s poetry, and to trace the outlines of a distinctively female poetic tradition. In The Madwoman in the Attic Gilbert and Gubar scrutinized problems of literary heritage, of women writers’ alienation from male predecessors who depicted women as either ‘‘angels or monsters.’’ They explore the ‘‘anxiety of authorship’’ that confronted women novelists of the 19th century: Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and poets Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. As critic Walter Kendrick noted, the madwoman image serves ‘‘as an emblem of the confinement inflicted on Victorian women who wished to write.’’ The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women (1985), edited by Gilbert and Gubar, was designed to serve as a ‘‘core-curriculum’’ text for courses in literature by women. While the principle of selection of this comprehensive and somewhat unwieldy volume has been challenged by some reviewers, it is a valuable compilation of women’s work in every period and genre and provides useful editorial material. No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century continues Gilbert’s and Gubar’s reassessment of the literary landscape, using ‘‘the battle of the sexes’’ metaphor as a way to approach changes in the modern period. A reviewer described the first volume, The War of the Words (1987), as documenting ‘‘a war on women’s words waged by male writers who felt their tradition invaded by alien female talents.’’ The second volume, Sexchanges (1989), approaches the post-World War I territory more intensively, comparing texts by men and women, and providing studies of Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather and a chapter on Gertrude Stein and lesbian writers of the 1920s. The third volume, Letter From the Front, published in 1994, completed the much-anticipated trilogy. Gilbert received a B.A. from Cornell University in 1957, an M.A. from New York University (1961), and a Ph.D. from Columbia University (1968). Since 1989 she has been professor of English at the University of California at Davis, where she had taught earlier (1975-80). She held a similar position at Princeton University from 1985 to 1989. Previously she was an associate professor at Indiana University (1973-75), where her collaborative work with Susan Gubar began. From 1963 to 1972, she taught at colleges in New York and California. Gilbert has also published more than 50 essays in a wide range of scholarly and literary journals and essay collections. Gilbert and Gubar joined forces with Diana O’Hehir on Mothersongs: Poems for, by, and About Mothers (1996), a collection of poems spanning various phases of motherhood. The editors have collected poems covering several centuries and have incorporated an interesting mix of poets, including Walt Whitman, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, and John Donne. In the words of one critic, ‘‘There’s no subject more personal yet more universal than the emotional subject of motherhood, and this vital anthology reflects that depth and variation.’’

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Gilbert’s recent volume of poetry, Ghost Volcano: Poems (1997), includes poems written while she was working on the memoir of her husband’s unexpected death. The poems are arranged in five unrelated sections and appear as a series of diary-type entries describing her ‘‘widow’s walks,’’ each titled with reference to the location (‘‘Outside Saratoga Springs’’). These works are peppered with descriptions she can no longer share with her mate and the grief of a spirit that is, surprisingly enough, able to go on in the face of tragedy. Wrongful Death: A Medical Tragedy (1997) is the aforementioned memoir of her husband Elliot’s untimely death in 1991, a few short hours after routine surgery for prostate cancer. Her suspicions were raised when her questions were avoided or responded to with lies. Gilbert describes her feelings and actions during the time following the series of ‘‘medical mishaps’’ (including poor management of a postoperative hemorrhage) that resulted in this senseless and avoidable loss. Although the case was settled out of court with admitted negligence on the part of the medical professionals involved, the emotions of the experience are painfully clear in Gilbert’s account. Gilbert continues to write for magazines and periodicals such as Poetry, Times (London) Literary Supplement, Women’s Review of Books, and Novel: A Forum on Fiction. She has received numerous awards and fellowships, including an honorary D.Litt. from Wesleyan University in 1988, a Guggenheim fellowship in 1983, a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1982, and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in 1980-81. She received the International Poetry Foundation’s Charity Randall Award in 1990 and Poetry’s Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize in 1980. With Susan Gubar she shared the Woman of the Year Award from Ms. magazine in 1986. OTHER WORKS: Shakepeare’s Twelfth Night (1964). Two Novels by E. M. Forster (1965). D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1965). The Poetry of W. B. Yeats (1965). Two Novels by Virginia Woolf (1966). Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence (1973, 2nd edition, 1990). In the Fourth World (1979). The Summer Kitchen: Poems (1983). The Awakening and Selected Stories of Kate Chopin (edited by Gilbert, 1984). Emily’s Bread: Poems (1984). The Female Imagination and the Modernist Aesthetic (1986). Feminism and Modernism (1987). Blood Pressure (1988). Orlando, by Virginia Woolf (edited by Gilbert, 1993). Masterpiece Theatre: An Academe Melodarama (1995). The House is Made of Poetry (1996). Want: New and Selected Poems (2000). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1979). CANR (1991). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Literature (Mar. 1990). Booklist (15 Jan. 1995, 1 May 1995). British Medical Journal (19 Oct. 1996). College English (Nov. 1988). Commentary (July 1988). Comparative Literature (Spring 1991). Contemporary Sociology (July 1990). Criticism (Fall 1989). English Language Notes (Sept. 1990). Journal of American Studies (Apr. 1991). Journal of


Modern Literature (Fall-Winter 1989). Journal of English and Germanic Philology (July 1989). Modern Fiction Studies (Winter 1988, Winter 1989). Nation (2 July 1988). National Review (28 Oct. 1988). NYRB (31 May 1990). NYTBR (7 Feb. 1988, 19 Feb. 1989, 12 Mar. 1989). Poetry (Dec. 1996). PW (27 Mar. 1995). Studies in the Novel (Spring 1989, Winter 1990). Texas Studies in Literature and Language (Fall 1990). TLS (3 June 1988, 2 June 1989). Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature (Spring 1989).

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subjects at war within herself: a slavocracy in which life was good for her, and her aspirations for success in a society that denied the realities of racism to which she could not have been blind. She permits one young Southerner in her first novel, Rosehurst, to argue that the South should have been defeated; no one speaks for him in Katherine Somerville.

Born 1841, Hardin County, Tennessee; died 2 February 1912, Nashville, Tennessee Daughter of James and Ann McFarland Somers; married John A. Gilchrist, 1860; children: one son

The Night-Rider’s Daughter (1910) is a novel of social protest. The main characters are ten-year-old Gracie Gaylor and her parents, decent, common people who become victims of ruthless economic change and uneven justice in backwoods Samburg County, Tennessee. Developers deprive them and their neighbors of access to the lake where they fish for a livelihood; their lawyers betray them for bribes of land; the outraged fishermen organize as night riders to counterattack. The father learns of the destructive plans for the attack and withdraws, but is wrongfully imprisoned, and the mother, worn down by work, fear, and hopelessness, dies. Going to see her father, who has contracted a fever in prison, Gracie finds him chained to a hospital bed; the chain is removed only on the morning of his death.

Annie Somers Gilchrist grew up at ‘‘The Oaks,’’ the Somers plantation, near Dresden, Tennessee, and graduated from Mary Sharpe College in Winchester, Tennessee. She lived with her husband in New York until 1865 when they moved to Nashville where he operated a hotel. They had one son. Gilchrist was a member of the South’s first woman’s club, named in honor of Margaret Fuller Ossoli.

The impact of these events on Gracie, the resourcefulness of which she is capable, the pluck and resilience that helps her endure sorrows she cannot comprehend are depicted with restraint. Gilchrist transforms what might have been a tearjerking tale into the characterization of a child whose admirable bearing is a measure of the worth of a devastated family. This poignant minor novel, in which people talk like people who deserve to be heard, is a testament to a mature author and woman.

—KINERETH GENSLER, UPDATED BY REBECCA C. CONDIT

GILCHRIST, Annie Somers

Gilchrist’s novels depict the emotional life of heroines whose histories are related to the fortunes of their families and changes in circumstances that test and prove character. She believed in an aristocracy of merit, often confirmed by wealth but qualified by Christian charity. Her first major novel, Rosehurst; or, The StepDaughter (1884), delineates the trauma of a rejected daughter, Marion Lawrence, whose father prefers his son and neglects her for her stepmother. Later Marion misjudges her husband’s relationship with his cousin; when he fails to perceive her jealousy, she leaves him for a man who loves her. The husband convinces everyone she is deranged, and Marion, in her flight, does become disoriented. Through the help of an old friend, she recovers her sanity and returns, aged and scarred, to her husband. Fusing the novel of manners and a psychological study, Gilchrist writes with acumen. Fascinated by the costumes and ‘‘consummate masks’’ of society, she knows the stratagems by which people preserve the appearance of propriety and morality. She views those pretensions and appearances in conflict with the true heart: better insanity than adultery. And she evokes both the longing and ‘‘voiceless anguish’’ of a daughter who cannot become a woman—even with a husband whose enduring love should outweigh his momentary obtuseness—or live unscathed by years of parental rejection. Katherine Somerville; or, The Southland Before and After the Civil War (1906) is probably autobiographical. The subjects indicated in the title are not effectively joined. Perhaps the point of the novel is that zest went out of life in the South after the war; it is more likely that Gilchrist refused to come to grips with the large

—ELIZABETH PHILLIPS

GILCHRIST, Ellen Born 20 February 1935, Vicksburg, Mississippi Daughter of William G. and Aurora Aford Gilchrist; married Marshall Walker (twice); Freddie Kullam; children: Marshall, Garth, Pierce Although she calls herself a poet and philosopher, Ellen Gilchrist is best known for her short stories and novels. The daughter of an engineer, Gilchrist spent some of her childhood in Indiana during World War II, but has lived most of her life in the South of her ancestors and of her own creation. Her childhood is a series of memories of the Hopedale Plantation where her mother’s family lived and where Gilchrist was born. It is, she says, ‘‘THE RICHEST LAND IN THE WORLD and we are happy there.’’ Gilchrist attended Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi (B.A., 1967) and has worked as a journalist and as a weekly commentator on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. Mother of three sons and several times a grandmother, Gilchrist asserts that children are much more important than writing and that she would burn all her books to save one finger joint of one of her children or grandchildren. It is not surprising, then, to find many of her stories peopled by adolescents who are struggling to find themselves, parents who live only to help their

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children survive, and family retainers who create an optimistic perspective on the possibility of family endurance. Gilchrist herself says she is a happy person and an optimist. Gilchrist’s first book of short stories, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams (1981), was published by the University of Arkansas Press because Gilchrist was afraid to let her teacher give it to a New York agent; the underground success of the book led Little, Brown to reissue it in 1985. The stories are set among the vacuous rich of New Orelans or the dying aristocracy of the Mississippi Delta where Gilchrist spent much of her childhood. Stories about surviving, and sometimes not surviving, they all have a quality of vision about them. They are rampant with children whose lives are sprinkled with moments from Gilchrist’s own childhood; even those who die live a rich moment in her fiction. Two other short story collections, Victory Over Japan (1984), which won the American Book award for fiction, and Drunk with Love (1986), brought Gilchrist further recognition as a writer in control of her Southern material. In these volumes, some characters from In the Land of Dreamy Dreams return and Gilchrist writes about their lives with perception and humor. Perhaps the most important character in Victory Over Japan is Traceleen, a black maid who, despite the fact Gilchrist often waxes too poetic about the dedication of servants, is wise beyond Gilchrist’s own wisdom. The Annunciation (1983), Gilchrist’s ambitious but flawed first novel, features Amanda McCamey, who is too stereotypically New Orleans rich, too egotistical. Finally, when she retreats to Arkansas to live simply and be a writer, she is simply unbelievable. The eternally dedicated Lavertis, another version of Traceleen and Amanda’s ever faithful maid, strains the book’s credulity, but the effort is grand, and Gilchrist tries to deal with large issues of loss (Amanda was forced, as a teenager, to give up a child for adoption) and creativity. Her pictures of New Orleans capture the heart of the city’s richness and vacuity. With the publication of The Anna Papers (1988), Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle (1989), and I Cannot Get You Close Enough (1990), Gilchrist began to transcribe what her characters told her to and thus to lose the control she had over her best fiction. There are some excellent adolescent characters in the Hand family who people much of The Anna Papers and I Cannot Get You Close Enough, but the artist character, Anna Hand, who seems to be a side of Gilchrist herself, is too self-advertising and often too self-absorbed to see how her actions affect her family. In Net of Jewels (1992) Gilchrist once again incorporates pressing issues into her fiction. She asks, through the character of Rhoda Manning, how a woman can save herself from drowning in the limited and limiting culture of the South. A cousin of Anna Hand, Rhoda struggles through a series of attempts to find herself in marriage, affairs, diet pills, booze, and political movements— none of which can help her dispel her desperate sense she is not really alive. Gilchrist has a fine talent for capturing the voices of rich, dissatisfied Southern ladies; she has a real empathy for her adolescents; and she has a Southerner’s eye for the landscape

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outside and inside her characters. The author of one book of poetry, The Land Surveyor’s Daughter (1979), she told an interviewer she would one day stop writing fiction and return to poetry, a way, perhaps, for her to regain the control she demonstrated in her earlier work. In Starcarbon: A Meditation on Love (1994), Gilchrist resurrects the Hand family, which first appeared in I Cannot Get You Close Enough. Starcarbon focuses on Daniel Hand’s second daughter, Olivia, a half-Cherokee who has completed her first year in college. As usual, Gilchrist’s theme is love. She follows a number of relationships through this novel, including Olivia’s relationship with Bobby Tree, the Navajo boyfriend she left behind in Oklahoma to live in wealth with her father. Olivia returns to her Native American family to study their ways and rekindle her relationship with Bobby. Gilchrist tackles a period piece in Anabasis: A Journey to the Interior (1995). The lyrical novel is set in ancient Greece when Pericles ruled Athens. Auria, a young slave girl, is placed in the hands of an herbalist, Philokrates, from whom she escapes and joins a band of runaway slaves who are planning a rebellion. This is the story of an assertive, independent heroine as found in many of Gilchrist’s novels. The author began developing the story as a child when her mother read Greek myths to her. In Rhoda: A Life in Stories (1995), Rhoda Manning, the fictional author who appears in all of Gilchrist’s previous short story collections, rates her own anthology. This volume presents all 21 Rhoda stories, an excerpt from Net of Jewels (the novel in which she appeared), and two new short story offerings arranged chronologically by Rhoda’s age, covering her life from age 8 to age 60. In The Age of Miracles (1996), Gilchrist returns to short stories after several novels. In keeping with her previous collections, these tales feature characters with strong personalities and conflicting emotions. The Courts of Love (1996) includes a novella and nine short stories. The novella and a few of the stories focus on the recurring character Nora Jane, first encountered in Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle. The novella, Nora Jane and Company, is full of action, including a brush with a terrorist, an emergency in the California wilderness, and the spirit of Leonardo da Vinci. Gilchrist continues to produce wonderful prose and passionate characters. Sarah Conley (1997) is a novel with a new character, Sarah Conley, a 52-year-old journalist, successful and independent in true Gilchrist form. She is called back to Nashville, where her best friend, Eugenie Moore, is dying, and encounters Eugenie’s husband, Jack McAllen, whom she has always loved and who is her ex-husband’s brother. When Sarah flies off to Paris to write and Jack pursues her, she is faced with a choice between the career in which she has submerged herself for years and her love for Jack. Flights of Angels (1999) is another collection of 18 Gilchrist short stories presenting several new characters and some popular characters from her past works, including Rhoda and her family and Crystal and her maid, Traceleen. Throughout these tales, a theme emerges of desire on the part of the characters to make their lives meaningful beyond their immediate environments. The


protagonists are largely women raised as Southern belles who break from their controlling male relatives to move on with their lives in independence. OTHER WORKS: Falling through Space: The Journals of Ellen Gilchrist (1987). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1985, 1986). CLC (1985, 1988). CLCY (1984). DLB (1984). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: BL (15 Jan. 1994, 1 Sept. 1994, 1 Apr. 1995, 15 Oct. 1996, Aug. 1997, Aug. 1998). LJ (1 Sept. 1997, 15 Sept. 1996). New Orleans Review (Spring 1988). New Orleans Times Picayune (14 Oct. 1990). PW (31 Jan. 1994, 8 Aug. 1994, 18 Sept. 1995, 26 Aug. 1996, 7 July 1997, 14 Sept. 1998). Southern Quarterly (Fall 1983). —MARY A. MCCAY, UPDATED BY REBECCA C. CONDIT

GILL, Sarah Prince Born 1728, Boston, Massachusetts; died 5 August 1771, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of Thomas and Deborah Denny Prince; married Moses Gill, 1759 Sarah Prince Gill grew up in an extremely religious family. Her father, a champion of evangelical Protestantism, was minister of Boston’s Old South Church and was instrumental in introducing the Great Awakening to Boston in 1740. Evangelicism often liberated women because it maintained that graceful souls were equal regardless of class or sex, and because evangelicals were encouraged to share their pious reflections and religious experiences. Some of Gill’s religious meditations were published posthumously as Devotional Papers (1773). Gill and Esther Edwards Burr kept a letter-journal from 1754 to 1757, but only Burr’s letters survive. They encouraged each other to write and even to publish their thoughts and experiences as models for other women. Gill also kept a daily journal of thoughts and meditations, parts of which survive in manuscript form. Because few other avenues of written expression were open to 18th-century women, we must look to these religious diaries for details of women’s lives during this period. Gill’s journal includes her reflections on proper conduct for religious men and women—she advises industry and thrift as well as piety—and provides a view of the spiritual and emotional struggles of a colonial woman. As a Christian woman who found it difficult not to complain of her lot in life, she was tortured with fears of ‘‘backsliding.’’ Her struggles intensified in 1759 when she married a merchant, later the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, and became mistress of a large house, mother to Gill’s two sons, and hostess for her husband’s business and political

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contacts. She feared her husband’s piety might be secondary to his interest in material well-being. A few months after her marriage, Gill confided to her journal: ‘‘I have been the subject of mixed dispensations since I came to housekeeping. . .tried with lameness, with froward ungovernable ungodly Servants. . .but the greatest trial of all is the unsettled malloncholly state of the church I belong unto.’’ At her death in 1771, Gill was eulogized not only as a pious woman but also as a patriot. She and her husband had been part of an intellectual circle of early republicans which included John Adams. Gill and her women friends formed prayer groups, to comfort and support each other in times of trial and loneliness and to encourage each other in charitable works. Prayer groups of the 18th century were precursors of the women’s organizations of the 19th century involved in moral reform and abolition. More important, the writings of these women catalogue the frequently successful attempts of colonial women to define their own talents and activities independently of the men who ruled their social and political world. OTHER WORKS: The papers of Sarah Prince Gill are in the collection of the Boston Public Library. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cott, N. F., The Bonds of Womanhood: ‘‘Woman’s Sphere’’ in New England, 1780-1835 (1977). Crumpacker, L., ‘‘Esther Burr’s Journal 1754-1757: A Document of Evangelical Sisterhood’’ (dissertation, 1978). Letzring, M., ‘‘Sarah Prince Gill and the John Adams-Catharine Macaulay Correspondence,’’ Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society (1976). Other references: Boston Evening-Post (12 Aug. 1771). —LAURIE CRUMPACKER

GILMAN, Caroline Howard Born 8 October 1794, Boston, Massachusetts; died 15 September 1888, Washington, D.C. Wrote under: Caroline Gilman, Caroline Howard, Clarissa Packard Daughter of Samuel and Anna Howard; married Samuel Gilman, 1819; children: seven, three died in infancy Caroline Howard Gilman’s father died when she was two, her mother when she was ten. She had an irregular education, as the family moved from one Boston suburb to another. After her marriage to a Unitarian minister she moved to Charleston, South Carolina. Three of her seven children died in infancy. In 1832, Gilman began publication of the Rose-Bud; or, Youth’s Gazette, one of the earliest American magazines for children. Renamed the Southern Rose-Bud in 1833 and the Southern Rose in 1835, it gradually became a general family magazine before ceasing publication in 1839. Many of Gilman’s writings appeared first in its pages.

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In Recollections of a Housekeeper (1834), ‘‘Clarissa Packard’’ gives a brief account of her education and then describes her first years of marriage. Because its first person narrator is solidly middle class (Mr. Packard is an attorney), Clarissa Packard’s chronicle presents a ‘‘case history’’ of the ‘‘disestablishment’’ of the American woman as described by Ann Douglas in The Feminization of American Culture. Her duties as a housekeeper seem to consist largely of training cooks, hired girls, or nursemaids; and the domestic crises of her early marriage usually involve the unexpected departure of one or more of these servants. She emphasizes throughout that she can roast and boil, make puddings and pies, sweep and dust, and she is pleased her mother has educated her for usefulness: ‘‘My mother was proud to say that I could manufacture a frilled shirt in two days, with stitches that required a microscope to detect them.’’ She is busy, however, teaching others to do her cooking, sweeping, and washing. No sooner does she train women than they tire of devoting themselves to her and her family and want to get married and have lives of their own. Much of the humor in the Recollections of a Housekeeper is afforded by the vocabulary and accents of the rustic New Englanders who come to serve and by their inability to grasp the forms (and perhaps the spirit) of such service. When Gilman wrote her chronicle of a New England housekeeper, she had already been living in Charleston for many years. The disestablishment of the middle-class housewife and the attitudes towards servants revealed in the first book reach a logical culmination in its companion piece, Recollections of a Southern Matron (1838), which depicts all for the best in that best of all possible worlds, the Southern plantation. The first person narrator of this second book supplies more information on her background and early life, and a romantic plot with a subplot involving a secondary heroine, but the focus is again on scenes of domestic life. Gilman places great emphasis on the contentment of the slaves (they are always called ‘‘servants,’’ but they stay around once they are trained), and she claims their lot is better than that of Northern servants and millhands. Gilman’s letters to her children after the Civil War show her still unchanged in the opinion that slavery had benefitted the slaves. In The Poetry of Travelling in the United States (1838), Gilman sets out to ‘‘present something in the same volume which might prove attractive to both the Northern and Southern reader’’ and ‘‘to increase a good sympathy between different portions of the country.’’ The details of the 19th-century means of travel are often absorbing. Gilman admits that listening to members of Congress in Washington excites her ‘‘state feelings’’ and that ‘‘a word against Carolina is a personal offence to me,’’ but it is still 20 years before Brooks’s attack on Sumner: ‘‘Amid the clanship, however, there is a general and beautiful courtesy, which in private leads to the happiest results; a pleasant jest is the very hardest weapon used, and that sparingly. The extreme Northern and Southern members are on terms of the most agreeable intercourse.’’ Gilman also published collections of short stories, poetry (some with her daughter Caroline Howard Jervey), and novels. She prided herself most on her writings for children and young

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people, but these are now of interest mostly as indications of what Americans of the 1830s thought suitable reading for their children. Her position as a humorous chronicler of middle-class domesticity, North and South—a sort of early Erma Bombeck— became more and more difficult to sustain, as this New Englandborn Unitarian gave her sympathies to her adopted South. OTHER WORKS: The Lady’s Annual Register and Housewife’s Memorandum Book (1838). Letters of Eliza Wilkinson (edited by Gilman, 1839). Tales and Ballads (1839). Love’s Progress (1840). The Rose-Bud Wreath (1841). Oracles from the Poets (1844). Stories and Poems for Children (1844). The Sibyl; or, New Oracles from the Poets (1849). Verses of a Life Time (1849). A Gift Book of Stories and Poems for Children (1850). Oracles for Youth (1852). Recollections of a New England Bride and a Southern Matron (1852). Record of Inscriptions in the Cemetery and Building of the Unitarian. . .Church. . .Charleston, S.C. (1860). Stories and Poems by Mother and Daughter (with C. H. Jervey, 1872). The Poetic Fate Book (1874). Recollections of the Private Centennial Celebration of the Overthrow of the Tea (1874). The Young Fortune Teller (with C. H. Jervey, 1874). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Saint-Amand, M. S., A Balcony in Charleston (1941). Reference works: DAB. The Living Writers of the South (1869). NAW (1971). NCAB, 13. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Women of the South Distinguished in Literature (1861). Other references: NCHR (April 1934). SAQ (Jan. 1924). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH

GILMAN, Charlotte Perkins Born 3 July 1860, Hartford, Connecticut; died 17 August 1935, Pasadena, California Daughter of Frederick Beecher and Mary A. Fritch Perkins; married Charles Walter Stetson, 1884 (divorced 1894); George Houghton Gilman, 1900; children: one daughter Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s father left the family soon after she was born. Although he made infrequent visits home and provided meager support for his family, he was largely responsible for Gilman’s early education, emphasizing reading in the sciences and history. Her only formal education consisted of brief attendance at the Rhode Island School of Design. Like her great aunt, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Gilman was a reformer. At an early age, she recognized the plight (particularly the economic servitude) of her mother and many New England housewives. By age twenty-one, she was writing poetry that described the limitations of being female in late-19th-century New England. As a teenager, Gilman was a commercial artist, art teacher, and governess. Ten months after her marriage to Charles W. Stetson, also an artist, their only daughter was born. Gilman


suffered extreme depression after the birth and made a recuperative trip to California. She moved there in 1888 and divorced Stetson in 1894. Gilman did not establish her reputation as a forceful writer and lecturer until the last decade of the century when she published a series of satiric poems in the Nationalist. She also began lecturing on a wide variety of topics. For a time she was a member of the National Movement, during which her writing and lectures reflected this group’s nationalistic fervor. In 1893, Gilman collected about 75 poems into a small volume entitled In This Our World. Gilman designed the cover, ‘‘based on Olive Screiner’s Three Dreams in a Desert.’’ The book was first published in England but enjoyed scanty success in the U.S., where, besides Gilman’s family and friends, William Dean Howells first recognized its greatness. He called Gilman ‘‘the only optimist reformer he ever met.’’ The poems outline Gilman’s economic and social views and are considered by many to be a classic statement on the women’s movement. Women and Economics, originally titled Economic Relation of the Sexes as a Factor in Social Development, appeared in 1898 (reprinted 1998). This book’s arguments in behalf of women’s rights arise out of a firm and broad philosophical and historical base. Gilman calls American society ‘‘androcentric’’ and illustrates how traditionally male values have dominated almost every aspect of American life. It is considered one of the most important works on the women’s movement. Written in 1890 but not published as a separate work until 1899, The Yellow Wall-Paper is a fictional though partially autobiographical treatment of a woman artist’s nervous breakdown. Having recently given birth, she is forced by her husband and physician to spend the summer in isolation in a Gothic-style country estate. She is forbidden to write, which is the one thing she truly wants to do. The result is the woman’s madness, her delusion that another woman is trapped behind the wallpaper in her attic bedroom. Gilman’s Concerning Children (1900) and The Home (1904) expand on arguments originally advanced in Women and Economics. Both suggest children’s lives can be stunted instead of enriched by a home in which the mother’s sole occupation is housekeeping. Gilman argues instead for day care centers where children are well cared for, and where they can continue to explore the ‘‘thrilling mystery of life.’’ Gilman called The Home ‘‘the most heretical—and the most amusing—of anything I’ve done.’’ In 1900 Gilman married her first cousin, George H. Gilman, a lawyer from New York. During their honeymoon, Gilman read him the book she had been writing, Human Work (1904). It attempts to make the same claim for work that Cardinal Newman made for knowledge: that it is intrinsically valuable, its own end. According to Gilman, work is both a responsibility and a pleasure. One does it because one is obligated to the human community. In 1909 Gilman began a seven-year editorship of her own monthly periodical, the Forerunner. Written entirely by Gilman and containing 21,000 words per issue, Gilman figured the

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Forerunner equaled four books a year, of 36,000 words apiece. The periodical contained articles on social and economic issues (invariably about women) and some poetry and fiction. It published two full-length novels by Gilman: What Diantha Did (1910) and The Crux (1911). The Man-Made World (1911) was also published in Forerunner. It juxtaposed male and female values: women, Gilman wrote, are peace-loving and concerned with community. Contrarily, the prevailing values in our society are male: aggressiveness, competition, and destructiveness. His Religion and Hers (1923) was published six years after Gilman had resigned from the Forerunner. In it, Gilman compares the male conception of the world (a postponement and preparation for the afterlife) with the female (heaven in the present time and place). She directs her argument toward current social considerations, suggesting that if women controlled society, they would place greater emphasis on practical issues: how to live comfortably and peacefully from day to day. Her autobiography, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1935), is an excellent source for understanding Gilman’s life, work, and death. Suffering from cancer and surviving her husband’s unexpected death in 1934, Gilman lived quite peacefully for a time near her daughter in Pasadena, then committed suicide by chloroform. The conclusion of her autobiography is an appropriate epitaph and was part of a letter left to her survivors: ‘‘The one predominant duty is to find one’s work and do it, and I have striven mightily at that. The religion, the philosophy, set up so early, have seen me through.’’ Interest in Gilman exploded in the 1980s and 1990s with numerous new editions of her writings—including her previously unpublished diaries—and an outpouring of critical literature. Many of these writers suggested that Gilman was a woman before her time: she articulated questions that seemed irrelevant to most of her contemporaries, but are vital and unresolved a century later. Some critics have focused on Gilman’s fiction. Her short story, ‘‘The Yellow Wallpaper,’’ has become a classic. It is often read in literature and women’s studies classes as a launching point for discussing domesticity, work and activity, sanity and madness, relationships between husbands and wives, and/or the power of medical authority. Gilman’s utopian novels, Herland (serialized 1915) and With Her in Ourland (serialized 1916), explore what a society of women might be like and how a person from such a society might react to ours. Critics have used these novels to deepen conversations about separatism, differences between men and women, and the role of imagination in cultural change. Other people—and sometimes the same people—have focused on the more material aspects of Gilman’s work. She believed the root cause of women’s subordination is their economic dependence. The stand-alone single-family home, she argued, mires women in the endless tasks of cooking, cleaning, and child care. In order to free women to participate in the work of the world, living spaces must be redesigned to allow domestic work to be done collectively and efficiently. As feminists have become more aware of how economic structures and physical surroundings shape women’s lives, they have become more interested in Gilman’s insights into these issues.

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Gilman is a complex figure, and most of the recent scholarship does not attempt to address all aspects of her life and work. One exception is Ann Lane’s biography, To Herland and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1990), which uses a psychological analysis of Gilman’s early family experiences to illuminate her later actions, motivations, and priorities. OTHER WORKS: Moving the Mountain (1911). The Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1994). A Journey From Within (1995). The Later Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1996). The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories (1997). Unpunished (1997). The Abridged Diaries of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1998). Herland and Selected Writings (1999). The Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader (1999). Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Utopian Novels (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Allen, P., Building Domestic Liberty: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Architectural Feminism (1988). Dell, F., Women as World Builders (1913). Golden, C., The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on The Yellow Wallpaper (1992). Karpinski, J., Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1992). Kessler, C., Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Her Progress Toward Utopia with Selected Writings (1995). Meyering, S., Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Woman and Her Work (1989). Peyser, T., Utopia and Cosmopolis (1998). Wellington, A., Women Have Told: Studies in the Feminist Tradition (1930). Reference works: DAB (Supplement 1). HWS (V, VI). NAW. NCAB (13). Other references: AQ (Spring 1956). Canadian Magazine (Aug. 1923). Century Magazine (Nov. 1923). PMLA (1996). Poet-Lore (Jan.-March 1899). Women’s Studies (1989, 1991). Utopian Studies (1995, 1997). —MARY BETH PRINGLE, UPDATED BY LORI KENSCHAFT

GILMER, Elizabeth Meriwether Born 18 November 1870, Woodstock, Tennessee; died 16 December 1951, New Orleans, Louisiana Wrote under: Dorothy Dix Daughter of William and Maria Winston Meriwether; married George Gilmer, 1888 Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer’s career as a newspaper columnist and reporter stemmed from her tragic marriage. The daughter of impoverished Southern gentry, Gilmer had little formal training and no work experience when, shortly after her marriage, she had to assume financial responsibility for herself and her husband, a victim of an incurable mental disease. Rejecting the idea of divorce, she began working as a woman’s-page writer on the New Orleans Picayune in 1896. Successful as a columnist and reporter, Gilmer moved to the New York Evening Journal in 1901, where she continued her column, ‘‘Dorothy Dix Talks,’’ and covered sensational murder trials (usually involving women) and vice investigations. From 1917 until her death, she

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confined her newspaper writing to her advice column, first for the Wheeler syndicate and from 1923 for the Ledger syndicate. Between 1912 and 1914, Gilmer, a supporter of woman suffrage, wrote three pamphlets on the subject. She also published a number of books of advice, some fictional in technique and southern in setting, like Mirandy (1914) and Mirandy Exhorts (1922), but mostly drawn from her columns, like Fables of the Elite (1902), Hearts à la Mode (1915), and How to Win and Hold a Husband (1939). In addition, she published travel books describing the customs and problems in the places she visited. Best known for her column, reaching an estimated 60 million readers worldwide with sympathy, humor, and common sense, Gilmer dispensed sermonettes on courtship and marriage as well as answers to letters. She advised women to develop a positive self-image and know how to work at a job, but also retain femininity, good nature, and adaptability. Beginning many columns with ‘‘Men are a selfish lot,’’ Gilmer accepted the reality of a sexual double standard and advised her readers how to deal with it. Convinced of the healthy and life-enriching power of love, Gilmer nevertheless explained how to achieve that goal with imagery taken from games, hunting, and marketing, with what one reviewer has called ‘‘hardboiled realism that would do credit to a brothel keeper.’’ For example: ‘‘A young girl who lets any one boy monopolize her, simply shuts the door in the face of good times and her chances of making a better match.’’ ‘‘Few grafts are more profitable than comforting a widower. But remember that fast work is required.’’ And in a ‘‘recipe’’ book for marriage: ‘‘All wives should encourage their husbands in dough-making. It keeps them out of mischief and promotes domestic felicity.’’ Coexistent with the pragmatism, however, is the pride, independence, and self-worth Gilmer advocates for all women. In Woman’s Lack of Pride (circa 1912), she writes about how women lack sex pride ‘‘when they permit themselves to be classed politically with the offscourings of the earth [the criminal, the idiot, the insane]. . . All of woman’s failures are due to her shame of her sex, and she will never succeed until she [realizes] she is entitled to stand side by side with man, not to have to trail along in his wake like a humble slave.’’ Sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd in their study of middle America, Middletown (1929), assess Gilmer’s column as the best single available source to represent Middletown’s views about marriage, and also as ‘‘perhaps the most potent single agency of diffusion from without shaping the habits of thought of Middletown in regard to marriage.’’ Gilmer defined the ideal of love and marriage, acknowledged the reality, and wrote pragmatic advice reflecting but also shaping the behavior and mores of her readers. OTHER WORKS: What’s Sauce for the Gander Is Sauce for the Goose (circa 1912). Dorothy Dix on Woman’s Ballot (1914). My Trip Around the World (1924). Dorothy Dix, Her Book (1926). Mexico (1934). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Criss, D. ‘‘Eliza Nicholson, Elizabeth Gilmer, and the New Orleans Daily Picayune, 1876-1901’’ (thesis, 1994).


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Kane, H. T., Dear Dorothy Dix: The Story of a Compassionate Woman (1952). Lynd, R. S. and H. M. Lynd, Middletown (1929). McDonald, J. Dorothy Dix Speaks! Murders, Mayhem and Advice to the Love Lorn Housewife, Tricks and Simple Recipes for the Novice Gourmet (1992). Reference works: CB (1940, 1952). DAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Dorothy Dix: A Symposium Sponsored by Austin Peay State University (videos, 1991). NYT (17 Dec. 1951). Proceedings of the Contributed Papers Session of the Dorothy Dix Symposium (1993). Time (14 Aug. 1939). —HELEN J. SCHWARTZ

GIOVANNI, Nikki Born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni, 7 June 1934, Knoxville, Tennessee Daughter of Jones and Yolande Cornelia Giovanni; children: Thomas Nikki Giovanni did not have the kind of poverty-stricken, uncertain childhood typical of a number of other black writers. Hers was a close family enriched by loving relatives. While at Fisk University, she reinstated a chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which had been forbidden to operate on campus. After her 1967 graduation with an honors degree in history, she planned the first Black Arts Festival in her hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio. As an extension of her community activism, with assistance from a Ford Foundation grant she attended the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work; she later enrolled in Columbia University’s School of Fine Arts. In 1968, Giovanni received a National Foundation for the Arts grant; she was then teaching English at Queens College and continuing her activist work in the black community. A year later, Giovanni became an associate professor at Livingston College, Rutgers University. Although Giovanni desired children, she had no wish to be married; in 1969, determined to succeed as a single mother, she bore her son Thomas Watson Giovanni. Her 1971 book, Spin a Soft Black Song (reprinted 1987), written for black American children, was dedicated to him. A subsequent book of poems for children (Vacation Time, 1980) and poems in other books reveal her intense dedication to her family life. In Sacred Cows and Other Edibles, she devotes a large section of an autobiographical essay to the joys and frustrations of living with her then fourteenyear-old son. Though she is best known as a revolutionary poet who writes poems asking, ‘‘Nigger / Can you kill?,’’ Giovanni is also a very private, very personal poet. She had been creating stories since her childhood and had published a few poems in various magazines, but she didn’t realize a notable literary success until the publication of her first book of poetry, Black Feeling, Black Talk (1968). This and Black Judgement (1968) place the individual in the middle of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Even in this

early volume Giovanni is trying to balance her own personal concerns (mostly with love) with the pressing concerns of the group, and she is searching for the exact role she can play in the revolution. In Re-Creation (1970, 1973), one critic has said there is a new lyricism, but the feelings expressed are ‘‘less parochial and more universal in their blackness.’’ My House (1972) explores the ‘‘rooms inside’’ and the ‘‘rooms outside.’’ The first section is filled with vividly endearing reminiscences about family, friends, and lovers. The poems are about napping, nighttime, sleeping, cuddling, soothing hot baths, and loving. There is a groping, though contented, aloneness (which is different from loneliness) about most of the poems. In ‘‘The Rooms Outside,’’ however, Giovanni ventures out of the sheltering cocoon of the nest into the harsher realities of life. The poems here are disturbing, harder to understand, the tone more impersonal and factual. Ego-Tripping, and Other Poems for Young People (1973, 1993) was written for adolescents. One critic found the poems ‘‘sly and seductive, freewheeling and winsome, tough, sure and proud.’’ Here, as everywhere, the author reveals ‘‘a boundless enthusiasm for the essences of black life.’’ Women and Men (1975) includes poems written between 1970 and 1975. The section ‘‘The Women’’ consists mainly of startling, honest portraits that define black womanhood. ‘‘And Other Places’’ contains several short, vivid images of life in Africa. Giovanni has also published prose. The subtitle of Gemini (1971), explains it all: ‘‘An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First 25 Years of Being a Black Poet.’’ Here Giovanni uses her incredible imagination to blend fact with fiction, myth with history, hindsight with perhaps no sight. As with most of her works, the personal accompanies the impersonal so that there are not only touching autobiographical chapters but also critical and political chapters about Charles Chesnutt, as the father of black literature, and about the oral tradition and history of blacks. Her book jackets call Giovanni ‘‘our most widely read living black poet,’’ and indeed her many volumes of poetry, a book of essays, and several recordings attest to her continued popular appeal. In the 1980s and 1990s her alternately provocative and elegant speeches keep her in demand as a public speaker and have helped earn her the title ‘‘Princess of Black Poetry.’’ Giovanni’s close family is featured in a few sketches in Sacred Cows and Other Edibles (1988), and Those Who Ride the Night Winds (1982) is composed primarily of meditations: on public figures, personal friends, social injustice throughout American history, and loved relationships. The book is an innovative experiment in form. The pieces are written in short paragraphs, punctuated with ellipses. As such, they have the telegraphic immediacy of Emily Dickinson’s dash-punctuated poems, as if the poet’s thoughts are scribbled down as they flash across her mind. At the same time, the form implies an uncertainty, a care lest the reader miss a subtlety of thought or image. Dedicated to those courageous people ‘‘who in sonic solitude or the hazy hell of

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habit know—that for all the devils and gods. . .life is a marvelous, transitory adventure,’’ these poems are written for Lorraine Hansberry, John Lennon, Robert Kennedy, Billie Jean King, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Phillis Wheatley. Of the latter, Giovanni writes, ‘‘The critics. . .from a safe seat in the balcony. . .disdain her performance. . .reject her reality. . .ignore her truths. . . . How dare she. . . . Why couldn’t she. . .be more like. . .more like. . . . The record sticks. . . . Phillis was her own precedent.’’ In Racism 101 (1994, 1995) the poet continues to surprise readers with her range of viewpoints, again in prose. Examining American life from her perspective as an introspective, educated, independent-minded black woman, Giovanni ranges in her focus from reminiscences on her childhood to the role of education and her dismay over the attitudes of affluent African Americans like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and their rejection of the affirmative action policies that enabled their success. While Racism is classic Giovanni in its provocative, sometimes intimate, but often totally unapologetic political slant, she provides a balance with her edited collection Grand Mothers: Poems, Reminiscences, and Short Stories about the Keepers of Our Traditions (1994, 1996). Compiled for both children and adults of many cultural and ethnic traditions and containing works by authors ranging from writers Gloria Naylor and Kyoki Mori to civil rights leader Mary Elizabeth King, the volume refrains from the sentimentality usually bestowed upon well-loved older relatives and treats grandmothers as women valuable for their personal insight and their ability to place daily trauma’s into a perspective based on strong traditions. Whether in prose or poetry, Giovanni continues to create an honest, charming, idiosyncratic, and alert persona. Her voice now marks the pulse, not only of black America, but of the country’s diverse peoples and cultures. She has been praised highly and damned highly, but Giovanni lives on, ego-tripping, ‘‘flying high like a bird in the sky.’’ She has the power to anger, to humor, and to bring tears to the reader’s eyes; much of her power lies in her ability to negotiate distances between herself and the reader. Giovanni is a product of the chaotic 1960s, but she manages to retain her individuality, while urging others to recognize their obligations to the black cause. She is at her best when she is private and personal, but she is a multidimensional poet who records the pulse of life for the benefit of all. OTHER WORKS: All I Gotta Do (1970). Poem of Angela Yvonne Davis (1970). Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement (combining the two former books, 1970, 1972). Night Comes Softly: An Anthology of Black Female Voices (editor, 1970). A Poetic Equation: Conversations Between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker (1974, 1983). James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni: A Dialogue (1975). Old Thoughts, New Voices (1982). Appalachian Elders: A Warm Hearth Sampler (editor, with C. Dennison, 1992). Conversations with Nikki Giovanni (edited by V. Fowler, 1992). Covers (1993). Knoxville, Tennessee (1994). The Genie in the Jar (1996, 1998). The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni (1996). Shimmy, Shimmy, Shimmy Like My Sister Kate (editor,

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1996). The Sun is So Quiet (1996). Blues: For All the Changes— Poems (1999). Grand Fathers: An Anthology (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Carroll, R., I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like: The Voice and Vision of Black American Women Writers (1994). Evans, M., ed., Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation (1984). Fowler, V., ed., Conversations with Nikki Giovanni (1992). Fowler, V. C., Nikki Giovanni (1992). Gaffke, C. T., ed., Poetry Criticism: Excerpts From Criticism of the Works of the Most Significant and Widely Studied Poets of World Literature (1997). Georgoudaki, E., Class, Race, and Gender Consciousness in Gwendolyn Brooks’ and Nikki Giovanni’s Poems for Children (1990). Georgoudaki, E., Race, Gender, and Class Perspectives in the Works of Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rita Dove, Nikki Giovanni, and Audre Lorde (1991). Hufnagel, J., ‘‘Seeing Things as We Are: The Universal in the Poetry of Nikki Giovanni’’ (thesis, 1992). Jago, C., Nikki Giovanni in the Classroom: ‘‘The Same ol’ Danger But a Brand New Pleasure’’ (1999). Lee, D. L., Dynamite Voices: Black Poets of the 1960s (1971). Rediger, P., Great African Americans in Literature (1996). Smith, J. C., ed., Epic Lives: One Hundred Black Women Who Made a Difference (1993). Strickland, M. R., African-American Poets (1996). Tate, C., ed., Black Women Writers at Work (1983). Weixlmann, J. and C. J. Fontenot, eds., Belief vs. Theory in Black American Literacy Criticism (1986). Whitlow, R., Black American Literature: A Critical History (1973). Reference works: Black Literary Criticism (1992). CB (April 1973). CP (1975). Crowell’s Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry (1973). DLB (1985). FP (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: African American Review (Fall 1994, Spring 1995). Black Issues in Higher Education (Jan. 1993). Black World (Feb. 1971). Book World (Feb. 1994). Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books (July 1994). CLAJ (Sept. 1971). CSM (1 May 1974). Ebony (Feb. 1972). Essence (Mar. 1994, May 1999). Harper’s Bazaar (July 1972). Ingenue (Feb. 1973). MELUS (Winter 1982, Winter 1994). NYTBR (5 May 1975). PW (1999). —LISA CARL AND PAMELA SHELTON

GLASGOW, Ellen (Anderson Gholson) Born 22 April 1873, Richmond, Virginia; died 21 November 1945, Richmond, Virginia Daughter of Francis T. and Anne Gholson Glasgow Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow was the eighth of her parents’ 10 children. Her father was director of the Tredegar Iron Works, chief armaments factory during the Civil War. His dour Scotch-Irish Calvinist background instilled in her qualities of strength Glasgow was to sum up as a ‘‘vein of iron.’’ This phrase and the staunch values it implied occur approvingly in over half her novels; yet she hated her father for his tyranny, his religious severity, and his philandering. He was, she wrote, ‘‘more patriarchal than paternal.’’ She adored her generous, long-suffering


mother, a ‘‘perfect flower of the Tidewater’’ aristocracy. In her autobiography, The Woman Within (1954), Glasgow described her own nature as deeply divided between this gentle mother and stern father. Glasgow acquired her learning at home. She was excused early from a formal education because of shyness and headaches at school. Considered sickly, she always thought of herself this way. All her life she sought refuge in books—both in reading and in writing. As a girl she loved the novels of Scott, generally admired in the South. She read Fielding, Austen, the Brontës, Dickens, Hardy, Balzac, and Maupassant. Her sister’s husband, Walter McCormack, introduced her to 19th-century historians, biologists, and social philosophers. As a budding novelist, Glasgow immersed herself in these; she especially valued Darwin. At a later stage of personal crisis, she sought solace in mysticism: the Upanishads, the Buddhist Sutras, the Bhagavad-Gita, as well as philosophers from Plotinus to Schopenhauer. Glasgow never married. Her observations of her parents’ marriage, as well as a desire to remain independent to devote herself to her art, probably influenced her decision. Her writings reflect a distrust of marriage and tend toward satire, both bitter and lighthearted, on the subject. Of her many male friends, the most important was Henry W. Anderson, an attractive, successful Richmond lawyer, who also served as a Red Cross colonel in Rumania during World War I. Their affection, sometimes stormy, survived a broken engagement; their friendship continued for nearly 30 years until Glasgow’s death. Friends remember Glasgow as a diminutive woman with a radiant smile who could charm if she chose, a witty, well-read conversationalist with a sarcastic edge. Outstanding among her literary friends was the Richmond writer James Branch Cabell. There is disagreement as to how much critical assistance he gave Glasgow, whether in her plan for a social series on Virginia, in her prefaces (collected as A Certain Measure, 1943), or in her last novel, written in the shadow of her death. Cabell at any rate felt she did not acknowledge his aid sufficiently. Glasgow held her work and literary reputation uppermost; these compensated for what she called ‘‘the long tragedy of my life.’’ An especial burden was her deafness, which assailed her in adolescence and worsened. It isolated her, and plunged her into profound depressions. She consulted psychoanalysts and aurists. Eventually her hearing devices improved, but she never ceased to complain. Allusions in the novels to a ‘‘soundless tumult,’’ a ‘‘rustling vacancy,’’ apparently grow out of this affliction. Glasgow’s home life from 1911 until 1945 was spent chiefly with her companion, secretary, housekeeper, and nurse, Anne Virginia Bennett, sharing not so much a love of letters as a capacity for coexistence and an affection for Glasgow’s dogs, who were treated with a human respect. Glasgow lived nearly all her life in the big grey Greek Revival house at One West Main Street. She traveled often to Europe, especially in her younger days; lived in New York for years at a time; and escaped the Southern heat in the summer. With all her mobility, Glasgow remained devoted to Richmond and Virginia. Virginia is the scene

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of nearly all her novels; those set in New York are about uprooted Southerners. Glasgow’s first two novels, The Descendant (1897) and Phases of an Inferior Planet (1898), together with The Wheel of Life (1906), wrestle with, among other things, the plight of the woman as artist. All are based in New York which, to Glasgow, meant intellectual Bohemia. The first two novels both show obvious signs of her deep reading of Darwin, Nietzsche, Henry George, Mill, Haeckel, Weismann, and other writers on heredity, milieu, class struggle, evolution, and survival. Gradually, the social concerns of these apprenticeship novels would be more skillfully integrated into her Virginia novels; and Glasgow’s successes enabled her to drop the anxious woman artist theme. While Glasgow did not choose to incorporate these novels in her collected Old Dominion and Virginia editions, they are of biographical interest. With her Virginia novels, Glasgow was breaking new ground. She wished to correct the sentimental picture of ‘‘Ole Virginia’’ perpetrated by romances of plantation life and the glorious defeat of the Civil War. The South suffered from what Glasgow termed ‘‘evasive idealism.’’ The Battle-Ground (1902) gently satirizes the prewar fable: honey-voiced belles, picturesque Negroes, a crusty old major and an enlightened governor disputing the virtues of slavery by a comfortable library fire. The Deliverance (1904) deals with tobacco farming and the moral struggles of a destroyed planter family in the post-Reconstruction period of 1878 to 1890. Fortunes are reversed: the once-rich Blakes live in penury in an overseer’s cottage, while the shady former overseer lords it in Blake Hall. Glasgow continues her concern with heredity: ‘‘Blood will out, even at the dregs.’’ But the overseer’s vital daughter, refined by education and an imperfect marriage, will through love and literacy redeem the vengeful, demon-ridden younger Blake. A new order of Southern society will result, Glasgow hopes, from the joining of the two white classes. In writing about the New South, Glasgow liked to show an underdog hero fighting his way to personal acceptance and public service. This pattern of action is found in several of Glasgow’s novels of Virginia political life. The Voice of the People (1900), Glasgow’s first Virginia novel, is one of the earliest fictional treatments of the Southern poor white. Nick Burr, a farmer’s son, strives against entrenched upper-class prejudice and snobbery. He becomes governor of the state, and is known as ‘‘the Man with the Conscience,’’ only to be murdered when he intervenes in a lynching. Political assassination also cuts short the career of the hero of One Man in His Time (1922). A political novel on which Glasgow collaborated with her fiancé, Henry Anderson, was The Builders (1919). Anderson probably penned the speeches emanating from the misunderstood, patrician hero, David Blackburn, for whom he also posed as the model. A strain of pessimism permeates these novels. Glasgow celebrates Virginia heroines in Virginia (1913), Life and Gabriella (1916), and Barren Ground (1925). One of her best works, Virginia traces the dawning self-knowledge—too late—and lifelong disillusionment of a Southern woman bred conventionally and decorously to a romantic ideal of marriage.

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Growing up in the 1880s, she is subjected to the educational principle that ‘‘the less a girl knew about life the better she would be prepared to contend with it.’’ While social codes bar women from interesting lives and work, the adventuresome male surges ahead. Sunk in domesticity, Virginia watches her husband flourish, professionally and sexually, at her emotional cost. Glasgow’s writing sustains a delicate tone of irony that does not withhold sympathy from the heroine. Life and Gabriella forms a companion portrait to Virginia. Here Glasgow gives us a less malleable heroine, although, misguidedly, Gabriella marries a rake. Left with two children and no money, she carves her way out of misfortune. Through somewhat self-righteous fortitude Gabriella emerges as a millinery businesswoman, while her former husband dies a vagrant alcoholic. There is even a daredevil chance of her dashing off into the future with a virile Irishman. Of Barren Ground and the novels that followed it, Glasgow wrote this was the work upon which ‘‘I like to imagine that I shall stand or fall as a novelist.’’ The novel is among her best, and probably her most renowned. Seduced, pregnant, and abandoned, Dorinda Oakley leaves her Virginia farm home. Fortuitously she miscarries; upon her return she adjusts her nature to the demands she establishes for her life: to remain aloof from love and all entanglements, to labor unremittingly to control the fertility of the worn and wasted land as it had controlled her parents’ lives, and to prosper richly. At the last, as a strong, white-haired woman, Dorinda watches her erstwhile lover die. ‘‘For once in Southern fiction,’’ wrote Glasgow, ‘‘the betrayed woman would become the victor instead of the victim.’’ The people of Barren Ground seem to grow out of the soil, the rhythms of their lives paralleling those of nature’s blooming and decay. Desolate though it is to humans, the land readily produces a weed called broomsedge. Broomsedge flames across the earth, ‘‘a kind of fate,’’ however farmers may try to root it out. It becomes also symbolic of the smothered fire of Dorinda’s nature. In the first transports of despair her soul is ‘‘parched and blackened, like an abandoned field after the broomsedge is destroyed.’’ Her tormented dreams of her lover ripple with broomsedge, a growth to be eradicated from soil and soul. As Dorinda learns to dominate the land, she also brings her woman’s nature under control. ‘‘Oh if the women who wanted love could only know the infinite relief of having love over.’’ As she gains in ascendancy, the specter of rampant broomsedge gives way to the serene image of the harp-shaped pine. It is a triumph of Dorinda’s, as of other of Glasgow’s heroines, to labor, to live ‘‘without happiness,’’ to become themselves sexually barren ground while transferring energies to their work and forcing it to flower. It may be noted that in a quarter of the novels a woman nurses, survives, or slays the depleted man, who languishes or dies in her house, in her arms, or at her feet. Leaving the Virginia countryside, Glasgow comes indoors with her Queenborough (i.e., Richmond) novels of manners: The Romantic Comedians (1926), They Stooped to Folly (1929), and the somber The Sheltered Life (1932). The Romantic Comedians centers on the fatuous, aged, would-be lover, Judge Gamaliel Honeywell, whose ‘‘withered heart urgently craves to be green again.’’ He is surrounded by women, from the hovering shade of

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his dead wife Cordelia to the winsome girl of twenty-three whose youth leads him to overidealize her and whom he fancies he can please. Undaunted by sickness and the desertion of his girl-wife, the Judge at the last reacts to the charms of his nurse. As a mirror image reproach to his way of life there is his outrageous twin sister, the much-married and much-loved Edmonia, who lives to please herself. Glasgow’s gallery of female caricatures is superb. The word ‘‘happiness’’ recurs with ironic frequency. Glasgow’s satiric vision is both classic and fresh in this work, whose aphoristic dialogue is reminiscent of theater. The comic possibilities of youth’s encounters with age in a framework of sexual morality are also explored in They Stooped to Folly. Glasgow introduces diverse women characters, focusing on the seduced and fallen women of three generations. These women are observed from the perspective of the central couple, Virginius and Victoria Littlepage, who are conventionally, virtuously, tediously married. Unfree themselves, their perceptions of the others are imperfect; their plight is subject to Glasgow’s overarching assessment. The novel counterpoints the themes of self-deceit, hypocrisy, and the standards of moral conduct. In her preface, Glasgow refers to the ‘‘woman myths. . .invented by man’’ to flatter his own self-esteem and diminish women. Women couldn’t have bothered with a mythology for themselves since they have been so busy with ‘‘planning, contriving, scheming to outwit an adverse fortune, and tilling the fertile soil of man’s vanity.’’ The Sheltered Life observes the interaction of three generations of Southerners before World War I. Courtly General Archibald reflects on the polite hypocrisies that warped lives in his youth. His own poetic temper was quashed by a barbarous upper-class training, his hope of true love thwarted by a forced, scandalaverting marriage. He is sedulously deferential to women, especially to his beautiful neighbor, Eva Birdsong. Once a belle, she now strains to uphold the cult of beauty, to which she has sacrificed autonomy and happiness. Imprisoned by old standards of feminine decorum, she affects to ignore her insouciant husband George’s infidelities; she devotes her whole being to her gowns and her lovely smile, which droops only when she thinks herself unobserved. Eva’s garden continues to die while she inwardly dies. The General’s granddaughter is the ecstatic Jenny Blair. Impelled by a narcissistic sensuality, which the life of privilege has sheltered in its heedless innocence, she entices George with furtive embraces; at the same time, she adores Eva. Tragedy peaks when Eva, hollow and ‘‘maimed’’ from an operation, levels her sporting husband’s gun at him and brings him down amid his ducks. Family and friends close in and call it an accident. Pervading this crumbling world of deluded upper-class gentility is a chemical reek that corrodes the quality of living. It is the new Queenborough factory, giving off the industrial and moral nerve gas of the future. Youth and age and the insufficiency of love are themes pervading all three Queenborough novels. In this last, the General and Eva have allowed themselves to be molded by an older morality. Jenny Blair and George are the new happiness seekers who trample on those they love, but don’t ‘‘mean anything.’’


Vein of Iron (1935) documents the lives of the Scotch-Irish ‘‘good people’’ of Ironside, a village of the Upper Valley of the James River in Virginia. The surrounding mountains loom as personal presences. Glasgow takes her much-tried heroine Ada Fincastle from girlhood to middle age, from 1901 to 1933. The vision produced by the novel is one of nostalgia and of perpetual accommodation to necessity in the face of futility. In Vein of Iron, Glasgow is best when extolling ancestral values, for she saw the future as a dying age. Despite its being awarded a Pulitzer Prize, a belated consolation for the committee’s having passed over The Sheltered Life, In This Our Life (1941) is a minor achievement. The portrayals of the elderly weary hero and his desperate daughters betray Glasgow’s declining health and her difficulty in coming to grips with the modern world. Beyond Defeat (1966), its posthumously published sequel, is of academic interest only. Glasgow’s social perspectives and her thirst for realism made her a precursor of writers she failed to appreciate, notably a stylist like Faulkner. She was outspoken about newer writers, whom she characterized as amateurs and illiterates. As she grew older she found it difficult to cast aside the values she had once lightheartedly satirized. She saw the modern world as ‘‘distraught, chaotic, grotesque. . .an age of cruelty without moral indignation, of catastrophe without courage.’’ Her efforts to embrace the young within her artistic vision, even to deal with contemporary argot, turn out shrill and awry. Despite awards and honors during her lifetime, Glasgow’s literary reputation suffered after her death. Glasgow’s best writing is in the comic spirit. There are fine humorous characterizations, many buried in the subplots of her novels. As an innovator, she rejected the South’s codes and genteel fables to write about politics and industry rising up out of the Virginia soil. Race and stock are for her determinants of character in the battle for survival. Work, whether of the grower, the tycoon, or the artist, brings salvation. Manners are both valued and criticized. Glasgow drew her chief inspirations from the land that bred the vein of iron and from the tremors of society. Past and present, the conflict of generations, the uneasy commerce between an older patriciate and the new working classes, mores and wars, ceremony and the fresh winds of change—these were the broad concerns of Glasgow’s writing which she treated with the ‘‘blood and irony’’ she had prescribed for Southern fiction. OTHER WORKS: The Freeman, and Other Poems (1902). The Ancient Law (1908). The Romance of a Plain Man (1909). The Miller of Old Church (1911). The Shadowy Third, and Other Stories (1923). The Old Dominion Edition of the Works of Ellen Glasgow (8 volumes, 1929-1933). The Virginia Edition of the Works of Ellen Glasgow (12 vols., 1938). Letters of Ellen Glasgow (edited by B. Rouse, 1958). The Collected Stories of Ellen Glasgow (edited by R. K. Meeker, 1963). Beyond Defeat: An Epilogue to an Era (edited by L. Y. Gore, 1966). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Auchincloss, L., Pioneers and Caretakers (1965). Carpenter, L., Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women (1991). Ekman, B.,

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The End of a Legend: Ellen Glasgow’s History of Southern Women (1979). Godbold, E. S., Jr., Ellen Glasgow and the Woman Within (1972). Goloboy, J. L., ‘‘Marrying the Future: Kate Langley Bosher, Mary Johnston, Ellen Glasgow, and the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia’’ (thesis, 1995). Harrison, E. J., Female Pastoral: Women Writers Re-Visioning the American South (1991). Holman, C. H., Three Modes of Southern Fiction (1966). Inge, M. T., ed., Ellen Glasgow: Centennial Essays (1976). Jessup, J. L., The Faith of Our Feminists: A Study in the Novels of Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Willa Cather (1950). Kelly, W. W., Ellen Glasgow: A Bibliography (1964). Kraft, S., No Castles on Main Street: American Authors and Their Homes (1979). McDowell, F. P. W., Ellen Glasgow and the Ironic Art of Fiction (1960). Parent, M., Ellen Glasgow: Romancière (1962). Raper, J. R., Without Shelter: The Early Career of Ellen Glasgow (1971). Raper, J. R., From the Sunken garden: The Fiction of Ellen Glasgow (1980). Raper, J. R., ed., Ellen Glasgow’s Reasonable Doubts (1988). Ribblett, D. L., From Cross Creek to Richmond: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Researches Ellen Glasgow (1986). Richards, M. K., Ellen Glasgow’s Development As a Novelist (1971). Rouse, B., Ellen Glasgow (1962). Santas, J. F., Ellen Glasgow’s American Dream (1965). Wanless, T. C., ‘‘Soil and Soul: The Experience of Southern Rural Womanhood in Selected Novels by Edith Summers Kelley, Ellen Glasgow and Elizabeth Madox Roberts’’ (thesis, 1984). Reference works: CB (Jan. 1946). DAB. LSL. NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA, TCAS. Other references: Ellen Glasgow Newsletter (Ashland, Virginia). —MARCELLE THIEBAUX

GLASPELL, Susan Born 1 July 1876, Davenport, Iowa; died 27 July 1948, Provincetown, Massachusetts Daughter of Elmer S. and Alice Keating Glaspell; married George C. Cook, 1913; Norman Matson, 1925 Susan Glaspell began her career writing numerous short stories—for popular magazines—in line with the sentimental and escapist mode popular at the time, and two conventional romantic novels. When she met and married her first husband, George C. Cook, her lifestyle and the direction of her work changed radically. Her novel Fidelity (1915) is thematically connected to this love affair. With Eugene O’Neill, she and Cook became the founders of and prime contributors to the Provincetown Players, an experimental group begun on Cape Cod in 1915 to provide a place where native drama could develop freely outside the fetters of commercialism. The company, which moved to New York’s Greenwich Village (as the Playwrights Theatre) in the fall of 1916, proved to be one of the most important and seminal forces in the history of American theater.

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Glaspell’s first one-act play, written with Cook, was part of the Provincetown Players’ initial season. Her second one-act play, Trifles was produced in 1916 during the second summer season. (Glaspell’s short story adaptation of it, ‘‘A Jury of Her Peers,’’ appeared in Best American Short Stories of 1916). On a bleak Iowa farm, dour farmer John Wright has been found dead in his bed, his own rope around his neck. His wife, Minnie, who never appears onstage, is in custody pending investigation of the murder. The tacit agreement of two women onstage to conceal the telltale evidence of guilt implies that Wright was a man who deserved to die as he did, and their sympathy (with that of the audience) goes to the abused wife. After 50 years, this piece is still deservedly cited as an example of expert craftsmanship. For the next two seasons Glaspell continued to write, act in, and direct plays. Her first full-length play, Bernice (1920), in which again the heroine never appears onstage, was produced in 1919. Glaspell returned in The Inheritors (1921) to a favorite theme: the desirability of preserving the best values of pioneer character. The only character who represents the true spirit of her forefathers (the founders of a liberal college) and of America itself is the granddaughter Madeline Morton, who goes to jail for the rights of Hindu students protesting British domination of India. In The Verge (1921), Glaspell deals with a ‘‘new woman’’ again. However, Claire Archer is very different from Madeline. Claire is so intent on attaining her own freedom—an ‘‘otherness,’’ she calls it—that she is driven over the edge of sanity when she rejects the past and present (ancestors, husband, and daughter) in hopes of a new future. Glaspell dramatizes the subject of the artist’s life and connection to society in her final two plays, The Comic Artist (1928) and Alison’s House (1930). The latter, dealing with the posthumous disposition of the poetry of a woman much like Emily Dickinson, was produced at the Civic Repertory Theatre, with Eva LeGallienne playing the role of the niece who favors publication. It won the Pulitzer Prize. Glaspell had only minor connections with the theater after 1931. She had returned to the novel in 1928 with Brook Evans. In Ambrose Holt and Family (1931), Glaspell clearly connects the ‘‘free woman’’ of the 20th century with the best qualities of the pioneer, as in her play The Inheritors. This novel and the following, The Morning Is Near Us (1939), have philosophical depth, but little relevance to the time of the Great Depression. It was not until Norma Ashe (1942) and then Judd Rankin’s Daughter (1945) that Glaspell took cognizance of failures inherent in Midwestern isolationist attitudes, appropriate though they may have been for the original pioneers. Because her work in the theater was of necessity much more experimental than her work in other genres, Glaspell’s main significance stems from her Provincetown connection, not only as a playwright, but, more importantly, as an innovator instrumental in changing the course of American drama forever. The most striking hallmark of her best writing is her consistent emphasis on the need for human beings to fulfill their highest potential by utilizing what is desirable from the past and applying it with faith

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and courage to the future. Because she developed a broad humanistic viewpoint, she never became a typical Midwestern regionalist in the narrow sense; she eschewed always the 20th century provincialism, superpatriotism, and fatuousness that evolved as Main Street, USA. OTHER WORKS: Glory of the Conquered (1909). The Visioning (1911). The Road to the Temple (1927). Fugitive’s Return (1929). Cherished and Shared of Old (1940). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Gelb, A., and B. Gelb, O’Neill (1960). Goldberg, I., Drama of Transition (1922). Gould, J., Modern American Playwrights (1966). Hapgood, H., A Victorian in a Modern World (1939). Lewisohn, L., Expression in America (1932). Quinn, A. H., History of American Drama from the Civil War to the Present Day (1927). Schlueter, J., ed., Modern American Drama: The Female Canon (1990). Vorse, M. H., Time and the Town (1942). Waterman, A. E., Susan Glaspell (1966). Reference works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1991). DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA, TCAS. Other references: Arts and Decoration (June 1931). Bookman (Feb. 1918). Commonweal (20 May 1931). Drama (June 1931). Independent Woman (Jan. 1946). Nation (3 Nov. 1920, 6 April 1921, 4 April 1923). NR (17 Jan. 1923). NYT (12 April 1931, 10 May 1931). Palimpsest (Dec. 1930). Review of Reviews (June 1909). SR (30 July 1938). WLB (Dec. 1928). Women’s Journal (Aug. 1928, June 1931). —EDYTHE M. MCGOVERN

GLÜCK, Louise Born 22 April 1943, New York, New York Daughter of Daniel and Beatrice Grosby Glück; married John Dranow, 1977 (divorced); children: Noah Louise Glück’s parents lost their first child, a daughter, seven days after her birth. This loss irrevocably altered the family that might have been, and in her poetry Glück examines the intimate dramas of family life as loss reverberates across generational lines. She treats private pain with relentless, lyrical intensity, yet maintains a paradoxical reticence. In Glück’s work, confessional poetry meets restrained classicism; her poems are tragic in a traditional sense, yet imbued with the psychological awareness of Freud and Jung. During the years she might have been at college, she undertook psychoanalysis. She attended Sarah Lawrence College for six weeks and later took courses, almost entirely poetry workshops, at Columbia University’s School of General Studies. She worked with Léonie Adams, Stanley Kunitz, and briefly with Adrienne Rich. Glück is one of the foremost American lyric poets. She has taught in a variety of institutions, including Goddard College, the


universities of North Carolina, Virginia, Iowa, Cincinnati, and California (Berkeley, Davis, and Los Angeles), Columbia University, and Williams College. She has received grants from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim foundations and from the National Endowment for the Arts. Glück’s work has been recognized with many awards and prizes, including the Poetry Magazine Eunice Tietjens Prize, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters award in literature, the National Book Critics Circle award, the Boston Globe Literary Press award for poetry, and the Poetry Society of America Melville Kane award. Firstborn, published in 1968, bears the imprint of the confessional sensibility, and Glück assumes the stance of the embittered outsider. She uses short, trenchant sentences, rhyme and off-rhyme, and colloquial diction, much like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. In her late twenties, Glück wrote nothing for over a year. In the poems that follow this silence she abandons her more formal approach with its implied harmony and its authorial virtuosity. The hot drama of the confessional style yields to increasing control and plainness of speech. Calvin Bedient says of The House on Marshland (1975): ‘‘Its ornament proved chastely limited; besides, the figurative. . .simply and hallucinatingly asserted itself as the real.’’ The poems, authoritative, beautiful, and reticent, resemble folktale and myth. In ‘‘The School Children,’’ the mothers must offer their children to the schools, like propitiatory apples, and are helpless to keep them from hurt: ‘‘And the teachers shall instruct them in silence / and the mothers shall scour the orchards for a way out, / drawing to themselves the gray limbs of the fruit trees / bearing so little ammunition.’’ In Descending Figure (1980) and The Triumph of Achilles (1985), she draws heavily on what Helen Vendler calls an ‘‘eclectic mythology’’ to elucidate private matters. In Ararat (1990), a series of lyrics that composes a balanced narrative about the death of her father, bereavement, and the surviving family, the mythic references are less explicit, but the resonances remain. Her family of origin appears as the archetypical family over which looms an ancient, unalterable tragedy. In Wild Iris (1992), which won the Pultizer Prize for Poetry, Glück explores questions of faith and the place of the human in the natural order through a series of meditative poems in the tradition of Emily Dickinson and George Herbert. Framed by the diurnal and seasonal cycles, the book locates itself in Glück’s own garden, where everything has a voice. Characteristically, these voices are not gentle but tough and demanding. ‘‘Poems are autobiography, but divested of the trappings of chronology and comment, the metronomic alternation of anecdote and response,’’ wrote Glück in the introduction to The Best American Poetry (1993). Her poetry represents a quest for the self in its relation to domestic and natural life, and emotional and spiritual perception. Metaphor and myth authenticate the loss and transgression that are her poetic resources while they also replicate the predicament of paradox inherent in human knowledge. Her language is stark and inward yet lyrical. As Allen Hoey noted, she is ‘‘a devoted lyricist in the tradition of Hopkins and Donne.’’ Her questions are pragmatic and secular, essential to survival, yet ultimately unanswerable.

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In a description of ‘‘the religious mind,’’ in Glück’s essay on T. S. Eliot (1994), she reveals the transformative power of her own poetry: ‘‘Its hunger for meaning and disposition to awe, its craving for the path, the continuum.’’ Glück’s poems explore this space between the material and spiritual realms. Unlike Eliot’s tendency to ultimate beliefs, Glück’s impulse is toward the paradox at the center of her poetic seeking: the continuing cycle of loss and the search for meaning without end. She writes, in Hoey’s view, ‘‘to know the world, to get closer to the mystery.’’ The poems in Meadowlands (1996) replay the decline of a contemporary marriage in juxtaposition with the marriage of Odysseus and Penelope. These figures, with Telemachus, take on the characteristics of a family’s struggle to come to terms with conflict and betrayal and the needs of the self versus the needs of relationship: husband/wife, father/son, and mother/son. Vita Nova (1999) explores the loss of love and relationship in that time and space beyond the waiting, longing, and hope represented in Meadowlands. Dido and Aeneas, Orpheus and Eurydice, and Odysseus and Penelope represent the finality of one kind of relationship and the subsequent confrontation with the self alone. The season is spring. The poet in the first poem, ‘‘Vita Nova,’’ remembers the sounds she heard as a child: ‘‘Laughter for no cause, simply because the world is / beautiful.’’ Later these sounds seem out of reach, perhaps lost: ‘‘Crucial / sounds or gestures like / a track laid down before the larger themes / and then unused, buried,’’ until one morning she wakes ‘‘elated, at my age / hungry for life, utterly confident.’’ The last poem, also titled ‘‘Vita Nova,’’ describes ‘‘the splitting up dream’’ figured by the dog named Blizzard who symbolizes the breach when a relationship ends. She addresses the dog: ‘‘O Blizzard, / be a brave dog— this is / all material; you’ll wake up / in a different world. / you will eat again, you will grow into a poet.’’ Glück’s recent honors for Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (1994) include the 1995 PEN/Martha Albrand award for first nonfiction and honorary Doctors of Letters from Middlebury College (1996), Skidmore College (1995) and Williams College (1993). In July 1998 she became the Preston S. Parish lecturer in English at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. OTHER WORKS: The Garden (chapbook, 1976). The First Four Books of Poems (1995). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brown, M. L., The Love of Form is a Love of Endings: Poetic Hunger and the Aesthetic Body in Louise Glück (dissertation, 1997). Dodd, E., Reticence and the Lyric: The Development of a Personal Classicism among Four Women Poets of the Twentieth Century (dissertation, 1990). Vendler, H., Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets (1980). Williamson, A., Introspection and Contemporary Poetry (1984). Reference works: CA (1978). CLC (1977, 1982, 1989). Contemporary Poets (1970, 1975, 1980, 1991). DLB (1980). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). World Authors (1970). Other references: APR (Jan.-Feb. 1997). Beall Poetry Festival, Baylor University Department of English: Online, 1999.

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Bulletin of Bibliography (Dec. 1987). Contemporary Literature (Spring 1990). Hollins Critic (Oct. 1982). Literary Review (Spring 1988). Mid-American Review (1994). Midwest Quarterly: American Journal of Contemporary Thought (Summer 1983). NR (17 June 1978). NYTBR (22 Dec. 1985, 2 Sept. 1990). Parnassus: Poetry in Review (Spring-Summer 1981). Sewanee Review (Spring 1976). —NORA MITCHELL, UPDATED BY KAREN J. MCLENNAN

GODCHAUX, Elma Born 30 November 1896, Napoleonville, Louisiana; died 3 April 1941, New Orleans, Louisiana Daughter of Edward and Ophelia Gumbel Godchaux; married Walter Kahn (n.d., divorced); children: one daughter Elma Godchaux, daughter of a prominent Louisiana planter and granddaughter of a Jewish planter and philanthropist, was raised at the Godchaux sugar plantation. The family owned one of the largest sugar refineries in the world in 1938. Godchaux attended Radcliffe College and remained in the East for a number of years, marrying and giving birth to a daughter. The marriage ended in divorce, and Godchaux again used her maiden name. After living in New York City for a time, she moved to New Orleans, where she resided until her death. Godchaux published five short stories and a novel and was at work on a second novel at the time of her early death. In Stubborn Roots (1936), a novel of the Old South, Godchaux describes the operation of a sugar cane plantation in the 1800s. Her portrayal of the herculean efforts, by landowner and workers alike, to protect the sugar cane crop from devastation by floods indicates Godchaux’s ability to realistically depict people from all classes. The novel was reviewed with a considerable amount of praise. The Saturday Review of Literature called it ‘‘a remarkable novel,’’ and the London Times described its characters as being ‘‘drawn with bold decision.’’ The uncommon background and the vivid way in which the author presents it were noted by the Chicago Daily Tribune. Godchaux dedicated her novel to ‘‘the memory of Edward Godchaux, Louisiana planter,’’ and the book was written after the death of her father. The focus of the novel seems to be on the planter, Anton, who is drawn from memories of her father and her grandfather. Some critics, perhaps looking for a more romantic figure than Anton, seemed to misread and felt the central figure to be his cruel undisciplined wife, Marie Elizabeth, but it is likely the epic quality of the story of Anton is exactly what the author was seeking to portray, and what readers of the novel today may find most interesting in it. Godchaux’s short stories were first published by the Southern Review and the Frontier and Midland, and then were included in the Best Short Stories of 1935, the Best Short Stories of 1937, the O. Henry Memorial Prize Stories of 1936, and other anthologies.

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In one of Godchaux’s short stories, ‘‘Chains,’’ the protagonist is a poor Cajun who owns only a small patch of swampland. Quite different from Anton, the leading character in Stubborn Roots, he is a most unusual sort of landowner in that, although he loves the land, he does not actually work it. Both the Cajun man and Anton, however, are indicative of many of the writer’s characters, who act on their principles and become defined by those actions, rather than by tangible rewards or achievements. Critics praised both Godchaux’s novel and short stories in her own lifetime. She believed ‘‘all ordinary experience is fleeting. . . . Writing is something to live for. If it is your work you can hold it with you. Everything else somehow always escapes.’’ Unfortunately, Godchaux’s writing career, although noteworthy, was very brief. She did not begin to write until her daughter was in college, and she died prematurely at the age of forty-four. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Goldstein, A., ‘‘The Creative Spirit,’’ in The Past As Prelude: New Orleans 1718-1968 (1968). McVoy, L. C., and R. Campbell, eds., A Bibliography of Fiction by Louisianians and on Louisiana Subjects (1935). Other references: New Orleans Times-Picayune (5 April 1936, 4 April 1941). —DOROTHY H. BROWN

GODWIN, Gail Born 18 June 1937, Birmingham, Alabama Daughter of Mose W. and Kathleen Krahenbuhl Godwin; married Ian Marshall, 1965 (divorced) Gail Godwin received her B.A. (1959) in journalism from the University of North Carolina and her M.A. (1968) and Ph.D. (1971) in English from the University of Iowa. From 1967 to 1971 she taught English at the University of Iowa, and she has lectured at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Godwin worked as a reporter for the Miami Herald (1959-60) and as a writer for the U.S. Travel Service at the U.S. Embassy in London (1962-65). She has contributed short stories to Cosmopolitan, North American Review, Paris Review, and Esquire. Godwin’s first novel, The Perfectionists (1970), depicts the disintegration of a marriage constructed on philosophical and psychological theories. The perfectionists in the novel are John Empson, a British psychotherapist, and his new American wife, Dane; they are an obsessively analytical couple who use Hermann Keyserling’s Book of Marriage as a yardstick against which to measure their own relationship. What the novel reveals as it explores the dynamics of their relationship is that union and invasion are two sides of the same coin. John sees marriage as a union in which both of the partners reveal the internal moments of their lives; Dane wants something akin to a Victorian marriage of form and individual privacy, and regards her husband’s rage for union as a personal invasion.


The tensions resulting from their attempts to realize not only the ideal of a perfect marriage but also some rather vague conceptions of personal transcendence are compounded by the presence of John’s three-year-old illegitimate son. Dane comes to hate the implacable child for his refusal to contribute to the picture of the ideal family; and when, finally, she almost beats the child to death, one part of her analytical mind is already translating the cruelty into evidence of a cosmic experience which she can later share with her husband. In her second novel, Glass People (1972), Godwin again explores the relationship of marriage, moving away from the representation of the wife as both victimizer and victim to a portrayal of the wife as the passive possession of a remote and self-assured husband. Here Godwin evokes the boredom and malaise afflicting Francesca Bolt, of whom her husband, Cameron, requires nothing except she be his flawlessly beautiful wife. Francesca seeks emancipation from the stifling atmosphere of her marriage in brief affairs with chance acquaintances and a temporary job as an amanuensis to an eccentric writer until Cameron rescues her from the dismal consequences of her attempts at independence and restores her to her place as his adored objet d’art. Godwin returns to this depiction of the woman as frustrated and powerless to act affirmatively in the collection of stories that comprises Dream Children (1976). Most of the women in these stories are victims—either of men or of their own unrealized expectations—who escape into the marginal world of dreams. Godwin appropriates from George Gissing the title of her third and best-known novel, The Odd Woman (1974), and relies upon the meaning of ‘‘odd’’ in the sense of ‘‘unpaired’’ to suggest the plight of her protagonist. Armed with a Ph.D. in English literature and a collection of melodramatic family stories, Jane Clifford visualizes the events of her life either in terms of fictional plots or as a kind of mythologized family history. She finds in the example of George Eliot and G. H. Lewes substantiation for her belief in a lasting and creative love, and she sees in the tale of her great-aunt’s elopement with the villain from a traveling melodrama an appealing prototype of daring passion. Yet as she attempts to construct her life out of ‘‘real’’ materials and to give it a comprehensive shape, she realizes that novels can have happy endings and myths can remain beautiful only because, unlike life, they omit all the loose ends and most of the mundane details. Traces of The Odd Woman shadow into Godwin’s next novel, Violet Clay (1978), where the protagonist who gives the book its title resembles Jane Clifford in gauging her own life by those of her relatives who figure significantly in a family myth. Unlike The Odd Woman, however, which offers no resolution to the protagonist’s quest for order and beauty in a lasting relationship, Violet Clay demonstrates the possibility of laying to rest the ghosts from the past and achieving a personal vision of balance and proportion. In this significant novel, Godwin, often viewed as a ‘‘woman’s novelist,’’ has achieved a satisfying picture of a ‘‘new woman’’—one who realizes successfully her own possibilities. Godwin has continued to examine the inner workings of the family, especially those families with some connection to the

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American South. Many of her recent works open with the death or removal of a family member. This loss drives Godwin’s characters to create new and more meaningful families around the resulting void. In A Mother and Two Daughters (1982), the sisters Lydia and Cate Strickland help their mother, Nell, through the aftermath of the death of their universally loved father. Cate, an English professor teaching in the Midwest, returns to the North Carolina town of Mountain City where Lydia has remained. Mountain City is also the setting of A Southern Family (1987); Clare Quick, a successful author in New York City, visits her childhood home and becomes embroiled in the travails of her family after the violent death of her brother Theo. In the novella Mr. Bedford and the Muses (1983), another expatriate Southerner, Carrie Ames, attempts to build a new family in an old house in London. This story and the five published with it address issues surrounding familial bonding and the creation of art. Each work in this volume concerns the inspiration of the artist, and Godwin includes an author’s note identifying her own inspiration for each story. The themes of family, art, and inspiration reappear in The Finishing School (1985), in which Justine Stokes, a successful actress, looks back on the summer when her father’s death caused her and her mother to move from Virginia to the suburban North. There Justine meets and is fascinated by Ursula De Vane, a middle-aged woman who introduces her to the beauty and treachery of art. Father Melancholy’s Daughter (1991) also takes the perspective of a grown woman looking back on her girlhood. In this richly textured work, Margaret Gower reflects on life changes precipitated by her young mother’s unexpected decision to leave her and her father, an Episcopalian priest, to explore the art world. Margaret’s recollections blend religion and ritual with Godwin’s ideas about art, inspiration, and family. In addition to her published fiction, Godwin has provided the texts for musical compositions by composer Robert Starer and the libretto for his ‘‘musical morality play,’’ The Last Lover (1977). Since the 1980s, her work has received increasing critical attention. Violet Clay and A Mother and Two Daughters both had National Book award nominations. In 1981 Godwin received an Award in Literature from the American Institute and Academy of Arts and Letters. An accomplished novelist, Gail Godwin is most interested in creating characters who operate at a high level of intelligence and feeling as they go about trying to make sense of their world. In her fiction she most often concentrates on depicting the choices that modern women make. These choices necessitate compromise, and rarely bring complete happiness. Godwin’s characters often explore their options through art as they create or analyze images that may reveal or even change reality. Over the course of 11 novels, collections of short stories, and three plays, Godwin draws from her own experience to broaden the scope of contemporary fiction. The struggles of women who seek both an independent life and a productive connection to others are central to her work. Godwin strives in her novels and

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short fiction to place those efforts within a larger context, especially within the framework of modern theories of art and psychology. As was often true of the central characters in several of Godwin’s earlier novels, Magda Danvers is facing a transformative event. At the center of Godwin’s complex story of loss and mortality, Magda faces what she calls her ‘‘final examination’’ in The Good Husband (1994). Under the tutelage of ovarian cancer, Magda, a star professor at a college in upstate New York, faces her death with wit and her usual flamboyant and penetrating intelligence. She is tended by a thoughtful but unreflective husband, Francis Lake, who left the seminary at age twenty-one to dedicate himself for nearly a quarter-century to Madga rather than God. As Magda’s condition worsens, another grieving couple is drawn into her orbit: Hugo Henry, the college’s writer-in-residence, and his second wife, Alice, formerly his editor, who have just lost their only child in a tragic home birth. Godwin creates a meditation on the nature of intimacy and influence, and the differences between good matches and good mates. Sequels, whether in books or movies, can often be a disappointment. Godwin risks the challenge in Evensong (1999). Margaret Gower, who first appeared as the motherless daughter of a smalltown Episcopal priest in Father Melancholy’s Daughter (1991), returns. Margaret herself has also become a priest and is serving All Saints High Balsam, a parish with a reputation for being rich and old-fashioned, nicknamed ‘‘All Saints High Horse’’ by the surrounding community. Margaret’s life is stable though a bit stale. Godwin weaves an eclectic collection of supporting characters as the yeast leavening this tale of work, family, and growing spiritual responsibility. Godwin draws upon her rich expertise to examine the daily lives of people alive with conflicts, complexities and frailties. OTHER WORKS: Gail Godwin’s papers are in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hill, J., Gail Godwin (1992). Pearlman, M., ed., American Women Writing Fiction: Memory, Identity, Family, Space (1989). Pearlman, M., ed., Mother Puzzles: Daughters and Mothers in Contemporary American Literature (1989). Reference works: Bloomsbury Guide to Women’s Literature (1992). CA (1972). CANR (1985). CLC (1978, 1982, 1985). CN (1986). DLB (1980). Great Women Writers (1994). Larousse Dictionary of Women (1996). Larousse Dictionary of Writers (1994). Other references: Contemporary Literature (Spring 1983). Hollins Critic (Apr. 1988). Iowa English Bulletin (1987). Iowa Journal of Literary Studies (1981).Mississippi Quarterly (Winter 1988-89). NYTBR (7 June 1970, 9 Sept. 1990, 3 Mar. 1991). Southern Literary Journal (Spring 1989, Spring 1995). Southern Quarterly (Summer 1983). —GUIN A. NANCE, UPDATED BY E. M. NIX AND CELESTE DEROCHE

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GOLDEN, Marita Born 28 April 1950, Washington, D.C. Daughter of Francis S. and Beatrice Reid Golden; children: Michael Marita Golden was educated in the 1960s, a time of great political turmoil and change in America. The daughter of a taxi driver father and landlord mother, Golden’s African American background and the tumultuous times of her schooling years influenced her writing. Though originally trained as a journalist, she has written novels, poetry, and an autobiography. In her own words, ‘‘I write essentially to complete myself and to give my vision a significance that the world generally seeks to deny.’’ Golden entered American University in Washington, D.C., in 1968, the year the black consciousness movement in America was reaching its peak. After receiving her B.A. in 1972, she interned at the Baltimore Sun newspaper. In 1973, she received a master’s degree from Columbia University School of Journalism and worked as associate producer at WNET in New York City, from 1974 to 1975, before her marriage to a Nigerian man led her to Africa. In Lagos, Nigeria, she taught as assistant professor of mass communication at the University of Lagos from 1976 to 1979. Upon Golden’s return to the U.S., a literary agent who was impressed with her writings about Africa encouraged her to write her first book, an autobiography entitled Migrations of the Heart (1983). While Golden found the prospect of writing an autobiography at the age of twenty-nine somewhat scary, she explains that she wanted ‘‘to meditate on what it meant to grow up in the 1960s, what it meant to go to Africa for the first time, what it meant to be a modern black woman living in that milieu. I had to bring order to the chaos of memory.’’ One of the first accounts of a contemporary African urban experience by a young black American, the book focuses on her years in Africa and on her marriage and its dissolution, but also tells of her relations with her family. It met with mostly favorable reviews. Golden’s first novel, A Woman’s Place (1986), traces the lives of three black women who meet and become friends at a prestigious American college in the 1960s. The novel explores their relationships and the numerous problems and challenges that confront them during 15 years of friendship. The novel was widely praised, especially for its believable characters. Long Distance Life (1989) illustrates the transformation of black American culture throughout the 20th century by tracing the lives of four generations of a black American family. Golden traces the changes and growth of this family as they move from North Carolina in the 1920s, to Washington, D.C., in mid-century, through the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and finally into the tragedies and promises of contemporary America. Golden has also written poetry and her work has been included in many anthologies. Her writing has appeared in Ms., Essence, National Observer, Black World, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and many other publications. Executive


director of the Institute for the Preservation and Study of African American Writing from 1986 to 1987, Golden is also a founding member of the African American Writers’ Guild and has been president of the guild since 1986. She has taught at Roxbury (Massachusetts) Community College and was professor of journalism at Emerson College, Boston. In a stunning nonfiction effort, Saving Our Sons: Raising Black Children in a Turbulent World (1994), Golden paints a frighteningly clear picture of the trials facing parent raising black children. Through the use of her own diaries and interviews with ‘‘psychologists, writers, . . .and young black men—criminals and scholars both. . .’’ Golden presents the story of her fight to raise her son in a world where children of color face incredible challenges. After her divorce, and 10 years in the child’s native Nigeria, Golden took her son to the Washington, D.C. area, away from the comfort of a warm, extended family. The book, written in four sections, details the realities of single motherhood, regardless of race. The Edge of Heaven (1997), Golden’s fourth novel, is set in Washington, D.C. and deals with the issues facing three generations of black women, one of whom is on trial, and one of whom is a law student. The story unfolds in a mixture of first and third person narrative, but is primarily the story of the law student, Teresa. Well-developed characters and commentary on the plight of black families in America mark this offering. Revisiting the issues of American single mothers, Golden’s A Miracle Every Day: Triumph and Transformation in the Lives of Single Mothers (1999) seeks to counter the often negative stereotypes of families headed by single mothers. Merging her own experiences in a household headed by a woman and her experience as a single mother with interviews of other single mothers and adults raised by single mothers, Golden creates an inspiring tribute to the adaptive skills of both mother and child and the novel support systems they develop to survive and flourish. OTHER WORKS: Keeping the Faith: Writings by Contemporary Black American Women (contributor, 1974). And Do Remember Me (1992). Wild Women Don’t Wear No Blues; Black Women Writers on Love, Men, and Sex (editor, 1992). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Metzgar, L., et al eds., Black Writers: A Selection of Sketches from Contemporary Authors (1989). Reference works: Black Writers (1989). CA (1984, 1999). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). WW of Black Americans (1992). Other references: Black American Literature Forum (Winter 1990). Black Issues in Higher Education (26 June 1997). Book List (15 Nov. 1997, 15 Feb. 1999). Essence (Nov. 1989). LJ (1 Mar. 1999). PW (27 Oct. 1997). WP (22 May 1983, 4 June 1983, 30 July 1986, 5 May 1991). —MARY E. HARVEY, UPDATED BY REBECCA C. CONDIT

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GOLDMAN, Emma Born 27 June 1869, Kovno, Russia; died 14 May 1940, Toronto, Canada Daughter of Abraham and Taube Bienowitch Goldman; married Jacob Kersner, 1887; James Colton, 1926 Born to Jewish parents in Russian-dominated Lithuania, Emma Goldman was unwelcome to a father who made a precarious living as manager of the government stagecoach and later as an innkeeper. Her mother, whose first husband had died leaving two small daughters, had married Goldman out of economic need and was just as unhappy at the arrival of another child—especially of a female, when it was her husband’s fervent wish to have a son. After several family moves and haphazard schooling in German and Russian, Goldman was taken to St. Petersburg, where at the age of thirteen she was forced by the family’s poverty to work long exhausting hours in glove and corset factories. She nevertheless found time to read German, French, and Russian literature and to absorb the radical anticzarist ideas abroad in the Russian capital. At seventeen she came to America, where an older married sister had settled in Rochester, New York. In the late 1880s she began to attain, as an active anarchist, a charismatic speaker, and a proficient writer and editor, the notoriety which increased until her deportation by federal authorities at the end of 1919. Although her name appeared less often in American newspapers after World War I, she continued her battles against injustice everywhere in the world: at the time of her death she was in Canada collecting funds for the Spanish Loyalists whose cause she espoused. Throughout the last decade of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th century, Goldman flailed the society which knowingly espoused poverty and discrimination, and the state which exploited the laborer and turned women into minor citizens. She could be counted on to come to the defense of accused labor leaders and radicals, who were, in her opinion, usually unable to get a fair trial. In her lecture tours of the country, she spoke on such varied subjects as women’s rights, birth control, political violence, the needs of labor, prejudice in the American courts, the somber condition of American prisons, the social significance of the Continental and British playwrights, and the failure of justice in America, where she had come, like so many others, with high hopes. These are also the subjects on which Goldman wrote hundreds of pamphlets and articles. Goldman’s little monthly publication, Mother Earth, which ran from 1906 to 1917, when it was confiscated by the police, was a ‘‘gadfly’’ that stung liberals into radical thinking and furnished a voice for anarchists from coast to coast. It was consequently subject to harassment by various officials of justice departments who believed in the kind of law and order that disregarded civil rights. Besides espousing the cause of women, it was so heretical as to satirize the great evangelist Billy Sunday and to castigate the puritanical Comstocks of America who interfered with personal freedom and looked at sex as obscene. Mother Earth, ‘‘devoted to social science and literature,’’ also sought to encourage ‘‘the

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various art forms in America’’ by printing poetry, literary excerpts, and book reviews. Goldman did much personally, as well, to bring knowledge of the contemporary unpublished foreign drama to Americans through many lectures, included in The Social Significance of the Modern Drama (1914). Her autobiography, Living My Life (1931), begins with what she considers the unjust execution of anarchists following the Haymarket Riot in Chicago in 1887 and continues through various instances of perversions of justice up to the Sacco-Vanzetti case in 1920. Writing of the denial of their appeal, she grieved: ‘‘It seemed impossible that the State of Massachusetts would repeat in 1923 the crime Illinois had committed in 1887.’’ Although supporting the suffragists, Goldman knew true emancipation would come only when there evolved ‘‘a great race of women who could look liberty in the face.’’ She stressed the need for birth control, condemned the white slave traffic, and saw marriage itself as a kind of enslavement of women, a social arrangement not synonymous with love but actually antagonistic to it. She claimed woman ‘‘has been lulled into a trance by the songs of the troubadours. . . . And though she is beginning to appreciate that all this incense has befogged her mind and paralyzed her soul, she hates to give up the tribute laid at her feet by sentimental moonshiners of the past.’’ She was many years ahead of her time in advocating social, economic, and sexual freedom and equality for women—a cause which was embodied in her philosophy that individual liberty for all must prevail against the coercive state. Viewing all government as repressive—whether it be capitalistic or Marxist—she opposed the war fervor of World War I by holding anticonscription meetings, for which she and her longtime friend and comrade Alexander Berkman were sentenced to two years in prison and then deported. In spite of appeals from Americans as prominent as H. L. Mencken, Goldman was never allowed in the country again except for a brief lecture tour of 90 days in 1934. After the publication of Goldman’s My Disillusionment in Russia (1923), Mencken wrote that the U.S. sustained a loss by exiling Berkman and Goldman. He praised their books on Russia and their ability to write ‘‘simple, glowing, and excellent English,’’ and concluded America was not so rich in literary talent and honest criticism that she could afford to kick them out of the country. But an exile this heroic woman remained until her death, when the Immigration Service allowed her to be buried in Chicago’s Waldheim Cemetery near the graves of her Haymarket comrades.


Rebel in Paradise: A Biography of Emma Goldman (1961). Duberman, M. B., Mother Earth: An Epic of Emma Goldman’s Life (1991). Eastman, M., Enjoyment of Living (1948). Shulman, A. K., ed., Red Emma Speaks (1972). Shulman, A. K., To the Barricades: The Anarchist Life of E. Goldman (1971). Shulman, A. K., ed., Traffic in Women, and Other Essays on Feminism (1971). West, R., Introduction to My Disillusionment in Russia by E. Goldman (1970). Reference works: CB (Jan.-July 1940). DAB. NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Investigative Activities of the Department of Justice, 66th Congress, Vol. 12, Document no. 153 (17 Nov. 1919). —WINIFRED FRAZER

GOODMAN, Allegra Born 1967, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Madeleine and Lenn Goodman; married David Karger, 1989; children: Ezra, Gabriel In an address given at the1994 meeting of the Modern Language Association, Allegra Goodman acknowledged that ‘‘my most intimate and immediate audience comes from the American Jewish community, that in many ways when I write fiction I am writing not only about them but also for them.’’ In so defining both her readership and the source of her fiction, Goodman confirms her place in the evolving tradition of American Jewish writers at the close of the 20th century. These writers draw equally from the legacy of Yiddish writers such as Sholom Aleichem and I. B. Singer, who carried the burden of representation of the world of the Eastern European Jew, and those postwar American Jewish writers such as Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Grace Paley, and Cynthia Ozick, who emerged beyond ethnicity into mainstream American letters.

OTHER WORKS: Anarchism, and Other Essays (1911). My Further Disillusionment in Russia (1924). My Disillusionment in Russia (combining the two former books, 1925). Voltairine De Cleyre (1933).

As an American Jewish writer whose fiction is patterned on a long tradition of both scriptural and secular storytelling, Goodman draws from the collective memory of the past, ‘‘a memory, real or imagined’’ (from ‘‘One Down’’), to contextualize the paradoxes of contemporary Jewish life. Her fiction resounds with the ‘‘thundering of history’’ (‘‘The Four Questions’’), with Jewish history, a mythic, often religious, at times onerous, certainly contentious legacy. As a result her fiction turns on the complex tensions surrounding the place of ancient Jewish law and learning in contemporary American life and thought, tensions between old and new, between orthodoxy and reform, between piety and secularism, between Judaism and modernism, between tradition and change.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Anderson, M., My Thirty Years War (1930). Berkman, A., Bolshevik Myth (1925). Berkman, A., Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912). Chalberg, J., Emma Goldman: American Individualist (1991). Drinnon, R., Introduction to Anarchism, and Other Essays by E. Goldman (1969). Drinnon, R.,

Goodman has so far produced three volumes of fiction: the short story collections, Total Immersion(1989) and The Family Markowitz(1996), and a novel, Kaaterskill Falls(1998). All revolve around the preoccupations of the American Jewish community and all show the influence of this fluid tradition of Jewish letters from which she draws. In her first collection of short

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stories, Total Immersion, published when she was a twentyone-year-old Harvard College undergraduate, Goodman brings to the more established settings and climate of the urban American Jewish writer a distinctive twist, the environment of the Jewish community of Hawaii in which she was raised. For, although born to an Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn, Goodman moved at the age of two to Honolulu, where her parents were academics at the University of Hawaii. Hawaii forms the exotic setting for most of the stories in Total Immersion, a seemingly incongruous backdrop for Jewish ritual and custom, in which Goodman ‘‘chose to present the exotic as familiar.’’ Indeed, a sense of familiarity, of the quotidian, of daily, recognizable attitudes and responses to contemporary life permeates Goodman’s fiction, whether the setting is England, Hawaii, California, or the East Coast. In large part she draws upon the familiar as a source of satiric commentary. The Family Markowitz, in which Goodman creates recurrent, evolving characters whose lives are played out in interlocking, successive stories, is a kind of postmodern epic in which three generations of Markowitzes— from immigrant matriarch Rose to the American-born granddaughter Miriam, whose return to the orthodoxy mystifies her liberal, well-educated parents, Sarah and Ed Markowitz—struggle to maintain autonomy in the midst of the constraints of family life. Her characters and their responses to the upheavals and vagaries of contemporary life become a source of comedy. No one escapes Goodman’s ironic parody, not the tolerant academic, nor the would-be converts, nor the expatriate Anglophile, and least of all the politically correct, all targets of her satiric wit. While The Family Markowitz gets at the heart of tensions specific to American Jews at the end of the century—interfaith marriages, religious observance—it also speaks to the concerns of contemporary American life in general: the place of the aged, the intrusions of popular culture, and the possibilities for self-transformation within the politics of everyday living. Goodman’s novel, Kaaterskill Falls, on the other hand, takes us inside the conscripted and insular world of the ultra Orthodox, the followers of the Rav Elijah Kirshner, who leave the city to summer in a small community in upstate New York. With biblical resonance, Goodman contemporizes the struggle between two brothers vying for their father’s blessing. The tension between pious succession and secular transgression, while located in the dichotomous polarizing of the brothers, permeates the Jewish community at large, where the Rav believes there is ‘‘no room for compromise, there is no sustenance outside the community.’’ This position, as Goodman so acutely and compassionately articulates, inevitably is threatened by the seductions of the outside world. Goodman is among the new generation of American Jewish writers whose fiction embraces the subtleties of American postmodernity while recognizing the continuing place of Jewish history and identity. While, as Ed Markowitz concedes, ‘‘the generations are sort of flipping over’’ (‘‘Fantasy Rose’’), there is, as Andras Melish insists, finally ‘‘no way to conceive, to picture, someone else’s life. . .no way to transfer memories’’ (Kaaterskill Falls). Goodman, however, does exactly that: she recreates believable characters whose stories, past, present, and future, converge indelibly on the pages of her fiction.

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The recipient of a Whiting Foundation Writers award in 1991, the Salon magazine award for fiction, and a Mellon fellowship, Goodman received her Ph.D. in English literature from Stanford University in 1997. Her short fiction continues to appear in a number of journals and periodicals, including Commentary and the New Yorker. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. OTHER WORKS: ‘‘Writing Jewish Fiction In and Out of the Multicultural Context,’’ in Daughters of Valor: Contemporary Jewish American Women Writers (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Jewish American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical and Critical Sourcebook (1994). Other references: Baltimore Jewish Times (4 Jan. 1991). Commentary 106 (Dec. 1998). Forward (8 Dec. 1989, 6 Nov. 1992). NYT (21 Aug. 1998). NYTBR 103 (30 Aug. 1998). Poets and Writers 26 (Sept./Oct. 1998). PW 245 (27 July 1998). Studies in American Jewish Literature 11 (1992). Vogue (Aug. 1998). —VICTORIA AARONS

GOODMAN, Ellen (Holtz) Born 11 April 1941, Newton, Massachusetts Daughter of Jackson J. and Edith Wienstein Holtz; married Anthony Goodman, 1963 (divorced 1971); Robert Levey, 1982; children: Katherine Syndicated columnist Ellen Holtz Goodman has lived all but a short period of her life in the Boston area and uses her family, neighbors, politics, the daily news, and social change as her subject matter. She is an observer and commentator who tries to make sense of the world; she explores and questions, and although she offers opinions, she does not always present answers. Goodman’s social conscience and curiosity were honed in a family that valued an individual’s decisions, and political action. Her father was a lawyer and politician who served as a state legislator while in his twenties and later ran for Congress. Her mother, a homemaker, had a strong sense of the importance of fostering the individual. Goodman and her sister, Jane, who became an architecture critic and journalist, were encouraged to do whatever they wanted to do, but doing well in school was expected. Goodman grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts, attended the private Buckingham School in Cambridge, and graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College with a degree in history (1963). A week after graduation she married a medical student and moved to New York, where she was hired at Newsweek as a researcher. All the researchers were women, Goodman notes. Only men received reporter jobs, a fact she found disturbing. During her two years at the magazine, she did some freelance work for the New York weeklies.

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When the couple moved to Michigan, Goodman became a reporter for the Detroit Free Press. They returned to Boston in 1967, where she was hired by the Boston Globe and assigned to the women’s pages. Her daughter was born shortly after. When she divorced in 1971, Goodman’s ties with Boston, family, and friends tightened. In 1972 she began her column, ‘‘At large,’’ in the Globe. It attracted broad readership, and by the 1990s was syndicated in over 440 newspapers. Goodman chronicles the changing society in which she lives and tries to make sense of a complicated world. Her 750-word column is like a conversation with a friend whose opinions are open-ended and who waits for your response. After receiving the Pulitzer Prize in 1980, Goodman wrote that she ‘‘had a sense of how much things had changed. Ten years ago, what I write about—values, relationships, women’s issues, families, change— would not have been taken seriously by the newspaper world.’’ Later, in the same piece she wrote that her articles ‘‘deal with life-and-death issues in my own home and in the Congress. They discuss matters which are both public and private, argued in the bedroom and the boardroom, the kitchen and the court: love, work, sexuality, children, war, peace. . . .The one constant is a desire to find a context and a meaning.’’ In 1973-74 Goodman spent a year at Harvard University as a Nieman Fellow, researching the dynamics of social change in personal lives. Subsequently, between 1975 and 1978 she interviewed more than 150 people. The result was Turning Points: How People Change Through Crisis and Commitment (1979), a book about how change affects people’s lives, particularly the changes brought about by a reexamination of traditional sex roles. It is her only publication that is not a compilation of previously published newspaper columns. Goodman has won a myriad of awards, including the New England Women’s Press Association Woman of the Year Award in 1968, the Catherine L. O’Brien Award in 1971, the Media Award of the Massachusetts Commission on Status of Women in 1974, and the New England Women’s Press Association Columnist of the Year award in 1975. In 1980 she won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, as well as the Distinguished Writing Award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Headliners Best Local Column award. In 1988 Goodman received the Hubert H. Humphrey Civil Rights award for dedication to the cause of equality. Goodman continued to write her column throughout the 1990s, garnering many more awards, including the President’s Award from the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1993. She also taught at Stanford University in 1996 as the first Lorry I. Lokey Visiting Professor in Professional Journalism. Goodman’s voice continued to be one of moderation, and she deplored what she saw as the polarization of politics in the 1990s, which pitted extreme left against extreme right. She insisted such clear-cut views were not the norm for most Americans, who were ambivalent, undecided, or open to question on many major issues. Goodman noted that she was often asked to participate in call-in radio shows where she was expected to give the women’s point of view, as if she could represent all female America. But personal

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insight, not grand pronouncement, was what was most important to her. In the late 1990s she began work on a nonfiction book about women and friendship, coauthored with the novelist Patricia O’Brien. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts with her husband. OTHER WORKS: Close to Home (1979). At Large (1981). Keeping in Touch (1985). Making Sense (1989). Value Judgments (1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Braden, M., She Said What? Interviews with Women Newspaper Columnists (1993). Mills, K., A Place in the News (1988). Reference works: CA (1982). Biographical Dictionary of American Newspaper Columnists (1995). WWC (1989-90). Other references: Boston Women (Winter 1990). Christian Science Monitor (10 Nov. 1981). Harvard Independent (9-15 Apr. 1981). Harvard (Mar.-Apr. 1979). Utne Reader (Jan.-Feb. 1999). —JANET M. BEYER, UPDATED BY ANGELA WOODWARD

GOODSELL, Willystine Born 8 January 1870, Wallingford, Connecticut; died 31 May 1962, New York, New York Daughter of Jacob and Jennie Clark Goodsell Willystine Goodsell received her education at the Welch Normal Training School, New Haven, Connecticut, and Teachers College, Columbia University. Her arrival at Columbia was shortly preceded by that of John Dewey. Goodsell’s early interest in philosophy is evident in her master’s dissertation, ‘‘The Relation of the Individual to Society in the Social Theories of Rousseau’’ (1906). The following year William James came to Columbia to give a highly successful lecture series on pragmatism. Heavily influenced by Dewey and James, Goodsell’s first book, The Conflict of Naturalism and Humanism (1910), is a history of philosophy tracing its relation to educational theory and practice in different periods. In a concise, clear style Goodsell traces the division between humanists and natural scientists from the Renaissance, a period dominated by the humanists, to 1910, an era when scientists were predominant in the U.S. In a final chapter, Goodsell proposes a pragmatic solution to the conflict, one which relates science (testing of knowledge) and the humanities (study of the past) to the appreciation of the depth and beauty of everyday human life. Goodsell’s next book, A History of the Family as a Social and Educational Institution (1915, revised 1939), established the direction the rest of her books were to take. Her interest now moved toward anthropological or sociological topics. With The Education of Women (1923), feminist overtones became obvious. With the hopes that more attention would be given to the improvement of the education of women, Goodsell published Pioneers of


Women’s Education in the United States: Emma Willard, Catherine Beecher, and Mary Lyon (1931). In this volume Goodsell summarizes women’s education before 1820, provides detailed biographical information on each woman studied, and also includes selections written by all three. A History of Marriage and the Family (1935) is a meticulously detailed study of the family from primitive times through those of the patriarchal Greeks and Romans, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. Because of the dominant cultural influence, the English family is studied in detail from the 17th to the 20th centuries. The greatest attention is given to the American family from colonial times to the present. An entire chapter outlines the difficulties of modern marriage, but Goodsell expresses optimism for improved family relationships. Her final chapter deals with governmental and social aid that may help ‘‘in the interest of [family] stability and happiness.’’ Since Goodsell expresses one of her goals as being ‘‘to reveal existing injustices and evils in the marriage relation,’’ she deserves to be ranked as an early feminist. At the same time, the breadth and scope of her writing—philosophical, historical, and critical—earn her a place among scholars in the fields of the history of education and social anthropology. —CAROLE M. SHAFFER-KOROS

GOODWIN, Doris Kearns Born 4 January 1943, Rockville Center, New York Daughter of Michael Alouisius and Helen Witt Miller Kearns; married Richard Goodwin, 1975; children: Joseph, Michael, and Richard. Doris Kearns Goodwin is a critically praised writer of historical-biographical books. She is cited for her ability to capture the private details of her subjects’ lives, to show how their personal histories affected their leadership style and ultimately were intertwined with the events that occurred during their period of governance. Goodwin was born in 1943. Her father, a state bank examiner, instilled in her a love of baseball that would later become the theme for her memoir of the 1950s, Wait Till Next Year (1997). In 1964 Goodwin received her B.A. from Colby College in Waterville, Maine, and attended the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard on a full scholarship, earning her Ph.D. in 1968. In 1967 she worked as special assistant to W. Willard Wirtz, the secretary of labor, as part of a White House fellowship. While working at the White House Goodwin met President Lyndon Johnson, with whom she had a long and close relationship. She soon became Johnson’s special assistant and, through many late-night conversations toward the end of his term, learned much about him and his life. After Johnson’s term ended in 1969, Goodwin visited him often in Austin, Texas, to assist him in writing his memoir. The resulting book, called The Vantage

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Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963-1969, was published in 1971, yet it does not include many of the personal details Goodwin had discovered through her association with the former president. Many of these more intimate facts are documented, however, in Goodwin’s first book, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, which was released in 1976. The book is typical of her work in the way it describes details from her subject’s life, such as Johnson’s relationship with his parents, and demonstrates how these traits affected his policymaking and method of governing. In 1975 she married Richard Goodwin, an attorney, political consultant, and former speechwriter for Presidents Johnson and Kennedy. Goodwin began to research a book on John F. Kennedy in 1977, which was intended as a biography but blossomed into a history of the Kennedy and Fitzgerald families that took a decade to research and write. The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga, published in 1987, contains information to which Goodwin was able to gain access partly through her husband’s connection to the family. She delved into a great many unpublished papers and conducted interviews with John F. Kennedy’s mother, Rose. Goodwin’s account, which starts with the birth of John’s maternal grandfather and ends with the Kennedy inauguration, was lauded by reviewers for its mass of background information and fascinating character studies. A 1990 ABC-TV miniseries, The Kennedys of Massachusetts, was adapted from the book. Goodwin next tackled the Roosevelts in No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt; The Home Front in World War II, which came out in 1994 and won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for History. It focuses on the couple’s private lives and especially the relationship between the Roosevelts themselves as well as with their associates. Structured more like a novel than her previous books and including some previously unpublished material, No Ordinary Time is sympathetic to its subjects, as is all of Goodwin’s work, yet does not ignore the darker sides of the time or the couple’s lives. Goodwin is known for her objectivity, despite her obvious admiration for—and sometimes personal relationship with—the people about whom she writes. Each book is cited for its painstaking research and inclusion of information that adds to the public record. Critics also applaud her emphasis on her subjects’ relationships with their colleagues, friends, and family, shedding light on how history unfolded at the time. Her accessible writing style has made her books popular with the general public as well as historians, and most titles became bestsellers. Wait Till Next Year, Goodwin’s memoir of her childhood as a Brooklyn Dodger fan, describes the events of the 1950s as filtered through her recollections. Despite being a memoir of her own life, Goodwin bolstered her account with research, including interviews and a review of her extensive collection of carefully filledin scorecards. This book met with mixed reviews. Florence King in American Spectator, for example, faulted her reliance on scorecards and interviews rather than her own remembrances, writing, ‘‘Goodwin brings nothing to the task except the maniacal thoroughness of her scorecard technique.’’ Ann Hulbert, in the New York Times Book Review, disagrees: ‘‘Goodwin recounts an exemplary coming-of-age story from an often maligned era.’’

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Goodwin has written articles for many publications including the New Yorker and New Republic, and contributed to Marc Pachter’s Telling Lives: The Biographer’s Art, published in 1979. She is a guest commentator on NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and other programs, briefly appeared as a television hostess in Boston during the 1970s, and was featured in the 1994 Ken Burns documentary, Baseball. Goodwin has taught at Harvard, was assistant director of the university’s Institute of Politics, and held various political posts early in her career. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference Works: CANR 53 (1997). CBY (1997). Other references: American Spectator (Apr. 1998). Journal of American History (Sept. 1995, Dec. 1995). National Review (21 Nov. 1994). NYTBR (26 Oct. 1997). People (31 Oct. 1994). —KAREN RAUGUST

GOODWIN, Maud Wilder Born 5 June 1856, Ballston Spa, New York; died 5 February 1935, New York, New York Daughter of John and Delia A. Wilder; married Almon Goodwin, 1879 Maud Wilder Goodwin did not begin to write until the age of thirty-three and evidently ceased to write for publication at sixtythree, 16 years before her death. Her 30-year literary career was productive and varied, but her motivation remains unclear, for few details of her life are recorded. Goodwin clearly writes for a young or at least naive audience. Her phrasing is frequently quaint, formally correct, and occasionally intimate. Her interest in the past seems in part nostalgic, but she is at the same time a solid if occasionally sentimental scholar. The Colonial Cavalier (1894) contains scholarly notes as well as a ‘‘List of Authorities’’ on Southern life before the American Revolution. The account is entertaining, factual, and suggestive of a mind actively interpreting colonial history. Historic New York, which Goodwin edited in four volumes in 1898, is also competent history and hints at a society and a past that fascinated Goodwin in much the same way these forces captivated her contemporary, Edith Wharton. Goodwin’s finest factual work is her biography of her relative, Dolly Madison (1896). It is affectionate, generous, and occasionally sentimental, but throughout Goodwin presents impressive insights along with sound evidence and numerous quotations from Dolly Madison’s letters and from those of her friends. Despite its dated qualities, it is a penetrating study of one woman by another and still seems the best available biography of Dolly Madison. Goodwin’s historical novels are generally mechanical, predictable, and forced. The Head of a Hundred (1895) chronicles the

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courtship of Dr. Humphrey Huntoon, who flees England for Virginia in the first years of the 17th century because of a silly misunderstanding with his lover, Elizabeth Romney, who soon also flees to ‘‘James City.’’ The conversation is particularly stilted and pretentious. Sir Christopher (1901) is an unfortunate sequel; but Goodwin’s attempt to reconcile Catholic and Protestant beliefs and her honest treatments of anti-Catholic sentiment in colonial Maryland are interesting. White Aprons (1896) is a similar romance, set during Bacon’s rebellion in Virginia in 1676, and Veronica Playfair (1909) is clearly from the same pen; set in England during the reign of George I, the novel follows the trials of a hero and heroine who are ultimately secretly married at Alexander Pope’s villa. Goodwin’s impressive contemporary novels reveal a sharp wit and penetration of character, while her historical fiction of the same time is pedantic and formulaic. Flint (1897) is the study of a misperceived young man, Jonathan Edwards Flint, who appears harsh and cold but is actually generous and reflective. Goodwin’s treatment of the independent woman he finally marries, Winifred Anstice, is compelling. While Flint is still slow and rough, Four Roads to Paradise (1904) and Claims and Counterclaims (1905) are accomplished novels of wit and satire. The latter is at times coincidental and farfetched, but it is psychologically sound and sprinkled with epigrammatic wit. Four Roads to Paradise is certainly Goodwin’s best work. The author studies several characters with delicate penetration, and various figures come to the fore, gain the reader’s sympathies—or at least understanding—and then fade properly into the background, as the most admirable characters dominate the end of the book. Thus the young, finally self-centered Episcopal priest, Stuart Walford, controls the first chapters as he follows Bishop Alton’s advice and defers his desire to minister to the lepers at Molokai; the bishop, wise in the ways of the world, tells him that ‘‘Selflove. . .has many forms. One of them is altruism.’’ To learn the world he thinks he wants to reject, Walford goes to New York and then to Europe, where much of the novel takes place, and is attracted to Anne Blythe, the bishop’s niece. Initially selfish, Anne is, unlike Walford, a basically good character who befriends by stages her dead husband’s illegitimate child and finally marries her shy, reflective, honorable lawyer, Fleming. Even Goodwin’s minor characters are realistically developed. This fine novel reminds one most of Edith Wharton in its deft handling of characters and their society. Along with Goodwin’s Dolly Madison it perhaps best deserves to be read today. OTHER WORKS: Open Sesame! Poetry and Prose for School Days (edited by Goodwin, 1889). Dutch and English on the Hudson (1919). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: A Dictionary of American Authors (1904). A Guide to Historical Fiction (1914). A Guide to Historical Literature (1936). —CAROLINE ZILBOORG


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innocence, while religion became a means of confronting the abyss, a terrifying image permeating her fiction.

Born 6 October 1895, Merry Mount Farm, Kentucky: died April 1981 Also writes under: Caroline Tate Daughter of James M. and Nancy Meriwether Gordon; married Allen Tate, 1924 (divorced 1959); children Nancy

The literary milieu at Benfolly Farm appears in several works, particularly The Strange Children (1951), Gordon’s first novel after her conversion to Catholicism in 1947. It traces the search for grace in a fallen world. The central intelligence of nineyear-old Lucy Lewis records the despair and materialism of the skeptical intellectual world and the need for an order only religious belief can provide. As Lucy struggles with her own growing religious awareness, her artist-parents Stephen and Sarah perceive their own shallowness after their friend Kevin Reardon converts to Catholicism. When a compromised poet runs away with Reardon’s mad wife, Reardon’s disciplined belief provides a vision of the mysterious nature of grace. In the last passage, Stephen Lewis recognizes in Reardon’s Catholicism a possible salvation for the cynical strange children of the modern South and of all the ‘‘desert’’ countries.

Born on her mother’s ancestral farm in the Kentucky tobacco region near Tennessee, the setting for much of her fiction, Caroline Gordon was tutored by her father until she was ten. She then attended his all-boys classical school. In 1916 she received a B.A. from Bethany College in West Virginia. After teaching high school until 1920, she became a journalist for the Chattanooga News. While there she met many of the Agrarians, including Allen Tate. Gordon readily identified with the Agrarians’ traditional conservative values, favoring a stable, hierarchical society based on Christianity over an urban, technological society. Gordon became deeply involved in Tate’s literary world; both spent much of the late 1920s in Europe on Guggenheim Fellowships. The Tates raised their daughter Nancy at Benfolly Farm, Tennessee, entertaining many artistic visitors. Although Gordon and Tate were divorced in 1959, in 1960 they coedited a second edition of their successful and influential The House of Fiction: An Anthology of the Short Story (1950, 1960). Both this and Gordon’s How to Read a Novel (1957) adapt many New Critical poetic principles to fiction. Gordon has spent much of her life as professor and writer-inresidence at various colleges. She worked on what she characterized as her ‘‘last’’ novel in the years before her death in 1981, a portion of which, The Glory of Hera, appeared in book form in 1972. Gordon’s short stories and novels, long out of print, were reprinted in the early 1980s. As Ford Madox Ford’s literary secretary, Gordon finished her first novel, Penhally (1931, reissued 1991), acclaimed by Ford as ‘‘the best novel that has been produced in modern America.’’ It chronicles one hundred years of antebellum Southern culture by tracing the decline of the Penhally estate and the Llewellyn family. The ancient virtues violently conflict with the inevitability of change. In Aleck Maury, Sportsman (1934, reissued 1996), her most popular novel, an old classics teacher, modeled on Gordon’s father, spends every spare moment hunting and fishing. Maury’s ritualistic, almost sacramental devotion to sport allows him a dignity rarely possible in the chaos of the wasteland world which has replaced the Old South. Only the quest for love—apparent in many of Gordon’s women characters, like Maury’s wife Molly— provides a similar dignity. Gordon’s fiction of the late 1930s and the 1940s continued to develop her ancestral, regional material; it also reflected a growing emphasis on sophisticated knowledge in contrast to primitive

The salvation that is possible in The Strange Children becomes real in The Malefactors (1956). Tom Claibourne, a nonproducing poet, must reevaluate the direction of his life after he leaves his wife Vera for the ambitious and intellectual poet, Cynthia Vail. Through the influence of Catherine Pollard, a symbol of Christian charity, Claibourne discovers that he is bound nowhere unless he can return to his wife. While in her earlier work the classical Greek world subtly patterned Gordon’s vision, in The Malefactors it is the archetypal world of Jungian psychology that prepares for Claibourne’s religious conversion, reversing the pattern of action in Gordon’s fiction from death and destruction to grace. Gordon’s worth as a novelist has been too often ignored by critics. She is more frequently identified as coeditor of The House of Fiction and as Allen Tate’s former wife than as a creative artist in her own right. In addition, because her work is usually set in the South and because of her close association with the Agrarians, critics have tended to dismiss her too easily as a regionalist. Her talent for dealing with religious themes and with the themes of male/female relationships and the possibility of creativity in a wasteland world has been virtually overlooked by critics who miss the broader implications of the South in her fiction. Though Gordon is enjoyed a renewal of interest in the 1980s, her novels, particularly The Strange Children and The Malefactors, have not received the attention they deserve. She was as fine a fiction writer as Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate and should share equally in the acclaim so often accorded the Agrarians and New Critics as the generators of the Southern Renascence.

OTHER WORKS: None Shall Look Back (1937, reissued 1992). The Garden of Adonis (1937). Green Centuries (1941, reissued 1992). The Women on the Porch (1944, reissued 1993). The Forest of the South (1945). A Good Soldier: A Key to the Novels of Ford Madox Ford (1957). Old Red, and Other Stories (1963). The Collected

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Stories of Caroline Gordon (1981, reissued 1999). The Southern Mandarins: Letters of Caroline Gordon to Sally Wood, 1924-1937 (1984). A Literary Friendship: Correspondence Between Caroline Gordon and Ford Madox Ford (1999). The papers of Caroline Gordon (manuscripts and correspondence) are housed at the Princeton University Library. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Boyle, A. M., The Unendurable Feminine Consciousness: A Study of the Fiction of Caroline Gordon (dissertation, 1984). Brinkmeyer, R. H., Three Catholic Writers of the Modern South (1985). Chappell, C. M., The Hero Figure and the Problem of Unity in the Novels of Caroline Gordon (dissertation, 1987). Fraistat R. A., Caroline Gordon as Novelist and Woman of Letters (1984). Golden, R. E., and M. C. Sullivan, Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon: A Reference Guide (1977). Hall, T. R., Escape from the Abyss: Order in the Fiction of Caroline Gordon (dissertation, 1986). Henderson, M. K. B., Network of Resemblances: Fictional Technique in Caroline Gordon’s The Malefactors (dissertation, 1984). Jones, P. W., ‘‘The Captive’’: Caroline Gordon’s Telling of the Jennie Wiley Legend (thesis, 1989). Jonza, N. N., A Hunger for Home: The Life and Art of Caroline Gordon (dissertation, 1993). Jonza, N. N., The Underground Stream: The Life and Art of Caroline Gordon (1995). Landess, T. H., The Short Fiction of Caroline Gordon: A Critical Symposium (1972). Makowsky, V. A., Caroline Gordon: A Biography (1989). McDowells, F. P., Caroline Gordon (University of Minnesota Pamphlet, 1966). Pfohl, D. M., The Search for Identity in the Fiction of Caroline Gordon and Robert Penn Warren (thesis, 1989). Smrcka, T. S., Revisioning the South: Caroline Gordon and the Female Pastoral (dissertation, 1997). Stuckey, W. J., Caroline Gordon (1972). Waldron, A., Close Connections: Caroline Gordon and the Southern Renaissance (1987). Weaks, M. L., A ‘‘Little Postage Stamp of Native Soil’’ in the Upper South: The Poetry and Fiction of Caroline Gordon, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren (1992). Reference works: American Women Fiction Writers, 1900-1960 (1997). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Short Story Criticism (1994). TCA, TCAS. Other references: Criticism (Winter 1956). Renascence (Fall 1963). SR (Summer 1946, Autumn 1949, Spring 1971, 1980). Southern Quarterly (1990). —SUZANNE ALLEN

GORDON, Mary Catherine Born 8 December 1949, Far Rockaway, New York Daughter of David G. and Anna Gagliano Gordon; married James Brain, 1974 (annulled); Arthur Cash, 1979; children: Anna, David Described as a ‘‘humane, masterly novelist,’’ Mary Catherine Gordon combines a rich moral imagination with a prose style

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whose sentences ‘‘burst with metaphoric energy.’’ Writing within the contexts of Roman Catholicism, the Irish-American experience, and feminism, Gordon’s work poses increasingly complex problems, often centering on the struggle to balance the competing claims of the sacred and the profane, of particular and universal love, of the need for personal freedom and connection. ‘‘The Church of my childhood that was so important for my formation as an artist,’’ she noted in 1988, ‘‘is now gone.’’ Although she regrets the loss of connections with the past—in The Other Side (1989) the power of the Irish immigrant experience has been dissipated by the fourth generation—she often looks to children as the hope of the future. The only child of an Italian-Irish Catholic mother and a Jewish father who converted to Catholicism, Gordon attended Catholic schools in Valley Stream, Long Island. Her father died when she was seven, but his faith and commitment to the intellectual life were long-lasting influences. In 1967 Gordon entered Barnard College (B.A. 1971), where Elizabeth Hardwick encouraged her to write fiction rather than poetry. After Barnard, Gordon earned an M.A. (1973) at Syracuse University and began work toward a Ph.D. in English. While teaching freshman composition at Dutchess Community College in Poughkeepsie, New York, she began writing Final Payments (1978), which was accepted for publication after Hardwick suggested she change the point of view from third to first person. Gordon’s work often chronicles the attempt to find a moral center in a decentered age. In Final Payments, Isabel Moore, an Irish-American woman, puts her own life aside to minister to her ailing father. When he dies, she reenters the world and adapts to the new sexual mores, but seeks expiation for the guilt this causes her by taking responsibility for the care of her father’s former housekeeper, a selfish and difficult woman. Ultimately, Isabel frees herself from the moral imperative of ‘‘loving the unlovable’’ by making a less costly but hopefully final payment. The demands of charity are also addressed in Men and Angels (1985) but with greater complexity and outside the Catholic context. Anne Foster, who is not religious, hires Laura, a fundamentalist Christian, to care for her children while she works on an exhibition catalog. Anne tries to like Laura, but cannot; Laura, out of affection, plots Anne’s religious conversion. The chapters alternate between Anne’s and Laura’s points of view, providing a compelling counterpoint between and among the requirements of the flesh and the spirit. Gordon’s characters are also faced with the social expectations of women in a patriarchal society. Anne struggles to balance motherhood with scholarship, Isabel to escape the grudging self-sacrifice of the caretaker role. In The Company of Women (1980) five women are united in friendship by their devotion to a conservative priest, Father Cyprian, who grooms Felicitas, the daughter of one of the women, to be his intellectual heir. At college, however, Felicitas joins another company, also led by a male guru, a professor who believes in free love. When Felicitas


becomes pregnant, she returns to the company of women, though no longer an acolyte, and her child becomes the group’s hope for the future. Good Boys and Dead Girls (1991), a collection of more than two dozen reviews, essays, and journal entries written between 1978 and 1989, manifests clearly what the Economist’s reviewer called Gordon ’s ‘‘fierce intelligence’’ and her own struggle to define the moral life. Her ambivalence toward Catholicism—a rejection of authoritarianism and patriarchy but an acceptance of mystery—as well as her insights into contemporary social and literary issues are evident here. The title essay extends Leslie Fiedler’s observation that in literature by American males, men avoid domesticity by heading for the frontier in the company of other men. In a review, Wendy Martin pointed out antinomianism, ‘‘the conviction that subjective experience is as important as religious doctrine,’’ not only explains this phenomenon more fully but also reflects Gordon’s own tendency to trust experience over dogma. Gordon has also written introductions for reprints of writings by Virginia Woolf, Stevie Smith, and Edith Wharton. Gordon’s short fiction, most of it collected in Temporary Shelter (1987), has been received somewhat less enthusiastically than her novels and criticism. Several of the short stories, including the title story, are memorable, however, as are the three novellas included in The Rest of Life (1993). The Shadow Man: A Daughter’s Search for Her Father (1997) presents Gordon’s quest to ‘‘know’’ her father, who died when she was seven years of age. The book details the results of the author’s agonizing journey and the surprising results of her research. The man with whom Gordon had spent most of her first seven years (father and daughter were inseparable) was not the Harvard-educated intellectual she believed him to be, but rather a high school dropout and rabid anti-Semite who had been supported almost exclusively by his disabled wife, a victim of polio. Gordon summarizes her feelings: ‘‘I confronted that ghost, and he is both more terrible than I had thought and not as terrible as I had feared. And I think in giving up an idealized father, I stopped being, most importantly, a daughter.’’ Praised by critics as ‘‘erotic and highly intelligent,’’ Spending: A Utopian Divertimento (1998) takes the protagonist, Monica Szabo, on a ride to the heights of the art world. Szabo, a painter in her fifties, jokingly laments in a public lecture that female artists are rarely the beneficiaries of a ‘‘muse’’—one who offers physical and financial support to the career artist. When a handsome, wealthy audience member challenges her statement and offers his services, she is launched into the most productive period of her career. True to the religious overtones of Gordon’s work, Szabo’s rise to fame results from a set of eight paintings that depict Christ’s condition after removal from the cross as postcoital rather than dead. In order to create her subject in realistic terms, Szabo enthusiastically embarks on appropriate research. If there is a message here, it is that despite her lifelong quest to experience ‘‘the REAL thing’’ in life, Szabo ultimately learns that the real things in life are some of the simplest. Mary McCarthy, Ford Madox Ford, J. F. Powers, and Virginia Woolf are among the writers Gordon admires, John Updike

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among those she finds dispensable. Although a few critics find some of her plotting a bit contrived, some of her characters lacking in development, and some of her prose uneven, Gordon’s intelligence, her deep and passionate moral sense, and her keen eye for nuance and detail have earned her a large following among the reading public. She received the Janet Kafka Prize for Fiction in 1979 and 1982 and her books have been widely translated. She is currently the Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College and teaches there three times a week, stating that her students give her hope.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cooper-Clark, D., ed., Interviews with Contemporary Novelists (1986). Day, F., ed., Mary Gordon (1996). Reference works: CA (1981). CBY (1981). DLB (1980). DLBY (1981). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: America (14 May 1994, 15 Aug. 1998). Christian Century (20 Nov. 1985). Commentary (June 1985). Commonweal (12 Aug. 1988, 17 May 1991). Critique (Summer 1986). Cross Currents (Summer/Fall 1987). Economist (15 June 1991). Essays in Literature (Spring 1990). Literary Review (Fall 1988). Newsweek (1 Apr. 1985). NYTBR (31 Mar. 1985, 28 Apr. 1991, 8 Aug. 1993). Ploughshares (Fall 1997). Poets and Writers (July-Aug. 1997). PW (8 Aug. 1994). Sewanee Review (Spring 1979). Signs (Autumn 1988). Time (27 May 1996). TLS (1 Sept. 1978). —ANGELA DORENKAMP, UPDATED BY REBECCA CONDIT

GORDON, Ruth Born 30 October 1896, Wollaston, Massachusetts; died August 1985 Daughter of Clinton and Anna T. Ziegler Jones; married Gregory Kelly, 1927 (died); Garson Kanin, 1942 An only child, Ruth Gordon grew up in a small New England town. At eighteen, she went to New York hoping for a career on the stage and the next year won her first professional role as Nibs in Maude Adams’s 1915 production of Peter Pan. Several years of playing ingenues in touring companies followed, until Guthrie McClintic cast her as the shy spinster, Bobbie, in the 1927 Broadway production of Saturday’s Children. This was succeeded by a long series of varied roles. After the death of her first husband she married Garson Kanin, with whom she wrote and produced plays. The two of them also coauthored scripts for three films: A Double Life (1947), The Marrying Kind (1952), and Pat and Mike (1952).

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Her writing is largely based on autobiographical material and reflects a strong theatrical sense. Her plays are comic in structure, revealing a good ear for the clever line, but the total effect evolves more from situation than from witty dialogue. Over 21 (1944) was derived from her early marital experience with Kanin, when he served in the army during World War II. The leading characters— Gordon herself, Kanin, Herbert Bayard Swope, and a number of army acquaintances—were easily recognized by New York audiences. Topical references, amusing situations, and her own highly stylized characterization combined to make it a Broadway Success. In 1939 Gordon found a diary she had kept as a stagestruck high school girl and at the suggestion of Edward Sheldon, used it as the basis for several articles published in Forum and the Atlantic Monthly. She returned to the material again for another successful comedy, Years Ago (1946). In this play, the setting is Wollaston, the characters are called by their actual names, and the only alteration of fact is in the compression of time to fit the dramatic form. Gordon’s third play, The Leading Lady (1948), written with Kanin, was not as popular as the other two. Here, too, she utilizes events from her own life to demonstrate a favorite thesis, namely, the necessity for an individual to be self-sufficient. The plot, however, is thin, the scenes so romanticized as to lack substance, and, except for a nostalgic portrait of Alexander Woollcott, the characters are sentimental recreations of companions she knew in her years of touring companies. Gordon wrote several autobiographical books, including Myself Among Others (1971) and My Side: The Autobiography of Ruth Gordon (1976, reissued 1986), are collections of reminiscences, mostly of persons and events connected with Gordon’s professional life. The first, written in a rapid-fire, staccato style, is a series of brief sketches, personal glimpses of well known people, descriptions of places, and comments on the world at large, punctuated with observations directed to the reader. It is essentially a self-portrait revealing an energetic woman who unashamedly enjoys the fact she has achieved her ambitions and has no intention of retiring into a comfortable oblivion.


OTHER WORKS: Years Ago (1946). Ruth Gordon: An Open Book (1980). Shady Lady (1981, 1983). Children of Darkness: A True Story (1988).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Groutt, K. M., ‘‘A Metahealth Analysis of the Lives of Gwendolyn Brooks, Dorothy Day, Ruth Gordon, Anaïs Nin, and Georgia O’Keeffe’’ (dissertation, 1986). Reference works: CB (April 1943, April 1972). Other references: Cinema (1976). NYTM (12 Jan. 1947, 5 Oct. 1969). Ruth Gordon: My Side (audiocassette, 1970, 1979). Ruth Gordon Talks About Greta Garbo and Her Own Life (audio, 1977). —HELENE KOON

GORNICK, Vivian Born14 June 1935, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Bess and Louis Gornick; married (divorced) Vivian Gornick earned a B.A. from the City College of the City University of New York in 1957 and an M.S. from New York University in 1960. Like many of her female writing colleagues, she began her career as a teacher, as an instructor in English at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (1966-67), then at Hunter College of the City University of New York (1967-68). Periodically throughout her career she has had one-year guest teaching appointments, such as one at Yale University, where she taught literature from a feminist perspective. Her writing career began with a position as staff writer for the Village Voice in New York City from 1969 to 1977; since then she has worked freelance. She is a member of P.E.N. and the Authors Guild.

My Side is a vivid recounting of Gordon’s life, although not in chronological order. The emphasis is almost entirely on her professional experience, and the personal elements are related only as they relate to the theater. She is frank, almost brutally honest in discussing her early struggles and failures, her marriage to Kelly, her abortions, and her love affairs with Arthur Hopkins and Jed Harris. It is an uneven, at times confusing story, but it is a unique view of a kaleidoscopic and genuinely theatrical personality.

Gornick’s first book, Women in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness (1971), was coedited with Barbara K. Moran. She collaborated on the introduction and contributed the article ‘‘Woman As Outsider,’’ which became one of the two most widely read books from the early years of feminism’s ‘‘second wave’’ (beginning in the 1960s and, in some ways, still continuing). Along with the Sisterhood is Powerful anthology, edited by Robin Morgan, Women in Sexist Society formed a framework from which early women’s studies courses were launched.

Gordon’s work is neither profound nor timeless, but it is amusing, distinctly theatrical, and representative of an important as well as fascinating era of American drama. Yet she is probably best known as ‘‘Maude’’ from the quirky film Harold and Maude, first released in 1971, which on to become a cult classic and was released on home video in 1994.

Gornick and Moran’s book included such famous essays as ‘‘Psychology Constructs the Female’’ by Naomi Weisstein, ‘‘The Paradox of the Happy Marriage,’’ by Jessie Bernard, and ‘‘Why Are There No Great Women Artists?’’ by Linda Nochlin. Gornick’s feminism has continued to fuel her writing. She had an essay in the first regular (July 1972) issue of Ms. and continued to write for it.

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She was a regular contributor to the Nation and the New York Times Magazine, where her ‘‘Who Says We Haven’t Made a Revolution?’’ (about the feminist movement) was the cover story on 15 April 1990. Other venues for her critical or analytical pieces have been the American Scholar, Utne Reader, and the New York Times Book Review. Gornick is the author of seven other books. In Search of Ali Mahmoud: An American Woman in Egypt (1973) resulted from a sojourn in Egypt, where Gornick lived with the family of a close Arab friend of hers. The book, according to reviewer Sara Blackburn in Ms., is about a society ‘‘in which family relationships and personal friendships take precedence over the acquisition of material goods, success, and the abundance of leisure activities that some other cultures find so appealing.’’ Gornick observes and describes the sexism ‘‘that locks Egyptian women into a definition of themselves only in relation to their male counterparts.’’ Yet, as an outsider, Gornick’s chief interest during the Egyptian visit was the male society where she, as an American journalist, ‘‘could be and was. . .eagerly accepted.’’ In The Romance of American Communism (1977), Gornick reported on a year of interviewing Americans who had been involved with American Communism, either as ‘‘card-carrying members,’’ ‘‘fellow-travelers,’’ sympathizers, or simply interested observers. Gornick’s interest in the subject came from the fact that her parents had been sympathizers and that she herself had been a member of the Labor Youth League, and from her sudden realization in the mid-1970s that the subject fascinated her. ‘‘I wanted to show how human they [her interviewees] were and how varied their experiences had been,’’ Gornick said. ‘‘The great thing about them all was their tremendous vitality. They were people who cared very deeply about living and about living serious lives.’’ It wasn’t until the 1980s that the subject of the dearth of women in the scientific professions moved to the front consciousness of feminists and others concerned with the exclusion of talent from sex-biased workplaces. Gornick stepped in with a significant book, Women in Science: Portraits from a World in Transition (1983). Drawing on both careful research and interviews with 100 women of all ages who have pursued or are trying to pursue scientific careers in a variety of disciplines, Gornick produced a book that Ruth Schwartz Cowan in the Quarterly Review of Biology said was ‘‘not a sociological study of women scientists, in the sense that the sample is not random, and the questionnaire not standardized. . . .Yet it is sensitive, insightful, stimulating, and thought-provoking. . . .’’ Women in Science is full of sobering statistics on the low percentages of women earning science degrees at all academic levels, on the high unemployment rate of those same women, and on the inequity in promotion and tenure for women in science. Because of these statistics and the stories of the women themselves, Cowan recommended that the book be assigned to students to read, because it is ‘‘career counseling of the most salient sort: reminding us that there are living, breathing, painful, joyous lives

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[of women in science]. . .and that recently some of those lives have started. . .beating time to a new tune.’’ Since 1983 Gornick has published Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (1987), Approaching Eye Level (1996), from which her essay on fearing loneliness was published in Utne Reader, and The End of the Novel of Love (1997), a series of critical essays on novelists (Kate Chopin, Jean Rhys, Willa Cather, Grace Paley, George Meredith, Raymond Carver, Jane Smiley, and others) that aim to prove Gornick’s thesis that romantic love can no longer be ‘‘the center of a novel,’’ that today, ‘‘love as a metaphor is an act of nostalgia, not of discovery.’’ As the range of her publication indicates, Gornick is proof again that those who want to be writers, if they pursue it with discipline and without distraction, can succeed. By her own testimony, she was not immune to the distraction and lack of focus that so many women writers testify to, but she apparently had two means of salvation: first, she did not have the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood that seem to frequently hobble women’s career pursuits, and second, she was and is ‘‘passionate about ideas.’’ In an interview in Publisher’s Weekly she said her Yiddish teacher told her: ‘‘Ideas, dolly, ideas. Without them, life is nothing. With them, life is everything.’’ ‘‘The explosion of an idea inside you, that sudden consciousness, is everything,’’ she continued. In addition, she apparently found her life’s passion in feminism, which, in turn, helped to fuel the ideas which have driven her writing commitments.

OTHER WORKS: Essays in Feminism (1978). Women in Science: 100 Journeys into the Territory, revision of the 1983 book, with a new title (1990). Fierce Attachments (1988, reprinted 1997).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: American Literary History (Spring 1998). American Scholar (Winter 1999). Atlantic (June 1979). CA 101 (1981). Commonweal (23 Apr. 1982, 13 Feb. 1998). Ms. (July 1979, Apr. 1982, Oct. 1983, June 1987). Nation (23 Sept. 1978, 18 Nov. 1978, 6 Nov. 1995, 21 Oct. 1996, 22 Sept. 1997, 26 Jan. 1998). NYTBR (16 Jan. 1983, 2 Oct. 1983, 22 Nov. 1987, 16 Sept. 1990, 31 July 1994, 13 Oct. 1996). NYT Magazine (10 Jan. 1971, 14 Jan. 1973, 15 Apr. 1990, 2 Mar. 1997). New Yorker (9 Sept. 1996). Physics Today (Sept. 1984). Quarterly Review of Biology (June 1991). Utne Reader (Sept.-Oct. 1989, Nov.-Dec. 1996). Yale Review (Oct. 1998). —JOANNE L. SCHWEIK

GOTTSCHALK, Laura Riding See JACKSON, Laura

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GOULD, Hannah Flagg Born 3 September 1789, Lancaster, Massachusetts; died 5 September 1865, Newburyport, Massachusetts Daughter of Benjamin and Griselda A. Flagg Gould Hannah Flagg Gould lived most of her life in Newburyport, as the housekeeper and companion of her widowed father. A quiet and retiring person, she was nevertheless a central figure in the intellectual life of the community. She contributed poems to periodicals which her friends collected and published as Poems (1832). After the unexpected success of this book, she published several more volumes of poetry. Although her poems were fairly popular, her reputation did not endure. Gould was best known for her short, simple poems about the child’s world. She wrote about children because she saw them as closest to the spirit of God. In her poems, children express moral truth, and their innocence makes them receptive to the Divine Will. Gould’s interest in the child’s spiritual sensibility may have been stimulated by the work of William Blake. She copied into her commonplace book his poems about children, most notably ‘‘The Chimney Sweeper’’ and ‘‘The Tyger.’’ She quoted admiringly Blake’s remark that ‘‘my business is not to gather gold, but to make glorious shapes expressing God-like sentiments.’’ But where Blake’s children show ‘‘A world in a grain of sand / Heaven in a wild flower,’’ Gould’s children express conventional pieties. She lacked Blake’s imagination, power, and skill, and so the children in her poems are often merely pathetic rather than visionary—their insights sentimental and didactic rather than profound. Gould also wrote about the American past, contemporary manners, and nature. The historical poems are mostly about the American Revolution or America’s religious and ethnic minorities—the Quakers, the Native Americans, and others. The most famous was The Rising Monument (1840), a poem commemorating the battle of Bunker Hill, which in dignified iambic pentameter tells of the ‘‘Patriot souls / That from thy native spot arose to God. . . / This last high place by freedom’s martyrs trod.’’


Gould’s work: ‘‘Alone I walked the ocean strand; / A pearly shell was in my hand: / I stooped and wrote upon the sand / My name— the year—the day. / As onward from the spot I passed. / One lingering look behind I cast; / A wave came rolling high and fast, / And washed my lines away.’’ Simple and moral, these poems have a gentle charm in which the didacticism is mellowed by the author’s unassuming tone.

OTHER WORKS: The Golden Vase: A Gift for the Young (1843). Gathered Leaves (1846). New Poems (1850). The Diosma (1851). The Youth’s Coronal (1851). The Mother’s Dream, and Other Poems (1853). Hymns, and Other Poems for Children (1854). Poems for Little Ones (1863). Poems for Children (1870).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Gould, B. A., The Family of Zaccheus Gould of Topsfield (1895). Reference works: Career Women of America, 1776-1840 (1972). Daughters of America (1883). NCAB. Oxford Companion of Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Poets of Essex County, Mass. (1889). Woman’s Record (1853). Other references: Baltimore Literary Monument (Nov. 1838). New England Historical and Genealogical Register (Jan. 1866). North American Review (Oct. 1835). Southern Literary Messenger (Jan. 1836). —MAUREEN GOLDMAN

GOULD, Lois Born New York, New York Also writes under: Lois Benjamin Daughter of Jo Copeland; married Robert E. Gould (divorced); another marriage (divorced); children: two

The poems about the contemporary scene focus on manners and morals. While the patriots of the historical poems were virtuous and valued honor, Gould’s contemporaries, she thought, were caught up with ‘‘progress’’ and preoccupied with wealth. As with most of her works, those poems about American history and contemporary manners are marred by excessive sentiment and didacticism.

Lois Gould’s nonfiction is both graceful and biting. A feminist who operates effectively both inside and outside the establishment, Gould celebrates the women’s movement with insight and without parochialism. A collection of her magazine pieces, Not Responsible for Personal Articles (1978), refutes the charge that feminism lacks humor; it surveys many aspects of the contemporary scene (such as charge accounts, health club addiction, burglary) with penetrating insight, thoughtfulness, and wit.

The best of Gould’s poems are the nature poems, many of which were written for the ‘‘entertainment and instruction’’ of children. The most attractive are ‘‘The Frost,’’ ‘‘The Pebble and the Acorn,’’ ‘‘The Ground Laurel,’’ and ‘‘A Name in the Sand.’’ The latter illustrates the quiet gentleness which marks the best of

Gould’s fiction depicts urban women and their feelings about themselves, often capturing them in moments of crisis. Using both realistic and fabulistic styles, Gould effectively conveys the ambience of slick people leading slick lives. The typical protagonist often struggles against this fakery. Gould is not afraid of

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happy endings; a note of restrained optimism underscores the difficulty of achieving fully realized humanity in an essentially inhumane society. Julie Messinger in Such Good Friends (1970) must face the end of the marriage that served her as a symbol of emancipation from a self-loathing traceable to one of fiction’s most damaging mothers. As her husband lies in a coma—the result of medical miscalculation during purportedly simple surgery—Julie is forced to reevaluate their relationship and their corps of glib friends. Discovering Richard’s secret record of extramarital affairs, she learns many of the women in their circle have been his partners. Once deciphered, the diary is childishly explicit, and it symbolizes the false ‘‘code’’ of their union, which has caused her to blame herself for Richard’s failures as husband and father. In the course of the novel, Julie struggles through stages of self-pity, disbelief, retaliation, and anger toward self-sufficiency and understanding. She is at least partially successful. Full of blunt sexuality, pain, humor, and truth, Such Good Friends is a remarkable book. The Lowen sisters, protagonists of Necessary Objects (1972), never seek genuine understanding; instead, they collect possessions, counting among them husbands and children. Each of the four sisters was once potentially capable and productive, but the society about them, symbolized by their father, has transformed them into cold champion consumers, destructive to themselves and to others. Less successful than Such Good Friends, this novel nevertheless offers some fascinating characterizations (Alison’s husband, Chad Batchelder, for instance) and some memorable scenes, including the staff conferences at Lowen’s department store. Gould’s Final Analysis (1974) takes its unnamed protagonist through therapy, which includes a long-term affair with her equally troubled analyst. Each of the lovers must achieve some valid sense of self before the relationship can become healthy, and their struggle to do so is touching and funny. Gould’s central character suffers Dr. Foxx’s immaturity a bit longer than is wholly believable, but she remains convincing largely through the telling passages depicting the writer coming to terms with her real work. A Sea-Change (1976) is a commanding and powerful fable tracing Jessie Waterman’s transformation from photographer’s model and model wife into the founder of a new family living a vastly different life. As Jessie comes to understand social and sexual power as it is used against her, she also learns to use it herself. Couched in mythic terms, making vivid use of sexual and name imagery, the book depicts the emergence of the new Jessie from the eye of Hurricane Minerva. It is a stunning variation of the maturation novel. Jessie’s strength and determination also effect profound changes in her daughters, Robin and Diane, and in her friend and lover, Kate. In her novels since 1980, Gould’s style has continued to move toward the fanciful, a mix of reality and fantasy. As she turns to historical figures and mythical kingdoms, her language becomes rich and sensuous, her imagery deeper and more obscure. Mythology acted out for the love of the lower middle class

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was Jorge Luis Borges’ description of the power of Juan and Eva Perón over Argentina. Referencing this observation and reflecting the magic realism of contemporary Latin American fiction, in La Presidenta (1981) Gould follows the progress of an impoverished, beautiful girl detailing her power over the media, her life with the president, her hold over her country, her untimely death. Corruption, sex, abuse, intrigue, and violence play against a background of poverty and wealth, hope and despair. Gould’s rich use of language and imagination and of history that borders on fantasy and her vivid characterizations make it possible to put truth at a distance without judgement. We know we are not meant to take the story literally. Subject to Change (1988) is entirely myth; least like Gould’s other novels, it was accurately called by one critic an ‘‘adult fairytale.’’ A childish king, a childless queen, an aging mistress, a mystical dwarf, and a wandering sorcerer inhabit a medieval kingdom. The marks of a classical fairy tale are here: magical herbs, potions, secret gardens, labyrinths, foolish battles, stolen property, and a mysterious birth. The pope and a heretical cult play a mysterious role. The dwarf Morgantina—‘‘A tiny monster. A gargoyle’’—is sent to the queen as a gift: Morgantina is the queen’s toy and she is cruelly treated. Her limbs are severed by the queen in sport, and grow back. Morgantina also has the significant power and great cunning of a sorceress. Gould’s language and syntax add to the intrigue. Questions are asked and not answered. The ending, the last line tells us, is subject to change. Medusa’s Gift (1991) combines the styles of La Presidenta and Subject to Change. Fame, sex, power, history, and myth are again the means Gould uses to tell the story. Marilyn Monroe could, but might not be the lead character, Magdalen. Medusa, the coldly beautiful Gorgon, swims in the waters off an Aegean island; her poisonous sting can be fatal. The island is the reality where playboys, power brokers, has-beens, artists, and writers live and where Magdalen comes seeking privacy. Or is it Magdalen? Filmmakers and movie historians follow, pursuing the rumor and her legend or myth. Sex, mystery, and carefully placed hints are the tools she uses to keep them interested. Medusa, the myth, strikes and apparently destroys the vulnerable Magdalen. Gould again asks questions that have no answers, plays with syntax, illuminates and hides through lush language. Gould’s eighth novel No Brakes (1995) is set at a car rally in the dark countryside of Northern Ireland. The protagonist, an American woman named MaryJo, joins her son’s best friend, Ludo, as navigator for the event. She is fascinated by the charismatic Ludo. Unable to resist the chance to spend several days with him, she embarks on an adventure that slowly reveals itself to be fraught with more danger than simply that supplied by speed. One of the participants is Princess Victoria, a rebellious British royal who may be the target of terrorists, or who may herself be hatching a plot to terrorize the family she hates. It also appears Ludo may not only be part of the plot but may be carrying explosives in his car.

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Gould is the daughter of Jo Copeland, America’s first famous fashion designer. Sixteen years after her mother’s death, Gould wrote Mommy Dressing: A Love Story, After a Fashion (1998), a retrospective of her life as the daughter of the noted designer. Brought up in wealth and with the best of everything, Gould’s parents were divorced when she was three. Her mother had a difficult time with intimacy, which comes through loud and clear in this tale. Gould was often lonely, her parents never attending a school function or birthday party. She describes Mommy Dressing as an account ‘‘of my mother; of her mysterious, splendid life in fashion; of my own sad childhood at the dark fringes of that shining world.’’ It is done with ‘‘applaudable equanimity’’ in Gould’s stunning prose, and is an interesting, honest read, regardless of whether the reader is familiar with its characters. Gould is an able writer with a fine mastery of detail and dialogue; her observations are cogent and worthy of continuing close attention. OTHER WORKS: Sensible Childbirth (with W. L. Fielding, 1962). So You Want to Be a Working Mother! (1966). X: A Fabulous Child’s Story (1978). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1990). CANR (1990). MTCW (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). WW in Writers, Editors and Poets (1989). Other references: Book World (21 June 1970). Chicago Tribune Book World (19 September 1976). LJ (15 Feb. 1997). Ms. (Feb. 1978, July 1981). NYTBR (15 Oct. 1972, 14 Apr. 1974, 19 Sept. 1976, 26 Feb. 1978, 31 May 1981, 10 July 1988, 27 Oct. 1991). People (7 July 1997). PW (3 Feb. 1997). Time (4 July 1988). WPBW (24 May 1981, 17 July 1988). —JANE S. BAKERMAN, UPDATED BY JANET M. BEYER AND REBECCA C. CONDIT

GRAFTON, Sue Born 24 April 1940, Louisville, Kentucky Daughter of Cornelius W. and Vivian Harnsberger Grafton; married twice and divorced; Steven F. Humphrey; children: three Sue Grafton changed the face of fictional hardboiled private eyes with the introduction of Kinsey Milhone, a Southern California private investigator who is savvy, irreverent, and female. For this heroic adaptation of the previously male-centered genre, Grafton has been called a pioneer, and her book A Is for Alibi (1982) a ‘‘landmark novel.’’ Grafton grew up amidst detective stories in a book-filled household. Her mother, a high school chemistry teacher, was a voracious reader; and her father, an attorney, wrote one novel and three detective mysteries. Grafton has frequently acknowledged

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her father’s influence on her literary life, telling a 1995 People reporter she had ‘‘regrets’’ that she had never, as an adult, discussed writing techniques with him. She’s also been open about her parents’ alcoholism and her feeling that she coped with it by becoming self-reliant. Before Grafton turned to the detective genre, she wrote two published novels, Keziah Dane (1967) and The Lolly-Madonna War (1969). The first was reviewed as promising; the second was panned. It led, however, to a spot in Hollywood adapting The Lolly-Madonna War to a screenplay for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. From there, Grafton moved on to further screenplay writing. Over the next 12 years, she scripted episodes for a variety of television series, including the popular situation comedy Rhoda. Grafton never liked working in Hollywood, telling a 1998 Publishers Weekly interviewer she ‘‘hated the democratic process [of the industry’s writing collaborations] where everybody got a vote.’’ She especially hated the fact that nonwriters had clout over her scripts. Nevertheless, while in Hollywood, she accrued numerous screen credits, including Sex and the Single Parent (1979) and a television movie adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Caribbean Mystery (1983). In 1978 one of her teleplay cowriters, Steven F. Humphrey, became her third husband. She had married the first time while still an English major at the University of Louisville; from this marriage, she has one child. She married a second time in 1961, moved to California the next year, and has two children from that marriage. She wrote A Is for Alibi while working through the rage of a six-year child custody battle with her second husband. Routing her anger through the novel, she created a hero fashioned after herself, a twice-divorced, brunette Southern California woman. At the time, with little knowledge of the real world of a private eye, she built her alphabetical world, instead, around the character. ‘‘Being female was the one area where I felt I knew what I was talking about,’’ Grafton said in a 1990 Publishers Weekly interview, ‘‘and what I did in essence was to make myself my prime character.’’ At the end of A, Kinsey Milhone emerges from a garbage can and, at point-blank range, shoots the bad guy, who is modeled after Grafton’s second husband. Though Kinsey Milhone has aged only one year every two-and-a-half books, beginning at age 32 in 1982, the character has evolved. In fact, one of Grafton’s goals for her hero, she told the New York Times, was to ‘‘let her grow and change.’’ And she has, with new relationships and situations being informed by those in previous books. At the same time, her deepening expertise is fueled by Grafton’s aggressive research into guns, self-defense, and police procedure. Grafton has portrayed her belief that detective genre heros can be more than light entertainment. She told Publishers Weekly she sees the fictional private eye as ‘‘an observer. . .who comments on society and on family relationships and on the state of justice.’’ Indeed, as her hero moves through Santa Teresa, a town based on Santa Barbara, California, she sees the underside of society and does her utmost to clean it up—a hero’s efforts.


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Grafton has won numerous awards for her alphabetical series, including at least five Doubleday Mystery Guild awards (DMGA). The series includes A Is for Alibi (Mysterious Stranger award), B Is for Burglar (Shamus and Anthony awards, 1985), C Is for Corpse (1986), D Is for Deadbeat (1987), E Is for Evidence (DMGA, 1988), F Is for Fugitive (DMGA, Falcon award, 1989), G Is for Gumshoe (DMGA, Shamus and Anthony awards, 1990), H Is for Homicide (DMGA, American Mystery Award, 1991), I Is for Innocent (DMGA, 1992), J Is for Judgment (1993), K Is for Killer (Shamus award, 1994), L Is for Lawless (1995), M Is for Malice (1996), N Is for Noose (1998), and O Is for Outlaw (1999). Grafton’s detective books have financed a lifestyle she herself characterizes as simple but that includes a home near Santa Barbara on the California coast as well as one in Louisville, Kentucky. By 1998 Publishers Weekly was reporting close to 10 million copies of her books in print and translations into 26 languages. Her publisher, Holt, announced a one million-copy first printing for M Is for Malice, a first for the publisher as well as the author. One of the most common questions asked of Grafton is what will happen when she reaches ‘‘Z’’? That day is projected to come at about 2018; Kinsey Milhone will be 40; Grafton will be 78. Echoing the manner of her hero, Grafton answered the question on her web site in 1999: ‘‘Your guess is as good as mine on this one.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1997). CBY (1995). WW in America (1998). Other references: NYTBR (28 July 1991, 17 May 1998). People (30 Oct 1995). PW (13 Apr. 1990, 20 Apr. 1998). WSJ (18 May 1998). Web site: http://www.suegrafton.com. —JUDITH HARLAN

GRAHAM, Isabella Marshall Born 29 July 1742, Lanarkshire, Scotland; died 27 July 1814, New York, New York Daughter of John and Janet Hamilton Marshall; married John Graham, 1765 (died 1772); children: three daughters and a son

Antigua in 1772, leaving Graham with three daughters under five years and a son who was born shortly after his father’s death. Returning to Scotland, Graham taught and successfully administered a large boarding school in Edinburgh. It was upon the recommendation of Dr. Witherspoon that Graham moved to New York City and in 1789 established a school for young women. Other institutions in New York for which she was instrumental in founding and supporting were the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children (1797), the Orphan Asylum Society (1806), the Magdalen Society (for the mentally ill, 1811), the Society for the Promotion of Industry Among the Poor (1814), and the Sunday School for Adults (1814). Graham’s works do not have a consciously literary purpose; they chronicle the events of her life in the context of revolutionary America. The Power of Faith (1817), edited by Graham’s daughter, Joanna Graham Bethune, includes correspondence, meditations, journal entries, and a small number of religious poems. The volume went through four editions; the final one contains the narrative which Graham composed on her husband’s death. Her daughter also edited a second volume, The Unpublished Letters and Correspondence of Mrs. Isabella Graham (1838). All of Graham’s works appear to serve the purpose of furthering her own understanding of her faith in the practical and pressing concerns of her life. Graham’s approach to humanity and to God is clear; she sees her service to God primarily as service to others. In both devotional materials and correspondence there are signs of her familiarity with the Scriptures. Fragments of Psalms, Proverbs, Letters, and Gospels are intermingled consistently, creating a kind of biblical stream of consciousness. Graham’s correspondence with her husband between 1767 and 1772 constitutes an important body of the collected letters. Here Graham deals with a strong sense of dependence on her husband. She appears to live in the shadow that John would die, at which time she felt her life would be ‘‘insupportable.’’ The correspondence after 1772 is Graham’s record of the slow process of accepting death and resolving to make the remainder of her own life worthwhile. Another large segment of correspondence concerns Graham’s activity in initiating her work for the poor and oppressed in New York. The rationale, plans, and organization of a variety of institutions are submitted to local public officials to enlist the needed funds and support.

During Isabella Marshall Graham’s early years her intense interest in religion brought her to study under John Witherspoon, pastor of the Presbyterian congregation of Paisley, Scotland, and later president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton). By age seventeen, Graham had arrived at firm religious convictions and was admitted to the Lord’s Supper, which she considered to be a full commitment to her church and those it served.

One of Graham’s most engaging pieces is a meditation entitled ‘‘My Last Journey through the Wilderness.’’ After summarizing the journeys of the Israelites and of the early Christian community, she sees herself as part of this history in her present struggle. This theme of the journey is also present in her poetry, which is strongly reminiscent of 19th-century hymns. The language, style, and imagery in Graham’s writings are similar to those of the preachers and religious personalities of her period, but her work provides a unique view into one woman’s faith and experience.

Two years after her marriage to a physician, a move was made to Canada due to her husband’s appointment as surgeon of the Royal American Regiment. John Graham died on a mission in

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Belden, E. P., New York: Past, Present, and Future (1849). Bethune, J. G., The Life of Mrs. Isabella Graham

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(1839). Lamb, M. J., History of the City of New York, Vol. 2 (1881). Mason, J. M., Christian Mourning: A Sermon Occasioned by the Death of Mrs. Isabella Graham (1814). Scott, A. F. Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History (1991). Reference works: NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: New York Evening Post (27 July 1814). —VIRGINIA KAIB RATIGAN

GRAHAM, Jorie Born 9 May 1950, New York, New York Daughter of and Curtis Bill and Beverly Stroll Pepper; married James Galvin, 1983; children: Emily Jorie Graham grew up in Europe; she attended the Sorbonne, New York University (B.F.A. 1973), Columbia, and the University of Iowa (M.F.A. 1978). She has taught at Murray State, Humboldt State, and Columbia universities; since 1983 she has been on the faculty of the Writer’s Workshop, at the University of Iowa. Her first book, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980), won the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award, and her work has generally been well received; John Ashbery describes her as ‘‘one of the finest poets writing today.’’ Graham’s work has been compared to that of Laura Jensen, Wallace Stevens, and Rainer Maria Rilke, and her poems have won prizes from the Academy of American Poets, Poetry Northwest, the American Poetry Review, and the Pushcart Press. She has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, from the Guggenheim, Whiting, Ingram Merrill, and MacArthur Foundations, and a fellowship from the Bunting Institute, Radcliffe College (1982). Graham’s poems have been frequently anthologized and appeared in such journals as the Iowa Review, the Nation, New Yorker, Paris Review, and Ploughshares. Graham’s study of philosophy and her love of art are central to her poetry, which is both imagistic and abstract, rejecting the confessional for the metaphysical and rhyme and meter for variable length lines whose enjambment stresses and fractures syntax but creates the shapes of stanzas. Her subjects range from quotidian experiences (sewing, drawing, gardening, looking in a mirror) to investigations of historical violence and complicity, from explorations of identity through mythical figures to meditations about saints, artists, and philosophers. But her true focus is always the ‘‘spiritual questing’’ of writing itself, which gives her poetry the ascetic passion of the visionary or mystic. Images fragment into ideas; specific details and words are transcended in visions of light, of infinity, of what cannot be said. Consequently, these insights must be felt or intuited—her language is simultaneously flattened and allusive or, like T. S. Eliot’s, interwoven with others’ words. In The End of Beauty (1987) she incorporates ‘‘_____s,’’ underlined spaces that may be blanks the reader is to fill in, or

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signs for an inability to speak, an ‘‘accurate failure’’ (‘‘Some Notes on Silence’’), or for what escapes language—consciousness, the world. Each __ may also be read as a ‘‘line,’’ in much the same way that her algebraic variables may be puns (y on ‘‘why’’ and x as ‘‘ex-’’ or ‘‘cross ’’), though they also function as markers (and disruptions) of the schematic nature of narrative. These signs, like the dashes and ellipses that permeate and end some of her poems, also function as an acknowledgment of silence, into and against which the poet speaks. Graham defines silence as existing in consciousness and the world, as ‘‘doubt, madness, fear,’’ or ‘‘awe or astonishment,’’ and as all ‘‘forms of death and mystery.’’ This idea is suggested by the poems’ synaesthetic figures, where sound (including the poetic line) is a fabric, tapestry, scrim, or shroud that she weaves and sees woven (by Penelope, for example) and, more importantly, sees cut, torn, or unraveled to reveal the silence all around it. Because Graham perceives the most important task of poetry as enacting a struggle with silence, her imagery of gaps, rents, wounds, and openings is invested with sacred language and an oracular tone. Silence is her Kali, her Great Mother, giving birth to and destroying the line (‘‘Imperialism,’’ The End of Beauty), her home’s inaudible ‘‘voiceover keeping on (come in, in)’’ to a pair of juncoes who may die trying to escape, ‘‘aiming for the brightest spot, the only clue,’’ a sunlit window or white space (‘‘The Phase After History,’’ Region of Unlikeness). In Materialism: Poems (1994) Graham brings together disparate topics into a unified, albeit difficult, whole. The work incorporates texts by other writers, including Emerson, Wittgenstein, and Dante, as well as social imagery and themes ranging from Tiananmen Square to a gun-toting New York subway passenger. All of this ‘‘allows the reader to encounter a thinking poet’s thought,’’ according to Commonweal’s Suzanne Keen. In 1995 Graham’s work was discussed in two books (In the Given and the Made and The Breaking of Style) by Harvard professor Helen Vendler, who particularly appreciates Graham’s rhythms. That same year Graham published her Pulitzer Prizewinning Dream of the Unified Field, Selected Poems 1974-1994, an anthology featuring 10 poems from each of her previous five books. The following year, 1996, Graham edited a collection called Earth Took of Earth: 100 Great Poems of the English Language. Many critics consider The Errancy: Poems (1997) Graham’s most rewarding and challenging work. Concerned with the relationship of the subjective and the objective, it has been called intellectually and emotionally deep, as well as beautiful. Graham’s work has historically attracted mixed reviews, with each critic coming up with his or her own unique interpretation of the poetry. The Economist said of Dream of the Unified Field, ‘‘It is self-consciously obscurantist; written in ‘open form,’ it lacks any sense of containment that some adherence to metrical rules gives; and its subject matter is so nebulous and shifting, so to do with the inner logic of the poet’s own deeply complicated and oppressively serious life, that it scarcely ever emerges into the clear daylight of discourse of any kind.’’


The opposite view is taken by James Longenbach in the Nation. Of The Errancy he wrote, ‘‘Jorie Graham stands among a small group of poets (Dickinson, Hopkins, Moore) whose styles are so personal that the poems seem to have no author at all: they exist as self-made things. Each of her books has interrogated the one preceding it, and The Errancy feels like a culmination. It is her most challenging, most rewarding book. Graham has not simply forged a style; she is exploring the very notion of what it means for a poet to have a style—an exterior mark of an interior vision.’’ OTHER WORKS: Erosion (1983). ‘‘Some Notes on Silence’’ New American Poets of the Golden Gate (ed. by Philip Dow, 1984). ‘‘Pleasure,’’ Singular Voices: American Poetry Today (ed. by Stephen Berg, 1985). The Best American Poetry, 1990 (editor with David Lehman, 1990). Region of Unlikeness (1991). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA 111 (1984). CANR 63 (1998). CBY (1997). CLC 48 (1988). Contemporary Poets (1985). FC (1990). Other references: APR (Jan.-Feb. 1982, Nov.-Dec. 1983). American Imago (Winter 1995). Black Warrior Rev. (Spring 1989). Boston Review (Aug. 1983). Commentary (Jan. 1992). Commonweal (2 Dec. 1994). Economist (13 July 1996). Georgia Review (Winter 1983). Hollins Critic (Oct. 1987). Literary Review (Spring 1988). Nation (5 Sept. 1987, 21 July 1997). NR (27 Jan. 1992, 11 July 1994). New Yorker (27 July 1987). NYRB (21 Nov. 1991). NYTBR (17 July 1983, 26 July 1987, 31 July 1994, 5 May 1996). Parnassus (Spring/Summer 1983). People (5 May 1997). Poetry (April 1982, July 1998). Southwest Review (Summer 1982). —DANA SONNENSCHEIN, UPDATED BY KAREN RAUGUST

GRAHAM, Katharine Born 16 June 1917, New York, New York Daughter of Eugene and Agnes Ernst Meyer; married Philip L. Graham, 1940 (died 1963); children: Elizabeth, Donald, William, Stephen As a reporter for the San Francisco News, Katharine Graham’s first serious assignment was to lure delegates attending the convention of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union to a bar with the simple proposition that they visit the scene of the crimes they railed against. They agreed and she got her story. Years later, as publisher of the Washington Post, she was instrumental in enabling other reporters to get the story of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. Graham’s father, Eugene Meyer, came from a distinguished Jewish family with roots going back many generations in Alsace-Lorraine, France, while her mother, Agnes Ernst Meyer,

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came from a long line of Lutheran ministers. From each parent Graham received a passion for learning, ideas, strength, and leadership. Her father was a millionaire investor and her mother an intellectual and writer. Graham received an elite education. She attended Madeira, a private high school for girls in Virginia, outside Washington, D.C., where her family resided. She went on to Vassar College and received her undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago in 1938. Rather than starting right away at the Washington Post, which her father bought in 1933 for $825,000, Graham worked in San Francisco for a year. In 1939 she returned to Washington and began her tenure with the Post as an editorial-page employee. As the most junior member of the editorial team, Graham’s assignments were on the least important issues of the day—so-called light editorials. The titles themselves revealed just how light: ‘‘On Being a Horse,’’ ‘‘Brains and Beauty,’’ ‘‘Mixed Drinks,’’ and ‘‘Spotted Fever.’’ But work at the Post brought her into contact with experienced reporters. Through these developing friendships, Graham became involved in an increasingly lively social life with women and men whose life experience and backgrounds were quite different from her own. A pivotal introduction was to Philip Graham, who was then a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Stanley Reed while waiting to clerk for Felix Frankfurter the following year. Phil Graham had been editor of the Harvard Law Review and was seen as brilliant, charismatic, and fascinating by this extended circle of determined young people. After a brief and intense courtship, Katharine and Phil married on 5 June 1940. From the start, Phil Graham was apprehensive about his father-in-law’s enormous wealth. He was determined that he and his new wife would live on his salary. Eugene Meyer was eager to have his bright and capable son-in-law employed at the Post and finally convinced him to come on board as associate publisher in 1946. After a few months, Meyer promoted him to publisher. In 1948 Meyer sold the paper to Katharine and Phil for a token sum. But believing a man should not be his wife’s employee, Meyer gave Phil Graham three times the amount of Post stock held by Katharine. The newly formed Washington Post Company, with Philip as its president, began to enlarge in circulation and influence. Katharine’s role during these years was behind the scenes and clearly subservient to Phil’s leadership and direction. Her life changed dramatically when Phil began suffering from mental illness and committed suicide in August of 1963. Fresh from this tragedy, Graham became president of the Post’s parent company. She felt unprepared for the challenge. ‘‘It’s hard to describe how abysmally ignorant I was,’’ she related in her memoir Personal History (1997). ‘‘I was also uneducated in even the basics of the working world.’’ Nevertheless, she was knowledgeable enough to surround herself with a capable staff. She built the Post into a competitor of the New York Times. She named Benjamin C. Bradlee as managing editor in 1965, and he was instrumental in luring talented journalists away from other papers. As publisher and chairperson of the board during these years, Graham was instrumental in guiding the decisions that determined

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the role the Post assumed. Two years after she became the paper’s publisher; the Post became involved in the fight to publish the Pentagon Papers. The New York Times had been ordered by the U.S. government to refrain from publishing any more of the documents. Despite the risk of a restraining order on themselves as well as a violation of the injunction that had restricted the Times, Graham and the Post decided to publish the papers. Graham later pointed out: ‘‘The decision had to be made quickly. There had never before been prior restraint of the press. Weighing all factors, it seemed like the right thing to do. And I still feel the same.’’ The Post did go to court for its action, but the Supreme Court eventually ruled in favor of the two newspapers and their right to publish. Graham and the Post regained national attention with coverage of the Watergate scandal. Two Post reporters, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, were the foremost investigators of the crimes of the Nixon administration. Despite threats from the White House and warnings and criticism from her friend Henry Kissinger, Graham supported the reporters throughout. In 1973 the Post received a Pulitzer Prize for public service in uncovering the Watergate conspiracy. Graham turned her journalistic skills to her own life in her autobiography Personal History. In a volume described as ‘‘disarmingly candid and immensely readable,’’ she chronicles her personal transformation. She also provides an invaluable inside glimpse of some of the most critical turning points in American journalism. Graham describes her personal and professional growth with charm, intelligence, and grace, much the same way she lived her life. Personal History received a Pulitzer Prize for biography in 1998. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Davis, D., Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and the Washington Post (1979). Felsenthal, C., Power, Privilege, and the Post: The Katharine Graham Story (1993). Reference works: CA (1982, 1999). Larousse Dictionary of Women (1996). Who’s Who in America (1999). Who’s Who in the East (1997-1998). Other references: Time (1997). —CELESTE DEROCHE

GRAHAM, Shirley Born 11 November 1907, Evansville, Indiana; died 27 March 1977, Peking, China Also wrote under: Shirley Graham DuBois Daughter of David A. and Lizzie Bell Graham; married Shadrach T. McCanns, 1921 (died); W. E. B. DuBois, 1951 Shirley Graham, a lifelong advocate of human rights, was born on the farm of her great-grandfather, a freed slave and blacksmith who used his home as an Underground Railroad

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station for runaway slaves. Graham and her four brothers grew up in a variety of cities—New Orleans, Colorado Springs, and Spokane—in which their father, an African Episcopal minister, received pastoral assignments. Graham married a year after completing high school, but within three years she became a widow with two sons to support. Graham studied music theory and composition at the Sorbonne. While there, she also learned about African music from West African students studying in France. In 1931, Graham matriculated at Oberlin College, where she received both the B.A. and M.A. degrees. Her years there marked the beginning of her career as a dramatist and composer. Graham’s one-act play, Coal Dust, and her three-act comedy, Elijah’s Ravens, were performed during this period; both had been written in 1930. A musical drama, TomTom (1932), was based upon Graham’s knowledge of African rhythms; it was later revised into an opera for which Graham wrote the libretto and music. Appointed head of fine arts and drama at Nashville’s Tennessee State College in 1935, Graham continued to write plays and compose music. Between 1935 and 1938, she was affiliated with the Chicago Federal Theater as supervisor of the ‘‘Negro Unit.’’ Her major works during this period were Little Black Sambo (1937), a children’s drama for which she wrote music, and The Swing Mikado (1938), a jazz adaptation of the Gilbert and Sullivan opera and her most successful musical composition. Awarded a Julius Rosenwald fellowship in 1938, Graham studied at the Yale School of Drama, where two of her plays were presented: It’s Morning (1940), the tragedy of a slave mother who kills her daughter rather than have her sold away, and Dust to Earth (1941), a three-act drama about the futile efforts of a coal miner to rescue his son from a mining accident. Although she was a successful dramatist, Graham’s major literary contribution was made in the field of biography. Her decision to research and record the lives of significant black people was influenced indirectly by her cultural and political activities with the NAACP, which appointed her a national field secretary in 1942, and directly by the death of her son Robert, who because of his race, was mistreated in an army camp and denied proper hospital care. Graham’s biographies combine history and fiction in celebrating black life during a period of general neglect. They are primarily popular books recognizing the contributions made by blacks to American culture and preserve the history of black achievement for the world. Because Graham’s biographies delineate heroic qualities for emulation and seem especially suited for young adults, they have become categorized as ‘‘juvenile’’ literature and have not received the critical attention they deserve. Graham’s fictional biographies are lyrical, rather than analytical, in technique. They derive their power from her control over form and dramatic structure. Graham has explained her method in these works as that of a storyteller constructing a


narrative ‘‘within the framework of little known true facts,’’ by documenting dates and main events, but also by creating probable incidents in order to ‘‘illustrate character, reveal trends, or bring actual facts into juxtaposition so as to emphasize them.’’ Unfortunately, her achievement has been obscured by a wider familiarity with black history among contemporary readers, and her effort has been overshadowed by more scholarly works. Graham wrote 12 biographies. Among the most successful is Paul Robeson, Citizen of the World (1946), which traces the life of the famous singer from his boyhood through his forty-sixth birthday. Graham uses the musical patterns of a classical concerto and modern blues to orchestrate the details of Robeson’s life. In There Was Once a Slave: The Historic Story of Frederick Douglass (1947), Graham relies on an association between the North Star and liberty as the controlling metaphor for her poignant narrative. Your Most Humble Servant (1949), the first book-length treatment of Benjamin Banneker, a late 18th-century astronomer, mathematician, and surveyor, is Graham’s major work on a historical figure. Graham married the famous Harvard-trained social scientist, Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, four days after his eighty-third birthday and on the eve of his indictment as an ‘‘agent of a foreign principle.’’ Their marriage culminated a 30-year friendship during which Graham was guided by DuBois’ emphasis on ‘‘Beauty, Accomplishment, and Dignity’’ as the criteria of Black art. Throughout the years of her marriage, Graham devoted much of her attention to political work against oppression and to cultural activities for peace. She was also her husband’s companion-helpmate on his final project, a massive Encyclopedia Africana, yet she did not live in his shadow; she helped to found Freedomways, a magazine on the African-American freedom movement, and was selected its first editor. Her last three books, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Son of the Nile (1972), Zulu Heart (1974), and Julius K. Nyerere: Teacher of Africa (1975), reflect Graham’s international perspective after a decade of living on the African continent. His Day Is Marching On: A Memoir of W. E. B. DuBois (1971) is essentially Graham’s own biography. In it, she emerges as the exemplar of the values and virtues defining the heroic men and women of her biographies. The book is notable for its quiet celebration of love, loyalty, conviction, and courage. Sensitive and vivid in language, Graham’s memoir documents a personal experience and outlines a cultural history. In her final years, Graham was acclaimed for her contributions as writer, scholar, teacher, and activist to black and thirdworld cultures. Her life and her art stand as testimony to the vitality of DuBois’ ideals of ‘‘Beauty, Accomplishment, and Dignity.’’

OTHER WORKS: I Gotta Home (1939). Track Thirteen (1942). Dr. George Washington Carver, Scientist (with G. D. Lipscomb, 1944). The Story of Phillis Wheatley (1949). Jean Baptiste Pointe de Sable, Founder of Chicago (1953). The Story of Pocahontas

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(1953). Booker T. Washington: Educator of Hand, Head, and Heart (1955). The papers of Shirley Graham are housed in the W. E. B. DuBois Manuscript Collection at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, as well as at the Washington Conservatory of Music Collection at Howard University in Washington D.C.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bedini, S. A., The Life of Benjamin Banneker (1972). Hamalian, L. and J.V. Hatch, eds., The Roots of African American Drama (1991). Miller, E., ed., The Negro in America (1970). Perkins, K. A., Black Female Playwrights: An Anthology of Plays Before 1950 (1989). Reference works: Afro-American Encyclopedia (1974). Black American Writers: Bibliographical Essays (1977). Black Playwrights, 1823-1977: An Annotated Bibliography of Plays (1977). CB (Oct. 1946). DLB:AAW (1988). Negro Almanac (1976). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Crisis (Aug. 1932). NYT (5 June 1973, 5 April 1977). —THADIOUS M. DAVIS

GRAHN, Judy Born 28 July 1940, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of Elmer August and Vera Davis Grahn For over three decades, Judy Grahn has helped forge a new tradition of lesbian feminist literature in the United States. Adrienne Rich wrote in her introduction to Grahn’s The Work of a Common Woman (1978) that ‘‘more than any other poet today,’’ Grahn has accepted the challenge ‘‘to ask questions that never occurred to a Donne or a Yeats, or even to an Elizabeth Barrett Browning. . .questions about taboo, integrity, the fetishization of the female body, the world-wide historical violence committed against women by men, what it means to be ‘true to one another’ when we are women, what it means to love women when that love is denied reality, treated as perversion, or, even more insidiously ‘accepted’ as a mirror-image or parallel to heterosexual romance.’’ After being discharged from the army in 1961 for lesbianism, Grahn began her career as a poet, writing openly and proudly about lesbian themes. In 1965 she wrote Edward the Dyke, a satire about a lesbian and the psychoanalyst who diagnoses her as deviant. Since no publisher would print the work, Grahn was inspired to cofound the Women’s Press Collective in Oakland, California, in 1969, which eventually published Edward in 1971. Grahn has said she thinks of her work ‘‘as one long thought that has many facets and methods for developing itself.’’ Indeed, her writing has taken a wide variety of forms: poetry, prose, audio

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recordings, plays, and nonfiction. Her earliest published work, The Common Woman Poems (1969), consisted of seven poems describing ‘‘regular, everyday women without making us look either superhuman or pathetic.’’ In A Woman is Talking to Death (1974), for which she was awarded the 1979 American Poetry Review Poem of the Year award, Grahn reflects on witnessing a fatal motorcycle accident and on the issues of racial, gender, and class injustice it evokes. Grahn’s work as a writer and publisher had a profound effect on the nascent women’s movement. With the publication of The Common Woman Poems and Edward the Dyke, her name quickly spread among women’s rights activists. Her words were memorized, set to music, and reprinted on posters, pamphlets, and t-shirts. She, along with other pioneering writers such as Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde, paved the way for the genre of contemporary lesbian-feminist literature. With The Queen of Wands, winner of a 1982 American Book award, Grahn began an ambitious four-part cycle of poems inspired by the four queens of the tarot deck. Based upon the mythic ‘‘story of a queen who has been stolen. . .a lamentation for a female power gone,’’ the Queen of Wands is represented in figures from Helen of Troy to Marilyn Monroe. The second book of the series, a poetic play entitled The Queen of Swords, appeared in 1987. Grahn continued to expand the scope and form of her work, embarking on her vocation as a ‘‘renegade scholar of gay life’’ with Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds (1984), a nonfiction genealogy of the history of gay culture. With The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition (1985), which traces the connections between Sappho and modern lesbian poets, Grahn ventured into literary theory and criticism. In a similar vein, Really Reading Gertrude Stein: A Selected Anthology (1989), pairs writings by Stein with Grahn’s commentary. Blood, Bread, and Roses (1993), her most recent book of nonfiction, presents a provocative feminist reinterpretation of the development of culture and history, placing menstruation at its center. Drawing from mythology and anthropology, Grahn argues that the practices that evolved from menstruation rituals gave birth to mathematics, astronomy, cosmetics, and even cooking utensils. In addition to writing, Grahn has been involved as a political activist (in the early 1960s she was a member of the Mattachine Society and later in the decade helped to organize the West Coast Lesbian Feminist Movement); instructor of writing, women’s literature, and gay and lesbian studies; and editor of several literary anthologies, as well as on the board of the Lesbian Review of Books.

OTHER WORKS: She Who: A Graphic Book of Poems with Fifty-Four Images of Women (1972). Elephant Poem Coloring Book (1972). True to Life Adventure Stories, Vol. I (contributor and editor, 1978). True to Life Adventure Stories, Vol. II (contributor and editor, 1980). Spider Webster’s Declaration: He is

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Singing the End of the World Again (1983). Descent to the Roses of the Family (1986). Mundane’s World (1988). Butch/femme (contributor, M. G. Soares, ed., 1995).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Case, S., ‘‘Judy Grahn’s Gynopoetics: The Queen of Swords,’’ in Studies in the Literary Imagination (Fall 1988). Donnelly, N., ‘‘A Conversation with Judy Grahn,’’ in Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review (Spring 1995). Grimstad, K., and S. Rennie, eds., The New Woman’s Survival Sourcebook (1975). Yalom, M., ed., Women Writers of the West Coast: Speaking of Their Lives and Careers (1983). Reference works: CA (1986, 1988). Gay and Lesbian Literature (1994). The Gay 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Gay Men and Lesbians, Past and Present (1995). Other references: LJ (1 Nov. 1993). Ms. (May 1975). PW (18 Oct. 1993). —LAURA BRAHM

GRANT, Margaret See FRANKEN, Rose

GRAU, Shirley Ann Born 8 July 1929, New Orleans, Louisiana Daughter of Adolph E. and Katherine Onions Grau; married James K. Feibleman, 1955; children: Ian, Nora, William, Katherine Daughter of a dentist, Shirley Ann Grau describes her family as ‘‘ordinary middle class. White. Protestant.’’ She also admits, however, family members were well enough set financially that they could choose not to work. Her mother was in her middle forties when Grau was born, yet she had another daughter even later. Grau attended the Booth Academy in Montgomery, Alabama, until she transferred to the Ursuline Academy in New Orleans as a senior. She attended Sophie Newcomb, the ‘‘girl’s wing’’ of the all-male Tulane University, where she took many of her classes and met her future husband, a philosophy professor 26 years her senior. They were married in New York City, where Grau had moved to pursue her writing career, and lived in New Orleans with their four children. Grau’s first collection of short stories, The Black Prince (1955), won immediate acclaim and was compared in its importance to J. D. Salinger’s Nine Stories and to Eudora Welty’s A Curtain of Green. These stories reveal concerns and characters that would dominate her later fiction. The first of these are her


primitives, living—like young Joshua in the story of that name— in tune with nature, sharing its creative violence and heroically, if hopelessly, defying its destructive forces. These primitives burst forth in her first novel, The Hard Blue Sky (1958), a flawed work but with moments of great power. The Louisiana island fishermen of the novel take on mythic proportions, similar to the Aran Islanders in Synge’s plays, owing to Grau’s simple and realistic dialogue, her vivid recreation of their daily struggles with nature, and her concentration on their awareness rather than on their innocence. Synge’s characters are aware of the human condition and accept it; Grau’s primitives are aware of it and rebel, even when the only rebellion possible is symbolic: Cecile throwing a half-brick at that ‘‘hard blue sky.’’ The early short stories also introduce Grau’s concern with the city-bred Southerners, individuals locked away from nature within the artificiality of society, unaware that nature in all its violence is within as well as outside. Two of the short stories particularly focus on women trapped between the stereotypes of the past and the confusion of the present. The anachronism of the Southern lady appears twice, in mother and daughter, in ‘‘The Girl with the Flaxen Hair.’’ The excessive fragility and eventual destruction of the daughter, Rose, reflect the inadequacies of the stereotype, at least today. Contrasted to this are the modern mother and daughter in ‘‘Fever Flower,’’ but society still has little to offer its daughters. The pleasure-loving mother is described as a ‘‘superb animal. But she was not quite human. She did not need anyone.’’ Rose Ramond may have been a dying blossom, but Maureen Fleming, the ‘‘fever flower,’’ the blossoming of her parents’ sickness, scarcely improves the garden. The modern woman steps forth again in Grau’s next novel. Trapped in The House on Coliseum Street (1961) is Joan Caillet, who floats into an abortion only to be tossed and torn by its psychological aftermath. The emptiness within reflects the emptiness outside, and Joan’s growing awareness of this emptiness, this lack of values within the surviving shell of Southern society— perhaps of American society as a whole—leads her to destructive violence. Grau seems to argue that unless individuals live in tune with nature, as do her primitives, their violence will destroy rather than recreate the world. A similar violence is produced by Abigail Tolliver’s discovery of hypocrisy in The Keepers of the House (1964). This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel combines Grau’s primitives with her Southern lady and blacks with whites, as she traces the heritage of a family that rises above the prejudices of the stereotypes to assert the integrity of the individual. Abigail has been taught the role of the Southern lady, but her grandfather, William Howland, has given her an even more important legacy. The evidence of his love for his black housekeeper, Margaret, a hardy primitive reminiscent of the folk-heroine Alberta in ‘‘The Black Prince,’’ destroys Abigail’s illusions of safety, thus exposing her to the violence of life itself. But William has also provided in his actions an example of humanity that keeps Abigail from being destroyed by her own rebellious violence, which enables her to be born again into a new awareness of life.

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Grau’s next set of novels, The Condor Passes (1971) and Evidence of Love (1977), as well as many of the stories from her first collection The Wind Shifting West (1973), continue her interest in family and social heritage, but they concentrate more than ever on character studies. Each novel opens with an old man and ends with his death, in between examining the people and experiences of his life. Each also explores the interactions of love and money. The economic security of the central characters allows Grau to touch only lightly on the social context except in flashbacks; the characters struggle instead with the complexity of human relationships and of personal identity. The 1980s brought another collection of stories called Nine Women (1985). Grau departed somewhat from her concentration on the South to describe the lives of nine very different characters. One critic noted that almost every woman is on the verge of great change and is looking back on the memories of her life. Some reviewers expressed disappointment with the women’s fatalistic and hopeless attitudes, while others contended that they were simply overcome by fate. In either case, the compilation was not as well received as Grau’s previous work. It would be almost 10 years before Grau’s next publication, this time the novel Roadwalkers (1994). The novel tells the story of Baby, a young orphaned black girl living in the South in 1934. Baby grows up in an orphanage but escapes poverty as a young adult by becoming a fashion designer. The prose then veers to the tale of Nanda, Baby’s daughter, as an adult. The sudden shift in narration puzzled many, as did the emotional distance employed by Grau. Most, however, continue to admire Grau’s control and mastery of language, and her narrative abilities are frequently praised. Grau’s most recent writing was as a contributor to Clarence John Laughlin’s pictorial account of New Orleans, published as Haunter of Ruins (1997). She has also contributed to journals and magazines including Atlantic, New Yorker, Redbook, Mademoiselle, and Reporter. Grau displays throughout each novel her consummate skill at manipulating point of view, and her unique ability to empathize with each character. Above all, she is a superb storyteller, creating her Louisiana world in rich detail and letting her characters live, speak, and argue for themselves. She has been criticized for her traditional style, but her symbolic realism, with its roots in the Louisiana bayous of Kate Chopin, still rises far above imitation. Her originality is evident in her consistent philosophy of nature and in her uniquely female imagery, from the caverns of emptiness which haunt Joan in The House on Coliseum Street to the vivid description of his own birth offered by Edward Milton Henley as the first scene of Evidence of Love. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Gossett, L. Y., Violence in Recent Southern Fiction (1965). Reference works: CA (1967). CA Online (1999). CB (1959). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Crit. (1963, 1975). Insula: Revista Bibliografica de Ciencias y Letras (Madrid) (1966). KR (15 May

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1994). NR (18 Apr. 1964, 24 Nov. 1973). NYRB (2 Dec. 1971). NYTBR (22 Mar. 1964). SR (1962, 21 Mar. 1964). —THELMA J. SHINN, UPDATED BY CARRIE SNYDER

GRAVES, Valerie See BRADLEY, Marion Zimmer

GRAY, Angela See DANIELS, Dorothy

Mr. Leavenworth is found murdered in his locked study. The suspects include his servants, employees, and two nieces. The sleuth is Ebenezer Gryce—a kind, rheumatic man and Green’s most frequently used detective. The Leavenworth Case was very popular; the Pennsylvania Legislature even debated its authorship, consensus being that ‘‘the story was manifestly beyond a woman’s powers.’’ Miss Hurd: An Enigma (1894) is a powerful mysterymelodrama in which the woman is the mystery to be solved. Vashti Hurd had wanted a ‘‘broad, free life.’’ Instead, she was forced to marry the rich Mr. Murdoch. The murder puzzle that eventually develops is a subplot to the greater problem of Vashti’s hatred for her husband and her need for freedom. Contemporary male critics found Miss Hurd an unsympathetic character. But feminist readers will find Vashti both sympathetic and heroic. Despite its rather sensational plot elements, the novel transcends its identity as a mystery novel and becomes a women’s novel.

Born 11 November 1846, Brooklyn, New York; died 11 April 1935, Buffalo, New York Daughter of James W. and Catherine Whitney Green; married Charles Rohlfs, 1884; children: three

That Affair Next Door (1897) introduces Green’s prototype spinster sleuth, Miss Amelia Butterworth. A sharp, independent woman, Miss Butterworth works both with and against the police, as personified by the now-elderly Mr. Gryce. Amelia’s own, rather satirical, narration makes the book a delight. It is also one of Green’s most challenging mysteries. Miss Butterworth would make two more appearances: a starring role in Lost Man’s Lane (1898) and a cameo appearance in The Circular Study (1900).

Anna Katharine Green was the youngest child of a lawyer father and a mother who died when Green was three. She received a B.A. from the Ripley Female Seminary in Poultney, Vermont, and began publishing poetry in Scribner’s, Lippincott’s, and other journals.

The Golden Slipper, and Other Problems for Violet Strange (1915) is a short story collection featuring a professional woman detective. Violet Strange is worthy of respect both as an investigator specializing in women’s ‘‘problems’’ and for her motivation in becoming an investigator—to support a dearly loved but disinherited older sister.

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Although not the first American detective novel, The Leavenworth Case (1878) has been our most famous early mystery. Because of the decided success of The Leavenworth Case, Green gradually turned away from poetry writing. Only two of her 40 books are not mysteries: a volume of verse, The Defense of the Bride, and Other Poems (1882), and a verse drama, Risifi’s Daughter (1887). In 1884 Green married a tragedian turned furniture designer. They made their home in Buffalo, New York. Over the next eight years, Green produced three children and eight books. The last two decades of the century were her most fertile writing years. She produced 22 published volumes between 1880 and 1900 for an ever-widening audience. Green’s popularity grew with each new published thriller. She soon became the grande dame of the American mystery novel; her global fame made her an effective lobbyist for international copyright. The Leavenworth Case was, for many years, considered both the first American detective novel and the first detective novel by a woman, although it is neither. It is, however, a well-plotted, vastly entertaining murder puzzle of a type now classic. The rich

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Green brought detective fiction to a more ‘‘cultured’’ reading public. She frankly and proudly wrote for a popular audience, but her books were published in hardbound editions by respected houses. No longer was the American mystery relegated to dimenovel status; prime ministers, presidents, and honored writers were avowed fans. Green’s long and prolific career spanned from the infancy of the genre to its golden age. But changing tastes within this fast-growing fiction formula dealt harshly with Green at the end of her career. Soon her poetic touches, her fondness for melodrama, her Victorian verbiage were judged worthless by the jaundiced eye of the interwar reading public. The genre became rigidly formularized, lean, and cynical. By the 1940s, Green’s work was forgotten, or remembered only to ridicule. Green is worthy of reexamination, both as a female forerunner in a largely male genre and as a writer with a real respect for women. Her female characters are strong, brave, and resolute against evil and largely male violence. There is a recurrent theme of sisterhood in her works among women who pool their energies for survival. Green gave us some of the first female sleuths, both


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amateur and professional. Unlike many 20th-century mystery writers who think of women only as victims or secondary characters, Green portrayed women as characters of primary importance who refused to be victimized.

OTHER WORKS: A Strange Disappearance (1880). The Sword of Damocles (1881). Hand and Ring (1883). X Y Z: A Detective Story (1883). The Mill Mystery (1886). 7 to 12: A Detective Story (1887). Behind Closed Doors (1888). The Forsaken Inn (1890). A Matter of Millions (1890). The Old Stone House (1891). Cynthia Wakeham’s Money (1892). Marked ‘Personal’ (1893). The Doctor, His Wife, and the Clock (1895). Dr. Izard (1895). Agatha Webb (1899). A Difficult Problem (1900). One of My Sons (1901). Three Women and a Mystery (1902). The Filigree Ball (1903). The Amethyst Box (1905). The House in the Mist (1905). The Millionaire Baby (1905). The Woman in the Alcove (1906). The Chief Legatee (1906). The Mayor’s Wife (1907). The House of Whispering Pines (1910). Three Thousand Dollars (1910). Initials Only (1911). Dark Hollow (1914). To the Minute/Scarlet and Black (1916). The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow (1917). The Step on the Stair (1923). The papers of Anna Katharine Green are housed in the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Harkins, E. F., and C. H. L. Johnson, Little Pilgrimages among the Women Who Have Written Famous Books (1901). Overton, G., The Women Who Make Our Novels (1928). Reference works: Detecting Women (1994). Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996). Other references: Bookman (1929). Reading and Collecting (1938). Writer (1888).

her Southern ancestry. She and Julian passed the war years (1940-45) with Baltimore relatives. She became a Catholic convert in 1947. The Greens’ circle included many celebrated artists and intellectuals. A translator and a correspondent for American and English magazines, Green also wrote comic/romantic novels, autobiography, and historical fiction. Her novels usually focus on the family life of American expatriates in France and incorporate her mother’s nostalgia for the South. This nostalgia surfaces in memories, dreams, or visits to and from American relatives. Childhood is a pervasive theme. Her autobiography, With Much Love (1948), shows that her fictional families are based on Green’s own—the gauche and sprightly sisters, the obedient little brother who, like Julian, displays an early interest in the devil, and the harried, loving parents just scraping by. Green represents the adult brothersister bond fictionally by siblings who seem to be lovers, in 16 rue Cortambert (1937)—in fact an address of the Greens; by the married couple who seem to be siblings, in The Delamer Curse (1940); and by the fated heroine of Marietta (1932), her thoughts like hothouse flowers, who loves her brother-in-law. Green’s heroines are occasionally vulnerable but determined to grasp at happiness and self-sufficiency. They are young women who read Cosmopolitan, smoke to stay thin, rip and twist their clothing into ropes for escaping from high bedrooms, rouge their cheeks, carry their own latchkeys, engage in unhappy love affairs, get jobs selling books or drudging as companions to the tyrannical rich, whistle American spirituals in taxis, write notes in lipstick, and plan their novels. The sense of being truly not so scatterbrained as one is willing to appear is ruefully expressed by one heroine playing the pixie role: ‘‘Men will only love me for what they think I am.’’ Green’s archly innocent modern girl of the 1930s appears in such novels as The Selbys (1930), Reader, I Married Him (1931), Fools Rush In (1934), and That Fellow Perceval (1935).

—KATHLEEN L. MAIO

GREEN, Anne Born 11 November 1891, Savannah, Georgia; died circa 1975 Daughter of Edward Moon and Mary Hartridge Green Taken to France in 1893 after her father’s financial ruin, Anne Green grew up in Le Havre and in Paris. Of the seven bilingual Green children the youngest was Julian, who became a noted French writer. Green’s mother wrote ‘‘Letters from a Housekeeper in France’’ for a newspaper, and spun visions of her Savannah girlhood that would haunt Green’s and Julian’s writing. She and her sister served as nurses during World War I; ‘‘angels in their uniforms,’’ wrote Julian, they were awarded the Médaille des Épidémies. After their father’s death in 1927 Green and Julian lived together. Green traveled to America in 1922 to rediscover

Green writes about French families in A Marriage of Convenience (1933), Just Before Dawn (1943), and Paris (1938). The heroine of Paris is a poor, lame, but lovely girl, dedicated to her milliner’s art, who hesitates between yielding to the man’s control and becoming ‘‘a light eager soul, obliged to create.’’ Here as elsewhere Green indulges her taste for decor: the primrose and white boudoir with its Venetian mirrors and ebony bed, a boat to carry the milliner into a sea of dreams. In her French novels of the 1950s and 1960s, Green reverts to the material of these and other earlier works in English. La Porte des songes (1969), for example, sets the action of Paris in an American city. Atmosphere deepens menacingly in The Delamer Curse. The curse on the Southern family, living now as Parisian expatriates, descends from their slaveholding days and is transmitted through African beads soldered into a vermeil family coffeepot. The curse lifts, once these have been pried out and cast into the Seine and the heroine has expiated the ancestral guilt through her infants’ deaths. Green’s psychic fantasies, her summoning of evil presences, resemble her brother’s literary preoccupations. Where

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Julian narrowly probes the anguished mind, however, to lay bare authentic nightmares of the spiritually and sexually tormented, Green’s hallucinations are temporary, depending upon theatrical props and scenery. True horror is absent in Green, who, moreover, cannot keep the comic spirit from breaking through the fabric. For example, in the earlier Fools Rush In, the heroine’s troubled quest for a demented father and the death of her mother are events interspersed with uncontrollable whimsy. Green’s difficulties are with plotting and pacing, with evenness of tone and the creation of convincing characters. She succeeds as a social documentarian of the milieu and manners she knows. Her works show a liking for the comic, the spontaneous, and the incongruous, and also reveal an interest in childhood and the lives of women at different periods. Love is often treated with ambivalence. Her characteristic subject matter—Americans abroad at their provincial worst, or the expatriate Paris family whose history belongs to the American South—is, as she has said, largely autobiographical.

OTHER WORKS: A Crime by G. Bernanos (translated by Green, 1936). Winchester House (1936). The Silent Duchess (1939). France Speaking by R. de Saint Jean (translated by Green, 1941). The Lady in the Mask (1942). Basic Verities by C. Péguy (translated by Green, with J. Green, 1943). Men and Saints by C. Péguy (translated by Green, with J. Green, 1944). The Old Lady (1947). Le Goret (1954). Adeline (1956). A Certain Smile by F. Sagan (translated by Green, 1956). La Lanterne magique (with D. Mesnil, 1956). God Is Late by C. Arnothy (translated by Green, 1957). The Transgressor by J. Green (translated by Green, 1957). Le Vestiaire des anges (1958). Each in His Darkness by J. Green (translated by Green, 1961). Wonderful Clouds by F. Sagan (translated by Green, 1961). L’Or et l’argent (1962). Diary: 1928-1957 by J. Green (translated by Green, 1964). La Fille du grand marais (1964). La Bonne aventure (1966). Corinne et le prince persan (1967). To Leave Before Dawn by J. Green (translated by Green, 1967).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Gaddis-Rose, M., Julien Green: Gallic-American Novelist (1971). Green, J., Diary: 1928-1957 (translated by Anne Green, 1964). Green, J., Memories of Happy Days (1942). Green, J., Personal Record: 1928-1939 (translated by J. Godefroi, 1939). Saint Jean, R. de, Julien Green par lui-meme (1967). Reference works: Catholic Authors (1952). NCAB. TCA, TCAS. Other references: Bookman (Aug. 1932). Time (26 April 1948). —MARCELLE THIEBAUX

GREEN, Olive See REED, Myrtle

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GREENBERG, Joanne Born 24 September 1932, Brooklyn, New York Wrote under: Hannah Green Daughter of Julius and Rosalie Bernstein Goldenberg; married Albert Greenberg, 1955; children: David, Alan Formerly an elementary school teacher, Joanne Greenberg is a successful novelist and short story writer who also happens to be a professor of anthropology and creative writing at the Colorado School of Mines. Born in Brooklyn, Greenberg graduated from American University in Washington, D.C., where she had majored in anthropology and literature. She continued her studies at the University of London and the University of Colorado. Yet the most pivotal years of her life may be from 1948 through 1951, when she was treated for schizophrenia by the famous psychoanalyst Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. Greenberg had planned to write a book with her before the analyst’s sudden death in 1957. Five years later, Greenberg began writing (alone) I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964), publishing it under the pseudonym Hannah Green. Only when she realized, four years later, there was another Hannah Green, also a writer, did Greenberg acknowledge authorship of the book. Greenberg’s first book, The King’s Persons (1963), is a historical novel exploring the causes of the conflict resulting in the 1190 massacre of the Jews of York. The book’s theme is the danger of creeds as a source of misunderstanding. Her second novel, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, is Greenberg’s most successful. A sensitive study, not overly sentimental or melodramatic, of a psychotic teenage girl, the book appealed to a wide range of readers and became something of a cult classic. Both the girl, with her strange, troubled fantasy world, and her doctor, a woman with great patience and understanding, are carefully drawn. Greenberg avoids easy answers, carefully depicting the world of the mentally ill, but her final prognosis is optimistic. In The Monday Voices (1965), Greenberg uses a case-history format to follow the day-to-day professional life of Ralph Oakland, a caseworker at a state department of rehabilitation (Greenberg’s husband was a vocational rehab counselor, often working with hearing-impaired clients). Oakland’s cases represent a cross-section of society’s ills. Following his failures and successes, the reader can empathize with the pressures that drive the best people from such work, as Oakland struggles against despair, guilt, and an ulcer. Alienation and lack of communication arise from a physical disability in Greenberg’s novel, In This Sign (1970), an insightful depiction of the world of the deaf. This carefully researched, painfully accurate narrative follows a deaf couple, the Ryders, from the early stages of their marriage through their roles as grandparents facing retirement. Exploited by the hearing world, shut out by themselves as much as by others, they nevertheless persist and survive.


In Summering: A Book of Short Stories (1966), Greenberg’s favorite themes of isolation and imperfect communication are especially apparent. In ‘‘You Can Still Grow Flowers,’’ a woman is recording a dying dialect she herself cannot speak. Similarly isolated is the mild, white librarian of ‘‘Gloss on a Decision of the Council of Vicea,’’ jailed with a group of militant blacks, with whom she sympathizes but cannot reach. In Greenberg’s second collection of short stories, Rites of Passage (1971), the reader is introduced to an extraordinarily varied assortment of characters. Only the element of change—sometimes painful, sometimes welcome, always inevitable—links these narratives, whose subjects range widely within the scope of the 12 stories. Greenberg’s novel Founder’s Praise (1976) is a return to her original subject, for it, like her first novel, recognizes the dangers of creeds. The religious phenomenon she explores here is the birth and growth of a sect based on the unique vision of a farmer, Edgar Bisset. He does not live to see the religion, founded on his personal experience, institutionalize his vision and turn it into something he would not have recognized. Like The King’s Persons, Founder’s Praise underscores the irony inherent in allowing love of God to create hatred and conflict among people. Greenberg chooses themes of isolation and loneliness, of the difficulties in overcoming countless obstacles—physical, spatial, temporal, emotional, psychological—in order to realize one’s best self and to know and communicate with others. The problem of understanding is central to Greenberg’s books, and she is especially adept in her ability to show that much of our failure is due to our own preconceptions and the barriers we construct out of our fears. Greenberg does not opt for simple answers, but she raises questions which must be faced if society is to survive. Greenberg is also a master of making the extraordinary accessible. Although she has been criticized on occasion for lacking in art, or seen as merely a special-interest author (like in her most famous novel, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden), Greenberg’s consistently understated style lends a matter-of-fact quality to characters and experiences far from the ordinary reader’s experience. However odd her characters, they exist within complex networks of interpersonal relationships; families, especially, are never far from the center of her stories. Her books are as much about connections as about isolation, as much about rich identities as about fractured selves. While her prose hesitates to announce itself, Greenberg’s plotting and narrative devices are prominent. In Simple Gifts (1986), Greenberg’s use of multiple points of view is appropriate for a novel that explores the endless emotional and moral valences of a family who find themselves transformed when a government program turns their dilapidated farm into a vacation spot for jaded yuppies. A Season of Delight (1981) also examines the dynamics of competing family values. Vivian Sanborn in Age of Consent (1987) embarks on a pilgrimage to find out about the life of her adopted, recently assassinated brother, Daniel, healer, saint, and a man incapable of

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ordinary human interaction. Attempts at fixing one meaning to an event or person prove as fruitless as finding the incinerated pictorial documentation of Sanborn’s work. Yet the plotting of this intricate novel is so tidy as to conflict with the complexity of the characters and events. Another perhaps overly plotted but richly textured novel is The Far Side of Victory (1983), which constructs itself around two focal points—the car accidents that mold Eric Gordon’s life. Of Such Small Differences (1988) departs from Greenberg’s other works in its creation of a different language, appropriate for the reality experienced by the deaf-blind. Greenberg returns here to an old concern—how ‘‘unfamiliar’’ worlds intersect with, conflict with, and question other realities. The poet John, deaf-blind and independent, falls into a relationship with the hearing and sighted Leda. Isolation, disability, and even ‘‘the self’’ as static, limpid categories have no place in Greenberg’s fiction, which always finds people striving among others, choosing among conflicting ideas of duty and fulfillment. The extraordinary inheres in both everything and nothing in works that treat the ‘‘oddest’’ and most ‘‘normal’’ of characters and events not from a stance of wonder or condescension but from the perspective of familiarity. Greenberg uses a series of letters written between family members to construct her novel Where the Road Goes (1998). Tig Warriner is a sixty-two-year-old grandmother and environmental activist who is on a year-long, cross-country walk to evaluate the nation’s feelings on environmental issues. While she is gone, she corresponds with her husband, Marz, her daughters, Justice and Solidarity, and her granddaughter, Hope, Justice’s daughter. The distance and resultant correspondence brings the family closer than they had been when living together in Colorado and provides the foundation and format for the book. In her letters, Tig describes the walk across the U.S. in detail. The letters she receives provide not only the issues and relationships on which the stories are based, but the different perspectives found when more than one person tells the same tale. Hope becomes pregnant and marries Larry, who is of Native American heritage and has a drinking problem. Marz writes of challenges, new beginnings, and introspection brought about by his relationship with his grandson, Ben. The theme of the tribe weaves throughout Where the Road Goes as it relates to communities in general—families, gays, activists, idealists. As always, Greenberg presents a good story through complex characters and simple, elegant prose for a truly memorable offering. Greenberg is the recipient of a myriad of awards, including the Community Grange Award for Citizenship, the H & E Daroff Memorial Award for fiction (1963), William and Janice Eppstein Fiction Award (1964), Fromm Reichmann Award (1967), Kenner Award (1971), Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute Award (1983), and the Denver Public Library Bookplate Award (1990). Greenberg has also been awarded several honorary degrees, from Gallaudet College, Western Maryland College, and the University of Colorado.

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OTHER WORKS: High Crimes and Misdemeanors (1979). Leah (with Seymour Epstein, 1987). With the Snow Queen (1991). No Reck’ning Made (1993).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1969). CANR (1985, 1991). CLC (1977,1984). SATA (1981). Other references: Booklist (1 Jan. 1998). LJ (Jan. 1998). Psychology Review (1972). PW (23 Sept. 1988, 8 Dec. 1997). NYTBR (27 Dec. 1987, 30 Oct. 1988). —JANETTE S. LEWIS, UPDATED BY FAYE HALPERN AND REBECCA C. CONDIT

GREENE, Sarah (Pratt) McLean Born 3 July 1856, Simsbury, Connecticut; died 28 December 1935, Lexington, Massachusetts Daughter of Dudley B. and Mary Payne McLean; married Franklin L. Greene, 1887 (died 1890) The second youngest of five children, Sarah McLean Green grew up on a Connecticut farm. Taught by her mother and in local schools, she attended Mt. Holyoke College for two years and then accepted a teaching appointment at Cedarville, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. Intrigued by the eccentricity of Cape Cod life, she set down her impressions of it. When a Boston relative who had noted the quality of her correspondence urged her to publish something, she submitted these recollections to a Boston publisher. Her writing career began with the publication of Cape Cod Folks (1881), followed by Towhead: The Story of a Girl (1883) and Some Other Folks (1884), a collection of stories. Greene married a former Annapolis midshipman. The couple lived first near Chihuahua, Mexico, where Greene was involved in a silver mining operation; later they lived in the Washington Territory and in California. In 1890, when her husband died, Greene moved back to New England to write. Greene’s literary career was based largely on the notoriety of her first novel, Cape Cod Folks. Essentially personal reminiscences of a community that had fascinated her, the book has for its plot a set of romantic involvements and is characterized by a perceptive rendering of local humor and by vivid depictions of Codder life and mores. Some of the accounts were a little too realistic, however, since Greene had described certain characters under their real names and a series of lawsuits ensued, some culminating in settlements against her. Nevertheless, published at a point when regionalism was all the rage, the novel went through 11 printings in its first two years and established Greene as a local-color writer. Vesty of the Basins (1892), Greene’s second most successful work, also employs the themes and techniques of Cape Cod Folks,

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but with greater sophistication. The tale concerns the beautiful Vesty, whose strength and good sense make her a quiet center of the isolated Basin community. Loved by three men, she marries one, the simple and devoted Gurd, to save another, the rich Notely, from his own folly. After Gurd has died trying to save Notely in a storm, and after Notely (married to another) dies as well, Vesty finally acknowledges the love of Major Henry. Henry, a lamed and scarred summer visitor to the Basin, narrates most of the action. His point of view effectively serves to reveal his silent love for Vesty and to provide a distanced commentary on the Basin lifestyle. When Greene introduces an omniscient narrator to delineate other relationships, however, the alternation of viewpoint is sometimes strained. Several of Greene’s characters are skillfully drawn. Vesty, for example, despite some idealization, is an appealing woman in her quiet strength. The Basin folk are distinguished by a broad— even slapstick—humor and by a somewhat self-conscious dialect. Nevertheless, the story is true to the complexity of emotion and catches the flavor of a rural New England community. In later novels, such as Lastchance Junction, Far, Far West (1889) and Leon Pontifex (1890), Greene tried the West as a setting, but she was always most attuned to the quirks and language of New England, and novels like Towhead and Flood-Tide (1901), despite faults of exaggeration, exhibit Greene’s talent most effectively. Greene’s gift was for humor and the exact rendering of the manners of her New England country men and women. Her characters often verge on vivid caricature, a quality winning her the private praise of Mark Twain, and a skill by which she frequently captures the essence of her region. OTHER WORKS: Stuart and Bamboo (1897). The Moral Imbeciles (1898). Winslow Plain (1902). Deacon Lysander (1904). Power Lot (1906). The Long Green Road (1911). Everbreeze (1913). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Howe, J. W., Representative Women of New England (1904). Smith, H. N., and W. Gibson, eds., Mark TwainHowells Letters (1960). Reference works: NAW (1971). Other references: Boston Globe (30 Dec. 1935). Boston Transcript (30 Dec. 1935). Harper’s (Nov. 1881). Harvard Graduates Magazine (June 1931). Nation (22 Sept. 1881, 14 July 1892). New Orleans Picayune (8 Jan. 1882, 4 June 1893). —BARBARA C. EWELL

GREENFIELD, Eloise Born 17 May 1929, Parmele, North Carolina Daughter of Weston W. and Lessie Jones Little; married Robert J. Greenfield, 1950 (separated); children Steven, Monica Passionate about language and the rhythms of words, Eloise Greenfield has devoted her career to writing children’s books


offering African American children a positive and self-affirming view of the minority experience. Greenfield writes: ‘‘I want to be one of those who can choose and order words that children will want to celebrate. I want to make them shout and laugh and blink back tears and care about themselves.’’ Her extensive list of prestigious awards is one indication that she has succeeded in this goal. After what Greenfield describes as a childhood she looks back on with pleasure, she attended Miner Teachers College from 1946-49. She then began a career as a clerk typist at the U.S. Patent Office (1949-56). From 1956 to 1960, Greenfield was a supervisory patent assistant, after which she worked in a variety of capacities in the Washington D.C. area until 1968. In the 1970s Greenfield became involved in the District of Columbia Black Writer’s Workshop, where she started as the codirector of adult fiction (1971-73) and then became director of children’s literature (1973-74). She served as the District of Columbia Commission on the Arts and Humanities’ writer-inresidence for 1973 and 1985-86. She continues to write and participate in numerous school and library programs and workshops for both children and adults, striving to address realistic childhood issues—African American issues in particular—by stressing the importance of family and positive alternative methods of solving problems. Early in her career, Greenfield commented on how ‘‘it has been inspiring. . .to be part of the struggle’’ to create quality books for African American children. In picture books, novels for young readers, biographies of famous African Americans, memoirs of childhood, and poetry, Greenfield’s work has been infused with warmth, hope, and joy. Her vision has always pointed in two directions: back to a past rich with strength and courage and forward to a future brimming with possibilities. Greenfield’s young protagonists are often dreamers whose quiet time spent imagining and dreaming is growing time. In Nathaniel Talking (1989), her third Coretta Scott King Award winner, young Nathaniel B. Free raps philosophically about his family, his friends, his life. Despite losing his mother, Nathaniel feels strongly connected to his father and his extended family. Familial connections are always important in Greenfield’s writing, and she lovingly explores alternatives to the traditional nuclear family. Family provided Greenfield with personal strength as she faced societal hostility and rejection. With her mother, Lessie Jones Little, she wrote Childtimes: A Three Generational Memoir (1979) dedicated to the memory of her grandmother who had dictated material for the book. This autobiography, which many consider Greenfield’s best work, traces the history of the three women against the landscape of their times. An intimate personal history shapes the book’s quiet theme that childhood can and should be happy, a time of building self-esteem supported by a caring family and community: ‘‘a childtime is a mighty thing.’’ The book received the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for nonfiction and the Carter Book Award for outstanding merit. Greenfield created her first book, a scrapbook put together with household paste, when she was three and views this act as the

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beginning of her life. As a creator, she thrilled to the sentence ‘‘Home is where the music is,’’ and continues to feel a mission to celebrate those words. Home and music continue as constant themes, anchors to which she and her characters return. Her first book of poetry, Honey, I Love: and Other Love Poems (1978), a Reading Rainbow selection, includes the music of skipping rope and the rhythm of riding trains; all poems are home bound, safe and secure. Nathaniel Talking contains the literal music of ‘‘bones’’ and blues. Most of Greenfield’s picture books address everyday traumas and delight: the arrival of a new sibling, parent separation, a grandmother’s sadness about moving, buying a present for a mother’s birthday. Sometimes the resolution seems too easy and predictable, but Greenfield’s determination that children feel good about themselves transcends these considerations. Two novels for young readers, Sisters (1974) and Talk About a Family (1978), record the anger and sadness of their young female protagonists as they try to make sense of their fears and confusion. Both novels conclude realistically: with a potential for a better future, but with no facile solution to present difficulties. Her commitment to providing good role models for African American children has drawn Greenfield toward biography. Lucid writing and artful selection of detail makes her books on heroic Americans Mary McLeod Bethune, Rosa Parks, and Paul Robeson accessible to young readers, and she has won numerous awards for these documents of resilience and courage. They are an important part of Greenfield’s share in building a significant body of excellent literature for all children. OTHER WORKS: Sister (1969). The Last Dance (1971). Love, Oh Love (1972). Bubbles (1972, reissued as Good News, 1977). Rosa Parks (1973, 1995). She Come Bringing Me That Little Baby Girl (1974). Me and Nessie (1975). Paul Robeson (1975). First Pink Light (1976, reissued 1991). Africa Dream (with L. J. Little, 1977). Mary McLeod Bethune (1977). I Can Do It Myself (with Lessie Jones Little, 1978). Darlene (1980). Grandmama’s Joy (1980, 1999). Daydreamers (1981). Alesia (with Alesia Revis, 1981). Grandpa’s Face (1988). Under the Sunday Tree (1988). My Doll, Keshia (1991). Night on Neighborhood Street (1991, 1996). Big Friend, Little Friend (1991). Daddy and I (1991). I Make Music (1991). Koya Delaney and the Good Girl (1992). William and the Good Old Days (1993). Aaron and Gayla’s Counting Book (1993). Sweet Baby Coming (with J. S. Gilchrist, 1994). On My Horse (1995). Easter Parade (1997). For the Love of the Game: Michael Jordan and Me (1997). Kia Tanisha (1997). Kia Tanisha Drives Her Car (1997). Angels (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Black Authors and Illustrators of Children’s Books (1992). CA (Online, 1999). Children’s Books and Their Creators (1995). Children’s Literature Review (1996). TCCW (1983, 1989). SATA (1990). CLR (1982). Other references: Horn Book (Dec. 1975). —SUSAN P. BLOOM, UPDATED BY JULIET BYINGTON

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GREENWOOD, Grace See LIPPINCOTT, Sara Jane

GRIFFIN, Susan Born 26 January 1943, Los Angeles, California Daughter of Walden and Sarah Colvin Griffin; married John Levy, 1966 A self-defined radical feminist, Susan Griffin graduated from San Francisco State University (B.A. 1965, M.A. 1972). She has been variously employed as a waitress, switchboard and teletype operator, house painter, teacher, assistant editor of Ramparts, artists’ model, and an actor and director in San Francisco. She is a supporter of the Feminist Writers’ Guild. In Like the Iris of an Eye (1976), which includes her three earlier volumes of poetry, Griffin writes in a first-person, conversational style underscoring the intensity of the poems’ emotional content. The first section—‘‘Early Poems’’ (1967-73)—includes the title poem, ‘‘Love Should Grow Up Like a Wild Iris in the Field’’ and it deliberately and ironically rejects the romantic stereotype to locate love in ‘‘the iris of an eye,’’ which is probably watching out for a child, checking a cooking dinner, and seeing the tame, familiar, and restricted life that is the antithesis of a wildflower. Most of the poems in this section are concerned with contradictions either between stereotypes and reality or between expectations and reality. The woman whose feelings Griffin identifies recognizes her affinity with the black American slave (‘‘I like to think of Harriet Tubman’’), Native American (‘‘White Bear’’), war protesters (‘‘To Gather Ourselves’’), and political revolutionaries (‘‘Letter to the Revolution,’’ ‘‘Poem in the Form of a Letter’’). She is an outsider whose search for power leads her into conflict with unaware men who ‘‘won’t know the half of it, not in a million years’’ (‘‘An Answer to a Man’s Question, ‘What Can I Do About Women’s Liberation?’’’). The second section—‘‘Family’’ (1967-76)—is a verbal portrait album; descriptions are almost visual in the ordering of heretofore insignificant details that assume mythic proportions in linking four generations of women and some of the men who shared their lives. The six poems of section three—‘‘The Tiredness Cycle’’ (1973-74)—reflect disappointment and disillusionment, which are allowed neither to deepen into despair nor to vanish through avoidance (‘‘I dwell on the line’’). Structurally more varied than the earlier sections, the works of the final group—‘‘New Poems’’ (1973-76)—focus primarily on selfdiscovery and acceptance; on evolving a vivid understanding of the woman-self. Though varied, the experiences examined are central to women’s existence and awareness; Griffin’s works bear witness to the common base of women’s real lives. Griffin’s Emmy award-winning radio drama Voices (1975) presents five women whose ages (nineteen to seventy) and experiences span 20th century American life—as it is allowed to

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women. Despite their differences, the characters share underlying fears and frustrations; at the conclusion of the play, speaking in chorus they identify themselves with womankind, from slave to socialite. Only Rosalinde, the youngest, seems not to share the others’ feelings of suppression, but to remain apart she must employ tactics of deliberate avoidance. Her exaggerated lifesketch and her impassioned rejection of the emotions of the others only underscore reality’s threat, which she subconsciously recognizes. The women finally reject death-suicide-endless sleep, and the vitality of the play’s poetic form emphasizes the resilience and renewal of the women’s spirits. Uniting feminism and ecology, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (1978) is an elegant prose poem, and its design allows for both continuous reading and random sampling. In the four sections—‘‘Matter,’’ ‘‘Separation,’’ ‘‘Passages,’’ and ‘‘Her Vision’’—Griffin blends science, literature, history, religion, myth and more, to reexplore the limitations of patriarchy and the limitlessness of the woman-centered universe. ‘‘Matter’’ compares and contrasts patriarchal judgements about nature and women with ludicrous and absurd conclusions; ‘‘Separation’’ focuses attention on the enforced distance between humans and nature. Moving through ‘‘Passages’’ to ‘‘Her Vision,’’ Griffin describes a new way of seeing a woman-identified view of nature and women which challenges and encompasses the reader. The power of Griffin’s works comes from the clarity of her perceptions of the role, conditions, existence, and aspirations of ordinary women. The domestic details, the historical stereotypes, and the contemporary dilemma are carefully integrated in her well-crafted, fully accessible poetry, drama, fiction, and essays. She neither excuses nor accuses; she investigates with sympathy and understanding, and she speaks for the experience of us all. Griffin’s career has included a range of genres: poetry, plays, stories, and essays. By 1980, after almost a decade of publication, she had garnered such awards as the Ina Coolbrith Prize in poetry and a National Endowment for the Arts grant, as well as her Emmy for Voices. Her work in the 1980s and 1990s engaged with subjects of a global nature—rape, pornography, and war. Emphatically feminist in politics and writing, Griffin has increasingly become a theorist and interpreter of women’s condition. This trend is especially clear in Rape: The Power of Consciousness (1979), a collection of essays, and Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revolt Against Nature (1981). Rape includes a version of her well-known 1971 essay, ‘‘Rape: The All-American Crime,’’ in which, like Susan Brownmiller, Griffin analyzes rape as the chief tool of patriarchy in maintaining power: a crime carried out by a few men on behalf of many. Calling it ‘‘a male protection racket’’ where a woman is made to feel unsafe and therefore dependent on ‘‘her man,’’ she also connects the crime of rape with national aggressions, such as American imperialism, particularly in Vietnam. Her other essays look at encouraging changes in the attitude toward the prosecution of rape since the women’s movement in the 1970s but warn the crime of rape is still statistically increasing. In Consciousness she closes on a hopeful


note, choosing ‘‘hope over dread,’’ with a vision of the possibility of change for women when they learn to confront and overcome fears keeping them from full self-realization: ‘‘I have tasted freedom from fear, a world we imagine, and this small taste means more to me than large fears.’’ In Pornography and Silence, a groundbreaking work, Griffin denies the conventional notion women are subservient and enjoy subservience and argues forcefully that women do not welcome domination—a necessary message at the time. She also interprets the male psyche, perceiving it as separated from emotion and, ultimately, from women. This disassociation, as well as the belief in the subservience of women, creates the environment for pornography. Although some critics argued the ferocity of Griffin’s tone and language diminished the impact of her message, her work was prophetic, opening the way to a feminist analysis of pornography. A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War (1992, reissued 1994) is a moving and profoundly multilayered meditation on history—especially the history of war and weapon making, on family secrets and the connections between public and private, and on the destructiveness this silence and denial create, both in war and in families. Firmly joining the personal to the global, Griffin ranges over wars and countries to demonstrate connection. ‘‘As social concepts, war and gender evolved together,’’ Griffin once told an interviewer. ‘‘To change either, we have to change both.’’ The stones of the title are a paradoxical symbol: though silent, they ‘‘reveal traces from fires suffered thousands of years ago.’’ So, too, human beings carry ‘‘our own history and the history of the world embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that history is song.’’ Griffin has also published essays on such topics as chronic fatigue syndrome. In addition to writing, she sought a doctorate degree at the Starr King School of Ministry.

OTHER WORKS: Dear Sky (1971). Let Them Be Said (1973). Letters (1974). The Sink (1974). Made from This Earth: An Anthology of Writings (1983). Unremembered Country (1987). Gourmet Expose: Revealing Favorite Restaurant Recipes of the Wasatch Front (1994). The Eros of Everyday Life: Essays on Ecology, Gender and Society (1995, reprint 1996). Bending Home: Selected & New Poems, 1967-1998 (1998). What Her Body Thought: A Journey into the Shadows (1999). Has contributed to the following books: Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism (1990); Revisioning Philosophy (1992); Ecofeminism: Women, Culture, Nature (1997); Women on Hunting (1994); Images of Women in Literature (1991); Transforming a Rape Culture (1993); Issues in Feminism: An Introduction to Women’s Studies (1995); and Readings in Ecology and Feminist Theology (1995).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Freedman, D. P., ‘‘Writing in the Borderlands: The Poetic Prose of Gloria Anzaldua and Susan Griffin’’ in

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Constructing and Reconstructing Gender: The Links Among Communication, Language, and Gender (1992). Howe, R., ed. No More Masks!: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets (1993). Shima, A., Skirting the Subject: Pursuing Language in the Works of Adrienne Rich, Susan Griffin, and Beverly Dahlen (dissertation, 1993). Ysunza, A., ‘‘Embracing Chaos: A Literary Analysis of Susan Griffin’s Women and Nature’’ (thesis, 1989). Reference works: CA 49-52 (1975). CANR (1981, 1989). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Women Writers of the West Coast (1983). Other references: NYTBR (22 Nov. 1992). PW (10 Aug. 1992). Whole Earth Review (Summer 1989). LJ (July 1987). —KATHLEEN GREGORY KLEIN, UPDATED BY LINDA BERUBE AND NELSON RHODES

GRIFFITH, Mary Born date unknown; died 1877 Wrote under: The Author of ‘‘Our Neighborhood,’’ Mrs. Griffith Very little is known of Mary Griffith’s life. Records of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society show that she became an honorary member of the Society in 1830 and that she died in 1877. In response to Griffith’s gift of her first volume the editor of the New England Farmer tells a little more about her. Griffith had ‘‘long been distinguished for her extensive, interesting, and valuable experiments as a practical cultivator of the soil.’’ She was known also for her contributions to horticultural literature, although he does not tell us what they were. He does call her, in light of Our Neighborhood (1831), ‘‘the first female author on tillage.’’ About her personal life he tells us only that she was left a widowed mother ‘‘in the prime of life’’ and boldly attempted to support herself at the practice of agriculture. She signs her address simply Charlies Hope, New Jersey, a place which does not appear in modern atlases. Griffith’s published books number four, one of which, Discoveries in Light and Vision (1836, reprinted in 1993 by the Classics in Opthamology Library), testifies to her interest in science. Her other three books are fiction, throughout which she often stops for a ‘‘scientific’’ observation about light, soil, or phrenology. Our Neighborhood and The Two Defaulters (1842) are novels, while Camperdown; or, News from Our Neighborhood (1836) is a collection of tales. All three works are lightly interconnected, being supposedly about the same ‘‘neighborhood,’’ although there is only slight mention of people who appear in other stories to connect the works. Horticulture is not really a major feature of her stories, except as infrequent asides in Our Neighborhood, in which she tells how to plant grapes or potatoes while devoting most of the book to a silly romance between the narrator and a mysterious girl.

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Griffith’s writing style is weak in plot and organization; for instance, some of the tales in Camperdown are not at all clear, in plot or meaning, except as vehicles for her social concerns. One of the tales, ‘‘The Little Couple,’’ tells of two very short people who marry and who are given money by a rich uncle who expects (and gets) the privilege of ridiculing their size and naming their first daughter Glumdalclitch. The punch line is that they have a happy life and six normal-sized daughters. Another story caricatures a man who has no regard for his 13 daughters and is bitterly disappointed not to have any sons. Probably the most interesting story in Camperdown is ‘‘Three Hundred Years Hence,’’ a utopian story in which her main character is frozen in a block of ice and awakens 300 years later in the same place. He finds all sorts of marvels: Griffith’s 22ndcentury America is powered by a mysterious sort of engine invented by a woman. Among other reforms, dogs are extinct, ending the threat of massive outbreaks of hydrophobia. Men are educated for business life, while women have the right to earn money and control their own property. Griffith was very concerned with the economic security of women. She had no interest in politics or public life for women, only asking such things as they be allowed to clerk in retail stores and do tailoring. In Our Neighborhood she devotes pages to a lecture on ‘‘Woman’’ given by one of the characters who is obviously voicing Griffith’s own opinions. Various other of her works show her constant concern with respect due to women and the needs of women to be economically independent. She was both a critic of the business community for its treatment of women and its dishonest practices, and a true believer in the opportunities offered by the American way. A woman of strong opinions, Griffith despised dogs, bankers, society doctors, and any man who let women work to support him, such as young men who allow church women to raise scholarships for them to study for the ministry. Women’s work, she felt, should benefit women. Her fiction gives a fascinating picture of contemporary life highly colored by her earnest solicitation of the reader’s opinion. The three works of fiction by Griffith are well worth the attention of a student of early American fiction, especially her utopian romance. But perhaps the most interesting aspect of her work after all is its critical comment on woman’s place in the business world. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Adkins, N., Introduction to Three Hundred Years Hence by M. Griffith (1950). Jones, L., F., and S. W. Goodwin, eds., Feminism, Utopia, and Narrative (1990). Rohrlich, R. and E. H. Baruch, eds., Women in Search of Utopia (1984). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: History of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society (1880). New England Farmer (May 1831). Transactions of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society (1876, 1877). Women’s Studies (1982). —BEVERLY SEATON

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GRIMES, Martha Born Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (birthdate not available) Daughter of D. W. and June Dunnington Grimes; married and divorced; children: Kent Van Holland The popular English-mystery series Martha Grimes has written features Scotland Yard Inspector Richard Jury and his sidekick, amateur sleuth Melrose Plant. Inspired by the name of a British pub for her debut mystery novel (The Man with a Load of Mischief, 1981), Grimes continued the theme with all of the Richard Jury novels that followed. The pub names serve not only as the title but also as part of the setting in each book. In 1983 Grimes told a reporter, ‘‘Unless I have the pub name first, I can’t write the book.’’ She has also said she often doesn’t know who the murderer is until she’s halfway through writing the book. Her mystery novels are truly a series in that the characters continue from one book to the next with relatively little introduction, and previous events are frequently alluded to. Grimes’ main characters, Richard Jury, the tall, cultured and quiet professional, and Melrose Plant, the agreeable, aristocratic amateur, have been called an unusual duo. Plant’s American-born, interfering Aunt Agatha is another recurring character. Commended for her sense of humor and graceful writing style, Grimes has been described as a literary descendant of Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie. But unlike her native-Briton predecessors, Grimes, a devout Anglophile, relies on research and frequent trips to England to gather material for her settings and characters’ backgrounds. While her plots have been described as complex and convoluted, the depth of plot and the strong emotional appeal of her eccentric characters have made Grimes a favorite in America. There are those, however, particularly British readers, who take pleasure in pointing out factual errors in her books, such as trains leaving from the incorrect London station. These errors, however, have decreased as the series has progressed. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where her father was the city solicitor, Grimes spent summers at her mother’s hotel in Mountain Lake Park, Maryland. Her favorite memories of that time include the theatrical productions her brother staged in the garage behind the hotel. She earned her B.A. and M.A. at the University of Maryland and went on to teach English at the University of Iowa and at Frostburg State College in Maryland, where she was an assistant professor. In the late 1990s Grimes was an English professor at Montgomery College in Tacoma Park, Maryland, and on occasion she also teaches detective fiction at Johns Hopkins University. She has residences in both Washington, D.C., and Santa Fe, New Mexico. After introducing readers to Richard Jury in The Man with a Load of Mischief, discovered in an unsolicited manuscripts pile by an editor at Little, Brown in 1979 and published with a first printing of three thousand copies, Grimes published The Old Fox


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Deceiv’d in 1982. The following year, 1983, Grimes’ third novel in the series, The Anodyne Necklace, earned her the Nero Wolfe award for best mystery of the year along with critical acclaim. The Five Bells and Bladebone put Grimes on the New York Times bestseller list in 1987. Her next two books in the series, The Old Silent (1989) and The Old Contemptibles (1991), also made the bestseller list. In 1992 Grimes broke from her fans’ beloved Jury series with The End of the Pier, which combined a serial-murder mystery in Maryland with the touching exploration of a mother and son relationship. Though it was praised by critics, Richard Jury fans felt betrayed and reacted much more negatively. In 1993 Grimes told a reporter, ‘‘Perhaps I should have published under a pseudonym.’’ Twice during the 15-book Jury series, Grimes brought her Scotland Yard inspector to America. The Horse You Came In On (1993) was titled after a pub she came across in Baltimore. ‘‘I knew I would have to figure out some way to get Jury and Melrose to come over [to America],’’ Grimes said in 1993, ‘‘purely on the basis of the name of this pub.’’ Fan reaction was so positive that her characters crossed the Atlantic again in Rainbow’s End (1995). In 1999 Grimes published Biting the Moon, the first in a series of novels that explores animal welfare, a topic of keen interest to her, with most of her royalties going to animal charities. On why she wrote Biting the Moon, Grimes says, ‘‘While the characters are fictional, the practices are not. This is my way of reaching people. So many people can be reached through fiction.’’ OTHER WORKS: The Dirty Duck (1984). Jerusalem Inn (1984). Help the Poor Struggler (1985). The Deer Leap (1985). I Am the Only Running Footman (1986). Send Bygraves (1989). Hotel Paradise (1996). The Case Has Altered (1997). The Stargazey (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Book Review Digest 1997 (1998).CA (1986). Heising, W., Detecting Women 2 (1996). Swanson, J., and D. James, By a Woman’s Hand (1994). —KATHY HENDERSON

GRIMKÉ (WELD), Angelina (Emily) Born 20 February 1805, Charleston, South Carolina; died 26 October 1879, Hyde Park, Massachusetts Also wrote under: A. E. Grimké, Angelina Grimké Weld Daughter of John F. and Mary Smith Grimké; married Theodore D. Weld, 1838 An abolitionist and women’s rights pioneer, Angelina Grimké launched her meteoric career in the abolitionist movement in a letter to William Lloyd Garrison published in The Liberator (1835).

Grimké’s first pamphlet was Appeal to Christian Women of the Southern States (1836). In the Appeal she attacked the traditional religious justifications of slavery and focused instead on the God-given equality of the slave as human being. The most powerful and original part of the Appeal was her call to Southern women to take action against slavery. Though women lacked political power, they could free slaves who were their own property, ameliorate the conditions for other slaves, and petition legislatures for emancipation. Such actions might lead to fines or imprisonment; nevertheless, she called women to civil disobedience. She contended: ‘‘If a law commands me to sin, I will break it; if it calls me to suffer, I will let it take its course unresistingly.’’ Grimké’s Appeal was the only abolitionist message by a Southern woman addressed specifically to Southern women. As such it aroused violent opposition in the South. Grimké’s second pamphlet, An Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States (1837), stressed women’s particular responsibility to their fellow women in bondage. Female slaves are in fact ‘‘our countrywomen. . .our sisters.’’ Both free and slave women suffered from discrimination; because of alleged mental inferiority, both were denied educational opportunities. Grimké denounced not only slavery but also Northern race prejudice. She condemned segregation patterns as a ‘‘wicked absurdity’’ in a republic. Such prejudice, she contended, radically limited Northern influence on the South. Letters to Catharine E. Beecher (1838) came in response to Beecher’s Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism with Reference to the Duty of American Females (1837). Beecher had attacked Grimké both for advocating abolition and for urging women’s involvement therein. In the Letters, first published serially in the Liberator and the Emancipator in 1837, Grimké concentrated primarily on a detailed defense of the efficacy of immediate abolition. She condemned the gradualism Beecher advocated and called for a program of immediate abolition including equal rights to education and equal protection under the laws. Such a program, she acknowledged, would bring major changes in Northern society as well as Southern. And Grimké welcomed the prospect. In the two letters which dealt specifically with Beecher’s concept of women’s limited sphere, Grimké developed a strong feminist argument based on a doctrine of human rights. According to Grimké, ‘‘human beings have rights because they are moral beings.’’ As moral beings, women no less than men must act publicly on moral issues. As human beings, women should participate in making all laws concerning their own condition. She saw a new cause emerging out of the abolitionist controversy, a broad drive to reclaim the usurped rights of all disadvantaged persons, including women and slaves. When she married Theodore Weld, her career as a writer came to an end. She collaborated with him and her sister, Sarah, in compiling American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839). Some speeches and a letter on women’s rights were later published. But it is upon the three works written between 1836 and 1838 that her reputation rests.

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As a writer, Grimké has a forceful and clean-cut style. Her arguments are lucid and cogent, and she writes with ease and directness. She utilizes 18th-century reformist ideas to support her arguments, drawing heavily on environmentalist theories to explain the perversion of original equality. She also draws on 18th-century republican ideology with its stress on the imperative necessity for moral virtue among citizens if the republic is to survive. Above all, however, as a 19th-century evangelical reformer, she relies on religious arguments. The Bible offered the standard of judgement by which to determine the evils of slavery. It offered the religious-historical role models for women undertaking responsible moral action against slavery. In her religious convictions, Grimké found the basis for the formulation of the doctrine of human rights. In so doing, she finally fused the two causes with which her private life and her public career became identified, abolition and women’s rights.

OTHER WORKS: The papers of Angelina Grimké Weld are housed in the Moorhead-Springarn Research Center of Howard University in Washington, D.C.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barnes, G. H., and D. L. Dumond, eds., Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Sarah Grimké: 1822-1844 (2 vols., 1934). Birney, C., The Grimké Sisters, Sarah and Angelina Grimké: The First Women Advocates of Abolition and Woman’s Rights (1885). Ceplair, L., ed., The Public Years of Sarah and Angelina Grimké: Selected Writings, 1835-1839 (1989). Hull, G. T., Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (1987). Lerner, G., The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels Against Slavery (1967). Lumpkin, K. Du Pre, The Emancipation of Angelina Grimké (1974). Miller, E. M., The Other Construction: Where Violence and Womanhood Meet in the Writings of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Nella Larsen (1999). Weld, T. D., In Memory: Angelina Grimké Weld (1880). Reference works: HWS, I. NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —INZER BYERS

GRIMKÉ, Sarah Moore Born 26 November 1792, Charleston, South Carolina; died 23 December 1873, Hyde Park, Massachusetts Daughter of John F. and Mary Smith Grimké Sarah Moore Grimké made her impact upon American history and literature as an abolitionist and advocate of women’s rights. Her first publication was a pamphlet, An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States (1836). In it, Grimké stresses the

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inherent conflict between slavery and Christianity, basing her argument against slavery on the premise that God had created all men equal. Referring to state laws and practices, she effectively demonstrates how the law kept ministers from meeting religious obligations to slaves, and she calls on the Southern clergy to act as moral leaders against slavery. Grimké’s second publication came out of an antislavery lecture tour of New England in 1837 and 1838. Because Grimké and her sister Angelina lectured publicly on abolition to both men and women, they were sharply criticized, especially by the Congregationalist Ministerial Association of Massachusetts. Grimké responded with 15 letters, first published serially in 1837 in the New England Spectator and later collected as a book. In the Letters on the Equality of the Sexes (1838), Grimké rejects indignantly the contention that women should not speak publicly on moral issues, asserting that as morally responsible individuals, they cannot do otherwise. She further argues women should themselves become ministers. She went on to develop a full-fledged argument for women’s equality. Again, she started with the religious premise. God had created man and woman with equal moral rights and duties; original equality and responsibility remained unaltered by the Fall. Nor did Christ distinguish between male and female virtues. The biblical message is clear: ‘‘Whatever is right for man to do, is right for woman.’’ Grimké contrasted this original equality with the oppression women historically have endured around the world. Throughout history man has imposed his authority over woman. In nonWestern countries, he treats woman as a slave or a toy to amuse himself. In America and Europe, male dominance is generally cloaked in terms of protection, but the oppression is no less real. The weight of inequality varies according to women’s social status. In America, Grimké argued, working women felt economic consequences most keenly; for middle class women, legal disabilities and intellectual deprivation were the crucial problems. After the Letters, Grimké largely withdrew from writing. She collaborated with her sister and brother-in-law in compiling American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839); she wrote occasionally for newspapers and did a translation of Alphonse de Lamartine’s Joan of Arc (1867). Of the two publications of 1836-38, the Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States is essentially a minor work. It added little to the antislavery argument, and the often turgid style of writing further limited its appeal. The Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, on the other hand, is a significant pioneering work written with power and originality. In it her style is forthright and lucid, the tone grave and dispassionate. Her arguments are lit with occasional flashes of ironic humor and anger. In explaining women’s historical inequality, Grimké particularly stressed the environmentalist argument. She contrasted the role women in general were allowed to play with the role women in authority showed themselves capable of fulfilling. Especially she denounced the deliberate efforts to ‘‘debase and enslave’’ women’s intellect. ‘‘All I ask of our brethren is that they take their


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feet from off our necks and permit us to stand upright.’’ Only then can the validity of male assumptions about women’s nature and abilities be tested. Grimké also used the American revolutionary tradition of protest against usurpation of rights. She thus offered a basis for attacking inequality that the women of Seneca Falls would utilize in 1848. Above all, Grimké recognized the importance of putting the argument for equality in religious terms, which were the terms most crucial for her own generation. She boldly staked out the claim that equality itself was God’s will, built into creation. As God’s gift, this equality could and must be reclaimed. The Letters on the Equality of the Sexes stands as a major achievement, the first significant defense of women’s rights by an American woman.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barnes, G. H., and D. L. Dumond, eds., Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Sarah Grimké: 1822-1844 (2 vols., 1934). Bartlett, E. A., ed., Sarah Grimké: Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and Other Essays (1988). Birney, C., The Grimké Sisters, Sarah and Angelina Grimké: The First Women Advocates of Abolition and Woman’s Rights (1885). Ceplair, L., ed., The Public Years of Sarah and Angelina Grimké: Selected Writings, 1835-1839 (1989). Hull, G. T., Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (1987). Lerner, G., The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels Against Slavery (1967). Reference works: DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —INZER BYERS

GRUENBERG, Sidonie Matzner Born 10 June 1881, Vienna, Austria; died 11 March 1974, New York, New York Daughter of Idore and Augusta Bassechés Matzner; married Benjamin C. Gruenberg, 1903 The oldest of four girls and two boys, Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg was raised in a large family villa outside Vienna. In 1895, her father brought the family to New York, where they began a lifelong association with Felix Adler’s Ethical Culture Society, a ‘‘religious society, imbued with the spirit of religion but without the dogmas.’’ After studying at the Ethical Culture schools, Gruenberg took graduate courses at Teachers College, Columbia University. In 1907 she began her association with the Federation of Child Study, a group of Ethical Culture women encouraged by Felix Adler to study new ideas in child development. In 1924, the federation expanded and became the Child Study Association of

America; Gruenberg was named director, a post she held until her retirement in 1950. She taught parent education at Teachers College and New York University between 1928 and 1936. In her first book, Your Child Today and Tomorrow (1913), Gruenberg exhibited her talent for synthesizing the best sources of child development information and translating them into language parents could understand and trust. The combination of conventional wisdom and a willingness to experiment with new ideas which characterizes this book is also representative of Gruenberg’s style throughout her work. Sons and Daughters (1916), in a similar format, addressed itself to the training of older boys and girls. Here she drew from innovative psychological theories that isolated adolescence as a unique stage of development. We, the Parents (1939), written in the shadow of World War II, won the Parents’ Magazine award in 1940 as the outstanding publication of that year. In addition to advice on child rearing, an important theme of this book and throughout her work is the ambivalence inherent in women on the subject of work vs. family. Gruenberg recognizes the complex needs of modern women and warns mothers to prepare for a number of life stages. ‘‘We have to choose not once, but many times and at each stage with the same degree of uncertainty.’’ She felt women need no longer be martyrs to their families and suggested ‘‘marriage does not necessarily entail parenthood,’’ but she also discussed a vast range of possibilities for working out a balance between parenting and personal growth. Gruenberg and her daughter, Hilda Krech, continue examining the problem of women’s choices in The Many Lives of Modern Women (1952). They confront the intellectual and physical isolation of modern housewives and the conflicts involved in being educated but unable to pursue a career. Gruenberg’s own ambivalence is expressed in a picture of women both as victims of conflicting social expectations and yet personally responsible for finding their own ‘‘appropriate’’ solution. Gruenberg and her biologist husband coauthored The Wonderful Story of How You Were Born (1952), a masterful book of sex education for children. It is told in story form with illustrations, explaining not only the entire reproduction process but also the unique complex of emotions parents feel toward the birth of their child. The book went through several printings; it was revised in 1970 and translated into several languages. Her major editorial work, climaxing years of parent education work, is The Encyclopedia of Child Care and Guidance (1954). She was able to draw together in this 1,000-page compendium a massive quantity of facts and ideas on child rearing, by such experts as Margaret Mead and Benjamin Spock. Gruenberg also edited several anthologies of children’s stories. Gruenberg’s writing represents a social history of the first half of the 20th century, in that it reflects the evolution of attitudes and conventions toward the child, the family, and women. Further, the whole of her work chronicles child development theories

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as they were interpreted and popularized in journals and magazines. Gruenberg had an intuitive ability to absorb changes and ideas and was skilled at communicating in clear, persuasive language, although she was less successful when attempting a personal or philosophical analysis. While some of her writing has become outdated, the children’s anthologies, many of the child rearing topics, and her insights into family relations remain contemporary and instructive.

OTHER WORKS: Our Children: A Handbook for Parents (edited by Gruenberg, with D. C. Fisher, 1932). Parents, Children, and Money (with B. C. Gruenberg, 1933). Parents’ Questions (edited by Gruenberg, 1936; revised edition, 1947). The Use of Radio in Parent Education (1939). The Family in a World at War (edited by Gruenberg, 1942). Favorite Stories Old and New (edited by Gruenberg, 1942; revised edition, 1955). More Favorite Stories Old and New (edited by Gruenberg, 1948; revised 1960). Your Child and You (1950). Our Children Today: A Guide to Their Needs (edited by Gruenberg, with the CSAA, 1952). Children for the Childless (with B. C. Gruenberg, 1954). Let’s Read a Story (edited by Gruenberg, 1957). Guiding Your Child from Five to Twelve (1958). Parent’s Guide to Everyday Problems of Boys and Girls (1958). Let’s Read More Stories (edited by Gruenberg, 1960). The Wonderful Story of You (with B. C. Gruenberg, 1960). Let’s Hear a Story (edited by Gruenberg, 1961). Stories for Little Girls and Little Boys (edited by Gruenberg, 1961). All Kinds of Courage (edited by Gruenberg, 1962). Your Child and Money (Public Affairs Pamphlet #370, 1965). The papers of Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg are at the Library of Congress, Manuscript Division in Washington, D.C.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Wollons, R. L., ‘‘Educating Mothers: Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg and the Child Study Association of America, 1881-1929’’ (dissertation, 1983). Reference works: CA (1975). CB (May 1940). Other references: Child Study Magazine (Spring 1950, Fall 1956). NYT (9 June 1962, 13 March 1974). —ROBERTA WOLLONS

GRUMBACH, Doris Born 12 July 1918, New York, New York Daughter of Leonard W. and Helen Oppenheimer Isaac; married Leonard Grumbach, 1941 (divorced); children: Barbara, Jane Doris Grumbach, retired professor of literature at the American University in Washington, D.C., has written several novels, literary biography, numerous critical articles, and hundreds of book reviews for the New York Times Book Review, Commonweal, New Republic, America, and Saturday Review.

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The characters in the academic (The Spoil of the Flowers, 1962; The Short Throat, the Tender Mouth, 1964) and semiacademic (Chamber Music, 1979) settings of Grumbach’s novels are a dimension of her concern with the mind at work, for these are often men and women who for all their intelligence and learning, reflect but gain little pleasure from reflection, think but cannot act effectively on their thoughts, and create but cannot share. The rivalries in The Spoil of the Flowers, the frustrated lives in The Short Throat, the Tender Mouth, and the unhappy marriages in Chamber Music all speak to the fragmentation characterizing the lives of many of Grumbach’s characters. In Chamber Music, one finds composers who have no desire to share with their wives ‘‘the old talk, the old making of music together, four hands at the same keyboard, four hands and two mouths and our whole beings engaged in the same loving act.’’ Only in the extraordinary loving relationship of Caroline and Anna, sketched so economically and sensitively in this introspective novel, does the reader find an integrated, unified relationship. Yet even this relationship is continually in the process of being reshaped and redrawn by Caroline. At the work’s conclusion, she notes, ‘‘I think the historian’s view always superimposes itself upon history.’’ Asked to write the history of her famous composer husband, Caroline ‘‘managed to produce merely a sketch of the chamber of one heart’’ and continues to live only because her memory of Anna has ‘‘grown, reached up, covered, and supported the rest of [her] life.’’ Grumbach’s exposure to socialism as a student surfaces both in The Short Throat, the Tender Mouth and in a sensitive essay on McCarthyism, and her memory of a nun in an undergraduate class appears as a vignette in a novel and as a touchstone in an essay on her own conversion to Catholicism. This is not to imply Grumbach is primarily a biographically inspired writer. Rather, it is to say her works, as diverse as they appear to be, are of one piece and reflect upon each other in terms of themes and techniques. One watches Grumbach as an essayist explore the relationship of the experience to the written word, as a biographer study the bond between the life and the work of Mary McCarthy (a woman who, like herself, was also a novelist and outstanding critic), as a novelist show awareness of the reviewer, and as a literary critic analyze the works of others. Grumbach’s literary concerns initially seem unrelated—the Catholic layperson’s role in the Church, the academician’s scrutiny of the teaching profession and the Modern Language Association, the feminist’s consideration of women writers, the biographer’s perspective on her subject—but the primary and unifying thrust behind all of Grumbach’s work is that of reflection. An experience is considered and transformed in the retelling so that a continual sense of evaluation and reevaluation informs Grumbach’s fiction as well as her nonfiction. Grumbach’s roles gather their shape from her varying responses to the printed word, as teacher, critic, reviewer, essayist, and novelist, and it is possible to see in her literary production her own contention that a good teacher lets students see her mind in


the process of grappling with an idea. In ‘‘The Art of Teaching: Some Minor Heresies,’’ Grumbach notes that ‘‘the student sees that learning is a continuous process, not a matter of authority or imposition of views’’ (Catholic World, Oct. 1964). In the controlled, evocative language and characterization of Chamber Music, Grumbach best illustrates the active, reflective spirit that characterizes her own literary production. Grumbach’s active, reflective spirit is especially obvious in Coming into the Endzone (1991), a memoir and a reflection on the seventieth year of her life. ‘‘Growing old means abandoning the rituals of one’s life, not hardening into them as some people think,’’ she writes. And so, in the summer of 1989, the year following her seventieth birthday, Grumbach and her longtime companion, Sybil Pike, moved from Washington, D.C., to Sargentville, Maine. Her active mind is not hardened against new ideas. The computer provides both assistance and simile: ‘‘My memory is diminished, like a hard disk that suddenly fails to deliver. . . . I operate with floppy intelligence.’’ She continues to believe that to help students learn, you ‘‘hold their coats while they go at it.’’ Grumbach collects, she says, metaphors for death—caged lions, a dead goldfish. Young friends are dying of AIDS, older ones are becoming frail. She is starting a new life, this time on the ocean, much as she and Sybil Pike did in 1972 when they moved to Washington to start their life together. Reflecting the freedom of form that memory enables, the book moves through sadness and loss to affirmation in a voice that is distinctively Grumbach’s own. During the 1980s, Grumbach published three novels. The Missing Person (1981) traces, through second-person references, the life of Franny Fuller, a movie queen much in the Jean Harlow and Marilyn Monroe molds. Although reviewers frequently assume that the subject is Monroe, Grumbach has said, ‘‘I really was not writing about Marilyn Monroe, as everyone assumed, but simply about someone who might have been almost anyone. I erred in staying too closely to the biographical facts.’’ The missing person is a Hollywood star, manipulated, used, abused, superficial, and enormously beautiful. We do not hear her speak, but see her only through narrators, just as we see movie stars only through their pictures; she is a prototype for all people who are missing, especially to themselves. The Ladies (1984) fictionalizes historical figures. Two Irish-born women, Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, move to a small Welsh village so they can live as they wish to, as a married couple, rather than as society wishes them to. The women become renowned for their independence, and their visitors include such people as William Wordsworth, who dedicated a poem to them, Edmund Burke, and Walter Scott. Lonely, they are forbidden by Eleanor’s father to step foot inside Ireland again; they farm their land, make friends with and enemies among the local townfolk, become sick, aged, and die. Their marriage has all the incumbent difficulties and pleasures. Eleanor, tutored and

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bright, teaches the shy, unlettered Sarah; as Eleanor becomes crotchety and loses her sight, Sarah is increasingly in charge. While some critics argue that the novel is an admirable departure from more pessimistic lesbian novels, others see it as predetermined, placing joy where it may not have existed. The Magician’s Girl (1987) tells of three college roommates in the 1940s. The title is taken from a line by Sylvia Plath: ‘‘I am the magician’s girl who does not flinch.’’ Grumbach is acutely aware of the pains endured unflinchingly by young women: Maud, poor and unattractive, Minna, middle class and overprotected but haunted by fears, and Liz, whose parents were Communist sympathizers, scoffing at the world outside their apartment. This is the first direct use of autobiographical material in Grumbach’s work. Liz, the photographer who does not flinch, who survives, has Grumbach’s socialist, Jewish, New York childhood. She is the survivor, recording the world through her lens. In addition to her work as a novelist, Grumbach has had a distinguished career as a teacher and a critic. In 1972 she became literary editor for the New Republic, a position that occasioned her move to Washington from upstate New York where she had taught at the College of St. Rose. After two ‘‘magical’’ years at the New Republic, she returned to teaching, becoming professor of literature at the American University. Grumbach retired from teaching in 1984, but remained very active as a reviewer for both print and radio. From 1982 to 1990, her distinctive voice and carefully considered reflections on books were familiar to listeners of National Public Radio. Grumbach has completed a second volume of memoirs, Extra Innings, published in 1993. Extra Innings: A Memoir has been said to be more of a ‘‘hodgepodge’’ than Endzone, but whatever it is, it is the recollections of a woman who has lived her long and speckled life through words. Fifty Days of Solitude (1994) explores what Grumbach did when left alone while her companion went on a book-buying trip—she listened to music, sat in silence, and looked inside herself, what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls the ‘‘inscape, the deep meandering landscape of an interior life.’’ Again in Life in a Day (1996), she writes introspectively about solitude and her gratitude for everyday, common things, as the reader follows her through a day in her seventyseven-year-old life. The Book of Knowledge (1995) takes a turn to study four central characters, teens during the stock market crash of 1929, and follows them through to adulthood. The book deals head-on with sexuality issues, which some critics have attacked, but others feel followed closely the tragedy of that generation. Grumbach’s The Presence of Absence: On Prayers and Epiphany (1998) explores a subject many explore in their later years: God. Grumbach specifically reflects on her ongoing search for God, sparked by a revelation that occurred over 50 years ago. She delves into the works of writers and philosophers—such as Simon Weil, Thomas Merton, and Kathy Norris—as she does in her other works, to make sense of her thoughts. She is waiting for God to return to her life, to come back to her spiritually.

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OTHER WORKS: The Company She Kept: The Fiction of Mary McCarthy (1967).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Arnold, K., The Presence of Absence: On Prayers and Epiphany (Mar. 1999). Reference works: CAAS (1985). CA (online, 1999). CANR (1983). CLC (1982; 1991). Gay & Lesbian Literature (1994). Other references: Key Reporter (Autumn 1991). WRB (Dec. 1991). —SUSAN CLARK, UPDATED BY JANET M. BEYER AND DEVRA M. SLADICS

GUERNSEY, Clara F(lorida) Born 1 October 1836, Pittsford, New York; died 20 June 1893, Rochester, New York Daughter of James T. and Electa Guernsey Clara F. Guernsey, sister of Lucy Ellen Guernsey, lived all her life in the Rochester area of upstate New York. Her father was well known in the area as a friend of the Seneca, including chiefs Red Jacket and Corn Planter. When the Senecas traveled east from their homes, they would often spend the night at the Guernsey place in Pittsford. Guernsey followed her father in befriending the Senecas, and she is remembered for organizing wagonloads of food to be taken to the reservation during a period of famine. She also wrote many articles for periodicals about the Senecas and was eventually adopted as a member of the tribe. Guernsey wrote initially for periodicals. Her first publication was in Gleason’s Pictorial of 1850, and she was later a contributor to the Atlantic, Lippincott’s, and Cosmopolitan. Her book-length publications include collections of fairytales (Christmas Greens, 1865; The Merman and the Figure Head, 1871), domestic fictions (Aunt Priscilla’s Story, 1867; Elmira’s Ambitions, 1875), and adventure stories (The Silver Rifle, 1871; The Shawnee Prisoner, 1877). All of the aforementioned are for children and almost all of them were published by the American Sunday School Union. One tends to think of American Sunday School Union publications as pamphlets, but Guernsey’s form is most often the novel, and her books usually run to about 200 pages. The defining characteristic of ASSU publications, whether short or long, is the turning of the story so that it illustrates a clearly enunciated spiritual principle, i.e., they are clearly didactic. Elmira’s Ambitions is representative of both Guernsey’s strengths and her weaknesses in this form. It is primarily a story about spiritual pride. Elmira, about fifteen, has learned at school to think of herself as ‘‘superior’’ and as ‘‘called’’ to a life of

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philanthropy. She tries to train her younger sister by bullying her to give up sewing for her dolls and to take up sewing for the poor, though of course Elmira herself does not sew. She tries to entertain and comfort their invalid mother by carrying on ‘‘intellectual’’ conversation, but succeeds only in giving her mother a lecture and a headache. Finally, she adopts a child whose mother has just died, but finds herself incapable of managing either its care or education. It is not until her youthful foolishness allows the child’s ne’er-do-well father to rob a house and kidnap the child that Elmira realizes her limitations and sees she must learn before she can teach. The major weakness of Elmira’s Ambitions is that it is too long, rambling, and repetitious for the slight plot. Every episode makes the same point about Elmira’s pride, so that the theme is much too mechanically tacked onto the action. The strengths of the novel are present in the cleverly sketched supporting characters—the younger sister, the grandmother, the adopted child and her mother—and in the natural-sounding dialogue, Guernsey’s most effective means of creating character. Clearly didactic in purpose and rather limited in their literary achievement, Guernsey’s novels are perhaps most important as reflections of the values and attitudes the American Sunday School Union and its supporters wished to inculcate in American children in the latter years of the 19th century. OTHER WORKS: The Drifting Boat (1860). Lucy and Her Friends (1865). The Silver Cup (1865). Berty’s Visit (1867). Chip and Kitty (1867). The Coveted Bonnet (1867). The Hem-Stitched Handkerchief (1867). Mark’s Composition (1867). Stingy Lewis (1867). The Stone House (1867). The Sunday School Picnic (1867). Theodora’s Trouble (1867). Dulcie’s Lonesome Night (1868). Out of the Orphan Asylum (1869). Perverse Pussy (1869). Out in the Storm (1870). Scrub Hollow Sunday School (1870). Alice Fenton (1871). Boys of Eaglewood (1872). The Mallory Girls (1875). A Spirit in Prison (1875). Washington and SeventySix (with L. E. Guernsey, 1876). Betsey’s Bedquilt (1878). Sibyl and the Sapphires (1879). The Trying Child (1886). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: NCAB. Other references: Rochester Democrat (21 June 1893). Rochester Union Advertiser (22 June 1893). —KATHARYN F. CRABBE

GUERNSEY, Lucy Ellen Born 12 August 1826, Pittsford, New York; died 3 November 1899, Rochester, New York Daughter of James T. and Electa Guernsey Lucy Ellen Guernsey was the fifth daughter of a Rochesterarea businessman and philanthropist and the sister of Clara


Florida Guernsey. Her father’s philanthropic bent was reflected in Guernsey, who was an active member of the Episcopal church and who for 11 years (1888-99) edited a religious publication, the Parish Visitor, intended for distribution in prisons, homes, and hospitals. In the 30 years that were her most productive (1855-85), Guernsey wrote more than 60 books, most of them published by the American Sunday School Union (ASSU). Often the ASSU publications were no longer than pamphlets, but Guernsey’s were juvenile novels, frequently running to more than 200 pages. The speed with which she wrote took its toll on her work; most of her novels are loosely plotted at best. However, she does have a good ear for natural-sounding dialogue, and her novel The Chevalier’s Daughter (1880) was praised in the Saturday Review for its accurate portrayal of the manners and customs of the people. Tabby’s Travels (1858) provides a good example of Guernsey’s ability to combine accurate observation and didacticism. Tabby is a ‘‘heedless and disobedient’’ kitten who thinks she is mistreated, although in fact she is only spoiled. She runs away from home and, as she travels from house to house and from family to family, she sees her own faults reflected in the people about her. Through Tabby, the child reader learns the value of being good-natured, hard-working, self-respecting, and obedient. What makes the book interesting and almost overcomes its didactic spirit and episodic plot is Guernsey’s eye for the physical behavior of cats. Most of Guernsey’s novels are best described as domestic fictions—stories about contemporary young people and their families and the problems of reaching responsible maturity. The ASSU novels characteristically conclude with an apt biblical quotation to reinforce the moral point. Guernsey also wrote, however, many historical fictions, including the multivolume ‘‘Stanton Corbet Chronicles.’’ Like the ASSU novels, the historical fictions are episodic, but they are redeemed to some extent by a richness in subject and character reminiscent of Sir Walter Scott. In The Foster-Sisters (1882), two English girls, raised in a French convent, return to a Church of England household just in time to meet Charles Wesley and become Methodists. At their ancestral home they discover that their relatives, although English, are avid Jacobites, and they escape harm and forced marriages by fleeing to the Scots housekeeper, a Presbyterian. Religion is the most important theme, but the successful feature of the book is the characterization, especially of the narrator, Lucy Corbet, who is at once devout, witty, and capable of being acerbic. After quoting St. Ignatius on the decay of the physical body (‘‘You will become that for which there is no name in any language!’’), Lucy Corbet observes in a footnote: ‘‘Bossuet has the same phrase. I don’t know who stole it.’’ A prolific writer, Guernsey is most distinguished by her close observations of people and animals, her natural dialogue, and her wit. Her books are marred, however, by the looseness of the plots. Yet especially in those novels published by ASSU, she clearly

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reflects the values and attitudes a significant segment of the community wished to inculcate in children of the time.

OTHER WORKS: Irish Amy (1854). Duty and Inclination (1856). Ready Work for Willing Hands (1856). The Sign of the Cross (1856). Sophie Kennedy’s Experience (1856). Upward and Onward (1856). Jenny and the Insects (1857). Kitty Maynard (1857). Meat-eaters, with Some Account of Their Haunts and Habits (1858). The Christmas Earnings (1859). Straight Forward (1859). Jenny and the Birds (1860). The Straight Path (1860). The Blue Socks (1862). The Tattler (1863). Charlie (1866). Milly (1866). Abbey (1867). Lolla (1867). Nelly (1867). Opposite Neighbors (1867). The Twin Roses (1868). Cousin Deborah’s Story (1869). Lady Lucy’s Secret (1869). Mabel (1869). Winifred (1869). The Child’s Treasure (1870). The School Girl’s Treasury (1870). The Dark Night (1871). Ethel’s Trial in Becoming a Missionary (1871). The Fairchilds (1871). The Langham Revels (1871). Only in Fun (1871). Lady Betty’s Governess (1872). On the Mountain (1872). Percy’s Holidays (1872). The Red Plant (1872). The Sunday School Exhibition (1872). Claribel (1873). Rhode’s Education (1873). The Tame Turtle (1873). Lady Rosamond’s Book (1874). Benny the Beaver, and Other Stories (1875). Grandmother Brown’s School Days (1875). The Heiress of McGregor (1875). School Days in 1800 (1875). Guy Falconer (1876). Washington and Seventy-six (with C. F. Guernsey, 1876). The Story of a Hessian (1877). Cub’s Apple (1878). The Mission Box (1879). No Talent (1880). The Old Stanfield House (1880). Phil’s Pansies (1880). Loveday’s History (1885). Oldham (1885). Through Unknown Ways (1886). A Lent in Earnest (1889). The Soldiers of Christ (1889). The Hidden Treasure (1890).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: NCAB. Other references: Rochester Democrat (4 Nov. 1899). Rochester Union Advertiser (4 Nov. 1899). Parish Visitor (Dec. 1899). —KATHARYN F. CRABBE

GUINEY, Louise Imogen Born 7 January 1861, Boston, Massachusetts; died 2 November 1920, Chipping Camden, England Also wrote under: Roger Holden, P.O.L. Daughter of Robert P. and Janet Doyle Guiney An Irish Roman Catholic and daughter of a Civil War general, Louise Imogen Guiney was something of a literary novelty in late 19th-century Boston, yet she was warmly received into the by then well-established literary circle of Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett. Fields eventually bequeathed a large portion of her estate to Guiney

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Guiney’s health was never excellent; she had a hearing impairment which grew steadily more severe. She collapsed twice from overwork, once in 1896 and again in 1897. These breakdowns were partially precipitated by the hostile reception she received after her appointment as postmistress of Auburndale, Massachusetts, in 1894. A combination of anti-Irish, antiCatholic, and antifemale sentiment led local citizens to organize a boycott to force her resignation. Later she was employed in the Catalogue Room of the Boston Public Library. Guiney emigrated to England in 1901 and devoted her later years to scholarly research at Oxford. At the same time, she moved toward a more reclusive lifestyle, as her religious dedication deepened. Her closest friends included Fred Holland Day, with whom she uncovered some important Keats material, Grace Denslow, and Alice Brown, with whom she traveled abroad. Brown dedicated her The Road to Castaly (1896) to Guiney and wrote her biography. They also collaborated on a book on Robert Louis Stevenson (1896). Guiney published her first lyrics under pseudonyms (‘‘P.O.L.’’ and ‘‘Roger Holden’’) in 1880. Her first collection of poems, Songs at the Start, appeared in 1884; and her first collection of essays, Goose-Quill Papers, in 1885. She considered A Roadside Harp (1893) her best poetical effort, while critics estimate Patrins: A Collection of Essays (1897) to include her most important critical work. Especially significant are the essays ‘‘On the Rapid versus the Harmless Scholar’’ and ‘‘Wilfull Sadness in Literature,’’ in which she rejects Arnoldian ‘‘disinterestedness’’ as a proper critical attitude. Her collected lyrics, Happy Endings, were published in 1909 and reissued in 1927. Guiney was also a dedicated biographer and scholar. Robert Emmet (1904) is about an Irish nationalist, and Blessed Edmund Campion (1908) is about an English Jesuit martyr. She also put forth several important critical editions of relatively minor figures, such as Katherine Philips, ‘‘The Matchless Orinda’’ (1904). One volume of her magnum opus of scholarship, an anthology of Catholic poets from Thomas More to Alexander Pope, entitled Recusant Poets, was published posthumously in 1938. Guiney favored the cavalier rather than the puritan spirit; her letters suggest a lively, engaged personality. In her works, she was attracted to flamboyant gypsy-like women such as Carmen. In 1896 she wrote a critical preface to Merimée’s short story, and ‘‘Martha Hilton,’’ a vivacious Cinderella figure drawn from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, history, was Guiney’s contribution to Three Heroines of New England Romance (1896), which also included sketches by Harriett Prescott Spofford and Alice Brown. Some consider that Guiney’s unpublished letters contain her finest writing. Two volumes of her letters were published in 1926. Yet even among her published works the consensus is that her religious lyrics are among the finest American contributions to the genre, and that her criticism contains much that is still of value.

OTHER WORKS: Brownies and Bogles (1887). Monsieur Henri: A Footnote to French History (1892). A Little English Gallery

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(1894). Lover’s Saint Ruth’s, and Three Other Tales (1895). Robert Louis Stevenson (with A. Brown, 1896). England and Yesterday (1898). The Martyr’s Idyl, and Shorter Poems (1900). Hurrell Fronde (1904). Letters (2 vols., 1926). Many of Louise Imogen Guiney’s unpublished letters are housed at the Dinand Library of Holy Cross College, Worcester, Massachusetts, and at the Library of Congress.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Adorita, Sister M., Soul Ordained to Fail: Louise I. Guiney, 1861-1920 (1962). Brown, A., Louise I. Guiney (1921). Fairbanks, H. G., Louise I. Guiney: Laureate of the Lost (1973). Guiney, G. C., Letters of Louise I. Guiney (1926). Tenison, E. M., Louise I. Guiney; Her Life and Works (1923). Reference works: AW. DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB. TCA, TCAS. —JOSEPHINE DONOVAN

GULLIVER, Julia Henrietta Born 30 July 1856, Norwich, Connecticut; died 25 July 1940, Eustis, Florida Daughter of John P. and Frances W. Curtis Gulliver A member of the first graduating class of Smith College in 1879, Julia Gulliver received her Ph.D. from Smith in 1888. Two years later she was appointed head of the department of philosophy and biblical literature at Rockford Female Seminary, predecessor of Rockford College, in Rockford, Illinois. In 1892 and 1893, by special permission because she was a woman, she studied under the noted Wilhelm Wundt at the University of Leipzig; in 1898 her translation of Part I of his Ethics was published. From 1902 to 1919 she served as president of Rockford College, and during her tenure helped to shape the course of American women’s education by creating a curriculum that fused liberal studies with a program of home economics, which Gulliver saw not as limiting women to the home but as enabling them to work for the health and well-being of the entire society. Gulliver’s essay ‘‘The Substitutes for Christianity Proposed by Comte and Spencer’’ (New Englander, 1884) represents some of the work done in fulfillment of her doctorate. In it she defends Christianity against the cosmic theism of Herbert Spencer and the positivism of Auguste Comte by using a test that Spencer himself had proposed, that progress is the change from a lower level of differentiation and integration to a higher one. In Gulliver’s view, positivism fails because by finding divinity in the collective existence of humanity it offers a unity without difference. Spencer’s cosmic theism, on the other hand, offers difference without unity, since no true union seems possible between the human person and an impersonal unknowable Deity. Christianity alone exhibits the


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progress Spencer outlines, and it brings to perfection what is good in positivism and cosmism: the love of neighbor and the rejection of anthropomorphism. Gulliver’s commitment to Christian principles characterizes all her writings, and hers was a religion that went far beyond mere piety. Religious maxims often became metaphors of current social issues, as when she applied the notion that ‘‘no man liveth unto himself and no man dieth unto himself’’ to the issue of infectious diseases, and when she expressed hope that some day the work of men and women would be ‘‘like the seamless cloak of Jesus.’’ She saw the incarnation as continuing through human action, and exhorted women to take an active role in social reform, since ‘‘God himself fails of fulfillment unless you fulfill your destiny.’’ In praising the economic, civic, and legislative advances wrought by American women, she rejoiced at ‘‘how grandly. . .the transcendent God of the 18th and even of the 19th century [has] become the immanent God of the 20th century through these devoted efforts of the women of our country!’’ Gulliver’s educational philosophy rested on a conviction that the human personality is an organic whole, and that therefore the liberal arts should not be isolated from practical or vocational courses. She felt that the forte of Midwestern women is for executive achievement, and she departed from the practice in eastern women’s colleges of emphasizing ‘‘cultural subjects’’ exclusively, believing that women should not so much ‘‘be accomplished’’ as ‘‘be able to accomplish.’’ A number of Gulliver’s essays in psychology, philosophy, and literature were published in the New Englander, the Andover Review, the Philosophical Review, and New World. In her book Studies in Democracy: The Essence of Democracy, the Efficiency of Democracy, American Women’s Contribution to Democracy (1917), consisting of three addresses given on various occasions, Gulliver argues democracy is not founded on equality in the sense of uniformity but on the opportunity of each individual to reach his or her full potential; the great democratic ideal is ‘‘that everyone should have the chance he is capable of availing himself of.’’ In discussing women’s contribution to democracy, Gulliver points out the ways in which women have incarnated the spirit of democracy and shaped the social conscience of America. Gulliver’s most lasting contribution is no doubt her pioneering work in women’s education. While insisting that the role of ‘‘homemaking’’ must be reinterpreted to embrace the welfare of the entire society, she at the same time helped provide the means by which women could prepare for such a role. She thus incorporated in herself that which she always advocated, the union of the theoretical and the practical. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: NAW (1971). Other references: American Political Science Review (May 1917). Boston Transcript (29 May 1917). Springfield Republican (29 July 1917). —HELENE DWYER POLAND

GUY, Rosa Born 1 September 1925, Trinidad, West Indies Daughter of Henry and Audrey Gonzales Cuthbert; married Warner Guy, 1941; children: Warner A powerful writer who makes delight out of difficulties in life, Rosa Guy has written numerous insightful children’s books. She is a native of Trinidad who left the island as a child with her sister to join their parents in Harlem. The adjustment from island life to city life was difficult for them. Although black and of African Caribbean culture, Guy found herself set apart by black and white children because of her West Indian dialect and customs. When her mother became ill shortly after her arrival, Guy was sent to the Bronx to stay with cousins. Here she was introduced to Marcus Garvey’s fervent views extolling the dignity of all blacks and his belief in black nationalism, themes that proved to be major forces stimulating Guy intellectually and politically. The premature deaths of their parents left Guy and her sister orphans. Experiences in a series of institutions and foster homes intensified her feeling of being an outsider. By fourteen Guy had dropped out of school and had become a factory worker. At sixteen she married Warner Guy. In searching for ways to enrich her life and to express her creativity, Guy found herself drawn to the American Negro Theater, then to the Committee for the Negro in the Arts. Experiences with the latter group led Guy to write and to become a cofounder of the Harlem Writers Guild. Affiliation with the guild deepened Guy’s commitment to black affairs by giving her the opportunity to meet and work with influential members of the community. Guy’s response to the waste of bright minds being ‘‘channeled into a life of crime and self-destruction by the crushing confinement of prejudice and poverty’’ inspired her first book, Bird at My Window (1966). Then, wanting to know how the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the turmoil of the 1960s affected Southern black children, Guy collected taped interviews and essays that became Children of Longing (1971). This work, cited as bringing together Guy’s activism and writing interests, advanced her writing skills to a new level. Guy’s theme of trying to find one’s place in a hostile environment while struggling for self-identity and self-affirmation arises from her early childhood and adolescent experiences. Her forte is her compassionate ability to portray the adversity ghetto children face. In her acclaimed trilogy The Friends (1973), Ruby (1976), and Edith Jackson (1978), Guy insightfully presents the lives of three adolescents as they mature fighting the odds in a deteriorating community. The Disappearance (1979), which won Guy the American Library Association award for best book for young adults, and its

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sequels, New Guys Around the Block (1983) and And I Heard a Bird Sing (1987), complete a second trilogy, each with a mystery involved. The protagonist, Imamu Jones, is a young man determined to vindicate himself and escape the hopelessness of a now-corrupt Harlem.

are regularly published in paperback or reprinted. Her acute sensitivity to issues faced by inner-city children has made her a timeless and successful young-adult author who gives hope and books to a readership too frequently overlooked.

In her first picture book, Guy translated the Senegalese folktale Mother Crocodile (1981), successfully dipping into the richness of African folklore. She has also written two juvenile books, Paris, Pee Wee, and Big Dog (1985) and The Ups and Downs of Carl Davis III (1979), which confirm the need for parental acceptance.

OTHER WORKS: Venetian Blinds (1954). Mirror of Her Own (1981). A Measure of Time (1983). Billy the Great (1991). The Music of Summer (1992).

Guy’s tightest and most poignant story, however, is one written for a general readership, My Love, My Love; or, The Pheasant Girl: A Fable (1985). In this short tale, Guy expresses all the mystique of her West Indian heritage while carefully showing the impenetrable barriers of color and caste. This book was the basis for a musical by Lynn Ahrens, Once on This Island, which opened in New York in 1990. Guy’s ventures into African tradition, which flow with a special warmth and seamlessness, add a new depth and dimension to her writing. In 1999 the musical was performed at the Cab Calloway School of Performing Arts in Wilmington, Delaware, as a tribute to the legendary entertainer.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Norris, J., Presenting Rosa Guy (1988). Reference Works: Black American Fiction: A Biography (1978). Black American Writers Past and Present (1975). Black Writers 2. CA 17-20R. CANR 14, 34. Children’s Literature Review (1999). CLC (1983). DLB 33. Feminist Companion (1990). SATA 14, 62. Other references: Essence (Oct. 1979). Horn Book (Mar./ Apr. 1985). NYTM (16 Apr. 1972). Top of the News (Winter 1983).

Guy published The Sun, the Sea, a Touch of the Wind (1995) in the year of her seventieth birthday, and most of her early books

—SANDRA RAY AND ELIZABETH COONROD MARTINEZ

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HACKER, Marilyn Born 27 November 1942, New York, New York Daughter of Albert and Hilda Rosengarten Hacker; married Samuel R. Delany, 1961 (divorced); life partner, Karyn J. London; children: one daughter Marilyn Hacker attended the Bronx High School of Science, New York University, and the Art Students League in New York City. She has taught for a short time, sorted mail at a post office, and was an antiquarian bookseller in London for four years. Two interests, however, have dominated: editing and writing poetry. Hacker has edited paperback novels, a men’s magazine, engineering trade journals, and a poetry magazine. At present she is one of the editors of the Little Magazine. She and her husband, a noted science fiction writer from whom she is divorced, founded and coedited Quark, a speculative fiction quarterly. She has one daughter. She has published in numerous literary journals, including Poetry, Poetry Northwest and the American Poetry Review. Her first collection of poetry, Presentation Piece (1974), was chosen as the 1973 Lamont Poetry Selection and was the winner of the 1975 National Book Award. Most recently, Hacker has published in Conditions and Chrysalis, both feminist publications, affirming her strong feminist commitment. Presentation Piece, as the awards indicate, is an impressive collection of poetry. Hacker’s work is characterized by a strong command of traditional forms (the villanelle, the sestina, and the sonnet, among others); by an equally strong control of rhetoric, from the very formal to the most colloquial; and by a total commitment to emotional accuracy, whether rendered by imagistic detail or through the intensity of rhetoric or tone. Presentation Piece is a book of discoveries that probes many kinds of relationships—between persons and times or places, between private and public selves, between art and life. Hacker’s second collection, Separations (1976), is defined by its title: it is largely about learning to cope with the many kinds of distances one must endure. The first long sequence, ‘‘The Geographer,’’ presents the intense reactions of the speaker to the death of someone very close. Though there are moments of joy and tenderness in this collection, the strongest impressions are left by the poems chronicling the growing separation between the

speaker and her lover, in the section titled ‘‘The Last Time’’ and in the final sequence of sonnets from which the book takes its title. Hacker’s growing feminism is apparent in both works, though the personal commitment never overwhelms her art. The tone changes distinctly in her second collection, in ‘‘After Catullus,’’ and in ‘‘Two Farewells’’: ‘‘‘Try to turn / boys into men,’ Circe said, / ‘and they behave like pigs.’’’ The feminist statement is even more clear, however, in ‘‘The Regent’s Park Sequence,’’ a sonnet sequence published in the American Poetry Review (1976). Exploring again the pain of separation and of ‘‘women’s own solitude,’’ the persona tells us, in the coda: ‘‘It was not my mother or my daughter / who did me in. Women have been betrayed / by history, which ignores us, which we made / like anyone, with work and words, slaughter / and silver.’’ In an important article discussing recent work by younger American poets, Stanley Plumly begins with Hacker’s work, using her as an example of those poets who write out of an emotional imperative rather than from emblematic commitment. To Plumly and others, Hacker had become one of the major voices in contemporary American poetry. Hacker’s Taking Notice (1980) continues the formal and thematic concerns of her earlier work. Utilizing various traditional forms, particularly the sonnet sequence, and often using a colloquial diction, Hacker investigates private relationships of love, the semiprivate relationship of mother and daughter, and the public relationships among women in society. In this book Hacker begins clearly to articulate a lesbian eroticism that becomes an increasingly important part of her later works. Hacker’s fourth collection, Assumptions (1985), again considers questions of family, love, sexuality, and the place of a woman among other women in the world. The section ‘‘Inheritances’’ deals specifically with the poet’s history and her legacy to her daughter and from her mother, as well as her daughter’s inheritance from her father’s family. ‘‘Open Windows’’ is a sequence of love sonnets to other women. The book ends with ‘‘Ballad of Ladies Lost and Found,’’ which invokes a repressed history of women, recalling the losses and erasure of women ranging from ‘‘the gym teacher, the math department head’’ to such important writers as H. D. [Hilda Doolittle] and Zola Neale Hurston. Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (1986, reprinted 1995) is a verse novel describing a love affair between two women. This sonnet sequence is rooted in the mundane events of life—eating, drinking, shopping—as transformed by romantic longing and anxiety. Going Back to the River (1990), a largely autobiographical collection of poems, traces the poet’s departure from the U.S. and her return to confront her often difficult past and present as an American. This journey is perhaps best epitomized

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by the first poem, ‘‘Two Cities,’’ where for the first three sections the poet in Paris is ‘‘the inventor / of my own life, / an old plane tree in new leaf, / a young woman almost forty-five.’’ In the final section, the poet and her daughter sit in a New York restaurant watching a scene of seemingly random street violence, a cry of despair addressed to nobody in particular. Hacker pays tribute to French writer Malraux through her translations of his poems in Edge: Contemporary French Poetry in Translation (1996). She compiled the pieces from various sources and provides the French and English phrasing. Hacker has been recognized often for her works. Winter Numbers: Poems (1994) won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 1995. She was the fifth woman to receive the award. Selected Poems, 1965-1990 (1994) won the Poet’s Prize. She received the Lambda Literary Award for Winter Numbers: Poems; Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons; Assumptions; Taking Notice; and Going Back to the River. Hacker also won the Bernard F. Conners Prize from the Paris Review, the John Masefield Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, and Presentation Piece was the Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets and a National Book Award winner. Hacker was editor of the Kenyon Review from 1990 to 1994. She has contributed works to the Yale Review, Paris Review, Poetry, Epoch, Feminist Studies, and London Magazine. She has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. Like Adrienne Rich, whose work serves as epigraph for many of Hacker’s poems, Hacker surveys the emotional and social terrain of women who love women. She skillfully mixes traditional, or even archaic, poetic forms with various levels of diction from the most formal to the colloquial, producing one of the most powerful voices of contemporary poetry.

OTHER WORKS: The Terrible Children (1967). Highway Sandwiches (with T. M. Disch and C. Platt, 1970). The Hang-Glider’s Daughter: Selected New Poems (1990). Squares and Courtyards (2000).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1979). CLC (1983). CP (1985, 1991). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Poetry Review (Jan.-Feb. 1978). Denver Quarterly (Autumn 1976, Summer 1985). Dispatch (Fall 1988). Frontiers (1980). Hudson Review (Summer 1987). LJ (15 Apr. 1990). Ms. (Apr. 1975). Midwest Book Review. Nation (21 Jan. 1991). New Review (7 Sept. 1974). NYTBR (21 June 1987, 12 Jan. 1975). Poetry (Apr. 1975, July 1991). TLS (10 July 1987). WPBW (26 May 1974). —M. L. LEWANDOWSKA, UPDATED BY JAMES SMETHURST AND NICK ASSENDELFT

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HADAS, Rachel Born 8 November 1948, New York, New York Daughter of Moses and Elizabeth Chamberlayne Hadas; married Stavros Kondilis, 1970 (divorced); George Edwards, 1978; children: Jonathan A poet, essayist, translator, critic, and professor of literature, Rachel Hadas grew up in a literate and intellectual setting. Her father was a classical scholar and professor at Columbia University, her mother a Latin teacher. Hadas’ relationship with her father, with whom she spent many hours reading Latin texts and learning the Greek alphabet, was of particular importance in the formation and development of her writing. When her father died, Hadas was seventeen; this loss figured early, and lastingly, in the focus and themes of her work. The themes of loss, memory and legacy, the ways in which knowledge is passed from generation to generation, particularly in consideration of the uses of art, appear, transmute, and evolve throughout her poetry and essays. After receiving her B.A. from Harvard University in 1969, Hadas traveled to Greece on fellowship. There she first met, among others, poet James Merril, whose presence as friend and influence can be felt in Hadas’ later work, and her first husband, with whom she lived on the Greek island of Samos for some years. After returning to the U.S., she studied at Johns Hopkins, received an M.A. in poetry, and later her Ph.D. from Princeton, going on to teach literature at Rutgers University. Hadas’ first two collections of poetry have as their subject and setting her years in Greece. In the chapbook Starting from Troy (1975), the poems have a fragmentary feel, and the images and references, for all their debt to the classical, are very personal. The poem ‘‘That Time, This Place,’’ starting with the image of Troy and the ‘‘fossils of families and fates of war,’’ goes on to consider whether we must ‘‘build what was by tearing down / what is, beat down our celebrated towers / to our own stature, shut our eyes, and sing?’’ This poem’s repeated refrain, ‘‘the shell remains, the softer parts decay,’’ and final two lines, ‘‘All fighters, fathers, all departed heroes, / our house cries out for you,’’ address Hadas’ absorption with loss and legacy. Already present, as well, is her command of poetic form and structure. In Pass it On (1989), Hadas names the impulse found in her previous work: to pass on what we inherit from others, whether fathers, mothers, friends, or long-dead writers. That inheritance includes the memories, feelings, and legacies of their work in life, the complex lens of an individual’s experience and perceptions as it endures for those who continue on after their death. The poems range from what is passed on by an individual poet’s work to the passing on of legacy in more physical form, through Hadas’ son, to the larger passing on of language: ‘‘Not light but language shocks us out of sleep’’ (’’The End of Summer’’). Using a variety of meters and stanzaic forms, the poems in this volume, most particularly those that rely on a strict meter and rhyme, are


effective, sustained meditations on large and abstract themes as they are found within the milk and carpentry of everyday life. Living in Time (1990) came out the same year in which Hadas was given a literature award by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. The book is a triptych, one long poem bracketed by two sections of prose essays. Each section examines the meaning of time and the ways in which art—in this case, writing and the poetic imagination—affects and changes our experience of it. The central poem, ‘‘The Dream Machine,’’ a sustained reflection on the nature of reality and our need for stories with which to understand our passage through it and time, stems from a question posed by Hadas’ son about whether a story she read him was ‘‘real.’’ Among the essays in the first and third sections there is ‘‘The Lights Must Never Go Out,’’ which relates Hadas’ experiences leading a poetry writing workshop for men with AIDS. The essay illuminates how writing poetry became a way of slowing down the time the men had left to live. In 1995 Hadas came out with The Empty Bed, a series of elegies for her recently deceased students and for her mother, poems which explore the emotional landscape of loss with some thoroughness. Hadas’ motif of art and its place in our lives threads through the elegiac explorations, as in these lines from ‘‘Benefit Night, New York City Ballet’’: ‘‘For as we raptly gaze / at limbs in cool blue light / sculpting a carnal maze / of intricate delight, / of passions sketched on air, / it is ourselves we see, / divested of despair.’’ Halfway Down the Hall (1998) collects selections from Hadas’ previous volumes, including her translations of poems by Beaudelaire, Valéry, Hugo, and Karyotakis, along with 33 new poems in the opening section. The new poems probe Hadas’ usual subjects, while exhibiting a finer, more exquisite balance than ever between adherence to formal constraints and an acute communion with the familiar and everyday. She addresses the minutia of visceral reality in an assured voice, giving the thoughts drawn from particular images a graceful strength. With each successive volume, Hadas, who is acknowledged as one of our best technical poets, has gained depth and resonance. Her work is literate and finely honed, reaching gently profound insights through a lyric conversation with the everyday. She has received numerous awards and been a Guggenheim fellow in poetry. OTHER WORKS: Trelles by Stephanos Xenos (translated by Hadas, 1978). Slow Transparency (1983). Form, Cycle, Infinity: Landscape Imagery in the Poetry of Robert Frost and George Seferis (1985). A Son from Sleep (1987). Unending Dialogue: Voices from an AIDS Poetry Workshop (1991). Poetry: Mirrors of Astonishment (1992). Other Worlds Than This: Translations (1994). The Double Legacy: Reflections on a Pair of Deaths (1995). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Collier, M., ed., The Wesleyan Tradition: Four Decades of American Poetry (1993). Reference works: American Poets Since World War II (1992). DLB 120. Other references: American Book Review (Aug. 1992). Bulletin of Bibliography (June 1994). Denver Quarterly (Fall 1998).

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Georgia Review (1984). NYTBR (6 May 1990). Poetry (Feb. 1997). Progressive (Feb. 1999). —JESSICA REISMAN

HAHN, Emily Born 14 January 1905, St. Louis, Missouri; died 18 February 1997 Daughter of Isaac N. and Hannah Hahn; married Charles R. Boxer, 1945 As a child, Emily Hahn developed an adventurous spirit and an independent mind. Scorning custom and convention, she became the first woman to enroll in and earn a degree from the University of Wisconsin’s College of Engineering. She also studied mineralogy at Columbia University, New York City, and anthropology at Oxford, England. Later, many Americans would be scandalized when Hahn openly introduced her lovers to her readers. Her first book, Seductio ad Absurdum: The Principles and Practices of Seduction; a Beginner’s Handbook (1928), had a mixed reception. Some critics did not find her rules and regulations very interesting or very subtle and others were astonished by the gossipy episodes, but most readers found the book delightfully entertaining. Having begun her writing career, Hahn took on a wide variety of projects, including documentary reports, histories, novels, biographies, children’s books, a guide book, a cookbook, and several autobiographical works. In 1930 Hahn began a two-year stay, the first of several, in Africa. She lived with a tribe of Pygmies in the Ituri Forest of the Belgian Congo, where she worked with a doctor at a medical mission. Congo Solo (1933) was based on her diary. Although her vocabulary and expression often seem too rough, her informal and amusing style proved appealing to many readers. Also based on her first African experience, With Naked Foot (1934) is a story of an African woman and her various white ‘‘masters.’’ In it Hahn sought to interpret the native viewpoint with sympathetic understanding; the scenes and the characters seem both realistic and picturesque. Africa to Me: Person to Person (1964), based on a later trip when she visited Jomo Kenyatta and Tom Mboya, addresses the problems accompanying Africa’s emergent nationalism. In 1935 Hahn set off on a world tour. She was to remain in China for nine years, settling in Hong Kong and beginning a career as the New Yorker’s China Coast correspondent. Her experiences amidst war and revolution had dramatic effects on her literary career, as well as on her personal life. The Soong Sisters (1941) is about Ch’ing-ling, Mei-ling, and Ai-ling (Madame Sun Yat-sen, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, and Madame Kung, wife of China’s financial wizard), with whom Hahn became intimate while in China. It tells of their father’s association with America, of his involvement with Sun Yat-sen,

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and of the key roles played by the family in the Chinese revolution. Intended as an entertaining narrative, the book also reveals her strong sympathy for the family’s controversial political activities. Hahn’s support of Chiang Kai-shek is unmistakable in China to Me (1944, reissued in 1988), a ‘‘partial autobiography’’ in which she recounts the dramatic political events as well as the trivial daily incidents that filled her days in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Chungking. Although she undoubtedly tried to be objective in the biography Chiang Kai-shek (1955), her admiration for her subject resulted in a very defensive account of the corruption in his government and his lack of inspirational leadership. She admits he could be stubborn and narrowminded, but she describes him primarily as a Christian crusader and gallant ally—consistent, faithful to his principles, and brave. Hahn continued to write on diverse topics. Animal Gardens (1967, reissued 1990) is a history of zoos from the pre-Christian era in China and Egypt to the construction of the Milwaukee Zoo. Breath of God (1971) examines world folklore. Once Upon a Pedestal (1974) is an account of prominent women in art and literature from colonial times to the present. In Lorenzo: D. H. Lawrence and the Women Who Loved Him (1975), she depicts the writer as a neurotic, self-centered genius, to whom a great number of women were eager to dedicate themselves. Like so many of Hahn’s earlier books, it is intriguing, gossipy, readable, and entertaining. In the charming and informative treatise, Look Who’s Talking (1978), Hahn examines ways in which animals communicate with each other and with humans. OTHER WORKS: Beginners’ Luck (1931). Affair (1935). Mr. Pan (1942). Hong Kong Holiday (1946). Picture Story of China (1946). Raffles of Singapore: A Biography (1946). Miss Jill (1947). England to Me (1949). Purple Passage: A Novel about a Lady Both Famous and Fantastic (1950). A Degree of Prudery (1950). Francie (1951). Love Conquers Nothing: A Glandular History of Civilization (1952). Francie Again (1953). James Brooke of Sarawak: A Biography of Sir James Brooke (1953). Mary, Queen of Scots (1953). Meet the British (1953). The First Book of India (1955). Diamond (1956). Francie Comes Home (1956). Leonardo da Vinci (1956). Kissing Cousins (1958). Aboab: First Rabbi of the Americas (1960). Around the World with Nelli Bly (1960). June Finds a Way (1960). Tiger House Party (1960). China Only Yesterday, 1850-1950: A Century of Change (1963). Indo (1963). Romantic Rebels: An Informal History of Bohemianism in America (1967). The Cooking of China (1968, reprinted 1981). Zoos (1968). Time and Places (1970). Fractured Emerald: Ireland (1971). On the Side of the Apes (1971). Mabel: A Biography of Mabel Dodge Luhan (1977). Love of Gold (1980). The Islands: America’s Imperial Adventure in the Philippines (1981). Eve and the Apes (1988, 1989). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cuthbertson, K. Nobody Said Not to Go: The Life, Loves, and Adventures of Emily Hahn (1998). Reference works: Authors of Books for Young People (2nd edition, 1971). CA (1967). CB (July 1942). NCAB. TCAS. —PATRICIA LANGHALS NEILS

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HALE, Lucretia Peabody Born 2 September 1820, Boston, Massachusetts; died 12 June 1900, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of Nathan and Sarah Everett Hale Lucretia Peabody Hale came from a distinguished New England literary family. Her mother was a writer; her father, nephew of the famous revolutionary-war patriot, was owner and editor of the Boston Daily Advertiser. Among Hale’s six brothers and sisters were Edward Everett, Unitarian clergyman, abolitionist, and writer, best known for his ‘‘A Man without a Country’’ short story; Charles, consul general to Egypt at the time of the opening of the Suez Canal; and Susan, writer and traveler. Hale gained a reputation as a bright student at the highly regarded George B. Emerson School for Young Ladies, the graduates of which had the equivalent of a contemporary Bachelor of Arts degree. There she and four other girls comprised a group called the Pentad, maintaining their friendship for many years. When the Pentad visited one another, Hale often made up stories for amusement when they were in bed at night. After her schooling, Hale remained at home helping with the housework, sewing, attending cultural events, and writing. The only one of her immediate group never to marry, she became known as Aunt Lucretia to the children of her friends. She often visited their homes, telling stories to their children as she had to their mothers when she and they were children. After the deaths of her parents, Hale traveled in 1867 with her sister Susan to Egypt to visit Charles, then consul general. After enjoying the sights for some months, the two took a horseback trip through Palestine before returning home. In 1869 Hale settled again in Boston, where she involved herself in public affairs and in various educational and charitable causes. In 1874 she became the first woman elected to the Boston School Committee, a position she held for two years. She ran a dame school with Susan for a time, taught in correspondence school, promoted kindergartens and vacation schools, and introduced sewing and cooking into the public school curriculum. A prolific writer, Hale began wielding a pen at a very early age, because the Hale children were often called upon to help out with editorials, book reviews, and translations. Although much of her work consisted of editorials and fillers for the journals her brothers published, she wrote texts and Sunday-school books, edited collections of games and needlework, and produced several novels and books of short stories, sometimes in conjunction with other writers. After the death of her father in 1863, Hale supported herself by her writings. Her first venture into fiction, Margaret Percival in America (1850), written in collaboration with Edward, was a well-received religious novel and had modest sales. The first of her independent writings to attract attention was ‘‘The Queen of the Red Chessmen’’ (Atlantic Monthly, 1858), a short, fanciful tale in which a strong-willed red chess queen comes alive. A novel, Six of One by Half a Dozen of the Other (1872), a six-way collaboration with Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edward, among others, is an amusing


comedy of manners, and in The New Harry and Lucy (1892), another novel done with Edward, Harry and Lucy write letters home about how they spend their time in the big city and how they come to meet and marry. Although they did not last, these tonguein-cheek lightweights are vivid with lively details of the times. Hale’s claim to literary distinction, though she never knew it, came through her stories about the Peterkin family. The first one, ‘‘The Lady Who Put Salt in Her Coffee’’ (1868), was made up to amuse Meggie, the daughter of Hale’s old school friend, Mrs. Lesley. One summer vacation, when Meggie was sick and forced to miss the family fun, Hale sat down by her bedside and on the spot created the story about Mrs. Peterkin’s problems with her cup of coffee. She later published it in the periodical Our Young Folks. Five more Peterkin stories were printed there, and still others followed in St. Nicholas, its successor. Some two dozen stories were first put out in book form in 1880, and 1886 saw a sequel of eight more, The Last of the Peterkins, with Others of Their Kin. The stories were called after Mr. Lesley, whose first name was Peter, his children forming the ‘‘kin,’’ while Mrs. Lesley herself was the wise Lady from Philadelphia. The first significant nonsense done for children in the U.S., the Peterkin stories became immensely popular throughout the nation, not only with children but with adults as well. Their gentle satire on American attitudes and ways tickled the national funny bone and helped people laugh at themselves. The lovable, foolish Peterkins of Boston consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Peterkin; Agamemnon, who had been to college; Elizabeth Eliza; Solomon John; and the three little boys, always nameless, but never without their India rubber boots. The stories concern the family’s efforts to cope with everyday problems, all of which develop into crises of major proportions because of their blundering attempts to deal with them. When the Peterkins get their new piano into the parlor, they discover the only way Elizabeth Eliza can play it is by sitting outside on the porch. The milk from the Peterkins’ new cow develops a queer taste after they decide the best place to keep it is by the kitchen chimney. They raise the parlor ceiling to accommodate their too-tall Christmas tree, get lost repeatedly at the Philadelphia Centennial, and never have enough plates and cups to serve the large groups they enthusiastically invite to their home. The humor of the stories arises from the absurdity of their predicaments and the family’s roundabout ways of attempting to come to grips. They are often assisted in extricating themselves from their dilemmas by the sensible and practical advice of the Lady from Philadelphia. Although the stories reflect the manners and attitudes of their period, in their revelation of character they ring true yet today, and it is upon the droll, whimsical adventures of this winning family of bumblers, still favorites with children, that Hale’s reputation as a writer rests. OTHER WORKS: Seven Stormy Sundays (1859). Struggle for Life (1861). The Lord’s Supper and Its Observance (1866). The Service of Sorrow (1867). The Wolf at the Door (1877). Designs in Outline for Art-Needlework (1879). More Stitches for Decorative

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Embroidery (1879). Point-Lace: A Guide to Lace-Work (1879). The Peterkin Papers (1880). The Art of Knitting (1881). Fagots for the Fireside (1888). Stories for Children (1892). Sunday School Stories (with B. Whitman, n.d.). An Uncloseted Skeleton (with E. L. Bynner, n.d.). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hale, E. E., A New England Boyhood (1893). Hale, N., Introduction to The Complete Peterkin Papers (1960). Reference works: AA. DAB. Junior Book of Authors (1934). NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). WW of Children’s Literature (1968). Other references: Horn Book (Sept.-Oct. 1940, April 1958). PW (28 Oct. 1957). —ALETHEA K. HELBIG

HALE, Nancy Born 6 May 1908, Boston, Massachusetts; died 24 September 1988 Daughter of Philip L. and Lilian Wescott Hale; married Fredson Bowers, 1942 The only child of two painters, Nancy Hale attended the Winsor School in Boston and the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. She placed her first short story at the age of eleven with the Boston Herald and at twenty went to New York, the setting for her first novel. For five years Hale worked in New York as a journalist, first as assistant editor of Vogue (1928-32) and then as assistant editor of Vanity Fair (1932-33). In 1935 she became the first woman reporter for the New York Times. In 1937 Hale moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, and this piedmont area, with its historic traditions and aura of southern gentility, provides both the ambience and the central motif for several of Hale’s short stories and novels. The three locales that figure prominently in Hale’s life— New England, New York, and Virginia—also furnish the backdrop and often create the tensions in her fiction. Her first novel, The Good Die Young (1932), depicts the sophisticated ‘‘Manhattan types’’ of the 1930s with the attention to detail also given to the ‘‘Southern types’’ of Hale’s later novels. Her most popular novel, The Prodigal Women (1942, reissued 1988), follows the lives of three women—two of them Southern and one a New Englander—from childhood through the course of their love affairs and marriages. Categorized at the time of its publication as a ‘‘woman’s book’’ because of its concern with ‘‘the viciousness in men,’’ the novel portrays the warfare between men and women waged in the name of love. The scenes are laid in Boston, Virginia, and New York, and Hale deftly captures the sense of place and the inflections of speech that point to the geographical origins of her characters. In the novel Dear Beast (1959), and in the title story of her collection of short stories The Pattern of Perfection (1960), Hale exhibits especially well her considerable talent for evoking regional differences and for portraying the antagonism between

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northern and southern manners. In ‘‘The Pattern of Perfection,’’ Hale creates the climate of opposition between a Virginia matriarch and her New Jersey daughter-in-law; and with a restraint that avoids moral judgement, she highlights in Dear Beast the foibles of both southern provincialism and Yankee sophistication. For all the social implications of these regional tensions, however, Hale is essentially concerned with the individual in these settings. She shows the personal pretensions that render real communication between a New England wife and her Virginia husband almost impossible, and the private insecurities which cause a woman from Rochester to feel displaced in her new suburban home in Virginia. In her fiction of manners, Hale creates conflicts essentially personal but are accentuated by the differences in the outward trappings of everyday life from one region to another. In her most recent novel, Secrets (1971), Hale moves from her use of regional tensions as a correlative for personal conflict to portray a woman’s conflict in integrating her own world within. The middle-aged narrator tells how she grew from a lonely, sensitive child into a mature adult, capable of coping with both the past and the present. Hale has written that she has purposely attempted to conceal the seriousness of her work with ‘‘the light touch.’’ Yet in more than 50 years of publishing novels and short stories, she revealed herself to be a penetrating observer of the human scene. OTHER WORKS: Never Any More (1934). The Earliest Dreams (1936). Between the Dark and the Daylight (1943). The Sign of Jonah (1950). The Empress’s Ring (1955). Heaven and Hardpan Farm (1957). A New England Girlhood (1958). The Realities of Fiction: A Book about Writing (1962). Black Summer (1963). New England Discovery: A Personal View (edited by Hale, 1963). The Life in the Studio (1969, 1980). Secrets (1971). Mary Cassatt (1975, 1987). Birds in the House (1985). Wags (1985). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Peden, W., The American Short Story: Continuity and Change, 1940-1975 (1975). Reference works: NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCAS. —GUIN A. NANCE

HALE, Sarah Josepha (Buell) Born 24 October 1788, Newport, New Hampshire; died 30 April 1879, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Also wrote under: Cornelia, Mrs. Hale, A Lady of New Hampshire Daughter of Gordon and Martha Whittlesey Buell; married David Hale, 1813 (died 1822); children: five As editor for many years of Godey’s Lady’s Book, one of the leading periodicals of the 19th century, Sarah Josepha Hale was perhaps the most widely known and most influential woman of

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her time. Her enormously successful career as editor, novelist, poet, and essayist is the more remarkable for having commenced at the age of forty. In the years before she began her editorial work, Hale lived a quiet life in rural New Hampshire. She was educated at home by her mother, who, Hale later said, encouraged her ‘‘predilection for literary pursuits,’’ and by her older brother, who shared his college studies when on vacation from Dartmouth. Hale conducted a private school for children from 1806 until 1813, when she married a lawyer. By her own account, Hale’s married life was a model of domestic bliss. She admired her husband greatly and spent idyllic evenings with him in reading and study. In 1822, however, just before the birth of their fifth child, Hale died, leaving his wife in financial distress. She soon turned to writing and, with the assistance of her husband’s Masonic friends, published The Genius of Oblivion (1823), a thin volume of poetry. Although the poems are undistinguished, they contain the seeds of themes Hale was later to develop—the superiority of American character, the need for higher education for women, and the differing roles of the sexes (man ‘‘rides the wave’’ and ‘‘rules the flame,’’ while woman is the ‘‘star of home’’). In addition, the first line of the book, ‘‘No mercenary muse inspires my lay,’’ is Hale’s first pronouncement to the world of the self-image which, as skillful advertiser of herself and her magazines, she was to promote for the rest of her life. She claimed repeatedly that although she had published a few poems during her husband’s lifetime, she had never intended to become an ‘‘authoress’’: her chief aim was to prepare reading material for their fireside. She turned to writing and editing neither for financial gain for herself nor for fame or ego satisfaction, but only for funds to educate her children. Hale’s career was launched in 1827 with the publication of her first novel. Northwood is usually represented as one of the earliest novels to contrast American life in the North and South; however, the subtitle, A Tale of New England, more accurately describes Hale’s intent. Southern scenes and characters are introduced, like British ones, to point up the characteristics of Yankee life. Hale describes at great length the domestic customs and manners of the postcolonial period in New England. Food, clothing, and architecture receive detailed attention; pages are devoted to the description of a Thanksgiving dinner. There is little plot, except for a frenzied effort at the end, but much preaching. Moral homilies on subjects ranging from the proper education of children to the sins of greed and vanity are interspersed with speeches defending life in New England against typical foreign criticisms. Despite its flaws Northwood was original and became an instant popular success. Its renown brought Hale an offer to edit a new magazine, and the year after the publication of her novel she found herself in Boston, the editor of Ladies’ Magazine. Each issue contained stories, poems, essays, household hints, book reviews, and sketches of American life, the latter often written by Hale herself. In forming her editorial policy Hale simply brought together elements that had been present in her early work: emphasis on America, attention to domestic detail, and frank didacticism, particularly on the subject of women.


In contrast to the current editorial practice of lifting entire articles from other (usually British) magazines, Hale sought original articles by Americans on national subjects. She dedicated the magazine to ‘‘female improvement,’’ promising to ‘‘cherish the effusions of female intellect’’ and educate women in domestic skills. Typically, while she reassured men nothing in the magazine would cause their wives and daughters to ‘‘encroach on the prerogatives of men,’’ she included a large amount of material on education for women—detailed notices of existing schools and seminaries and editorials advocating teaching as a profession for women and the establishment of infant schools. Although there had previously been female editors and periodicals for women, Ladies’ Magazine was the first one of quality and the first to last more than five years. It attracted the attention of Louis Godey, an enterprising publisher who was editing an inferior magazine in Philadelphia. Godey offered to buy out the Ladies’ Magazine and unite it with his Lady’s Book under Hale’s editorship. Hale accepted and began an association which lasted from 1837 until 1877. She edited Godey’s Lady’s Book until she was in her ninetieth year. Because Godey was able to finance the novel practice of paying contributors, Hale could attract better writers, such as Edgar Allan Poe. She also expanded the number of domestic departments begun in Ladies’ Magazine. In Godey’s can be found the forerunners of most departments existing in today’s home magazines: cooking and recipes, sewing and patterns, domestic architecture, interior decoration, etiquette, health advice, gardening, child psychology, beauty, and fashion. Godey’s was famous for its hand-colored fashion plates and steel engravings, the number of which increased rapidly through the years. Missing from Godey’s were essays on the political, economic, and religious questions of the day. Hale’s advocacy of education for women and other reforms was carried on principally in her editorial columns, for Godey, with an eye on circulation, forbade any controversial articles. Incredibly, the Civil War was never mentioned within the pages. The magazine was successful, however, as circulation climbed from 10,000 in 1837 to 150,000 by 1860, an astounding figure for the time. Godey’s was the arbiter of American taste and manners, and Hale’s name became literally a household word. During her career as editor, Hale continued to produce her own work. She published collections of her sketches; she compiled recipe books and household handbooks; she edited gift books, anthologies of verse and letters by women, and works for children. In her Poems for Our Children (1830) is ‘‘Mary Had a Little Lamb,’’ the poem for which she is best known today, although her authorship of the first stanza has been disputed. Hale’s major work is Woman’s Record; or, Sketches of All Distinguished Women from ‘The Beginning’ till A.D. 1850 (1853). This monumental biographical encyclopedia, still useful today, took her several years to write and contains some 2,500 entries. Hale also continued to write fiction. In 1852 the fifth edition of Northwood appeared, with revisions by Hale. She changed the subtitle to Life North and South: Showing the True Character of Both and added lengthy discussions of slavery. In the original

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version, slavery was mentioned as a temporary evil which should not disturb the harmony of North and South; in the later version Hale advances the view that slaves should be taught Christianity, whereupon they might be freed and sent to Africa ‘‘to plant Free States and organize Christian civilization.’’ This theory is further developed in her didactic novel, Liberia; or, Mr. Peyton’s Experiments (1853). While Hale has been criticized for her views on slavery, Northwood and Liberia have also been called antislavery novels. Interpretation of Hale has always varied widely. Some of her biographers claim she was a ‘‘militant feminist,’’ others a ‘‘true conservative.’’ Actually her philosophy, expressed repeatedly in her works, was internally consistent and explains many seeming contradictions. She believed God created women morally superior to men. Eve’s sin was less than Adam’s, as she fell because of desire for spiritual truth and he from sensual appetite. Eve did sin, however, and woman’s punishment is to be subordinate to her husband. She is required to work through him, elevating him and transforming his nature in order to save humanity. In America she is particularly to restrain his materialism and greed to save the nation. Woman’s sphere is restricted—she must use her influence only in the domestic realm because if she entered public affairs she might be contaminated. Thus Hale spoke against women’s rights and attacked those leaders who wanted the vote. However, because women had to be educated in order to use their moral powers effectively, she campaigned vigorously for higher education for women and supported educators like Mary Lyon, Emma Willard, and Matthew Vassar. Similarly, although Hale believed slavery was wrong, she thought the slaves should not be freed until their moral sense was developed (by female teachers, of course). Additionally, women could not properly support abolition because in their role as spiritual guardians they should cultivate only peace and harmony. Hale’s philosophy also explains the major contradiction in her life. She thought of herself as a reformer and indeed was an energetic and outspoken supporter of many causes. Yet apart from her advocacy of education for women, the causes for which she labored were essentially trivial ones, such as eliminating the use of ‘‘female’’ as a noun, having Thanksgiving declared a national holiday, and raising money to complete the Bunker Hill Monument. Hale wielded tremendous influence and could unite large numbers of women. She used her power to promote, in her words, women’s ‘‘happiness and usefulness in their Divinely appointed sphere.’’ OTHER WORKS: Sketches of American Character (1829). Conversations on the Burman Mission (1830). Flora’s Interpreter; or, The American Book of Flowers and Sentiments (edited by Hale, 1832, revised edition, Flora’s Interpreter, and Fortuna Flora, 1849). The School Song Book (edited by Hale, 1834, reissued as My Little Song Book, 1841). Tales for Youth (edited by Hale, 1835). Traits of American Life (1835). The Ladies’ Wreath (compiled by Hale, 1837, revised edition, 1839). The Good Housekeeper; or, The Way to Live Well and to Be Well While We

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Live (1839, reissued as The Way to Live Well, and to Be Well While We Live, 1847). My Cousin Mary; or, The Inebriate (1839). The Juvenile Budget Opened: Being Selections from the Writings of Doctor John Aiken (edited by Hale, 1840). The Pleasures of Taste, and Other Stories Selected from the Writings of Miss Jane Taylor (edited by Hale, 1840). Things by Their Right Names, and Other Stories. . .Selected and Arranged from the Writings of Mrs. Barbauld (edited by Hale, 1840). The Lady’s Annual Register, and Housewife’s Almanac, for 1842 (edited by Hale, 1842). The Little Boys’ and Girls’ Library (10 vols., edited by Hale, circa 1842). Alice Ray: A Romance in Rhyme (1845). Keeping House and House Keeping (1845). Modern Cookery, in All Its Branches. . .by Eliza Acton (edited by Hale, 1845). ‘‘Boarding Out’’: A Tale of Domestic Life (1846). Harry Guy, the Widow’s Son (1848). Three Hours; or, The Vigil of Love, and Other Poems (1848). Aunt Mary’s New Stories for Young People (edited by Hale, 1849). The Poets’ Offering: For 1850 (edited by Hale, 1850, reprinted with revised preface as A Complete Dictionary of Poetical Quotations, 1850). The Ladies’ New Book of Cookery (1852, revised as Mrs. Hale’s New Cook Book, 1857; English edition, Modern Household Cookery, 1863). The New Household Receipt Book (1853, revised as Mrs. Hale’s Receipts for the Million, 1857). The Bible Reading Book (compiled by Hale, 1854). The Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (edited by Hale, 1856, revised 1869). The Letters of Madame de Sévigné to Her Daughter and Friends (edited by Hale, 1856, revised 1869). Manners; or, Happy Homes and Good Society All the Year Round (1868). Love; or, Woman’s Destiny (1870). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Albertine, S., ed., A Living of Words: American Women in Print (1995). Entrikin, I. W., Sarah Josepha Hale and Godey’s Lady’s Book (1946). Finley, R. E., The Lady of Godey’s (1931). Fryatt, N. R., Sarah Josepha Hale (1975). The Story of Mary and Her Little Lamb (commissioned by H. Ford, 1928). Taylor, W. R., Cavalier and Yankee (1961). Wright, R., Forgotten Ladies (1928). Reference works: AA. CAL. DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Historian (Feb. 1970). Legacy (1985). NEQ (Jan. 1928, 1990). —BARBARA A. WHITE

HALE, Susan Born 5 December 1833, Boston, Massachusetts; died 10 September 1910, Matunach, Rhode Island Daughter of Nathan and Sarah Everett Hale The youngest of eight children, Susan Hale was born into a literary family. Her father and brothers were successively editors of the Boston Daily Advertiser. Her mother, a sister of Edward Everett, the well-known Unitarian clergyman, orator, author, and public official, was an author herself. Her sister Lucretia and her brother Edward Everett Hale were also writers.

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Hale’s education was conducted under various tutors until 1849, when she entered George B. Emerson’s prestigious school. She began teaching in 1850, when her family was experiencing financial difficulties, and continued to teach for the next decade. At thirty-two, following the deaths of her father and mother, Hale began to experience a degree of independence. She took up painting and traveled extensively, making trips to Europe, Algiers, California, Mexico, and Jamaica in the next two decades. During the 1870s she began to travel around the country giving literary readings to women’s groups. Hale’s published writings include the ‘‘Family Flight’’ series of travel books, coauthored with her brother, Edward Everett Hale. The travel books, such as The Story of Mexico (1889), authored solely by Hale, demonstrate an interest in the many strands that make up a national character. History, Hale apparently believed, is a continuous process, with the past always in part present in today. She sets the scene of her first view of Vera Cruz with the thought of Cortez looking over her shoulder. Men and Manners of the Eighteenth Century (1898) appears to be her series of literary readings. No clear connections exist between its ten parts except the desire to know ‘‘what man was like in the century before our own.’’ The writers she discusses— among them Pope, Charlotte Lennox, Addison, Richardson, Fielding, Goldsmith, and Anne Radcliffe—are frequently grouped with another writer, male or female, to show their relationship. The section ‘‘Mrs. Radcliffe and Her Followers’’ is the best. In it she discusses Radcliffe’s ability to describe places she had never been, noting ‘‘evidently she was a diligent reader, and wrote with the map before her.’’ It is clear Radcliffe, the nontraveler, intrigued Hale, the traveler: ‘‘I imagine her sitting comfortably in London and writing about crags and ravines in Southern France without any real knowledge of landscape outside England.’’ The essay, however, contains far too many long quotations and apparently was intended to be read aloud to an audience totally unfamiliar with the work. The other sections suffer from the same fault—too much original text and too few ideas. The advantage of the author’s unifying personality during an oral presentation is missing in the written text. In his introduction to the edition of her letters, Edward Everett Hale attempts to assess the personality of ‘‘the real Susan.’’ His assessment is contradictory. On the one hand, he writes of her restraint—‘‘in her invariable sympathy and interest in others there was frequent reserve’’—and suggests ‘‘her letters have rather more of her real self.’’ On the other hand, he adds: ‘‘She wrote a good deal in various ways—sometimes travelletters to the papers, sometimes books—but though there was a good deal of herself in these, they never impressed people as she did herself.’’ Similar comments have been made about Margaret Fuller, a woman whose brilliance, it is claimed, was never captured for posterity. Like Fuller, Hale’s method and focus were dictated by the social structure—the nation in her books of travel and her interaction with her audience in her readings and with friends and family


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in her letters. But unlike Fuller, what is left is insubstantial, a husk, and the personality within has vanished. OTHER WORKS: A Family Flight Through France, Germany, Norway, and Switzerland (with E. E. Hale, 1881). A Family Flight Over Egypt and Syria (with E. E. Hale, 1882). A Family Flight Through Spain (with E. E. Hale, 1883). A Family Flight Around Home (with E. E. Hale, 1884). Life and Letters of Thomas Gold Appleton (1885). Self-Instructive Lessons in Painting (1885). A Family Flight Through Mexico (with E. E. Hale, 1886). The Story of Spain (with E. E. Hale, 1886). Young Americans in Spain (1899). Inklings for Thinklings (1919). Letters of Susan Hale (edited by C. P. Atkinson, 1919). The papers of Susan Hale, part of the Hale Family Papers, are housed in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Atkinson, C. P., ed., Letters of Susan Hale (1919). Clement, C. E., and L. Hutton, Artists of the Nineteenth Century and Their Works (1879). Hale, E. E., Jr., The Life and Letters of Edward Everett Hale (2 vols., 1917). Reference works: AA. NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —JULIANN E. FLEENOR

HALL, Florence (Marion) Howe Born 25 August 1845, Boston, Massachusetts; died 10 April 1922, High Bridge, New Jersey Daughter of Samuel G. and Julia Ward Howe; married David P. Hall, 1871; children: three sons, one daughter Florence Howe Hall was educated at home and in a variety of private schools. Because her husband’s legal practice flourished only intermittently, Hall went to work lecturing and writing for magazines. Her income enabled her three sons to attend college and her daughter to pursue advanced artistic training. Hall was also widely respected as an active suffragist and club woman. Hall’s writing falls into three categories: stories for children, memoirs and reminiscences, and etiquette books. She began her career as a writer for children, but her stories sold poorly, and she gradually abandoned the genre. Hall found an interested audience for her books of reminiscences, however. As the daughter of two influential reformers, she could call on memories of people, places, and events that were landmarks of American cultural and political life. She collaborated with her sisters on a prizewinning biography of their mother. They also wrote a biography of their father’s most famous pupil, Laura Bridgman, a blind deaf-mute whose education was a model for Helen Keller’s. Both volumes use the technique of quoting extensively from family letters and diaries, with the authors providing background information, transitional material, and occasional anecdotes from personal memory. Hall further exploited the public interest in her famous family

with a history of her mother’s poem, The Story of the ‘‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’’ (1916). In Julia Ward Howe and the Woman Suffrage Movement (1913), Hall selected documents and recounted events that would secure for her mother a place as a prominent suffragist. Memories Grave and Gay (1918) is an account of her own life. Although Hall abandoned the technique of quoting from letters and journals in this book, she continued to base her memoirs on the lives of her family and famous friends. Her simple, direct, and anecdotal style of writing, combined with glimpses into her own personal and professional life, explain the wide appeal of this book of reminiscences. Social Customs (1887) established Hall as a successful writer in the field of manners. It differed from other etiquette books in several respects. Hall tackled a broader range of topics than most writers, touching on the behavior of children at home, for example, as well as the behavior of adults in various social situations. Furthermore, Hall was amusing. She never hesitated to use a humorous anecdote or to poke fun at an outdated mode of behavior, and this boosted the popularity of her book. Thirdly, Hall opened her book with a brief discussion of the origin of manners. Although her sociological and anthropological information is limited, the chapter does provide insight into the value of an explicit code of manners from the point of view of the upper middle class. Hall hoped her work would enable people to see the justification for different social classes. She believed, too, that etiquette filled the gaps left by legislation, thus preserving order in a society where immigration, urbanization, and industrialization were challenging old social arrangements. Manners, in short, could provide a subtle form of social control that would strengthen the hand of the middle class and upper middle class. The Correct Thing in Good Society (1888) provided a convenient handbook of proper behavior. Hall’s brief and amusing directions were accessible to people without much leisure who needed information quickly. It extended the usefulness of the etiquette book as an instrument of social control by providing a means for the upwardly mobile to identify and adopt the forms of behavior considered correct by the existing elite. Hall continued to expand her career as an authority on etiquette well into the 20th century. She revised her books to take into account both the changing tastes in entertainment (automobile trips, for example) and the emergence of the ‘‘new woman.’’ For the benefit of the latter, Hall included advice on how to behave at college, how to handle business correspondence, and how to establish a woman’s club. Hall also added new titles covering the same general issues but with a different emphasis. Although Hall was aware of the varieties of class and region in American society, she never revealed any awareness of the impracticality of her advice for many ethnic groups or for rural and working-class people. Fundamentally a conservative, she limited herself to describing social arrangements of the upper middle class. She never questioned them, and she never advocated

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any change; instead, she employed her direct and amusing style to strengthen and extend the values she shared with the elite of her day.

OTHER WORKS: Little Lads and Lassies: Stories in Prose and Verse about and for Them (1898). Laura Bridgman; or, Howe’s Famous Pupil and What He Taught Her (1903). Flossy’s Play-Days (1906). Social Usages at Washington (1906). A Handbook of Hospitality for Town and Country (1909). Boys, Girls, and Manners (1913). Good Form for All Occasions: A Manual of Manners, Dress, and Entertainment for Both Men and Women (1914). Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910 (with L. Richards and M. Elliott, 1915). ABC of Correct Speech and the Art of Conversation (1916).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hall, F. H., L. R., and M. Elliott, Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910 (1915). Reference works: CB (Aug. 1943). DAB. NCAB. —MARY H. GRANT

HALL, Hazel Born 7 February 1886, St. Paul, Minnesota; died 11 May 1924, Portland, Oregon Daughter of Montgomery G. and Mary Garland Hall As a child, Hazel Hall was taken by her parents to Portland, Oregon, where she remained throughout her short life. At twelve, she became permanently confined to a wheelchair as a result of either a fall or an attack of scarlet fever; thus her formal public school education terminated with the fifth grade. She contributed to her own support by doing needlework; she also wrote poetry and prose under a pseudonym. By thirty, failing eyesight led her to devote herself more to writing, and her poetry began to appear under her own name. She continued pseudonymous publication, however, perhaps because she felt, as she wrote, that ‘‘my poetry should be given more attention than my life.’’ Her pseudonym remains undisclosed. Hall’s contemporaries regarded her highly both as a person and as a poet. The individuality of her poetry was frequently noted. Her poems were sought after by the leading periodicals, and many of them were anthologized. She won several prizes including, in 1921, a first prize from Contemporary Verse and the Young Poet’s Prize from Poetry magazine. Hall never mentioned her affliction explicitly, but she used her confinement and the repetitive, monotonous domestic employment as subject and metaphor in many of her poems. In her

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first book, Curtains (1921), the poems from the title section use immediate objects—door, window frame, stairway—symbolically. The objects lead to the wider world, which is denied the speaker. The mood of these poems is a mixture of resignation and longing. Unsentimentally, the poems reveal flashes of Hall’s struggle to accept confinement bravely and without resentment. In the ‘‘needlework’’ section, Hall used her occupation in a variety of ways. In the poem ‘‘Monograms,’’ she juxtaposes the details of a seamstress’s work—the cold linen, the repetitive nature of the sewing and its long duration—with small, warm details of a bride’s experience—‘‘June, real flowers. . .like flesh’’— to create a poignant sense of the barrenness of the speaker’s life, a life that has been representative of many women’s. In ‘‘Instruction,’’ she makes a direct correlation between herself and ‘‘All the tired women, / Who sewed their lives away.’’ Hall created fresh and original analogies between nature and the seamstress’s world: ‘‘The wind is sewing with needles of rain’’ (‘‘Two Sewing’’); ‘‘the dawn unfolds like a bolt of ribbon’’ (‘‘Heavy Threads’’). The subjects of Walkers (1923) are sometimes seen from a window, sometimes only heard. These passersby reveal themselves in the way they walk. They are perceived as being concerned with their individual, temporal matters and as being unaware of how they resemble each other, how ultimately each is moving toward the same destiny. While ‘‘they are always seeking a road,’’ the one who observes them is always seeking a word; yet the goal for all is to ‘‘strive to give the understanding wings / And to make the brilliant flight of it enough’’ (‘‘Summary’’). Hall knew she was dying when she composed some of the poems found in Cry of Time (1928), published posthumously. There is a restlessness here, but there is awareness, too, that reflection and perception and song have been wrought from pain and silence. These poems are less personal and more varied. Hall more clearly portrayed herself as a representative of other women, sharing with them ‘‘hands never still’’ (‘‘Woman Death’’), sorrow, and a search for peace and repose. In ‘‘Tract on Living,’’ Hall approached total reconciliation to life and death with her recognition that ‘‘the only answer is the call.’’ Hall’s verse was usually traditional in form, but occasionally she experimented with newer techniques. She used a subtle juxtaposition of images to good effect, and she spoke to more modern sensibilities than do many of her contemporaries. Although her work is fairly limited in range, it is slight only in terms of quantity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Franklin, V. P., A Tribute to Hazel Hall (1939). Reference works: DAB. NCAB. Other references: Bookman (Feb. 1929). NYHTB (3 Mar. 1929). Oregon Daily Journal (12 May 1924). Overland Monthly (Aug. 1924). —JEANNINE DOBBS


HALL, Louisa (Jane) Park

HALL

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hanaford, P. A., CAL, Daughters of America (1882). Read, T., The Female Poets of America (1851). Reference works: NCAB.

Born 2 February 1802, Newburyport, Massachusetts; died 8 September 1892, Cambridge, Massachusetts Daughter of John Park; married Edward B. Hall, 1840 Louisa Park Hall began to compose verse at an early age, publishing it anonymously in newspapers around 1820. The first part of her verse drama Miriam (1837) was read at a literary gathering in Boston in 1825 and highly praised. Shortly after she and her family moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1831, she developed an eye condition that almost completely blinded her for several years. Her disability, however, did not prevent her from enjoying literature; her father read aloud to her several hours a day and helped to record her own work. When she recovered her vision, Hall married a Unitarian minister and moved to Providence, Rhode Island. The Cross and the Anchor (1844), a collection of religious verse, was written to benefit a mission for sailors there. Hall also wrote three pieces of prose fiction: Alfred (1836) and The Better Part (1836), both didactic moral tales, and The Sheaves of Love (1861), a sentimental romance tracing the friendships and courtships of schoolgirls. Hall’s two verse plays, Miriam and Hannah, the Mother of Samuel the Prophet and Judge of Israel (1839), show that religion is the chief motivating force in life, and both illustrate the importance of women as teachers and examples of faith. Miriam depicts the doomed love between the son of a proud Roman governor and a devout young Christian girl ready to die for her faith, while Hannah shows the influence of the mother of a biblical prophet upon her son. Hall’s blank verse reflects her reading in 18th-century tragedy. The Memoir of Miss Elizabeth Carter (1844) is a carefully documented and lucidly written biographical tribute to Samuel Johnson’s scholarly friend. It was actually composed before Hall regained her sight, at about the same time as the historical drama Joanna of Naples (1838). The latter, based on Jameson’s Lives of the Female Sovereigns, is a florid romance with lavish passages of description. Several of Hall’s works were reprinted in her lifetime. Her short lyric poems were perhaps the most widely circulated of all her writings, since they were regularly printed in newspapers throughout the country. Her favorite themes in these poems are children, scenes in nature, and settings and situations dramatizing religious faith. Hall’s last works, My Body to My Soul (1891) and Verses (1892), express her love of nature, her full life, and her religious faith, as well as her calm acceptance of death. Hall’s large and varied body of work reflects her lifelong pleasure in reading and writing and her ability to discuss religion, the heart, and the home, all favorite subjects of domestic literature, in a variety of different ways.

—KATHERINE STAPLES

HALL, Sarah Ewing Born 30 October 1761, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 8 April 1830, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Wrote under: Constantia, Florepha, Mrs. Sarah Hall Daughter of John and Hannah Sargent Ewing; married John Hall, 1782; children: eleven (two died young) Although she was not formally educated, Sarah Ewing Hall’s active and inquisitive mind absorbed a great deal from conversations with her father, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia and provost of the University of Pennsylvania from 1779 until his death in 1802. Her favorite subject was astronomy, in which her father was expert. She acquired an extensive knowledge of Greek and Latin while listening to her brothers recite. In 1782 Hall married the son of a wealthy Maryland planter. They retired to the family estate for eight years, but returned in 1790 to Philadelphia, where John served as secretary of the land office and a U.S. marshal. Although they moved to New Jersey in 1805 and later were forced by financial reverses to move back to Maryland, the family returned to Philadelphia in 1811. Throughout her life, Hall continued her self-education through reading. In the midst of rearing 11 children (nine reached adulthood), she found little free time, so she borrowed ‘‘the hours which are usually appropriated for repose,’’ staying up until midnight or later. She wrote primarily for periodicals such as Port Folio, edited for 10 years by her eldest son, John. Another son, Harrison, collected Selections from the Writings of Mrs. Sarah Hall (1833). He included extracts from letters, book reviews, poems, prayers, and essays. Hall’s views on the role of women were quite conventional. In an essay ‘‘On Female Education,’’ she argues against another woman’s plea that she be allowed to learn Greek and Latin. The end of education, says Hall, is to qualify people ‘‘to act with propriety the part assigned to us by Providence.’’ Hall sees in the ‘‘wise and beautiful order of created being’’ a ‘‘different destination of man and woman.’’ While they share common moral duties, ‘‘the superior strength of the man declares that he is designated to wrestle with the world.’’ As for woman, ‘‘retirement is her element, domestic and social life is her proper sphere.’’ In another essay, ‘‘On the Extent of Female Influence,’’ she accepts the traditional view that ‘‘obedience in a wife is a scriptural doctrine.’’ A woman’s proper sphere of influence is as wife and mother; those without children can raise money for missions, distribute tracts, or write, as did British educator Hannah More. Hall did assert, however, that no talent should be

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wasted; and she sensed that times were changing. In the poem ‘‘Line for an Album,’’ she claims that while women have been denied the exercise of intellect, ‘‘Now, men are wiser grown— they see. . .that she may read and write, like man, / And every form of being scan.’’ A frequent subject of Hall’s writing was religion. Throughout her life, she studied the Bible, and at age fifty she began to learn Hebrew in order to more accurately research her only book-length publication, Conversations on the Bible (1818). The 365-page volume went through one British and three American editions in her lifetime. It is actually a commentary on the Old Testament and the Gospels, but since it would have been unusual for a woman and a nonscholar to write such a work, Hall styled hers as a series of conversations between ‘‘Mother,’’ ‘‘Catharine,’’ and ‘‘Fanny.’’ Mother begins with an interesting introduction to each book, and then, in response to questions, offers comments about the probable authorship; explanations of unusual words, places, or customs; a summary of the plot or argument; and sometimes a contemporary application or parallel. Under the heading ‘‘Song of Moses and Miriam’’ (Exod. 15:1-21), Fanny offers her own poem-paraphrase of the text. Although Conversations on the Bible represents precritical biblical scholarship, it is well researched and presented in a lively, cogent, clear, and careful manner. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hale, S. J., Woman’s Record Hanaford, P. A., Daughters of America (1882). Reference works: AA. DAB. NCAB.

(1853).

—NANCY A. HARDESTY

HAMILTON, Alice Born 27 February 1869, New York, New York; died 22 September 1970 Daughter of Montgomery and Gertrude Pond Hamilton A pioneer of American industrial medicine, Alice Hamilton was the second of four daughters in a family of five children. The family’s idealism and humanitarian interests led each of the sisters to pursue a professional career. Hamilton graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in 1893. In her autobiography, she writes that she chose medicine ‘‘because as a doctor I could go anywhere I pleased, to far-off lands or to city slums, and be quite sure that I could be of use anywhere.’’ In 1897 Hamilton became the first woman professor at the Women’s Medical School of Northwestern University. During her time there, she resided at Hull House, a facility designed to give professional care and advice to the poor in Chicago’s slums. It was at Hull House that Hamilton first became aware of the problems of occupationally caused lead poisoning and other

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degenerative diseases that prevailed among the workers she treated. In 1910 Hamilton’s work won the recognition of the governor of Illinois, who made her the first managing director of the state’s Commission on Occupational Diseases. Hamilton’s report for the commission concerning the effects of phosphorus and lead fostered the legislation of the state’s workers’ compensation laws. In 1912 Hamilton and her sister Edith studied in Germany. The new insights Hamilton gained there led to a series of articles for the U.S. government’s Women’s Bureau. This research is still a valuable introduction to the study of industrial medicine. Hamilton became Harvard’s first woman professor of industrial medicine in 1919, and she was the only woman to serve as official delegate to the U.S.S.R. on a League of Nations health commission (1924). She continued her research and published her first book, Industrial Poisons in the United States, in 1925. The 590-page work summarized the first 40 years of Hamilton’s long and productive career by drawing upon case histories for both the diagnosis and treatment of industrial poisoning. Industrial Toxicology (1934) was a concise statement of the principles of industrial health and fundamental concerns of the field; it is regarded as an important primary text for medical students even today. At the same time that Hamilton’s elder sister, Edith Hamilton, published The Great Age of Greek Literature, Hamilton published her autobiography, Exploring the Dangerous Trades (1943). The book also featured illustrations by her sister Norah. Ironically, this book, the least technical of Hamilton’s works, received the greatest notoriety. The autobiography tells of Hamilton’s pioneering work in industrial medicine, her research in Munich and at Johns Hopkins University, and her residence at Hull House. Hamilton’s interesting life is discussed in a colorful, forthright manner. She candidly describes, for example, the trauma of being the only female student in the German universities, and how she was politely reminded that female faculty members were not seated at Harvard’s graduation exercises. She also gives touching accounts of her visit to the U.S.S.R. in 1924 and her return to Germany after World War I. Hamilton was honored after her retirement by numerous women’s organizations and medical societies. She continued to lecture in public until her death at the age of 101 years. BIBLIOGRAPHY: U.S. Dept. of Labor (Dec. 1977). Reference works: CB (May 1946, Nov. 1970). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Journal of Public Health (Oct. 1925, Aug. 1943). Booklist (15 Apr. 1943). Bookmark (16 May 1943). Book Week (2 May 1943). Nature (24 Oct. 1925). NR (19 Apr. 1943). NY (17 Apr. 1943). SR (8 May 1973). Survey (1 Nov. 1925, July 1943). TLS (13 July 1925). Weekly Book Review (11 Apr. 1943). —ILISE LEVY


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HAMILTON, Edith

intelligent, nonscholarly reader, and for high school and college humanities students.

Born 12 August 1867, Dresden, Germany; died 31 May 1963, Washington, D.C. Daughter of Montgomery and Gertrude Pond Hamilton

Her best-known work, Mythology (1942), recounts with authority and charm the stories of the (mainly Greek) gods, goddesses, heroes, and nymphs. One wishes she had made a greater effort to situate the myths historically and analytically. Cultural bias prevented her from looking beneath the outermost layer to determine possible sources, earlier forms, and cultural significance. Not surprisingly for her time, Hamilton subscribed to the ‘‘early science’’ and ‘‘primitive literature’’ theories of mythmaking. To her credit, she sensed these theories do not carry one very far.

In the record of Edith Hamilton’s work as an educator and writer, one glimpses strong models and an abiding confidence in herself and her traditions. Born abroad, Hamilton was only six weeks old when her parents returned with her to Fort Wayne, Indiana, where her Irish grandfather had settled in the early 1800s. There, in an affluent and cultivated atmosphere, she was early introduced to the classics. After attending Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, she received her B.A. and M.A. (1894) from Bryn Mawr College, majoring in Latin and Greek. She was a fellow in Latin at Bryn Mawr the next year, and received a one-year fellowship to study in Leipzig and Munich, where she was the first woman ever admitted. From 1896 to 1922, Hamilton was headmistress of the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore, which set new standards for the intellectual potential and achievement of young women. Personal magnetism, an unquestioned faith in the value of classical learning, and the determination that all 400 of her girls would succeed made the school popular. Many of her former students remained her devoted disciples. After retirement, Hamilton published a series of articles on Greek theater later collected in The Ever-Present Past (1964), a posthumous volume including a prologue by her friend and companion, Doris Fielding Reid. Hamilton maintained she had been bullied into writing; urged by friends to record thoughts that had crystallized over decades of studying and teaching, Hamilton proceeded with an almost evangelical fervor to produce volume after volume of materials relating to the ancient world, especially Greece, but also Rome, the prophets and teachers of the Old Testament, and finally the world of Jesus Christ. Although aspiring to the objectivity of positivism, these works never question the supremacy of Western culture or the elitist conception of progress that is its underpinning. In The Greek Way (1930) and its updated version, The Great Age of Greek Literature (1943), Hamilton attempts to recreate the ‘‘Greek miracle’’ through the words of her favorite authors. (There is no mention of Sappho.) The question she does not pose is how to march forward from perfection. Readers may be disturbed by cross-cultural comparisons: ‘‘The English method is to fill the mind with beauty; the Greek method was to set the mind to work.’’ Her generalizing tendency, however, forces one to make interesting and provocative connections, and it is offset by copious textual examples. Normative implications remain a problem: comparing the amplification of Hebrew prose with the brevity of Greek, she merely cites as proof Pericles’ statement that ‘‘we are lovers of beauty with economy.’’ Hamilton neglects scholarly apparatus, but her works retain their validity as a general introduction to the ancient world for the

Witness to the Truth (1948) separates the experience of Christ, likened unto Socrates, from history, theology, and the church. Hamilton eliminates all religious phenomenology save faith in order to focus upon the ethics and the metaphysics of Christ-likeness. In her view, the gospel of love breaks ‘‘through all restrictions, family, nation, race.’’ Among other awards, Hamilton received the Golden Cross of the Order of Benefaction from King Paul of Greece in 1957, at ceremonies on the stage of the ancient theater of Herodes Atticus in Athens, and was proclaimed an honorary citizen of Athens. A member of many professional organizations and a well-known woman of letters in her own time, Hamilton is unjustifiably ignored by critics of ours. OTHER WORKS: The Klubwoman (1925). The Roman Way (1932). The Prophets of Israel (1936). Three Greek Plays (1937). Spokesmen for God: The Great Teachers of the Old Testament (1949). The Echo of Greece (1957). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cole, R. W., Mythology: A Critical Commentary (1966). Reference works: CB (Apr. 1963, July 1963). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA, TCAS. —ALICE PARKER

HAMILTON, Gail See DODGE, Mary Abigail

HAMILTON, Jane Born 1957, Oak Park, Illinois Daughter of Allen B. and Ruth Hubert Hamilton; married Robert Willard, 1982; children: two. Jane Hamilton writes of small-town, Midwestern Americans who face extraordinary challenges. While her three novels are set

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in the sort of environment where Hamilton was raised and still lives—rural hamlets in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Minnesota—her characters lead lives very different from her own, which she describes as ‘‘ordinary.’’ Despite these divergent paths, Hamilton has said in interviews that she can relate to her characters emotionally, particularly their feelings of alienation. After graduating in 1979 with a B.A. from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, Hamilton planned to move to New York for a position with a publishing house. On the way, she took a job at a Wisconsin apple orchard, where she decided to remain, eventually marrying one of the business’s owners. In 1982 she began writing, winning grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wisconsin Art Board and submitting autobiographical short stories to publications such as Harper’s. Hamilton’s first novel, The Book of Ruth (1989), won the Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award from the PEN American Center (Hamilton and Hemingway share the same birthplace, Oak Park, Illinois.) The book (published in England under the title The Frogs Are Still Singing) focuses on Ruth, a resilient woman who is emotionally abused by her husband, Ruby, and his domineering, live-in mother. The story and its violent and inevitable conclusion were inspired by a newspaper article about a man in a town near Hamilton’s who murdered his mother-in-law. In its first seven years, The Book of Ruth sold steadily, accruing sales of 75,000 copies. Sales jumped to over a million, however, when the book became the third selection of Oprah Winfrey’s televised ‘‘Book Club.’’ A Map of the World (1994), Hamilton’s second novel, is about Alice and Howard, a married couple who move to a rural community to follow Howard’s dream of becoming a dairy farmer. The pair are viewed as outsiders, a perception compounded by the fact that they once entertained a dreadlocked African American houseguest. When a friend’s young child drowns under Alice’s watch and another subsequently accuses Alice of sexual abuse at the elementary school where she is a nurse, the couple’s lives change drastically and Alice ends up in jail. A Map of the World—like The Book of Ruth, was inspired by real-life events, including a documentary about a couple falsely accused of child abuse and a neighborhood child who drowned in his family swimming pool. The novel garnered somewhat mixed reviews, although it was praised for its use of telling details, perceptive emotional currents, innovative manipulation of point of view, and moving and involving story. ‘‘This highly observant author articulates what is poetic in children, in the natural world, and in the rigors of farm life,’’ stated a review in the New Yorker. ‘‘But there are mixed signals and blurs in her depiction of character which finally rob this otherwise lovely story of its full impact.’’ John Skow, reviewing the book for Time, added, ‘‘This would be soap opera if the author were not unusually good at transforming acute, intuitive perceptions into sentences.’’ Hamilton’s third book, The Short History of a Prince (1998), is about a 1970s suburban Chicago teenager who loves ballet but lacks talent. He is also dealing with his own homosexuality and his brother’s battle with terminal cancer. The book’s second

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section jumps to the 1990s, when the protagonist, now HIVpositive, confronts regrets over how he spent his youth. He returns from New York to a town near his family’s summer home to teach high school and a surprise ending involves his redemption. Though known for her strong female characters, Hamilton was applauded for her depiction of a gay man. As Robert Plunket wrote in The Advocate, a publication written for a gay and lesbian audience, ‘‘It is quite a surprise to discover that in her new novel, The Short History of a Prince, Jane Hamilton paints a very credible and sympathetic portrait of not just a man but a gay man.’’ As with her previous characters, Hamilton was complimented for her compassion and her use of believable detail to describe her characters and their lives. ‘‘Hamilton has an amazing way with the varieties of human pain,’’ wrote Laura Shapiro in Newsweek. ‘‘Her characters live with ordinary and sometimes extraordinary torment, yet her writing remains buoyant and her sensibility full of light.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference Works: CA 147 (1995). Other references: Advocate (26 May 1998). English Journal (Sept. 1996). LJ (15 Sept. 1997). Newsweek (13 Apr. 1998). New Yorker (15 Aug. 1994). NYTBR (26 Apr. 1998). People (30 May 1994). PW (2 Feb. 1998). Time (27 June 1994). Writer’s Digest (Oct. 1990). —KAREN RAUGUST

HAMILTON, Kate W(aterman) Born 1841, Schenectady, New York; died 28 November 1934, Bloomington, Illinois Also wrote under: Fleeta Daughter of Farwell H. and Ruth A. Cady Hamilton Kate Waterman Hamilton resided in New Jersey and Massachusetts, although her childhood was spent in Steubenville, Ohio, and she spent much of her life in the Midwest. She began writing at an early age, and her first publications were Sunday school books, the majority of them published by the Presbyterian Board of Publication and written under the pseudonym Fleeta. Unlike many women writers who began as Sunday school writers and then wrote for commercial firms, Hamilton continued to publish works in the 20th century for juvenile readers by the religious publishers, even though she occasionally wrote for commercial companies. Aside from publishing at least 42 books, Hamilton also wrote short stories and poetry for Harper’s, Youth’s Companion, Hearth and Home, Golden Hour, and St. Nicholas. Two of Hamilton’s best-known works are The Parson’s Proxy (1896) and Rachel’s Share of the Road (1882). In the former, the new minister from the city, Reverend John Sterling, has a rude introduction to his new parish in the country. After officiating at a wedding in the back hills, he breaks his leg from a


fall suffered when a drunken wedding participant, Nate, kicks him down a hill. Nate repents and offers to fill the pulpit while the parson recuperates; Nate’s conversion is one aspect of the story. The most interesting characters in The Parson’s Proxy are the minister’s sister, Nelson Sterling, and Granny Slocum. Nelson is an intelligent and independent young woman who befriends the country people. She wonders whether her real self is the ‘‘morning girl’’ who made mud pies with the poor children or the ‘‘afternoon girl’’ who dressed in finery. And at the end of the story she chooses to marry the man who says that a woman’s sphere is ‘‘what she needs to do, wants to do, and can do.’’ Nelson’s ideas may be noteworthy, but Granny Slocum is a far more interesting character. Hardly more than a stereotypical country hick at the novel’s beginning, she develops into a character of wit and wisdom. Rachel’s Share of the Road presents another woman who is willing to relinquish her wealth and status to help the country people of her town. Rachel is the daughter of the powerful and wealthy railroad magnate, Judge Lyndal. Hamilton emphasizes that unlike her father and her two city cousins, Rachel sees people as individuals rather than as classes. Initially, she convinces her father to hire a man who is responsible for a family and unable to find work. Later she supports a strike (both verbally and financially) at a foundry owned by her father. Rachel’s social consciousness is far more interesting than her romance, the outcome of which is certain from the beginning. Hamilton is a bit of a mystery. Many of her works are currently inaccessible. She wrote primarily for children, and these are precisely the most difficult works to locate. Her adult works were well received, but to today’s reader, her attempt to reproduce the vernacular speech of both upper- and lower-class people seems condescending; nonetheless, her characters do emerge as convincing people. Her writings suggest an interesting, but by no means unusual, view of religion; she believes that true spirituality lies in everyone and is best expressed by those furthest from organized religion. Hamilton’s scenes depicting those involved in organized religion are often the most humorous or sarcastic passages of the novels. On the other hand, her overt religious messages and the inclusion of quotations (often in conversation) from hymns and scripture make her work badly dated. Hamilton’s tendency toward complicated plots with hasty last-chapter resolutions also detracts from her work. OTHER WORKS: Mina Grey (1863). Frederick Gordon; or, Principle and Interest (1864). Norah Neil; or, The Way by Which He Led Thee (1864). The Old Brown House; or, Mother’s Birthday (1865). The Blue Umbrella (1866). The Shadow of the Rock (1866). Brave Heart (1868). Greycliff (1870). Chinks of Clannyford (1872). Robin Hood and Another Hood (1877). We Three (1877). Old Portmanteau (1878). Prue’s Pocket Book, and Other Stories (with E. F. Pratt, 1878). The House That Jack Built (1880). General Peg and Her Staff (1880). How the Buttoned Boots Marched (1880). Vagabond and Victor: The Story of David Sheldon (1880). Peg of the Royal Guard (1881). Tangles and Corners in Kezzie Driscoll’s Life (1882). Unity Dodge and Her Patterns (1883). Wood, Hay, and Other Stubble (1886). The Royal

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Service; or, The King’s Seal (1887). The Hand with the Keys (1890). Dick and His Cousins (1891). Giving and Keeping (with E. M. Hamilton, 1891). Nellie’s Red Book (1891). Tommy and Millie (with E. M. Hamilton, 1891). Two and a Half (1891). What Dolly and Robbie Did (1891). Dr. Lincoln’s Children (1892). Billy’s Motto (with E. M. Hamilton, 1894). Calendar of the Days (1894). Dolly’s Quest (1894). Dot’s Christmas (with E. M. Hamilton, 1894). How Billy Helped the Church (with E. M. Hamilton, 1894). In Search of a Fortune (with E. M. Hamilton, 1894). Like a Story (1894). Recitations and Exercises for Children’s Day and Other Occasions (1895). How Donald Kept Faith (1900). The Kinkaid Venture (1900). Mother’s Day: An Order of Service Arranged (1915). Thanksgiving Ann (n.d.). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: A Supplement to Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors (1891). NCAB. A Dictionary of North American Authors Deceased before 1950 (1951). Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of Bibliography (1900). —AMY DYKEMAN

HAMILTON, Virginia Born12 March 1936, Yellow Springs, Ohio Daughter of Kenneth J. and Etta Belle Perry Hamilton; married Arnold Adoff, 1960; children: one son, one daughter Virginia Hamilton’s heritage gives her an excellent perspective from which to view black history. She is only two generations removed from slavery; her maternal grandfather, born a slave, escaped with his mother to Ohio. Hamilton’s father experienced discrimination in finding a job suited to his business-college education. Hamilton herself, born in a place that once served as a station on the Underground Railroad, attended the African Methodist Episcopal Church as a child. Hamilton studied at Antioch College on a full scholarship and later at Ohio State University and the New School for Social Research. Hamilton went to New York City to further her career and, shortly after her twenty-fourth birthday, married a well-known white anthologist of black poetry. After living in New York for several years, the couple settled, with their son and daughter, in a rural home in Hamilton’s native Yellow Springs. Of the 10 books for children Hamilton has published, three are nonfiction: highly praised biographies of black activists W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson and a collection of Du Bois’ writings. Two of Hamilton’s fiction books, the Jahdu tales, are intended for the younger reader. Although these stories of the powerful creature Jahdu have been viewed as a portrayal of the growth of black consciousness in America, they lack a consistently developed mythic dimension. Hamilton’s most successful novels portray a child’s increased awareness of self and of the child’s heritage. Zeely (1967), which received the Nancy Block Memorial award for promoting

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interracial understanding, traces the maturing of 11-year-old Elizabeth Perry, who in her search for identity assumes the name Geeder. She becomes Elizabeth again through the wisdom of the beautiful and proud black woman, Zeely, who teaches her an important lesson about their African heritage. The House of Dies Drear (1968) is a very successful, somewhat gothic mystery, which received the Edgar award in 1968. Hamilton utilizes the setting, a small Ohio town where the abolitionist Dies Drear operated a station on the Underground Railroad, and the protagonist, 13-year-old Thomas Small, to communicate an important aspect of the history of blacks in America. Hamilton’s most highly acclaimed novel is M. C. Higgins, the Great (1974), which in 1975 received the Newbery Medal, the National Book award, and the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award. In this novel, set in the hills of Appalachia, Hamilton skillfully uses point of view to explore the consciousness of a maturing teenager who comes to understand his relationship to his family, its past, and Sarah’s Mountain, where his runaway-slave ancestor settled with her child. The element of black history is very significant; equally important, however, is Hamilton’s portrayal of the destruction of the mountain by strip miners and the subsequent effect on the hill people. Hamilton’s other novels are more experimental in theme and technique. In The Planet of Junior Brown (1971), set in New York City, Hamilton enters the world of the street-wise Buddy Clark and his friend, Junior Brown, a 300-pound musical prodigy who finally retreats into his own private world of madness. Arilla Sun Down (1976) utilizes the complexities of the stream-of-consciousness technique to mirror the confused identity of the part-black, part-Indian girl, Arilla Adams. The novel, however, is sometimes difficult to follow. In the 1980s and 1990s, Hamilton continued to produce wellwritten and well-received biographical and fictional books; in addition she published the phenomenally popular picture book, Jaguarundi in 1994. She stands at the forefront of children’s literature. In her many and varied works, she never condescends to her child reader in style, tone, or theme. These books will continue to appeal to adults and children because of the truth Hamilton sensitively and perceptively presents through her characters, settings, and creative storylines. OTHER WORKS: The Time-Ago Tales of Jahdu (1969). W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography (1972). Time-Ago Lost: More Tales of Jahdu (1973). Paul Robeson: The Life and Times of a Free Black Man (1974). Illusion and Reality (lecture, 1976). The Justice Cycle: Justice and her Brothers (1978). Dustland (1980). The Gathering (1980). Jahdu (1980). Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush (1982). The Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl (1983). Willie Bea and the Time the Martians Landed (1983). A Little Love (1984). Junius Over Far (1985). The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales (1985). The Mystery of Drear House (1987). A White Romance (1987). In the Beginning: Creation Stories from Around the World

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(1988). Anthony Burns: The Defeat and Triumph of a Fugitive Slave (1988). Bells of Christmas (1990). The Dark Ways: Stories from the Spirit World (1990). Cousins (1990). All Jahdu Storybook (1991). Drylongso (1992). Many Thousand Gone: African Americans from Slavery to Freedom (collection, 1993). Plain City (1993). Looking for America (1994). Her Story: Marican Folktales (1995). When Birds Could Talk (1996). A Ring of Tricksters (1997). Second Cousins (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1971). MTCW (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: A Teleconference with Virginia Hamilton (video, 1993). CA (video, 1991 & 1993). English Elementary Reader (Apr. 1971). Horn Book (Dec. 1972, Aug. 1975). In Print: Maurice Sendak, Virginia Hamilton (video, 1984). Instructor (February, 1994). Meet Virginia Hamilton (video, 1988 & 1998). NYTBR (13 Oct. 1968, 22 Sept. 1974, 31 Oct. 1976). Virginia Hamilton (audiocassette, 1992). Virginia Hamilton (videos, 1978 & 1991). —MARTHA E. COOK

HANAFORD, Phebe (Ann) Coffin Born 6 May 1829, Siasconset, Massachusetts; died 2 June 1921, Rochester, New York Wrote under: Phebe A. Hanaford, Rev. Phebe A. Hanaford Daughter of George W. and Phebe Barnard Coffin; married Joseph H. Hanaford, 1849; children: two Phebe Coffin Hanaford’s father, a merchant and shipowner, traced his descent from Tristram Coffin, a founder of Nantucket, and her mother was descended from Gregory Priest, pilot of the Mayflower, and Peter Folger, grandfather of Benjamin Franklin. Hanaford’s mother died soon after she was born; her father then married Emmeline Barnard Cartwright, who brought a son, older than Hanaford, and then bore seven younger children. Raised a Quaker, Hanaford was accustomed to hearing women preach. The men of Nantucket were frequently away from home on whaling and mercantile trips, and women were important figures in the Nantucket community. Among the women preachers who inspired the young Hanaford to her ministerial vocation were Mary Farnum, Elizabeth Coggeshall, and her cousin, Lucretia Mott. Hanaford studied in both public and private schools on Nantucket and studied Latin and higher mathematics privately. She was undoubtedly a very serious, dedicated person: she signed the temperance pledge at eight, published her first piece at thirteen, and began to teach in Siasconset at sixteen. In 1849 Hanaford married a homeopathic physician and teacher 10 years older than she. She had two children, and later served in her capacity as minister at the marriage of her daughter, Florence, and


at the ordination of her son, Howard, to the Congregational ministry. Hanaford became a Baptist after her marriage but joined the Universalist church after a crisis brought about by the death of a sister and brother. After marriage, she continued to teach and edited the religious magazines The Ladies’ Repository and The Myrtle from 1866 to 1868. In 1865 at her father’s request, she preached her first sermon in the Siasconset schoolhouse. With the urging and support of the Reverend Olympia Brown of South Canton, Massachusetts, Hanaford entered the ministry, becoming ordained in 1868. She served as minister to congregations in Hingham and Waltham, Massachusetts, New Haven, Connecticut, and Jersey City, New Jersey, apparently leaving her husband to take the pulpit in New Haven in 1870. She was a popular speaker, known for her ‘‘clarity of expression and well-modulated voice.’’ Writing her memoirs of 20 years of pastoral service in The Woman’s Journal (27 December 1890), Hanaford listed among her accomplishments ‘‘preaching four different sermons on one Sunday in four different towns, and riding in a carriage twenty-eight miles to do it,’’ citing this as evidence of woman’s capacity to undertake responsibilities as demanding as those of men. She was proud of being the first woman ordained in New England and the first woman to serve as chaplain in a state legislature (the Connecticut House in 1872 and the Connecticut Senate in 1872). Hanaford was active in the temperance and women’s movements as well. In 1869 she participated in the American Equal Rights Association Convention, helped organize the conservative American Woman Suffrage Association, and served as vice president of the Association for the Advancement of Women. Her church in New Jersey divided on ‘‘the woman question,’’ and Hanaford continued to serve as minister of the more radical branch. She preached at the funerals of her friends Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. At the age of eighty-nine, Hanaford drove eight miles to cast her first vote. After retiring from the ministry in 1891, Hanaford lived in New York City with her friend, a Sunday school teacher and hymn writer, Ellen E. Miles. She had hoped to live to 100 years of age, but died at ninety-two of hardening of the arteries and endocarditis at the home of a granddaughter. Hanaford was a prolific writer of inspirational fiction, biographies, and light verse for adults and children. In 1852 she wrote My Brother, a miniature volume of poems and essays addressed to brothers of different types: the orphan, the student, etc. Lucretia, the Quakeress (1853) was an abolitionist novel. Her Life of Abraham Lincoln (1865) sold 20,000 copies and was translated into German. Hanaford’s work of most enduring value is an American centennial celebration of women’s accomplishments, Women of the Century, 1877, reissued in expanded form in 1882 as Daughters of America. The introduction stresses the importance of freedom and equality and describes heroines of the Bible, ancient

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Rome, and Greece. The bulk of the book consists of biographical sketches of both major and minor American women, arranged by vocational categories such as lawyers, reformers, inventors, and journalists. It is a valuable and readable source of information. OTHER WORKS: Stories about Egypt (1856). The Best of Books and Its History (1857). Leonette; or, Truth Sought and Found (1857). Frank Nelson, the Runaway Boy (1865). The Soldier’s Daughter (1866). The Captive Boy of Tierra del Fuego (1867). Field, Gunboat, Hospital, and Prison (1867). The Young Captain (1868). George Peabody (1870). The Life of Charles Dickens (1870). From Shore to Shore, and Other Poems (1871). Our Home Beyond the Tide (1872). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Douglas-Lithgow, R. A., Nantucket: A History (1914). Hanson, E. R., Our Woman Workers (1882). Harper, I. H., The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (1898). Services at the Ordination and Installation of Rev. Phebe A. Hanaford (1870). Reference works: AW. DAB. HWS. NAW. NCAB. Other references: Nantucket Historical Association Proceedings (1929). —KAREN F. STEIN

HANSBERRY, Lorraine Born 19 May 1930, Chicago, Illinois; died 12 January 1965, New York, New York Daughter of Carl A. and Nannie Perry Hansberry; married Robert Nemiroff, 1953 Youngest of four children in a prosperous Republican, black family, Lorraine Hansberry spent two years at the University of Wisconsin, then went to New York City, where she studied African history under W. E. B. Du Bois and worked on a radical monthly, Freedom, published by Paul Robeson. In her words, her editor, Louis E. Burnham, taught her ‘‘all racism is rotten, black or white, that everything is political, and that people tend to be indescribably beautiful and uproariously funny,’’ tenets that are themes of her entire oeuvre. By 1959 she had attained fame as the youngest American and the only black dramatist to win the Best Play of the Year award, for A Raisin in the Sun (1959). Hansberry continued to write and work until her untimely death from cancer during the run of The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964). In addition to her dramatic works, essays, and journals, she made a significant contribution to the black movement by writing the text for a photographic journal, The Movement: A Documentary of a Struggle for Equality (1964), published shortly before she died. A landmark in American theater, A Raisin in the Sun ran for 530 performances, toured extensively, and has been published and

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produced in over 30 countries. Its title and theme are based on a poem by Langston Hughes that questions, ‘‘What happens to a dream deferred?’’ The play derives its power from the inevitable conflicts arising because each member of the Younger family has a different dream, an individual ‘‘plan’’ for escaping the dreary life of the Chicago ghetto in which they live. To Beneatha, the daughter, this means becoming a doctor. For Walter Lee, the son, the dream is to own his own business. But for Lena, the matriarch, the first order of business is to move out of their stultifying environment so the family may live and grow in dignity. The wherewithal to fulfill these dreams is a $10,000 insurance policy left by Lena’s husband, who had literally ‘‘worked himself to death.’’ After putting part of the money down on a house in a ‘‘white neighborhood’’ because it’s a good value, Lena entrusts the remainder to her son—half to be banked for Beneatha’s education, half for his business venture. Walter Lee, however, is bilked out of the entire sum by a black partner and so almost accepts the white ‘‘welcoming’’ committeeman’s offer to pay the Youngers for staying out of their neighborhood. Ultimately shamed by Lena, he decides against this cowardly solution, and the play ends as the family prepares to move. Two facts are noteworthy. Hansberry doesn’t assert it will be any easier for the Youngers to live in their new neighborhood than it was in fact for the Hansberrys to live in Englewood, Illinois, after they moved out of the Chicago ghetto. Nor does she arrange matters to make the white men the only villains. As in all her work, Hansberry shows that despite special feelings for her own people, she remains objective about race, with ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’ people in a spectrum totally unrelated to color. Hansberry’s second commercially produced play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, features a white protagonist, an engagé whose statements that he has always been ‘‘a fool who believes that death is waste and love is sweet’’ and that ‘‘hurt is desperation and desperation is energy and energy can MOVE things’’ sound like the playwright’s voice verbatim. Criticism by some reviewers on the basis that the characters are merely personifications of conflicting ways to view the world meant early closure, before giving the public a chance to estimate its value. Through Herculean efforts—donations and advertisements sponsored by distinguished people in the American theater—it remained open until over 80,000 people had seen the production. At Hansberry’s death, the sign came down in New York, but the play was successful on tour and has had subsequent productions in a dozen countries, including a particularly distinguished one in Paris with Simone Signoret as translator and producer. To Hansberry, her most important play was Les Blancs (1972), an accurate foretelling of what has happened in Africa in terms of black revolution. When produced posthumously (1970), there were cries of antiwhite bias, despite the fact it deals as fairly with opportunistic blacks as with white capitalists. In a similar vein, Hansberry’s 90-minute television drama, The Drinking Gourd (1960), commissioned by NBC for the Civil War centennial, was shelved as ‘‘too controversial,’’ although many of its

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scenes are forerunners of those done on television in such programs as Alex Haley’s Roots. Throughout her life, Hansberry kept diaries, journals, and letters and wrote many essays for newspapers and magazines. Bits and pieces of these, along with scenes from her plays, are well blended by Robert Nemiroff in To Be Young, Gifted, and Black (1969), a two-act drama. It was published as a book with extensive background notes and an introduction by James Baldwin. This playwright’s influence in the theater in terms of black performers, as well as black audiences—who saw themselves truthfully presented onstage for the first time in A Raisin in the Sun—was far greater than it might seem from the number of her works. Actually, since her death, there has been a growing interest in this woman whose philosophy was summed up in her address to young black writers. She said: ‘‘What I write is not based on the assumption of idyllic possibilities or innocent assessments of the true nature of life, but, rather, on my own personal view that, posing one against the other, I think that the human race does command its own destiny and that that destiny can eventually embrace the stars.’’ BIBLIOGRAPHY: Abramson, D. E., Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre, 1925-1959 (1969). Bigsby, C. W. E., Confrontation and Commitment: A Study of Contemporary American Drama, 1959-1966 (1968). Carter, S. R., Hansberry’s Drama: Commitment Amid Complexity (1991). Cheney, A., Lorraine Hansberry (1984). Brown-Guillory, E., Their Place on the Stage: Black Women Playwrights in America (1988). Reference works: CA (1971). CB (Sept. 1959, Feb. 1965). Black Theatre USA (1974). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Ebony (18 Sept. 1963). Freedomways (issue devoted to Hansberry, 1979). Newsweek (20 Apr. 1959). New York Amsterdam News (29 Jan. 1972). NY (9 May 1959). NYT (29 Nov. 1970). SR (31 Dec. 1966). Time (10 Jan. 1969). Vogue (June 1959). Lorraine Hansberry: The Black Experience in the Creation of Drama (video, 1975). —EDYTHE M. MCGOVERN

HARAWAY, Donna Born 6 September 1944, Denver, Colorado Daughter of Frank O. and Dorothy Maguire Haraway; married B. Jaye Miller, 1970 (divorced) Donna Haraway is a science historian whose works range from treatises on the study of primate behavior to thoughtful expositions on the influence of technology in our daily lives. Haraway has also written extensively on the concept of the cyborg and contributed to the cyberpunk culture. Her writings have influenced science fiction writers like Philip K. Dick and Octavia Butler.


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Haraway attended Catholic schools in her hometown of Denver and received a Boettcher Foundation scholarship to study at Colorado College. She graduated from college in 1966 with a major in zoology and philosophy and went to Paris on a Fulbright scholarship to study different theories of evolution. She received a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1972 for an interdisciplinary dissertation on the functions of metaphor in shaping research in developmental biology in the 20th century. Haraway was an assistant professor of general science at the University of Hawaii at Honolulu from 1970 to 1974 and an assistant professor of the history of science at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore from 1974 to 1980. Since 1980 she has been a professor in the history of consciousness department at the University of California at Santa Cruz. In addition to teaching feminist theory and science studies in her own department, she is also affiliated with the women’s studies, anthropology and environmental studies departments at UCSC.

purposes. She points to the androgynous status of the cyborg as a victory for femininity.

Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (1990) stems from Haraway’s ten-year investigation of the various studies of monkeys and apes that have been conducted in the 20th century. In this monumental and loosely chronological account of the history of primatology, Haraway notes the evolution of scientific views toward primates. She asserts monkeys and apes, which were once seen as nonhuman primates, are now viewed as our ancestors in part because of our embarrassment in claiming marginalized ‘‘others,’’ like primitive African tribesmen, as ancestors. She asserts ‘‘the commercial and scientific traffic in monkeys and apes is a traffic in meanings, as well as in animal lives.’’ This complex theoretical argument is grounded in case studies of American, British, Japanese, and Indian researchers and their differing methods and philosophies. Haraway also discusses the concept of feminist primatology and the ways in which women researchers have taken a different approach from their male counterparts. The concluding chapter, ‘‘Reprise: Science Fiction, Fictions of Science, and Primatology,’’ includes a reading from Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis series.

OTHER WORKS: Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors of Organicism in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology (1976).

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1992) is a partly autobiographical account of what Haraway describes as the transformation of a ‘‘socialist-feminist, white, female, hominid biologist’’ into ‘‘a multiply marked cyborg feminist.’’ The 10 essays comprising the book were adapted from various articles published between 1978 and 1989. The essays in the first and second parts of this collection explore the definition and role of gender in scientific discovery and the ways in which the concept of both nature and the human body has been invented, altered, and redefined during the last several decades. The third section consists of ‘‘The Cyborg Manifesto,’’ arguably Haraway’s best and certainly her most infamous piece of writing. ‘‘A Cyborg Manifesto’’ discusses the problems contemporary men and women face as a result of their skewed perspective on society. Her solution, which she calls ‘‘cyborg embodiment,’’ is to be found in the dual perspective earned by a psychic melding of man and machine, the organic and the inorganic. Haraway insists that understanding the significance of technology in shaping our lives and identities is the only way to mold technological change for worthy and emancipatory

Haraway describes Modest Witness @ Second Millennium: Femaleman Meets Oncomouse: Feminism and Technoscience (1996) as ‘‘a landscape of cyborgs, patented lifeforms, computer-mediated representations, reproductive technologies, genetic engineering and nuclear research.’’ These essays explore the far-reaching cultural associations in the information and life sciences and question the boundaries between what we call ‘‘nature’’ and ‘‘science’’ and ‘‘culture’’ as well as the boundaries between scientists and laypersons. Along the way, she discusses such diverse aspects of science and technology as biology textbooks, computer simulations, science fiction, the Human Genome Project, the ability of science to effectively cloak racism in technical language, and the origins of copyrights and trademarks.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1978). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the Untied States (1995). Other references: Futures (Nov. 1991). Nation (5 Nov. 1990). PW (11 Jan. 1991). Science (18 May 1990). Technical Communication (Aug. 1998). Zygon (June 1996). —LEAH J. SPARKS

HARDING, Mary Esther Born 5 August 1881, Shrewsbury, England; died 4 May 1971, London, England Mary Esther Harding came from an educated Shropshire family. At the University of London, she experienced a typical rebuff to women medical students of the time as she was prevented from interning in any but the Royal Free Hospital. She received her M.D. in 1914 and served in hospitals during World War I. In the 1920s, Harding devoted herself to the practice and study of Jungian psychoanalysis. Jungians (and even Jung himself) credit her more than any other person with having brought analytical psychology to America. She (with the help of two other doctors, Kristine Mann and Eleanor Bertine) founded the first American Jungian Society in New York in 1936. She was also the first head of the training branch of the New York Institute for Analytical Psychology. Her first two books on psychology, The Way of All Women (1933) and Women’s Mysteries (1935), are her most original. The former has been translated into five languages, and both have come out in revised editions. Women’s Mysteries is almost a catalogue of myths and dreams that link woman’s psyche to the moon. Harding argues

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modern woman is out of touch with the deepest, most instinctual, and positive roots of her own feminine principle (as distinguished from the feminine principle of the male psyche), and that she has given her allegiance too exclusively to masculine forces of supposed reason and destructive dominion over nature and people. Harding concludes that our future depends on the balance between the feminine Eros and the masculine Logos. The book also reconstructs the Moon-Goddess and the nonrational, dark, yet redemptive side of life that she represents, making the book important also for religious studies on the goddesses or feminine godhead left out of the Christian concept of trinity. Another important point in the book is her analysis of ‘‘the sacrifice of the son’’ (the weaning of all children from the nest and the mother’s psyche) from the mother’s point of view so she may develop as a person. Women’s Mysteries is undoubtedly Harding’s most important work but is also her most difficult stylistically because the archetypal, mythic, and dream materials are not integrated gracefully into her own thoughts about their meaning and application. Jung himself asked Harding to assimilate the material more before publishing the book. In response, she first published The Way of All Women, which extrapolates in lucid and compassionate terms the meaning of her feminine archetypes in the lives of real women. Throughout both these books she emphasizes that women must grow beyond the image society has projected for them, that they must develop their minds to become persons, to ‘‘individuate.’’ In most of her later works, Harding emphasizes her concern with a predominantly Jungian construct, the religious urge as it surfaces in the latter half of life. Most important of her works for the dissemination of Jungian thought in America was the widely read Psychic Energy: Its Source and Its Transformation (1947), which emphasizes the introversion of the second stage of life in realizing the mandala and other symbols of psychic wholeness that connect the human psyche to the transpersonal. The I and the Not-I (1965) and Journey into Self (1956) are also graceful, remarkably jargon-free introductions to Jungian thought. Harding’s work has been neglected because her emphasis on the religious impetus of the older person is antithetical to American schools of psychology, mostly dominated by behaviorism and Freudian thought, and because her writings on women counter the bias of feminist thought of the 1960s and 1970s, which holds that all psychic differences between men and women are enculturated. Moreover, women in the Jungian school have tended to be disciples rather than thinkers, and Harding was an independent thinker, attracting from other Jungians such labels as ‘‘animus-bound’’ (a woman with an overdeveloped masculine side), opinionated, dogmatic, and assertive. Yet her popularizing Jungian books are perhaps the most gracefully written and elegant (even urbane) of all those that attempt to make Jung’s circumlocutory style and thought accessible to the layperson. Her studies on women reintroduced the feminine godhead lost under Judeo-Christianity; they systematized and synthesized myths about woman’s special biology and psyche; and they are among the first psychological studies to look

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at woman from a woman’s own point of view, as Harding experienced her in analysis as well as in myth, dream, and art. It is necessary to concede, however, Harding does echo the male Jungian ideology that thinking is less natural to a woman, though she must develop the faculty, and Harding holds to the idea that ‘‘relatedness’’ is more endemic to the feminine psyche than the masculine. She reflects her era as well as transcending it on some crucial concepts. OTHER WORKS: The Circulatory Failure of Diphtheria (1920). A Short Review of Dr. Jung’s Article ‘‘Redemptive Ideas in Alchemy’’ (1937). The Parental Image (1965). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Journal of Analytical Psychology (1972). Quadrant (Fall 1971). —STEPHANIE ANN DEMETRAKOPOULOS

HARDING, Sandra Born circa 1950; no other biographical data available Sandra Harding is an accomplished professor, philosopher, writer, and editor. For 20 years she taught at the University of Delaware and then joined UCLA in 1996. She currently is a professor of education and women’s studies for the graduate school at UCLA, where she lectures theories and philosophies on women’s issues concerning science, feminism, sociology, and philosophy. Dedicated to lecturing and writing, Harding has a countless list of accomplishments. She is the author or editor of 10 books and special journal issues including: Can Theories Be Refuted? (1976), Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and Philosophy of Science (1983), The Science Question in Feminism (1986), Sex and the Scientific Inquiry (1987), Feminism and Methodology: Social Science Issues (1987), The Process of Science (1987), Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives (1991), The ‘‘Racial’’ Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future (1993), and Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms and Epistemologies (1998). She has lectured at over 200 universities and conferences in North America, Europe, South Africa, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and Central America. She has been a visiting professor at the University of Amsterdam, the University of Costa Rica, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) at Zurich. She has also been a consultant to several United Nations organizations, including the Pan American Health Organization, UNESCO’s World Science Report, the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), and the United Nations Commission on Science and Technology for Development. Harding focuses on the connection between women and science in her lectures and writings. In lectures for the World Health Organization, she concerned herself with women’s health


and science issues pertaining to research and clinics. ‘‘In the ministries of health, they think of women as uteruses with feet,’’ she said. ‘‘If the feet can get the uterus into the clinic, they don’t care what happens to the woman. They’re only concerned with reproductive issues.’’ Harding was particularly concerned about this scientific research issue because women tend not to come to clinics because of this dehumanization, and their health, as well as the community as a whole, suffers. ‘‘It’s women who deliver health on an everyday basis,’’ she said. ‘‘Not only to their children but to the elderly and sick.’’ Harding explores science and the differences in feminist theory. According to Harding, there are two feminism theories: multicultural feminism and global feminism. Multicultural feminism studies cultural differences in American women compared to histories, cultures, concerns, and lives led by other women. Global feminism, on the other hand, focuses on how women are located in the global political economy and questions what the relationship is like between American women’s lives and the lives of women all over the world. ‘‘We need to develop in our science studies a more suitable multicultural global context,’’ Harding comments as she stresses the importance of the effect of women on science and the effect of science on women. The Process of Science discusses the same issues presented in The Science Question in Feminism. However, The Process of Science is more condensed. Harding states the feminism in science problem as seen by traditional science. She acknowledges feminism as a political movement for social change. Taking the ‘‘scientific approach’’ of the pursuit of value-neutral, objective, dispassionate, and disinterested scientific method, political feminism does not fit or belong in science. That is, according to the objectivity of the scientific method. Science is supposed to be protected from politics, according to Harding. To argue this, she presents the problem of male bias in scientific research just as science could claim feminist bias in research due to the political agenda of feminism. Harding is presenting, in essence, a two-way political agenda affecting science as a whole. The claims she makes in The Process of Science is that science and politics truly affect one another in regard to the feminism and nonfeminism movements. In Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?, Harding insists on sexual equality in the sciences, but not only for ethical reasons of equal opportunity between men and women. She sees feminism as a way to make science more truthful and resourceful in regard to the specific criteria and needs for women. ‘‘We can hold that our own account also has social causes,’’ she wrote. She believes that research should begin with the lives of women rather than of men, who are the dominant group. She also adds that women should take into consideration other oppressed groups when conducting scientific research and not listen to all dominant groups. Harding believes focusing on dominant classes creates a distortion in scientific theory and research. ‘‘They are the powerful tide against which women must swim,’’ she wrote. Finally, Harding emphasizes that feminism in science is not the complete answer to truth in science. She believes that the most objective research realm would be submitted in an egalitarian society, one without dominant and oppressed societal classes.

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OTHER WORKS: Contributor to: Beyond Domination: New Perspectives on Women and Philosophy (1984), The Process of Science: Contemporary Philosophical Approaches to Understanding Scientific Practice (1987), Feminism & Science (1989), Feminist Theory in Practice and Process (1989), Feminism/ Postmodernism (1990), (En)gendering Knowledge: Feminists in Academe (1991), Inventing Women: Science, Technology, and Gender (1992), The Centennial Review (1992), Signs (1992), Social Research (1992), American Feminist Thought at Century’s End: A Reader (1993), Feminist Epistemologies (1993), Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader (1994), Isis (1995), Missing Links: Gender Equity in Science and Technology for Development (1995), Synthese (1995), Women Writing Culture (1995), Knowledge, Difference, and Power: Essays Inspired by Women’s Ways of Knowing (1996), Reviews in Anthropology (1996), Radical Philosophy (1996), Science Wars (1996), Social Text (1996), Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science (1997), Men Doing Feminism (1998), editor with U. Narayan of two special issues, Hypatia (Spring, 1998; Summer, 1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bulletin of the History of Medicine (Spring 1990). Contemporary Sociology (July 1992). Gender & Society: Official Publication of Sociologists for Women in Society (June 1993). Isis (September 1992). Library & Information Science Research (January 1993). Philosophical Review (April 1993). Philosophy of Science (September 1990). Sociology (August 1992). Zygon (1995). —KIMBALLY A. MEDEIROS

HARDWICK, Elizabeth Born 27 July 1916, Lexington, Kentucky Daughter of Eugene A. and Mary Ramsay Hardwick; married Robert Lowell, 1949 (divorced); children: one daughter Novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick, still vigorous and opinionated at 83, writes in the New York Review of Books (22 April 1999) about the gripping drama which dominated national and international news during that winter. Her review of the specious book, Monica’s Story by Andrew Morton, displays a characteristically mordant wit and distaste for the vulgar and indecorous: ‘‘The shabby history of the United States in the last year can be laid at the door of three unsavory citizens,’’ she writes—describing one as ‘‘shallow and reckless,’’ another as ‘‘aggressive and exhibitionist’’ and the third as a ‘‘pale, obsessive Pharisee.’’ It is significant that Hardwick can and does make sweeping political statements in her ‘‘Head over Heels’’ column with complete confidence in both her own judgement and her audience. As founding partner at the New York Review of Books in 1963, as an advisory editor there still, a distinguished and respected woman of letters for more than 60 years, Hardwick is central to the literary and social commentary of the 20th century. Her undisputed position as Critic, in an age when fashionable criticism

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comes and goes, makes the appearance of a new book by her a cause for rejoicing. Joyce Carol Oates, no slouch of a writer herself, has written that Hardwick’s most recent collection of essays, Sight-Readings: American Fictions (1998), contains ‘‘commentary on literary biographies [that] is, quite simply, brilliant, the most reasoned and responsible thinking on the subject the general reader is likely to encounter. . .without ostentation or polemics.’’ Hardwick was born into a family of 10 brothers and sisters in Kentucky. She was educated at local schools, including the University of Kentucky where she earned both B.A. and M.A. (1939) degrees in English literature. When she moved to New York City shortly after, and enrolled at Columbia University, her orbit of friendship and influence grew to include the leading writers and critics of the era. With her marriage to the dashing but deeply disturbed poet Robert Lowell in 1949 she entered a family of American intellectual aristocrats, and the intimate company of the best poets and writers in the world. Together the Lowells traveled to meet Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil, to James Merrill in Greece, to writers’ conferences and colonies. They lived in Boston while he taught at Harvard. She later lived and taught in New York as an adjunct professor of English at Barnard College. Hardwick has won many awards and honors: an early Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction (1948), was followed by the George Jean Nathan Award for outstanding drama criticism (1967), a nomination to the National Book Critics Circle (1980), and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1989). If Lowell was brilliant and prolific; Hardwick was equally so. Her novels The Ghostly Lover (1945), The Simple Truth (1955), and Sleepless Nights (1979) emerge as a series of fictions that attempt to explain the dilemma of human emotional development. In the last of these she succeeds—through a judicious blending of semiautobiographical material and stream-of-consciousness motif (explored in the first novel)—to realize the promise of her own narrative line. The reflective nature of Hardwick’s immature work becomes the foundation of an explicit and comprehensive view of the human individual in her mature stories and essays. She was praised early and often for the quality of her prose as well as her gift for the nuances of casual discourse and a flair for description. Her literary and social criticism and her short stories are widely admired as quirky, compelling, and very smart. The amount of writing she has produced is substantial, its range enormous: three serious collections of essays including A View of My Own: Essays on Literature and Society (1962), Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature (1974), and Bartleby in Manhattan and Other Essays (1983) precede Sight-Readings (1998). These volumes include book reviews, social criticism, political commentary, biographical sketches, and trenchant remembrances that appeared, along with many short stories, in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Partisan Review, New Republic, Sewanee Review, and other varied periodicals. Two of her most successful endeavors remain relatively unknown: 18 volumes of Rediscovered Fiction by American Women: A Personal Selection (1977) which she carefully compiled and edited; and an edition of the letters of William James. These texts emphasize her range of mind, her breadth of interest and of knowledge. Anne Tyler has exclaimed

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that ‘‘Whatever her subject, Hardwick has a gift for coming up with descriptions so thoughtfully selected, so exactly right, that they strike the reader as inevitable.’’ Hardwick combines this intense critical scrutiny and what she herself has described as a ‘‘passion‘‘ for ideas with the roles of devoted mother to Harriet Lowell and of supportive wife to Robert Lowell (despite their divorce and his subsequent remarriage) until the last moments of his life, (when he died in a taxi returning with her to her apartment in New York City). She is most gracious still in answering the hundreds of questions about her more famous husband (winner of two Pulitzer Prizes for poetry), but in outliving him by two decades has surely influenced more writers, more often and more fully than he did. OTHER WORKS: Selected Letters of William James (edited by Hardwick, 1961). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Pinckney, D., ‘‘Elizabeth Hardwick’’ in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (1986). Reference works: CA (1969). CANR (1991). CLC (1980). DLB (1980). Modern American Women Writers (1991). WA. Other references: Manchester Guardian Weekly (18 Sept. 1983). Nation (5 May 1945). NR (14 Feb. 1955). NYRB (24 September 1998). NYT (24 May 1983, 17 Aug. 1986). NYTBR (29 April 1979, 12 June 1983). Newsweek (30 May 1983). WPBW (29 May 1983). —KATHLEEN BONANN MARSHALL

HARJO, Joy Born 9 May 1951, Tulsa, Oklahoma Daughter Allen W. and Wynema Baker Foster; children: Phil, Rainy Dawn Joy Harjo is a poet, screenwriter, and musician, and is a member of the Muskogee (Creek) tribe. Raised in Oklahoma until leaving to attend high school at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Sante Fe, New Mexico, she received her B.A. from the University of New Mexico (1976) and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa (1978). Harjo’s love of the language is influenced by her mother, who wrote songs, and her father’s grandfather, who was a full-blooded Creek and a Baptist minister. Harjo’s Creek identity is central to her poetry. Her work is based on a duality she argues is distinctly Native American: to be Native American is to experience acutely the banality and injustice of the present and, at the same time, to have privileged access to the mythic world and its resources for empowerment and survival. Harjo beautifully indicates these resources in ‘‘Javelina,’’ where she gives voice to herself at seventeen: ‘‘I was born of a blood who wrestled whites for freedom, and I have lived dangerously in a diminished system.’’ She consoles this earlier desperate woman with a prediction of a future already achieved: ‘‘The mythic world will enter with the subtlety of a snake the color of


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earth changing skin. . .you who thought you could say nothing, write poetry.’’ Poetry directs self-destructive dangerous living into creatively dangerous struggle, dissent, and survival.

stories. In his review for Booklist, Pat Monaghan wrote: ‘‘Harjo melds the present with the mythic past, seeing through time and space into a timeless, spacious abode of spirit.’’

In her first book, What Moon Drove Me to This? (1980), Harjo demonstrates a variety of understandings of the mythic world in relation to present experience. Her palpable sense of the mythic both unites and separates her from the community of Indian peoples. Whereas much of Harjo’s early poetry labors on behalf of a social community, her later poetry finds her listening to the voices of those who also experience the power of myth, and needing that community for consolation and survival.

Notable among Harjo’s numerous awards are the American Book Award, Before Columbus Foundation (1991); the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America for the best book of poetry (1990); the American Indian Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Award (1990); the Oakland PEN Josephine Miles Award (1990); the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award for In Mad Love and War, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native American Writers Circle of the Americas and from the Arizona Commission on the Arts (1989).

She Had Some Horses (1983) is a successful exorcism of personal, poetic, and historical fears that she describes intensely at the book’s opening. Harjo drives her duality or ‘‘doubleness’’ inward, into an intense vacillation between hope and despair that she indicates by the doubling of her poetic endings. The survivor poem, ‘‘The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window,’’ ends with the woman both falling to her death and pulling herself off the ledge into life. By the book’s end, Harjo embraces doubleness and argues that the triumph and tragedy of her personal and collective history are inseparable: ‘‘She had some horses she loved. / She had some horses she hated. / These were the same horses.’’ In Mad Love and War (1990) tells the story of powerful women—mythic and real—and their struggle to bring the world out of its current diminished state. The mythic deer dances naked in a bar, transforming the tawdry moment with the promising presence of the ancestors. In elegies extolling the transformative power of memory, Harjo (who renamed herself after her grandmother) keeps alive the work of Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, a woman active in the American Indian movement who was murdered in 1976, and Jacqueline Peters, a writer and activist lynched in California by the Ku Klux Klan in 1986. Being a part of a community of women is as central to Harjo as her Creek identity, and she counts among her mentors Audre Lorde, Leslie Marmon Silko, Meridel LeSueur, June Jordan, Simon Ortiz, Galway Kinnell, and Leo Remero. Harjo has written a series of prose poems on the Southwestern landscape, Secrets from the Center of the World (1989), which accompany photographs by Stephen Strom, and several screenplays. A teacher of poetry and Native American literature, she has taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts (1978-79), Arizona State University (1980-81), the University of Colorado (1985-88), and the University of Arizona at Tucson (1988-90). She joined the English Department of the University of New Mexico in 1991. Harjo has served as a writer and consultant for the Native American Public Broadcasting Consortium, the National Indian Youth Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts (1980-83). Many of Harjo’s writings deal with what she calls mythic space. She defines mythic space as that which is not easily explained, yet can’t be ignored. Many poems in The Last Song (chapbook, 1975) deal with mythic space, and she returns to that theme in The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (1994). In The Woman Who Fell from the Sky, she juxtaposes the present with the past to weave modern-day tales with ancient Native American

Harjo plays tenor saxophone in her band, Poetic Justice, whose music fuses rock and jazz with tribal sounds and rhythms. She is working on three books: The Good Luck Cat is a children’s book, A Love Supreme is a compilation of personal essays, and In the Beautiful Perfume and Stink of the World is a book of poetry. Harjo also edits the literary journals High Plains Literary Review, Tyuonyi, and Contact II. OTHER WORKS: Furious Light (audiocassette, 1986). Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writing of North America (1998). Spiral of Memories: Interviews (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Balassi, W. et al., eds., This Is about Vision: Interviews with Southwestern Writers (1990). Harris, M. et al., eds., A Gift of Tongues: Critical Challenges in Contemporary American Poetry (1987). Norwood, V., and J. Monk, eds., The Desert Is No Lady: Southwestern Landscapes in Women’s Writings and Art (1987). Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets (1987). Reference works: CA (1985). CANR (1992). FC (1990). Other references: American Indian Quarterly (Spring 1983). American West (Dec. 1989). Booklist (15 Nov. 1994). Christianity and Crisis (22 Oct. 1990). MELUS (Spring 1989). Ms. (July 1983). WRB (Oct. 1983, July 1990). World Literature Today (Winter 1991). Web sites: Academy of American Poets, Voices from the Gaps: Women Writers of Color (23 Nov. 1996, available online at www.poets.org), and www.hanksville.org. —DARIA DONNELLY, UPDATED BY NICK ASSENDELFT

HARPER, Frances Ellen Watkins Born 24 September 1825, Baltimore, Maryland; died 22 February 1911, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Wrote under: Frances E. W. Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins married Fenton Harper, 1860 (died 1864); children: one daughter Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, the author of the first novel published by an African American woman, was the most popular

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black poet of her day. She was a sought-after lecturer, as well, speaking on behalf of abolitionism, temperance, and women’s rights. Born to free parents, Harper was orphaned at an early age, then reared and educated by an aunt and uncle active in the antislavery movement. She became self-supporting at age thirteen. After working at various occupations—including nursemaid, seamstress, and teacher—Harper found her true calling on the lecture platform. She gave her first speech in 1854 in New Bedford, Massachusetts; her subject was ‘‘The Education and the Elevation of the Colored Race.’’ Few women in the abolitionist movement traveled so widely or spoke to so many audiences. Apparently no copies of Forest Leaves (circa 1845), an early book of poetry by Harper, are extant. Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854), with an introduction by William Lloyd Garrison, went through some 20 editions by 1874. Her dramatic readings of her verse were highlights of her lectures, and according to William Still, with whom she worked on the Underground Railroad, more than 50,000 copies of her books were sold. Harper married in 1860; she was the mother of one daughter. After her husband’s death in 1864, Harper resumed her career as a lecturer. With the end of the Civil War, Harper carried her message of education and moral uplift to the Southern states. Here she took the greatest interest in meetings called exclusively for black women, whose needs she felt were more pressing than those of any other class. Like many other 19th-century feminists, Harper believed in the temperance cause; for many years she held the office of superintendent of colored work in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. She was also active in the National Association of Colored Women, of which she was a founder and vice president until her death. Harper’s poems are of a piece with her oratory, determinedly propagandistic and emotional. In poems such as ‘‘The Slave Auction’’ and ‘‘The Slave Mother,’’ Harper presents the horrors of slavery from a female point of view. These poems are unabashedly sentimental but undeniably effective. Her frequently anthologized poem, ‘‘Bury Me in a Free Land,’’ derives its considerable strength both from its powerful theme and its balladlike simplicity. Harper’s is very much an oral poetry; it needs to be heard, not merely read. By all accounts, Harper herself was an outstanding performer, rendering her lines with dramatic voice and gesture, with sighs and tears. Her stage presence reflected her oratorical skill, but it was clearly derived as well from her profound commitment to the freedom struggle. The first novel by a black author to depict the Reconstruction, Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted (1892), drew heavily on Harper’s experiences in the South after the Civil War. Iola Leroy also contains frequent flashbacks to earlier periods and thus embraces the whole of 19th-century black experience. The main characters, Iola Leroy and Robert Johnson, are mulattoes whose actions are motivated specifically by their desire to reunite their families after emancipation and generally by their desire to uplift the race. As mulattoes they enjoy certain privileges not shared by other blacks, notably access to education, but they are steadfast in their refusal to set themselves apart from their fellows.

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Iola Leroy is not a well-written work; its weaknesses to a large degree are those of the sentimental novel, the literary genre to which it belongs. The plot is often confused and incredible, and the characters overly idealized. The novel is nevertheless valuable for its historical insights, especially its portrayal of the bravery of black soldiers during the war and of the sacrifices made by the black community during Reconstruction. In its Christian humanism and its dedication to the principle of equality, Iola Leroy dramatizes the ideals to which Harper devoted her life. OTHER WORKS: Moses: A Story of the Nile (1869). Sketches of Southern Life (1872). The Martyr of Alabama, and Other Poems (circa 1894). The papers of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper are located at the Springarn Research Center of Howard University and the New York Public Library. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Campbell, J., Mythic Black Fiction: The Transformation of Hisotry (1986). Carby, H., Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (1987). Christian, B., Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976 (1990). Foster, F. S., ed., A Brighter Coming Day: A Frances E. W. Harper Reader (1990). Graham, M., ed., The Complete Poems of Frances E. W. Harper (1988). Lerner, G., Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (1973). Montgomery, J. W., A Comparative Analysis of the Rhetoric of Two Negro Women Orators—Sojourner Truth and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1968). Robinson, W. H., Early Black American Poets (1971). Sillen, S., Women against Slavery (1955). Still, W. G., The Underground Railroad (1872). Reference works: AAW (1991). Black American Writers Past and Present (1975). DLB (1986). NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Black World (Dec. 1972). —CHERYL A. WALL

HARPER, Ida Husted Born 18 February 1851, Fairfield, Indiana; died 14 March 1931, Washington, D.C. Daughter of John A. and Cassandra Stoddard Husted; married Thomas W. Harper, 1871 (divorced 1890); children: one daughter Ida Husted Harper was a prolific writer and journalist and an active feminist. A suffragist of international reputation, Harper traveled throughout the U.S. and Europe with Susan B. Anthony, who asked her to become her official biographer. She handled publicity for the National American Woman Suffrage Association when Carrie Chapman Catt served as president. After leaving Indiana University to become principal of a high school in Indiana, Harper began her writing career at twenty by sending articles under a male pseudonym to the Terre Haute


Saturday Evening Mail. Under her own name she then wrote a column, ‘‘A Woman’s Opinions,’’ for that same newspaper for 12 years. She simultaneously edited weekly discussions of women’s activities in the Locomotive Fireman’s Magazine, the official organ of the union of which her husband was chief counsel. After her divorce in 1890, she joined the staff of the Indianapolis News. From then on she devoted her life to her daughter, to writing, and to her activities in the woman suffrage movement. Her career in journalism led her from Indiana to New York, where she wrote a column for the New York Sun (1899-1903) and, best known, a woman’s page in Harper’s Bazaar (1909-1913). She devoted most of this writing to the suffrage movement; her interests, unlike those of Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucy Stone, centered on the primary importance of the vote for women. She offered detailed reports about the status of women and their right to vote in countries all over the world. Her insight into international politics gave to her work the standards of accurate social history. In Harper’s Bazaar, she reported on working women demanding suffrage, on women as officeholders in states with the vote, on the deaths of her friends who had ‘‘lived for the Movement,’’ and on the joys of seeing her dreams become a reality: ‘‘Yes, woman suffrage is becoming fashionable and it is all very amusing to veterans of the cause. They understand fully that, underlying the fashion, are years of hard and persistent work yet ahead before a universal victory.’’ Her spirit is striking as she writes that ‘‘women of today who are not helping in the effort for the franchise do not know the joy they miss. . .so vital, so compelling, so full of the progressive spirit of the age.’’ This same vigor appears in her two volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage, that monumental compilation begun by Anthony and Stanton. Harper helped Anthony edit volume four, and she alone edited volumes five and six, dealing with state and national activities from 1900 to 1920. While the History contains records rather than interpretations of documents, speeches, and state and national activities, it nevertheless forms a coherent pattern of immense value for historians. Harper was Susan B. Anthony’s Boswell: to her we owe a detailed study of Anthony’s life and activities in two long volumes published in 1898. During later life she continued her work on the Anthony biography; volume three was published in 1908. The searcher for psychological insight will be disappointed by The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony. Its deepest penetration in explaining Anthony’s personality and motivation is through its astute description of Anthony’s Quaker family background and of the encouragement in her education given by both parents. Otherwise, the biography remains largely a chronicle, dull at times and burdened with detail. Stylistically, it belongs to the tradition of sentimental 19th-century prose. Yet no historian concerned with Anthony’s role in the 19th-century women’s movement can ignore the intimate details of social history in Harper’s story: Anthony’s role as teacher, her support of both temperance and Amelia Bloomer, her acceptance of hydropathic medicine, and her relationships and correspondence with leaders of social reform, such as Garrison, Stanton, Stone, and Antoinette Brown.

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Though close to her daughter, who continued her mother’s work in the women’s movement, Harper remained independent, spending her last years working in the headquarters of the American Association of University Women in Washington, D.C. Using her journalistic talent to good effect, Harper served the suffrage movement well. The extent and variety of her writing is impressive; 14 large indexed volumes of her writings stand in the Library of Congress. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Lutz, A., Susan B. Anthony (1959). Reference works: AW. DAB. Indiana Authors and Their Books, 1816-1916 (1949). NAW. NCAB. Other references: Indianapolis News (16 Mar.1931). NYT (17 Mar. 1931). Terre Haute Star (17 Mar. 1931). —LOIS FOWLER

HARRIS, Bernice Kelly Born 8 October 1893, Mt. Moriah, North Carolina; died 13 September 1973, Seaboard, North Carolina Also wrote under: Bernice Kelly Daughter of William Haywood and Rosa Poole Kelly; married Herbert Harris, 1926 Born the third of six children in an established farming family, Bernice Kelly Harris spent her childhood and adult years in the coastal plains region that dominated her novels. Like other writers, including Carson McCullers, Harris’ first writing efforts were childhood plays performed for family and friends. Her subsequent attempts at poetry and novel writing were short-lived. She attended Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina, expressly to train as a teacher of English. After graduation, Harris taught for three years at an academy in the foothills of western North Carolina, instructing rural Baptist preachers in the rudiments of grammar. She then took a post with the Seaboard, North Carolina, public schools and remained in Seaboard the rest of her life. In 1919, a summer-school class introduced Harris to folk drama. Although she used her skills in drama primarily for pedagogical purposes, the years 1920 to 1926, when she encouraged students to write and to produce folk plays, provided an intense period of story collection and writing apprenticeship for herself. Her marriage and the obligatory retirement from teaching prompted her to write her own plays rather than to encourage others to write. From 1932 to 1938 she wrote folk drama, drawing from actual people and events in the North Carolina towns around her. Seven of the better plays were published collectively in 1940; almost all were produced at regional drama festivals. Harris’ novels grew out of her feature stories written on a free-lance basis for Raleigh and Norfolk newspapers. Encouraged by her editor, Harris began in 1937 the work which became Purslane, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1939. Also in 1939, Harris interviewed tenant farmers for four

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pieces appearing in These Are Our Lives, the Federal Writers Project publication. The nostalgic first novel impressed critics, but Harris’ second novel, Portulaca (1941), a realistic portrait of the rural and smalltown middle class, won even more support from the literary establishment on both sides of the Atlantic. It also necessitated the change to a commercial publisher, since the university press feared such blunt themes would offend southern readers. All of Harris’ novels have related characters and draw from real-life experiences of Harris and those she knew. She is the narrator of a region, with a thorough understanding of its people and mores; as such she can be compared to Cather or Faulkner in her ability to evoke time and place—to produce social history in novel form. So skillful is she at delineating character from life that reviewers of her one novel dealing exclusively with black farmers (Janey Jeems, 1946) failed to understand that the characters were not white because the depiction did not follow accepted stereotypes. The characters of her seven novels encompass all classes, races, ages, and personalities of the region. The strength of her novels clearly lies in their vivid characterization, which evokes not only a sense of regional identity and folkways but also of dynamic humanity. OTHER WORKS: Folk Plays of Eastern Carolina (1940). Sweet Beulah Land (1943). Sage Quarter (1945). Hearthstones (1948). Wild Cherry Tree Road (1951). A Southern Savory (1964). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Walser, R., B. K. H.: Storyteller of Eastern Carolina (1955). Reference works: American Novelists of Today. CA. CB. Other references: WLB (Jan. 1949). —SALLY BRETT

HARRIS, Bertha Born 17 December 1937, Fayetteville, North Carolina Daughter of John H. and Mary Z. Jones Harris; married Mr. Wyland, 1963 (ended 1964); children: one daughter Bertha Harris, born and raised in North Carolina, moved to New York City in 1959, immediately after completing a B.A. degree in English at the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina. In New York, she worked for about five years at essentially clerical jobs and explored the city, finding a particular fascination with the Metropolitan Opera. When her marriage disbanded in 1964, she supported herself and her daughter by proofreading, editing, and ghostwriting. During this time, Harris also began and finished her first novel, which she used as the thesis for an M.F.A. degree in writing when she returned to the University of North Carolina in 1967. Harris taught literature at

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East Carolina University and at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she was also acting head of the Creative Writing Sequence from 1970 to 1973. After she returned to New York in 1973, she coordinated Women’s Studies at the College of Staten Island of the City University of New York. She also served as a part-time editor for Daughters, Inc., a women’s press located in Houston, Texas. Harris’s first novel, Catching Saradove (1969), is a brilliant portrayal of what it is like to be young, a woman, and lacking direction. The book begins with Saradove Racepath, who is raising a child by herself on the Lower East Side of New York City. Succeeding chapters move between Saradove’s memories of a childhood with lower-class parents in the South and a confused, almost desperate, young adulthood in New York. Following a nonlinear pattern of time, Harris emphasizes the workings of Saradove’s mind, reflecting the frailties of the human psyche. Events in the main character’s life correspond closely to those of the author’s, giving the plot an autobiographical quality. Harris’s characterization of Saradove is, however, much more than a fictionalized self-portrait. From Saradove’s isolation through the moment in which she realizes her capacity for self-actualization, Harris encompasses both the despair and the hope of the world. In her second novel, Confessions of Cherubino (1972), Harris tracks an elusive love through the lives of her characters while satirizing the American South with a warm humor. Cherubino is the embodiment of romantic love and is found throughout the book but is especially focused in the characters of Ellen and Margaret. These two young women find themselves enwrapped in the innocent aura of infatuation and eventually, through their struggles, experience what is perhaps love’s perfection. Harris is able to examine love as a romantic myth while simultaneously showing it as a very real force effecting significant changes. Her third novel, Lover (1976), is an experiment of sorts, in that Harris gives fact and fiction an equal validity. At the beginning of each chapter, she places anecdotes about women saints, some of which she fabricated and others she found in a hagiography. Unique to Lover is Harris’s constant changing of perspectives. Moving from first- to third-person narrative, Harris gives a whole (and more objective) view of the women in her book. With them, Harris dips into the subconscious world and then moves back out to express the reality that remains forever changed, once integrated with the archetypal essence from the subconscious. Harris is an artist with words; her fiction gives a patterned depth to something that was once shallow and flat. Her emphasis on the lives of women is probably related to her involvement with the women’s movement, in which she became active in 1972. Soon after, she began to apply movement principles and ideology to the study of literature and to her own writing. Harris has written several essays exploring literary history with a scholarly precision. As certainly as her fiction guides one through the realm of an evocative imagination, her essays unveil to the logical mind ideas of philosophical originality, and both essays and novels prove themselves to be part of the freshly broken ground of feminist theory.


The 1980s and 1990s were a quiet time for Harris in terms of publishing. She wrote a biographical piece, Gertrude Stein (1996), as part of the Lives of Notable Gay Men & Lesbians series. The work, however, is no longer in print. Similarly, none of Harris’ earlier novels are currently in print, with the exception of Lover. This book, certainly her best known, was republished in 1993 with a new lengthy introduction by Harris criticizing Daughters, Inc., the original publishers, and provides much in-depth information about the book. The author herself notes in the Amazon.com web page for Lover some of the cultural context of the early 1970s when the novel was written. Harris’ works lack widespread appeal, but many appreciate her storytelling and writing skills. She is without a doubt better known within the homosexual community than among the general public. OTHER WORKS: Traveller in Eternity (1975). The Joy of Lesbian Sex (with E. Sisley, 1977). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Leonard, M., Battling Bertha: A Biography of Bertha Harris (1975). Leonard, M., The Lesbian in Literature: A Bibliography (1975). Reference works: Booknews, Inc. (1 Feb. 1994). CA (1972). CA (Online, 1999). Other references: Nation (19 May 1969). NYTBR (9 Mar. 1969). —LISA TIPPS, UPDATED BY CARRIE SNYDER

HARRIS, Corra May (White) Born 17 March 1869, Farm Hill, Georgia; died 9 February 1935, Atlanta, Georgia Also wrote under: Mrs. L. H. Harris Daughter of Tinsley R. and Mary Matthews White; married Lundy H. Harris, 1887 Corra May Harris’ childhood was spent in rural Georgia. After her marriage to a minister, her experience widened first to the world of a Methodist circuit rider’s wife and then to that of a college professor’s. The security of these worlds collapsed in 1898 when her husband suffered a mental breakdown and Harris had to assume responsibility for the support of the family. She tried teaching but gladly abandoned that when the publication in a New York magazine, the Independent (18 May 1899), of a letter defending the Southern white position on lynching launched her career as a prolific writer of articles, stories, and reviews for periodicals. Her first novel, A Circuit Rider’s Wife (1910), established both her publishing method and writing style. It was first published in serial form and then as a book. The style Harris

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established here was to devise a plot that served merely as a frame on which to hang her observations about people, life, love, and morality. The novel tells of Mary Thompson’s life as a struggling clergyman’s wife. Generously interspersed throughout are Harris’ long digressions about the social responsibilities of a rural minister’s wife and about the moral irresponsibility of the church hierarchy. This novel was so popular that Harris later wrote two sequels, A Circuit Rider’s Widow (1916) and My Son (1921). As the circuit rider’s widow, Mary Thompson fondly remembers her life with William and comments about the townspeople of rural Berton, Georgia. In My Son, Mary is the housekeeper and critical observer in the home of her son Peter, a successful Methodist minister. These novels about Mary Thompson were Harris’ most successful because Mary caught and held the popular imagination with her down-to-earth wisdom and sprightly comments about both congregation and church hierarchy. With her second novel, Eve’s Second Husband (1911), Harris established another of her major plot lines, namely, a wife’s efforts to deal with a problem husband. In this novel, as well as in Happily Married (1920), The Eyes of Love (1922), and The House of Helen (1923), the wife solves problems with an unfaithful or unstable husband, to the accompaniment of Harris’ digressions on women, marriage, and husbands. In all these novels, the wife’s resourcefulness and steadfastness win the day. The Recording Angel (1912), Harris’ third novel, was the first of her satires. Ruckersville, Georgia, comes under the barbed attack of Amy White, who amuses herself by chronicling the activities of its socially prominent citizens. Another satirical work, The Co-Citizens (1915), deals with the corrupt politics of a small town, against which the ‘‘co-citizens’’ must battle in order to win woman suffrage. In Search of a Husband (1913) introduces yet another of Harris’ themes—the taming and eventual domestication of a wild, misguided young woman by a strong, self-made man. As in this novel, the young women in Making Her His Wife (1918), A Daughter of Adam (1922), and Flapper Anne (1926) all learn that the social values of a large city are inferior to the values of rural Georgia, and in each case it is the strong man who stabilizes the flighty girl. With My Book and Heart (1924), Harris began a series of books that were more or less autobiographical. The underpinning of autobiography is, however, all that distinguishes these books from her fiction. Harris followed My Book and Heart with As a Woman Thinks (1925) and The Happy Pilgrimage (1927). In all these books, fact forms a loose base for the personal observations and prejudices of a highly opinionated woman. All of Harris’ writing was heavy with personal opinion. What would otherwise be interminable digressions within trite plots is made readable by her frequently witty style, her ironic humor, and her knack for aphoristic turns of phrase. It was this pungent expression of what her readers regarded as her great wisdom that sold her writings. In the last years of her life, as public taste began to change and her conservative morality and moralizing no longer spoke to the mass audience of the periodicals for which she wrote,

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Harris lost popularity and found it more difficult to publish. The papers of Harris are at the University of Georgia. OTHER WORKS: The Jessica Letters (with P. E. More, 1904). From Sun-up to Sun-down (with F. H. Leech, 1919). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Blackstock, W., Writers and Their Critics: Studies in English and American Literature (1955). Talmadge, J. E., Corra Harris: Lady of Purpose (1968). Reference works: LSL. NAW (1971). NCAB. Other references: Georgia Review (1951, 1963). Mississippi Quarterly (Fall 1972, Fall 1974, Fall 1975). —HARRIETTE CUTTINO BUCHANAN

HARRIS, Miriam Coles Born 7 July 1834, Glen Cove, New York; died 23 January 1925, Pau, France Wrote under Author of Rutledge; Mrs. Sidney S. Harris Daughter of Butler and Julia Weeks Coles; married Sidney S. Harris, 1864 (died 1892); children: two A descendant of Robert Coles of Suffolk, England, who accompanied John Winthrop to America in 1630, Miriam Coles Harris attended religious and exclusive private schools in New Jersey and New York City. After writing for periodicals and producing a bestseller at age twenty-six, Harris married a New York lawyer, raised two children, and continued to produce popular novels, as well as travel and devotional books. Widowed in 1892, she spent most of her remaining years in Europe. Harris’ first novel, the bestseller Rutledge (1860), has been called the ‘‘first fully American example’’ of the gothic romance. It is narrated by the unnamed orphan heroine, a passionately resentful teenager who, in Jane Eyre fashion, falls in love with Rutledge, the older brooding hero—her temporary guardian— whose ancestral home hides a dark family secret. After being introduced to fashionable society by her worldly permanent guardian, the rebellious heroine becomes involved in a series of jealous misunderstandings, including a rash engagement to a handsome social climber who turns out to be a murderer and who commits suicide after the heroine hides him in the secret room at the Rutledge estate where he discovers he is Rutledge’s illegitimate nephew. A period of penitence completes the education of the humbled heroine, who is finally reunited with the ‘‘masterful’’ Rutledge. Like Rutledge, Harris’s other fictions are characterized by psychological studies of negative feminine attitudes, religiously didactic themes, and sensational incidents. Anticipating in some ways the psychological realism of Henry James, Harris probes, with surprising honesty, the degrees of hostility, powerlessness,

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and masochism experienced by an unusual variety of 19th-century heroines: teenagers in Rutledge and in its juvenile counterpart, loosely based on Harris’s schoolgirl days, Louie’s Last Term at St. Mary’s (1860); unhappily married heroines in Frank Warrington (1863) and A Perfect Adonis (1875); a young widowed mother in Happy-Go-Lucky (1881); and middle-aged mother-wives in Phoebe (1884) and An Utter Failure (1891). Harris frequently resolves her plots by transforming her rebellious heroines into self-abnegating women who exemplify the author’s religious beliefs about renunciation of self and the world of vanity. Yet Harris’s mixed feelings about her humbled heroines can be seen in the conclusion of A Perfect Adonis: the new bride asserts, ‘‘I can’t see what I was created for,’’ to which her bridegroom replies, ‘‘I can’t either, except to make people want to possess you. To have and to hold you.’’ Then he silences all further questions with an all-absorbing kiss, a romantic conclusion that is immediately undercut by the author’s final remark: ‘‘It is a blessing that when you are a failure, you can forget it sometimes for a while. But the fact remains the same.’’ Her last novel, The Tents of Wickedness (1907), interweaves a love story with a defense of the Roman Catholic Church. Although melodramatic incident mars portions of her love plots, Harris’s use of topical subjects also marks her as a forerunner of realism. The Sutherlands (1862) is a proslavery novel, while Richard Vandermarck (1871) contains one of the earliest literary portraits of the Wall Street businessman hero. A murder trial, realistically depicted, makes up a major segment of Happy-Go-Lucky, which also covers prejudice against Irish immigrants and lower-class poverty. Her last three novels treat daring sexual issues such as premarital sex, resentment of maternal duties, near-adultery, and divorce, as well as other topical subjects such as tenement conditions, racial violence, politics, and alcoholism. Harris’ minor place in literary history has depended solely on her most romantically sensational novel, the best-selling Rutledge, but all of her fictions contain perceptive, slightly ironic studies of a particular type of feminine psychology, portraits which, in their own limited ways, contributed to the development of the realistic tradition. OTHER WORKS: St. Philips (1865). A Rosary for Lent; or, Devotional Readings (1867). Roundhearts, and Other Stories (1867). Dear Feast Lent: A Series of Devotional Readings (1874). Missy (1880). A Chit of Sixteen, and Other Stories (1892). A Corner of Spain (1898). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Baym, N., Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America (1978). Cole, F. T., The Early Genealogies of the Cole Families in America (1887). Mott, F. L., Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (1947). Reference works: AA. DAB. NCAB. —KATHLEEN L. NICHOLS


HARRISON, Constance Cary Born 25 April 1843, Lexington, Kentucky; died 21 November 1920, Washington, D.C. Daughter of Archibald and Monimia Fairfax Cary; married Burton Harrison, 1867 (died 1904) Constance Cary Harrison was a second child and only daughter. Her family moved to a plantation in Arlington, Virginia, and later to Cumberland, Maryland, where her father practiced law. Harrison received her elementary education first at a day school in Cumberland and then at the girls’ boarding school of Hubert Lefebre in Richmond. When her father died in 1854, the family returned to Vaucluse, the plantation. After war broke out in 1861, Harrison’s mother volunteered as a nurse, serving primarily at Camp Winder near Richmond. Harrison went to the Confederate capital to live with relatives and, with her cousins Hetty and Jennie Cary of Baltimore, became one of the most famous belles of the day. Here she met Burton Harrison, Jefferson Davis’ private secretary. The couple moved to New York City, where her husband practiced law. There Harrison became active in charitable and civic organizations. After her husband’s death in 1904, Harrison moved to Washington, D.C., to be near her sons. Harrison began writing short articles and verses for the Southern Illustrated News and the Magnolia Weekly during the Civil War. Her most famous piece, published in the News in 1864, was the ‘‘Blockade Correspondence,’’ a series of letters between ‘‘Refugitta’’ and ‘‘Secessia,’’ comparing wartime conditions in Richmond and Baltimore. After her marriage, Harrison translated and adapted several French plays to be performed for charity. One of these adaptations, ‘‘A Russian Honeymoon,’’ was so successful it was performed professionally. Harrison also wrote articles on George Washington and Colonel William Byrd for Century Magazine, a history of New York City, and a piece on social life in Richmond for Battles and Leaders of the Civil War. A great deal of Harrison’s fiction can be dismissed as pulp. Her novels and stories dealing with Southern life before the Civil War were, for the most part, poorly written. Filled with stock characters, predictable plots, and phony dialogue, works such as Flower de Hundred: The Story of a Virginia Plantation (1890) and The Carlyles: A Story of the Fall of the Confederacy (1905) were little more than mass-market teasers. Postwar readers were fascinated by anything dealing with the antebellum South, perhaps wanting to know why a social system they found repugnant had exercised such a hold over the imaginations of those who had lived under it. Therefore, Harrison and countless other writers found a ready market for otherwise undistinguished writing. More significant, and better written, however, are Harrison’s works dealing with the late 19th century. These novels and stories examined the socially conscious world in which Harrison lived, and found it wanting. Usually Harrison was faintly amused by her surroundings, but occasionally her style became cruelly satiric. In ‘‘Mr. Clendenning Piper,’’ one of the stories in A Daughter of the South, and Shorter Stories (1892), the title character is described

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as ‘‘no end of a swell,’’ and finds that his pretensions to fashion are the object of ridicule rather than envy. ‘‘Jenny, the Debutante,’’ Harrison’s version of the Cinderella tale, illustrates how kind, courteous Jenny wins fame, fortune, and a husband, while her nasty, more fashionable sister does not. Harrison’s best novel, both in style and content, is A Bachelor Maid (1894), which explores the problems of young women who choose not to rush into marriage. Marion Irving rejects a proposal from Alec Gordon, leaves her father’s house when he remarries, takes an apartment with another unmarried woman, and goes to work for the woman suffrage movement. Harrison employs the typical 19th-century convention of incorporating passages from feminist tracts in the guise of speeches and letters delivered by the characters. In this novel, however, the characters are finely drawn and believable. Eventually, Marion and Alec do marry, but the reader assumes that Marion is a better person for having been on her own. Despite the uneven quality of her fiction, Harrison will be remembered for her autobiography, Recollections Grave and Gay (1911). It is a valuable source of information about life in the highest circles of Confederate society. While Recollections lacks the impact of a diary kept during the war and is clouded by a tendency to romanticize the Confederate experience, it is nonetheless a fascinating historical document. Through Harrison’s eyes, the reader sees Lee, Davis, and others as men with all their human sorrows and failures, not as remote historical figures. Harrison’s recollections provide a valuable complement to those of Mary Boykin Chesnut and Virginia Clay-Clopton. OTHER WORKS: Woman’s Handiwork in Modern Times (1881). The Old-Fashioned Fairy Book (1884). Bar Harbor Days (1887). The Anglomaniacs (1890). The Well-Bred Girl in Society (1898). BIBLIOGRAPHY: De Leon, T. C., Belles, Beaux, and Brains of the Sixties (1907). Williams, B. A., ed., A Diary from Dixie (1949). Reference works: AA. AW. DAB. LSL. NAW (1971). NCAB. —JANET E. KAUFMAN

HART, Carolyn G(impel) Born 25 August 1936, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Daughter of Roy W. and Doris Akin Gimpel; married Philip D. Hart, 1958; children: Philip, Sarah Carolyn G. Hart is an extremely popular and prolific author of mystery novels. Her work appeals mostly to fans of the traditional murder mystery, in which the reader matches wits with an amateur detective as a series of clues are presented that eventually reveal the identity of the murderer. Hart is best known for a series of novels in which the investigator is the owner of a mystery bookstore.

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Hart earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Oklahoma at Norman in 1958. She worked as a newspaper reporter for the Norman Transcript from 1958 to 1959 and as editor of Sooner Newsmakers, a newsletter for University of Oklahoma alumni, from 1959 to 1960. She became a freelance writer in 1961. Hart began her career as an author of fiction by writing mystery and suspense novels for young adults. Her first novel, The Secret of the Cellars (1964), won the ‘‘Calling All Girls’’ Prize from publisher Dodd Mead. Encouraged by this success, Hart wrote more juvenile novels, often involving serious themes. No Easy Answers (1970) dealt with the Vietnam war, and Danger! High Explosives! (1972) involved the controversy over the presence of the military on college campuses. After publishing two novels for adults and a history of the University of Oklahoma, Hart went through a time when her work went unpublished in the United States. Although she had five novels published in the United Kingdom from 1982 to 1984, four of these books were never reprinted in the U.S. She worked as an assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Oklahoma from 1982 to 1985. Hart returned to freelance writing in 1986 with the publication of The Devereaux Legacy. Originally planned as a mystery novel, it was rewritten as a romance novel at the suggestion of Hart’s agent. At a time when publishers were purchasing very few mysteries by American women but the popularity of romances was at its height, the agent’s strategy worked. However, Hart would soon win great popularity with mystery novels that were not disguised as other types of fiction. In 1987 Hart published Death on Demand, the first in a series of humorous, traditional murder mysteries designed to appeal to avid readers of the genre. The series, set on a resort island off the coast of South Carolina, deals with the amateur investigations of Annie Laurence, owner of the Death on Demand bookstore. The novels are full of references to classic mystery stories. Hart also adds a touch of romance to the series with the relationship between Laurence and Max Darling, who are married in Honeymoon with Murder (1989). Hart reveals her knowledge and love of traditional mysteries throughout the series. The Christie Caper (1991) takes place during a conference on Agatha Christie, the epitome of the classic British mystery writer. Hart fills the novel with references to Christie and even includes a treasure hunt with clues based on Christie’s works, with answers included at the end of the book. Southern Ghost (1992) is an affectionate tribute to and parody of traditional Gothic mysteries. Hart began a new series with the publication of Dead Man’s Island in 1993. This series deals with the adventures of Henrietta O’Dwyer Collins, known as Henrie O, who is a retired journalist. Although the Henrie O series is similar to the Death on Demand series in its lighthearted tone, it differs from it in lacking the

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references to other mystery writers. The two series also differ in the fact that the Death on Demand books take place in a limited geographical area, while the investigations of Henrie O take her to locations ranging from Hawaii to the Caribbean. Dead Man’s Island was later adapted into a television movie. Hart has won numerous awards for her novels. She won the Agatha Award for Something Wicked (1988), Deadly Valentine (1990), Southern Ghost, and Dead Man’s Island. She won Anthony awards for Something Wicked, Honeymoon with Murder, The Christie Caper, and Southern Ghost. She won Macavity awards for A Little Class on Murder (1989), Deadly Valentine, The Christie Caper, and Southern Ghost. Hart has also been active as an editor of anthologies of mystery stories and as national director of the Mystery Writers of America. In 1986 she was one of the founding members of Sisters in Crime, an organization for women who read, write, publish, sell, or review mysteries. She served as president of the organization from 1991 to 1992.

OTHER WORKS: Dangerous Summer (1968). Rendevous in Vera Cruz (1970). Flee from the Past (1975). A Settling of Accounts (1976). The Sooner Story, 1890-1980 (with Charles F. Long, 1980). Escape from Paris (1982). Castle Rock (1983). Death by Surprise (1983). The Rich Die Young (1983). Skulduggery (1984). Brave Hearts (1987). Design for Murder (1988). Scandal in Fair Haven (1994). Mint Julep Murder (1995). Death in Lovers’ Lane 1997). Death in Paradise (1998). Yankee Doodle Dead (1998). Crime on Her Mind (1999). Death on the River Walk (1999). White Elephant Dead (1999).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CANR (1997). Detecting Women (1994). Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994). Great Women Mystery Writers (1994). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996). —ROSE SECREST

HART, Frances Noyes Born 10 August 1890, Silver Springs, Maryland; died 25 October 1943, New Canaan, Connecticut Wrote under: F. N. Hart, Frances N. Hart, Frances Newbold Hart Daughter of Frank B. and Janet Newbold Noyes; married Edward H. Hart, 1921; children: two daughters Born on a farm outside Washington, D.C., with tiger skins on the floors and books on the shelves, Frances Noyes Hart was sent to a number of different private schools in the U.S. and in Europe. Her father was a longtime president of the Associated Press and


HASBROUCK

editor and proprietor of the Washington Star. A YMCA canteen worker in France and a translator with the Naval Intelligence Bureau from 1917 to 1919, Hart made use of the experience in her first popular work, My A.E.F.: A Hail and Farewell (1920). Hart and her husband, a lawyer, had two daughters. Her death at fifty-three was unexpected.

entirely competent with English prose, and excellent with the telling detail. Her stories and novels remain entertaining, sophisticated light reading.

My A.E.F. was first published in McClure’s magazine in 1919 and then in book form a year later. Written as a second-person narrative, the short tribute honors the average American serviceman but is critical of his ungratefulness to organizations like the YMCA, which served him abroad, and is doubly critical of forgetful and ignorant people on the home front after the war. Written with appealing detail, the book is moving but not grossly sentimental.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Haycraft, H., Murder for Pleasure (1972). Symons, J., Mortal Consequences: A History from the Detective Story to the Crime Novel (1972). Reference works: Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996). TCA, TCAS. Other references: NYT (26 Oct. 1943). PW (23 May 1931). Saturday Evening Post (28 Jan. 1928).

Following the publication of many short stories in Scribner’s magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, the Ladies’ Home Journal, and a collection of them titled Contact and Other Stories (1923), Hart became famous for The Bellamy Trial (1927), which was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, published in book form, and later dramatized. According to Julian Symons, the original publication of this book marked the start of serialized novels replacing short crime stories as commercial articles. Based loosely on the sensational 1922 Hall-Mills murders in New Brunswick, New Jersey, for which Mrs. Hall and three others were brought to trial and acquitted five years later, the novel is set entirely in a smalltown courtroom during eight days of testimony in the trial of Susan Ives and Stephen Bellamy, accused of murdering Bellamy’s wife. The point of view is primarily that of a writer reporting on the trial, reacting to its principals and its revelations. Reviewers in 1927 and today’s readers alike agree The Bellamy Trial is entertaining, spirited, and clever. Hart’s subsequent mystery novels—Hide in the Dark (1929) and The Crooked Lane (1934)—while entertaining and suspenseful, do not have the interesting form of The Bellamy Trial. Combining love stories with intrigue, the two books are notable for their female murderers, who are simultaneously self-possessed, clever, and lovable. Hart’s Pigs in Clover (1931, British title Holiday) is a travel record of a motor trip through France made by Hart and her husband; it is outstanding for its culinary descriptions. In reply to an attack on women’s popular literature, Hart wrote an article (Bookman, September 1921) that effectively summarized her literary philosophy. She contended that not only were female readers for the most part more open to contemporary literature than male readers of the time, but they also were more fully educated in cultural matters. Calling herself a ‘‘great reader and small writer,’’ Hart defended not only the work of women writers such as Willa Cather and Zona Gale, but also the ‘‘women’s magazine’’ and the popular forms in which some women’s work was published. It is clear Hart never thought of herself as a deep or profound writer. She was, however, widely educated, widely traveled,

OTHER WORKS: Mark (1913).

—CAROLYN WEDIN SYLVANDER

HASBROUCK, Lydia Sayer Born 20 December 1829, Warwick, New York; died 24 August 1910, Middletown, New York Wrote under: Lydia Sayer Daughter of Benjamin and Rebecca Forshee Sayer; married John Hasbrouck, 1856 Raised on a farm, Lydia Sayer Hasbrouck was educated at the Elmira High School and Central College in upstate New York. She attended a three-month course on hydropathic medicine at the Hygeio-Therapeutic College in New York City, afterwards practicing medicine, writing, and lecturing in the East. Shortly before her marriage to an editor and publisher, he established the Sibyl, a feminist journal, for her. Hasbrouck edited the Sibyl for nine years, producing two eight-page issues a month for the first six years and one a month thereafter. In addition to promoting women’s rights through Sibyl, Hasbrouck lived according to her feminist principles. Her special wedding vows included the sentiment: ‘‘Yet while in this covenant I ignore that part of the accustomed marriage ceremony which demands of woman undue subjection and obedience, I promise equally with you to walk by your side through life, meeting the duties and requirements devolving upon us in every sphere of action, not renouncing my individuality in yielding unto you the true wife’s love and duty.’’ In 1859 she refused ‘‘taxation without representation,’’ whereupon a tax collector entered her home and ‘‘levied upon, and advertised a pair of Bloomer pants.’’ In 1863 she worked on a local road crew rather than pay a road tax. When New York State enacted school suffrage in 1880, she was elected to the Middletown Board of Education. Still later she became a real estate developer in downtown Middletown. Although Sibyl promoted most women’s rights causes, such as increased educational opportunities and suffrage, it primarily advocated Hasbrouck’s favorite cause, dress reform. Hasbrouck had adopted the short skirt worn over pantaloons, the ‘‘Bloomer’’ dress, in 1849; and she had been denied admission to the Seward Seminary in Florida, New York, because she refused to abandon

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the outfit. Her editorials in Sibyl reveal her beliefs that women’s equality and women’s health depended upon liberation from the dictates of fashion—from the confining, deforming corsets and stays and the heavy, unwieldy hoops and crinolines. She describes the ease with which the reform dress allowed her to perform her daily chores—whether she was picking strawberries, cultivating her orchard, or cutting grass for the cow. Hasbrouck used Sibyl to promote a club among like-minded women, printing reports of the convention proceedings of the National Dress Reform Association, which she served as president from 1863 to 1864, and listing names of Sibyl subscribers (mostly from New York and the Midwest) who in spite of scorn and ridicule, wore the reform dress. Hasbrouck’s relationship to the readers of Sibyl was intense and intimate. She encouraged them to correspond with ‘‘Sister Lydia’’ about their problems, and she shared with them, through the pages of her paper, her own personal life. She was perhaps the only one of the early dress reformists who did not backslide: she wore the Bloomer outfit until her death. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: DAB. NAW (1971). Other references: AHR (July 1932). Lily (15 Sept. 1856). —JEANNINE DOBBS

HASTINGS, Susannah (Willard) Johnson Born 13 July 1730, Harvard, Massachusetts; died 1810 Daughter of Josiah and Hannah Willard; married James Johnson, 1747; Mr. Hastings, n.d; children: four With her first husband, Susannah Johnson Hastings had four children, a son and two daughters and a fourth, unnamed child, who was born and died during her captivity among the Native Americans. The Johnsons were a farming family; in 1750, they moved to the backwoods of New Hampshire, to a sparsely inhabited pioneering settlement near the Connecticut River, in order to increase their land holdings. In 1754, during one phase of the French and Indian War, Hastings (along with her sister, Miriam, and her children) was captured in a Native American raid on the poorly secured settlement. She spent about five months in captivity, traveling north as far as Quebec, before she was ransomed. Hastings became a widow when her husband was killed at the battle of Fort Ticonderoga and later married an unidentified Mr. Hastings. Beyond these scant personal details, no facts are available about the life of Hastings, her education, or her domestic circumstances. Hastings’ only extant work is A Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Johnson (1796). Although the style, organization, and prefatory material indicate the heavy hand of an editor, the narrative contains attitudes and ideas central to late 18th-century American

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women’s writing, thus deserving consideration, if only for its historical and cultural value. Lacking either the religious or propagandistic purposes of earlier captivity narratives, Hastings’ reads like an adventure story, evidencing a conscious desire to entertain through recounting hardships and unusual occurrences among Native American and French captors in New Hampshire, Quebec, and Montreal. Eighteenth-century American preoccupations with sentimentality, sensibility, the noble savage, and national history provide the ideological foundations for her reconstruction of experiences in New England forests, Native American camps, French-Canadian homes, and prisons. With its neat chapter divisions and carefully salted moments of suspense, the narrative becomes in part a late 18th-century sentimental romance. Notable among the attitudes Hastings emphasizes are her belief in the natural benevolence of the Native Americans (she shows how a Native American family of the royal blood adopts her and treats her as a true member of their group) and her strong feelings of patriotism for the young American republic. Her criticism of the causes and events of the French and Indian War serve as oblique criticism of the British in general and of British rule in America. To enhance her nationalistic themes, Hastings uses a historical perspective to show that the courage and perseverance of the American forefathers, as they faced the perils of settling the wilderness frontier, ensured a progressive culture in America. Through an artfully worded conclusion, she depicts the prerevolutionary period as the dark, uncivilized past moving inevitably into the sunshine of a civilized republic because of the moral strengths of the American colonists. Thus in her narrative Hastings carefully combines the personal and the national to create a simplistic presentation of a currently popular historical theory. Ultimately, her work becomes a vehicle to exhibit civilization thriving under the care of independent Americans, and a further example of the often ambitious nature of American women’s writing in the 1790s. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Davis, W. A., Records of the Town of Lunenburg, Massachusetts, 1719-1764 (1896). Nourse, H. S., History of the Town of Harvard, Massachusetts, 1732-1893 (1894). —JACQUELINE HORNSTEIN

HATCH, Mary R. Platt Born 19 June 1848, Stratford, New Hampshire; died 28 November 1935, Santa Monica, California Wrote under: M. R. P. Hatch, Mary R. P. Hatch, Mabel Percy Daughter of Charles G. and Mary Blake Platt; married Antipas M. Hatch, 1871 (died 1896); children: two sons Mary R. Platt Hatch was born and raised in the fertile Connecticut River valley of northern New Hampshire. She was educated at home and in the Stratford public schools; at fifteen,


she entered advanced classes at the Lancaster Academy. By seventeen, Hatch was publishing widely in various journals and papers, first using the pseudonym Mabel Percy and later using her own name. Marriage, in 1871, transformed Hatch from a farmer’s daughter to a farmer’s wife. Her busy, demanding life soon included the care of two sons. Still, during the last two decades of the century, Hatch became an increasingly energetic and versatile writer. She published poems, ‘‘temperance pieces,’’ essays, and stories of local color about northern New England. In 1892 she and Celia Thaxter edited the New Hampshire section of A Woman of the Century, Frances Willard and Mary A. Livermore’s reference work. The Upland Mystery (1887) was first serialized in the Portland (Maine) Transcript; it is a murder mystery based on fact— the Bugbee arsenic murders of nearby Lancaster. Hatch next wrote The Bank Tragedy (1890), which features a locked-vault murder and a brave heroine/sleuth. The Missing Man (1892), a mystery involving impersonation and e.s.p., proved to be Hatch’s most popular novel, but The Strange Disappearance of Eugene Comstocks (1895) is perhaps her most compelling mystery. In the latter the missing bank teller is really a lesbian transvestite and the heroine is a gun-toting adolescent daughter of a Robin Hood-style bandit leader. The work is not only a mystery puzzle but also a fantasy fiction of a decidedly female character. Hatch’s The Berkeley Street Mystery, an 1895 serial, was published in book form in 1928. Hatch’s mystery-writing career was influenced by that of Anna Katharine Green, with whom she formed ‘‘a strong and enduring friendship’’ early in life. Hatch dedicated one of her novels to Green and wrote perhaps the finest biographical sketch of her friend in ‘‘The Author of The Leavenworth Case’’ (The Writer, 1888). After the death of her husband in 1896, Hatch sold the family farm in Northumberland and dedicated herself to the education of her sons and to her writing. She continued to write essays, poems, and short stories for serial publication. In 1905 Hatch published her Gossiping Guide to Dartmouth and to Hanover—Dartmouth being the alma mater of both of her sons. Hatch later moved to the Boston area, where she became an active and enthusiastic clubwoman. She was a member of the Boston Author’s Club—along with women like Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward and Mary Wilkins Freeman—and was one of the founders of the Harvard Woman’s Club. At the age of sixty-three, Hatch went back to college. She attended Radcliffe classes between 1911 and 1913, taking part in Dr. George P. Baker’s famous 47 Workshop (a school for playwrights). The first meeting of the Harvard Woman’s Club (in June of 1913) featured a presentation of one of Hatch’s plays, The Dreamer. Few of her plays were published, but many were performed in Boston and Washington, and several were made into films. One example, Mrs. Bright’s Visitor (1927), tells of a woman’s capable handling of a potential burglary. During the 1920s, Hatch’s civic and publishing activities gradually slackened, and in 1929 she moved to the home of her son, Jared Platt, in Santa Monica, California.

HAVEN

Hatch was a modest writer. Yet the inventiveness with which she approached the mystery story is impressive. And her strong and unusual women characters still have the power to delight feminist readers. OTHER WORKS: Mademoiselle Vivine (1927). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: AW. Other references: Granite Monthly (1889). —KATHLEEN L. MAIO

HAVEN, Alice Bradley Born Emily Bradley, 13 September 1827, Hudson, New York; died 23 August 1863, Mamaroneck, New York Wrote under: Cousin Alice, Clara Cushman, Alice B. Haven, Alice G. Less Daughter of George and Sarah Brown Bradley; married Joseph C. Neal, 1846 (died); Samuel L. Haven, 1853; children: five Alice Bradley Haven lost her father when she was three and was adopted by her uncle J. Newton Brown, a Baptist minister. While a student at the seminary in New Hampton, New Hampshire, her classmates challenged Haven to submit one of her stories to a newspaper. Using the pseudonym of Alice G. Less, she sent her story to Joseph C. Neal, the Philadelphia editor of Neal’s Saturday Gazette and Lady’s Literary Museum. Neal accepted Haven’s story and enthusiastically encouraged her literary talent. Widowed seven months after her marriage to Neal, Haven worked for the next six years as an editor of the Gazette and wrote stories for children under the name of Cousin Alice. After her second marriage, Haven retired from editing and had five children, dying a month after the birth of the fifth. Her first novel, Helen Morton’s Trial (1849), concerns the ordeal of a young girl’s temporary blindness, a condition Haven herself had periodically experienced as a child. Her best-known work, The Gossips of Rivertown: Sketches in Prose and Verse (1850), reveals that beneath her saccharine surface, Haven possessed a gift for sarcastic ridicule of the religious hypocrisy and provincialism of the small town. The book includes a novel detailing the persecution of a pretty and lively girl who becomes the target of maliciously jealous gossips. The sketches that follow expose the same jaundiced view of domestic life, one being entitled ‘‘Ideal Husbands; or, School-Girl Fancies.’’ Haven followed this novel with a series of ‘‘Home Books’’ for children, each presenting a moral embodied in the title, such as Out of Debt, Out of Anger (1856) and A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place (1857). Haven was eulogized by the Godey’s Lady’s Book for being a member of the ‘‘Sensible School, in the tradition of Jane Austen.’’ ‘‘She has not adopted the vulgar and pretentious maxim that it is

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better to do a great thing badly than a little thing well. . . . [She] trusts to nature to be interesting.’’ OTHER WORKS: No Such Word As Fail (1852). All’s Not Gold That Glitters (1853). Contentment Better Than Wealth (1853). Patient Waiting No Loss (1853). Nothing Venture, Nothing Have (1855). The Coopers (1858). Loss and Gain (1860). The Good Report: Morning and Evening Lessons for Lent (1867). Home Studies (1869). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: AA. CAL. DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB. —DIANE LONG HOEVELER

HAWTHORNE, Elizabeth Manning Born 7 March 1802, Salem, Massachusetts; died 1 January 1883, Beverly, Massachusetts Daughter of Nathaniel and Elizabeth Manning Hawthorne Except for three and one-half years spent in the remote, wooded area of Raymond, Maine, the older sister of Nathaniel Hawthorne lived all of her eighty-one years in Salem or in Beverly, a small community near Salem. A precocious child, Elizabeth Manning Hawthorne walked and talked when she was nine months old and read Shakespeare when she was twelve years old. She studied under a number of ‘‘preceptoresses’’ in Salem, including Mrs. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, only until she was about thirteen. She was essentially self-educated. Hawthorne’s letters allow spontaneous unfettered revelation of a many-faceted woman; they record her fervent responses to political events, her perceptive and often acid literary comments, her personal philosophy, her candid self-assessments and whimsical observations, her love affair with the woods. Most of Hawthorne’s literary efforts, however, were abortive ones. She wrote poetry in her youth but published only a poem or two in newspapers. She translated Bon Jardinier—for her uncle, a pomologist— and Cervantes’ Tales, but neither was ever published. She mentions in her letters her desire to review books for the Atlantic Magazine, but she never got the opportunity. There is ample evidence she would have liked a literary career, but the reality and pathos of her existence are epitomized in her acknowledgment: ‘‘I am utterly destitute of the ability to earn.’’ Hawthorne’s major pieces of published writing were unsigned and have been generally unrecognized. When her brother edited the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge (March-August 1836), Hawthorne was his only contributor. Written entirely by the two of them, the six issues contain essays, extracts, and notes from other published material. While it is not always possible to distinguish her contributions from Nathaniel’s, much of the magazine’s writing reflects attitudes, interests, and expressions typical of Hawthorne: ‘‘Nothing is so intolerable as a

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little wit and a great desire of showing it.’’ Deeply interested in politics and history, she was unswervingly convinced of American superiority. ‘‘Alexander Hamilton,’’ her long essay in the May issue, is a eulogistic discussion of Hamilton’s early military career and his distinguished contribution to the American Revolution. The tone and attitudes of much of the writing in American Magazine are repeated in Peter Parley’s Universal History on the Basis of Geography (1837). Her brother, originally commissioned by editor Samuel Goodrich to write the history, offered Hawthorne the $100 fee to do the work, and it is probable the writing is entirely hers. Immediately successful, the book went through countless editions, was used in schoolrooms throughout the 19th century, and made its publishers a fortune. World history, from Eden to America, is narrated in an intimate, first-person manner and a lively, story-telling mode by Peter Parley, staunch Christian and American. Entertainingly and morally instructive, the narrator combines biblical myth, historical events, and geographic description to instruct young minds on the nature of good and evil in the progression of the world. A prime example of 19th-century American orthodoxy, the history integrates Christian ideology and American chauvinism. Through anecdotes about famous leaders in history and through generalizations, the Peter Parley text molded American minds for more than half a century. OTHER WORKS: The papers of Elizabeth Manning Hawthorne are in the Hawthorne collections at the Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley, the Beinecke Library at Yale University, the Boston Public Library, the Bowdoin College Library (Brunswick, Maine), the Essex Institute (Salem, Massachusetts), the Huntington Library (San Marino, California), and the New York Public Library. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hawthorne, J., Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (1888). Lathrop, R. H., Memories of Hawthorne (1897). Loggins, V., The Hawthornes: The Story of Seven Generations of an American Family (1951). Other references: AL (Jan. 1945). Colophon (1939). Essex Institute Historical Collections (Oct. 1964). NEQ (June 1947). —JANE STANBROUGH

HAWTHORNE, Hildegarde Born 25 September 1871, New York, New York; died 11 December 1952, Ridgefield, Connecticut Daughter of Julian and Mary Amelung Hawthorne; married John M. Oskison, 1920 Granddaughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hildegarde Hawthorne was the first of nine children and the one who seemed most


clearly destined to inherit the family impulse to earn literary recognition. She had little formal education—an occasional tutor or term of school as the family moved from New York to Dresden to England to Long Island to Jamaica during her childhood. Spirited and apt, Hawthorne capitalized on these moves by putting the family experiences into several of her numerous books. For example, Makeshift Farm (1925) describes their life on Long Island, and Island Farm (1926) tells of their Jamaica experiences. During World War I, Hawthorne volunteered for war work in France for the YWCA and the Red Cross, sending back to the New York Times and the Herald Tribune accounts of her observations of Paris under siege. She was a prolific book reviewer for both newspapers from 1917 to 1925. After her marriage, Hawthorne lived in California for many years and became an expert hiker and camper, seeking out remote spots of California wilderness and making friends with Natvie Americans and backwoodsmen. These experiences provided background for further literary ventures; she wrote several western novels and three books on California. Hawthorne’s youthful productions were published in St. Nicholas magazine. She established herself as a serious writer with ‘‘A Legend of Sonora,’’ a story appearing in Harper’s magazine when she was twenty. Throughout her life she published many poems, stories, articles, and book reviews, and more than 40 books. Hawthorne’s numerous biographies of famous men—including one of her grandfather, Romantic Rebel: The Life of Hawthorne (1932)—were imaginatively written with interesting dialogue designed to appeal to the adolescent audiences for whom they were published. She was effective in this genre, whether she wrote of Hawthorne and his friends Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes, or of Western explorers such as Frémont, or of figures from the American Revolution such as Patrick Henry and Thomas Paine. She was clever at interweaving biographical data and conversation, which she no doubt based on research in letters and journals. Her six western novels, pitched to her usual adolescent reader, are in the style of Zane Grey narratives. Open Range (1932), a typical example, is filled with western novel clichés, idealizing the life of her cowboy hero, Slim, and his noble horse, Feathers. In contrast to Hawthorne’s informative and well-researched biographies, these westerns are superficial and hackneyed. The travelogues, such as Corsica (1926), are highly descriptive, personal accounts of Hawthorne’s travels. Of her histories, California’s Missions (1942) is a very interesting and directly related account of those missions and the men who founded them. It is a well-written work that still deserves to be read. Hawthorne’s simple, straightforward, and unaffected style gave her work a popular appeal. Both her biographies and her histories show evidence of greater artistic potential than she ever actually realized. OTHER WORKS: A Country Interlude (1904). Poems (1904). Essays (1907). The Lure of the Garden (1911). A Peep at New

HAZLETT

York (1911). Old Seaport Towns of New England (1916). Girls in Bookland (1917). Rambles Through College Towns (1917). Maybe True Stories (1926). Deedah’s Wonderful Year (1927). Mystery at Star C. Ranch (1929). Mystery of Navajo Canyon (1931). Street of Rancho del Sol (1931). Wheels Toward the West (1931). Riders of the Royal Road (1932). Lone Rider (1933). Tabitha of Lonely House (1934). Enos Mills of the Rockies (with E. B. Mills, 1935). Youth’s Captain: The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1935). On the Golden Trail (1936). Poet of Craigie House: The Life of Longfellow (1936). Phantom King: The Life of Napoleon’s Son (1937). Rising Thunder: The Life of Jack Jouett (1937). The Happy Autocrat: A Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes (1938). The Miniature’s Secret (1938). Romantic Cities of California (1939). Concord’s Happy Rebel: The Life of H. D. Thoreau (1940). No Road Too Long (1940). Williamsburg, Old and New (1941). The Long Adventure: Churchill’s Life (1942). Ox-Team Miracle: The Life of Alexander Majors (1942). Matthew Fontaine Maury, Trail Maker of the Seas (1943). Give Me Liberty: The Story of Patrick Henry (1945). Westward the Course: The Story of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1946). Born to Adventure: The Story of John Charles Frémont (1947). His Country Was a World: The Life of Thomas Paine (1949). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Junior Book of Authors (1951). —JANE STANBROUGH

HAZLETT, Helen Born circa 1820s; death date unknown Wrote under H. M. Tatem, M. H. Tatem An intensive search failed to reveal any biographical information about Helen Hazlett. Works listed in secondary sources are contradictory regarding titles and dates of publication. Since all Hazlett’s works were published in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, records of this city were investigated, but without results. Hazlett’s works are sentimental novels, replete with frail female characters who faint at any slight emotional agitation. Each follows the same formula, opening with a dialogue between two characters who are revealed indirectly through the conversation. Descriptive and narrative passages are minimal throughout the novels. Each of Hazlett’s novels has a unifying theme—the Christian religion. In her first novel, The Cloud with a Golden Border (1859), the Nesbit family laments the fact that their friend Solomon Mordecai, a rich banker, is Jewish. As Hazlett states in the introduction, she feels that ‘‘in regard to the Hebrew race. . .the chosen people of the Almighty will surely take their station among the Christian nations of the earth. . .and if the footsteps of one wanderer from the fold be led to recognize his own Shepherd in Him who hung on Calvary by means of this little work, she will feel her time has not been misspent.’’ The faith of Nellie Nesbit, a

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doubter who was to marry Mr. Mordecai’s son, is strengthened at the moment of death. Needless to say, one by one, all the members of the Mordecai family find ‘‘the golden border’’ and convert to Christianity. The setting of The Heights of (H)Eidelberg (1870) is a Swiss Protestant and Catholic community. Since Hazlett’s purpose is to ‘‘lead a misguided Romanist to seek truth as it is in Jesus,’’ the priest is portrayed as the devil himself, who ‘‘holds tyrannical sway under the mask of holy counsel.’’ Young Vanclive is publicly accused of possessing a Bible, and he admits to being a Protestant. Vanclive’s premature death leads to his father’s conversion to Protestantism at the moment of his own death. When the priest attempts to gain access to the father’s money, he is beaten as a scoundrel by a Protestant. Glennair (1869) deals with Hazlett’s Scottish ancestry. While the purpose of the novel is not to convert any definite group of nonbelievers, religion plays an enormous role in the book. When the matriarch, Mrs. Graeme, dies, ‘‘her soul winged its way to the home where Jesus was waiting with hosts of angels, to welcome it.’’ Again, dialogue, this time in Scottish dialect, is the principal form. Lord Glennair, whose faith has lapsed, is aroused to ‘‘true religion’’ (The Great I AM) under the pressure of difficult times. The religious overtones of Hazlett’s novels no doubt made her one of the less-read sentimental novelists of her day. Despite her intolerance toward nonbelievers, it is unfortunate no one cared to record her biographical data. OTHER WORKS: The Pastor’s Widow (Son); or, The Contract (1865). A Ray from the South BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: A Supplement to Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors (1891). Wright American Fiction 1851-1875. Research Publication Microfilm, No. 1147. —CAROLE M. SHAFFER-KOROS

HEILBRUN, Carolyn G. Born 13 January 1926, East Orange, New Jersey Also writes under: Amanda Cross Daughter of Archibald and Estelle Roemer Gold; married James Heilbrun, 1945; children: Emily, Margaret, Robert An only child, Carolyn G. Heilbrun went to private schools and graduated from Wellesley College. After earning an M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University, she taught at Brooklyn College and at Columbia, where she became a full professor in 1972. Known for her position on feminist issues, Heilbrun has been president of the Virginia Woolf Society; consultant for the University of Michigan Press Series on Women; a member of the

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editorial boards of Signs, Twentieth Century Literature, and Columbia University Press; and adviser to several radio and television productions. Heilbrun’s work ranges from scholarly books and articles to witty, leisurely, intellectual mysteries written under her pseudonym, Amanda Cross. In her first book, The Garnett Family (1961), Heilbrun presents the history of a literary family in England, particularly the three generations beginning with Richard Garnett (1835-1906). Richard’s son, Edward (1868-1937), and his wife, Constance, (1862-1946) are the key characters in this biography. As a publisher’s reader, Edward encouraged many of the literary talents from the 1890s to the time of his death, including Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence. Constance, about whom Heilbrun writes with enthusiasm, was an independent woman who translated many of the major Russian novelists into English and who, after becoming a wife and mother, traveled alone to Russia to see the country for herself. Her education at Newnham College, Cambridge, is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s description of a woman’s education in A Room of One’s Own. Woven through the book are other suggested parallels to Woolf: the elder Garnett is compared with Woolf’s father and family gatherings with those described by Woolf. Heilbrun’s interest in Woolf found greater expression in her very important work, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (1973). Heilbrun believes ‘‘our future salvation lies in a movement away from sexual polarization and the prison of gender toward a world in which individual roles and the modes of personal behavior can be freely chosen.’’ Divided into three sections—‘‘The Hidden River of Androgyny,’’ ‘‘The Woman as Hero,’’ and ‘‘The Bloomsbury Group’’—her book concentrates on the novel, after tracing the history of androgyny in myth and early literature. A wide-ranging critical study, it perceptively reexamines the works of many of our major novelists. Heilbrun asks for a new approach, one that recognizes the ‘‘woman hero’’ as distinct from the ‘‘heroine.’’ She notes that in the late 19th- and early 20th-century novels, it is the women who speak against the antiandrogynous vision. She differentiates between the ‘‘feminist’’ novel and the androgynous novel. In Jane Eyre, an example of the former, one identifies only with the woman hero. In Wuthering Heights, an example of the latter, one is aware of the human waste because of sexual polarization. In the essay, ‘‘Marriage Perceived’’ (1977), Heilbrun continues to explore the meaning of the woman’s role. She seeks to tear down the facade, to destroy the shibboleths that say that marriage is the desired state. She believes that much of the criticism written between 1932 and 1960 misinterprets the writers’ intentions. As an example, she cites those critics who believe that Henry James supported the old ideas of marriage, when in fact he noted its painfulness and the close connection between economics and marriage. As Amanda Cross, Heilbrun won the Scroll of the Mystery Writers of America for In the Last Analysis (1964). Here Heilbrun created Kate Fansler, a professor from a large urban university, as the amateur sleuth. In a later work, The James Joyce Murder (1967), the protagonist professor spends the summer sorting the


papers of the American publisher of James Joyce, when a crime is committed and a manuscript disappears. In these works, Heilbrun weaves her academic background into the story, either through plot devices or by creating intellectual, sophisticated characters. In 1983 Heilbrun was coeditor of The Representation of Women in Fiction, a collection of papers from the first English Institute program (1981) devoted to feminist criticism. Her own work at this time began to focus on women’s lives and particularly women’s autobiographies and biographies. In an important article, ‘‘Women’s Autobiographical Studies: New Forms’’ (1985), she argues that until the 1960s women had written only preautobiography, where ‘‘the individual. . .does not feel [her]self to exist outside of others.’’ This interest culminated in Writing a Woman’s Life (1988). In her characteristic combination of critical and textual analysis with autobiographical and biographical material, her essays focus on the necessity for women to write about their lives or to record the lives of others who have not been heard of before. She credits women poets, such as Denise Levertov, Jane Cooper, Maxine Kumin, Adrienne Rich, and Sylvia Plath, born between 1923 and 1932, with transforming ‘‘the autobiographies of women’s lives,’’ and notes that Rich, writing in prose, actually ‘‘practiced the new female autobiography directly’’ in her essay on her father, a subject Heilbrun argues women must write about in order to confront the patriarchal world. Other new forms and plots of women’s lives must be established, she argues, especially around marriage patterns and the story of friendship and love between women. Heilbrun, additionally, points out that in writing detective stories under a pseudonym, she was creating another identity for herself and another ‘‘possibility of female destiny.’’ Fansler was unmarried (though she later married the district attorney) and without children (Heilbrun has three children). She was also, Heilbrun notes, ‘‘unconstrained by the opinions of others, rich and beautiful.’’ Heilbrun produced five Fansler mysteries between 1981 and 1990. Death in a Tenured Position (1981), set at Harvard University’s English Department and featuring a victim who is the first tenured woman in the department, is characteristic of her novels in that it combines sharp social commentary with detective work and often solves the mystery through an analysis of literary texts. No Word from Winifred (1986), more than earlier novels, focuses on the effects of feminism on women’s lives, while The Players Come Again (1990) features literary detective work in the service of revealing a woman’s role in the work of a famous male writer. In her nonfiction Writing a Woman’s Life (1988), Heilbrun notes that alter ego Amanda Cross is no longer a fantasy figure ‘‘but an aging woman who battles despair’’ and who uses wit and humor and ‘‘the analysis of our ancient patriarchal ways’’ to find ‘‘a reason to endure.’’ In all of her writing, Heilbrun offers much more than mere endurance: she celebrates the lives and work of women who have the courage to live beyond convention and to tell their own stories. In the foreword to Hamlet’s Mother and Other Women (1990), Nancy Miller notes that Heilbrun has always identified with Virginia Woolf’s ‘‘Society of Outsiders.’’ In this collection

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of essays, beginning with her first published essay, ‘‘The Character of Hamlet’s Mother’’ (1957), Heilbrun reveals that from the beginning she was writing and thinking as ‘‘an opposing self’’ opposed to the male-centered culture of the university. All the other pieces were written between 1972 and 1988, during her life as a ‘‘declared and dedicated feminist.’’ They thus record her own history in the women’s movement as well as the spirit of ‘‘the revolution in its earlier years.’’ Most central in her literary criticism are the essays on Woolf, in one of which she argues that Woolf is a more revolutionary figure in modernism than James Joyce. Heilbrun includes two essays given at formal professional occasions, one her president’s address to the Modern Language Association and the other a University Lecture at Columbia. The two were, ‘‘collectively and separately, the bravest acts of my professional life,’’ because in them she confronted the male academic culture and spoke as a woman and not as ‘‘a genderless member’’ of the profession. In ‘‘The Politics of the Mind,’’ Heilbrun argues that ‘‘much of what passes for the life of the mind is, in fact, no more than the politics of the mind,’’ which has wasted the energies of women by too often silencing or hampering them. Heilbrun’s continuing promotion of feminist scholarship and the discussion of women’s issues particularly pertaining to the academic world was a central reason for her decision to retire from the faculty of Columbia University’s Department of English in 1992. Feminist critic Nancy Miller called Heilbrun a woman ahead of her generation and noted her passion ‘‘for the life in texts’’ and ‘‘from the beginning. . .has been writing the biography of literature.’’ Whether writing under her real name or under Amanda Cross, Heilbrun continues to earn widespread respect for her feminist theories. According to Nikki Lee Manos in Belles Lettres, Heilbrun has chosen to ‘‘interpret women’s literature from a woman’s perspective and thus to illustrate a critical means for validating female experience.’’ Los Angeles Times correspondent Kay Mills called Heilbrun ‘‘a pioneering mystery writer, not to mention one of the premiere translators of academic feminist concepts into language the rest of us can grasp and use. She’s influenced a generation of readers and writers with her belief that it’s vital to history to have women telling and honestly analyzing the stories of women.’’ In the decade since it was published, Writing a Woman’s Life (1988) has become essential reading in feminist literary theory. One reader who admired it was Gloria Steinem; when Steinem needed someone to write her authorized biography, she turned to Heilbrun. The result was The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem (1995). Steinem gave Heilbrun full cooperation on the manuscript but did not have the final say. The resulting work, according to Washington Post Book World contributor Grace Lichtenstein, ‘‘is an intriguing and unconventional portrait of this intriguing, unconventional and, above all, beloved leader. That the Steinem who emerges from this biography remains an admirable enigma in no way diminishes the book’s importance.’’ Other reviewers found the results of Heilbrun’s treatment of Steinem more uneven. Wini Breines in the Women’s Review of Books found ‘‘the story Heilbrun tells is strangely transparent, an

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unmessy narrative of Steinem’s admirable life with little attention to depth, complications, or contradictions.’’ Florence King, writing in the National Review, was blunt: ‘‘The only enjoyable parts of this book are the quoted passages by other writers. Miss [sic] Heilbrun is maddening.’’ Several reviewers felt a biography on Steinem was premature. The intellectual integrity Heilbrun has developed over a scholarly career serves her well when the subject is herself. In The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty (1997), she reflects on life after sixty. Her essays examine the unexpected pleasures of e-mail, her love for her dogs, a declaration of freedom from dresses and heels, the perils of finally getting a longed-for ‘‘room of one’s own,’’ her relationship with poet May Sarton, appreciation for the wisdom of the young, and the company of men. Rebecca Pepper Sinkler in the New York Times Book Review found that ‘‘one of the many honesties here is that Heilbrun makes the hard parts look hard.’’ Suitably reflective, this collection bears the clarity, humor, and deeply held feminist convictions that mark Heilbrun’s earlier works. As Amanda Cross, Heilbrun continues to allow Kate Fansler to stretch and grow. Fansler’s most recent challenge involved the kidnapping of her husband in The Puzzled Heart (1998). This was preceded by An Imperfect Spy (1995) and The Collected Stories of Amanda Cross (1997). Heilbrun’s major contribution is as scholar and feminist, overthrowing some of the sacred theories of an earlier generation and insisting on the influence of cultural bias in evaluations of literature. She has been criticized for her derogatory references to Freud and for the broadness of the field she covers. An articulate and original critic, Heilbrun brings a fresh perspective to literature. An encouraging teacher and generous colleague, she offers inspiration to women struggling to express their ideas in the academic world. OTHER WORKS: Christopher Isherwood (1970). Poetic Justice (1970). The Theban Mysteries (1972). The Question of Max (1977). Reinventing Womanhood (1979). Sweet Death, Kind Death (1984). A Trap for Fools (1989). Women’s Lives: The View from the Threshold (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Kress, S., Carolyn G. Heilbrun: Feminist in a Tenured Position (1997). Reddy, M., Sisters in Crime (1988). Reference works: CA (1974). CANR (1990, 1997). CLC (1983). Detecting Women (1994). Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1995). FC (1990). Feminist Writers (1996). Great Women Mystery Writers (1994). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996). Other references: Chronicle of Higher Education (11 Nov. 1992). Clues: American Journal of Detection (Fall/Winter 1982). Designs of Darkness (1983). LJ (15 Mar. 1997). National Review (29 Jan. 1996). NYTBR (6 Apr. 1997). NYTM (15 Nov. 1992). WRB (Dec. 1986, Dec. 1995). —IRENE DASH, UPDATED BY MARY GRIMLEY MASON AND CELESTE DEROCHE

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HEJINIAN, Lyn Born 17 May 1941, Alameda, California Daughter of Chaffee Hall Jr. and Carolyn Erskine Andrews; married John P. Hejinian, 1961 (divorced); Lawrence M. Ochs, 1977; children: Paull, Anna Lyn Hejinian is a contemporary poet and translator and a member of the ‘‘language writing’’ movement. As the founder and longtime editor of Tuumba Press and editor of Poetics Journal, she has also been an influential publisher of poetry, especially the early work of the language writers. Hejinian graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. in 1963. She began to write poetry seriously in the early 1970s, starting with the self-publication of a gRReat adventure (1972), a mixed-media creation of which Hejinian destroyed most copies. In the late 1970s, she became part of a group of San Francisco poets and writers among whom language writing began to evolve. Much of their poetry was published in journals such as This, Tottel, Ou, and Miam, as well as presses such as Berkeley-based Tuumba, which was founded by Hejinian in 1976. She remained editor until 1984, releasing a total of 50 books. As is typical of language writing, Hejinian’s work requires ‘‘resistant reading’’—as it is disruptive, demanding participation by the reader and rejecting the authority of the writer. It is deliberately unpredictable and seemingly out of control, and avoids poetic conventions. The primary technique used by Hejinian and other language writers to create disruptions in their poetry is the ‘‘new sentence,’’ a type of prose poem containing sentences without definite transitions to connect them. It moves from subject to subject and is open to interpretation by individual readers. Hejinian’s essay ‘‘The Rejection of Closure’’ (1985) develops her theory of an ‘‘open text,’’ which helps explain and define her previous and later work. Writing Is an Aid to Memory (1978) is Hejinian’s first book-length collection, composed of 42 sections of five- to eight-word phrases spread out over the page. Its eclectic content includes scientific references, bits of memory, and details of everyday life. The narrative voice that connects the sections focuses the reader on how the poem is constructed. One of the book’s themes is restlessness, a major concern throughout Hejinian’s work, especially as it relates to the mass media images that inundate the contemporary world. Hejinian’s poem ‘‘Gesualdo’’ (1978) reflects the autobiographical and biographical themes that are central to much of her work. It is an annotated prose poem that incorporates aspects of the life of the 16th- and 17th-century composer Don Carlo Gesualdo. As is typical in Hejinian’s poetry, the biographical details form the context for exploring sexual and literary passion. My Life (two versions, 1980 and 1987) is one of Hejinian’s best-known and most-studied works. The first edition was written in 1978 when Hejinian was thirty-seven and contained 37 sections with 37 sentences each. The revised edition, written when she was forty-five, integrated eight additional sentences into each section


and featured eight new sections. Each section begins with a phrase or sentence that is repeated in the same or a slightly revised form later in the book. The work is autobiographical yet multiplicitous and ever changing, forcing the reader to use his or her powers of interpretation. A Library Journal reviewer wrote of My Life: ‘‘A language poet, [Hejinian] captures experience in discrete, brilliant bits of imagery and sound. The result is an intriguing journey that both illuminates and perplexes, teases and challenges, as it reveals an innovative artist at work.’’ In 1983 Hejinian traveled to Leningrad and Moscow, learned Russian, and began friendships with Russian poets who influenced her subsequent work. Leningrad (1991) is the result of one of her trips to Russia and is a collaborative effort, typical of language writing. In alternating voices, the poets describe their travels and add political and cultural commentary. Two of her next works, Oxota (1991) and The Cell (1992), are often considered, along with Leningrad, as a trilogy. Some stories appear in all three in different forms. Oxota is somewhat in the form of a novel, although it, like The Cell, uses the device of the new sentence. It also contains autobiographical elements, in some ways extending the poetry of My Life. The Cell is a book-length collection of poems containing five-word lines. Like much of Hejinian’s work, it combines observations of everyday life with global and political concerns and contains sexual undercurrents. Publishers Weekly wrote of The Cell: ‘‘The poet breaks up syntax until form becomes content, yet she works from a self-referential base, laying bare a life so disjointed that readers are left to piece it together. . . . Clearly, this is an American answer to the French écriture féminine, or body as text. As such, it is successful and provocative.’’ The Cold of Poetry (1994) is a collection of shorter poems that had gone out of print. It follows many of the tenets of language poetry and includes social and cultural concerns. The work contains ten long poems written over two decades, but holds together as if meant as a whole. Publishers Weekly noted: ‘‘Hejinian’s poems are philosophical reveries, matter-of-fact in their occasions and wryly meditative in tone. Reading her, we watch thoughts in formation as she rummages around in her mind to see what odds and ends she can turn up.’’ The book, PW continued, reflects ‘‘Hejinian’s characteristic interest in the consistency and inconsistency of memory and self, and the role that writing plays in preserving and transforming these. . . . Hejinian is certainly an intellectual and self-conscious poet, but her work is also appealingly alert to daily life in these penetrating, instructive and thoroughly enjoyable poems.’’ OTHER WORKS: A Thought is the Bride of What Thinking (1976). A Mask of Motion (1977). The Guard (1984). Redo (1984). Individuals (with K. Robinson, 1988). The Hunt (1991). Jour de Chasse (translated by P. Alferi, 1992). Two Stein Talks (1996). Wicker (with J. Collom, (1996). The Little Book of a Thousand Eyes (1996). Guide, Grammar, Watch, and the Thirty Nights (in Australia, 1996). A Book from a Border Comedy (1997). A Traveler and the Hill and the Hill (collaboration with E. Clark,

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1998). Sight (with L. Scalapino, 1999). A Border Comedy (1999). The Language of Inquiry (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1997). DLB (1996). Other references: LJ (15 Dec. 1980, Dec. 1987). PW (10 May 1991, 7 Dec. 1992, 28 Mar. 1994, 29 Aug. 1994, 29 Mar. 1999). —KAREN RAUGUST

HELLMAN, Lillian Born 20 June 1905, New Orleans, Louisiana; died 30 June 1984, Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts Daughter of Max B. and Julia Newhouse Hellman; married Arthur Kober, 1925 (divorced), lived with Dashiell Hammett Lillian Hellman, an only child, was both repelled and fascinated by the vital obsession with money of her mother’s family, who had become wealthy through shrewd and often unscrupulous business dealings; she had warmer feelings for her father’s family, particularly his two sisters. Hellman spent her childhood in New York City and New Orleans. After two years at New York University from 1922 to 1924 and a brief stint at Columbia University, she accepted a position as manuscript reader for Horace Liveright, Inc., a New York publisher. She worked as a theatrical playreader in New York from 1927 to 1930 and a scenario reader for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1930 to 1931 before returning to New York in 1932. Hellman met her future husband, press agent Arthur Kober, and became acquainted with the literary world while working in New York. Kober and Hellman also lived in Paris and Germany for several months, and Hellman later made extensive visits to Spain and the Soviet Union. Hellman’s observations of the political situation in Europe, coupled with her own Jewish faith, contributed to the dislike of fascism and anti-Semitism apparent in her later political works. After she and Kober got an amicable divorce, Hellman lived with Dashiell Hammett, the detective-fiction writer. An honest and severe critic, he read all Hellman’s work in progress and kept after her to rewrite it until it met his exacting standards. With the profits from her early plays, Hellman bought a large working farm in New York, where she spent her happiest years with Hammett. After both she and Hammett were investigated in the 1950s by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and were blacklisted, they lost their major sources of income and had to sell their farm. Hammett guided her to the source for her first produced play, The Children’s Hour (1934), an account of an actual libel suit in 19th-century Scotland. It tells the story of Karen Wright and Martha Dobie, owners of a successful girls’ school, who are ruined by a charge of lesbianism. Extremely successful, partly because of its then shocking theme, the play ran for 691 performances on Broadway. The Children’s Hour is a skillfully wrought melodrama deepened by psychological penetration and moral significance.

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The Children’s Hour was one of a number of Hellman’s plays made into highly successful films in the 1930s and 1940s. She received Academy Award nominations for her adaptation of The Little Foxes in 1941 and her original screenplay The North Star in 1943. Her other filmed plays include The Searching Wind, filmed in 1946. Among Hellman’s theatrical awards are the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1941 and 1960, a Gold Medal from the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1964 for Distinguished Achievement in the Theatre, and election to the Theatre Hall of Fame in 1973. The Little Foxes (1939) is a gripping drama about the Hubbards of Alabama, who display the greed and driving egotism Hellman saw in her mother’s family. Ben and Oscar Hubbard and their sister, Regina Giddens, form a partnership with a Northern industrialist to set up a profitable cotton factory in their town, but they cannot secure a controlling interest without obtaining money from Regina’s husband, Horace, which he refuses to advance because he is disgusted by the Hubbards’ ruthless greed. Throughout the play, mastery shifts between the brothers and their sister, depending upon who seems more likely to get control of Horace’s money. In the end, Regina gains control by deliberately provoking him into a fatal heart attack. The Little Foxes is even better constructed than The Children’s Hour. Throughout the play, every speech advances the action; the climactic scene in which Regina drives Horace into heart failure is both psychologically prepared for and superbly effective theatrically. Because the Hubbards are intended to be human beings as well as monsters of selfishness, Hellman decided to ‘‘look into their family background and find out what it was that made them the nasty people they were.’’ In Another Part of the Forest (1947), she went back 20 years to show Ben, Oscar, and Regina as young people dominated by their father, Marcus. Hellman found humor as well as evil in people like the Hubbards, and made this more obvious in her second play about them. In Watch on the Rhine (1941), Hellman turned to the current political situation in order to awaken Americans to the growing menace of fascism. The play is set in 1940, just before this country entered World War II. Its title, from a German marching song, suggests Nazism must be watched and fought not only in Europe but in the United States. Accordingly, Hellman brings the antifascist struggle into an upper-class American home. Her moral point overshadows artistic interest and realism, but her rather simplistic message was eagerly welcomed by a nation on the brink of war. Like Watch on the Rhine, The Searching Wind (1944) focused on the innocence of Americans and their inability to comprehend the growing power of fascism and anti-Semitism in the 1930s. The Autumn Garden (1951) is unlike Hellman’s earlier plays in emphasizing character over plot. In a handsome but shabby Southern resort hotel, she gathers 10 people who lack purpose, joy, and love. Hellman’s characterization here shows a notable advance in subtlety, as she views her people with more sympathy and less simple judgement. General Griggs, who wants a divorce from the wife with whom he is desperately bored, is a touching portrait of a decent, intelligent man trapped with a woman who cannot grow. The artist Nick Denery is no simple villain, despite

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his irresponsibility to others. He does not mean to hurt people; he just cannot resist the temptation to win their affection by charming compliments and well-intentioned but ill-considered interference. Since his own life is empty—his wife despises him, and he has not finished a portrait for 12 years—he has to fill it by establishing intimacy with others, yet he is too shallow and selfish for emotional commitment. Despite inadequate plotting, Hellman has powerfully developed her theme of people stalemated in middle age. Perhaps the most obvious characteristic of Hellman’s writing is her first-rate craftsmanship: the neat plotting of the Hubbard plays, where thrilling melodramatic climaxes are meticulously prepared for, as hints are dropped in the beginning, every one to be picked up by the end; the relief from this suspenseful melodrama through pathos or comedy; the sharp characterization and vividly authentic speeches, which at the same time economically move the plot along. In her last two original plays—The Autumn Garden and Toys in the Attic (1960), which also present middle-aged people who come to recognize the bleakness of their lives but find they cannot change them—Hellman’s artistry appears more in character development. Instead of presenting lively sketches of villainy or pathos, she probes the motivation of a shallow charmer like Nick Denery. Instead of presenting straightforward relationships of love or domination, she examines ambivalent ones of mutual dependency. She sacrifices neatness to subtlety: dialogue no longer proceeds so briskly, but it expresses more precisely the feelings between people. She relaxes her tight plotting to give her characters more room to develop, though she unfortunately retains some jarring melodramatic elements. Hellman is surely right in considering The Autumn Garden her finest play. Well made and popular as her plays have been, they are all redeemed from commercialism by their strong moral commitment. Hellman constantly makes the point, equally applicable to private and public affairs, that it is immoral to remain passive when evil is being done. She believes that a clear moral message ‘‘is only a mistake when it fails to achieve its purpose, and I would rather make the attempt, and fail, than fail to make the attempt.’’ Only in a few cases, such as the anticlimactic discussion after Martha’s death in The Children’s Hour and the antifascist plays, does the moral message become obtrusive. Generally, it is organically part of her artistic structure and characterization. Hellman’s works consistently demonstrated responsibility, courage, and integrity. Hellman turned from writing plays to teaching at various New England and New York universities in the 1960s. She taught and conducted seminars in literature and writing at Yale University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Hunter College, and the City University of New York. In the 1970s, Hellman gained considerable fame through the publication of her memoirs, the first of which was released in 1969 as An Unfinished Woman, and won a National Book Award. This vivid autobiography runs from her childhood in New Orleans to the death of Hammett in 1961. The whole book is characterized by painstaking honesty, as Hellman analyzes her rebellions and conflicts, her ambivalent attitudes toward money and the theater,


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and the tensions of her relationship with Hammett. Often she renders her experience in dramatic dialogues. The second volume of her memoirs, Pentimento (1973) is Hellman’s reconsideration of certain themes in her life not developed in An Unfinished Woman. It consists mostly of portraits, of which the most memorable is that of her beloved girlhood friend, ‘‘Julia,’’ a passionate anti-Nazi who involved Hellman in the mission (especially perilous for a Jew) of carrying $50,000 into Berlin to ransom political prisoners. Hellman’s innocence, played against the elaborate subterfuges undertaken to safeguard her mission, makes for taut suspense. Scoundrel Time (1976) describes Hellman’s experience of political persecution in the 1950s. These three memoirs were republished together as Three in 1979 with new commentary by Hellman. Her last volume of memoirs, Maybe: A Story, was published in 1980.

1926-1978 (1980). Rollyson, C., Lillian Hellman, Her Legend and Her Legacy (1988). Shannon, D. D., ‘‘Mothers and Daughters: The Quest for Psychological Wholeness in the Plays of Lillian Hellman and Marsha Norman’’ (thesis, 1994). Triesch, M., The Lillian Hellman Collection at the University of Texas (1968). Wright, W., Lillian Hellman: The Image, The Woman (1986). Reference works: American National Biography (1999). Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature (1991). CANR (1991). CB (May 1941, June 1960). Encyclopedia of World Biography (1998). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA (1942). Other references: Contact (1959). Modern Drama (1960). Paris Review (1965, Spring 1981). Lillian Hellman: The Great Playwright Candidly Reflects on a Long, Rich Life (recording, 1977).

With the publication of Three and Maybe came controversy, when Hellman was called a liar by Mary McCarthy in a televised interview (Hellman later sued her), while Martha Gellhorn asserted that Hellman had fictionalized parts of An Unfinished Woman. In addition, another woman, psychoanalyst Muriel Gariner, who wrote Code Name Mary (1983), said Hellman appropriated her past as the basis of her ‘‘Julia’’ recollections in Penitmento. None of the charges or allegations were ever settled and Hellman died before her libel suit against McCarthy went to court. A film based on the relationship of Hellman and Hammett was produced by the Arts & Entertainment (A & E) network in 1999, appropriately titled Dash and Lil.

—KATHARINE M. ROGERS, UPDATED BY LEAH J. SPARKS AND NELSON RHODES

OTHER WORKS: Dear Queen (with L. Kronenberger, unpublished and unproduced play, 1931). Days to Come (1936). The North Star: A Motion Picture About Some Russian People (1943). Candide by Voltaire (dramatization by Hellman, with music by L. Bernstein and lyrics by R. Wilbur, J. LaTouche, and D. Parker, 1957). Four Plays (1942). Six Plays (1960). Collected Plays (1972). Eating Together: Recollections and Recipes (with P. S. Feibleman, 1984). The Lillian Hellman Collection is housed in the Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bryer, J. R., ed., Conversations with Lillian Hellman (1986). Dick, B. F., Hellman in Hollywood (1982). Estrin, M., Lillian Hellman: Plays, Films, Memoirs—A Reference Guide (1980). Estrin, M. W., ed., Critical Essays on Lillian Hellman (1989). Falk, D. V., Lillian Hellman (1978). Feibleman, P., Lilly (1988). Feibleman, P., Cakewalk (1993). Foster, K., ‘‘Detangling the Web: Mother-Daughter Relationships in the Plays of Marsha Norman, Lillian Hellman, Tina Howe, and Ntozake Shange’’ (thesis, 1994). Heilman, R. B., The Iceman, the Arsonist, and the Troubled Agent (1973). Heilman, R. B., Tragedy and Melodrama: Versions of Experience (1968). Holmin, L. R., The Dramatic Works of Lillian Hellman (1973). Lederer, K. Lillian Hellman (1979). Luce, W., Lillian (1986). Moody, R., Lillian Hellman: Playwright (1972). Nelson, R., Sensibility and Sense (1989). Riordan, M. M., Lillian Hellman: A Bibliography:

HENDERSON, Zenna Born 1 November 1917, Tucson, Arizona; died 11 May 1983 Daughter of Louis R. and Emily Rowley Charlson; married 1947 Zenna Henderson was born and educated in Arizona and has spent much of her life there. After being educated at Arizona State University (B.A. 1940, M.A. 1954), Henderson taught in schools throughout Arizona, including Eloy, where she lived until her death. She also taught at the Seaside, a tuberculosis sanitorium for children in Waterford, Connecticut. In the early 1950s, Henderson began her career as a writer by publishing her short stories. Her short fiction has appeared in periodicals such as the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Galaxy, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. In her early collections of short stories, The Anything Box (1965) and Holding Wonder (1971), typical characters are the schoolteacher (often the narrator), the child with extraordinary gifts, the youngster who observes supernatural happenings and accepts them as natural, and persons who encounter the first alien arrivals to Earth. Pervasive themes include the notion of a universal quasi-Christian morality throughout time and space, the importance of children as a new generation of Homo superior, and the tentativeness of the world’s survival. Typical of these short stories is ‘‘The Anything Box,’’ in which the narrator, an elementary schoolteacher, notices that Suelynn, one of her students, is always looking at something concealed in her hands. It is the ‘‘anything box’’ in which one can see anything that is the most attractive or the most important to the person looking. The teacher recognizes ‘‘out of (Sue-lynn’s) deep need she had found—or created it’’ and no rational or scientific explanation is offered. It is Sue-lynn’s only source of solace after her father is convicted of robbery, because in the box she can see a happier world of the past. The teacher takes away the box because

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the child tries to escape into it, but after looking into it herself, the teacher realizes the power of the box will destroy her because she was not meant to have it. Later, she sees the child changed by a ‘‘maturity born of. . .sorrow and loneliness,’’ and she returns Suelynn’s property. The two become friends, for they recognize each other’s strengths and failings. Although all of her work has didactic overtones, some of it, like ‘‘The Closest School,’’ is decidedly satirical. The characters are faced with an extraterrestrial version of school integration. Because the law states children can attend the closest school regardless of their color, a school board is forced to deal with the new family in town, the Powdangs, who are purple and fuzzy, and with their daughter Vannie, who is a youngster by their terms although she was born on 12 October 1360. Henderson is most widely known for her series of stories about the People, who are humanoid aliens forced from their home because of a natural disaster and who have settled in various isolated communities on Earth. The stories are collected in Pilgrimage: The Book of the People (1961) and The People: No Different Flesh (1967). Although they are a gentle people, their gifts and talents—the ability to levitate, mind-read, heal, and experience others’ sensations empathetically—mark them as different, and their Earth history is one of persecution and destruction. They are forced to live in hiding, holding back the gifts they could use for all humanity, because they know from bitter experience that those without the gifts would destroy them. Henderson’s creation of people who are more than human, yet who are moral, kind, and thoughtful, and who might offer solutions to the world’s problems of illness and distress if they were allowed, makes a striking commentary on real life. Henderson is, moreover, a good storyteller, for by focusing on the personal and family lives of her aliens, she brings to science fiction a dimension it often lacks. Science fiction—especially in the 1950s, when Henderson began writing—took adventure as its primary subject matter. Stories dealt with monstrous aliens, space warfare, and adolescent male heroes; women were absent. Also missing were the details of everyday life—alien or not—that make all fiction moving and significant. Henderson’s contribution to science fiction is her integration of philosophy and the more mature concerns of the family into the adventure narrative. Henderson died in May of 1983, and a her People books were collected into one volume in 1991, aptly titled The People Collection. To her loyal fans from decades past as well as more recent admirers, Henderson’s works were gathered into a comprehensive new book, Ingathering: The Complete Stories of Zenna Henderson, released in 1995. Throughout the decade, Henderson’s stories continued to receive new acclaim and interest, with many appearing in anthologies and new books, including ‘‘As Simple As That’’ in the Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990 (1993), ‘‘Subcommittee’’ in New Eves: Science Fiction About the Extraordinary Women of Today and Tomorrow (1994), ‘‘Through a Glass-Darkly’’ in Masters of Fantasy (1992, reprinted 1994), ‘‘Walking Aunt Daid’’ in Angels of Darkness: Tales of Troubled and Troubling

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Women (1995), and ‘‘The Anything Box’’ in A Magic Lover’s Treasury of the Fantastic (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Calkins, E., and B. McGhan, Teaching Tomorrow: A Handbook of Science Fiction for Teachers (1972). Sargent, P., Women of Wonder (1974). Sheets, A. J. and L. Trudeau, eds., Short Story Criticism: Excerpts from Criticism of the Works of Short Fiction Writers (1998). Reference works: CA (1967). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the Untied States (1995). St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers (1996). —BILLIE J. WAHLSTROM, UPDATED BY NELSON RHODES

HENISSART, Martha See LATHEN, Emma

HENLEY, Beth Born Elizabeth Becker Henley, 8 May 1952, Jackson, Mississippi Daughter of Charles B. and Lydy B. Caldwell Henley The eldest of three daughters of an attorney and an actress, Henley started out as an actress before beginning to write plays during a dry spell in her acting career. She is one of the first women to have been acknowledged as a playwright on the national level since Lillian Hellman and Lorraine Hansberry. Henley’s plays, often described as Southern gothic or grotesque, are set in the Mississippi in which she was raised; they portray women and men and their complex, tragicomic relationships both within a family and between the family and the outside society that frequently disapproves of it. Her female characters are at their indecorous best when they gleefully or grimly sabotage societal expectations, and when they manage not to harm themselves too much. As a Southern writer whose characters are frequently grotesque and obsessive, Henley has been frequently compared with Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and William Faulkner. Several sources note Henley first read the work of O’Connor only after the resemblances between their work had been commented upon by reviewers. Henley achieved early success with Crimes of the Heart (produced 1979, published 1981), which won the Pulitzer Prize and was later made into a movie. Crimes introduces several themes and characters that appear in Henley’s later work: the Magrath sisters, although they argue among themselves, bond together to defend themselves fiercely against all comers. Their social-climbing cousin, Chick, is mortified by Lenny, Meg, and Babe’s family skeletons (including suicides, false pretenses, and illicit sexuality); the sisters themselves are busy trying to recoup lost chances. Crimes has been compared to plays of Chekhov for


its realism, its mixture of tragedy and comedy, and its portrayal of the force of the family against outsiders. That Henley began her career as an actress may in part account for the liveliness of her characters and dialogue and for the ensemble quality of many of her plays. Her characters onstage are obsessive, identified by their quirkiness. We see them at awkward or unpleasant moments (at a wake, having lost a beauty contest), and we see them inflicting pain on themselves senselessly, while imparting to their actions a kind of logic (such as in Debutante Ball [1985, 1988] when Teddy stabs her face and legs repeatedly with any sharp object at hand). Henley’s characters also tell stories of revelatory moments or formative experiences. In The Miss Firecracker Contest (1980, 1985), for example, Popeye tells the story of her nickname, which is also the story of her partial blindness and the beginning of her ability to hear voices in her eyes. Sometimes the grotesquerie or absurdity seems unfounded or unexplored, or to be only a hint at an unstated truth beneath the surface, as when Babe in Crimes explains she shot her husband ‘‘because I didn’t like his looks.’’ Efforts by characters to change society’s disapproval of them and their attempts at self-redemption recur in several of Henley’s subsequent plays. Carnelle in Miss Firecracker tries to restore her bad reputation with the locals by winning a beauty pageant. Debutante Ball focuses on a woman who is determined to distract the town from her reputation as a murderess by providing her awkward misfit daughter, Teddy, with the ideal debut night. The Wake of Jamey Foster (1983, 1985) is another ensemble piece in which each character is looking for love and disappointed at his or her inability to live up to others’ expectations. Henley’s later plays, The Lucky Spot (1986, 1987) and Abundance (1990, 1991), further her interest in characters’ lost loves and broken dreams while moving her focus to settings beyond Mississippi and the New South, and to characters in circumstances not solely brought about by family commitments. Several of Henley’s plays have been turned into movies, and she is the author of both unproduced and produced screenplays, notably as coscreenwriter with David Byrne and Stephen Tobolowsky of True Stories (Warner Brothers, 1986) and 1988’s Nobody’s Fool. Signature, written in 1990 but not produced until 1995, involves four characters who go into business with each other but end up at each other’s throats. The main character finally decides he can save his life by changing his signature. Henley wrote the play after having her handwriting analyzed while she was in the midst of a depressive state. The graphologist recognized this in her handwriting, which led her to develop the character. Henley appears to have changed perspectives to some degree in Impossible Marriage (1999). In contrast to the emotional disorder and confusion that marked the characters in her work of the 1980s, those in this tale of modern marriage have ‘‘grown up.’’ One critic termed the shift in Henley’s style to be in the realm of ‘‘Wildean satire.’’ Impossible Marriage revolves around two sisters, the youngest of whom (Pandora) is fast approaching her wedding day. The

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older sister, Flora, who is unhappy with her own situation— pregnant and feeling smothered by her narcissistic husband— plots to stop the marriage and is encouraged to do so by the girls’ mother. Pandora is marrying an older man, whose son shows up unannounced, also wishing to prevent the wedding in order to save his mother, who has threatened to throw herself from a window if the nuptials take place. The play courses with Henley’s slightly hysterical characters but with an underlying philosophical bent. Henley comments, ‘‘All these women are cursed with the ability to see the truth, if not live the truth.’’ Henley’s projects at the turn of the century have included collaborating with the play’s director on the casting of Impossible Marriage for its New York off-Broadway production and completing a screenplay about Canadian bank robbers. OTHER WORKS: Am I Blue? (1982). Beth Henley: Four Plays (1992). Control Freaks (1992). Monologues for Women (1992). The Revelers (1994). The L Play (1995). Collected Works, Volume I (1999). Collected Works, Volume II (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Betsko, K., and R. Koenig, Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights (1987). Jones, J. G., ed., Mississippi Writers Talking (1982). Schlueter, J., ed., Modern American Drama: The Female Canon (1990). Smith, L., Women Who Write: From the Past and Present to the Future (1989). Reference works: CANR (1991). CLC (1983). Contemporary Dramatists (1988). DLBY (1986). Notable Women in the American Theatre (1989). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: American Theatre (Nov. 1998). Back Stage (24 Mar. 1995). Conference of College Teachers of English Studies (Sept. 1989). Southern Quarterly (Summer 1984; Spring 1987). Studies in American Drama (1988; 1989). Variety (19 Oct. 1998). Women and Performance: American Journal of Feminist Theory (1986). —KATHRYN MURPHY ANDERSON, UPDATED BY REBECCA C. CONDIT

HENRY, Alice Born 21 March 1857, Richmond, Australia; died 14 February 1943, Melbourne, Australia Also wrote under: Alice Henry Daughter of Charles F. and Margaret Walker Henry Alice Henry’s Memoirs of Alice Henry (1944), in which she describes her childhood in the Beaconsfield District at the edge of the Australian bush, reveals her close and loving relationship with the natural world around her. While she was still very young, her family moved to Melbourne, where she was educated both in private schools and at home, and formally exposed to the

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Swedenborgian religion. From her earliest life, Henry was expected to earn her own living; she also received, during her growing years, instruction in physical training, a discipline new to women. Henry first supported herself by teaching, but soon began to write for the daily Melbourne Argus and for its weekly edition, the Australian. Her reading of Thomas Hare’s Representative Government convinced her of the importance of active democratic involvement. When both parents died, Henry sailed for England as Melbourne’s representative to a charity organization conference. In Britain, she interested herself deeply in women’s issues and became close friends with feminist leaders Christobel Pankhurst and Annie Kennedy. Unable to support herself in England while working for the women’s cause and the poor, in 1906 Henry left for the United States. She soon embarked on speaking tours where she discussed the social conditions in Australia. She frequently joined such well-known figures as Edwin Markham, Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Stanton Blatch, Julia Ward Howe, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson on the lecture platform. Jane Addams invited her to live at Hull House and work for the municipal vote; during her residence there, Henry also supported the many programs devoted to bringing the arts to working-class women. In Chicago, Henry took over the position of office secretary of the National Women’s Trade Union League and was soon in charge of the league’s column on women’s affairs in the Union Labor Advocate. Between 1911 and1915, she edited Life and Labor, the league’s journal, which she expanded to include information on suffrage and homemaking, as well as short stories and poetry. The Trade Union Woman (1915), a pioneering work, was conceived by Henry as a handbook to inform the public about the economic and biological vulnerabilities of the American working woman. She viewed industrial organization and suffrage as the two major issues facing the women of her day. She believed trade unionism to be the most viable means of strengthening working women’s relationships with their brothers in the labor movement. Tracing the history of labor organizing in this country from the early 19th century, the volume includes discussions of such topics as immigrant women in industry, major strikes, conflicts facing working women when they marry, and vocational training. Women and the Labor Movement (1923) expands and updates the material in the earlier volume. After returning to Australia in 1933, she wrote the Memoirs of Alice Henry, and thereafter devoted herself to medical projects, the education of bush children, and the compilation of a bibliography on Australian women writers. Henry was a woman devoted totally to the social causes she espoused, her personal life being inseparable from her professional dedication. An idealist, she lived in the fervent belief that the peace following World War I would offer opportunities for both the labor movement and the women’s movement ‘‘to come into their own.’’ In her vision, and in the energies she invested in trying to realize her vision, lies her major contribution to the improvement of the lives of working women.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY: Boone, G., The Women’s Trade Union Leagues in Great Britain and the U.S.A. (1942). Reference works: Biographical Cyclopedia of American Women (1924). DAB. NAW (1971). Other references: Life and Labor Bulletin (Apr. 1943). —VIRGINIA R. TERRIS

HENRY, Marguerite Born 13 April 1902, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; died 26 November 1997, Rancho Santa Fe, California Daughter of Louis and Anna Kaurup Breithaupt; married Sidney C. Henry, circa 1924 Daughter of a printer, Marguerite Henry was set up as a kitchen-corner writer at age ten and published her first sketch the next year. She took a degree in journalism at Milwaukee State Teachers College. Her husband’s interest in animals may have encouraged Henry to develop, years later, her strongest genre: animal-centered books for children. At first, Henry worked as a technical writer and journalist, perfecting her straightforward prose style. This talent for clear prose, her ability to see dramatic conflict, and her indefatigable energy as a researcher served Henry well when she turned to writing for children. Henry read, interviewed, and traveled to gather material, which she then filed in boldly marked manila folders, giving her a flexible outline and easy access to information as she wrote her books. This efficient approach may explain how, between 1940 and 1946, Henry could produce not only 12 geography books, but also nine other books, including what Henry considers her first serious work, Justin Morgan Had a Horse (1945), one of many books that grew out of her notes for An Album of Horses (1951). This story of the first Morgan horse won the Junior Scholastic Gold Seal Award and the Award of the Friends of Literature and was made into a Walt Disney movie in 1972. It also brought Henry together with illustrator Wesley Dennis for a longtime collaboration producing ‘‘some of the most beautiful and worthwhile books ever published for children.’’ Henry has written well on many subjects—her works include biographies of Robert Fulton and Benjamin West, albums on birds and dogs, several dog stories, and one book on a talking fox named Cinnabar—but she has gained the greatest popularity and acclaim for her horse books. King of the Wind (1948), a fictional account of Godolphin Barb, the Arabian ancestor of Man-o-War, won the Newbery Medal. The book reads like romantic fantasy, but is based on copious research, a ‘‘whole horse van of letters.’’ The mute stableboy, Agba, in his devotion to Godolphin, is typical of Henry’s young protagonists. Born to Trot (1950) tells the true story of Gibson White, the boy who owned and trained Rosalind, the ‘‘Queen of Trotters.’’ One critic has noted this type of story succeeds because of the skill with which Henry spins ‘‘a narrative of triumph mixed with tragedy.’’ Another young real-life hero, Giorgio Terni, was the


basis of Gaudenzia: Pride of the Palio (1960), which describes his surprising victory in the hair-raising horse race tearing through the streets of Siena once a year. The most famous horse in Henry’s books appeared in Misty of Chincoteaque (1947) and introduced readers to the legend and modern reality of the wild ponies herded once a year on Pony Penning Day on this Virginia island. Misty, who played herself in a 1961 movie, is the type of plucky, intelligent horse every child hopes to own, and young readers must envy Paul and Maureen Beebe, who actually shared the adventure of capturing and training Misty. Further events in the lives of these two and the equally well-portrayed Grandma and Grandpa Beebe are followed in Sea Star: Orphan of Chincoteaque (1949), which tells of the saving of an abandoned foal, and in Stormy, Misty’s Foal (1963), in which the flooding of Chincoteaque, Misty’s stay in the Beebes’ kitchen during the catastrophe, and her eventual successful foaling are vividly recounted. In these Chincoteaque books Henry is at her best, using keen observation, careful recording and selection, and enough imagination to make the true stories flow like fiction. Henry brought loving research to each of her many books. She showed her respect for children by maintaining high standards of journalism; and her young audience, who voted her many of the awards she held, repays this respect with its enthusiasm. Her books remain in print; they are in demand at libraries, perhaps because, as Rudyerd Boulton said of Henry: ‘‘The author has happily chosen to present factual information in a joyous way.’’ OTHER WORKS: Auno and Tauno: A Story of Finland (1940). Dilly Dally Sally (1940). Birds at Home (1942; revised 1972). Geraldine Belinda (1942). Their First Igloo on Baffin Island (1943). A Boy and a Dog (1944). Robert Fulton: Boy Craftsman (1945). Always Reddy (1949). Little or Nothing from Nottingham (1949). Portfolio of Horses (1952). Brighty of Grand Canyon (1953; film version, 1966). Wagging Tails: Album of Dogs (1955). Cinnabar: The One O’Clock Fox (1956). Black Gold (1957). Muley Ears, Nobody’s Dog (1959). All About Horses (1962). Portfolio of Horse Paintings (with W. Dennis, 1964). White Stallion of Lipizza (1964). Mustang: Wild Spirit of the West (1966). Dear Readers and Riders (1969). San Domingo: The Medicine Hat Stallion (1972). The Pictorial Life Story of Misty (1976). One Man’s Horse (1977). The Marguerite Henry Misty Treasury: Three Complete Novels in One Volume (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Collins, D. R., Write a Book for Me: The Story of Marguerite Henry (1999). Reference works: Authors and Illustrators of Children’s Books: Writings on Their Lives and Works (1972). CA (1976). CB (1947). Junior Book of Authors (1951). Newbery Medal Books, 1922-1955 (1955). Other references: Horn Book (Jan. 1950, Feb. 1954). Library Bulletin (Nov. 1947). Life (10 June 1955). NYTBR (22 Dec. 1957) PW (26 March 1949, obituary, 1997). —CELIA CATLETT ANDERSON

HENTZ

HENTZ, Caroline (Lee) Whiting Born 1 June 1800, Lancaster, Massachusetts; died 11 February 1856, Marianna, Florida Daughter of John and Orpah Danforth Whiting; married Nicolas M. Hentz, 1824; children: five (one died as a child) Caroline Whiting Hentz was the eighth and youngest child of an old New England family directly descended from the Reverend Samuel Whiting, who settled in Massachusetts in 1636. Her father served as a colonel in the Revolutionary War. Two years after Hentz’s marriage to a French entomologist, her husband became chairman of modern languages and belles lettres at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. This move was the first of many the family made following his erratic teaching career. Hentz bore five children; the oldest son died when he was two years old. In addition to rearing the children, running the household, supervising boarding students, and helping her husband with teaching and insect collecting, Hentz wrote verse, drama, tales, and novels. Reputedly, she could write easily in the midst of household distractions. Her first novel, Lovell’s Folly (1833), was suppressed by her family as ‘‘too personal.’’ Some accounts say it was libelous. While in Kentucky, Hentz wrote a prize-winning play, DeLara; or, The Moorish Bride (1843). The five-act drama, set in a Spanish castle during the Moors’ conquest of Spain, was produced in Philadelphia and Boston. Of her poems written for special occasions, perhaps the most important one was composed for the visit of Andrew Jackson to Florence, Alabama, in 1836. Her husband read the poem for President Jackson. Although she began writing as a girl, Hentz did not become a well-known writer until the Philadelphia Saturday Courier serially published a domestic tale in 1844. It was later published in book form as Aunt Patty’s Scrap Bag (1846). When her husband became chronically ill in the late 1840s, Hentz, out of financial necessity, began the most prolific period of her writing at the age of fifty. Her novel Linda; or, The Young Pilot of the Belle Creole (1850) became a bestseller. Seven more domestic novels and six collections of stories were published in rapid succession. Her books remained popular after her death until the end of the century. Two novels, Eoline; or, Magnolia Vale (1852) and The Planter’s Northern Bride (1854), were reprinted in the 1970s. While living in Cincinnati, Hentz knew Harriet Beecher Stowe. Both women belonged to a literary group, the Semi-Colons. Although they might have shared cultural interests, the issue of slavery separated them. Hentz’s novel The Planter’s Northern Bride was written as an answer to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It is proslavery propaganda. In Marcus Warland (1852), probably composed before she had read Stowe’s work, Hentz made only a partial defense of slavery, but the later novel is a full-blown counterstatement to abolition. With other writers of antebellum novels, Hentz helped create and perpetuate an image of ideal plantation life. This fictional world of pious belles, gallant gentlemen, and happy slaves appeals so strongly to the popular mind that the myth persists.

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OTHER WORKS: Mob Cap (1848). Rena; or, The Snow Bird (1851). Helen and Arthur; or, Miss Thusa’s Spinning Wheel (1853). Wild Jack; or, The Stolen Child, and Other Stories (1853). The Victim of Excitement (1853). Robert Graham (1855). The Banished Son (1856). Courtship and Marriage (1856). Ernest Linwood (1856). The Lost Daughter (1857). Love After Marriage (1857).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ellison, R. C., Introduction to The Planter’s Northern Bride (1970). Papashvily, H. W., All the Happy Endings (1956). Williams, B. B., A Literary History of Alabama: The Nineteenth Century (1979). Reference works: AA. CAL. DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB. Ohio Authors and Their Books (1962). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: AL (1950). Alabama Review (1951). —LYNDA W. BROWN

HERBST, Josephine Born 5 March 1892, Sioux City, Iowa; died 28 January 1969, New York, New York Daughter of William B. and Mary Frey Herbst; married John Herrmann, 1925 (divorced, 1940) Josephine Herbst, a proletarian writer, is a major figure in the history of 20th-century literature and radicalism. Although less well known than her friends Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, and John Dos Passos, she is often regarded as their peer. Her most important work is a trilogy, a sweeping reconstruction of the life of an American family from the Civil War through the 1930s. Other works include four more novels, reports from the crisis areas of the 1930s, and numerous short stories and critical essays. Herbst grew up in Sioux City, Iowa, where her father sold farm implements. Neither of her parents had much formal education, but her mother, a strong influence in Herbst’s life, imparted a love of books to her four daughters, and the stories she told about her ancestors formed the beginning of Herbst’s trilogy. The family was always poor; consequently, Herbst’s college education was spread out over nine years and four different institutions, as she alternated periods of work with periods of study, eventually receiving her degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1919. After graduation, she moved to New York City and there became a part of the intellectual and political ferment of the 1920s. Maxwell Anderson, then a socialist journalist and poet, was her first serious lover; a pregnancy resulted, and at Anderson’s insistence, Herbst had an abortion. A few months later, her

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favorite sister died from an abortion. The pain from these two events was devastating for Herbst. Unable to resume her life in New York, she left her job as a reader for H. L. Mencken’s magazines and went to Europe to write. There she met and fell in love with John Herrmann, an expatriate writer, whom she later married. The farm they bought in Erwinna, Pennsylvania, continued to be Herbst’s home for the rest of her life. During the first 10 years at Erwinna, Herbst produced five novels. Herrmann, never as ambitious a writer as Herbst, began to write less and to increase his involvement in the Communist Party. Although Herbst never formally joined the Communist Party, her beliefs and activities were sympathetic to it. The trilogy Pity Is Not Enough (1933, reprinted 1998), The Executioner Waits (1934, 1985), and Rope of Gold (1939, 1984, 1986) tells the story of the Trexler and Wendel families and reveals the development of Herbst’s ideas. Walter Rideout pointed out that she views the families’ decline as a ‘‘tiny part of the dialectical process of world history,’’ and juxtaposes the deterioration of capitalism with the possibility of power for the proletariat. The political message is carried mainly in vignettes about farmers and workers, which give added breadth and force to the main story. Most of Herbst’s fiction is strongly autobiographical. The family of the trilogy is her own, thinly disguised. Two of the characters, Victoria and Jonathan Chance, closely resemble Herbst and Herrmann, and sometimes events in the author’s life were being written into the book almost as soon as they occurred. In Rope of Gold, Victoria and Jonathan are growing apart, as were Herbst and Herrmann, and the novel records the pain of their deteriorating relationship, which for Herbst and Herrmann resulted in divorce in 1940. During the 1930s, Herbst’s reports from crisis areas of the world were widely published. She talked with farm pickets in Iowa, reported on the sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, went to Nazi Germany shortly after Hitler took power, was in Spain with the Loyalists in 1937, and visited Cuban radicals in their mountain hideout. Fired from a wartime job in Washington for political reasons, Herbst spent much of the 1940s and early 1950s at Erwinna, alone and suffering privately over the outcome of her marriage. The two novels published during this period were not given the attention of her previous books. Gradually, she renewed old friendships, and Erwinna became a gathering place for writers and intellectuals. A lesbian relationship with poet Jean Garrigue began during this period. From the mid-1950s until the time of her death, she was preoccupied with her memoirs, which were never completed because she could not arrive at a portrait of her times that was satisfying to her. Elinor Langer’s excellent biography is titled Josephine Herbst; The Story She Could Never Tell.

OTHER WORKS: Nothing Is Sacred (1928, 1977). Money for Love (1929, 1977). Satan’s Sergeants (1941). Somewhere the Tempest


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Fell (1947). New Green World (1954). The Starched Blue Sky of Spain: And Other Memoirs (1991, 1999). Josephine Herbst’s papers are housed in the Beinecke Library at Yale University, as is ‘‘A Bibliography and Checklist of Josephine Herbst,’’ prepared by Martha Elizabeth Pickering in 1968.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bevilacqua, W. F. Josephine Herbst (1977). Gourlie, J. M., The Evolution of Form in the Works of Josephine Herbst (dissertation, 1975). Cleppe, J., ‘‘Down Yesterday’s Road: The Radical Spirit and Revolutionary Novels of Josephine Herbst’’ (dissertation 1991). Cleppe, J., ‘‘Josephine Herbst’s Trilogy: A New Look’’ (thesis 1987). Davis, P. J., ‘‘Brokenwing’’ Ellen Glasgow, Josephine Herbst, and the Creation of Mourning (dissertation 1997). Kempthorne, D. Q., Josephine Herbst: A Critical Introduction (dissertation, 1973). Langer, E., Josephine Herbst: The Story She Could Never Tell (1984, 1994). Rasmussen, M. A., ‘‘Feminist Representation and Radical Ideology: The Writings of Josephine Herbst, 1917-1939’’ (dissertation 1991). Rideout, W., The Radical Novel in the United States (1966). Roberts, N. R., Three Radical Women Writers: Class and Gender in Meridel Le Sueur, Tillie Olsen, and Josephine Herbst (1996). Roehrig, E. L., Josephine Herbst and George Orwell: Two Lives, Two Political Journeys (1996). Wiedemann, B., Josephine Herbst’s Short Fiction: A Window to Her Life and Times (1998). Reference works: DAB (1988). DLB (1981). FC (1990). NAW (1980). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Great Plains Quarterly (Spring 1998). NYT (29 Jan. 1969). NYRB (27 Mar. 1969). —MARY E. FINGER

HERSCHBERGER, Ruth Born 30 January 1917, Philipse Manor, New York Also writes under: Josephine Langstaff Daughter of Clarence B. and Grace Eberhart Herschberger Daughter of two academic parents, Ruth Herschberg was educated at the University of Chicago and Black Mountain College, and later took courses at the University of Michigan and at the New School for Social Research and Union Theological Seminary, both in New York City. For years, she lived in New York and summered on Washington Island, Wisconsin. Herschberg’s career as a writer in both verse and prose has brought her considerable public attention. Her plays have been produced on radio and on stage. Her book of feminist essays, Adam’s Rib (1948), was published under the pseudonym Josephine Langstaff, first in England, then in Finland, Norway, and Sweden; and parts of it have been anthologized. Her poems have appeared

in over 30 national and literary magazines, including the feminist magazines Aphra and Feelings, and in more than a dozen anthologies. Her feminist lyrics for ‘‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’’ were sung on Walter Cronkite’s show in 1969 and at the 1970 Statue of Liberty sit-in. ‘‘A Sound in the Night,’’ first published in Harper’s Bazaar, is included in Best American Stories, 1949. Herschberg has received some well-known critical awards. Herschberg is a multifaceted author, who writes plays, poems, and feminist essays with equal vigor. She is not primarily an academic writer, does not depend heavily on learning, but neither is she a lazy or emotionally self-indulgent writer. She uses strong rather than restrained tones, but she is not flashy or superficial. In ‘‘A Day in Autumn,’’ she goads herself to be forthright, unsentimental, and energetic, an active combination of mind and body. She asks the Lord to dissatisfy her because merely to accept the goodness of bodily nature might anesthetize: ‘‘Dissatisfy me, Lord, / . . .Make me all muddy / . . .Make me unwieldy, / . . .What is to be done, how can we/ Simplify what is already / Simplified? Ah intellect, / . . .Get to work.’’ The body and its pleasures are but ‘‘slightly earned’’ and therefore not enough. Mind must discipline feeling and use it. Herschberg’s subjects are as varied as experience, especially female experience. Her overriding theme seems to be that the poet should celebrate all life’s contradictions by means of the full range of contradictory emotions available to her nature—except selfpity. The resulting tone of her writing is as various as her subject matter and often complex—tender and at the same time repulsed and horrified (‘‘A Sound in the Night’’); playful and macabre (‘‘A Dream Play’’); and angry yet somehow sympathetic (‘‘Is Rape a Myth?’’). Her most frequent tone is satiric, and she ejaculates rather than whispers. Herschberg’s diversity of genres makes one hesitate to give her only the label of ‘‘poet,’’ although two books of published poetry, several awards for poetry, and a number of verse plays have certainly earned her the title. Nevertheless, compared to poets who have concentrated solely on verse, her technical skills are somewhat underdeveloped. She seems to feel most comfortable with end-stopped iambic pentameter lines, often rhymed couplets, or four-line stanzas with alternate rhymes. In other words, though not unskilled, she has done nothing adventurous in prosody. Her diction is often ‘‘poetic’’—and not always for the sake of humor—and there are flat lines and awkward inversions. But at her best, when she writes epigrammatically, as in the sharply satiric sonnet ‘‘Americans All,’’ she fuses diction, rhythm, and metaphor into an intense and successful whole: ‘‘Zebras we, a plait of black and lighter, / Running through woodlands like the horse and ass, / With buff for background and jet stripes that pass / Over our sides in camouflage.’’ Though Herschberg will probably be most easily remembered as an energetic feminist, chiefly because of her book of feminist essays, Adam’s Rib, she should also be remembered as a poet whose voice is most often more eager than irate, and more hearty than shrill.

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OTHER WORKS: A Way of Happening (1948). Nature and Love Poems (1969). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1973). TCAS. Other references: Chicago Sun (28 March 1948). LJ (1 Jan. 1970), NYHTB (16 May 1948). NYT (9 May 1948, 1 Aug. 1948, 30 Nov. 1970). San Francisco Chronicle (13 June 1948). SR (25 Sept. 1948). —ALBERTA TURNER

HEWITT, Mary E(lizabeth) Moore Born 1808, Malden, Massachusetts; died death date unknown Wrote under: Mary Elizabeth Hewitt, Ione, Jane Daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Moore; married James L. Hewitt, circa 1827; Mr. Stebbins, n.d. Mary Elizabeth Moore Hewitt was born in a suburb of Boston. Her father, a farmer, died while she was quite young, and she and her mother moved closer to the city. In 1829 she and James L. Hewitt, a music publisher, moved to New York City, where Mary Elizabeth continued to live for most of her life. Known primarily as a poet, Hewitt published her first verses in Knickerbocker magazine under the pseudonyms Ione and Jane; most of her work appeared in magazines in the 1840s and 1850s. She became acquainted with many of the popular writers of her day. The Songs of Our Land, and Other Poems (1845), her first collection, was made up primarily of poems that had appeared in various publications; it was reissued, almost unchanged, as Poems: Sacred, Passionate, and Legendary (1853). Hewitt’s poetry has little to recommend it save perhaps an interesting variety in subject matter. In her collections, one finds fervently nationalistic poems as well as some translations from French poets and poems drawn from Greek and Norse legends. The poems deal with love and loss, with historical events, and with secular and religious themes. ‘‘The Songs of Our Land’’ is a long poem that echoes the mood of the nation in the mid-19th century. Taking her inspiration from the optimism and sense of achievement then existing in America, Hewitt’s theme is that the songs of her land, although not based on ancient traditions, are all one superior song, that of ‘‘Liberty.’’ Many verses on the American pioneer experience— such as ‘‘A Thought of the Pilgrims,’’ about the early experience on the ‘‘lonely Mayflower,’’ and ‘‘The Axe of the Settler’’— reflect the literary and political mood of Hewitt’s time. Titles such as ‘‘Love’s Pleading,’’ ‘‘Alone,’’ ‘‘A Wife’s Prayer,’’ and ‘‘The Lady to Her Glove’’ characterize Hewitt’s love poetry, which too often shows no originality or imagination. ‘‘I pine, my cherished one! for Thee! for Thee!’’—a line from ‘‘A Voice of the Heart’’—is typical of her sentimental verse. She is more successful when dealing with natural forces, such as the sea. A series of poems about mariners and the sea was praised by Poe. The ambitious ‘‘Myth,’’ one of her most interesting failures, is

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about fishermen ‘‘on the Ionian sea.’’ In ‘‘Myth’’ Hewitt attempts, through the use of a chorus, an invocation, and several alternating voices, to create the atmosphere of a Greek drama within a poem. Heroines of History (1856) is a series of prose sketches. In the preface, Hewitt says she wishes to present women ‘‘rendered illustrious by their heroism and their virtues.’’ The prose style of these tales is unremarkable, and the subjects seem to have been chosen because they had violent, unhappy lives; they include Semiramis, Zenobia, Beatrice Cenci, Anne Boleyn, Joan of Arc, and Charlotte Corday. Hewitt’s writing is characterized by her love of drama and her intense feeling, as evidenced most often by her use of the exclamation point and a short emphatic line. Praised for her ‘‘impassioned heart,’’ her ‘‘lyrical power,’’ and (by Poe) for her ‘‘poetic fervor,’’ Hewitt was valued more for her emotions than her poetry even in her day, and may today be appreciated primarily for the variety of her subject matter and a certain innocent intensity in some of her poems. OTHER WORKS: The Gem of the Western World (1850). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Poe, E. A., The Literati of New York (1860). Reference works: American Female Poets (1848). CAL. A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors (1870). FPA. Woman’s Record (1853). —JULIA ROSENBERG

HEYWARD, Dorothy (Hartzell) Kuhns Born 6 June 1890, Wooster, Ohio; died 19 November 1961, New York, New York Wrote under: Dorothy Heyward, Dorothy Kuhns Daughter of Herman L. and Dora Hartzell Kuhns; married DuBose Heyward, 1923 Although best known for two plays written in collaboration with her husband, Dorothy Kuhns Heyward established herself as a dramatist and novelist in her own right. Her commitment to writing for the stage began shortly after her marriage, when Nancy Ann (1924), a prize-winning play she wrote for George Pierce Baker’s 47 Workshop, was produced on Broadway. Instructed to write about what she knew, Heyward filled the three-act comedy with ‘‘aunts, debuts, and theatrical waiting rooms.’’ Heyward attended the National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C., Columbia University, and Radcliffe College, where she took the famous Harvard playwriting course. On the strength of her writing for this class, she was invited to the MacDowell Colony for Artists in Petersboro, New Hampshire, during the summer of 1922. There she met her future husband, who was also spending his first summer at the colony. During the following


year, Heyward toured as a chorus girl in a musical to gain firsthand experience in the theater. Similarities of taste, temperament, and appearance were frequently noted in Heyward and her husband by their acquaintances: both were tall, slender, fair, brown-eyed, and fragile-looking. DuBose Heyward was an insurance salesman who had published two volumes of poetry; Heyward persuaded him to become a full-time writer, and they went to live in a cabin in the Great Smokies. Drawing upon his youthful experience as a cotton checker among the Gullah-speaking blacks on the waterfront of his native Charleston, South Carolina, DuBose wrote his first novel, Porgy (1925). Heyward suggested a dramatization of Porgy, but DuBose was already working on his second novel, Angel (1926). Letting him think she was writing a mystery story, Heyward alone prepared a rough draft of the play, which he then helped to polish for production. For both of their collaborative dramatizations, Heyward supplied the technical knowledge of theater while her husband contributed his sense of local color and poetic language. Porgy, produced by the Theatre Guild, opened 10 October 1927 for a run of 217 performances; the following season, a revival ran for 137 performances. The folk-opera version, Porgy and Bess, was scored by George Gershwin and adapted by DuBose and Ira Gershwin in 1935. Mamba’s Daughters (1939), the Heywards’ dramatization of DuBose’s 1929 novel, was again set among the Gullah blacks of South Carolina. The play is melodramatic and awkwardly constructed. There are intervals of several years between some of the 10 short scenes. It was a popular success largely because of the use of Negro spirituals and the stirring performance of Ethel Waters as Hagar. Heyward was less fortunate in her collaborations with other dramatists. Jonica (1930), Cinderelative (1930), and South Pacific (1943) all reached Broadway, but were unfavorably reviewed. South Pacific, written with Howard Rigsby and with incidental music by Paul Bowles, is unrelated to the later Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. Heyward’s South Pacific maroons a black American seaman on a Japanese-held island, where an improbable encounter with native blacks helps him to appreciate the positive values of the American society that had exploited him. The play closed after five performances. In 1948 the Theatre Guild presented Set My People Free, a historical drama Heyward had written seven years earlier, based upon an aborted Charleston slave rebellion of the 1820s. The insurrection was led by a former slave named Denmark Vesey, but the focus of the play is on the dilemma of George Wilson, who is torn between loyalty to his race and devotion to his master. Despite encouraging reviews, the play had only 36 performances. Heyward’s two novels, like her plays, are uneven. The Pulitzer Prize Murders (1932), a haunted house mystery, is rambling and predictable. Three-a-Day (1930) is more engaging; this romance set in a theatrical milieu has a standard plot enlivened by the local color and jargon of the world of vaudeville in the 1920s. These two novels and Set My People Free, the last play she

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wrote alone, demonstrate the overambitiousness of her approach and the compassion for human situations she brought to her collaborative efforts. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Durham, F., Dubose Heyward, the Man Who Wrote Porgy (1954). Miller, J. Y., American Dramatic Literature (1961). Nadel, N., A Pictorial History of the Theatre Guild (1969). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: NYT (1 Apr. 1924, 30 Dec. 1943, 14 Nov. 1948, 20 Nov. 1961). —FELICIA HARDISON LONDRÉ

HEYWOOD, Martha Spence Born 8 March 1812, Dublin, Ireland; died 5 February 1873, Washington, Utah Wrote under: Martha Spence Married Joseph L. Heywood, 1851; children: two Martha Spence Heywood emigrated to the U.S. in 1834, supporting herself by sewing, making hats, and teaching. Keenly interested in religion, she traveled as an Advent preacher before joining the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in 1849. A year later, she made the overland journey to Utah and became the third wife of a polygamist. Mormon leaders sent the couple to settle Nephi in central Utah, where Heywood’s two children were born. In 1861 Heywood relocated in southern Utah. She continued teaching and hat-making until her death at age sixty. Heywood wrote poetry and letters and kept a diary. She was also active in the founding of several literary and cultural organizations. Although the few extant examples of her poetry show little talent, her diary and letters reveal her as a keen observer capable of rare frankness and introspective insight. Her diary for 1850-56 demonstrates her ability to place events in perspective. Traveling to Utah after her conversion to the Mormon church, which was controversial at the time, she wrote: ‘‘Liberty of conscience and action I have had for years and it has placed me where I am. In embracing Mormonism I followed the dictates of my own judgment, in opposition to that of my best and dearest friends.’’ Independent of mind, Heywood chafed at the suggestion of Joseph Heywood’s first wife that she remain in Salt Lake City following her polygamous marriage to Joseph and called it ‘‘an interference in my affairs.’’ The unusual social relationships and conditions created by polygamy on the Western frontier, such as long absences from a spouse and the self-sufficiency of women, are well documented in Heywood’s writings. So too is her intellectual hunger for plays, lectures, readings, conversation, and classes, which she considered ‘‘a higher order of amusement than Balls.’’ Her eyewitness accounts of historical events are highly valued. To a well-known incident of the Walker War (1853-54) in Utah she brought another view, differing from the official account

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asserting the slain Native Americans acted aggressively and were killed in self-defense during a ‘‘skirmish.’’ Heywood wrote: ‘‘Nine Indians coming into our Camp looking for protection and bread with us, because we promised it to them and without knowing they did the first act in that affair [the earlier murder of three whites] or any other, were shot down without a minute’s notice.’’ Present-day historians give Heywood’s account greater credence. For the early years of Utah Territory, Heywood’s diary remains one of the richest sources of information on social conditions, polygamy, the difficulties of communal living, life in isolated towns, and the indispensable role of women in Mormon settlements. OTHER WORKS: Not by Bread Alone: The Journal of Martha Spence Heywood (1978). The papers of Martha Spence Heywood are in private possession of family members in Holbrook, Arizona. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ursenbach, M., ‘‘Three Women and the Life of the Mind,’’ in Utah Historical Quarterly (Winter 1975). —MIRIAM B. MURPHY

HIGGINS, Marguerite Born 3 September 1920, Hong Kong; died 3 January 1966, Washington, D.C. Daughter of Lawrence D. and Marguerite Godard Higgins; married Stanley Moore, 1940; William E. Hall, 1952; children two Marguerite Higgins was born in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong to a globetrotting businessman and his French war bride. Marguerite was educated in France and England, and when the Higgins family returned to the U.S., she was enrolled in an exclusive private school in Oakland, California. After graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, with honors in 1940, she went to work as a cub reporter for the local Vallejo Times-Herald. She was hired by the New York Herald Tribune after receiving her master’s degree from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism; she worked for the paper for the next 21 years. After three routine years on the Tribune reporting city visitors, suburban fires, and visiting royalty, Higgins won a coveted spot in the London bureau. Shortly thereafter, she transferred to the Paris bureau—largely because of her proficiency in French—and soon found herself reporting the wartime liberation of Europe. She made the front page regularly and built up a respected name for herself among the most experienced foreign correspondents in the world. She was twenty-five when the

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Tribune named her Berlin bureau chief. During the Korean War, Higgins was the Tokyo bureau chief and was with the first reporters who made their way into Korea on returning evacuation planes, the only woman correspondent in Korea. After her second marriage and the birth of two children, Higgins settled down to a less peripatetic schedule as a roving reporter for the Tribune and as a freelance writer for many periodicals. In the mid-1950s, Higgins reopened the Tribune’s Moscow bureau, and in 1956 she returned to Washington to cover the diplomatic beat. From then on, her competition claimed Higgins could be counted on to show up wherever a crisis occurred, from the Congo to the Dominican Republic. In 1963 Higgins resigned to become a syndicated columnist for Long Island’s Newsday. Out of her experiences covering the Korean conflict came War in Korea: The Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent (1951), which also appeared in a condensed form in Woman’s Home Companion in 1951. The book was a bestseller, and Higgins became an overnight sensation, touring and lecturing throughout the country. In Report of a Woman Combat Correspondent, Higgins recounted her experiences on the front in Korea with a lively style and the sense of adventurous excitement she felt. Although the book tends to provide an unbalanced view of history, reviews were favorable, and it enjoyed a wide readership. In 1954 Higgins received a Guggenheim Fellowship, allowing her to make a 10-week tour of Russia. Her experiences and reactions to life in Cold War Russia during the 13,500-mile trek are detailed in Red Plush and Black Bread, published in 1956. Higgins and her longtime personal friend, the late newsman Peter Lisagor, together wrote and published Overtime in Heaven: Adventures in the Foreign Service (1964), a series of behind-the-scenes true stories of 10 Foreign Service incidents. A highly entertaining set of adventure vignettes, the series won credits for its carefully researched and documented materials, although one critic noted they had created a ‘‘composite portrait of the Foreign Service man who looks suspiciously like a more moral James Bond.’’ Higgins became increasingly interested in Vietnam as the country opened up into one of the world’s most controversial hot spots, and she made 10 trips there. In late 1965, she was air ambulanced home, the victim of leishmaniasis, a disease brought on by the bite of a tropical sandfly, and within six weeks she was dead. Her Vietnam study, Our Vietnam Nightmare (1965), presented her research and conclusions on what was actually happening in Vietnam as a result of U.S. foreign policy and actions, covering the period from the Buddhist revolt and Diem’s fall in 1963 to the changing political tactics of the Viet Cong in the summer of 1965. Herman Dinsmore, former New York Times international edition editor, called it ‘‘superb.’’ He said, ‘‘She was not the most popular correspondent for one excellent reason: she was so brilliant she outshone every writer around her, men and women: and, of course, she was industrious, clever, and, of all things, patriotic.’’


OTHER WORKS: News Is a Singular Thing (1955). Jessie Benton Frémont (1962). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Army Times editors, American Heroes of Asian Wars (1968). Fleming, A. M., Reporters at War (1970). Forese, A., American Women Who Scored Firsts (1958). Jakes, J., Great War Correspondents (1967). Kelly, F. K., Reporters Around the World (1957). Reference works: CA (1969, 1971). CB (June 1951, Feb. 1966). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Life (2 Oct. 1950). NYHT (16 Feb. 1946, 19 Oct. 1950, 8 May 1951). NYT (8 May 1951). Time (25 Sept. 1950). —KATHLEEN KEARNEY KEESHEN

HIGGINSON, Ella Rhoads Born circa 1860, Council Grove, Kansas; died 29 December 1940, Bellingham, Washington Wrote under: Ella Higginson, Ella Rhoads Daughter of Charles and Mary Ann Rhoads; married Russell C. Higginson, circa 1880 In the early 1860s, Ella Rhoads Higginson’s family crossed the plains from Kansas to the Grand Ronde Valley of Oregon. In 1870 they moved to Portland and then to a farm eight miles from town. Later they lived in Oregon City, where Higginson received her few years of education in a public school. The youngest of three children, Higginson enjoyed freedom from punishments and farm chores. Although the family was poor, their home was filled with good books, visitors, and conversation. Her father’s ability as a storyteller and her mother’s poetic sensitivity to the beauty of nature enriched Higginson’s childhood experiences. At the age of eight, Higginson wrote her first poem and was encouraged to continue writing by her mother and her sister, Carrie Blake Morgan, who later became known as a poet in her own right as the author of Path of Gold. Her father and her brother laughed at her early poetic attempts, but at fourteen Higginson published a love poem in the Oregon City paper. At sixteen she joined the newspaper staff to learn everything from typesetting to editorial writing. Early stories were contributed to the West Shore, a Portland literary magazine, and to the Salem Oregon Literary Vidette. In 1888 Higginson moved to Whatcom (now Bellingham), Washington, with her husband. A druggist from New York, he possessed charming ‘‘Eastern’’ manners but, according to Higginson, did not sufficiently encourage or appreciate her literary work. From Bellingham she edited a department entitled ‘‘Fact and Fancy for Women’’ for the weekly West Shore. Her first column, in 1890, presented advanced views on the controversial subject of divorce. For 25 years after the demise of the West Shore in 1891, Higginson contributed fiction to national magazines such as

HIGGINSON

Century, Harper’s Weekly, Cosmopolitan, Short Stories, New Peterson, McClure’s, and Collier’s. Higginson’s stories were collected in several volumes. Her stories of common people of the Far West were praised by the Overland Monthly as ‘‘unpretentious tales. . .told simply and naturally, yet so vivid and graphic are they, that they charm the reader from the first to the last.’’ The Outlook described her as one of the best American short story writers, while the Chicago Tribune noted: ‘‘Mrs. Higginson has shown a breadth of treatment and knowledge of the everlasting human verities that equals much of the best work of France.’’ Higginson’s poetry appeared in magazines such as Atlantic, Harper’s, and Scribner’s and in the columns of many Pacific Coast and Eastern newspapers. Two of her most popular poems were ‘‘God’s Creed’’ and ‘‘Four Leaf Clover.’’ Many of her poems were set to music and performed by singers such as Caruso, McCormack, and Calve. The vivid imagery and singing quality of her poetry were achieved through diligence—she often rewrote a dozen times—and keen observation of nature. Many poems deal with the theme of the Pacific Northwest, and several, such as ‘‘The Grande Ronde Valley’’ and ‘‘The Evergreen Pine,’’ are specifically about Oregon. Higginson’s only published novel, Mariella, of Out West (1904), presents a young girl facing a hard frontier farming life, the economic boom of 1888-89, and the proposals of men who represent a variety of social backgrounds. The novel conveys a strong feeling for nature coupled with a sense of piety and spirituality. Alaska, the Great Country (1908), Higginson’s last book, is a combination of guide book, history, and romance. As a writer of poetry, short stories, travel articles, songs, and one novel, Higginson achieved prominence in the ranks of Pacific Northwest authors and earned national and international recognition for several of her works. The states of Oregon and Washington both claimed her as a daughter, and she was honored in 1931 as Washington’s poet laureate. Higginson realized her life’s ambition based on what she termed ‘‘the consuming desire to write.’’ As she explained, ‘‘It is the only thing I ever really wanted to do.’’ OTHER WORKS: A Bunch of Western Clover (1894). The Flower That Grew in the Sand (1896). The Forest Orchid (1897). From the Land of the Snow Pearls (1897). When the Birds Go North Again (1898). The Voice of April-Land, and Other Poems (1903). The Vanishing Race, and Other Poems (1911). The papers of Ella Rhoads Higginson are housed at the Oregon Historical Society in Portland, Oregon. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Horner, J. B., Oregon Literature (1902). Powers, A., History of Oregon Literature (1935). Smith, H. K., ed., With Her Own Wings (1948). Turnbull, G. S., History of Oregon Newspapers (1939). Reference works: AW. —JEAN M. WARD

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HIGHAM, Mary R. Born circa 1850; died death date unknown Verified biographical information on Mary R. Higham is unavailable, but it is likely she was born sometime around 1850 and was a Northerner. In addition to works of juvenile literature, Higham published several novels in which initially impetuous young women learn to bend their wills to the men they will ultimately marry. The process by which Higham’s heroines change on their way to the altar most often goes hand in hand with religious conversions or missionary zeal. In Cloverly (1875), rash Barbara Fox learns to read Thomas à Kempis and to like parish work, at Reverend Aymar’s instigations, before she weds the clergyman. The heroine of Agatha Lee’s Inheritance (1878) is led, with frequent reference by seminarian Paul Endicott to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, to pledging her monetary resources to further Christian foreign missions, at which point Paul finally proposes. The Other House (1878) charts the love affairs of the Gallantin sisters, one of whom sweetly supports her family until she marries a clergyman, while her younger sister rages against a doctor until she sees and participates in his Christian witness to the poor. Athol’s (1873) Atholinda Derwint spends six months in a convent before seeking out, nursing, and marrying her guardian, a Civil War amputee burdened with a secret past and mercurial moods. Higham’s heroines advance toward matrimony at an irregular pace that is keyed directly to their spiritual development. They cannot be wives until they have subordinated themselves to divine will as manifested in their immediate circumstances, and Higham describes divine power in terms of the limitations that it places upon humans’ freedom and sense of control of their own lives. Her heroines are uniformly women who chafe under restraint only to the point where they adapt to their restrictions, so they view and proclaim them not as curbs on their freedom but rather as necessary bridles on their sinful natures. Accordingly, the heroines find themselves in the roles of perpetual daughters and children. Higham’s novels allow for temporary assertiveness and rebellion on the part of her heroines, but all, like Athol, come around to acknowledging the ‘‘manly vigor that one instinctively liked and recognized as superior.’’ These women are thus portrayed as marrying older men who are often explicitly father figures or implicitly spiritual fathers. The ‘‘unmitigated slavery of childhood’’ is an ongoing process, as Higham portrays it with considerable irony, for her heroines never progress beyond the state of being constantly instructed, chastised, and led to what their future spouses paternalistically feel is best for them. Higham’s novels, while they are typical of the period in their somewhat florid style, are atypical with respect to both the irony the author injects into her treatments of the subjection of young women and her subtle indictment of a society choosing to ignore

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in women the active qualities it values in its males. The novels thus chart and underscore, through their negative portrayal of the role of bright women in the mid-19th century, the need for social change; for while Higham’s plots affirm the current order, her most vividly crafted characters and her own authorial intrusions do not. —SUSAN CLARK

HIGHET, Helen MacInnes See MacINNES, Helen

HIGHSMITH, Patricia Born Mary Patricia Plangman, 19 January 1921, Fort Worth, Texas; died 5 February 1995 Also wrote under: Claire Morgan Daughter of Jay B. and Mary Coates Plangman Both of Patricia Highsmith’s natural parents were artists, as was her stepfather, Stanley Highsmith, whom her mother married when Patricia was three. By the time Highsmith graduated from Barnard in 1942, she had decided to put her creative energy into writing rather than painting. But she still sees with a painter’s eye; the landscapes and cityscapes of her crime novels are cleanly drawn and evocative. By 1949 she was able to travel to Europe, where she eventually settled, first in England, later in France. It has been recognized for some time, especially in Europe, that Highsmith writes crime novels of great psychological acuity. In 1964 Brigid Brophy ranked her with Georges Simenon, and critical opinion has increasingly confirmed Brophy’s judgement. Highsmith’s first novel, Strangers on a Train (1950), introduced a plot twist of considerable originality: an innocent, decent man meets a man who is evil, or mad, or both, and through this meeting and the collusion of events, the innocent becomes a murderer. The Blunderer (1954) repeats this configuration of main characters and lays heavy emphasis on the power of rumor and sensational publicity in modern society. The court of public opinion convicts Walter Stackhouse of a murder he has twice resisted the temptation to commit. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) won the Mystery Writers of America Scroll and the Grand Prix de Littèrature Policière in 1957. It introduced a genuinely fascinating character, Tom Ripley, who also stars with chilling blandness in two later novels. Rarely has an amoral murderer been so likeable, had such good intentions, projected such pathos. Tom, having met Dickie Greenleaf, a man who has or is everything Tom wants, kills Dickie and then becomes him. Tom wears Dickie’s clothes and personality until he has acquired sufficient confidence to reassume his own name. Tom’s story is a sort of unholy rite of passage. These three novels introduce the main themes Highsmith’s crime novels explore and


the central plot device on which she rings a number of variations. Several of her novels revolve around an increasingly compulsive relationship between a good and an evil man. Highsmith never exploits this device for the same thematic purposes twice. In The Cry of the Owl (1962), the former mental patient and voyeur turns out to be the beleaguered innocent, and the clean-cut American boy is revealed as a natural killer, waiting for the right combination of circumstances to trigger his violence. In The Two Faces of January (1964), which was the Crime Writers Association of England’s novel of the year, and Those Who Walk Away (1967), it is the innocent who attach themselves to the guilty and, for their own psychological purposes, haunt them. The main theme of A Dog’s Ransom (1972) is the breakdown of the social institutions meant to protect the decent from predators. In Tom Ripley, Highsmith created the first of several characters who unite terrible innocence and terrible guilt in one personality. Vic Van Allen’s well-earned reputation for being the most long-suffering of upright citizens protects him long enough to commit murder twice, in Deep Water (1957). In This Sweet Sickness (1960), when David Kelsey retreats into an imaginary life and personality in order to enjoy the success in love that reality has denied him, he begins a slow deterioration into dangerous madness. One of Highsmith’s major themes, then, is the ease with which a decent man can cross the line into criminality, or a sane one slip into insanity. In her world, society can be counted on to accelerate these disasters in a variety of ways: by protecting the guilty, harassing the innocent, brutalizing prisoners, enjoying innuendo, wallowing in sensationalism, and tolerating terrorism. As the 1980s approached, Highsmith continued to write psychological crime fiction. Yet it was increasingly not only the criminal mind that attracted her; rather, it was the mind of the person battling against stronger enemies—the shift in emphasis from good and evil to weakness and strength is an important one in much of her later fiction. Edith’s Diary (1977) and Little Tales of Misogyny (1977, published in German in 1974) both focus on the lives of women who are trapped by circumstances and by their own unwise choices. In Edith’s case, powerlessness is compounded by the character’s need to pretend. Edith escapes into her diary in which she creates a happy family with a successful and loving son. The diary becomes more fictitious as the events and the people in Edith’s life become more and more disappointing. Many of the sketches of women in Little Tales of Misogyny also highlight the failure of characters to look at reality squarely and to take control of their lives. The stories, in Andrew Macdonald’s words, seem ‘‘medieval misogynist tracts,’’ but they are also examinations of how women who are already socially stereotyped accept and abet their limited and limiting classifications. The two books illustrate Highsmith’s clear eye for the ways in which power is used to entrap and destroy women, and the author’s sense of menace, a hallmark of much of her earlier fiction, is present sometimes in physical, but mostly in psychological brutalization.

HIGHSMITH

With Ripley Under Water (1992), Highsmith returned to the Ripley stories begun in 1955. In this novel, almost the entire emphasis is on psychological one-upmanship as Pritchard, a full-blown sadist, torments Ripley about the one crime Tom wishes he had not committed, the murder of Dickie Greenleaf. The emphasis on weakness and power again displaces the conflict between good and evil, as Tom Ripley (remembered from the earlier books) is far more charming and sympathetic than Pritchard. While this latest Ripley novel is not nearly so satisfying as the earlier ones, it does create a sense of menace and psychological anxiety. The Ripley stories are, according to Julian Symons, Highsmith’s most popular because contemporary readers feel ‘‘that crime is more interesting than its detection, and that intelligent criminals are to be congratulated or at least admired.’’ Other books include two collections, Slowly, Slowly in the Wind (1979), a series of stories including tales of revenge, murder, and muggings, and Black House (1981), comprised of tales focusing on violence and the seemingly ordinary people who commit bizarre and outlandish acts. A novel, People Who Knock at the Door (1983), shifts her focus from crime to religion and analyzes the behavior, often malignant, of a fundamentalist religious colony. Highsmith’s last novels returned to the gay and lesbian theme. She had dealt with the topic in her 1952 lesbian novel, The Price of Salt, which was republished in 1991 with a new title, Carol. It is about a department store worker who initiates a relationship with a customer and eventually becomes her lover. Highsmith had originally published the book under the pseudonym Claire Morgan but acknowledged she was the author when the book was reprinted. Found in the Street (1986) is set in New York and is the story of a married couple, Jack and Natalia Sutherland, and their daughter, Amelia; Elsie Taylor, a waitress who is taken up by the Sutherlands and later murdered; and Ralph Linderman, a puritanical security guard. In this novel, too, gay and lesbian homosexuality is a strong issue. Her last novel, Small g: A Summer Idyll (1995), takes place in Switzerland and has both homosexual and heterosexual characters. Russell Harrison called it ‘‘her most plotless creation.’’ It was published in England, Germany, and France. Knopf rejected the manuscript in the U.S.; Highsmith felt they did so out of fear of offending conservatives. Highsmith had moved permanently to Europe in 1963 and spent her last years in Switzerland, living quietly with her cats and declining most interviews. Although many people know her as the author of Strangers on a Train, her work as a whole has been better known and honored in Europe than in her native United States. In February of 1995 Highsmith died in Switzerland of lung cancer and aplastic anemia. She left her $3 million estate to Yaddo, the artists’ community in Saratoga Springs, New York, where she completed Strangers on a Train, her first and most famous novel. According to Yaddo president Michael Sundell, quoted in Publishers Weekly, Highsmith ‘‘felt that she had gained her identity as an artist at Yaddo, and she wished by her gift to

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provide the same opportunity for future generations of Yaddo guests.’’ Highsmith should not be approached as a mystery or suspense novelist, since there are very few mysteries and little suspense in her books. At her best, however, she was a sensitive chronicler of psychological stress and deterioration and a clear-eyed observer of social tragedy. OTHER WORKS: A Game for the Living (1958). Miranda the Panda is on the Veranda (with D. Sanders, 1958). The Glass Cell (1964). The Story-Teller (English title, A Suspension of Mercy, 1965). Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1966, 1983, revised 1990). The Tremor of Forgery (1969). Ripley Under Ground (1970). The Snail Watcher, and Other Stories (English title, Eleven, 1970). Little Tales of Misogyny (in German, 1974; in English, 1977). Ripley’s Game (1974). The Animal Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder (1975). The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980). Mermaids on the Golf Course (1985). The Mysterious Mr. Ripley (1985). Found in the Street (1986). Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes (1987). The Talented Mr. Ripley; Ripley Under Ground; Ripley’s Game; The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1994). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brophy, B., Don’t Never Forget (1966). Cavigelli, F. and F. Senn, eds., Über Patricia Highsmith (1980). Harrison, R., Patricia Highsmith (1997). Reference works: Concise Survey of Short Fiction (1991). CANR (1987). CLC (1974, 1975, 1980, 1987). CN (1976, 1991). Detecting Women (1994). Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994). FC (1990). MTCW (1991). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996). Other references: Armchair Detective (Fall 1981). Clues (Spring/Summer 1984). London (June 1969, June-July 1972). Midwest Quarterly (Apr. 1984). NYTBR (29 Jan. 1989, 18 Oct. 1992). TLS (24 Sept. 1971, 4 Oct. 1991, 17 Apr. 1992). Vanity Fair (Mar. 1999). —CAROL CLEVELAND, UPDATED BY MARY A. MCCAY AND KAREN LESLIE BOYD

HILL-LUTZ, Grace Livingston Born 15 April 1865, Wellsville, New York; died 23 February 1947, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania Also wrote under: Grace Livingston Hill, Grace Livingston, Marcia Macdonald Daughter of Charles M. and Marcia Macdonald Livingston; married Frank Hill, 1892 (died); Flavius J. Lutz, 1916 (separated); children: two daughters Grace Livingston Hill-Lutz’s mother published four romances under the name of Mrs. C. M. Livingston, but devoted herself primarily to being a preacher’s wife. Apparently in order to honor

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her mother as an individual, Hill-Lutz published three novels under her mother’s given name, Marcia Macdonald. Hill-Lutz’s father, a Presbyterian minister, also did some writing, exclusively on theological topics. His influence is reflected in Hill-Lutz’s establishment and direction of a mission Sunday school in Swarthmore. Perhaps the strongest of all family influences was that of her aunt, Isabella Macdonald (‘‘Pansy’’) Alden, an author who not only encouraged Hill-Lutz to write but persuaded her own publisher to print the youngster’s first effort, The Esseltynes; or, Alpsonso and Marguerite. Hill-Lutz’s first husband, also a Presbyterian minister, died after seven years of marriage. Hill-Lutz was forced to publish enough to support herself and her two daughters. She began with Sunday school lessons in a column syndicated by 10 local newspapers, but soon turned to fiction. By 1904 she was successful enough to build herself a comfortable home in Swarthmore. Hill-Lutz’s second marriage was unhappy and soon led to separation, although she remained adamant in her opposition to divorce. She was active as a writer until the end of her life, her final novel being completed by her daughter Ruth for posthumous publication. Hill-Lutz worked in a wide range of genres, specializing in the adventure story and contemporary romance but also including fantasy (her first novel, A Chautauqua Idyll, 1887), nonfiction (The War Romance of the Salvation Army, 1919), historical romance (Marcia Schuyler, 1908), and mystery (The Mystery of Mary, 1912). She wrote 107 books, which sold over three million copies during her lifetime. Hill-Lutz was especially successful at writing fast-paced adventures featuring intelligent and resourceful heroines. A good example is The Red Signal (1919), set during World War I. When the German truck farm where young Hilda Lessing works turns out to be swarming with German spy activity, Hilda shows herself to be both brave and lucky as she saves the U.S. from a major disaster and wins a presidential medal. She also wins the reward reserved for all of Hill-Lutz’s finest heroines—marriage with a handsome and affluent young man. Although the historical perspective is simplistic—World War I is explained as the result of Germany’s ‘‘forgetting God’’—and although the plot turns on some very unlikely coincidences, the narrative is compelling enough to have thrilled many a reader. Hill-Lutz’s most popular books were contemporary romances, such as Matched Pearls (1933), Beauty for Ashes (1935), and April Gold (1936). The most widely read of all, The Witness (1917), brought her thousands of letters of gratitude. In it as in most of her books, she utilizes one-dimensional characterization in which Christian believers are sincere, brave, and atruistic while unbelievers are selfish and corrupt. Paul Courtland is the typical Hill-Lutz hero: rich, handsome, popular, athletic, a Phi Beta Kappa man. A rich girl, who parallels the biblical ‘‘scarlet woman’’ by attempting to seduce Paul away from his faith, possesses a ‘‘nasty little chin’’ with ‘‘a Satanic point.’’ She is contrasted with a poor orphan girl who, because of her modesty and integrity, wins the prize of marriage to the hero. Hill-Lutz manifests a lively sense of social justice by having Paul refuse a


lucrative management position in a company that exploits its factory workers in unsafe conditions. The novel’s theme is the actual presence of Christ in any life devoted to human concern and justice. As one character puts it, ‘‘It’s heaven or hell, both now and hereafter.’’ Hill-Lutz knew how to wring human emotion and enlist current events to enliven her novels while she was making fairly overt attempts to convert her readers to Christ. For instance, a 1944 novel, Time of the Singing of Birds, features an attractive officer who returns wounded from World War II. When he eventually marries the most deserving of his Christian girlfriends, an observer comments, ‘‘Heavens! If I thought I could have a marriage like that it would be worth-while trying to be a Christian.’’

HIRSHFIELD

Crimson Mountain (1942). The Girl of the Woods (1942). The Street of the City (1942). The Sound of the Trumpet (1943). The Spice Box (1943). Through These Fires (1943). More Than Conquerer (1944). All Through the Night (1945). A Girl to Come Home To (1945). Bright Arrows (1946). Where Two Ways Met (1947). Mary Arden (completed by R. L. Hill, 1948). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Karr, J., Grace Livingston Hill: Her Story and Her Writings (1948). Reference works: DAB. NAW (1971). Reader’s Encyclopedia of American Literature (1962). TCA, TCAS. Other references: Book News Monthly (Oct. 1915). —VIRGINIA RAMEY MOLLENKOTT

Improbable coincidence, avoidance of moral ambiguity, unconscious sexism, and almost exclusive use of stock characters work together to keep Hill-Lutz’s fiction lightweight. But her fast-paced upbeat style has refreshed and relaxed many people. And there can be little doubt Hill-Lutz provided a shining ideal for younger readers by featuring so many heroines of unshakable standards and determined, triumphant integrity. OTHER WORKS: A Little Servant (1890). The Parkers-town Delegate (1892). Katharine’s Yesterday, and Other Christian Endeavor Stories (1895). In the Way (1897). Lone Point; a Summer Outing (1898). A Daily Rate (1900). The Angel of His Presence (1902). An Unwilling Guest (1902). According to the Pattern (1903). The Story of a Whim (1903). Because of Stephen (1904). The Girl from Montana (1908). Phoebe Deane (1909). Dawn of the Morning (1910). Aunt Crete’s Emancipation (1911). The Best Man (1914). The Man of the Desert (1914). Miranda (1915). The Finding of Jasper Holt (1916). A Voice in the Wilderness (1916). The Enchanted Barn (1918). The Search (1919). Cloudy Jewel (1920). Exit Betty (1920). The Tryst (1921). The City of Fire (1922). The Big Blue Soldier (1923). Tomorrow About This Time (1923). Re-Creations (1924). Ariel Custer (1925). Not Under the Law (1925). Coming Through the Rye (1926). A New Name (1926). The Honor Girl (1927). Job’s Niece (1927). The White Flower (1927). Blue Ruin (1928). Crimson Roses (1928). Found Treasure (1928). Duskin (1929). Out of the Storm (1929). The Prodigal Girl (1929). The Gold Shoe (1930). Ladybird (1930). The White Lady (1930). The Chance of a Lifetime (1931). Kerry (1931). Silver Wings (1931). Beggarman (1932). The Challengers (1932). Happiness Hill (1932). Her Wedding Garment (1932). The House Across the Hedge (1932). The Story of the Lost Star (1932). The Beloved Stranger (1933). The Ransom (1933). Amorelle (1934). The Christmas Bride (1934). Rainbow Cottage (1934). The Strange Proposal (1935). White Orchids (1935). Mystery Flowers (1936). The Substitute Guest (1936). Brentwood (1937). Daphne Deane (1937). Sunrise (1937). The Best Birthday (1938). The Divided Battle (1938). Dwelling (1938). Homing (1938). The Lost Message (1938). Maria (1938). Marigold (1938). The Minister’s Son (1938). Patricia (1939). The Seventh Hour (1939). Stranger Within the Gates (1939). Head of the House (1940). Partners (1940). Rose Galbraith (1940). Astra (1941). By Way of the Silverthorns (1941). In Tune with Wedding Bells (1941).

HIRSHFIELD, Jane Born 1953, New York, New York ‘‘Attentiveness,’’ writes Jane Hirshfield in the preface to her collection of essays, ‘‘only deepens what it regards,’’ and if Hirshfield’s opus is about anything, it is about this power of attentiveness and the resultant clarification of being. Her case for poetry is that words are a path into concentration, a state that is penetrating, unified, focused, yet also permeable and open; that writing begins when willed effort drops away, when the writer (and then the reader) enters the flow, the effortless effort. Jane Hirshfield’s poems are records of such attentiveness, intimacy, immersion, the self meeting the Self. Hirshfield’s work came to national prominence beginning in the mid-1980s. During this time, she lived in residence at Yaddo, McDowell, and Djerassi, and was awarded both Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships. Her poems written in free verse, American diction, have appeared in journals from Agni to ZYZZYVA, and in all notables between. In first grade, the poet wrote on a large sheet of unlined paper, ‘‘I want to be a writer when I grow up,’’ and, fatefully, the first book she ever bought, at age nine, was a collection of haiku. An undergraduate at Princeton, she created a dual major: creative writing and literature in translation, and though she won the poetry contest of Nation for work written while still an undergraduate, she did not pursue an M.F.A. Instead, she began to study Zen, entering an eight-year monastic practice, and including three years at Tassajara, a rural Zen community in Northern California. After leaving formal Zen training, Hirshfield published two collections of poetry, Alaya (1982) and Of Gravity & Angels (1988). She also returned to work begun as an undergraduate, the translation of Japanese women’s poetry. The poet’s third collection, The October Palace (1994), evoked this description from Women’s Review of Books: ‘‘These imagistically precise, celebratory poems reveal the interconnections between interior and exterior worlds,’’ and this comment, ‘‘A radiant and passionate collection,’’ from the New York Times Book Review. These

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poems owe much to Hirshfield’s commitment to both Buddhist meditation (a student of Zen since 1974) and to her practice of moving poetry forward with the fundamental energy of passion. The opening section, ‘‘What the Heart Wants,’’ announces this collection’s deep structure. Titles praise presence and mutability, the serene and the sensual: ‘‘Each Step,’’ ‘‘History as the Painter Bonnard,’’ ‘‘Floor,’’ ‘‘A Sweetening All Around Me As It Falls.’’ These opening lines from ‘‘The House in Winter’’ reveal the writer’s rhetorical stance, musicality, image and voice, the transforming arc of attention: ‘‘Here in the year’s late tide-wash, / a corner cupboard suddenly wavers / in low-flung sunlight, / cupboard never quite visible before. / Its jars of last summer’s peaches / have come into their native gold— / not the sweetness of last summer, / but today’s, / fresh from the tree of winter. / The mouth swallows peach, and says gold.’’ Jane Hirshfield has been honored with a Pushcart Prize, the Commonwealth Club of California’s Poetry Medal, the Poetry Center Book award, and, with the publication of The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono no Komanchi and Isumi Shikibu (1988), Columbia University’s Translation Center award. In all her work, the poet pays tribute to her colleagues (translator Mariko Arantani, editor Hugh Van Dusen), her teachers (Lewis Hyde, Ono no Komanchi, Gary Snyder), her muses (Giotto, Novalis, Wu Feng, cucumber, egret, poppy), and ‘‘those whose voices have been lost.’’ To read her poems is to encounter not only the poet but the lives and hearts of others. Hirshfield’s inclusiveness, her spiritual and intellectual reach, led her to edit the anthology Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (1994). A record of intimacy with the sacred, this book includes texts from Enheduanna (the earliest identified author of either sex in world literature), Makeda, Queen of Sheba, the Tamil saint Antal, Mechtild of Magdeburg, Mirabai, Anna Akhmatova, Nelly Sachs; each text is a reminder that the numinous does not discriminate, that spiritual experience is fundamental to human life. In her essay ‘‘The Question of Originality’’ (from Nine Gates), Hirshfield writes, ‘‘Originality requires an aptitude for exile,’’ and the ability to become invisible, ‘‘to offer oneself to the Other.’’ She reminds us that it is no accident that we speak of a body of knowledge because language begins in the facts of physical life. Like Yeats, she believes ‘‘When I write it is myself that I remake.’’ Lives of the Heart (l997), with its 80 poems, is surely blueprint and map, a daybook of the poet’s remaking. A sequence of 20 opens the volume: ‘‘Secretive Heart,’’ ‘‘Heart Stopped in Panic and Grace,’’ ‘‘Heart Pressing Further.’’ Among the 80, as well, a series of spells, ‘‘Spell for Inviting-in the New Soul,’’ poems that celebrate the concrete and illusory now, ‘‘A Thinking Stillness,’’ and, as always, Hirshfield’s lyric reckonings, ‘‘White Curtain in Sunlight and Wind.’’ The reader recognizes in these word-journeys that the real activity of poetry, as Hirshfield says, is ‘‘to discover wholeness and create wholeness, including the wholeness of the fragmentary and the broken’’ as in ‘‘A Month of Days and Nights’’—‘‘Days that could have / been anything, / nights that could have been anything, / turned with the leaves. / Then, someone played / the piano— / halting, unpracticed, and perfect. / I listened to pity / and lowered my head in shame. /

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Ashamed, not at my tears, / or even at what has been wasted, / but to have been dry-eyed so long.’’ Published in the same year, 1997, but written during the previous decade, Hirshfield’s book of essays on poetry, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, is described as, ‘‘doing for poetry what Pound intended to do at the turn of the century: through juxtaposition of the familiar and the unknown, it reinvigorates our thinking about the possibilities of the art.’’ The nine essays of this volume explore particular strategies of language and thinking, the ways a poem can illumine the circuitous passage between the inner and outer worlds and thus awaken consciousness. These essays are not abstract, not essays about criticism, but writing discoveries shared with the reader: ‘‘Metaphor isn’t embellishment; its way of thinking came first and was followed by abstract thought.’’ ‘‘Freedom from the words of the original combined with a deep love of its words lies at the heart of translation.’’ ‘‘No matter how the reader (or writer) concentrates, a poem can never be completely entered or known.’’ ‘‘It is the task of the writer to become permeable and transparent; to become, in the words of Henry James, a person on whom nothing is lost.’’ The poet, Jane Hirshfield, is just such a writer. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Other references: Atlantic Unbound (1997). LJ (1997). Ploughshares (Spring 1998). —ANN STALEY

HITE, Shere Born 2 November 1942, St Joseph, Missouri Daughter of Paul and Shirley Hurt Gregory, later adopted by stepfather Raymond Hite; married Friedrich Horicke, 1985 Shere (pronounced Share) Hite burst onto the scene with The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality in 1976. In it she challenged traditional theories about women’s sexuality and entered upon a life of controversy. Her subsequent work has continued on this path, questioning current views on male sexuality, women’s satisfaction with their roles, and family life. From the beginning, Hite’s work has met with criticism aimed at her feminist politics and her methodology. She is, indeed, a feminist, having embraced the movement in the late 1960s when the National Organization for Women (NOW) protested an advertisement featuring her posing as a typist. The caption read: ‘‘The typewriter is so smart she doesn’t have to be.’’ Hite joined NOW’s protest. Response by women to The Hite Report was tremendous. The book, based on anonymous interviews of approximately 3,000 women, revealed how female sexuality from a woman’s point of view was quite different from what was considered the norm. Clitoral stimulation, not sexual intercourse itself, was the key to orgasm for most women, according to the study. This was


cataclysmic news at the time. What made the book hold even greater impact and interest were the intimate details and anecdotes from the survey respondees. Through her survey, Hite explored the political, cultural, and biological contexts of sexuality and concluded that heretofore women’s sexuality had ‘‘been seen essentially as a response to male sexuality and intercourse.’’ The book was a bestseller nationally and internationally and it provoked heated discussions. Hite responded to some of her critics in an article for the Journal of the American Society of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists. Her methodology, she explained, was indeed ‘‘innovative.’’ It sought to provide ‘‘a large forum in which women could speak out freely’’ and readers ‘‘could decide for themselves how they felt about the answers.’’ In this, it was reflective of the feminist culture of the early 1970s, one of open forums and egalitarian formats. Hite’s second report, The Hite Report on Male Sexuality, was published in 1981. Her methodology here was the same as for her book on women: questionnaires distributed through magazines and organizations. She reported men ‘‘were deeply frustrated, angry, or disappointed with their emotional relationships with women’’ but also ‘‘treasured’’ them. She attributed much of men’s dissatisfaction to a patriarchal culture that limited them to the role of being ‘‘emotionally reserved, in control at all times.’’ Criticism for this book, the second in the Hite Report trilogy, was similar to that of the first book, and the book’s popularity as a bestseller was similar as well. Hite’s final book in what is considered her trilogy, The Hite Report: Women and Love; A Cultural Revolution in Progress (1987), used the same approach and methodology of the first two. It immediately had the critics ‘‘gnashing their teeth,’’ according to Time magazine. And Time itself reported this new survey ‘‘often seems merely to provide an occasion for the author’s own male-bashing diatribes.’’ On the other hand, Time’s next sentence adds that ‘‘Hite has tapped into a deep vein of female dissatisfaction with love relationships.’’ In 1994 Hite’s book, The Hite Report on the Family: Growing Up Under Patriarchy, was published in the U.S. after having first been published in Great Britain. In this work, Hite anticipated her critics and took care to explain her methodology in the book: ‘‘My research methods can best be seen as a combination of sociology, psychology, and cultural history, together with innovations relating to feminist methodology,’’ she wrote. She also confessed it was becoming ‘‘more and more difficult. . .to work and publish in a climate of media hostility and suspicion.’’ The controversy over Hite’s ideas, examinations of patriarchy as an underlying factor in relationships, and her revelations about sexuality had often forced her into a defensive posture. Personal threats, she reported, had caused her to move to Europe in the early 1990s. She had married Friedrich Horicke, a German, in 1985, and in 1996 she relinquished her American citizenship to become a German citizen. In that year, 1996, the New York Times reported, ‘‘The hunted look she had during her last years in the United States has long gone, and she has regained her sense of humor—but only because she is, at last, being taken seriously.’’

HOBART

In addition to The Hite Reports, essays, and an early book on women’s sexuality, Hite’s books include a fictionalized autobiography, The Divine Comedy of Ariadne and Jupiter (1994), and an autobiography, The Hite Report on Hite: A Sexual & Political Autobiography (1996). She has often lectured at prestigious universities, including Harvard, Oxford, and the Sorbonne. In 1998 she was a visiting professor at Nikon University in Japan. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: ANR (1990). CB (1988). Journal of the American Society of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists (Winter 1978). NYT (7 Apr. 1996). People (4 July 1994). Time (12 Oct 1987). WSJ (13 Nov. 1987). WWAW (1998). —JUDITH HARLAN

HOBART, Alice (Nourse) Tisdale Born 28 January 1882, Lockport, New York; died 14 March 1967, Oakland, California Also wrote under: Alice Tisdale Daughter of Edwin H. and Harriett Beaman Nourse; married Earle Tisdale Hobart, 1914 Alice Tisdale Hobart grew up near Chicago, Illinois, and attended the University of Chicago. She then worked as a YWCA secretary, later joining her elder sister, a teacher, in China. She and her husband, an oil company executive, lived in China until 1927. The Hobarts later made their home in California. Despite frequent ill health, the result of childhood meningitis aggravated by a fall, Hobart loved travel and adventure. Her autobiography, Gusty’s Child (1959), gives a full account of her travels and literary career. Hobart reported on her experiences in China in her first three books. Although she returned to China only for brief visits after 1927, it was the setting for much of her fiction. She was fascinated by the effects on both Chinese and Westerners of their contacts with each other, as well as by the great difference between their cultures. Pidgin Cargo (1929; reissued in 1934 as River Supreme, Hobart’s preferred title) tells the story of a steamboat builder so determined to conquer the Yangtse River that he sacrifices his family to his obsession. Western affinity for machinery is contrasted with Chinese indifference to it, but both the Chinese and the Westerners are changed by their meeting. In Oil for the Lamps of China (1933), Hobart’s great bestseller (filmed twice, in 1935 and again in 1941 as Law of the Tropics), the subject is business, the experiences of Stephen and Hester Chase being loosely based on those of Hobart and her husband. Important themes are the relationship between the two alien cultures and the company’s exploitation of its employees. Yang and Yin (1936) studies the effect of cultural contact in the area of ideas; central characters are an American doctor and his protegé, a young Chinese aristocrat. The chasm between the two cultures is also dramatized by other characters, particularly the women. When, much later, Hobart returned to her Chinese materials, she examined recent Chinese history and the new communist

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society. Venture into Darkness (1955), a study in guilt, responsibility, and expiation, describes the experiences of an American banker who makes an ill-fated, illegal journey into communist China. The Innocent Dreamers (1963) centers on an interracial marriage, tracing the history of 20th-century China and the divergent forces at work in it through the establishment and dissolution of the family.

the hero of her 1964 novel First Papers, closely resembles her father, who felt he must earn the right to his naturalization papers as a liberal editor of a Yiddish newspaper and an adamant labor leader. The warm portrait of the Ivarin family is simultaneously accurately detailed and sentimental in its evocation of the lower East Side life as it moved from the relative calm at the turn of the century to the exciting, overcrowded pre-World War I period.

With one exception—The Peacock Sheds His Tail (1945), which is set in Mexico—Hobart’s remaining novels deal with American themes and problems. Their Own Country (1940), a sequel to Oil for the Lamps of China, brings Stephen and Hester back to the U.S. and describes their attempts to build a new life during the Depression. An important subplot shows the struggle of several women musicians to achieve success while maintaining integrity. The Serpent-Wreathed Staff (1951) centers on a family of doctors; it implicitly attacks the American Medical Association and argues for prepaid group preventive health care. Two other novels are specifically Californian: The Cup and the Sword (1942; filmed as This Earth Is Mine) centers on the wine country during and after Prohibition. In The Cleft Rock (1948), set in the Central Valley, much of the action deals with the vexed question of water rights and the conflicts between small and large farmers.

Hobson’s background in advertising and publishing greatly influenced her fiction. She worked as an advertising copywriter, as a reporter with the New York Evening Post, and until 1940 as promotion director of Time, as well as writing short stories for popular magazines such as Collier’s, Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, and Cosmopolitan. With her husband, Thayer, Hobson wrote two westerns. Divorced in 1935, she lived with her adopted sons Michael and Christopher in New York City, where she continued to contribute to popular magazines and newspapers as well as to publish short fiction throughout her career as a novelist.

The central theme in Hobart’s work is social change. She also consistently dramatized a need to break with tradition, though she often sympathetically depicted old values. She saw hope for social amelioration through united action (in cooperatives and the like). Her central characters often include both those who bring change and those who resist it most strongly; their interactions create the dramatic tension in her work. Hobart perceived change as painful and the results seldom totally desirable, but she always stressed as most important the need for improvement in the lot of ordinary people, be they Chinese, Mexican, or American. OTHER WORKS: Pioneering Where the World Is Old: Leaves from a Manchurian Note-Book (1917). By the City of the Long Sand: A Tale of New China (1926). Within the Walls of Nanking (1928). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: TCA. TCAS. Other references: NR (20 Sept. 1948). NYHTB (22 Aug. 1948, 4 Nov. 1951). NYT (15 Mar. 1967). NYTBR (8 Oct. 1933, 8 Nov. 1936, 31 Mar. 1940, 6 Sept. 1942). Saturday Review (20 Oct. 1945). —MARY JEAN DEMARR

HOBSON, Laura (Keane) Z(ametkin) Born 18 June 1900, New York, New York; died 1986 Also wrote under: Peter Field Daughter of Michael and Adella Kean Zametkin; married Thayer Hobson, 1930 (divorced 1935); children: Michael, Christopher Most of Laura Z. Hobson’s childhood was spent on Long Island with her mother and father, a Russian émigré. Stefan Ivarin,

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Hobson’s first adult novel written on her own, The Trespassers (1943), establishes the liberal tone and controversial subject matter of all of her work. The double plot involves both a love story and a moral stand on the part of a strong, successful woman and a powerful radio tycoon. Hobson is quite adept at presenting the minutia of the well-to-do New York liberal, including the psychological intricacies of the male/female relationship as the lovers take opposing sides on the issue of the quota system that prevented refugees from immigrating to the United States. One of the fascinating aspects of Hobson’s fiction is the consistent appearance of a strong-willed liberal female career woman who endangers her love relationship by supporting a cause—in this case the liberalization of the immigration laws. Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) analyzes the social and economic effects of anti-Semitism by tracing the experience of Phil Green, a Gentile magazine writer, pretending he’s a Jew to gather material for a series on anti-Semitism. Hobson dramatizes so sharply the pain caused by anti-Semitism in the lives of Phil and those involved in his research that the reader identifies with and understands the subtle permeation of prejudice throughout the American culture, particularly in the liberal Eastern establishment. The weakest element of the novel is the formulaic melodrama of the love relationship between Phil and Kathy Lacey, his editor’s niece. Her most successful novel, Gentleman’s Agreement sold millions of copies and was translated into many languages. The film version received the New York Film Critics Award and the Academy Award for best picture of 1947. The effects of the notoriety surrounding the literary success, including the Hollywood ordeal, supplied much of the subject matter and insight for Hobson’s 1951 novel, The Celebrity. Hobson’s Consenting Adult (1975) manifests the same optimistic liberal philosophy as her other work, and thereby allows for the same personal identification with the protagonist, Tessa Lynn, the mother of a homosexual son, Jeff. After extensive attempts to change Jeff, Tessa discovers she is the one who must change. Consenting Adult, however, does not have the powerful impact of Gentleman’s Agreement. The reader can readily empathize with


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Tessa and marvel at the exhausting research she does to publish a book for gay people and their parents. But Hobson’s style, the slick prose of popular magazines, still tends toward righteous passion, a sentimental if sincere cry for tolerance that might sear the conscience if it were not for the necessary pat ending: ‘‘Consenting adults, she thought, and a fullness rushed to her heart. To consent, to assent, to be in harmony, to give your blessing. I give my blessing, all my blessings. Then I am a consenting adult too.’’ Hobson’s fictional concerns reflect her personal zeal for tolerance and understanding. Her novels are for the most part propaganda novels and suffer artistically from the strength of the message overpowering the style. But Hobson is an effective storyteller, and Gentleman’s Agreement, though somewhat dated, still succeeds in creating a sharp awareness of the insidiousness and pain of bigotry. OTHER WORKS: Dry Gulch Adams (with T. Hobson, 1934). Outlaws Three (with T. Hobson, 1934). A Dog of His Own (1941). The Other Father (1950). I’m Going to Have a Baby (1967). The Tenth Month (1971). Over and Above (1979). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1976). CB (Sept. 1947). TCAS. Other references: Chicago Sun Book-Week (2 Mar. 1947). Life (27 Nov. 1964). NYHTB (9 Mar. 1947, 8 Nov. 1964). Saturday Review (27 Feb. 1965). Time (29 May 1950, 9 Nov. 1953). —SUZANNE ALLEN

HOFFMAN, Alice Born 16 March 1952, New York, New York Married Tom Martin; children: Jake, Zack Alice Hoffman grew up in Franklin Square, New York, where she began writing at an early age. Her parents, who divorced when she was eight years old, worked in real estate and social work. She attended Adelphi University in Garden City, New York (B.A., 1973), received a fellowship to the writing program at Stanford University (M.A., 1975), and shortly thereafter began to publish stories. In 1976 she was awarded a fellowship at Breadloaf; her first novel, Property of, appeared in 1977 (reprinted in 1985, 1998). In addition to writing fiction, Hoffman is also a scriptwriter and reviewer. Hoffman is particularly noted for infusing her realistic stories with the mythical, lyrical, and metaphorical. Settings, even the most ordinary, take on a surrealistic, dreamlike atmosphere where the reader is prepared for anything to happen. And almost anything does, for Hoffman has tackled a wide range of issues in her novels: gangs, incest, AIDS, suicide, promiscuity, aging, agoraphobia, cancer. Her mystical treatment of emotionally charged issues allows the reader a measure of distance where judgement

may be suspended for a time and even the most painful or objectionable subject can be contemplated. In Property of, set in the depths of the New York underground of drugs and gangs, Hoffman introduces a theme that recurs in subsequent novels: the outsider searching to belong in impossible situations. The narrator, a 17-year-old girl in love with a gang leader, tries initially to resist him and his world, where all the girlfriends are designated as property. Falling under the spell of violence and of heroin, she succumbs but ultimately extricates herself from this primitive and chaotic atmosphere. Hoffman’s second novel, The Drowning Season (1979, 1989), takes the reader to the other end of the social spectrum. Its 18-year-old protagonist, Esther the Black, struggles for identity and connection against the forces of her wealthy Long Island family, and specifically against her formidable grandmother, Esther the White. Hoffman explores irony in plot and setting in Angel Landing (1980, 1999), a romance about love in the face of destruction set at a nuclear power plant. Like Property of, White Horses (1982) places an outsider in pursuit of an impossible person in an impossible situation. Teresa Connors waits, as her mother had, for a savior, an ‘‘Aria’’ (her mother’s term) to lift her out of the uneventfulness of her life. She believes her brother, the odd and elusive Silver, is her Aria; the novel traces the dangerous attraction between them. The feeling of suspension, so dominant in Teresa’s life, is pursued through Fortune’s Daughter (1985, 1994). Tracing the stages of women’s lives on both a literal and symbolic level, Hoffman again explores the relationship between two women. Illumination Night (1987, 1994) focuses on the inner workings of the family and the stresses from outside that threaten it. Hoffman uses agoraphobia to symbolize not only the powerlessness of Vonny, the novel’s primary female character, but also the other characters’ loss of control in their lives. In At Risk (1988, 1998), her most realistic novel to date, Hoffman recounts the isolation and fragmentation of her family that results when Amanda, an 11-year-old star gymnast, contracts AIDS from a blood transfusion. Making use of a social issue that comes complete with its own power of myth, Hoffman transforms AIDS to the level of metaphor, detailing the stress not only to the family but also to the community. The community struggling against what is foreign is also explored in Seventh Heaven (1990, 1992). Turtle Moon (1992) moves away from this pattern to assemble what seems to be an entire town of outsiders, some new to Verity, Florida, some who have lived all their lives there. Hoffman again presents the readers with a surreal setting—a town in the grips of excruciating heat, its roads littered with fallen fruit and dying turtles following the moonlight—where anything might happen. It is not a total shock when a young mother is murdered, her baby daughter is missing, and Keith, a troubled adolescent boy, disappears. The novel follows the search of Keith’s mother for her son, a search that reveals both the truth of the dead woman’s past and of her own.

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Second Nature (1994, 1998) is Hoffman’s most surreal and fantastical novel to date. The story itself resembles an allegorical tale. Its central premise is based, in large part, on ancient myth: a wild man raised by wolves, living in the woods of northern Michigan, is caught by trappers and sent to the city where he is incarcerated, the source of medical study and observation, soon to be transferred to the state hospital, a place that would hold him forever. In many ways, this story is a nature myth: the mystical, lyrical texture of the wilds, where one is free, unbounded, symbiotic with nature, as opposed to the confines of the civilized world, where one is chained, bound to the distractions and unnatural acts of domesticated, cultured life. But the two environs meet in Hoffman’s tale of fantasy when Robin, a woman running from a bad marriage and her own disaffection and disappointment, rescues the ‘‘Wolf Man,’’ only later to be rescued by him. Practical Magic (1995), Hoffman’s 11th novel, establishes the strength and enduring power of a matriarchy, generations of women who pass along the secrets of living and loving through an array of psychological filters and interpretations. The novel tells the central story of two sisters, Gillian and Sally Owens, who are raised by their two elderly and exotic aunts. The sisters escape the perceived threat of the mysterious and potentially dangerous world of their aunts, women for whom love itself poses unseen but not unexpected peril, only to return, women bound together by magic. Hoffman has described the predominant theme of many of her novels as the search for identity and connection. By raising this quest to the mythical and metaphorical level, Hoffman allows the reader to look into the deepest fears and problems that are obstacles in the search.

OTHER WORKS: Independence Day (screenplay, 1983). Fireflies (1997). Scribner’s Best of Fiction Workshops (1997). Here on Earth (1998). Local Girls (1999).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Fiffer, S. S. and Fiffer, S., eds., Family: American Writers Remember Their Own (1997). Houston, P., ed., Women on Hunting (1994). Reference works: CA (1979). CANR (1991). CLC (1989). MTCW (1991). Other references: Architectural Digest (1997). Boston Magazine (Oct. 1988). Book World (Jan. 1994, June 1995). Boston Review (Sept. 1985, Oct. 1987, April 1995). Critique (1997). Glamour (Dec. 1994). Ms. (2 Aug. 1979, 8 Feb. 1981). Newsweek (20 Aug. 1979, 12 April 1982, 1 Aug. 1988). New Yorker (15 May 1985). NYT (14 July 1977, 25 July 1987). NYTBR (10 July 1977, 15 July 1979, 28 Mar. 1982, 24 Mar. 1985, 9 Aug. 1987, 26 Apr. 1992). Observer (29 May 1983). TLS (21 Apr. 1978). WP (21 Dec.1980, 19 May 1985, 2 Aug. 1987). Yale Review (Winter 1978). —LINDA BERUBE, UPDATED BY VICTORIA AARONS

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HOFFMAN, Malvina Born 15 June 1885, New York, New York; died 10 July 1966, New York, New York Daughter of Richard and Fidelia Lamson Hoffman; married Samuel Grimson, 1924 (divorced 1936) Daughter of a celebrated German-born concert pianist, Malvina Hoffman studied at the Brearley School and the Art Students’ League in New York. In 1910 she was accepted as a student by Auguste Rodin and was associated with him until his death in 1917. This was the most formative influence upon her work as a sculptor; on his advice she studied anatomy and dissection for three winters at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. Hoffman married a musician in 1924 and was divorced in 1936; there were no children. In 1930 Hoffman received what is believed to be the largest commission ever given a sculptor: over 100 bronzes depicting the races of mankind to be placed on exhibition at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. This project, which opened in 1933, established Hoffman’s reputation as a leading figure in American art. Other widely known pieces include a World War I memorial entitled ‘‘The Sacrifice’’ (1922), in Memorial Chapel at Harvard, and portrait heads of Wendell Wilkie (1944) and of Teilhard de Chardin (1948). Various individual works received numerous prizes and awards. Hoffman was a fellow of the New York Historical Society and a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur. Heads and Tales in Many Lands (1937) is Hoffman’s account of her around-the-world trip collecting and modeling ‘‘racial types’’ for the Field Museum’s Hall of Man. The collection was conceived as an artistic as well as scientific record of mankind, especially the primitive races which seemed to be endangered by the rapid diffusion of Western culture. Although she was assisted by ethnographers and anthropologists, each piece of sculpture was finally a record of the artist’s vivid impression. ‘‘I have tried,’’ she wrote, ‘‘both by the gestures and poise of the various statues, as well as by the characterization in the facial modeling, to give a convincing and lifelike impression. I watched the natives in their daily life. . . .Then I chose the moment at which I felt each one represented something characteristic of his race, and of no other.’’ Although a contemporary scientist praised her enthusiastic portrayal of Africans, the collection has been criticized both for the conception of racial type and for the glorification of the Nordic type. Curiously, the statue representing the ‘‘Nordic’’ is based upon a man Hoffman found in New York who had ‘‘the best and most evenly developed physique’’ she had ever seen. The Field Museum no longer displays the collection as a whole, but individual pieces are effective and reveal Hoffman’s gift for portraiture. This project, which occupied Hoffman for most of five years, is again discussed in her autobiography, Yesterday Is Tomorrow (1965), which also treats the years of study with Rodin, and the influence of distinguished contemporaries such as sculptor Ivan Mestrovic, pianist Paderewski, surgeon Dr. Harvey Cushing, and dancer Paul Draper and his sister Ruth, a monologist. There is an


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account of her friendship with the dancer Pavlova, which produced a major work, Hoffman’s 26 bas-relief panels depicting the Bacchanale (1924). Her textbook, Sculpture Inside and Out (1939), intended for beginning and amateur sculptors, shows her interest in the techniques of her art. As a sculptor Hoffman excelled in portraiture. Despite interest in modernism and exposure to Rodin, Hoffman’s work is essentially realistic, often sentimental. Many individual pieces have charm, and all her work is strengthened by her mastery of anatomy. Hoffman’s prose, like her sculpture, is restrainedly genteel. The two biographical volumes provide useful documentation of her social and artistic milieu, the lively New YorkLondon-Paris circuit of the first half of this century. OTHER WORKS: Heads and Tales (1936). A Sculptor’s Odyssey (1936). Map of Mankind (1946). Malvina Hoffman (1948). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Field, H., The Races of Mankind (1933). Reference works: CB (1940, Sept. 1966). NCAB. Other references: American Magazine of Art (Feb. 1934). Art Digest (15 Oct. 1936, 15 March 1937). Art News (Sept. 1966). —JANE BENARDETE

HOGAN, Linda Born 16 July 1947, Denver, Colorado Daughter of Charles C. and Cleona Florine Bower Henderson; married Pat Hogan (divorced); children: Sandra Dawn Protector, Tanya Thunder Horse Poet and novelist Linda Hogan centers herself and, consequently, her readers on what nature has to teach human beings and on the regenerative female forces that shape the world. A writer of Chickasaw heritage, Hogan draws from the matrilineal and matrilocal precontact history of her ancestry. In her works, Hogan seeks to restore the balance between male and female power altered by the domination of Christian Europeans. She offers ancient wisdom about nature in mythological yet contemporary terms. Although born in Colorado, Hogan has her Chickasaw roots in south central Oklahoma; she is descended from a family of storytellers, who influence her writing. Poet, novelist, and essayist, she writes and tells her story from a Native American perspective. Hogan began to write in her late twenties while working with orthopedically handicapped children. Reading Kenneth Rexroth’s work during her lunch hours gave her confidence to start writing. For her the process of writing tapped into her own life; she told an interviewer, ‘‘I write because the poems speak what I can’t say in my normal language.’’ Hogan received an M.A. from the University of Colorado at Boulder (1978), where she is currently a member of the faculty. Previously she taught American Studies/American Indian Studies

at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis (1982-84) and at Colorado College (1980-84). She was awarded both the Pushcart Prize and a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1986. She has also been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and of the Five Civilized Tribes Museum Playwriting award (1980) for A Piece of Moon. She was the D’Arcy McNickle Fellow at the Newberry Library in 1981, a faculty fellow at the University of Minnesota (1985), and the recipient of state arts grants from both Colorado (1984) and Minnesota (1985). Hogan’s first book of poetry, Calling Myself Home (1978), is about discovering herself. In her introduction she wrote, ‘‘These first poems were part of that return for me, an identification with my tribe and the Oklahoma earth, a deep knowing and telling how I was formed of these two powers, called ancestors and clay. Home is in the blood, and I am still on the journey of calling myself home.’’ In ‘‘Heritage’’ she deals with the ‘‘painful and also inescapable reality and knowledge of being mixed.’’ A later volume of poems, Seeing Through the Sun (1985), received an American Book award for poetry from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1986. In That Horse (1985), a collection of notable short stories, Hogan incorporates both her own and her father’s story about the same horse, pointing out that they are very different stories. Her goal is to show the history of the time: ‘‘That Horse deals with the historical fact of fiction and what’s happened with Chickasaw people and what’s happened in my own family particularly.’’ Red Clay: Poems and Stories (1991) brings together work previously published in Calling Myself Home and That Horse. Mean Spirit (1990), Hogan’s first novel, received the Oklahoma Book award for fiction (1990) and the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association Fiction award. In this long, sad, historical novel, set in the early 1920s, Hogan chronicles the experience of two Osage Indian families during a time when ‘‘oil barons and government agents in Oklahoma swindle oil-rich, landowning Indians out of their land and rights.’’ Her writing style is spare and compact but rich in detailed descriptions of Native American rituals and customs. To write this novel, Hogan drew again from the history of her family. Like many Chickasaw and Choctaw people in the 1930s, her family lost everything when the government and the banks foreclosed on their land. When Hogan was growing up, she was very conscious of the land her family had lost and points out that the Ardmore Airport in Oklahoma was ‘‘my family’s ranch land.’’ Hogan re-creates Native American history and stories in her fiction; starting from this spiritual foundation, her poems seek images to embody its understanding of life and nature. Just as horses, turtles, birds, and small insects are prominent carriers of her poetic images, so too are ‘‘pollen blowing off the corn’’ or ‘‘yellow flowers’’ or the ‘‘yellow sun,’’ as well as ‘‘red clay,’’ and ‘‘brown earth.’’ Her poetry, with its distinctive drive and rhythm and life, is constantly manifesting its respect for the natural world. Hogan volunteers at wildlife rescue clinics to rehabilitate and to care for eagles, owls, and other birds of prey. She considers caretaking the basic work of living on earth and ‘‘sees a direct

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relation between how we care for the animal-people and the plants and insects and land and water, and how we care for each other, and for ourselves.’’ A recipient of the Lannan award in 1994, her Book of Medicines (1993) was a National Book Critics Circle finalist. This volume of poetry is divided into two long sections, ‘‘Hunger’’ and ‘‘Book of Medicines.’’ The poems lay out a plan, much as the New Testament gospels do, in which a new vision of the world takes shape. In Hogan’s poem, however, God resides not above, but within nature. A woman-centered environmentalist view emerges in Hogan’s poetry. Two books appeared late in 1995. Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World gathers 17 essays that express Hogan’s belief in the interconnectedness of all life forms. In the preface she says that she writes ‘‘out of respect for the natural world, recognizing that humankind is not separate from nature.’’ In the novel Solar Storms, she engages the story of five generations of Native American women and their struggle to preserve their way of life. Solar Storms won the Colorado Book award for fiction. It is at once a Native American coming-of-age story and a moving depiction of the ties that bind people to their roots and their land. Hogan is one of three editors for a multihued collection of writings by women on their kinship with animals. Through poems, reports from the field, ruminations, interviews, short stories, and formal essays, a variety of women nature writers and scientists examine the dialogue between species. Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals (1999) gives readers the opportunity to glimpse the personal yet profoundly universal impact of animals on women’s lives. Many reviewers highlight Hogan’s eye for detail and the Native American rituals and customs depicted in her poems and novels. She approaches her characters with reverence and brings them to life with quick, spare phrases. Hogan says, ‘‘My writing comes from and goes back to the community, both the human and the global community. I am interested in the deepest questions, those of spirit, of shelter, of growth and movement toward peace and liberation, inner and outer.’’ Since 1989 she has taught in the American Indian Studies Program and the English Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In addition, she gives lectures, readings, and workshops at other universities, in Native American communities, and for Native American organizations. She is committed to environmental preservation and has worked as a volunteer in wildlife rehabilitation clinics in Minnesota and Colorado. OTHER WORKS: Daughters, I Love You (1981). Eclipse (1983). The Stories We Hold Secret: Tales of Women’s Spiritual Development (coeditor, 1986). Savings (1988). Wind Leans Against Those Men (1990). From Women’s Experience to Feminist Theology (1996). Power (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Béranger, J., L’Ici et l’ailleurs: Multilinguise et Multiculturalisme en Amérique du Nord (1991). Bruchac, J., ed.,

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Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets (1987). Smith, P. C., ‘‘Linda Hogan,’’ in This Is About Vision: Interviews with Southwestern Writers (1990). Swann, B. and A. Krupat, eds., I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers (1987). Reference works: CA (1987). CANR (1995). DLB (1997). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Who’s Who of Writers, Editors, Poets (1989). Other references: American Indian Quarterly (Fall 1991). Journal of Ethnic Studies 16 (Spring 1988). LJ (1 Nov. 1990). NYTBR (24 Feb. 1991). Prairie Schooner (Fall 1983). Studies in American Indian Literature (Winter 1990). WRB (Apr. 1991). —SHARI GROVE, UPDATED BY CELESTE DEROCHE

HOLDING, Elisabeth Sanxay Born 8 June 1889, Brooklyn, New York; died 7 February 1955, Bronx, New York Daughter of Charles S. and Edith Hollick Sanxay; married George E. Holding, 1913 (died 1943); children: one daughter, one son After her marriage, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding lived in South America, the West Indies, and Bermuda, settings used in her fiction. Known primarily as a mystery writer, Holding also wrote romantic social criticism and short stories, two of which were filmed as The Price of Pleasure (1925) and The Bride Comes Home (1936). In both her first and last novels, Holding examines motherhood as a limiting factor in a woman’s life. Invincible Minnie (1920) is the story of Minnie and Frances Defoe, young orphans reared in a tradition of genteel poverty that forms Minnie’s destructive personality. Her determination to marry and her corrupt concept of motherhood excuse any untruth, even bigamy. Tillie MacDonald in Widow’s Mite (1953) hides facts in a murder case, using the welfare of her fatherless son as an excuse. Discussions contrasting detective fiction with the novel’s ‘‘reality’’ lend effective irony. Two nonmysteries denounce social attitudes rendering women useless and unproductive. Rosaleen Monahan and Nicholas Landry in Rosaleen Among the Artists (1921) avoid marriage because of class differences only to learn, years later, that love rooted firmly in sexual desire is a stronger force than social standards. The brisk portraits of Dorothy Mell and Enid Bainbridge, successful, self-supporting painters, and sound discussions of the genesis of real art subdue the plot’s sentimentality. The Unlit Lamp (1922) recounts the story of Claudine Mason Vincelle’s upwardly mobile marriage, which transforms her from a clever, independent girl into a dependent, ineffectual woman. Slowly paced, the novels are nevertheless successful because of sound characterizations.


Holding’s mystery novels are suspenseful personality studies rather than detective stories, and they often incorporate gothic elements. Dark Power (1930) is wholly gothic: the story of penniless Diana Leonard, isolated in a dreary country house, at the mercy of dangerous relatives. Traditionally, Diana is courted by two young men, and justice triumphs. In Miasma (1929), however, Holding inverts the subgenre, for the isolated innocent is a young physician, Alexander Dennison, who is attractive to two very different girls. A repeated and effective Holding motif is the self-examination and reevaluation to which middle-aged women are forced when violence erupts into the domestic scene. The Old Battle-Ax (1943) depicts widowed Charlotte Herriott, who must sort out both damaging and enhancing self-concepts and separate false friends from true, all in the midst of a murder investigation. Lucia Holley of The Blank Wall (1947; filmed as The Reckless Moment) perceives herself only as wife and mother until she must try to conceal a murder and cope with unsought love. Lucia does not forsake her traditional attitudes, but she does alter them. Vividly rendered difficulties caused by the generation gap contribute to the success of both portraits. Some of Holding’s strongest novels explore damaged personalities and make splendid use of extended interior monologues. Net of Cobwebs (1945, reprinted in London 1952) tells of Malcolm Drake’s faltering return to mental health after the sinking of his merchant ship and his subsequent collapse. In contrast, Montfort Duchesne of The Virgin Huntress (1951) fights a losing battle against guilt and cowardice. The tension in both books arises primarily from the characterization of the protagonists. Another basic Holding plot device sets murder against the background of a failing marriage, focusing on protagonists who have married unwisely but try to keep their bargains. Honey Stapleton in Lady Killer (1942) has married disagreeable Weaver Stapleton for security and has lost almost all will of her own until she sets out to prevent a murder. Hack writer James Brophy in Too Many Bottles (1951, reprinted London 1952, retitled The Party Was the Pay-Off in 1953) has also traded independence for security, only to find himself accused of the murder of his unsuitable wife. Both Honey and James are realistic, tough-minded characters whose self-evaluation and personal growth provide subplots. Too Many Bottles’ analysis of the writing process is fascinating. An early practitioner of the psychological mystery, Holding is considered a solid craftsperson particularly good at characterization and sustained suspense. She is noted for her treatment of a continuing character, police-lieutenant Levy, generally not the protagonist but rather a symbol of sanity, order, and justice. OTHER WORKS: Angelica (1921). The Shoals of Honour (1926). The Silk Purse (1928). The Death Wish (1934). The Unfinished Crime (1935). The Strange Crime in Bermuda (1937). The Obstinate Murderer (1938, in Britain as No Harm Intended, 1939). The Girl Who Had to Die (1940). Who’s Afraid? (1940, alternate title Trial by Murder). Speak of the Devil (1941, alternate title Hostess

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to Murder, 1943). Kill Joy (1942, retitled Murder is a Kill-Joy, 1946). The Innocent Mrs. Duff (1946). Miss Kelly (1947). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994). Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection (1976). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers (1996). Other references: Ladies’ Home Journal (Sept. 1925). Mystery Fancier (Sept. 1977). NYTBR (3 May 1942, 3 June 1951). —JANE S. BAKERMAN

HOLLANDER, Nicole Born 25 April 1939, Chicago, Illinois Daughter of Henry and Shirley Mazur Garrison; married Paul Hollander, 1962 (divorced) One of the few female cartoonists whose work has been featured in comic pages throughout the U.S., Nicole Hollander is best known for the comic strip Sylvia. Complete with her trademark feather boa, cigarette, and open-heeled bedroom slippers, Sylvia first began appearing in Hollander’s work in 1979 when her first collection of cartoons, I’m in Training to Be Tall and Blonde was released by St. Martin’s Press. Sylvia has changed the way women are portrayed in mainstream comic strips. Sylvia, a fiftyish wisecracking woman, scrutinizes politics and society from her bathtub, her easy chair, a barroom stool, or lunch table. Her foils are conventional Beth Ellen, her lunch partner; Harry, the cynical bartender; Rita, her patient, health-conscious daughter; and her all-knowing pets. Rita’s father is away; where and why varies. She casts a critical eye on most men and on the occasional female such as conservative spokeswoman Phyllis Schlafly. Although newspaper editors were wary of publishing this hefty woman in bathrobe, backless mules, and dyed hair, the public recognized a folk heroine. Unlike other women in comics, Sylvia is neither glamorous nor upwardly mobile. Her wardrobe is limited, her tastes tend to pizza and beer, and her politics are liberal; she casts a jaundiced eye on the world and says so in 10 words or less. Sylvia is not an analyst; she is an observer and commentator. In one strip, a television announcer notes: ‘‘Studies show that women with ‘sexy names’ like Dawn and Cheryl are less likely to be promoted to managerial jobs than women with names like. . .’’ ‘‘Bill or Roger,’’ Sylvia comments from the bar stool. The strip’s characters also include a cast of Cops who have their own sets of rules and fly about the country trying to inflict them on other people; a fairy godmother, who anticipates women’s needs; Gernif the Venusian, who questions the habits of earth people; bright-eyed Patty Murphy, a fallible television commentator; Alien Lover, a sensitive male; the Devil, who bargains for souls; angels who determine who will enter heaven based on their behavior in the neighborhood supermarket and taste in movies;

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and Grunella, a fortune-teller whose crystal ball forecast can change to accommodate the listener. Sylvia’s cats, who do not speak, but listen, think, write, and act, play a large role. In 1992 Hollander published a book of their advice to cat owners, Everything Here Is Mine: An Unhelpful Guide to Cat Behavior. Hollander was educated in Chicago public schools. She received a B.F.A. from the University of Illinois (1960) and an M.F.A. from Boston University (1966). Growing up in a working-class Chicago neighborhood where the women had all the funny lines, she learned to read, she says, because she wanted to read the comics. As an adolescent, Hollander realized the comics were not relevant to her life because they were written by men and filled with male characters. Her first comic strip was published in Spokeswoman, a national feminist newsletter. The mainstream press resisted: men held decisionmaking positions in most newspapers and Sylvia was too feminist, too outrageous; she did not speak to or for the male point of view. As feminist humor began to command a wider audience, St. Martin’s Press printed the first book of Sylvia cartoons in 1979 and continued as her publisher until 1991. Hollander was first syndicated by the Toronto Syndicate in 1979 and by Field Syndications in 1981. She has been self-syndicated since then, doing both administrative and creative work for the strip. In the late 1980s Sylvia appeared in over 50 newspapers. Hollander was given a national Wonder Woman Award in 1983, an honor given to women over 40 who have advanced the cause of women. In 1985 she received a Yale University Chubb Fellowship for Public Service. Hollander was one of four cartoonists featured in the film Funny Ladies: A Portrait of Women Cartoonists by Pamela Briggs. Sylvia’s Real Good Advice, a musical comedy, first performed in 1991 in Chicago, won a 1991 Joseph Jefferson Award and a Chicago After Dark Award. Hollander remains a keen observer and commentator. In recent years, she has taken a break from putting out books about Sylvia and issued books with a cat focus. As illustrator, Hollander’s projects included 101 Reason Why a Cat is Better Than a Man (1992), Women Who Love Cats Too Much (1995), 101 Reasons Why Cats Make Great Kids (1996), and 101 More Reasons Why a Cat is Better Than a Man (1997). With author Allia Zobel, Hollander offers irreverent advice for the cat lover in all of us. Hollander expounded on her own inscrutable felines’ impeccable taste in My Cat’s Not Fat, He’s Just Big-Boned (1998). Her cats think too much, hypnotize their owners, plot dastardly deeds but get distracted, and are obsessed with food, food, food. But Hollander has not forgotten the acerbic and often feminist humor that created her passionate readers. In Female Problems: An Unhelpful Guide (1995) and Getting in Touch with Your Inner Bitch (1997), she provides provocative and funny commentary on being female. Female Problems offers reflections and cartoons on visits to gynecologists, hair problems, and identifying with the Evil Queen rather than Snow White. Getting in Touch recognizes that the Inner Bitch is the Bette Davis in every woman—that integral, powerful part which often goes unrecognized. Hollander writes for the woman who wants to laugh out loud and speak her mind.

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OTHER WORKS: Hi, This Is Sylvia; Ma, Can I Be a Feminist and Still Like Men? (1980). That Woman Must Be on Drugs (1981). My Weight Is Always Perfect for My Height—Which Varies (1982). Mercy, It’s the Revolution and I’m in My Bathrobe (1982). Sylvia on Sundays (1983). O.K., Thinner Thighs for Everyone (1984). Never Tell Your Mother This Dream (1985). The Whole Enchilada (1986). Never Take Your Cat to a Salad Bar (1987). You Can’t Take It with You, So Eat It Now (1989). Tales from the Planet Sylvia (1990). Everything I Learned About the Rat Race I Learned from My Cat (1999). Also: yearly calendars, the Sylvia Book of Days, mugs, dolls, and greeting cards.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Alley, P. W., ‘‘Hokinson and Hollander: Female Cartoonists and American Culture,’’ in Women’s Comic Visions (1991). Cantarow, E., ‘‘Don’t Throw Away That Old Diaphram,’’ in Mother Jones (June-July, 1987). O’ Sullivan, J., The Great American Comic Strip: One Hundred Years of Cartoon Art (1990). Walker, N., and Zita Dresner, eds., Redressing the Balance: American Women’s Literary Humor from Colonial Times to the 1980s (1988). Reference works: CA (1998). SATA (1999). —JANET M. BEYER, UPDATED BY CELESTE DEROCHE

HOLLEY, Marietta Born 16 July 1836, Jefferson County, New York; died 1 March 1926, Jefferson County, New York Wrote under: Samantha Allen, Jemyma, Joshia Allen’s Wife Daughter of John M. and Mary Taber Holley The youngest of seven children, Marietta Holley was born on the family farm where she lived her entire life. Financial difficulties ended her formal education at fourteen, but she maintained a lifelong fondness for reading. In the 1870s she augmented her family’s modest income by teaching piano lessons. Always inordinately shy, she was fifty years old before she left Jefferson County for the first time. Her shyness eventually prevented her from accepting invitations to read her work in public or to address the leading feminist reformers of the day. After the death of her parents, she lived alone with her unmarried sister, Sylphina, who died in 1915. Nothing about her private life reflects the fact that she was a celebrated humorist whose popularity rivaled Mark Twain’s. Although she initially wrote and published poetry under the pseudonym Jemyma, her contributions to the American vernacular humor tradition began with My Opinions and Betsey Bobbet’s (1873). Holley created in Samantha Allen, her commonsensical persona, an ideal spokesperson for her primary theme: women’s rights. Holley made relatively unpopular feminist ideas more acceptable by grounding them in the domestic perspective of a


farm wife and stepmother. Even Samantha’s nom de plume, Josiah Allen’s Wife, served as an ironic comment on women’s subordinate social, political, and economic status. Two antagonists to Samantha’s feminism appear in the novel: Josiah Allen and Betsey Bobbet. Josiah’s views are suffused with sentimentality and male egoism, while Betsey, an aging spinster, holds that woman’s only sphere is marriage. Although Betsey soon disappeared from Holley’s work, Josiah continued as a comic foil to Samantha’s feminism and common sense. For her second novel, Josiah Allen’s Wife as a P.A. [Public Advisor] and P.I. [Private Investigator]: Samantha at the Centennial (1877), Holley’s publisher, Elisha Bliss, supplied her with extensive material about the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Thus began the practice that became characteristic of Holley’s humor; she wrote realistic descriptions of places she never visited in person. The travel motif gave Samantha increased opportunity to expound upon a variety of feminist issues, including women’s right to privacy, and to celebrate the wide range of talents displayed in the Woman’s Pavilion at the Exposition. In My Wayward Pardner; or, My Trials with Josiah, America, the Widow Bump, and Etcetery (1880), inspired by an open letter from the women of Utah to the women of the U.S., Holley responded to another contemporary issue, polygamy. She dramatized the abuses of polygamy by having Josiah, under the influence of a Mormon deacon, flirt with a widow. Although we never seriously believe Josiah will take a second wife, Holley came perilously close to destroying the strong family unit that served as the basis for Samantha’s domestic feminism. Holley’s fourth novel, Sweet Cicely (1885), dramatized the plight of women who married intemperate men. The novel was influenced by Holley’s correspondence with Frances Willard, head of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and it echoed the sentimental tone of temperance tracts. Because it dealt extensively with women’s legal status, it was a great favorite of the feminist leaders; Susan B. Anthony wrote Holley to tell her of the pleasure the novel gave her. It was not, however, a popular success. In contrast, her next novel, Samantha at Saratoga; or, Racin’ after Fashion (1887), was Holley’s most popular work. It features Samantha and Josiah vacationing at the country’s most fashionable resort, Saratoga. There Holley attacks, through humor, society’s preoccupation with the genteel values that were antithetical to her goals of full political and economic equality for women. Between 1887 and 1914, Holley wrote 14 more humorous novels that addressed a variety of social issues, ranging from women’s role in the Methodist church to American foreign policy. None of these, however, enjoyed the success of Samantha at Saratoga, and in many the quality of her humor declined. Nonetheless, Holley made important contributions to the American vernacular-humor tradition and to the feminist movement. No other humorist made the opponents of feminism the targets of her humor, and no other feminist used humor as her primary weapon

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for furthering the women’s rights movement. She gave to American literature one of its strongest and most eloquent heroines of the 19th century, and she was influential in making feminist principles acceptable to a wide audience of women. OTHER WORKS: Betsey Bobbet: A Drama (1880). The Lament of the Mormon Wife: A Poem (1880). Miss Richard’s Boy, and Other Stories (1883). Miss Jones’ Quilting (1887). Poems (1887). Samantha Among the Brethren (1890). The Widder Doodle’s Courtship, and Other Sketches (1890). Samantha on the Race Problem (1892). Tirzah Ann’s Summer Trip, and Other Sketches (1892). Samantha at the World’s Fair (1893). Samantha Among the Colored Folks (1894). Josiah’s Alarm, and Abel Perry’s Funeral (1895). Samantha in Europe (1895). Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition (1904). Around the World with Josiah Allen’s Wife (1905). Samantha vs. Josiah: Being the Story of a Borrowed Automobile and What Came of It (1906). Samantha on Children’s Rights (1909). Josiah’s Secret: A Play (1910). Samantha at Coney Island and a Thousand Other Islands (1911). Samantha on the Woman Question (1913). Josiah Allen on the Woman Question (1914). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Blair, W., Horse Sense in American Humor: From Benjamin Franklin to Ogden Nash (1962). Blyley, K. G., Marietta Holley (dissertation, 1936). Curry, J. A., Women As Subjects and Writers of Nineteenth-Century American Humor (dissertation, 1975). Curry, J., ed., Samantha Rattles the Woman Question (1983). Morris, L. A. Women Vernacular Humorists in Nineteenth-Century America: Ann Stephens, Frances Whitcher, and Marietta Holley (dissertation, 1978). Winter, K. H., Marietta Holley: Life with ‘‘Josiah’s Wife’’ (1984). Reference works: AA. AW. DAB. NAW. NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Critic (Jan. 1905). —LINDA A. MORRIS

HOLLINGWORTH, Leta Stetter Born 25 May 1886, Chadron, Nebraska; died 27 November 1939, New York, New York Daughter of John G. and Margaret Danley Stetter; married Harry L. Hollingworth, 1910 Leta Stetter Hollingworth graduated with highest honors in 1906 from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln in preparation for a teaching career. After teaching high school for a short period of time, she accompanied her husband to New York, where she attended Columbia University and received her Ph.D. in 1916 from its Teachers College. She was an instructor of educational psychology at Teachers College for the remainder of her career. While attending graduate school, she had an opportunity to replace Emily T. Burr in administering newly devised mental tests

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in a clinic for the mentally deficient. When Burr, an early worker in this field, returned to her post, Hollingworth was also retained, due to her excellence in carrying out this work. In 1914 Hollingworth was the first psychologist to be appointed under the newly formed Civil Service supervision. Early in her career, Hollingworth expressed a concern with problems connected with the social status of women. The subject of her doctoral dissertation was an experimental inquiry into the alleged limitations of women’s abilities. Many of her early writings, published primarily in the American Journal of Sociology and Medical Record, were concerned with sex differences at birth, variability in achievement as related to sex, sex differences as related to mental deficiency, and social control over the role of women. Functional Periodicity (1914) resulted from these early studies of women. She became an active and lifelong member of ‘‘Heterodoxy’’ and in 1917 was designated as a Watcher for the Woman’s Suffrage Party. Hollingworth was also an early writer in the area of the relationship between intelligence level and delinquency. She continued her association with Bellevue Hospital in New York throughout her career; in 1921 she was appointed psychologist of the classification clinic. Hollingworth is known for her innovative work in three major educational experiments. The first experiment was an analytic and remedial program with children having problems in particular school subjects. The Psychology of Special Disability in Spelling (1918) resulted from her work on this project. The second experiment, which involved children who were ‘‘highly endowed mentally,’’ was known as the Special Opportunity Class. It was concerned with providing the best educational opportunities possible and provided much of the material for Gifted Children (1926). The Speyer School project involved both slow learners (but excluding the mentally deficient) and exceptionally bright children; through this program the adaptation of the school to the needs and capacities of the individual was greatly enhanced. For the five-year experiment, Hollingworth was designated representative of Teachers College in charge of research and educational adviser for the two classes of exceptionally bright students; the school quickly became referred to as ‘‘Leta Hollingworth’s school for bright children,’’ even though they comprised a small minority of the classes. The school attracted much public attention not only in the U.S. but in foreign countries as well. Hollingworth was a prolific writer, who contributed over 80 articles and numerous reviews, reports, and summaries to the field of educational psychology. Materials from her courses taught at Teachers College were coordinated and published in a volume used as a standard text in her field, The Psychology of Subnormal Children (1920). In addition to scholarly works, a collection of poetry of an autobiographical nature was written by Hollingworth and published in Prairie Years (1940). Hollingworth was world renowned for her work in education and educational psychology, particularly in the area of the education of the gifted. Her many publications in this area were major

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contributions in the development of the field. In 1938 the University of Nebraska awarded her an honorary Doctor of Laws degree. In 1940 a Conference on the Education of the Gifted was held in her honor by Teachers College. A volume entitled Education and the Individual—In Honor of Leta S. Hollingworth was issued at the same time. OTHER WORKS: Special Talents and Defects: Their Significance for Education (1923). The Psychology of the Adolescent (1928). Public Addresses (1940). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hollingworth, H. L., Leta S. Hollingworth: A Biography (1943). Reference works: DAB. NAW. —SANDRA KUENHOLD

HOLM, Saxe See JACKSON, Helen Hunt

HOLMES, Mary Jane Hawes Born 5 April 1825, Brookfield, Massachusetts; died 6 October 1907, Brockport, New York Daughter of Preston and Fanny Olds Hawes; married Daniel Holmes, 1849 Mary Jane Hawes Holmes was the author of 39 novels and numerous stories and essays published in periodicals. Her uncle, Joel Hawes, was a well-known New England essayist and preacher whose influence may have contributed to the moral tone of her books. Encouraged by both parents in intellectual and literary pursuits, Holmes entered school at the age of three and at thirteen was teaching in a district school. She published her first story before she was sixteen. With her husband, a Brockport, New York, attorney, Holmes moved to Versailles, Kentucky, for a short period; later that area provided the Southern rural background of her first novel, Tempest and Sunshine (1854). The couple then made their permanent home in Brockport. Childless, Holmes spent her years writing and traveling. While producing novels at the rate of about one a year, she visited such distant places as England, France, Russia, the Mediterranean, and the Far East, gathering statuary, paintings, tapestries, and furniture on her travels. Generous with both her time and her money, she entertained young girls of the neighborhood with talks on her travels and on the art she collected; she also taught Sunday school, built the parish house for her church, was active in the temperance movement, gave financial aid to dependents of Civil War veterans, and paid for the education of two young Japanese girls.


Though now depreciated for being a writer of mawkishly sentimental, simplistically didactic domestic tales, Holmes was an author whose works had enormous appeal for the unsophisticated reader of her time. Some individual titles sold over 50,000 copies and during her lifetime her book sales totaled more than 2,000,000 copies. In 1870 a writer in Appleton’s Journal claimed Holmes had ‘‘an immense constituency outlying in all the small towns and rural districts.’’ Indeed, small-town and rural life was what she knew best, and it was this life that provided the background for most of her stories. Typical of her work is her first, and most popular, novel, Tempest and Sunshine. The central characters are two young sisters, Julia and Fanny Middleton, who live on a farm about 12 miles from Frankfort, Kentucky. The plot revolves around the courtship complications of several young people, including the sisters, and is filled with such contrivances as intercepted letters, coincidental relationships, and long-lost brothers newly found. The emphasis, however, is upon the contrast of the personalities of the sisters. Fanny, the angelic ‘‘Sunshine’’ of the title, named after Holmes’ own mother, is all purity and kindness, while Julia, ‘‘Tempest,’’ is hot-tempered, deceitful, and cruel. When Fanny becomes engaged to a New Orleans doctor whom Julia wants for herself, ‘‘Tempest’’ intercepts their letters and forges others, which destroy the relationship. Finally, in true domestic novel fashion, goodness and justice triumph, and all the young people are happily paired off except the repentant Julia, who remains at home to care for her aged father. Although both Fanny’s angelic nature and Julia’s conversion strain the modern reader’s credulity, the portraits of some of the minor characters, especially the girls’ roughhewn father, are picturesque and vivid. Furthermore, the portraits of the two sisters echo the light-maiden, dark-maiden motif identified by many critics in the works of Cooper, Hawthorne, and other 19th-century American writers. Holmes’ 1856 novel, Lena Rivers, was second to Tempest and Sunshine in sales. Other popular titles were Meadow Brook (1857), Marian Grey (1863), and Ethelyn’s Mistake (1869). Many of her novels were issued as serials in the New York Weekly. Though her stories were derivative and the situations contrived, Holmes’ strength as a writer lay in her portraits of rural domestic life and in the straightforward simplicity of both her style and her moral code. OTHER WORKS: The English Orphans (1855). The Homestead on the Hillside, and Other Tales (1856). Dora Deane (1858). Maggie Miller (1858). Cousin Maude (1860). Rosamond (1860). Hugh Worthington (1863). Darkness and Daylight (1864). The Cameron Pride (1867). Rose Mather (1868). Millbank (1871). Edna Browning (1872). West Lawn (1874). Edith Lyle (1876). Mildred (1877). Daisy Thornton (1878). Forest House (1879). Chateau D’Or (1880). Red Bird (1880). Madeline (1881). Queenie Hetherton (1883). Bessie’s Fortune (1885). Gretchen (1887). Marguerite (1890). Dr. Hathern’s Daughters: A Story of Virginia, in Four Parts (1895). Paul Ralston (1897). The Tracy Diamonds (1899). The Cromptons (1902). The Merivale Banks (1903). Rena’s

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Experiment (1904). The Abandoned Farm (1905). Connie’s Mistake (1905). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Papashvily, H. S., All the Happy Endings (1956). Pattee, F. L., The Feminine Fifties (1940). Reference works: AA. AW. DAB. LSL. NAW (1971). NCAB. Other references: Bookman (Dec. 1907). Nation (19 Oct. 1907). —ELAINE K. GINSBERG

HOLMES, Sarah (Katherine) Stone Born 8 January 1841, Hinds County, Mississippi; died 28 December 1908, Tallulah, Louisiana Wrote under: Kate Stone Daughter of William and Amanda Ragan Stone; married Henry B. Holmes, 1869 Sarah Stone Holmes was the oldest daughter of seven children. Her father died in 1855, leaving his widow with substantial debts. On her own, her mother bought a new plantation, Brokenburn, in Madison County, Louisiana, engaged slaves, and produced enough cotton to settle the debts. In 1869 Holmes married the ‘‘Lt. Holmes’’ of her journal. They settled in Tallulah, Louisiana, where Sarah became a leader in social and civic affairs. Holmes began her journal in May 1861. It was published in 1955 as Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861-1868, edited by John Q. Anderson. She was a rabid secessionist and confidently predicted an early Southern victory. Like most people living in the Gulf and Trans-Mississippi states, the Stones did not immediately feel the horrors of war. Life for Holmes and her family continued as it had before secession; parties, household duties, and church were their usual activities. The Stones’ complacency, however, was shattered in 1862 when Holmes’ two younger brothers joined the Confederate army. Both were dead within the year. In addition, the Union army began its first assault on the Mississippi River; the campaign failed, but the following year brought its return and new problems. Yankee raiders roamed throughout northern Louisiana, stealing horses and food and threatening to burn plantations. In March 1863, the Stones left Brokenburn for Texas. Holmes’ diary provides a vivid account of the refugee experience. Literally pursued by Union soldiers, Holmes and her family crossed the bayous by boat at night and then drove overland to safety. The journey in a rickety wagon, under blazing heat, was unpleasant, and was made more so by the hostility of the Texans and their refusal to shelter the refugees. Once settled in a rented house in Tyler, the Stones found goods scarce and prices high. Though refugees in general were resented, Holmes did make friends with local girls and was courted by the men. The family remained in Texas until the end of the war, returning to Louisiana in November 1865. Brokenburn, however, had been partially destroyed by war and floods.

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‘‘How I wish I could write well so that this old life could live in the imagination of my children, but I never had the gift of expression with my pen,’’ Holmes wrote in her 1900 retrospective to the journal. Her modesty is charming, but certainly unwarranted. While Holmes’ writing was unsophisticated, it was literate and striking. Her descriptive passages are so vivid that the reader feels the water through which the Stones had to wade in their escape from Louisiana and the heat of the Texas sun at midday. Interspersed with the narrative are flashes of humor and Holmes’ wry observations of her somewhat eccentric neighbors and friends. Brokenburn is one of the finest published Confederate diaries. Holmes herself was a charming and perceptive narrator, able to convey without false pride or sentiment the trials and accomplishments of her family. Unlike many Civil War diaries and memoirs, Brokenburn is unself-conscious in its depiction of Southern life. Holmes made no attempt to glamorize herself or her surroundings for posterity. Rather, we see life in the Trans-Mississippi Department of the Confederacy as it was: somewhat raw and unfinished and lacking the polish of the older Eastern states. For its charm and realism, Holmes’ diary deserves a place in the libraries of historians and literary scholars alike. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Massey, M. E., Refugee Life in the Confederacy (1964). Wilson, E., Patriotic Gore (1962). —JANET E. KAUFMAN

HOOKS, bell Born Gloria Jean Watkins, 25 September 1952, Hopkinsville, Kentucky Daughter of Rosa Bell Watkins Born in Kentucky to a Southern black working-class family, Gloria Jean Watkins grew up ‘‘talking back’’—childhood punishments left her feeling exiled from the adult community and thus she turned to books and discovered an imaginary community. In ‘‘Black Is a Women’s Color,’’ she says she began writing poetry, ‘‘using the poems to keep on living.’’ She has transformed the paradigm of ‘‘talking back’’ into an empowering metaphor for speech: ‘‘It is that act of speech, of ‘talking back,’ that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is the expression of our movement from object to subject—the liberated voice.’’ Watkins’ maternal great-grandmother, ‘‘a sharp-tongued woman’’ who ‘‘talked back,’’ was named Bell Hooks, and it was this name she chose as a pseudonym, in lower case because ‘‘claiming this name was a way to link [her] voice to an ancestral legacy of women speaking.’’ Demonstrating her own ability to ‘‘talk back’’ with authority and eloquence, hooks has published several volumes of social, cultural, and autobiographical criticism, a book of poetry, and numerous critical articles. Educated at Stanford, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of California, Santa Cruz (where she received her Ph.D. in 1983), hooks first and most polemical book, Ain’t I a

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Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981), is a self-proclaimed ‘‘book of the heart, expressing the deep and passionate longing for change in the social status of black women, for an end to sexist domination and exploitation.’’ A political gesture toward liberating the colonized mentality that fosters racism and sexism, this book provoked much critical commentary and debate and (although it took seven years to find a publisher) launched her prolific writing career as a ‘‘cultural worker’’ and social critic. In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), hooks articulates the need for a feminist theory that addresses the mechanics of marginalization. Her consciousness of the impact of marginalization upon groups who exist outside of the center of white, middle-class, heterosexual feminism emerged from her own experience of the dividing railroad tracks in the small Kentucky town where she grew up. There, the tracks ‘‘were a daily reminder of [her] marginality’’ from the affluent world of the white middle class. The book articulates the need to bring women who have existed only marginally in the feminist movement into dialogue with those in the center. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989) articulates African American women’s struggle to emerge from silence: ‘‘Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited. . .a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible.’’ The essays in this book ‘‘talk back’’ by addressing the politics of domination in institutions of cultural production. The politics of cultural production is also hooks’ subject in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1990). The essays in this collection range across film, television, music, the consumer culture, the community, and postmodernism; hooks locates a yearning for radical social change in postmodern representations of race, class, gender, and sexual practice. A dialogue with the philosopher Cornel West, published as Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (1991), is an intense and wide-ranging discussion of black intellectuality and the crises of both African American women and men. With their discussion, hooks hopes to create a ‘‘community of comrades who are seeking to deepen our spiritual experience and our political solidarity.’’ In Black Looks (1992), ‘‘a series of essays about identity,’’ hooks extends her critical interest in representations of blackness in the media, particularly in film. A prolific public speaker who has lectured all over the country, hooks is also an accomplished teacher and a member of the faculty at Oberlin College. She demonstrates in her writing, speaking, and teaching an activism that testifies to her engagement with the community of whom she speaks so eloquently whenever she ‘‘talks back.’’ Throughout the rest of the 1990s, hooks continued to write prolifically and to lecture, addressing a widening range of subjects and refining her positions on race, feminism, and culture. Killing Rage (1995) is an argument for creating dialogue on difficult subjects. Subtitled Ending Racism, the book emphasizes a liberal approach to ongoing racial divisions. ‘‘I understand rage to be a necessary aspect of resistance struggle,’’ she wrote. Art on My Mind, from the same year, contains essays on Alison Saar, Jean


Michel Basquiat, Carrie Mae Weems, and Lorna Simpson, along with polemic, personal recollections, and interviews. In it she wrote, ‘‘Art constitutes one of the rare locations where acts of transcendence can take place and have a wide-ranging transformative impact.’’ If her position as one of the premiere African American intellectuals has enabled hooks to be seen and heard in more places than her 1960s counterparts might have been, it has also exposed her to the criticism of conservatives who dismiss her social critique as outdated and liberals who want her to stop focusing on such popular culture topics as Madonna and to make better use of the attention she commands. Nevertheless, hooks’ book on the movies, Reel to Real, hardly fits into the category of conventional entertainment journalism. Two of her more recent books, Wounds of Passion and Remembered , tread the familiar ground of writers writing about writing, but hooks revitalizes some of the old questions by incorporating her contemporary take on race and gender. OTHER WORKS: And There We Wept (1978). Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery (1992). A Woman’s Mourning Song (1999). Happy to Be Nappy (1999). Important articles include: ‘‘Black Women’s Sexuality in the New Film,’’ Sage (1985). ‘‘Writing the Subject: Reading The Color Purple,’’ Modern Critical Views: Alice Walker (edited by Harold Bloom, 1987). ‘‘Black Is a Woman’s Color,’’ Callaloo (Spring, 1989). ‘‘Essentialism and Experience,’’ American Literary History (Spring, 1991). ‘‘Democracy, Inc.: The Hill-Thomas Hearings,’’ Artforum (January, 1992). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Florence, N., bell hooks’ Engaged Pedagogy (1998). Feminist Review (Autumn 1989). Signs (Summer 1986). —LISA MARCUS, UPDATED BY MARK SWARTZ

HOOPER, Lucy Born 4 February 1816, Newburyport, Massachusetts; died 1 August 1841, Brooklyn, New York Wrote under: L. H. Daughter of Joseph Hooper From an early age, Lucy Hooper’s educational and creative development was supervised and encouraged by her father. She was educated in botany, chemistry, French, Spanish, Latin, and English literature. In 1831 after her father’s death, the family moved to Brooklyn, where Hooper soon began contributing to the Long Island Star and the New Yorker. A devoted member of the Episcopal church, she wrote a prize-winning essay, ‘‘Domestic Happiness,’’ and two other pieces on religion and virtue for Dunning’s collection, Domestic Happiness Portrayed (1831). Hooper’s last year was spent editing The Lady’s Book of Flowers and Poetry (1842), a compendium of botanical information,

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poems, and illustrations, but she died of pulmonary consumption before its publication. Hooper’s more serious poems develop religious themes. ‘‘The Daughter of Herodias,’’ selected by William Cullen Bryant for inclusion in his volume of American poetry, recounts Salome’s sorrow and remorse on bearing the head of John the Baptist to her unpitying mother. Salome’s horror of death, her loss of innocence, and her forlorn desire for forgiveness are conveyed through the distraught voice of a young woman recounting ‘‘wild dreams of judgment and offended Heaven.’’ The skillful mixture of pentameter and trimeter lines and the unconventional rhyme pattern enhance this strange vision. In ‘‘The Queen’s Petition,’’ Hooper effectively uses blank verse to retell the story of Esther. Here the narrator abandons the ‘‘pages of old romance’’ to turn to the ‘‘inspired volume’’ where love between a man and a woman can become the means of a people’s salvation. Along with these two poems, contemporaries tended to favor such pieces as ‘‘Time, Faith, Energy,’’ ‘‘It is Well,’’ ‘‘The Summons of Death,’’ and ‘‘Life and Death,’’ all of which assure the reader that, in time, death will offer comfort and retribution for the hardships and sorrows of life. Too often Hooper allows her poetry to fall to the level of conventionally inconsequential romantic verse. Her editor recalls that she rarely revised, but her gift for easy meters and rhymes is not always a happy one. Her frequent use of variations on the ballad stanza relegates much of her output to light verse. She is too content to settle for facile rhymes such as ‘‘light/night’’ and ‘‘bloom/doom,’’ and tends to rely on trite refrains, such as ‘‘Lady, ’twas a dream,’’ to hold together her poems of knights and their ladies, of death and faithful love. Hooper’s prose is usually overtly didactic. ‘‘Scenes from Real Life,’’ for instance, is devoted to revealing the folly of such sins as pride and greed and to praising the attributes of loyalty, good taste, and reverence. One tale does show promise of a more original imagination. ‘‘Reminiscence of a Clergyman’’ presents the interesting moral dilemma of a man who, presumed lost at sea, returns after many years to find his wife now happily married to his brother. Having established this situation, however, Hooper is satisfied to have the man find peace by relying on the future happiness guaranteed in the next world. A contemporary critic evaluated Hooper’s work in what still appear to be valid terms. He wrote: ‘‘She was known to be capable of much more than she had ever accomplished. She chose, however, to make no struggle for fame; but preferred to sing occasionally a spontaneous song, and scatter flowers by the wayside.’’ Regretting that she did not make more effort, this critic continues: ‘‘What she left will be enough for memory with us, even if her fame was not matured for the world’s wider circle.’’ OTHER WORKS: Scenes from Real Life, and Other American Tales (1841). The Complete Poetical Works (1848). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: The American Female Poets (1848). Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography (1887). A

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Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors Living and Deceased (1863). The Female Poets of America (1851). —PHYLLIS GOTTLIEB

HOOPER, Lucy (Hamilton) Jones Born 20 January 1835, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; died 31 August 1893, Paris, France Daughter of Bataile Muse Jones; married Robert E. Hooper, 1854 Born into a prominent Philadelphia family, Lucy Jones Hooper began her literary career as an extension of her social obligations. At the Great Central Sanitary Fair in Philadelphia, she helped edit the daily chronicle and presented 100 copies of her first book of poems and translations from the German. A reverse in her husband’s finances, however, compelled Hooper to make her literary dabbling into a source of additional revenue. From 1868 to 1870, she was both a contributor and assistant editor of Lippincott’s magazine, and a second book of poems was published in 1871. In 1874 her husband was appointed vice-consul general in Paris. There Hooper found herself a central member of the American colony and an active participant in literary, artistic, and intellectual circles. She maintained a regular correspondence with numerous American periodicals, among them the Post-Dispatch of St. Louis and Appleton’s Journal. Her column in the Philadelphia Daily Evening Telegraph, where she reported on the fashion, art, and politics of Europe, ran without interruption for 20 years. In addition to her journalistic work, Hooper wrote two plays—one, Her Living Image (1886), with French dramatist Laurencin, and another, Helen’s Inheritance, which was produced in Paris in 1888, and in New York, as Inherited, in 1889. She also wrote three novels. The first, Under the Tricolor; or, The American Colony in Paris (1880), raised quite a stir, as various publications attempted to identify the fictional characters with living Americans. Without this element of gossip, however, the plot, which involves a romance between two insipid young people of good family but inadequate finances, is extremely dull. The characters are not allowed to develop beyond their stock roles as cruel father, flighty widow, uncultured provincial, or benevolent patron. Hooper does not have sufficient control over the tone of the book, which swings from sentimental pathos to what seem to be aborted attempts at satire. The Tsar’s Window (1881), on the other hand, is still rather engaging. The story is told primarily through the journal of Dorris Romilly, a device employed less consistently and less successfully in Under the Tricolor. While the romantic plot at times verges on the melodramatic, Dorris’ confusion over the character and motives of various suitors awakens the reader’s curiosity. Moreover, her straightforward intelligence, her independence, her wit, and her ability to laugh at herself all gain immediate sympathy. Without unnecessary preaching, Dorris’ character provides a

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vigorous defense of the American system of education, which, unlike the European, allowed women to have at least a modicum of freedom. In addition, the detailed descriptions of life in St. Petersburg in winter give an authentic and interesting picture of aristocratic life in 19th-century Russia. Sentimental themes of melancholy and death are prominent in Hooper’s poems, but her poetry is most successful when she is able to maintain a tough-minded stance toward romantic clichés. A poem such as ‘‘The Duel’’ deftly conveys the façade of flippant bravado assumed by a man who has just killed another and is now trying to quiet his wife’s fears as well as his own. The rhyming iambic pentameter line is smoothly colloquial throughout. Similarly, ‘‘Gretchen’’ uses a simple four-line stanza and refrain to tell the story of a young woman who drowns her illegitimate baby to maintain her spotless reputation. Hooper had a sharp eye for contemporary issues and social mores, a sound knowledge of the arts, an honest wit, and a clear-headed intelligence. When she allows these qualities to dominate, her work still commands attention. Unfortunately, she too often succumbs to using sentimental conventions to defend the platitudes of proper moral behavior. OTHER WORKS: Poems with Translations from the German of Geibel and Others (1864). Poems (1871). Those Pretty St. George Girls (1883). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Scharf, J. T., and T. Westcott, eds., History of Philadelphia, 1609-1884 (1884). Reference works: AA. Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography (1887). AW. CAL. DAB. NCAB. Other references: Philadelphia Evening Telegraph (31 Aug. 1893, 12 Sept. 1893). —PHYLLIS GOTTLIEB

HOPE, Laura Lee See ADAMS, Harriet Stratemeyer

HOPKINS, Pauline (Elizabeth) Born 1895, Portland, Maine; died 23 August 1930, Cambridge, Massachusetts Also wrote under: Sarah A. Allen Daughter of William A. and Sarah Allen Hopkins Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins was educated in the public schools of Boston. Before she graduated from the Girls High School, she had won a prize of $10 in gold, offered by the Congregational Publishing Society of Boston, for the best essay on ‘‘The Evils of Intemperance and Their Remedies.’’ Initially, she aspired to be a


playwright, and in 1879 wrote the musical drama Slaves’ Escape; or, The Underground Railroad, also known as Peculiar Sam. Another play, One Scene from the Drama of Early Days, based on the biblical story of Daniel, was also written in this period. From 1892 to 1985, she worked as a stenographer and eventually won a civil service appointment to the Bureau of Statistics on the Massachusetts Decennial Census, where she worked from 1895 to 1899. In May 1900, she resumed her literary career with a short story in the inaugural issue of the Colored American magazine. By May of 1903, she had become the literary editor of the magazine and contributed many short stories and essays, one series of 12 biographical articles on ‘‘Famous Men of the Negro Race,’’ and another series on ‘‘Famous Women of the Negro Race.’’ Two of her novels, Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest and Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self, were serialized in the magazine in 1902. Another serialized novel, Hagar’s Daughter, was apparently also written by Hopkins, under the pen name Sarah A. Allen. Because of ill health, in 1904 Hopkins left the Colored American, which had moved to New York, and returned to the stenographic profession, this time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her only literary endeavor after this was a series of articles, ‘‘Dark Races of the Twentieth Century,’’ which appeared in the Voice of the Negro from December 1904 through July 1905. Contending Forces (1900), Hopkins’ only novel published in book form, is a romance written in the typical genteel style common at the turn of the century. The plot centers on four young people in Boston who fall in love and, in spite of calamities, tragedies, and a complicated series of events, end up happily married and in possession of a lost family fortune. The ‘‘contending forces’’ in the novel are those problems and injustices African Americans encountered both in the North and in the South after the Civil War, such as the lack of political power, the difficulty in obtaining jobs, and most serious, the lynchings that were such a common occurrence in the South. In her frequently didactic style, she refers often to the inevitable and desirable mixing of the races through marriage. Mysticism and other psychic phenomena are important in the novel, existing concurrently with staunch, traditional Christianity. In the preface, she speaks of herself as ‘‘one of the proscribed race’’ and frequently uses the terms ‘‘inferior’’ and ‘‘superior’’ when referring to the black race and the white race, respectively. The serialized novels and numerous short stories share a similar style and subject matter; almost all have a strong mystical element, and many deal with interracial love and marriage. Many of her essays are biographical with an obvious didactic tone, and she invariably points out that perseverance and hard work have resulted in the various individuals’ success. In an essay in the Colored American of June 1900, she advocates limited suffrage for women. As one of the first black women writers, Hopkins has a secure niche among the ‘‘Talented Tenth’’ of the Negro race, as W. E. B.

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Du Bois designated the African American middle class of his day. Hers were not explicitly novels of protest, of which there were none at the turn of the century; she writes only of the black middle class and its problems. Her descriptive prose is often excessively florid, and when writing in dialect she falls short of authentic reproduction. Nonetheless, she occupies a unique place in the African American literary heritage as a woman who did no less herself than what she expected of her readers. OTHER WORKS: The papers of Pauline Hopkins are housed at the Fisk University Library in Nashville, Tennessee. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bone, R., The Negro Novel in America (1965). Campbell, J., Mythic Black Fiction: The Transformation of History (1986). Carby, H. V., Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Women Novelists (1987). Gloster, H., Negro Voices in American Fiction (1948). Loggins, V., The Negro Author: His Development in America to 1900 (1964). Pryse, M. and H. J. Spillers, eds., Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, Literary Tradition (1985). Reference works: Black American Writers Past and Present (1975). Dictionary of American Negro Biography (1982). DLB (1986). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Colored American (Jan. 1901). Phylon (Spring 1972). —MARILYN LAMPING

HOPPER, Hedda Born Elda Furry, 2 May 1885, Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania; died 1 February 1966, Los Angeles, California Daughter of David E. and Margaret Miller Furry; married DeWolf Hopper, 1913 (divorced 1922); children: one son The fifth of nine children, Hedda Hopper grew up in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where she left eighth grade to help at home and in her father’s butcher shop. She fiercely resented her autocratic father and grandfather and envied her brothers’ freedom. After seeing Ethel Barrymore on stage, Hopper vowed to become an actress. She studied music in Pittsburgh, then joined a road company in New York. In 1908, appearing in the chorus of The Pied Piper, she met actor DeWolf Hopper, 27 years her senior; she became his fifth wife and changed her name to Hedda. After the birth of her son in 1915, Hopper followed her husband to Hollywood, where he was to make a film. Although she had given up her career at marriage, she now accepted minor stage and screen roles offering her a security her husband could not. In 1922 Hopper divorced him on the grounds of adultery. In 1938 Hopper began a news column, later syndicated as ‘‘Hedda Hopper’s Hollywood.’’ Her background in films and theater provided excellent contacts; her innate sense of fashion

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helped her establish her personal trademark, the elaborate hat. She emerged as an awesome rival for gossip queen Louella Parsons— movie stars, with few exceptions, trod softly to avoid her wrath. She and Parsons became the Scylla and Charybdis of Hollywood. Columnist Hopper’s politics grew increasingly conservative, her morality sterner. She campaigned vigorously against communism in Hollywood and her personal feuds were legion. At her peak she claimed 35 million readers. Death came suddenly from complications of viral pneumonia. Hopper is frequently charged with having a ghostwriter for her column; in fact, she did not write it herself. The column was dictated to her staff (a rewrite woman, two secretaries, and two legmen), who then revised and typed it for her final approval. She could not spell, did not know grammar, and cared less. Hopper’s style is breezy and colloquial (‘‘Boy! Heck! ’’). Sunday feature articles are generally more focused and coherent; daily columns are breathless bits and pieces, with occasional acidic allusions to those currently out of her favor (such as Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, and Joan Bennett). Hopper’s From Under My Hat (1952) has been called ‘‘an amorphous autobiography.’’ Hopper officially eliminates five years from her life, omits dates, and ignores chronology wherever possible; thus her book becomes anecdotal and totally confusing. The Whole Truth and Nothing But (1963) resembles a dramatized gossip column bridging the years between the two books. Hopper’s organization is much tighter (perhaps because of her coauthor). The book also includes considerable grade-B dialogue, as Hopper offers counsel to erring film stars. There is an incredible scene in which Hopper summons Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Wilding to her home for prenuptial advice. (Wilding subsequently sued Hopper and her publisher for $3 million.) Hopper’s real influence came not through her books but through her column and her presence in a Hollywood now vanished. She recaptures some of that nostalgia, but the writing is frequently dull. Her view of women is not flattering; she praises Joan Crawford by writing that she ‘‘thinks like a man.’’ Hopper calls herself ‘‘The Bitch of the World,’’ delighting in her feuds, yet there is little of the well-turned phrase, the quick wit, in her work. At her best, Hopper recounts anecdotes; at her worst, she insinuates. She is no writer, but a talker, a gossip (albeit a powerful one), and too frequently a minor actress starring at last in her own books. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Eells, G., Hedda and Louella (1972). Reference works: CB (Nov. 1942, Mar. 1966). Other references: Chicago Sunday Tribune (24 Aug. 1952). NYT (14 Sept. 1952, 2 Feb. 1966). Time (28 July 1947, 15 Feb. 1963). —JOANNE MCCARTHY

HORLAK, E. E. See TEPPER, Sheri S.

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HORNEY, Karen (Danielsen) Born 16 September 1885, Hamburg, Germany; died 4 December 1952, New York, New York Daughter of Berndt and Clothilde Danielsen; married Oscar Horney, 1909 (divorced 1939); children: three daughters Karen Horney developed an early interest in foreign peoples, their cultures and customs, when in her teens she made several ocean voyages with her father, a devoutly religious Norwegian sea captain. Because of his long absences, however, it was Horney’s free-thinking Dutch mother who exerted the stronger influence and encouraged her to attend medical school at a time when professions were virtually closed to women. Horney received her medical degree from the University of Berlin in 1913. She married a Berlin lawyer, with whom she had three daughters before conflicting interests and her growing dedication to psychoanalysis resulted in separation in 1926 and divorce in 1939. After teaching for 12 years at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, Horney emigrated to the U.S. in 1932 and became a citizen in 1938. Horney codirected the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis (1932-34), taught at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute (1934-41), helped found the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis and the American Institute for Psychoanalysis, served on the teaching staff at the New School for Social Research, lectured at the New York Medical College, and was founding editor of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis. Horney’s most significant works include The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (1937), which stresses the impact of culture and environment on character development. New Ways in Psychoanalysis (1939) clarifies Horney’s position in relation to Freud. Our Inner Conflicts (1945) emphasizes the interpersonal dynamics of neuroses. Neurosis and Human Growth (1950), the most comprehensive explication of Horney’s mature ideas, focuses on the intrapsychic dynamics of neuroses. Horney’s break from Freud marks the beginning of her important contribution to the development of both psychological theory and therapy. It was triggered by her repudiation of Freud’s instinctivistic and male-oriented psychology. In a reversal of Freud’s concepts, Horney contends that neuroses may originate in adulthood as well as in childhood, that they are not an outgrowth of normal processes but a perversion of them, and that the dynamics of male and female neuroses are identical. Horney’s theory postulates a ‘‘real self’’ is the central motivating force of the psyche. It generates a ‘‘morality of evolution’’ whereby ‘‘man, by his very nature. . .strives toward self-realization, and. . .his set of values evolves from such striving.’’ It is the ‘‘blockage’’ of the real self Horney considers the first move toward neurosis. A ‘‘disturbance in one’s relation to self and to others,’’ neurosis results from a lack of love, security, belonging, and self-esteem. In an attempt to allay anxiety and cope with life, the individual develops a pseudo-‘‘solution.’’ This solution generates a complex system of defense mechanisms and a unique worldview


with a corresponding system of values, needs, and taboos. The three types of solutions include the self-effacing solution, which puts a premium on love, the expansive solution, which exalts mastery, and the resigned solution, which idealizes detachment. Every neurosis incorporates all three solutions; but for the sake of inner harmony, the individual makes one solution predominant and represses the others. One of the most important functions of the solution is its compensation for a lack of healthy self-esteem by creating an ‘‘idealized image’’ in which the individual takes an unhealthy pride. Indeed, one makes an unconscious ‘‘bargain with fate’’ by which all wishes will be fulfilled and pride reinforced if one can become the idealized self. Thus, one abandons the real self and begins to develop in self-alienated ways in the course of this search for glory. Far from solving problems, however, the solution generates a host of difficulties on both intrapsychic and interpersonal levels. Problems arise on an intrapsychic level because the needs of the solution are compulsive and take on the authority of ‘‘shoulds’’ that produce self-hate if the individual fails to live up to them. Since the standards of the idealized self are superhuman, self-hate is inevitable. It is exacerbated, moreover, when circumstances bring the repressed solutions to the surface. Since the three solutions are incompatible, the surfacing of a repressed tendency involves the individual in a conflict by which the fulfillment of one set of needs violates a contradictory set. Instead of becoming the idealized self, the individual is forced by self-hate to identify with its counterpart—the despised self. Interpersonal problems are caused by the individual’s distorted view of others, seen according to the individual’s needs. Lacking self-esteem, the neurotic’s false pride depends totally upon the opinions of others. To avoid inner conflict, ‘‘shoulds’’ are externalized and become ‘‘claims’’ on others. To allay self-hate, the neurotic projects it either directly in the form of vengeance or passively by seeing himself or herself as victimized. In all these ways, the neurotic’s vulnerability, dependency, and hostility are augmented. Ultimately, the neurotic solution does not provide salvation but becomes a monster by which the individual is enslaved to inner dictates, snarled in unreconcilable conflicts, and tormented with self-hate. Horney compares the neurotic’s bargain with fate to ‘‘a pact with the devil, who promises him glory’’ but makes him ‘‘go to hell—to the hell within himself.’’ In spite of this ‘‘great tragedy,’’ Horney’s theory is optimistic. It is possible to free the real self from its crippling shackles, to recover the individual’s actual capabilities, and to revive spontaneous wishes and wholeheartedness so that once again one can head in the right direction on the road to self-realization. Not only is Horney’s work notable for its description and etiology of neuroses and for its advancement toward a theory of healthy self-actualization, but it is also notable for the great strides it has made in feminine psychology. It has contributed to the liberation of woman from the image of virgin/mother/goddess and to the recovery of her humanity, together with the challenge to

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develop her ‘‘human’’ potentialities for strength, creativity, and growth. On the basis of Horney’s great achievements and the future possibilities offered by her work, she not only holds a place of distinction in American psychology—to which the Karen Horney Psychoanalytic Institute in New York City stands as testimony— but she also claims an international reputation, as indicated by the translation of her books into 13 languages. Although she is a scientist, Horney also made an impact on the world of literature. Her style blends the imaginative ideas, easy flow of language, and intriguing sense of humor that lend it the beauty of art with the precision, documentation, and explication that give it the authority of science. In addition to the pleasure and self-understanding to be derived from Horney’s work, it is an invaluable tool to the student of literature. Because it deals with enduring elements in human experience, Horney’s theory is congruent with a great many characters from Western literature of many periods and cultures. By providing a means to explain the conflicts, inconsistencies, and contradictions of these characters, it can lead to a deeper understanding of complex characterization than criticism has hitherto afforded. Horney’s work holds open the doors to the self, to others, and to literature. Through these doors can be found a fuller life of one’s own and a place in the human struggle for communication, understanding, and empathy that will make life richer for everyone.

OTHER WORKS: Self-Analysis (1942). Feminine Psychology (1964).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Alexander, F. A. et al., eds., Psychoanalytic Pioneers (1966). Kelman, H., Helping People: Karen Horney’s Psychoanalytic Approach (1971). Paris, B. J., A Psychological Approach to Fiction (1974). Rubins, J. L., Developments in Horney Psychoanalysis (1972). Rubins, J. L., Karen Horney: Gentle Rebel of Psychoanalysis (1978). Reference works: CB (Aug. 1941, Jan. 1953). DAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCAS. Other references: American Journal of Psychoanalysis (1954, 1961). —KAREN ANN BUTERY

HOUSTON, Jean Born 10 May 1939, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Jack and Maria Todaro Houston; married Robert Masters, 1965 Jean Houston, scholar, researcher, author of more than 17 books, calls herself a ‘‘midwife of the spirit.’’ Her work involves

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the study, collection, and application of human capacities developed around the world under different environmental and social conditions. Her books expand our understanding of human possibility through the examination of states of consciousness, sensory imageries, self-regulation of experiential time, and the exploration of the personal and collective unconscious. A ‘‘hybrid of hybrids,’’ Houston’s genetic background marries Scottish-Sicilian on her mother’s side with her father’s Texan and Cherokee heritage. Her father, a descendent of Texas hero Sam Houston, wrote comedy sketches for such notable personalities as Henny Youngman, Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Edgar Bergen, and others on the Hollywood scene of the 1940s and 1950s. ‘‘Gianuzza,’’ as her maternal grandmother called her, had a nomadic childhood, moving from one city and school to another as her father’s career moved them across the country. Rather than becoming the shy and reticent ‘‘new kid,’’ she learned to walk into the schoolroom and command control. Houston’s formidable talents as an evocateur of human capacities advance her vision of the highest achievement of individual potential, a key theme in the field of humanistic psychology. What makes Houston’s work unique is her ability to inspire individuals to see their own lives in terms of the larger world stage. Her experiential workshops, integrating imagery and creativity studies with exercises originally aimed at developing flexible body movement, result in improved memory, and the ability to think simultaneously on several tracks and reconnect with the mythic and symbolic realms of the deep self. The process contributes to both psychological and physical healing. In 1965 Houston and her husband, Robert Masters, started the Foundation for Mind Research in New York City to study methods of exploring human consciousness. She was among a team of experts who had grant money to study the effects of LSD on personality. When legalized tests of the substance ended, they focused on nondrug methods for exploring human consciousness, developing a sensory deprivation chamber, an audiovisual overload chamber, and an Altered States of Consciousness Induction Device (ASCID). That same year, they published their first book together, The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience, elaborating on their mutual and separate studies. The book, featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review under the headline ‘‘Psychedelicious or Psychedelirious?’’ launched Houston’s career as a speaker on college campuses and talk shows. For the remainder of the 1960s she became a maverick against the indiscriminate use of psychedelic drugs, a proponent of controlled nondrug mind-expanding experiences, and an ersatz ‘‘drug counselor’’ trying to talk students on bad trips back to earth. Mind Games (1972) addresses much of Houston’s and Masters’ work in the 1960s, describing their attempts to utilize altered states of consciousness for educational purposes. The late mythologist Joseph Campbell, with whom Houston conducted seminars and workshops, wrote that Houston and Masters had ‘‘broken through to a new understanding of the. . .disciplines of inward-turned contemplation,’’ leaving behind Freudian techniques of the day. Their focus, he argued, was not on curing disease but

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on enlarging health and discovering the joy, mystery, and life-wisdom of the unconscious. A protégé of Margaret Mead, with a matching sense of curiosity, independence, and mettle, Houston learned the workings of organizations and power structures Mead had observed in her work as an anthropologist. ‘‘Go out and make the money [for the foundation] yourself,’’ Mead advised Houston. ‘‘Then the job you want to do gets done and you are beholden to no one.’’ Both Campbell and Mead served on the Foundation Advisory Board, as did Israeli physicist Moshe Feldenkrais, artist Leo Katz, and philosopher Alan W. Watts. In 1972 the Foundation moved to Pomona, New York, where it has become a center for ongoing classes, seminars, and workshops. As founder of the Mystery School, which meets nine times a year in upstate New York, Houston remains dedicated to teaching history, philosophy, the new physics, psychology, anthropology, and myth as well as ‘‘the many dimensions of our human potential.’’ Houston’s range of accomplishments is prodigious; awards and citations include the distinguished Leadership Award from the Association of Teacher Education (1985); the Gardner Murphy Humanitarian Award and the INTA Humanitarian of the Year award (1993); the Lifetime Outstanding Creative Achievement Award from the Creative Education Foundation (1994); and the Joseph Campbell Award for Contributions to the Understanding of Mythology (1996). During her 30-year career, she has lectured and taught at Hunter College of the City University of New York, the New School for Social Research, Marymount College, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and gave the William James Lecture at the Harvard Divinity School. Her work has fostered hundreds of teaching/learning communities throughout the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia, South America, and Australia. In 1984 she founded the Possible Society, a nonprofit organization that encourages the solution of societal problems. She chaired the United Nations Temple of Understanding Conference of World Religious Leaders in 1975, served as president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology in 1977, and chaired the 1979 U.S. Department of Commerce symposium for government policymakers. As an adviser to UNICEF, she works to implement programs in education and health, primarily in Myanmar (Burma) and Bangladesh. Most recently, Houston made cross-cultural studies of educational and healing methods in Asia and Africa. ‘‘The world is set for a whole-system transition wherein all cultures have something of supreme value to offer the whole.’’ This holographic vision of the future speaks to the salvation of the planet and the human race. OTHER WORKS: Listening to the Body (with Robert Masters, 1978). Life Force: The Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self (1980). The Possible Human (1982). The Search for the Beloved: Journeys in Sacred Psychology (1987). Godseed: The Journey of Christ (1988). The Hero and the Goddess: The Odyssey as Mystery and Initiation (1992). Public Like a Frog: Entering the


Lives of Three Great Americans (1993). Manual for the Peacemaker: An Iroquois Legend to Heal Self and Society (with Margaret Rubin , 1994). The Passion of Isis and Osiris: The Union of Two Souls (1995). A Mythic Life: Learning to Live Our Greater Story (1996). A Passion for the Possible (1997). Erwachen (German, 1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Jean Houston website: www.JeanHouston.org —MIRIAM KALMAN HARRIS, PH.D.

HOWARD, Maureen Born 28 June 1930, Bridgeport, Connecticut Daughter of William S. and Loretta Burns Kearns; married Daniel Howard, 1954; Daniel J. Gordon, 1968 Maureen Howard attended Smith College (B.A., 1952) and was briefly employed in publishing. She is a novelist and has also been a frequent reviewer, particularly for the New York Times Book Review. Howard teaches at Columbia University. She has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award three times: in 1983, 1987, and 1993. Howard is one of the most important female novelists in America today, yet she goes largely unrecognized by feminists and by the general public, probably because her work is neither didactic nor fast-paced. Instead, the action is almost entirely cerebral, with events perceived indirectly, often filtered through the consciousness of the main character. Howard’s characters are searching for liberation; they attempt to free themselves, not politically but psychologically, from a past to which they are tied by memories and commitments too strong to escape completely. Howard’s memoirs demonstrate the power of the past in her personal life. Facts of Life (1978) is oblivious to chronology; it circles and recircles Howard’s past in an attempt to unravel its mysteries, creating a cumulative effect. The product of a middle-class family, her parents were so strictly Catholic that when little Maureen inadvertently broke her fast with orange juice before her first communion, her white dress and veil were packed away for a later date and the family celebration was canceled. Her mother had an unfocused admiration for the arts, sending Howard off to piano, dancing, and elocution lessons, while her father ridiculed art as unrealistic and pretentious, purposefully discomfiting his family with coarse ostentation. As a little girl, Howard, like her mother, ‘‘did not want art confused with real life,’’ so it is to her credit that her novels have overcome this separation. The conjunction of art and life came gradually. Howard herself describes Not a Word About Nightingales (1961) as ‘‘mannered’’ and ‘‘academic’’; it demonstrates the formal and thematic belief that ‘‘our passion must be contained if we are not to be fools.’’ This first novel juxtaposes the cultural reticence of New England with the emotional effusion of Italy (not unlike the

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opposing commitments of Howard’s parents). A New England professor on sabbatical decides to stay in Perugia, while his wife returns home, maintaining her quietly controlled demeanor. But she sends their daughter to bring her father home. At first the daughter prefers the father as she finds him in Italy, extroverted and appetitive; but when she discovers his affair with a plump signorina, she stages a suicide scare to manipulate her father into returning home. He is, in any case, now bored with his poverty, his mistress, his role. His return marks the resumption by the whole family of the reticent and controlled lives of their past. Howard’s second novel is far more challenging both in form and subject matter. Bridgeport Bus (1966) is presented as the notebooks of Mary Agnes Keely, a 35-year-old Catholic virgin who lives with her demanding and obese mother in a tacky Bridgeport duplex. Mary Agnes runs off to New York, and in the permissiveness of that society the notebook’s style becomes as experimental as the heroine. Half the book deals with the personal histories of Mary Agnes’ roommate and cousin, but an attempt to focus the novel comes at the end, which returns us to the beginning, when Mary Agnes goes back to Bridgeport as the new ‘‘Fat Momma’’ of a baby girl. There is, it seems, no bus out of Bridgeport, no escape from the past. This is the pattern again repeated in Before My Time (1975), where Jim Cogan arrives at the beginning and leaves at the end of the novel, with Laura Quinn left standing at the airport having thought a lot but changed little. Jim is the 17-year-old son of Laura’s cousin, sent to stay with Laura and her husband while awaiting arraignment on drug-possession charges. As Laura and Jim trade memories, she begins to envy his freedom from a past that has committed her to inescapable patterns of behavior. Jim is able to shrug off the past, saying it is ‘‘before my time,’’ but she carries burdens: a dead older brother to live up to, a pattern of orderly repression (revealed by her journalism), her tasteful suburban home, and the man she married. Jim Cogan’s anarchy exposes her restraints, yet when she offers him money to escape entirely from the law, from his family, and from his past, he refuses and takes up the commitments that she finds so restrictive. Howard’s novels consistently show a skillful, yet unpretentious and unobtrusive, stylistic sensitivity, with a fine sense of descriptive monologue conveying subtle nuances of meaning. Reviewers compare her to Henry James and Virginia Woolf, and while she has not reached the artistry of either, she may yet do so. She writes in a way that calls readers’ attention to her works as written texts, documents of life. It is not just that she often writes both about writing and writers—Margaret Flood, protagonist of Expensive Habits (1986) is a writer; Jack, a character in Natural History (1992), is a would-be screenwriter; and almost all of the characters of her recent novels are compilers and editors of their own memories. It is also Howard’s round, sometimes-jagged, often-poetic narrative structures and prose augment our understanding of the setbacks, start-ups, and rich, enigmatic moments of her characters’ lives. Almost all of Howard’s more recent critics see her as a superb craftsperson, and many of them cite her precision of perception,

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her abundance of feeling, and occasionally, her tendency to judge. Her few negative reviews stem from what the critics see as her excessive ellipses and her penchant for leaping from person to person (both in terms of character and narrative point of view) and from story line to story line. In an interview, Howard commented, ‘‘The most exciting thing in the world to me is the idea of audience. The knowledge that someone has had to do some work on the other side—to understand what you’ve implied, to imagine something in a new way.’’ Grace Abounding (1982) features Maude Dowd, widow, childlike mother of Margaret, fantasizer, and finally, child psychologist. Maude’s character remains as unfixed as Howard’s narrative, which alights on Margaret, the eccentric LeDoux sisters, and an abused little boy, among others. Expensive Habits centers on, but hardly restricts itself to, another multifaceted, intelligent, struggling woman. Margaret Flood battles, perhaps tritely, an injured heart. The novel chronicles her attempted rewritings of her life, which are beautifully crafted and perceptive, but can never tell the whole story. In this and her other novels, Howard creates the paradox of adding more and more details that increase our understanding of the novel while simultaneously expanding the parameters of what we have to understand. Natural History is Howard’s biggest novel, both in scope and ambition. It chronicles the development of Bridgeport, Connecticut, and some of its inhabitants, especially the Bray family. One critic names Howard’s native Bridgeport as the protagonist, a good choice for those who insist that every good, big novel have one. The novel’s lack of a main character, and of linear chronology and a consistent mode of storytelling (it includes prose narrative, screenplay, and civic diary), challenges notions about the necessities of novel writing. Howard’s experimentalism is not merely for its own sake: her characters are also experimenting— adding meaning to the mystery of their lives and vice versa. Howard’s seventh novel A Lover’s Almanac (1998) is the first of a proposed trilogy of stories set in the year 2000. Howard follows Louise Moffett, born and raised on a Wisconsin farm, and her boyfriend, Artie Freeman, a Park Avenue-raised computer geek. On the dawn of the new millennium, the two break up and Howard traces their feelings and subsequent reunion using the style of an almanac. As she charts the lives of the main characters—and a secondary relationship between Artie’s widowed grandfather and a woman from his past with whom he begins a relationship—Howard weaves predictions from the Old Farmer’s Almanac to make her points. She also adds biographical tidbits about Alexander Graham Bell, Virginia Woolf, Bill Gates, facts about astronomy and ancient Egypt, and bits of astrology. ‘‘Nearly every culture has created an almanac of some kind, trying to set some pattern—like a calendar—on the chaos of our emotions,’’ Howard explained to the Seattle Times in a review of her latest work. OTHER WORKS: The Penguin Book of Contemporary American Essays (editor, 1984). Contributor to: O Pioneers!, The Son of the

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Lark & My Antonia (1998); Cabbage and Bones: An Anthology of Irish-American Women’s Fiction (1997). Numerous articles and book reviews in such publications as Yale Review, NYTBR, the Nation, and the Virginia Quarterly.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1975). CANR (1990). CLC (1988). CN (1991). DLB (1983, 1984). MTCW (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Booklist (1 Jan. 1998). LJ (Dec. 1997). Newsweek (20 Jan. 1975). NR (4 Oct. 1982). NYTBR (19 Jan. 1975, 26 Sept. 1982, 21 Nov. 1982, 8 June 1986, 18 Oct. 1992). PW (27 Aug. 1982, 15 Oct. 1982, 13 Oct. 1997).SR (Winter 1975). Seattle Times (11 Feb. 1998). —SUZANNE HENNING UPHAUS, UPDATED BY FAYE HALPERN AND NICK ASSENDELFT

HOWE, Florence Born 17 March 1929, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Samuel and Frances Stilly Rosenfeld; married Paul Lauter, 1967 Raised in Brooklyn in an orthodox Jewish family, Florence Howe received a B.A. from Hunter College (1950), an M.A. in English from Smith College (1951), and did further graduate work at the University of Wisconsin (1951-54). A teacher at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland, from 1960 to 1971, Howe found the direction of her thinking and teaching altered by work in a Mississippi Freedom School during the summer of 1964; by participation in the anti-Vietnam War and student movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s; and by the desire to apply what she had learned from these experiences to writing and teaching, particularly to writing and teaching about women. A national leader in the field of women’s studies and one of its best-informed historians, Howe taught as a professor of humanities at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, and has been visiting professor of women’s studies at institutions here and abroad. She also served as editor of the Women’s Studies Newsletter, president of the Feminist Press, and coordinator of the Clearinghouse on Women’s Studies; she has been chairperson of the Modern Language Association’s commission on the status of women and division of women’s studies, as well as the association’s president. Howe’s essays and books are marked by several general characteristics: a recognition of the interrelationships between education, politics, and the teaching and writing of literature; a tendency to move from personal experiences (her own or those of others) to more general social analysis and then to the working out


of practical strategies for change; and a willingness to speak to a wide variety of audiences both within and without the women’s movement and the educational establishment. In essays on contemporary British novelist Doris Lessing, Howe comments on the ways in which Lessing links the growth of her characters and their struggles with freedom and madness, with larger struggles against racism and war, and with the breakdown of Western culture. Similarly, her introduction to No More Masks! (1973), an anthology of modern American women poets, emphasizes connections between the personal and the political in poems in which these writers explore their identities as writers and as women. In more general essays on the connections between feminism and literature, Howe’s principal assumption is that there are important—indeed crucial—connections of class, race, sex, and ethnicity between literature and the lives of those who write and read it. Pointing to our ignorance of women writers of the past, of feminist polemical writing, and of women’s history, she asks us to search for what has been left out of the literary canon and to ask in what ways rediscovered works by women force upon us a revised sense of the value and function of literature. She argues that if women, blacks, or others whose viewpoints are absent from works deemed great by the literary establishment are exposed to a ‘‘vision of the power of language and idea’’ in literature expressive of their own experience, a growth in self-respect and self-awareness and a desire for social change will result. In detailing the extraordinary growth of women’s studies during the late 1960s and early 1970s, Howe has defined its goals as raising the aspirations of women as individuals and as a group working for social change, compensating for the omission of women from the curriculum, encouraging the development of research tools and skills, and working to discover the lost or neglected history and culture of women. Further, Howe insists the perspective of women’s studies must be brought to the elementary and secondary schools, where perceptions of self and society are formed, if feminist goals for education and society are to be achieved. On their broadest level, these recommendations stem from Howe’s conception of power, as described in Women and the Power to Change (1975), ‘‘not as a finite commodity through which one person or group controls another,’’ but as an instrument for social change that can be diffused throughout a group when those with the capacity to lead use their talents to energize others rather than to control them. Seeing women not simply as victims of socialization and discrimination, but as potential agents of their own deliverance. Howe followed up her No More Masks! with a revised and expanded edition in 1993, compiling selected works from more than 100 women poets. As editor, Howe compiled an anthology which represents culturally diverse poetry. Both the former and the new anthologies have met with critical praise from experts and fans for highlighting little-known female writers. But critic Adrian Oktenberg of the Kenyon Review says the revised edition could

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have been deeper and more provocative, missing an opportunity to delve deeper into areas only touched upon by earlier works. Yet Oktenberg still believes No More Masks! is a work worth reading nonetheless. Howe’s Feminist Press marked its 25th anniversary in 1995. ‘‘The books we have brought to light are essential if our daughters and their daughters are to continue to live in a society that values and esteems not only women writers, but also the history and culture their books record,’’ Howe remarked. The press publishes 15-20 books a year. In 1993 the Feminist Press published Women Writing in India: 600 BC to the Present. The 1,200-page, two-volume work distills the most critically conscious writing from one of the longest traditions of women’s literature in the world, according to the Press. It’s next project is Women Writing in Africa, a series of volumes of African women’s writings never before available. Other ongoing projects of the press include the Cross-Cultural Memoir series and the Helen Rose Scheuer Jewish Women’s Series. Howe was the recipient of the Mina Shaughnessy Award Fund for Improvement of Post-Secondary Education in 1982-83. In addition, she was an NEH fellow, 1971-73; a Ford Foundation fellow, 1974-75; Fulbright fellow in 1977; Mellon fellow at Wellesley College in 1979; and a U.S. Department of State grantee in 1983 and 1993. OTHER WORKS: The Conspiracy of the Young (with P. Lauter, 1970). Women’s Studies: Evaluation and Impact on Institutions (1979). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: WW in America (1998). Other references: Choice (Nov. 1973). Critic (May 1971). Harvard Educational Review (Feb. 1977). Kenyon Review (Summer 1994). Political Science Quarterly (Spring 1976). Radical Teacher (Dec. 1977). Saturday Review (19 June 1971). WHR (Winter 1974). Women’s Review of Books (Nov. 1993). —JANET SHARISTANIAN, UPDATED BY NICK ASSENDELFT

HOWE, Julia Ward Born 27 May 1819, New York, New York; died 17 October 1910, Newport, Rhode Island Daughter of Samuel and Julia Cutler Ward; married Samuel G. Howe, 1843; children: six Julia Ward Howe was born into a wealthy New York City family. A combination of tutors and private schools provided her with an excellent education in literature and the Romance languages. She later taught herself German and studied the German philosophers. During her sheltered childhood and youth, her only

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vent for her emotions was the writing of religious poetry. Howe’s life of seclusion ended when she married Samuel Gridley Howe, the director of the Perkins Institute for the Blind. She bore six children in 16 years. Throughout the 1850s and 1860s, Howe struggled to establish a literary career despite her husband’s disapproval. She felt required to publish her first book of verse, Passion Flowers (1854), anonymously. The poems, regular in meter and rhyme, vary in theme and purpose. Passion Flowers contains a number of powerful emotional poems with themes of conflict, disappointment, and inadequacy. Although some of the poems in Words for the Hour (1857) continue to reflect Howe’s inner turmoil and unhappiness, most of the verses are conventional in tone. Later Lyrics (1866) introduces what was to become Howe’s primary poetic form: commemorative verses designed to celebrate a public event or notable personality. Howe’s final book of poetry, From Sunset Ridge (1898), reprinted some of her early poems in addition to publishing new commemorative verse. Other writing ventures included articles for the abolitionist newspaper Commonwealth, a brief stint as editor of Northern Lights, two travel books, travel letters to the New York Tribune, two wordy and unsuccessful plays, and a series of philosophical essays designed to be read as parlor lectures. Howe’s one substantial literary success was the publication of her ‘‘Battle Hymn of the Republic,’’ in Atlantic Monthly (February 1862). The poem gained increasing popularity as the century progressed, but Howe’s publishers forced her to recognize that the audience for her poetry was dwindling. By 1870 Howe was casting around for other ways to express herself. In 1868 Howe embarked on two new projects that departed dramatically from the literary salonière image she had cherished for so long. She helped found the new American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). She was an officer of the AWSA and its successor, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, for 41 years. Howe also helped found the first woman’s club in the Northeast, the New England Woman’s Club, and served as its president for 38 years. In the early 1870s, Howe added to her list of causes by initiating a women’s campaign for world peace. She made speeches, wrote letters, and circulated brief addresses that she composed herself. None of this material found favor with any publisher, but it helped establish Howe’s reputation as a woman activist, her vocation for the rest of her life. During the decades of the 1870s and 1880s, Howe wrote prodigiously. She wrote personal letters, increasing the bonds between women’s organizations and encouraging the founding of new clubs. She took extended lecture trips several times a year, during which she spoke extensively on women’s issues. In 1873 she helped found the Association for the Advancement of Women, a forerunner of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. In connection with her presidency of this organization, she wrote numerous papers on topics of concern to women.

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Howe’s feminist theory pervaded her lectures, articles, and even her occasional sermons. It was an articulate blend of conventional notions about women’s natural domesticity and moral superiority with more radical views concerning women’s spiritual and intellectual equality with men. She saw traditional femininity as a power base that women should strengthen by broader education and work experience. As a means to these ends, she advocated a better distribution of power within the family and the state, opportunities for higher education for women, support for working women, and access to the professions. Howe believed that America would achieve the glory to which she aspired during the 19th century only when women had received the opportunities and respect they deserved. As her sermons and lectures gained renown, Howe came to see herself as a guardian of American virtue. Two of her published lectures—Modern Society (1881) and Is Polite Society Polite? (1895)—reflect her convictions concerning the manners and morals of the New England elite, combined with a new emphasis on woman’s role in maintaining these values. When, in the 1890s, old age limited Howe’s mobility, she began a new career as an essayist for popular and religious magazines. She wrote about everything from ‘‘The Joys of Motherhood’’ to ‘‘Lynch Law in the South.’’ The exposure that these publications provided built up a new, gratifying reputation for Howe as ‘‘Queen of America’’ and ‘‘America’s Grand Old Lady.’’ Although Howe’s writings for public consumption were numerous, very few of them were published by a commercial establishment. The small fraction of her work that was published is not her best writing. The reams of articles and lectures that were never published, however, contain lively images and vigorous, convincing arguments. Howe’s major contribution was her ability to galvanize thousands of women into cooperative action on behalf of their sex. Her flair for ‘‘finding the right word,’’ as she put it, helped improve the status of women for generations, long after her poems and plays were forgotten.

OTHER WORKS: The World’s Own (1857). A Trip to Cuba (1860). From the Oak to the Olive (1868). Memoir of Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe (1876). Margaret Fuller, Marchessa Ossoli (1883). Reminiscences, 1819-1899 (1899). At Sunset (1910). The papers of Julia Ward Howe are housed in the Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College, the Houghton Library of Harvard University, and the Library of Congress.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Clifford, D., Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Biography of Julia Ward Howe (1979). Elliott, M., The Eleventh Hour in the Life of Julia Ward Howe (1911). Grant, M. H., Private Woman, Public Person: An Account of the Life of Julia Ward Howe from 1819-1868 (1994). Gray, J. and C. W. E. Bigsby, She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the 19th Century (1997).


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Hall, F., The Story of the ‘‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’’ (1916). Johnson, W. D., Serious Sentimentalism: A Rhetoric of Antebellum American Women’s Verse (dissertation, 1995). Kane, P., Poetry of the American Renaissance: A Diverse Anthology from the Romantic Period (1995). Kelly, M., ed., Woman’s Being, Woman’s Place: Female Identity and Vocation in American History (1979). Mead, E., Julia Ward Howe’s Peace Crusade (1910). Richards, L., and M. Elliott, Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910 (1915). Richards, L., Two Noble Lives: Samuel Gridley Howe and Julia Ward Howe (1911). Schriber, M. S., Telling Travels: Selected Writings by Nineteenth-Century American Women Abroad (1995). Tharp, L., Three Saints and a Sinner (1956). Williams, G. Hungry Heart: The Literary Emergence of Julia Ward Howe (1999). ZinkSawyer, B. A., The Preachers and the Suffragists: The Role of Preachers in the Ideological Transformation of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the United States (dissertation, 1998). Reference works: AA. AW. CAL. DAB. FPA. NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —MARY H. GRANT

HOWE, Susan Born 1937, Ireland Susan Howe’s poetics are in some respects the opposite of Walt Whitman’s. Where Whitman sought to mythologize America by celebrating Abraham Lincoln, the common worker, and, most famously, himself, Howe has questioned American mythologies, digging up the roots of Americana and struggling to find a place for herself. Whitman’s poems demand to be read aloud; Howe’s ask to be seen arranged on the page. Howe was born in Ireland, and though her subject matter remains centered on America, she draws on Irish literature in the context of the immigrant experience, and her harsh, minimal language has been compared to that of Samuel Beckett. But another harsh, minimal voice has inspired Howe to a far greater extent. She explores and reinterprets this voice in a work of poetic criticism, My Emily Dickinson (1985), demonstrating Dickinson’s intense engagement with American social and intellectual currents and therefore rescuing her from the kid gloves of critics who insist on treating her like an effete hermit. Frame Structures (1996) anthologizes Howe’s early poems, drawing on chapbooks published between 1974 and 1979. Chanting at the Crystal Sea (1975) touches on the history of the Quincy family (descendants of President John Adams) and the ruination of American Indian culture, testing their congruity with the poet’s personal history and an assortment of jarring images: ‘‘children coiled like hedgehogs’’; ‘‘blankets congealed / into icicles’’;

and ‘‘fire hung up by threads.’’ Secret History includes such nontraditional elements as line drawings, appropriated text fragments, and typographical idiosyncrasies, all of which would proliferate in later work, but this poem also has its traditional, even lyrical moments: ‘‘Flakes of thick snow / fell on the open pages.’’ Howe has been grouped with the Language Poets, a designation that brings out her self-conscious use of words, but she never sacrifices feeling for form. Howe’s prose preface to Frame Structures deals obliquely with the autobiographical, familial, literary, and historical sources of her early poetry, swooping from Nigeria to Niagara and Egyptian tombs, to memories of her father and mother, to meditations on the intimacy of archives and antiquarianism. Defenestration of Prague (1983) begins with a 17th-century incident that set off the Thirty Years War and shifts to Ireland, where the poet proceeds to mingle personal history, the ongoing sectarian conflict that proves how little progress has been made in three centuries, and the person of Esther Johnson. Better known as the ‘‘Stella’’ figure in Jonathan Swift’s love poems, Johnson is an elusive, compelling muse, and Howe collages 18th-century texts with Shakespeare’s Cordelia and other works into a personal meditation on female identity miles away from pop psychology or historical romance. My Emily Dickinson followed, and the New England poet took Stella’s place, allowing for a wide-ranging study with a paradoxically narrow focus on a single poem, ‘‘My Life had stood—a Loaded gun—.’’ ‘‘She built a new poetic form,’’ wrote Howe, ‘‘from her fractured sense of being eternally on intellectual borders.’’ The book offers not only a reevaluation of Dickinson’s place in literary history but a virtuosic explication of the poem around which the study is based. According to Marjorie Perloff, ‘‘Howe’s aim is not so much to ‘explain’ Dickinson’s meanings as to relive them.’’ In another nonfiction work, Birth-Mark (1993), Howe explores the concept of wilderness in American literature, surveying a number of writers to determine how wilderness fits into American mythology. In revisiting and interrogating quintessentially American voices, Howe has developed one of her own. Bypassing Whitman, she takes on not just Dickinson but Thoreau, Emerson, and such modern counterparts as Hart Crane and John Cage. Sometimes she even collides her own voice against itself. The final page of ‘‘Scattering As Behavior Toward Risk,’’ from her Singularities (1990), is a dizzying vortex of diagonal lines, where ‘‘Freak inside the heart’’ and ‘‘Secret fact a title given’’ literally intersect and overlap. OTHER WORKS: A Bibliography of the King’s Book or, Eikon Basilike (1989). The Europe of Trusts (1990). The Nonconformist’s Memorial (1993). Pierce-Arrow (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Quartermain, P., Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe (1992). —MARK SWARTZ

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HOWE, Tina Born 21 November 1937, New York, New York Daughter of Quincy and Mary Post Howe; married Norman Levy, 1961; children: Eben, Dara Born in New York City to a family of writers, Tina Howe writes plays stretching dramatic forms and evoking her selfprofessed ‘‘obsession’’ with art. While these plays often feature artists as characters, their concerns are the integration of art and daily life, her themes the renewal and regeneration only art and children provide. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College (B.A. 1959), where she wrote her first play, Howe spent a year in Paris where she ‘‘wrote around the clock. . .and the infatuation [with playwriting] began.’’ After returning, she earned her teaching credentials at Columbia Teachers College and Chicago Teachers College, then began teaching high school first in Monona Grove, Wisconsin, and later in Bath, Maine. There, she says, she learned her craft while running the drama department, a task she took on with the agreement that only her plays be produced. The Nest (1970) was Howe’s first professionally produced play. Often innovative and even experimental, Howe’s most critically successful works to date have been Painting Churches, which won the Outer Critics Circle Award for best Off-Broadway play, 1983-84, and was produced by PBS’ American Playhouse series in 1986, and Coastal Disturbances, which received a Tony nomination for best play, 1987. In 1983 Howe received an Obie for distinguished playwriting. Howe has always claimed an affinity with the absurdists. Her work, however, in its playful exploration of the absurd in a realistic setting, more resembles the early absurdists Pirandello and especially Giraudoux, than it does later, more minimalist absurdists such as Beckett and Genet. Her plays typically work through theme and variation based on musical forms rather than linear plot development. She moves her characters to epiphany incrementally, through accretion, in a series of large and small moments that build into a final, resonant image. This led to some unfounded accusations of formlessness in early reviews by critics more used to obvious moments of crisis and resolution. Howe’s plays develop a rhythmic energy that carry them beyond the ordinary and into a heightened realism bordering on the fantastic or absurd, ending in a release: unexpected silliness, poignant ecstasy, what she calls ‘‘the flamboyant in everyday life.’’ Howe’s plays are notable as well for their imaginative use of settings, from a full working kitchen in Art of Dining (1978) to the complete art exhibit of Museum (1983). Perhaps influenced by her mother’s work as a watercolorist, Howe’s stage directions often provide visual tableaux, as in the strikingly pictorial Coastal Disturbances, and an emphasis on the final image in the stage directions of each play. In The Art of Dining, Howe’s personal

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favorite, the characters huddle around a bonfire inside a restaurant ‘‘purified of their collective civilization and private grief’’ as they feast and the curtain falls. And in Approaching Zanzibar (1990), a young girl bouncing on a trampoline (made up to look like a bed) chants, ‘‘Paradise. . .paradise,’’ as she bounces higher and higher, until she ‘‘looks like a reckless angel challenging the limits of heaven.’’ Howe’s plays have been produced around the country and abroad and have premiered in such prestigious venues as the Los Angeles Actors Theatre, the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Kennedy Center, and the Second Stage. She has also received a Rockefeller grant, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Guggenheim fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and letters award in literature, and received two honorary degrees. Although her family has its roots in the Boston area, Howe has spent most of her life in and around New York City. She teaches playwriting at Hunter College and New York University, as well as at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, University of the South, Tennessee. Howe has served since 1990 on the council of the Dramatists Guild. Howe’s plays continue to document how the public perceives and interprets art and the arts. She acknowledges that women playwrights are often treated with disdain by what remains the largely male domain of the theater but continues to enjoy making the act of writing plays as difficult as possible via her selection of unexpected and untraditional situations and settings. Howe truly pushes the envelope more than the traditional, conservative playwright. Her absurdist comedy, One Shoe Off (1993), explores marriage, fidelity, and courage while also paying homage to the theatrical cliché that the show must go on no matter what else is happening. Her most recent offering is Pride’s Crossing (1997), produced at the Mitzi Newhouse Theatre of Lincoln Center. Called by most critics the best new play of the 1997-98 season, Pride’s Crossing is the story of Mabel Tiding Bigelow. The play opens when Mabel is ninety years old, as she tells the story of her failed attempt to escape from her upper-class Boston upbringing. Mabel moves from age ninety to ten, to thirty-three, to fifteen, to sixty, and finally back to ninety. The complex lead character of Mabel has clashed with society as she tried to make a place for herself in a world not quite ready for her feminist tendencies. Howe created the character of Mabel by blending her own eighty-nine-year-old Aunt Maddy with Gertrude Ederle, who at age nineteen swam the English Channel in 1924. The renegade Mabel of Pride’s Crossing, Massachusetts, swam the English Channel at the age of twentyfive, but rather than focusing on the swim, debated a marriage proposal instead. Pride’s Crossing was one of three plays nominated for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Yet the 1997 jury believed none of the three had filled all the criteria for the Pulitzer and no award was given. Pride’s Crossing, however, did receive the 1998 New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best American play.


OTHER WORKS: Closing Time (1960). Birth and After Birth (1974). Swimming (1991). The following pieces in: ‘‘Birth and After Birth’’ in The New Women’s Theatre (edited by H. Moore, 1977); ‘‘Antic Vision,’’ American Theatre Magazine (Sept. 1985); ‘‘Stepping Through the Frame,’’ Art and Antiques (Jan. 1987); ‘‘Teeth,’’ in Best American Short Plays (1990), and in Antaeus Plays in One Act (edited by D. Dalpern, 1991); ‘‘The Reluctant Exhibitionist,’’ Allure Magazine (Sept. 1991); One Shoe Off (produced 1993), and others.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brown, J., Feminist Drama, Definition and Critical Analysis (1979). Hart, L. ed., Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women’s Theatre (1989). Brater, E., ed., Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights (1989). Betsko, K., and R. Koenig, Interviews with Contemporary Women Playwrights (1987). Di Gaetani, John L., A Search for a PostModern Theatre (1991). Foster, K., ‘‘Detangling the Web: Mother-Daughter Relationships in the Plays of Marsha Norman, Lillian Hellman, Tina Howe, and Ntozake Shange’’ (thesis, 1994). Schlueter, J., ed., Modern American Drama: The Female Canon (1990). Reference works: CA (1983). CLC (1988). CD (1988). CBY (1990). FC (1990). Notable Women in the American Theater (1989). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: New York (28 Nov. 1983, 22-29 Dec. 1986). NYT (1 May 1983, 28 Nov. 1983, 16 Nov. 1986, 30 April 1989, 7 May 1989). Newsday (11 Jan. 1998). Otherstages (27 Jan. 1983). Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present (interview, 1989).Theatre Week (12 June 1989). —MARCIA HEPPS AND WILLIAM KEENEY, UPDATED BY HEIDI HARTWIG DENLER

HOWES, Barbara Born 1 May 1914, New York, New York; died 24 February 1996 Daughter of Osborne and Mildred Cox Howes; married William J. Smith, 1947 (divorced); children: two sons After graduating from Bennington College in Vermont, Barbara Howes lived in Italy, England, France, and Haiti; she lived the remainder of her life in Vermont, with frequent visits to the West Indies. She had two sons and was divorced. Howes was the recipient of many fellowships and awards. Her professional activities were literary rather than academic; she was editor of Chimera magazine from 1943 to 1947. In her essay in Poets on Poetry, Howes discussed the poets who have influenced her, her interest in translation and in adapting Old French and other literary forms to contemporary concerns, her purpose in writing, the importance in her work of

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domestic subject matter and of place, and her distrust of the ‘‘snarling little ego,’’ her aversion to writers who ‘‘give in to violence and spite.’’ The constants in Howes’ poetry are a detached, restrained tone that carries considerable tight-lipped intensity; an intellectual concern with physical and human nature and with the patterns and principles that underlie and relate their behavior; and a technique that is flexible, controlled, and relatively traditional. Unlike so many contemporary postmodernist poets, she did not write social protest about the women’s movement or the Vietnam War, and she was neither confessional nor surrealistic. Also unlike them, she manipulated rather than abandoned conventional prosody. Howes chose many traditional subjects, such as still-life; mythological personages; objects d’art; specific persons (‘‘To W. Howes Auden on His Fiftieth Birthday’’), places (‘‘On a Bougainvillaea Vine at the Summer Palace,’’ ‘‘Views of Oxford Colleges’’), and occasions; and nature interpreted by and for civilization: a deer in hunting season ‘‘dropped like a monument,’’ a dead toucan described as ‘‘a beak with a panache / chucked like an old shell back to the Caribbean.’’ Howes’ most insistent theme is that unrestricted emotion blinds and imprisons if allowed to dominate either life or art. In ‘‘The New Leda,’’ Howes speaks of the woman dedicated to the god, whether Zeus or Christ: ‘‘Her / limbo holds her like a fly in amber, / Beyond the reach of life.’’ In ‘‘For an Old Friend,’’ she imagines the friend thinking ‘‘ This hullabaloo about life / is not my forte’’; in ‘‘Radar and Unmarked Cars,’’ she writes, ‘‘our / Radar / Will hold us True: / We need / Love / At a constant speed.’’ Her aesthetic credo matches the personal one in ‘‘Portrait of the Artist’’: ‘‘For dear life some do / Many a hard thing, / Train the meticulous mind / Upon meaning, seek / And find, and yet discard / All that is not of reality’s tough rind / . . .To be / Ascetic for life’s sake, / Honest and passionate.’’ The effect of this personal and aesthetic credo on her work is both her poems’ strength and their weakness. In a poem like ‘‘Still-life: New England,’’ the tone of restrained disgust and assumed indifference is deliberately and successfully used to create horror, the ironic opposite of indifference. But when, in ‘‘Dream of a Good Day,’’ Howes puts all the action of the poem into conventional romantic dreams of sailing and discovering (i.e., making a poem), which are quite separate from reality, and then uses only the last line to state but not to experience reality (‘‘Then in the colloquial evening to come back to love’’), the poem suffers because the honesty is there without the passion. Yet it was passion that made her such a disciplined craftsperson. Howes speaks of the need to train the eye to notice and the ear to listen, to recognize the necessity of form (‘‘language must have discipline to have meaning’’), and to distinguish between the forms of art and journalism. It is this disciplined passion that enabled her to make her poetry ‘‘a way of life, not just an avocation,’’ a way in which ‘‘one orders and deepens one’s experience, and learns to understand what is happening in oneself and in others.’’

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Overall, Howes’ poetry strongly continues the ‘‘Apollonian’’ strain of Eliot, Stevens, and Wilbur, rather than the ‘‘Dionysian’’ strain of Whitman and Williams. But though she has not quite Eliot’s dramatic compression, nor Stevens’s mercurial imagination, nor Wilbur’s classical balance, her depth of perception, firm ironic tone, and technical control make her a worthy member of their company.

OTHER WORKS: The Undersea Farmer (1948). In the Cold Country: Poems (1954). Light and Dark: Poems (1959). Looking Up at Leaves (1966). The Blue Garden (1972). A Private Signal: Poems New and Selected (1977). The papers of Barbara Howes are at the Yale University Library in New Haven, Connecticut.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bogan, L., Selected Criticism (1955). Friedman, N., Contemporary Poets (1975). Nemerov, H., ed., Poets on Poetry (1966). Untermeyer, L., ed., Modern American Poetry (1962). Reference works: CA (1974). Contemporary Poets (1975). WA. Other references: Choice (Apr. 1978). NYHTB (15 Nov. 1959). NYT (4 Apr. 1954). SR (19 Mar. 1949). TLS (10 Feb. 1978). —ALBERTA TURNER

HOWLAND, Marie Born 1836, New Hampshire; Fairhope, Alabama Married Edward Howland

died

September

1921,

Marie Howland was employed as a millworker in Lowell, Massachusetts, and then after a normal-school education, as a school principal. Her career as an author, political propagandist, and pioneering architect began as a result of her involvement with followers of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier in New York City in the 1850s. Through these associations, Howland became convinced of the necessity of economic and industrial reform; she also was a champion of the ‘‘combined household’’ and free love. During the 1860s, Howland lived in the Familistère, or Social Palace, a Fourieristic community in Guise, France. While there, she became especially inspired by architectural reforms that greatly reduced and collectivized domestic work traditionally ascribed to women. Most significant of these reforms were centralized facilities for cooking, laundry, and children’s day care. Hoping to effect similar reforms in her own country, Howland returned to the U.S. in 1866. During the 1870s and 1880s, she worked with Albert Kimsey Owen and John J. Dewey in organizing the Pacific Colony, a self-sufficient, communitarian socialist

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community in Topolobampo, Mexico. Her involvement was directly instrumental in changing Owen’s initial plans for single-family dwellings to architectural designs stressing collective arrangements organized to reduce the domestic work of women, thus freeing them for more direct participation in the government of the community. In her studies of American women architects and social reformers, the historian Dolores Hayden has discovered and made public many of Howland’s original designs. They include ‘‘resident hotels, row houses linked to communal kitchen, and picturesque suburban houses with cooperative kitchen facilities.’’ Financial and administrative mismanagement prevented the construction of these buildings, but the plans were published in Integral Cooperation: Its Practical Application (1885). The book was originally released only under Owen’s name, but Robert Fogarty, in his introduction to the 1975 edition, revealed Howland’s substantial participation. Howland lived at the Pacific Colony for several years but eventually left because of hostility to certain aspects of her feminism, primarily her advocacy of free love. She subsequently lived in a Fairhope, Alabama, single-tax community, where she served as a librarian. Working with her husband, Howland for a brief period edited two journals devoted to the propagation of the principles of economic cooperation: the Credit Foncier of Sinaloa and Social Solutions. Howland’s 1873 translation of J. A. B. Godin’s Social Solutions, an in-depth presentation of the political philosophy responsible for the founding of the Social Palace in Guise, was serialized in 1887 in the Howland journal, Social Solutions. She also publicized the principles of utopian socialism in essays and short fiction written for Harper’s, Galaxy, Lippincott’s, and the Overland Monthly. In her only novel, Papa’s Own Girl (1874), Howland describes the establishment of a Fourieristic community in rural Massachusetts. According to a contemporary reviewer, ‘‘No novel has yet appeared so comprehensive in its range, bearing upon the great social questions of the day: the position of woman and the condition of labor.’’ Today the novel is regrettably a forgotten classic in the tradition of political fiction written by American women. In the first half of the novel, Howland describes how two women, Clara Forest and Susie Dykes, are converted to feminism. The two women—one separated from her still socially respectable husband and the other a mother unapologetic about her conspicuous lack of any husband—set up housekeeping, survive community ostracism, and operate a profitable greenhouse and nursery, an establishment that often serves as a refuge for other women. Howland is not content, however, with such a highly individualized resolution. In the novel’s second half, her analysis extends beyond the immediate problems faced by the two women and toward a reformation of the entire social organization, based on a utopian socialism that sees industrial reform and feminism as inseparable. In her work on Howland, Dolores Hayden has already established how Howland, like 19th-century women committed to


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domestic and economic reform, was attracted to communitarian socialism as ‘‘a concept which at once domesticated political economy and politicized domestic economy’’ and which held ‘‘special appeal for feminists because of their strategies to change traditional concepts of power and property.’’ A revival of interest in Howland’s writings should prove beneficial to anyone interested in the history of the ongoing study of the relationship between the social and sexual self-definition of American women. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Douglas, A. Feminization of American Culture (1977). Hill, V., ‘‘Strategy and Breadth: The Socialist-Feminist in American Fiction’’ (dissertation, 1979). Ransom, E., ‘‘Utopus Discovers America, or Critical Realism in American Utopian Fiction, 1798-1900’’ (dissertation, 1946). Reynolds, R., Cat’s Paw Utopia (1972). Stern, M., The Pantarch (1968). Torre, S., ed., Women in American Architecture (1977). Reference works: NCAB. Other references: AL (Jan. 1944). Chrysalis (1977). Fairhope (Alabama) Courier (23 Sept. 1921). Godey’s (Aug. 1874). New Orleans Picayune (14 June 1874, 26 Aug. 1894). SR (29 Aug. 1874). Signs (Winter 1978). Social Solutions (28 May 1886). —VICKI LYNN HILL

HULL, Helen (Rose) Born 1888, Albion, Michigan; died 15 July 1971, New York, New York Daughter of Warren C. and Louise McGill Hull Born of teachers, Helen Hull spent an early smalltown Michigan life dominated by books and brothers. She attended Michigan State College, the University of Michigan, and the University of Chicago, where she received a Ph.B. degree in 1912 and later did postgraduate work. Her subsequent teaching career included three years at Wellesley College, one at Barnard College, and 40 years at Columbia University, where she began as an extension teacher in 1916 and retired as emeritus professor of creative writing in 1956. Hull did much of her novel writing during her summers in a renovated farmhouse, ‘‘Bayberry Farm,’’ in the Blue Hill region of Maine. Her interests in flowers, boats, and dogs and her lack of interest in politics and publicity are reflected in her writing. She was active as teacher and creative writer in the literary currents of her time. At the time of her death, she had nearly finished her 21st novel. Hull’s 20 novels and two collections of short stories and novelettes (many of which appeared in popular magazines) explore in sensitive detail the ordinary, daily family and working-world relationships of children, parents, and spouses. Taken cumulatively, her novels are thematically Ibsenesque in exploring several sides to questions of marriage, divorce, remarriage, parenting, and career choices for women. Her first novel, Quest (1922), moves through the childhood and young adulthood of the

daughter of an unhappily married college teacher, chronicling her discoveries in sex and in childbirth. Labyrinth (1923) depicts with understanding the lack of supportive models for a woman combining marriage, career, and parenthood. ‘‘My mind is coated with fat, my thoughts creek. . . . The loneliest person in the world is a devoted mother,’’ laments an at-home Catherine. After she begins rewarding work, however, she is realistically faced with crises such as working when a child is sick. In one of her best books, Islanders (1927), Hull recognizes the isolation to which women have been relegated through three generations and presents a strong alternative to being ‘‘enisled’’ in ‘‘the sea of life’’ in Ellen Dacey, whose fiancé left for the gold fields when she was 18, who farmed the land of her absent father for 18 years, who lost unexpected wealth to her brother, land to her father and brother. Finally, years later, having her nephew’s daughter Anne to raise, she succeeds in breaking through Anne’s mother’s frail teaching, through finishing-school pretentions, to create in the young World War I suffragist a whole woman, capable of both essential love and essential independence. The Asking Price (1930) presents the negative possibilities of a strong but misguided woman, who dominates, represses, and organizes her husband’s life. Heat Lightning (1932), which gave Hull’s readership a large boost by being chosen as a Book-of-the-Month, reaffirms the loving and independent female model in Grandmother Westover, who is able to reinspire a granddaughter fleeing from a disintegrating Eastern marriage. Moving from the Midwestern setting of this book to the New York apartment of the Prescotts in Hardy Perennial (1933), Hull presents a woman who is the strength during the Depression of those—sons, daughter, husband—who surround her in the impersonal man-made city. Studies of various family relationships seem to culminate in The Hawk’s Flight (1946), which looks at four kinds of marriages. Throughout, the background hero is Gilbert Moore, a psychiatrist who sees and brings out the best in other characters. In departure from her previous work, A Tapping on the Wall (1960) and Close Her Pale Blue Eyes (1963) are entertaining, light, sophisticated mysteries. The former won the Dodd Mead Faculty Prize Mystery award. One cannot but be impressed by Hull’s literary productivity and her insight into human relationships. Emerging from her fiction, most of it favorably received, is a firm, healthy, and mature morality, unbuttressed by religious dogma or society’s moral codes. It is a morality opposed to possessiveness, domineering, condemning, and lack of recognition of others’ feelings, no matter where those negative qualities are found—in men, women, children, career women, housewives, professors, professor’s wives, or novelists. Hull’s books can lend wisdom to many everyday experiences. OTHER WORKS: The Surry Family (1925). Creative Writing (with M. L. Robinson, 1932). Morning Shows the Day (1934). The Art of Writing Prose (with R. S. Loomis and M. L. Robinson, 1936). Candle Indoors (1936). Uncommon People (1936). Frost Flower

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(1939). Experiment: Four Short Novels (1940). Through the House Door (1940). A Circle in the Water (English title, Darkening Hill, 1943). Mayling Soong Chiang (1943). Octave (1947). The Writer’s Book (1950). Landfall (1953). Wind Rose (1958). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Overton, G. M., Women Who Make Our Novels (1931). Reference works: American Novelists of Today (1951). CA (1972). CB (May 1940, 1971). TCA. TCAS. Other references: Bookman (May 1932). NYT (17 July 1971). Saturday Evening Post (1 June 1935). WLB (Oct. 1930). —CAROLYN WEDIN SYLVANDER

HULME, Kathryn Cavarly Born 6 January 1900, San Francisco, California; died August 1981 Daughter of Edwin P. and Julia Cavarly Hulme Kathryn Cavarly Hulme is one of those rare writers who write from self-knowledge, real knowledge, informed by truth and by universal realities of human behavior. The deep spirituality that marks her work derives to a large degree from her relationship with the mystic-philosopher Gurdjieff, a relationship that is described in detail in Undiscovered Countries: A Spiritual Adventure (1966), set in the exciting Paris of the 1930s. Writing and thinking came together for Hulme in the company of such writers as Janet Flanner, Solita Solano, Djuna Barnes, Jane Heap, Margaret Anderson, and Georgette Leblanc—many of whom were involved in the Gurdjieffian ideas and methods of self-study. Hulme credits Gurdjieff with having taught her, among other things, how to ‘‘unroll the reels and look at the shadows of forgotten selves buried in the unconscious memory.’’ Without this, We Lived As Children (1938), a fictionalized autobiography, might never have been written—or, at any rate, might not have been so poignantly written. The self (or selves) evoked is androgynous by nature, a wise child—as children tend to be before life dulls them—devastated by an elusive father. To sum up Gurdjieff’s influence, Hulme wrote: ‘‘He taught me. . .how to believe.’’ Travel, the discovery of unknown countries—both visible and invisible—is meaningful for Hulme, and is the basis for two books. Arab Interlude (1930) is a collection of North African sketches, a travelogue, and an amplification of her letters home. Look a Lion in the Eye (1974) describes a safari through East Africa Hulme took with two friends. But whereas Arab Interlude, which is pre-Gurdjieff, describes the places and atmosphere, Look a Lion in the Eye is distinguished by a deeper dimension of feeling and thinking, by Hulme’s conscious self. In contrast to the harmony evoked in Look a Lion in the Eye is the disharmony (caused by human misery) in The Wild Place (1953), for which Hulme won the Atlantic Nonfiction Prize. The account grew out of her experience as a deputy director of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and the

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International Refugees Organization field teams in the years following World War II. In this capacity she helped organize Wildflecken in Bavaria, a camp for Polish displaced persons. Though she never shies away from describing the harsh reality she witnessed, The Wild Place is, nevertheless, about the triumph of human dignity over life’s injustices. Characters appear and reappear in Hulme’s work, but no one so often as a Belgian nurse, whom we catch a glimpse of, as a fellow-traveler, in Look a Lion in the Eye and again in The Wild Place and in Undiscovered Countries. The Nun’s Story (1956), which won numerous awards and critical acclaim and was made into a film, is Gabrielle Van der Mal’s—or Sister Luke’s— extraordinary story of obedience and inner struggle of conscience. Framed on one side by a tyrannical father and on the other by Hitler, with a debonair Italian doctor in the middle, The Nun’s Story might never have been told had Hulme’s own personal struggle not been attuned by faith. Besides Gabrielle’s real-life counterpart and the beloved Gurdjieff, the most important person in Hulme’s life was her mother. Annie’s Captain (1961) is the fictional story of Hulme’s parents, their marriage and courtship. It describes a typically sexist marriage, the sexism heightened by the fact that the seafaring captain was absent more than most husbands, and by Annie’s obsession about giving him a son, but Hulme’s talent for detail and accuracy transforms the typical into the archetypal: the truth of family life, of the patriarchal mode of existence that cripples women and makes them lost to themselves, is all there. But there is no anger: Hulme has consistently been concerned with inner change, with self-knowledge as a precondition to understanding. In all this she has been highly successful. OTHER WORKS: How’s the Road? (1928). Desert Night (1932). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: The Book of Catholic Authors. CA (1975). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: America (15 Sept. 1956, 8 Dec. 1956). Atlantic (Nov. 1953). Commonweal (7 Sept. 1956). NYTBR (1 Nov. 1953, 20 Nov. 1966). Saturday Review (8 Sept. 1956). WLB (Nov. 1962). —LINDA LUDWIG

HUME, Sophia Born 1702, Charleston, South Carolina; died 26 January 1774, London, England Daughter of Henry and Susanna Bayley Wigington; married Robert Hume, 1721 (died 1737); children: two Born to a prosperous landowning family, Sophia Hume was raised in the Anglican tradition of her father and educated for a life


of elegance in high society. She married a lawyer and prominent citizen of Charleston; they had two children. After her husband’s death in 1737 and a series of illnesses, she became increasingly preoccupied with religion and the necessity to convert to Quakerism, the religious tradition of her mother and her maternal grandmother, Mary Fisher (ca. 1623-1698). She subsequently moved to England and joined the Society of Friends. In 1747 Hume returned to Charleston, where in a series of public meetings she reproached the inhabitants for their sinful lives and called them to a life of simplicity as exemplified in Quakerism. In order to spread her concern for their salvation, she published, with the help of fellow Quakers in Philadelphia, An Exhortation to the Inhabitants of the Province of South Carolina (1748). This forcefully written but poorly organized appeal admonished Charlestonians to repent, to give up their diversionary, prideful, and ostentatious lives, and to seek good forms of recreation, live simply, and dress modestly. She made a special plea that females cease neglecting their children in their quest for diversion. Cognizant that others perceived her as a heretic and a deluded, ridiculous madwoman, Hume argued that her case carried the authority of God and reason. Although she was a woman subordinate to man, she was a feeble instrument of God who was used as He saw fit. Her statements of faith were bolstered with numerous scriptural and literary references that demonstrated her erudition. Hume described her own conversion from a life of ‘‘forgetfulness of God’’ to the life of greater holiness. As a Christian, she had compassion for fellow sinners, but she was obligated to call their sinful conduct into question. She pleaded with Charlestonians and all Christians not to deny their eternal happiness for the momentary pleasures of this life. Returning to England, Hume became a Quaker minister and wrote A Caution to Such As Observe Days and Times (1763). In this piece, she warned formal Christians, those who ‘‘observe days and times,’’ that God may bring them suffering as He did the Jews in order that they learn that His power was in the heart and not the world. Believing that the world would be reformed when the hearts of the mighty were changed, she appended to this work An Address to Magistrates, Parents, Mistresses of Families, etc. In this she urged magistrates not only to witness Christ in their actions, but to restrain both the lower orders and higher ranks in society. Parents, masters, and mistresses who in their homes had roles analogous to magistrates should set a good example, provide for the physical and spiritual welfare of their charges, and acknowledge Christ. She warned that her advice should not be dismissed because it came from a woman. In an attempt to reform the Society of Friends and help stave off the decline in membership, Hume published Extracts from Divers, Antient Testimonies (1766), a collection of early Quaker writings. In her introduction addressed to ministers, elders, and members of the Society, she urged them not to conform to the ways of the world but to become the ‘‘foundation for the church of Christ.’’ In 1767 Hume went back to Charleston in an attempt to revive Quakerism there. Unsuccessful, she returned to England, where she died in 1774.

HUNT

The principal theme of Hume’s writing is the call to repentance and nonworldliness which she found exemplified in Quaker life. Through rejection of worldly pleasures, one came to enjoy the fruits of the spirit—joy, love, and peace—the highest of all pleasures. The rewards of simplicity, the universality of God’s grace, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in each person are emphasized in her work. While she maintained a very traditional attitude toward woman’s role, her Christian belief spurred her to write and speak publicly in defense of religion. OTHER WORKS: The Justly Celebrated Mrs. Sophia Hume’s Advice (1769). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bowden, J., The History of the Society of Friends in America (1850). Gummere, A. M., ed., The Journal and Essays of John Woolman (1922). Reference works: NAW (1971). —DANA GREENE

HUMISHUMA See MOURNING DOVE

HUNT, Irene Born 12 May 1901, Pontiac, Illinois; died August 1979 Daughter of Franklin P. and Sarah Land Hunt Irene Hunt grew up on the farm in southern Illinois that provided the setting for her Civil War novel, Across Five Aprils (1964). After her father died when she was seven, Hunt lived with her grandparents for five years. Her grandfather told many stories which later influenced her writing. For many years, Hunt taught French and English in Illinois public schools; she taught psychology briefly at the University of South Dakota. In her later years, she retired and moved to Florida. Hunt’s first novel, Across Five Aprils, was published when she was fifty-seven, after she had worked many years at her writing and accumulated many rejection slips. The novel received high critical acclaim, winning the Follett Award and being named the sole Newbery honor book of 1965 by the American Library Association. It was followed by Up a Road Slowly (1966), which received the Newbery Medal, among other honors. A story of great emotional appeal, Across Five Aprils was suggested by family letters and records and the stories of Hunt’s grandfather, who was a boy of nine at the beginning of the Civil War. Based on extensive research, it spans the five Aprils of 1861-65 to take the Creightons, a Southern Illinois farm family, through the war. Told from the point of view of nine-year-old

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Jethro, this tightly knit novel with its convincing, well-developed characters relates the problems the family faces when the sons enlist, one of them on the side of the South. Through experience and conversation, Jethro learns what the issues of the war are, and what it means to live in border country and be suspected of rebel leanings. Over the years, he gains in maturity and independence of judgement as he comes to realize there are two sides to every problem and that war is heartbreaking and divisive. Although no actual historical figures appear and historical events are recounted secondhand through letters and newspaper articles, Hunt conveys a good sense of the conflict and its effect on ordinary people. Hunt’s second novel, Up a Road Slowly, is a warm, sensitive, girl’s growing-up story, taking Julie Trelling from her seventh to her seventeenth years. After the death of her mother, Julie goes to live with her Aunt Cordelia, a schoolteacher who has never married. She learns to cope with the loss of her mother, jealousy, first love, her aunt’s strictness, and schoolgirl snobbishness as she matures into a gracious young woman, confident that she is ready for college and for whatever difficulties life may bring. The narrative is handled with restraint, and with the exception of the unconvincing Brett, Julie’s temporary love, characters are deep and memorable, particularly the dignified, egotistical, alcoholic Uncle Haskell and the dirty, underprivileged, learning-impaired Aggie Kilpin. The story is fiction, but Up a Road Slowly, like Hunt’s first novel, rose out of Hunt’s own personal experiences. Hunt’s next novels, although direct and unpretentious in style like the first two books, are judged by critics to be thin in plot and superficial in characterization. Better received critically was William (1977), a moving, compassionate story set recently on the Gulf Coast of Florida about three orphaned black children who are cared for by a young white girl, the four together forming a warm, closely knit family group.


1966-1975 (1975). SAA (1971). Third Book of Junior Authors (1972). Other references: LJ (15 March 1967). —ALETHEA K. HELBIG

HUNT, Mabel Leigh Born 1 November 1892, Coatesville, Indiana; died 3 September 1971, Indianapolis, Indiana Daughter of Tighlman and Amanda Harvey Hunt Daughter of a smalltown doctor, Mabel Leigh Hunt enjoyed a happy childhood as one of eight children in a closely knit, book-loving Quaker family. She invented her first story when she was about three years old and throughout her childhood cherished the ambition of becoming an author. While Hunt was in high school, her father died and the family moved to Indianapolis, which remained her home for the rest of her life. After study at DePauw University and training in library science at Western Reserve University, Hunt served as a librarian until 1938, when she decided to devote herself full time to writing. Although she was in her forties when she wrote her first book, Hunt published 30 volumes for juvenile readers and contributed numerous stories, articles, and poems to magazines and anthologies. Have You Seen Tom Thumb? (1942) and Better Known As Johnny Appleseed (1950) were Newbery Medal honor books, while Billy Button’s Butter’d Biscuit (1941) and The Peddler’s Clock (1943) received awards in the New York Herald Tribune’s children’s book festivals.

Although Hunt’s earliest books are her best ones, all of them represent serious attempts to confront the problems of life in story form. They hold out the old-fashioned virtues of hard work, courage, compassion, integrity, and responsibility and stress the importance of education. In her Newbery acceptance speech, Hunt spoke of her motivations as a writer, gained from years of experience as a teacher and counselor. She has watched ‘‘books bring new dimensions of happiness, of confidence and enlightenment, to young people from the age of three up. . . . Children are not created fully equipped with such values as courage, compassion, integrity, and insights into the motives and needs of themselves and others. These attributes are often learned from the behavior of the characters who people the books they read. . . A fine book that mirrors life accurately and honestly—there is the effective substitute for. . .ineffective [adult] sermons.’’

Hunt wrote for juvenile readers of various ages, but children from eight to twelve years old were her favorite audience. She aptly described her books as ‘‘pleasant stories of family relationships, ideal, yet real.’’ She usually pictured a stable, affectionate family with four or five children surrounded by grandparents, cousins, and friends. Stories that drew upon her Quaker background were special favorites. Hunt’s books reveal her interest in nursery rhymes, folk songs, and poetry.

OTHER WORKS: A Trail of Apple Blossoms (1968). No Promises in the Wind (1970).

Her father’s childhood in North Carolina provided background material for Benjie’s Hat (1938), the tale of a lively Quaker boy whose thrifty family expects him to wear hand-me-down headgear. Tomorrow Will Be Bright (1958) recounts the adventures of a Quaker girl whose family moves from North Carolina to Ohio sometime before 1860. In each of these preemancipation

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1976). More Books by More People (1974). Newbery and Caldecott Medal Books:

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Lucinda, a Little Girl of 1860 (1934), Hunt’s first novel, is based on her mother’s Quaker childhood in central Indiana. Routine activities of the farm family are punctuated by events of the Civil War and by the arrival of a runaway slave, a fugitive soldier, and an elderly man who is searching for the grave of his little sister who died while the family was moving northward in a covered wagon.


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stories, Hunt pictures free blacks living as part of the Quaker community. Conversations with her ‘‘own private fairy’’ who visited Hunt during childhood illnesses may have been the inspiration for the delightful but imaginary playmate of the heroine of Sibby Botherbox (1945). In John of Pudding Lane (1941), a printer in Boston collects and publishes the nursery rhymes with which Grandmother Goose entertains his children. Benjamin Franklin appears as a minor character. Ladycake Farm (1952) depicts the struggles and successes of a contemporary black family that moves from the city to a small farm and overcomes initial prejudice to gain acceptance in the new community. For older readers, Hunt wrote narrative biographies of Tom Thumb, the famous midget, and John Chapman, Better Known as Johnny Appleseed, as well as three novels. Beggar’s Daughter (1963), Hunt’s only historical novel with a British setting, records the life of Quakers living under the threat of persecution, loss of property, and imprisonment during the reigns of Charles II and James II. Their religious faith, simplistic practices, and hard work set them apart from the excitement and violence of village activities as well as from the comfortable, leisured existence of the landed gentry. Hunt’s work shows careful research, exacting craftsmanship, and a sincere respect and affection for both her material and her audience. OTHER WORKS: The Boy Who Had No Birthday (1935). Little Girl with Seven Names (1936). Susan, Beware! (1937). Little Grey Gown (1939). Michel’s Island (1940). Corn Belt Billy (1942). Peter Piper’s Pickled Peppers (1942). Young Man of the House (1944). Double Birthday Present (1947). Such a Kind World (1947). Matilda’s Buttons (1948). Wonderful Baker (1950). The Sixty-Ninth Grandchild (1951). Singing Among Strangers (1954). Miss Jellytot’s Visit (1955). Stars for Cristy (1956). Cristy at Skippinghills (1958). Cupola House (1961). Johnny-Up and Johnny-Down (1962).

by her paternal grandparents because of a neglectful mother and an abusive stepfather. She grew up in a ‘‘strict Mormon home, a very loving home,’’ in the semirural mountain valley town of Heber, Utah. ‘‘Papa,’’ Hunter’s grandfather, beloved of family and townspeople alike, believed education for women after high school unnecessary. Under his persuasion, Hunter declined offers of scholarships to three Utah universities, instead attending high school an extra year so she could take every English, literature, and journalism class available. She subsequently entered nurse’s training for the college credits, and much later, after marriage and the birth of three daughters, at the age of thirty-six, entered the University of Utah. From 1958 until 1967, Hunter edited and wrote for the Utah Fish and Game magazine. For months at a time she edited the magazine alone but was never allowed the title of editor because she was a woman. Each monthly issue contained one of her ‘‘Read-Aloud Stories’’ or a segment of the ‘‘Babes in the Woods’’ series for young readers, for which she won local and national awards. The back covers carried her poetry linked to a photograph. While claiming to ‘‘know nothing about poetry,’’ Hunter somehow, sometimes, manages to match words exquisitely in various poetic forms. At least 200 poems have been published. Her themes are of the Western land and people, the old West and the new West. In ‘‘The Jubilant Desert,’’ for example, the reader is invited to participate in an intimate historical review as the Salt Lake Basin awaits and then receives her destiny. ‘‘And the wind swirled her sands like mists. / She knew only the claws of the scurriers / And the bellies of the crawling ones.’’ Until, ‘‘The sound of feet. . .the sounds of steel, / The sounds of suffering, and the silence of dying. . . / And the desert knew that she was not barren.’’

HUNTER, Rodello

Hunter’s first book, A House of Many Rooms (1965, reissued 1981), is a family memoir told in first-person narrative style. It is the most successful of her early major works. It charms the reader into taking another look at a less complicated era, when family and church were all-important. This particular family was not uncommon in the way they lived, loved, disagreed, hurt, helped, cried, and laughed with one another. They were amazing because there were so many of them. Nine ‘‘born’’ and five ‘‘borrowed’’ brothers and sisters lived in the house which ‘‘did with wood and plaster what the loaves and fishes did for the multitude.’’ In spite of what seems like a life of poverty and hardship, Papa convinced his children they were blessed with a ‘‘heritage of going without.’’ This is a work that in compelling and simple prose leaves us an accurate imprint of a people and a set of values well worn but perhaps never discardable.

Born 23 March 1920, Provo, Utah Daughter of Thomas R. and Venus Harris Hicken; married Ross Hunter, 1938; Frank J. Calkins, 1965; children: three daughters

Wyoming Wife (1969) is an entertaining account of Hunter’s middle-aged marriage and move to Freedom, Wyoming. Though witty and well written, it lacks the impact and substance of her prior and subsequent books.

Rodello Hunter was born two months after her father was killed in a mine accident. When eight years old, she was adopted

Dubbed ‘‘critic’’ by her family, Hunter is continually probing, prying, questioning, wondering, and making simple yet

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Eakin, M. K., Good Books for Children, 1948-61 (1962). Reference works: CA (1975). CB (1951). Indiana Authors and Their Books, 1917-1966 (1974). Junior Book of Authors (1951). SATA (1971). —ALICE BELL SALO

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profound observations. While loving her Mormon people and her pioneer heritage, she is not blinded to their idiosyncrasies and shortcomings. An iconoclast of sorts, she campaigns for the removal of blindfolds from all those who would seek to know the truths of things for themselves. A Daughter of Zion (1972, reissued in 1999) is the superb unraveling of Hunter’s own blindfold, a courageous standing at the mirror of the past, eyes open, ready for reckoning. Hunter is significant beyond the intermountain region as a refreshing voice in the present, chronicling a not-so-distant past already out of reach. She writes rapidly and rarely revises. In her prose, this creates a charming spontaneity; in her poetry, an uneven quality. She is not a trendsetter, nor does she consciously strive for effect. Her prose is characterized by homely diction and plain, sharp images. Hunter is an unself-conscious, if slightly sentimental, writer. Not a leader, not a follower of literary style, she reflects the archetype of the questioner facing the dogma, the skeptic weighing the moral values. OTHER WORKS: The Soul of Jackson Hole (1974). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Calkins, J., Jim and Rodello Hunter Calkins Interview (audio recording, 1973). Other references: Book Week (4 July 1965). LJ (July 1965). PW (28 Apr. 1969). —CHERYL K. HUDSPETH

HUNTER-LATTANY, Kristin Born 12 September 1931, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Daughter of George L. and Mabel Manigault Eggleston; married Joseph Hunter, 1952; John I. Lattany, 1968; children: two sons One of the most prominent writers for the often-neglected audience of African American youth, Kristin Hunter-Lattany provides a message of optimism and hope in her stories of inner city black life. From a middle class background herself, Hunter-Lattany was greatly influenced by the poorer inhabitants of Philadelphia among whom she grew up in the 1930s and 1940s; it is they who later became the focus of most of her fiction. Known for their realism and vitality, Hunter-Lattany’s novels and short stories for both adolescents and adults celebrate the positive values of black culture and encourage unity, self-reliance, ingenuity, and courage in the face of adversity. In the tradition of the women writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Hunter-Lattany explores particularly the African American female experience and provides new instruction and inspiration for contemporary black women writers. The only child of a school principal father and a schoolteacher mother, Hunter-Lattany became an avid reader and writer in

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early childhood, commenting later: ‘‘I believe these circumstances—onliness, loneliness and resultant fantasizing and omnivorous reading—are the most favorable for producing writers.’’ Hunter-Lattany wrote poetry and articles for school publications, and in 1946, at fourteen, she began a teenage social column for the Philadelphia edition of the Pittsburgh Courier. Continuing as a columnist and feature writer for the Courier until 1952, she later drew on her coverage of a story on the annexation by the city of Camden, New Jersey, of the all-black town of Lawnside to provide the basis for her novel The Lakestown Rebellion (1978). The novel depicts a black community’s unified resistance to the construction of an interstate highway that is to run through their town. Hunter-Lattany received a B.S. in education from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951. At her parents’ request, she taught elementary school but quit in less than a year to pursue a writing career. In 1952 she began working as an advertising copywriter with the Lavenson Bureau of Advertising in Philadelphia, the first of several similar positions that allowed her enough stability and spare time to continue to write. In 1955 she won a national competition for a television documentary produced by CBS, entitled ‘‘A Minority of One.’’ This recognition launched her career. Hunter-Lattany began her first novel, God Bless the Child (1964), while she was still at Lavenson. A poignant tale of a young black woman’s struggle to raise herself and her family out of poverty, it establishes many themes for Hunter-Lattany’s later works, particularly the importance of inner strength and selfsufficiency. As in much of her later fiction, Hunter-Lattany explores the dangers and vitality of the city and the complex social and economic forces that oppress families there. The novel won the prestigious Philadelphia Athenaeum award in 1964, went into a third printing within a month of its publication date, and had subsequent softcover printings throughout the 1970s. While working as an information officer for the city of Philadelphia, Hunter-Lattany produced The Landlord (1966), her most successful novel at the time. In this comical story about a young white landlord of an inner city tenement building and his relationships with his tenants, Hunter-Lattany uses slapstick, caricature, and parody to explore class distinctions and racial tensions. The ‘‘lightness’’ with which she treats serious issues here, along with her exaggerated, seemingly stereotypical portrayals of blacks, led to mixed reviews. Hunter-Lattany was praised nonetheless for her uniqueness of expression, and in the book was adapted into a well-received film starring Joe Pesci. The success of Hunter-Lattany’s witty, comic style in The Landlord prompted her publishers to suggest she write books for children and adolescents. The Soul Brothers and Sister Lou (1968), inspired by young street singers who performed in an alley below Hunter-Lattany’s apartment, tells the story of a young singing group’s struggle for survival and success. With honesty and compassion, Hunter-Lattany tackles such issues as police violence, gang warfare, and racial injustice as her protagonists demonstrate courage and strength of character. Widely praised for


its affirmation of black culture and for providing hopeful alternatives to the violence and deprivation of the ghetto, Soul Brothers received many honors including the National Council on Interracial Books for Children award (1968) and the Lewis Carroll Shelf award (1971). Hunter-Lattany married for the second time in 1968 (changing her name from Kristin Hunter to its current hyphenated state) and became a stepmother to her husband’s two sons. She credits them with greatly influencing her understanding of children and encouraging her works for young people. Among these are Guests in the Promised Land (1973), a collection of short stories that won several awards, and the critically acclaimed Lou in the Limelight (1981), a sequel to Soul Brothers. Since early in her career, Hunter-Lattany’s poems, short stories, book reviews, and articles appeared in such publications as Philadelphia Magazine, Philadelphia Bulletin, Nation, Essence, Rogue, Black World, Good Housekeeping, and Seventeen. She was writer in residence at Emory University in 1979 and taught English and creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania from 1972 to 1995, when she retired; she held the title of senior lecturer in English at that university from 1983 to her retirement. Hunter-Lattany’s more recent work includes the novel Kinfolks, published in 1996. She continues to create realistic and optimistic depictions of African American urban life, similar to Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale. Kinfolks, written for adults, is the story of two African American women who, when their children meet, fall in love, and decide to marry, discover that the intended bride and groom are really sister and brother, sharing the same father. This circumstance was brought about by the political statement both mothers made in the 1960s when they chose to become single mothers as a show of support for the Black Power movement. The rest of the novel deals with African American life after the Civil Rights movement. The Charlotte (North Carolina) Post called Kinfolks a black First Wives Club. There are many lessons to be learned from the humorous yet touching novel, but the most weighty is the importance of fatherhood, as she believes this theme reflects her lack of close family ties and subsequent search for substitutes for her family. Hunter-Lattany likes to think of her young adult readers as an extended family. In 1996 the Philadelphia Congress of the National Political Congress of Black Women presented Hunter-Lattany with the Chisolm award (named for the National Political Congress of Black Women’s president, Shirley Chisolm) in honor of her contributions in literature and the arts. She also won the 1996 Moonstone Lifetime Achievement award. She won the 1981 Drexel Children’s Literature Citation, and fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts (1981-82 and 1985-86) and the Pennsylvania State Council on the Arts (1983-84). Hunter-Lattany is a member of the Authors Guild, the Authors League of America, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the University of Pennsylvania Alumni Association. In 1999 Hunter-Lattany was collaborating with her husband, John Lattany, on a memoir of successful lives of African Americans in the rural South. They hoped to offer suggestions for the

HUNTINGTON

present and the future for African Americans who are struggling to succeed. She was also working on a screenplay for a comedy and was considering another novel. Urban America, however, may no longer be her focus as she feels there is so much bad news emanating from the ghetto, and she prefers her writing to be optimistic. OTHER WORKS: Boss Cat (1971). The Pool Table War (1972). Uncle Daniel and the Raccoon (1972). The Survivors (1975). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Harris, T., From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature (1982). Tate, C., ed., Black Women Writers at Work (1983). Reference works: Black Writers (1989). CANR (1984). CLR (1978). Contemporary Novelists (1991). DLB (1984). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). SATA (1977, 1990). TCCW (1989). Writers Directory (1990). Other references: Black Literature Forum (Winter 1986). Philadelphia Inquirer (24 Nov. 1974). Philadelphia Tribune (2 Mar. 1996, 15 Apr. 1996). Web sites: http://www.alternet.com/dunnovelhtm, Donnette Donbar’s Novel Ideas (2 July 1999). http://www.bookpage.com/ ala/9702bp/blackhistory/womenfiction.html (3 July 1999). http:/ /www.english.upenn.edu/~wh/archive96/11readers.html (3 July 1999). http://www.release2-0.com/BB/readerscircle/lattany/ guide.htm (2 July 1999). —MARY E. HARVEY, UPDATED BY HEIDI HARTWIG DENLER

HUNTINGTON, Susan (Mansfield) Born 27 January 1791, Killingworth, Connecticut; died 4 December 1823, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of Achilles Mansfield; married Joshua Huntington, 1809; children: six Daughter of a minister and descended on her mother’s side from the noted native American apostle John Eliot, Susan Huntington was a worthy heir to generations of Puritan sensibility. She was educated at home, at the Killingworth common school, and for a short season at a ‘‘classical school.’’ Huntington married the junior, later senior, pastor at Old South Church, Boston; they had six children. Her husband died in 1819, and before her own death four years later, she lost two of her children. After Huntington’s death, the new pastor of Old South Church, Benjamin Wisher, wrote a biography of her, including copious quotations from her letters and from her journal, which she kept for years. Huntington published a few poems in the Boston Recorder. Little Lucy; or, The Careless Child Reformed (1820) is a book of moral instruction for children. A Short Address to Sick Persons Who Are Without Hope (n.d.) is a tract of the kind widely distributed door-to-door by devout church members and

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professional staff members of the tract society. These latter works are not easily available to scholars.

New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston. In 1889-90, she studied in Paris, Stockholm, Berlin, and London.

To the modern reader, Huntington’s religion might seem morbid and negative. In a letter to her son at Andover, she wrote that young people always imagine that religion will make them unhappy; attempting to convince him to join the church, she argued that Christ is true happiness. The contents of her letters and journals, however, do not reveal a very positive point of view. She was tortured with her own sins and inadequacies, at one time crying out, ‘‘Oh, my leanness, my leanness!’’ She brooded on her attitudes, her thoughts, and on the danger of worldly contamination by such things as the Unitarian church and the Waverley novels of Scott. In keeping with her concentration on states of mind, there is remarkably little about action and event in her letters and journals.

In 1890, Hurd-Mead became medical director of the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore and founded the Evening Dispensary for Working Women and Girls of Baltimore City in 1891. After her marriage to William E. Mead, a professor of early English at Wesleyan University, she moved to Middletown, Connecticut, where she set up practice. In 1895, Hurd-Mead was an incorporator of Middlesex County Hospital, where she served as a consulting gynecologist from 1907 to 1925.

In a letter to a friend, which was published in a local newspaper at the time, Huntington argued that women should not be treated as frivolous, silly persons, or they might become just that. Resting her case on the Bible, she argued that intelligent women could reason out for themselves the place of women in the home and family, if treated as reasonable adults. But treated as less, their authority in the home would be destroyed and the management of the family disrupted. In his funeral sermon for her, preached on Romans 8:28 (‘‘And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to His purpose’’), Wisner characterized Huntington as a bright, well-educated woman who graced the important position in society to which God had called her. However, he pointed out that the joy she felt in her religion as a young girl had to be refined by suffering, and it was. The trials of her life, her morbidity of temperament, and her steadfast humility in face of these afflictions no doubt gave her a good return according to her thinking and Wisner’s. But the modern Christian tends to look for a peace of mind that seems lacking in such religious thinkers. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Wisner, B., Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Susan Huntington (1828). Reference works: Daughters of America (1883). —BEVERLY SEATON

HURD-MEAD, Kate C(ampbell) Born 6 April 1867, Danville, Quebec, Canada; died 1 January 1941, Haddam, Connecticut Also wrote under: Kate C. Mead, Kate C. H. Mead Daughter of Edward Payson and Sarah Campbell Hurd; married William E. Mead, 1893 Born in Canada, Kate C. Hurd-Mead moved with her family to Newburyport, Massachusetts, where she graduated from high school in 1883. She received her M.D. from Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1888 and interned the next year at the

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Hurd-Mead was active in many women’s medical organizations and was president of the Medical Women’s National Association (MWNA) from 1922-24. In 1925, Hurd-Mead gave up practice to devote herself to full-time research and writing on the history of women in medicine. She traveled extensively in Europe, Asia, and Africa, gathering information about women in medicine. Medical Women of America (1933), Hurd-Mead’s first book, was dedicated to the MWNA and was published only after the press received 200 advance subscriptions. The book was oversubscribed—not because it had a wide audience but because many readers ordered more than one copy. Hurd-Mead records the history of medical women in America from the early midwives who practiced in the colonies to the women physicians who served in various capacities during World War I. Hurd-Mead traces the careers of the first American women medical students and physicians, relating the achievements of these women in founding dispensaries, hospitals, and medical schools. She shows that women physicians did well as private practitioners, as teachers and professors—when given a chance, as researchers, and even as surgeons. Hurd-Mead insists that medical women fall short of men only in writing about their achievements. As a result, the world does not realize the extent of women physicians’ abilities and accomplishments. Hurd-Mead’s book is an attempt to remedy that situation. A History of Women in Medicine from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century (1938) is Hurd-Mead’s magnum opus. The task that Hurd-Mead set for herself was great: to write the most complete history of women in medicine possible. Hurd-Mead spent two years doing research at the British Museum library and several more years consulting original manuscripts in many parts of the world. The result is an impressive compilation of facts presenting the story of women in medicine from 4000 B.C. in Egypt through the end of the 18th century in Europe. Volume II, still unpublished at Hurd-Mead’s death, was to have continued the story of women in medicine through the 20th century. This volume demonstrates convincingly that restrictions against women in medicine are relatively recent—a product of the Christian era and the founding of universities in the Middle Ages. From ancient times until about the 13th century, women were active in all aspects of medical care, surgery as well as midwifery. The book is extremely detailed; in fact, it is tedious to read. Hurd-Mead’s accomplishment in discovering and preserving facts about women in medicine in many countries throughout


HURST

many centuries is extraordinary. She has restored to medical women their proper heritage. OTHER WORKS: The papers of Kate Campbell Hurd-Mead, including the unpublished manuscript of Volume II of her History of Women in Medicine, are at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: NAW (article by G. Miller). Other references: Bulletin of the History of Medicine (July 1941). Journal of the American Medical Women’s Association (April 1956). Nation (28 May 1938). NYT (15 May 1938). Women in Medicine (April 1941). YR (Summer 1938). —ANNE HUDSON JONES

HURST, Fannie Born 18 October 1889, Hamilton, Ohio; died 23 February 1968, New York, New York Daughter of Samuel and Rose Koppel Hurst; married Jacques S. Danielson, 1915 Fannie Hurst, daughter of American-born Jews of German descent, was raised and educated in St. Louis, Missouri (B.A. 1909, Washington University). In 1910, eager to observe the working people of whom and for whom she wrote, Hurst moved to New York City. There she took assorted jobs as saleswoman, actress, and waitress, and started bombarding publications with her fiction. Her marriage to a Russian-born pianist, in which they both pursued separate careers, endured successfully until her husband’s death in 1952. Hurst became an established writer while still in her twenties. She began as a short story writer, but she is best remembered for her bestselling novels, especially Back Street (1931) and Imitation of Life (1933). Her works have been widely translated, and many became successful films. Back Street is about the beautiful Ray Schmidt, who is mistress to a married man and for over 20 years is confined to the ‘‘back streets’’ of his life. After her lover’s death, Ray spends her last few years penniless at a European spa, surviving on the few francs that winners at the casino throw to her; she dies alone in her room. The novel’s enormous popularity was due largely to two factors: It appeared during the Depression, when escapist entertainment was assured a large following, and it deals with the especially titillating subject of sex, which Hurst handles most cleverly. She avoids graphic description, knowing that the lack of it would afford greater excitement for her audience and, therefore, greater readership for her. Although we remain uncertain why the selfish and immature lover is even attractive to the lovely Ray, this is calculated; we are not meant to focus on the relationship, but on Ray, her feelings and responses. She is dominated, used, and ultimately destroyed, yet throughout, the reader, perhaps recalling similar trials, identifies and empathizes profoundly.

In Imitation of Life, Beatrice Fay Chipley, widowed mother of a young daughter, sells maple syrup door-to-door with the help of Delilah, a black woman who also has an infant daughter. Beatrice becomes one of the most prominent businesswomen in America, but the novel ends with her realization that she must continue to live an ‘‘imitation of life’’ without a man to love. Imitation of Life, in rough outline, is a woman’s version of the timeless rags-to-riches American success story. But the specific type of irony evident at the conclusion, as well as its stereotyped characterization of the black ‘‘mammy’’ figure, places it solidly in its time. Feminists would be outraged at its underlying philosophy—that, regardless of professional achievements, life must be worthless without what Delilah terms ‘‘manlovin’’’. Hurst’s audience, however, was attracted by the novel’s sympathetic— today we would call it sentimental—depiction of the heroine; by its handling of the touchy matter of race relations; and by its ‘‘bittersweetness,’’ still one of the recognizable marks of the popular novelist. Hurst wrote for women and, accordingly, her books focus on women. These characters tend to be inarticulate and enigmatic, types whom she termed ‘‘artists without an art.’’ They are concerned most significantly with the need for a man. Professional success, when women achieve it, is regarded as compensation for the lack of male companionship and, thus, in emotional terms, a poor replacement for true happiness. The novels are replete with women who sacrifice themselves for men and with women who long to do so. They are ministers of mercy to the weak, egocentric, even cruel male figures. Because the female characters, in contrast, are always presented positively, when they are hurt—which is often the case—they retain the sympathy of the audience. The women, we are made to feel, are too good for the objects of their desire. In her time, Hurst was very popular with readers and was scarcely taken seriously by critics. Today she retains our interest primarily because her works are accurate gauges of her contemporary audience’s beliefs. OTHER WORKS: Just Around the Corner (1914). Every Soul Hath Its Song (1916). Land of the Free (1917). Gaslight Sonatas (1918). Humoresque (1919). Back Pay (1921). Star Dust (1921). The Vertical City (1922). Lummox (1923). Appassionata (1926). Mannequin (1926). Song of Life (1927). A President Is Born (1928). Five and Ten (1929). Procession (1929). Anitra’s Dance (1934). No Food with My Meals (1935). Great Laughter (1936). Hands of Veronica (1937). We Are Ten (1937). Lonely Parade (1942). Hallelujah (1944). Any Woman (1950). The Man with One Head (1953). Anatomy of Me: A Wonderer in Search of Herself (1958). Family! (1959). God Must Be Sad (1961). Fool—Be Still (1964). The papers of Fannie Hurst are primarily housed in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin; other manuscripts and letters can also be found at both Brandeis University and Washington University. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brandimarte, C., Fannie Hurst and Her Fiction: Prescriptions for America’s Working Women (1980). Koppelman, S., ed., Fannie Hurst—The Woman, the Writer:

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A Collection of Essays (1994). Koppelman, S., A Fannie Hurst Anthology: Stories Selected and Introduced by Susan Koppelman (1994). Reference works: CA (1971). NCAB. Ohio Authors and Their Books (1962). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the Untied States (1995). TCA, TCAS. Other references: Arts and Decoration (Nov. 1935). Bookman (May 1929, Aug. 1931). Mentor (Apr. 1928). NYTBR (25 Jan. 1942). Saturday Review (Oct. 1937). —ELLEN SERLEN UFFEN

HURSTON, Zora Neale Born 7 January 1891, Eatonville, Florida; died 28 January 1960, Saint Lucie County, Florida Daughter of John and Lucy Hurston Born in the first incorporated black town in America, Zora Neale Hurston was the only writer in the 1920s and 1930s from a Southern background who evaluated her Southern exposure, realized the richness of her racial heritage, and built her fiction on it. At a young age, Hurston lost nearly all of her childhood security when her mother died, and she had to live from relative to relative, deprived of formal schooling, drifting through several domestic jobs. Supporting herself, Hurston completed two years at Morgan College in Baltimore and enrolled at Howard University, where her first short fiction was published in a literary journal there. She moved to New York, became secretary to the popular novelist Fannie Hurst, and earned a scholarship to Barnard College, where she studied anthropology under Franz Boas. When she graduated in 1928, Dr. Boas had arranged a fellowship for Hurston to go south to collect folklore. The result of this Southern expedition was Mules and Men (1935). Throughout the 1920s Hurston had continued to write short fiction which had been published in Opportunity. Her best efforts were ‘‘Spunk,’’ ‘‘Sweat,’’ and ‘‘The Gilded Six-Bits.’’ Hurston’s first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), a narrative loosely based on the lives of her parents, chronicles the life of John Pearson, an itinerant preacher. Incorporating her knowledge of folklore into her fiction, Hurston depicts John’s second wife as a character reliant on conjure to speed the first wife to an early death and to snare the protagonist quickly into marriage, a marriage which crumbles once he discovers her tactics. Hurston is lauded for her utilization of folklore, the ripeness and realism of black dialect, the poetic sermon, and the distinct racial flavor of Jonah’s Gourd Vine. However, critics have faulted plot construction, characterization, and dialogue. Additionally, much of the criticism of Hurston’s fiction is the result of her choice of setting—Eatonville, Florida, a black town. Hurston’s critics accuse her of neglecting to confront the problems of racism

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which constituted a daily issue in the livelihood of blacks in the 1930s and 1940s. Hurston wrote in her autobiography that what she wanted to write was a story about a man, but from what she had read and heard, ‘‘Negroes were supposed to write about the Race problem. My interest lies in what makes a man or woman do such-and-so regardless of his color.’’ Hurston’s second novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), also set in Eatonville, is frequently acclaimed her best novel. It is the story of Janie, a young black woman who searches for happiness, self-realization, and love; she is a woman who refuses to settle for less than her own realistic appraisal of what love should be. After the death of her second husband, when Janie is forty years old, she marries a man much younger than she who is unpretentiously one of the ‘‘folk,’’ who loves and wants her without imposing restrictions on her. In the Florida Everglades where Janie and Teacake move after their marriage, they experience a few years of happiness working in the fields together, and Janie is serenely content being a part of the folk culture. Somewhat melodramatically, the novel ends, after a hurricane destroys the Everglades community and Teacake is bitten by a mad dog. Janie is forced to shoot and to kill Teacake because, mentally deranged by rabies, he tries to kill her. The characterization of Janie is excellent, and plot structure, depiction of the folk culture, and the use of black dialect are all equally fine. Her last novel, Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), the only one in which a Southern white woman is the protagonist, has received little critical attention. Nevertheless, Arvay Henson is the second of Hurston’s fully delineated protagonists. More than any other woman in her fiction, Arvay offers a psychologically complete view of the complex entanglement of forces which impinge on the Southern rural woman and make her life, both externally and internally, a continuous struggle. Both before her marriage to Jim Meserve and for some 20 years afterwards, Arvay Henson is plagued with feelings of insecurity, inferiority, and self-worthlessness. At sixteen she had accepted that happiness, love, and normal relationships were not meant for her; she had publicly denied the world, dedicated her life to foreign missionary service, and begun having hysterical spasms. Finally, Array realizes she cannot depend on her husband to define her ‘‘self’’ for her, and Jim—also aware of this— abruptly gives her this opportunity when he leaves her. Arvay returns to her hometown in a symbolic trip, for she realizes that neither her glorified image of her family nor her image of herself as someone no man would want has been realistic. True to the author’s incurable penchant for romantic love, Arvay and Jim are reunited. From the early autobiographical story, ‘‘Drenched in Light’’ (1924), to Seraph on the Suwanee, Hurston based her fiction on her own personal experiences and wrote about the kind of life of which she had firsthand knowledge. Although her fiction is filled with an assortment of characters, her female protagonists all possess an inner strength which helps them survive the most adverse situations. All of Hurston’s novels focus on character and suggest that maturity is necessary before one can reach an


understanding of true values. Noteworthy in Hurston’s fiction is that escape to an urban environment is never suggested as a solution to any problem. The fact that Hurston chooses to place her characters in a Southern, rural, all-black setting suggests, also, that she wished to depict them as black men and women, not merely as reactors to racism. The additional inclusion of folk elements gives a uniquely Southern flavor to character and setting. As a writer who had grown up in the South, Hurston recognized the aesthetics of this particular setting and culture and utilized them as no other black writer of the 1920s or 1930s did.

HUTCHINS

Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom (1998). Wall, C. A., Women of the Harlem Renaissance (1995). WitherspoonWalthall, M. L., The Evolution of the Black Heroine in the Novels of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker (1988). Yates, J., Zora Neale Hurston: A Storyteller’s Life (1993). Young, J., Black Writers of the Thirties (1973). Reference works: CB (May 1942, April 1960). Norton Book of Women’s Lives (1993). Oxford Book of Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Short Story Criticism (1990). TCA, TCAS. Other references: Black World (Aug. 1972). NYHTB (22 Nov. 1943). NYT (2 Feb. 1960). SBL (Winter 1974). —JOYCE PETTIS

OTHER WORKS: Tell My Horse (1938). Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). Dust Tracks on a Dirt Road (1942, 1995 and 1996). I Love Myself When I Am Laughing. . .and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader (1979). Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writings (1995). Sweat (the original story and critical essays, edited by C. A. Wall, 1997). Go Gator and Muddy the Water: Writings (1999).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bloom, H., Major Black American Writers Through the Harlem Renaissance (1995). Bone, R., The Negro Novel in America (1958). Carson, W. J. Zora Neale Hurston: The Early Years, 1921-1934 (dissertation, 1998). Carter-Sigglow, J., Making Her Way with Thunder: A Reappraisal of Zora Neale Hurston’s Narrative Art (1994). Crawley, L.K., Zora Neale Hurston: Recordings, Manuscripts, and Ephemera in the Archive of Folk Culture and Other Divisions of the Library of Congress (1992). Cronin, G. L., ed., Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston (1998). Davis, R. P., Zora Neale Hurston: An Annotated Bibliography and Reference Guide (1997). Edwards, J. A. C., ‘‘Creative Reverence: Self-Defining Revisionary Discourse in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston’’ (thesis, 1998). Gates, H. L. and A. Appiah, eds., Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (1993). Harrison, I. E. and F. V., eds., African-American Pioneers in Anthropology (1999). Hemenway, R., Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (1977). Huggins, N., Harlem Renaissance (1971). Howard, L. P., ed., Alice Walker and Zora Neale Hurston: The Common Bond (1993). Lowe, J., Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston’s Cosmic Comedy (1994). Meisenhelder, S. E., Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: Race and Gender in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston (1999). Nathiri, N. Y., Zora! Zora Neale Hurston: A Woman and Her Community (1991). O’Banner, B. M., ‘‘A Study of Black Heroines in Four Selected Novels (1929-1959) by Four Black American Women Novelists: Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Paule Marshall, Ann Lane Petry’’ (thesis, 1985). Plant, D. G., Every Tub Must Sit On Its Own Bottom: The Philosophy and Politics of Zora Neale Hurston (1995). Rascher, S. R., The Neo-Slave Narratives of Hurston, Walker, and Morrison: Rewriting the Black Woman’s Slave Narrative (dissertation, 1998). Royster, B. H., The Ironic Vision of Four Black Women Novelists: A Study of the Novels of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston and Ann Petry (1980). Smith, B., The Truth That Never

HUTCHINS, Maude (Phelps) McVeigh Born 4 February 1902 (?), New York, New York Daughter of Warren R. and Maude Phelps McVeigh; married Robert Maynard Hutchins, 1921 (divorced 1948) Maude McVeigh Hutchins was educated at St. Margaret’s School in Waterbury, Connecticut, and received a B.F.A. degree from Yale University in 1926. Divorced in 1948, Hutchins settled in Connecticut with her children. Talented not only in writing but also in the plastic arts, Hutchins published poems and short stories in the New Yorker, the Kenyon Review, Accent, Mademoiselle, Nation, Epoch, Poetry, and the Quarterly Review of Literature; and her sculpture was exhibited in one-woman shows in St. Louis, Chicago, San Francisco, and New York. A Diary of Love (1950), originally banned by British customs as well as by the police censor board in Chicago, is a three-part recollection of a young girl’s initiation into adulthood. The diary’s exordium explains that the entries are ex post facto, written years after the events took place. The gap in time allows Noel’s sophisticated and knowledgeable perspective to enhance and deepen her adolescent experiences. The first part presents the earliest stimuli and those persons who provide negative lessons in sensitivity. The second part takes place in a sanitarium in the desert, where Noel convalesces for a number of years from tuberculosis. Here, too, the propriety and routine do not preclude erotic undercurrents, and the more imminent death appears to the patients, the more important sensuality and eroticism become. After Noel returns home, in the final part, she falls in love with Dominick and they share an intimate awareness of sensual experimentation. Their near-perfect relationship continues until the honeymoon night, when Dominick’s unconscious desires are revealed. As he cries out, in his sleep, his mother’s mythical name, Leda, Noel immediately understands his incestuous feelings. Neither she nor Dominick can alter the spontaneous direction of eroticism, and she silently acknowledges the permanence of her rival. Noel’s remark, ‘‘I imagined love as a pie, a slice for each,’’ provides the title for Hutchins’ collection of short stories, sketches, plays, and monologues. Love Is a Pie (1952) is somewhat

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uneven in quality. A more sustained work is the novel Victorine (1959), which, like A Diary of Love, presents a young woman’s journey from innocence to experience. Various persons emerge from a multitude of impressions to guide Victorine through successive passages to maturity. Honey on the Moon (1964), like A Diary of Love, is written from the first person, Hutchins’ most successful point of view. Sigourney, a twenty-year-old girl from Connecticut, marries Derek, a forty-year-old suave bachelor from New York City. Lonely for the simplicity of her single life, Sigourney discovers on her honeymoon that Derek’s graciousness and élan are tempered by his aloofness from her and his fascination with haute fashion, homosexuals, and transvestites. Once she realizes that he has married her for her astonishing resemblance to a former lover, Sigourney’s sanity deteriorates. Aiming a pistol at her husband, Sigourney fires too late, and when a second shot is fired, the reader cannot be sure if Sigourney has killed herself or merely hallucinated.

HUXTABLE, Ada Louise Born circa 1920s, New York, New York Daughter of Michael L. and Leah Rosenthal Landman; married L. Garth Huxtable, circa 1942 Ada Louise Huxtable was born and raised in Manhattan, where her passion for cities and buildings flourished. She edited the student newspaper at Wadleigh High School, Manhattan’s high school for music and arts. At Hunter College, she majored in fine arts, was elected Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year, and graduated magna cum laude. Huxtable has said she ‘‘never chose a career. I began as a scholar, writing and researching for my own pleasure and enrichment in a field that was of great interest to me.’’ She has always found immense personal satisfaction in that academic research. In 1946 she became assistant curator for architecture and design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. She worked there until accepting a Fulbright scholarship in 1950 (and in 1952) for study and advanced research in architecture and design in Italy.

Most of Hutchins’ novels trace the emerging sensuality of a young and acutely sensitive female protagonist. A Diary of Love opens as Noel delicately and deliberately crushes ripe raspberries against her tongue, relishing their ‘‘sweet disintegration.’’ Similarly, the protagonist of Honey on the Moon feels the physical vibrations down through her limbs from repeating the word ‘‘husband.’’ As the sensibilities of these women develop, random objects are supplanted by specific individuals, both male and female, who stimulate and refine new experiences and sensations. In Victorine, for example, the young girl is guided by her half-witted friend, ‘‘Fool Fred,’’ to share his vision of a magnificent white stallion, a vision poised ambiguously between their fantasies and reality. In Hutchins’ work, such epiphanies are crucial, but only intermittent, during the maturation process.

Her writing on art and architecture has been published in Art Digest, Progressive Architecture (where she was a contributing editor for almost 10 years), Art in America (again, a contributing editor for a decade), Interiors, Arts, and Architectural Review. Her work has also appeared in popular magazines such as Consumer Reports, Holiday, Horizon, and Saturday Review.

Hutchins balances her heroines’ perceptions between fantasy and the real, but sometimes they are too weak to maintain that balance; they are nevertheless consistently sensitive and appealing. It is through their ingenuous perceptions that Hutchins manages to combine a frank eroticism with succinct and elegant language. She was praised highly by Anaïs Nin (in The Novel of the Future) for her vivid and cinematic love scenes and for her attention to the senses and the emotions. Hutchins is at her best when suggesting evanescent moments of sensual apprehension that mark the transition from childhood to womanhood. For her honesty, subtlety, and graceful style, Hutchins deserves greater study from readers and critics.

Influential in the founding of New York’s Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1965, she defines preservation as ‘‘the retention and active relationship of the buildings of the past to the community’s functioning present.’’ The director of New York’s office of midtown planning and development has said he ‘‘would consciously go out of my way to get her advice on issues. . .she has such a keen understanding of the politics, the money, and the realities involved in any given situation that I can treat her as a peer.’’

OTHER WORKS: Diagrammatics (with M. J. Adler, 1932). Georgiana (1946). My Hero (1953). Memoirs of Maisie (1955). The Elevator (1963). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Nin, A., The Novel of the Future (1968). Reference works: CA (1976). WA. Other references: Book Week (15 Mar. 1964). Commonweal (3 Apr. 1964). NR (8 Dec. 1952). NYTBR (9 Feb. 1964). —MIRIAM FUCHS

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One of the many publications carrying her bylined articles in the 1950s was the New York Times magazine. In 1963, as her articles appeared with greater frequency, she was asked to take the newly created and prestigious post of architecture critic for the New York Times.

Her books include Four Walking Tours of Modern Architecture in New York City (1961), published by the Museum of Modern Art, and Classic New York: Georgian Gentility to Greek Elegance (1964). Both were intended as part of a six-volume series and represent years of painstaking research and personal reflections. Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard? (1970, 1972) is a collection of her articles from the Times. In one edition, her publishers labeled it ‘‘a primer on urbicide’’ as no one is immune from her caustic evaluations. She called the Pan Am building ‘‘a prime example of a New York specialty: the big, the expedient, and the deathlessly ordinary.’’


Huxtable is an outstanding authority on urbanism. Besides being a member of the New York Times editorial board and winning the first Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism, she has received many significant awards from professional and cultural organizations and more than a dozen honorary degrees. The Wall Street Journal has noted her ability to get ‘‘everyone—the builders included—eating out of her hand and telling her everything she wants to know. Then she retreats behind a closed door and out comes this very gutsy critique.’’ Huxtable has no fear of attacking big city interests, such as building speculators and real estate developers, when the occasion warrants. Her work has been both praised and damned by the reading public; it is trenchant, lively, precise, and—clearly— influential.

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Secrets (1971). Lloyd, J., Ada Louise Huxtable: A Case Study (1975). Papadakes, A., Architecture of Today (1997). Papadakes, A., A Decade of Architectural Design (1991). Williams, H. M., ed., Making Architecture: The Getty Center (1997). Wodehouse, L., Ada Louise Huxtable, An Annotated Bibliography (1981). Reference works: CB (1973). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Architectural Record (Apr. 1993, May 1993). ARTnews (1997). CSM (9 Apr. 1969, 11 Nov. 1973). Harper’s Bazaar (Aug. 1972). House Beautiful (Sept. 1970). Interior Design (Feb. 1993). Metropolis (1998). New York (3 Nov. 1975). Newsweek (23 Aug. 1965). NY (17 Dec. 1973). NYT (5 May 1970, 26 Sept. 1973, 2 Jan. 1975, 13 Mar. 1977, 29 Sept. 1977). Opera News (July 1999). WSJ (7 Nov. 1972).

OTHER WORKS: Pier Luigi Nervi (1960). Kicked a Building Lately? (1976, 1988). Goodbye History, Hello Hamburger: An Anthology of Architectural Delights and Disasters (1986). Architecture Anyone? (1988). The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered (1992). Inventing Reality: Architectural Themes and Variations (1993). The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Angeletti, M., ‘‘The Architectural Criticism of Ada Louise Huxtable’’ (thesis, 1995). Diamondstein, B., Open

—KATHLEEN KEARNEY KEESHEN

HYDE, Shelley See REED, Kit

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I IRELAND, Jane See NORRIS, Kathleen Thompson

IRWIN, Inez Haynes Born 2 March 1873, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; died 30 September 1970 Daughter of Gideon and Emma Jane Hopkins Haynes; married Rufus H. Gillmore, 1897 (died); William H. Irwin, 1916 Inez Haynes Irwin was educated in Boston schools and attended Radcliffe College from 1897 to 1900. At the turn of the century, Radcliffe was a center of suffragist sentiment. Determined to extend this feeling to college alumnae, Irwin and Maud Wood Park founded the Massachusetts College Equal Suffrage Association in 1900. This group expanded into the National College Equal Suffrage League, an active force in the enfranchisement campaign. Irwin’s other feminist activities centered around the more radical wing of the suffrage movement, the National Woman’s Party. Led by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, the party was patterned after the British suffrage movement in its militancy and political tactics. Irwin was a member of the party’s advisory council; she wrote for the party’s publications and was the party’s biographer. The Story of the Woman’s Party (1921) is flawed by its lack of objectivity and the failure to mention the other wing of the suffrage movement, but it is the only record of the party’s activities, other than the stories repeated in Irwin’s more ambitious work on the history of American women, Angels and Amazons (1933). Irwin’s first fictional work was published in Everybody’s in 1904. She then became a regular contributor to British and American magazines and devoted herself to writing short stories and novels. Other than her feminist chronicles, Irwin’s only digressions from these genres occurred during World War I. Having become the wife of newspaperman Will Irwin after the death of her first husband, Inez visited the European fronts with Will. Her accounts of these visits were printed in the magazines of three countries. ‘‘The Spring Flight’’ was the O. Henry Memorial award first prize winner in 1924, a puzzling choice, for the story is a quasibiographical sketch of William Shakespeare trying to overcome writer’s block before composing The Tempest. It is ironic Irwin received the highest acclaim for this story, so far removed from her field of expertise. After a few ventures with highly sentimentalized and simplistic novels about orphaned children and an idealized brother

and sister, Irwin began writing fiction that addressed the issues with which she is now most often associated—those underlying the suffrage movement. Of her feminist fiction, The Lady of the Kingdoms (1917) has been undeservedly forgotten. This long novel presents two young heroines, the beautiful and self-assured Southward and the plain and self-effacing Hester. Irwin uses both heroines to examine the conventional moralities women have been forced into, as well as the unconventional, even ‘‘immoral,’’ ones women have chosen for themselves. Though Irwin may disapprove of the latter roles, she never condemns the women who choose them. Irwin published two books dealing with divorce, Gideon (1927) and Gertrude Haviland’s Divorce (1925). The heroine of the latter work is a fat, dull, sloppy woman who has further alienated her husband by being overly absorbed in her children. The book begins as Gertrude receives her husband’s request for a divorce, follows her through mental illness, watches her recover as she realizes she is pregnant, and witnesses her transformation into a woman of resolution, intelligence, self-reliance, and new beauty. Her final triumph occurs when she rejects her husband’s offer of remarriage; however, this victory is mitigated by the fact that Gertrude now realizes she loves and will marry another man. Also troubling is the assertion that having a baby is enough to end a woman’s suffering, an attitude no doubt affected by Irwin’s failure to have children of her own. In the 1930s and 1940s, Irwin returned to sentimental, descriptive novels and wrote upper-class-murder mysteries and moralistic children’s books. The strongest indictment to be made against Irwin comes from these books, the last she wrote. She had run out of good ideas, and no longer had the ability to write strongly, to state issues clearly, and to imagine vital characters. Irwin apparently decided that those qualities of authorship she still possessed were good enough for children’s books. She was a prolific writer whose finest works came early and whose mediocre later works have so thoroughly reduced her reputation as a writer of adult and children’s fiction that she is virtually forgotten in these fields. Between 1917 and 1927, however, she wrote several impressively direct novels about divorce and women’s roles. OTHER WORKS: June Jeopardy (1908). Maida’s Little Shop (1910). Phoebe and Ernest (1910). Janey (1911). Phoebe, Ernest, and Cupid (1912). Angel Island (1914). The Ollivant Orphans (1915). The Californians (1916). The Happy Years (1919). The Native Son (1919). Maida’s Little House (1921). Out of the Air (1921). Maida’s Little School (1926). P. D. F. R. (1928). Confessions of a Businessman’s Wife (1931). Family Circle (1931). Youth Must Laugh (1932). Strange Harvest (1934). Murder Masquerade (1935). The Poison Cross (1936). Good Manners for Girls (1937). A Body Rolled Downstairs (1938). Maida’s Little Island (1939). Maida’s Little Camp (1940). Many Murders (1941). Maida’s Little Village (1942). Maida’s Little Houseboat (1943).

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Maida’s Little Theatre (1946). The Women Swore Revenge (1946). Maida’s Little Cabins (1947). Maida’s Little Zoo (1949). Maida’s Little Lighthouse (1951). Maida’s Little Hospital (n.d.). Maida’s Little Farm (n.d.). Maida’s Little House Party (n.d.). Maida’s Little Treasure Hunt (n.d.). Maida’s Little Tree House (n.d.). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: NCAB. TCA, TCAS. —LYNNE MASEL-WALTERS AND HELEN LOEB

ISAACS, Susan Born 7 December 1943, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Morton and Helen Asher Isaacs; married Elkan Abramowitz, 1968; children: Andrew, Elizabeth Susan Isaacs was born in Brooklyn, New York, on 7 December 1943 to Morton Isaacs, an electrical engineer, and Helen (Asher) Isaacs, a homemaker. Isaacs was raised in New York except for a brief period when her family lived in Ohio. She entered Queens College (now Queens College of the City University of New York) after graduating from high school. She switched majors from pre-med to economics and finally to English. Although Isaacs worked on the school newspaper, she did not consider becoming a professional writer until much later. She dropped out of Queens College in her senior year and became an editorial assistant in the reader mail department of Seventeen magazine in 1966. She married Elkan Abramowitz, a lawyer, two years later and was eventually promoted to senior editor, but quit in 1970 to stay home with her first child. Isaacs worked briefly as a freelance writer for various journals and had a brief stint as a speechwriter for local Democratic politicians, but was dissatisfied with her career. It was when her second child was in nursery school that she thought of writing a novel. Although she put the idea off at first, she eventually settled into a schedule of writing for three hours every morning. Her first book, Compromising Positions (1978), was finished a year later. A friend of her husband’s was an executive editor at Simon & Schuster, and he introduced Isaacs to an agent who sold the book to Times Books for its new fiction list. Compromising Positions centers on upper-middle-class Long Island homemaker Judith Singer’s amateur investigation into the brutal murder of Bruce Fleckstein, the local periodontist. In explaining her choice of her victim’s occupation, Isaacs said, ’’I just figured dentists cause pain, so they deserve to die.’’ Judith quickly finds herself entangled with the Mafia, an attractive policeman, and her suburban neighbors’ dirty secrets as she tries to solve Fleckstein’s murder. The book sold moderately well in hardback but received favorable reviews and was a Book of the Month Club main selection. The paperback and movie rights sold for large sums and the paperback version shot to the top of the bestseller lists.

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Isaacs’ second novel, Close Relations (1980), also focuses on a witty Jewish woman, although one remarkably different from Judith Singer. In Close Relations, Marcia Green is a divorced speechwriter working for an Italian New York gubernatorial candidate. During the campaign, Marcia becomes involved with both an Irish Catholic campaign manager and an eligible Jewish lawyer. The novel has been called a modern fairy tale and a ‘‘hilarious satire of ethnic stereotyping.’’ Isaacs’ next novel Almost Paradise (1984), is a contemporary Cinderella story with a twist. As in the majority of Isaacs’ work, the protagonist is a strong, independent female who nevertheless has trouble finding love. Jane Heissenhuber, who is poor and from an abusive home, falls in love with and marries handsome and wealthy Nicholas Cobleigh, who becomes a Hollywood superstar. Yet the couple’s story does not end happily. Critics’ reviews were mixed. Shining Through (1988), fared better with critics and became a successful motion picture in 1992 with Michael Douglas and Melanie Griffith. Its main character is feisty, intelligent, half-Jewish Linda Voss, a working girl who falls in love with her boss, handsome attorney John Berringer. The couple marry, but the marriage is not a happy one, and Linda eventually becomes an Allied spy working undercover in Nazi Germany. Unlike Almost Paradise, however, Shining Through has a Hollywood-style ending in which Linda finds the love and happiness she deserves. Magic Hour, Isaacs’ 1991 novel, features one of her few male protagonists, Long Island homicide detective Steve Brady. A Vietnam vet with a troubled past, Brady falls in love with a suspect in the murder of a movie producer. This novel has the same wickedly funny dialogue and eye for details that characterize Isaacs’ writing. Isaacs stuck with a mystery but returned to a female protagonist in After All These Years (1993). This novel’s heroine, Rosie, finds her husband murdered just after he announces he’s leaving her for a younger woman. She becomes the primary suspect and sets out to find the killer to clear herself of suspicion. Critics loved After All These Years but many didn’t care for 1996’s Lily White. The title character of the latter is a criminal defense attorney who defends a con man accused of murdering his latest victim. The book tells of Lily’s efforts to free her client while simultaneously presenting her family history in flashbacks. Some reviewers complained the two tales didn’t mesh and that Isaacs should have eliminated Lily’s history. In Red, White, and Blue (1998), Isaacs explores the questions of what it means to be an American by focusing upon an unlikely pair’s investigation of a radical Wyoming militia group. Charlie Blair, an FBI agent, and Lauren Miller, a New York reporter, are drawn together by their immigrant Jewish ancestry and American values. Tension escalates as Charlie infiltrates the hate group, but all ends well. Isaacs turns her writing skills to nonfiction with her latest book, Brave Dames and Wimpettes (1999). This title is part of the Library of Contemporary Thought series, in which popular authors write about intellectual subjects for a general audience. Isaacs examines the roles of women as depicted in books, television, and movies, dividing female protagonists into one of the two


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title categories and offers candid opinions on popular films and fellow novelists from Thomas Harris (Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal) and James Patterson (Along Came a Spider, Kiss the Girls) to Terminator 2 and the Alien movies. Isaacs has a remarkable eye for detail and a way with witty dialogue that make her novels come alive for readers. From Wyoming to Long Island and from contemporary Manhattan to Nazi Germany, her books are remarkably diverse in scope and setting. Quirky heroines and an occasional quirky hero are all ordinary people who encounter extraordinary situations that reveal their hidden strengths. As Isaacs herself once stated, ‘‘I like to show ordinary people reacting to ordinary circumstances. It’s an opportunity for adventure, and I like women to have adventures. There’s been far too little of it with women.’’

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CANR 20 (1987), 65 (1998). CBY (1993). Other References: People (30 Apr. 1984). PW (1 Feb. 1999). Writer (Feb. 1997).

frequent fits of hysterical laughter in those years.’’ She left the Observer in 1976 to become the Denver-based Rocky Mountain bureau chief for the New York Times, a position she held until 1982. She described this position by stating that ‘‘for three years, she covered nine mountain states by herself and was often tired.’’ After leaving the New York Times in February 1982, she became a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald until 1991, when she accepted her present position as columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Ivins once commented that her return to Texas ‘‘may indicate a masochistic streak, [but I’ve] had plenty to write about ever since.’’ The title of Ivins’ first book, Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She? (1991), grew out of one of her columns for the Dallas Times Herald. Ivins commented that if a state representative’s ‘‘IQ slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day.’’ Offended by this remark, some members of the Dallas business community tried to force the Times Herald into censuring Ivins. The Times Herald refused and plastered Dallas billboards with the question Ivins later took as her first book title. Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She? was on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year.

—LEAH J. SPARKS

IVES, Morgan See BRADLEY, Marion Zimmer

IVINS, Molly Born Mary Tyler Ivins, 30 August 1944, Monterey, California Daughter of Margot (Milne) and Jim Ivins Molly Ivins is one of America’s most well-known syndicated political columnists. She writes for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, but her hilarious accounts of Texas and national politics may be found in over 100 other newspapers throughout the country. Her three bestselling books bring together collections of her wittiest and most scathing columns, essays, and magazine articles on politics and journalism. Ivins was born Mary Tyler Ivins on August 30, 1944, in Monterey, California, but she grew up in Houston, Texas, with her brother, Andy. She graduated from Smith College in 1966 and studied briefly at the Institute of Political Science in Paris before earning a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1967. While still in school, she worked as a reporter for both the Houston Chronicle and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune newspapers. In 1970 she became a reporter and eventually coeditor of the liberal monthly Texas Observer. She covered the Texas legislature for the Observer, which accounts, as she puts it, ‘‘for her

Ivins’ second book, Nothin’ But Good Times Ahead (1993), continues her coverage of Texas politics, which she once called the ‘‘finest form of free entertainment ever invented.’’ In addition to the 1992 presidential campaign, she wrote about Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Texas and the Clarence Hill-Anita Thomas hearings. Publishers Weekly noted in its 23 August 1993 review of this book that Ivins ‘‘has a B.S. detector as sensitive as an electron microscope and a vocabulary that, when she is riled, goes beyond earthy.’’ In February, 1994, Ivins wrote an article in the Nation explaining why she had declined, against the urging of some, to enter the U.S. Senate race in Texas. Later that year she battled charges of plagiarism when staunch conservative Florence King, author of nine volumes on Southern humor, accused Ivins of copying from King’s 1975 title, Southern Ladies and Gentleman. Ivins had cited King throughout her work, but apologized for some passages in which she failed to adequately acknowledge the other author. In 1996 Ivins began a short-lived position on television’s 60 Minutes as the third member of a trio that included Stanley Crouch and P. J. O’Rourke. The three offered differing opinions in a point/counterpoint segment that was eventually dropped. Ivins’ third book, You’ve Got to Dance with Them That Brung You: Politics in the Clinton Years, was published in 1998 to the same critical acclaim as her previous titles. In this latest work, Ivins comments on the 1996 presidential campaign, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the O. J. Simpson case, in addition to her usual hilarious discourse on politics in her native Texas. The last section of this book, which Ivins dubs ‘‘Tributes to Souls Passing,’’ are farewells to the famous and the infamous. Particularly poignant and poetic is Ivins’ farewell to her own mother, which begins ‘‘My mother died the other day.’’ Her latest work, in progress and

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scheduled for a January 2000 publication, is a biography of Texas governor and Republican presidential hopeful George W. Bush. The book’s tenative title Shrub derives from an article Ivins wrote, in which she stated Bush had all the ‘‘charisma of a shrub.’’ In addition to her regular column, Ivins is a frequent contributor to such periodicals as the Nation, Esquire, Harper’s, Progressive, and Mother Jones and a frequent guest on network radio and television shows. Unabashedly liberal, Ivins is active in the Amnesty International Journalism Network and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. She also writes about press issues for the American Civil Liberties Union. Ivins has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist three times and has won numerous journalism awards, including Columbia University’s School of Journalism Outstanding Alumna award in 1976. She also served as a member of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize Jury. Yet, appropriately enough for Ivins, she wrote her two greatest honors are that ‘‘the Minneapolis police force named its mascot pig after

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her and that she was once banned from the campus of Texas A&M.’’ OTHER WORKS: Contributed to: The Edge of Texas and Other Texas Stories (1990). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CANR 138 (1993). Who’s Who in America (1998). Other References: ‘‘About Molly Ivins,’’ at http://creators.com/opinion/bio/bio-ivin.htm. ‘‘A Lifetime Prize for an Under-50 Writer,’’ in Editor & Publisher (16 July 1994). ‘‘Good Golly, Miss Molly,’’ in Entertainment Weekly (24 Nov. 1995). ‘‘Molly Ivins to Bring Her ‘Left-wing Populist’ Take to 60 Minutes,’’ in Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service (19 Feb. 1996). ‘‘My Friends, the Time Is Not Yet,’’ in Nation (7 Feb. 1994). —LEAH J. SPARKS

J JACKSON, Helen (Maria Fiske) Hunt Born 15 October 1830, Amherst, Massachusetts; died 12 August 1885, San Francisco, California Also wrote under: H. H., Saxe Holm, Helen Jackson, Marah, No Name, Rip Van Winkle Daughter of Nathan Welby and Deborah Vinal Fiske; married Edward Bissell Hunt, 1852; William Sharpless Jackson, 1875, children: two, both of whom died young The elder and more impetuous of two surviving children of a minister-turned-professor and his devout and educated wife, Helen Hunt Jackson was raised in an atmosphere of learning, piety, and enforced propriety. Although her parents both succumbed to tuberculosis while Jackson was a teenager, she continued to attend private schools until 1850. Jackson then married Lieutenant Hunt and began the restless life of an army wife and mother of two sons, only one of whom survived infancy. In 1863 Jackson’s husband was killed testing his newly invented torpedo. When, two years later, Jackson’s son died, she turned to writing poetry as an outlet for her grief. Jackson’s early poems won her recognition from the influential Thomas Wentworth Higginson; her subsequent prolific periodical publications gathered a wide popular audience and critical praise, even from Emerson. Jackson supported herself and traveled widely on the profits of her pen. Her generally pious and sentimental treatments of death, love, and nature themes date much of her poetry, but many of her Verses (1870) and Sonnets and Lyrics (1886) can still be appreciated for their skillful technique and use of language. Jackson’s first prose efforts were travel pieces, enriched by her flair for observation of detail in interior decoration and natural scenery. Her descriptions of unconventional people encountered along the way reveal the lingering influence of Jackson’s narrowly proper upbringing. While wintering in Colorado Springs in 1873 she met William Sharpless Jackson, a Quaker banker and railroad promoter, whom she married two years later. Jackson continued writing and experimented in prose fiction. Her passion for anonymity continued; ‘‘Saxe Holm’’ aroused popular curiosity as the author of two series of Jackson’s short stories (1874 and 1876), and she wrote two novels, Mercy Philbrick’s Choice (1876) and Hetty’s Strange History (1877), for her publisher’s ‘‘No Name’’ series. These works, set in New England, focus upon strong women characters dealing with complications wrought by love, death, family responsibility, and illness. For example, Draxy Miller, a memorable ‘‘Saxe Holm’’ heroine, arranges her sick father’s retirement, marries a minister, and takes over his pulpit after his death, all to the approval of the small-town community. Jackson’s love of children, undiminished by the deaths of her own, emerges in her children’s books. Her cat stories, particularly Letters from a Cat (1879), remain entertaining. In Nellie’s Silver

Mine (1878), Jackson incorporated her first impressions of Colorado into her story of unrelievedly good and resourceful Nellie and her somewhat petulant twin brother. The didactic asides prevalent in these works overwhelm Jackson’s Bits of Talk in Verse and Prose for Young Folks (1876). In 1879 Jackson heard Suzette ‘‘Bright Eyes’’ LaFlesche, an Omaha Native American, describe the wrongs suffered by Native Americans. Aroused by a righteous passion for justice for Native Americans comparable to abolitionist fervor, Jackson produced her most memorable works, and abandoned her pseudonyms to speak her mind. In A Century of Dishonor (1881), Jackson also abandoned fiction, writing impassioned history documenting several heinous examples of governmental perfidy practiced upon Native American tribes. Jackson’s strong indictment of the U.S. government and, by extension, its acquiescent populace, delighted reformers and enraged some critics who believed Jackson’s lack of objectivity damaged her case. Jackson was most appalled by the wrongful treatment inflicted upon California’s Mission Native Americans. She and Abbot Kinney served as official investigators, producing a Report on the Conditions and Needs of the Mission Indians (1883). Jackson was determined to publicize the situation of California’s natives and, since government documents reach few, she wrote Ramona (1884), a romance involving a half-Native American girl raised on a Spanish hacienda who elopes with a Native American, and subsequently shares his life as victim of land fraud and prejudice. Ramona enjoyed continuing popularity in over 300 reprintings, but unfortunately had little real impact upon Native American policy. Perhaps the outrage Jackson intended to arouse was lost in local color and drowned in tears, the very elements of Ramona’s story that have encouraged its frequent retelling in local pageants and national media productions. Ramona first reached the screen in a three-hour photoplay in 1916. A modified happy ending was added to the popular 1928 version, but in 1936, when a technicolor Ramona was released, one critic found the story ‘‘a piece of unadulterated hokum’’ far too sentimental for ‘‘these heartless days.’’ In spite of the sentimentality of much of her work, Jackson was widely respected in the literary and Native American reform circles of her era, and her death from cancer in 1885 was sincerely mourned. Her posthumously published stories return to eastern themes, and while they lack the fire of her Native American works, remain interesting for their powerful, independent women characters such as Sophy Burr in Zeph (1885), Victorene and Little Bel in stories included in Between Whiles (1887), and Pansy Billings and Popsy (1898). Although most modern critics fault Jackson’s obvious sentimentality, her works are important, both as an index for the taste of her times as well as for their focus upon women who act to determine their destiny. Marriage is not the end of their stories; Jackson shows them coping with widowhood, poverty, infidelity,

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and work. The presentation of Native Americans in her works deserves some criticism for its ‘‘noble savage’’ inclination and implications of Indian passivity, but the aim of her writing, to reach and arouse a white audience susceptible to such stereotypes, must be considered in any evaluation. Readers may weep at Ramona’s plight, but must still be subconsciously impressed by her strength of purpose. OTHER WORKS: Bathmendi: A Persian Tale (1867). Bits of Travel (1872). Bits of Talk about Home Matters (1873). Saxe Holm’s Stories (Series 1, 1874). The Story of Boon (1874). Bits of Travel at Home (1878). Saxe Holm’s Stories (Series 2, 1878). Mammy Tittleback and Her Family (1881). The Training of Children (1882). Easter Bells (1884). Glimpses of Three Coasts (1886). The Procession of Flowers in Colorado (1886). My Legacy (1888). A Calendar of Sonnets (1891). Poems (1891). Cat Stories (1898). Father Junipero and the Mission Indians (1902). Glimpses of California and the Missions (1902). Many of the papers of Helen Hunt Jackson are at the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hardy, G.J., American Women Civil Rights Activists: Bibliographies of 68 Leaders, 1825-1992 (1993). Higginson, T. W., Contemporaries (1899). Higginson, T. W., Short Studies of American Authors (1906). Odell, R., Helen Hunt Jackson (1939). Reference works: Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Vol. 3 (1887). Authors at Home (1886). DAB, IX. Herringshaw’s National Library of American Biography, Vol. 3 (1914). NAW. Notable Women in History (1913). Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary of Notable Americans, Vol. 6 (1904). Other references: American Literary Realism (Summer 1969, Summer 1973). AL (Jan. 1931). American Scholar (Summer 1941). Common Ground (Winter 1946). NYT (6 April 1916, 15 May 1928, 7 Oct. 1936). SR (Spring 1959).

America, where Laura met and married Schuyler Jackson (poet, farmer, and contributing editor of Time). For almost 30 years, she and Jackson worked on a reference work called the Dictionary of Exact Meaning. Schuyler Jackson died in 1970, and the work was finally published as Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words, and Supplementary Essays in 1997. During the dozen years of Jackson’s association with Graves, the two collaborated on literary criticism and on one odd satirical novel, No Decency Left (1932). A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) is a perceptive discussion of innovative techniques in poetry, such as those practiced by e.e. cummings, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. It analyzes the shortcomings of ‘‘temporary fads’’ such as Imagism and Georgianism and argues that modern experimental poetry, some of which they condemn to an early death, has been influenced by nonrepresentational art. Poets have too often simply abandoned coherent statement, creating abstract arrangements of emotionally laden phrases and sounds. Jackson also shared with Graves an interest in the Greco-Roman world and the status of women in ancient times, as evidenced by her novel A Trojan Ending (1937, reprint 1984) and her biographical sketches of famous women, Lives of Wives (1939, reissued 1995). Most of Jackson’s poetry is free verse, with a sensitive use of assonance and repetition and relatively little concern for rhyme. Each poem is a different problem, and each seeks to match sound to sense. In this Jackson has been compared with Gertrude Stein. Her poetry is often simultaneously playful and serious; sometimes there’s a trace of condescension toward nonpoetic thinking. In the first stanza of ‘‘Further Details,’’ for example, the poet, who presumably arrives at the ‘‘higher’’ truth intuitively and holistically, speaks to the analytical, rational pursuer of knowledge: ‘‘The reward of curiosity / In such as you / (Statistician of doubt) / Is increased cause of curiosity. / And the punishment thereof, / To be not a cat.’’

Born Laura Reichenthal, 16 January 1901, New York, New York; died 1991 Also wrote under: Laura Riding Gottschalk, Barbara Rich, Laura Riding Daughter of Nathaniel S. and Sarah Edersheim Reichenthal; married Louis Gottschalk, 1920; Schuyler Jackson, 1941 (died 1970)

Jackson is concerned with mental experience more than with sense experience. She favors philosophical subjects—the coexistence of multiplicity and sameness, the mysterious transformations of life and death, the ambiguous relationship between body and mind, the nature of love. Some readers find her poems obscure, but she implies this is the reader’s fault, not hers: ‘‘Doom is where I am and I want to make this plain because I know there are people to whom it can be plain’’ (preface to Poems: A Joking Word, 1930). She sometimes combines humor with metaphysical fantasy, as in the delightful creation story, ‘‘The Quids.’’ Other poems, like the enigmatic ‘‘Lucrece and Nara,’’ convey some eerie insight quite beyond rational explanation. In 1943 Graves referred to Jackson as writing in ‘‘the supreme female I, the original Triple Muse, who in her original Olympian mountain was mother of Apollo, not his chorus-girl troupe.’’

Laura Riding Jackson, raised in a nonreligious Jewish household actively espousing socialism, is best known for her strikingly original poetry, although she has also written criticism, novels, and biographical sketches. She attended Cornell University, married Louis Gottschalk (divorced, 1925), then spent 13 years abroad. She and Robert Graves were companions, establishing the Seizin Press in 1927 in Majorca. In 1939 they came back to

Her poetry has never achieved widespread popularity with general readers, but it is an important part of the modern flight from the conventions of 19th-century romanticism. Her diction shows a deliberate avoidance of traditional sentiments, a bare minimum of imagery and metaphor, a tendency to abstraction. The vocabulary is often deceptively simple, yet the reader must intuit meaning from limited clues. At its worst, this may require

—HELEN M. BANNAN

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sheer guesswork. At its best, it achieves a delicate precision and economy in the expression of complex meanings.

OTHER WORKS: The Close Chaplet (1926). Voltaire: A Biographical Fantasy (1927). Anarchism Is Not Enough (1928). Contemporaries and Snobs (1928). Love As Love, Death As Death (1928). Twenty Poems Less (1930). Laura and Francesco (1931, with R. Graves, 1932). The Life of the Dead (1933). Poet: A Lying Word (1933). Four Unposted Letters to Catherine (1933, 1993). Americans (1934). Progress of Stories (1935, 1994). Collected Poems (1938). Selected Poems (taken from 1938’s Collected Poems, 1970). The Telling (1970). Description of Life (uncorrected proof, 1980). How a Poem Comes to Be: A Poem for James F. Mathias (1980). A Poem (1980). Some Communications of Broad Reference (1983). The Poems of Laura Riding (1980, 1986). Experts Are Puzzled (reissue, 1985). The First Awakenings: The Early Poems (1992). A Selection of the Poems of Laura Riding (1994). Laura Riding: Selected Poems in Five Sets (reissue, 1995). A Short Sentence for Private Reflection on the Universal Length of Meaning (1995). The Word Woman and Other Related Writings (reissue, 1994).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Adams, B. B., The Enemy Self: Poetry and Criticism of Laura Riding (1990). Baker, D., In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding (1993). Graves, R. P., Robert Graves: The Years with Laura, 1926-1940 (1990). Seymour, M., The Telling (reissue, 1999). Van Hook, B. A., The Use of Myth in Laura Riding’s Selected Poems (1993). Wexler, J. P. Laura Riding’s Pursuit of Truth (1979). Wexler, J. P., Laura Riding, A Bibliography (1981). Reference works: Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1987). CAA (1944). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA, TCAS. Other references: American Literature (1992). Critical Inquiry (Spring 1992). CQ (Spring 1971). Poetry (Aug. 1932, May 1939). Guide to the Laura (Riding) Jackson and Schuyler B. Jackson Collection at Cornell University (1998). Laura (Riding) Jackson and the Promise of Language: Catalogue of an Exhibition, October 1998-January 1999 (1998). —KATHERINE SNIPES

JACKSON, Rebecca Cox Born 15 February 1795, Hornstown, Pennsylvania; died 24 May 1871, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Daughter of Jane (Cox), later Wisson or Wilson; father’s name unknown; married Samuel S. Jackson (date unknown, before 1830; separated 1836) Rebecca Cox Jackson was a charismatic itinerant preacher, the founder of a religious communal family in Philadelphia, and a

religious visionary writer. Though an important example of African American female religious leadership and spirituality in the 19th century, she was virtually unknown from her death until the rediscovery and publication of her spiritual autobiography; Gifts of Power, in 1981. Virtually all that is known of her life is recorded in this autobiography and in Shaker archives. As the result of the powerful religious awakening experience in a thunderstorm in 1830 with which her spiritual autobiography begins, Jackson became active in the early Holiness movement and came to challenge the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church of her upbringing. She moved from leadership of praying bands to public preaching, stirring up controversy within AME circles not only as a woman preacher, but also because she had received the revelation that celibacy was necessary for a holy life. She criticized the churches, including the AME church and its leaders, for ‘‘carnality.’’ Her insistence on being guided entirely by the dictates of her inner voice led ultimately to her separation from husband, admired older brother (Joseph Cox, an AME preacher with whom she had lived since her mother’s death), and church. After a period of itinerant preaching in the later 1830s and early 1840s, in June 1847 Jackson joined the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing (the Shakers), at Watervliet, New York. She was attracted to their religious celibacy, their emphasis on spiritualistic experience, and their dual-gender concept of deity. With her younger disciple and lifelong companion, Rebecca Perot, Jackson lived at Watervliet until July 1851. Increasingly disappointed in the predominantly white Shaker community’s failure to take the gospel of their founder, Ann Lee, to the African American community, Jackson left Watervliet on an unauthorized mission to Philadelphia, where she and Perot experimented with séance-style spiritualism. They returned to Watervliet for a brief second residence in 1857, and at this time Jackson won the right to found and head a new Shaker ‘‘outfamily’’ in Philadelphia. This predominantly black and female Shaker family survived her death by at least a quarter of a century. Like several other African American women preachers in the 19th century, Jackson achieved her religious leadership role largely through visionary experience and her ability to communicate such experience to others, at first solely through oral testimonial. Illiterate into her middle age—‘‘the only child of my mother that had not learning’’—she depended immediately after her conversion on her literate elder brother to help her religious correspondence. Her autobiography records her increasing frustration with this dependency and her joy when she prayed for literacy and received it by divine gift. Gifts of Power records her spiritual journey as a woman with a divine calling, from her awakening through her discovery of Shakerism and the founding of her own community. She describes a wide variety of visionary experiences, including mysterious prophetic dreams and supernatural ‘‘gifts of power’’ (such as the ability to control the weather by prayer). The dream visions give access to a world in which laws of nature are violated with ease.

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The physical body left behind, the dreamer soars into the air, and is given flashes of understanding about both the physical universe and the spiritual world. Jackson’s visionary dreams also show her confronting fears of racial and sexual violence; working out an understanding of the mother aspect of the godhead; and even resolving conflicts that arose in her relationships with brother, husband, spiritual companions, and Shaker leaders. Alice Walker has described Gifts of Power as ‘‘an extraordinary document,’’ which ‘‘tells us much about the spirituality of human beings, especially of the interior spiritual resources of our mothers.’’ Writing of Jackson’s relationship to Perot, Walker coined the term ‘‘womanism’’ to distinguish a specifically black feminist cultural tradition that includes women’s love for other women but is not ‘‘separatist.’’ OTHER WORKS: Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress (reissue, 1987). Manuscript writings include an autograph version of her incomplete autobiography in the Berkshire Athenaeum at the Public Library, Pittsfield, Massachusetts. A short booklet containing Perot’s dream accounts dictated to Jackson, a few of Jackson’s dreams, and a rough draft anthology of all Jackson’s extant writings, produced by her Shaker historian, Alonzo Hollister, are in the Shaker Collection, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio. A fair copy of this anthology is in the Library of Congress Shaker manuscript collection. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Braxton, J., Black Women Writing Autobiography (1989). Gates, H. L., Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988). Williams, R. E., Called and Chosen: The Story of Mother Rebecca Jackson and the Philadelphia Shakers (1981). Duclow, G., ‘‘The Philadelphia Shaker Family,’’ in The Shaker Messenger (1994). Evans, J. H., Spiritual Empowerment in Afro-American Literature: Frederick Douglass, Rebecca Jackson, Booker T. Washington, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison (1987). Humez, J. M., ‘‘Visionary Experience and Power: The Career of Rebecca Cox Jackson,’’ in Black Apostles at Home and Abroad, D. M. Wills and R. Newman, eds. (1982). McKay, N. Y., ‘‘Nineteenth Century Black Women’s Spiritual Autobiographies: Religious Faith and SelfEmpowerment,’’ in Interpreting Women’s Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives, the Personal Narrative Group, ed. (1989). Sasson, D., ‘‘Life as Vision: The Autobiography of Mother Rebecca Jackson,’’ in The Shaker Spiritual Narrative (1983). Walker, A., ‘‘Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Cox Jackson,’’ in In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens (1983). Williams, R. E., Called and Chosen: The Story of Mother Rebecca Jackson and the Philadelphia Shakers (1981). Reference works: NBAW (1991). Black Women in the United States: An Historical Encyclodpedia. Encyclopedia of African American Culture and History. ANB. Other References: Jackson of Feminist Studies in Religion (Fall 1989). Tulsa Studies in Women’s Litertaure (Fall 1982). —JEAN MCMAHON HUMEZ

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JACKSON, Shirley Born 14 December 1919, San Francisco, California; died 8 August 1965, North Bennington, Vermont Daughter of Leslie H. and Geraldine Bugbee Jackson; married Stanley Edgar Hyman, 1940; children: Laurence, Joanne, Sarah, and Barry Shirley Jackson began to compose poems and short stories almost as soon as she could write. She won her first literary prize at the age of twelve when her poem ‘‘The Pine Tree’’ won a contest sponsored by Junior Home magazine. Two years later her family, which by this time included younger brother Barry, moved from Burlingame, California, to Rochester, New York. The following year she graduated from Brighton High School at the age of fifteen in the top quarter of her class. She enrolled in the liberal arts program at the University of Rochester in September 1934 but withdrew two years later. Jackson then spent a year at home in a self-imposed ‘‘apprenticeship in writing’’ in which she kept to a strict regimen of writing at least 1,000 words per day. By the end of the year, she was ready for more formal education and entered Syracuse University in September 1937. Although she began her studies as a journalism major, she eventually transferred to the English Department and graduated with her B.A. in 1940. During her time at Syracuse she wrote 15 pieces for the campus magazine. She met her future husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, while at Syracuse when they both joined the magazine’s staff. A lifelong champion of civil rights, Jackson used her position as editor on the magazine to write editorials questioning the lack of black students at Syracuse and the poor condition of student living quarters. She did not get along well with the administration at Syracuse because of its desire to exercise what she considered excessive control over the campus magazine. She consequently refused to donate her papers to Syracuse later in life, and Hyman instead gave them to the Library of Congress three years after her death. After their marriage on 3 June 1940, Jackson and Hyman moved to New York City, where he took an editorial assistant position with the New Republic and she wrote in between working at various clerical jobs. A job at Macy’s during the Christmas season became the subject of a witty short story, ‘‘My Life with R. H. Macy,’’ which was published the following year in the New Republic. Another short story, ‘‘After You, My Dear Alphonse,’’ was published in the New Yorker in January 1943 and concerned prejudice and misperceptions of black Americans. More short stories were subsequently published by the New Yorker, including ‘‘Come Dance With Me in Ireland,’’ which was selected for inclusion in Best American Short Stories, 1944. Other stories were sold to American Mercury, Mademoiselle, and a short story collection called Cross-Section. After several years as a staff writer for the New Republic and the New Yorker, Jackson’s husband accepted a position as professor at Bennington College and the family moved to North Bennington, Vermont. Their second child was born shortly after the


move to Vermont in 1945 and Jackson worked as a substitute creative writing teacher at the college while continuing to write daily. The Road Through the Wall, Jackson’s first novel, was published in 1948 shortly before her most famous short story, ‘‘The Lottery,’’ was published in the June 26 issue of the New Yorker. It has been said that if Shirley Jackson had written nothing more for the rest of her life, she would still be famous for ‘‘The Lottery.’’ This much-anthologized and -dramatized short story tells of an annual ritual in a small New England town in which local residents draw names to see who among them will be stoned to death by the others. Reader reaction was intense; the story generated more mail than anything the New Yorker had published to date. Jackson’s dark view of human nature and her belief in its inherently greater capacity for evil than for good is a theme not only of ‘‘The Lottery’’ but of much of her fiction. In The Road Through the Wall, for example, Jackson wrote of the fictional families on Pepper Street in the Burlingame, California, of her youth. This first novel explores the twisted relationships between the individuals and households on the block and culminates in the murder of a three-year-old girl and suicide of a thirteen-year-old boy. ‘‘The Lottery’’ was included along with a number of Jackson’s other short stories in a collection published a year later in 1949 and titled The Lottery, or The Adventures of James Harris. Jackson continued to sell several short stories to women’s magazines, particularly Good Housekeeping and Women’s Home Companion. These pieces tended to be light, humorous tales based on her family’s exploits and without the ironic twists and black humor characterizing ‘‘The Lottery’’ and similar works. Jackson and her family moved to Westport, Connecticut, in 1950, in part because of her and her husband’s desire to be closer to the literary world of New York City. Hyman was himself a well-respected critic and author of nonfiction, and the two often critiqued each other’s work. Jackson and her family soon missed Vermont, however, and moved back to Bennington after only two years in Westport. Jackson published several short stories in 1950 and her second novel, The Hangsaman, in 1951. The Hangsaman, which received a favorable response from both critics and the public, was hailed by some as one of the outstanding books of the year. The novel centers on the slow mental breakdown of Natalie Waite, a bright seventeen-year-old who, unable to cope with being away from home during her first year in college, invents a friend named Tony. Life Among the Savages (1953, 1997) and Raising Demons (1957) are hilarious accounts of Jackson’s family and include most of her magazine articles on the exploits of her growing brood. These ‘‘family chronicles’’ were often excerpted in magazines or published in condensed form by Reader’s Digest. Jackson continued to write fiction, however, and her third novel, The Bird’s Nest, was published in 1954 to very good reviews. Jackson

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got the idea, which focuses on psychology and the inner workings of the mind, from reading a case study on multiple personality disorder. Jackson’s short stories continued to be well received, and ‘‘One Ordinary Day with Peanuts’’ was chosen for the Best American Short Stories, 1956. Her longtime fascination with witchcraft and the supernatural led her to accept an offer to write a nonfiction book for young people about the Salem witch trials. The Witchcraft of Salem Village (1956) is highly regarded as an interesting, accurate, and simplified history of witchcraft. In addition to this nonfiction title, Jackson also experimented with writing children’s plays. The Bad Children, originally written for her two daughters, with songs written by her son Laurence, was published in 1958 as a spoof on witchcraft. Jackson’s other deviations from her adult novels and short stories include Nine Magic Wishes (1963), a children’s picture book, and Famous Sally (1966), a juvenile novel written for her daughter Sarah. The Haunting of Hill House (1959) was a return to the world of gothic horror Jackson had successfully explored in The Sundial (1958) and to some extent in ‘‘The Lottery.’’ The Haunting of Hill House focuses on an investigation of an old estate house by a group of researchers who believe the building may be haunted. One of the women invited to participate becomes obsessed with, and perhaps obsessed by, the house. Unlike most gothic fiction writers, however, Jackson made the haunting real and the evil triumphant in the end. Though The Haunting of Hill House was made into an early black-and-white film (considered a masterpiece), a new variation was offered in 1999 with a big screen remake, complete with host of state-of-the-art special effects. Jackson’s last adult novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), was the second of her works to be named one of the year’s 10 best novels by Time magazine. The plot focuses on two sisters, Merricat and Constance Blackwood, who have survived the arsenic poisoning which killed four family members. Although Constance was acquitted of the murder, the sisters still face suspicion and hostility from townspeople. Cousin Charles arrives in the hope of wedding Merricat and controlling the family fortune. She rejects him and sets fire to the house, which the townspeople help Charles destroy. It is only at the novel’s close, when the two sisters return to live in the hulking ruin, that the reader learns a chillingly unrepentant Merricat is the poisoner. Jackson’s personal life and professional career are both starkly separate and intertwined. She presents portraits of bleakness, despair, and humanity’s inherent banality in her modern gothic fiction ‘‘The Lottery,’’ The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Yet she also wrote of her children’s humorous exploits in her family chronicles Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. Although the latter may represent the real Jackson, it is the former, with her ability to point out the blackness in every heart, who will always be remembered. OTHER WORKS: Special Delivery (contributor, 1960). The Magic of Shirley Jackson (edited by S. E. Hyman, 1966). Come Along

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with Me (edited by S. E. Hyman, 1968). The Lottery and Other Stories (1991). The Masterpieces of Shirley Jackson (1996).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Aldridge, J. W., After the Lost Generation: A Critical Study of the Writers of Two Wars (1958). Argenziano, G., ‘‘Existentialism in Shirley Jackson’s Last Novels’’ (thesis, 1983). Burrell, D. L., ‘‘Shirley Jackson: Contexts, Intertexts, and New Conclusions’’ (thesis, 1993). Caminero-Santangelo, M. M., ‘‘The Madwoman Can’t Speak: Feminist Debates and American Women’s Writing, 1945-1993’’ (1995). Delea, C., ‘‘Feminists Have Always Lived in the Castle: Shirley Jackson and the Feminist Gothic’’ (thesis, 1991). Friedman, L., Shirley Jackson (1975, 1980). Hall, K. J., ‘‘The Lesbian Politics of Transgression: Reading Shirley Jackson’’ (thesis, 1991). Lape, S. V., ‘‘Hostage of ‘The Lottery’: The Life and Feminist Fiction of Shirley Jackson’’ (thesis, 1994). Levy, B. Ladies Laughing: Wit as Control in Contemporary American Women Writers (1997). Metcalf, L. T., ‘‘Shirley Jackson in Her Fiction: A Rhetorical Search for the Implied Author’’ (thesis, 1989). Nardacci, M. L., ‘‘Theme, Character, and Technique in the Novels of Shirley Jackson’’ (thesis, 1980). Noack, J. ‘‘Shirley Jackson— Escaping the Patriarchy Through Insanity’’ (thesis, 1994). O’Callaghan, C. M., ‘‘Reclaiming Women and Race in World War II Society: Shirley Jackson’s Fiction’’ (thesis, 1996). Oppenheimer, J. Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson (1989). Reinsch, P. N., ‘‘A History of Hauntings: A Critical Bibliography of Shirley Jackson’’ (thesis, 1998). Varner, D., ‘‘A Feminist Analysis of Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman and We Have Always Lived in the Castle’’ (thesis, 1988). Warren, R. J., ‘‘An Overview of Recurring Themes and Concerns and Usage of Genre Conventions Within the Fiction of Shirley Jackson’’ (thesis, 1992). Reference works: Benet’s (1991). Best Short Stories of the Modern Age (1982). First Fiction: An Anthology of the First Published Stories by Famous Writers (1994). Granta Book of the American Short Story (1992). CANR (1992). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA, TCAS. Other references: Explicator (March 1954). Great Short Stories About Parenting: Stories by Jessamyn West, Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, D. H. Lawrence, and Other Great Writers of the World of Children (1990). Great Short Tales of Mystery and Terror (1982). Great Women Writers: The Lives and Works of 135 of the World’s Most Important Women Writers, from Antiquity to the Present (1994). The American Short Story: A Collection of the Best Known and Most Memorable Short Stories by the Great American Authors (1994). —LEAH J. SPARKS

JACKSON, Ward See BRAUN, Lilian Jackson

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JACOBI, Mary Putnam Born 31 August 1842, London, England; died 10 June 1906, New York, New York Also wrote under: Mary Putnam Daughter of George Palmer and Victorine Haven Putnam; married Abraham Jacobi, 1873 The descendant of American Puritan families and the eldest of 11 children, at fifteen Mary Putnam Jacobi traveled to the first public high school for girls in Manhattan, where her writing received critical attention. Her story ‘‘Found and Lost’’ was published in the Atlantic Monthly when she was seventeen, while another, ‘‘Hair Chains,’’ appeared there in 1861. The family expected Jacobi to be a writer, but she tended toward medicine. In 1863 Jacobi was the first woman to receive a degree from the College of Pharmacy in New York City. Since no male medical school would accept women, Jacobi attended the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania. Believing that only in Paris, where no woman had ever studied medicine, could she find proper training, Jacobi went there and fought to enter the École de Médicine. She supported herself by writing sketches, stories, and even a short novel for the New Orleans Times, the New York Evening Post, and both Putnam’s and Scribner’s magazines. Because she felt writing fiction took more from her and left her poorer, she began her prolific medical writing (printed in medical journals and collections) with a series of charming, literate medical letters from Paris. Jacobi won a bronze medal for her thesis and graduated in 1871. Returning home one of the best-prepared physicians in America, she was ready to teach at the fledgling women’s medical school of the New York Infirmary, to practice medicine, and to continue scientific research. From this point forward, Jacobi wrote no more fiction. Jacobi married a prominent physician and had two children, but continued her profession. In 1896 came the onset of Jacobi’s final illness. Brain tumors had been a subject of her medical writing, and she was the first to diagnose her own condition. Her description of her symptoms, published after her death, is a classic of medical literature. All but one of Jacobi’s magazine pieces were republished in Stories and Sketches (1907). The writing is graceful and lucid, with incident and character captured in concrete images. ‘‘Found and Lost’’ is a philosophical adventure story about a German who has found the source of the Nile, but loses it again when an American, seeking to commercialize it, goes with him. The best of this early writing, ‘‘Some of the French Leaders,’’ presents incisive portraits of ineffectual politicians. A critic considered it ‘‘one of the ablest ever printed in an American magazine,’’ with ‘‘intellectual grasp’’ and ‘‘grim and elucidating wit.’’ One of Jacobi’s many interests was improving primary education. She taught her own daughter, afterward writing Physiological Notes on Primary Education and the Study of Language


(1889). She believed experiments in geometry and science came first, then language—direct contact with things before symbols of things. Languages were to be taught three at once. The description of her experience is pertinent and interesting, but the rest is dated. A rare attempt at popularizing scientific material was her expansion in 1874 of her husband’s book, Infant Diet. She felt the material deserved wider distribution, believing women wanted explanations as well as directions. Although some critics felt Jacobi’s material was too unsparing of detail, demand for Infant Diet required annual editions for many years. The remarkable Question of Rest for Women During Menstruation (1877), which won the prestigious Boyleston Prize from Harvard University, reflects classical background, research into medical literature, and questionnaires to women in all walks of life. Prepared with Jacobi’s thorough, commonsense approach and literary flair, it should have forever retired the belief that women must inevitably withdraw from ordinary activity during menstruation. In the excellent historical overview, she points out that only in women have normal functions been considered pathological. Beliefs in temporary insanity, instability, or inability to make decisions during menstruation are demolished. Some of the medical theory is no longer valid, but the conclusions and recommendations are sensible, still pertinent, and thoroughly convincing. Jacobi’s writings about women’s roles began with an article in the North American Review (1882), ‘‘Shall Women Practice Medicine?’’ In surveying the history of women in medicine, she noted it was not an innovation at all. Women practiced freely when medicine was unpaid. Her contribution to Century’s symposium on women in medicine (1891), part of the successful campaign to open the Johns Hopkins medical school to women, was followed by the extensive ‘‘Woman in Medicine,’’ in Annie Nathan Meyer’s pioneer compilation, Woman ’s Work in America (1891). An erudite factual history, it is full of original views, such as her comparison of the arguments against male midwives and those against women physicians. ‘‘Common Sense’’ Applied to Woman Suffrage (1894) combines history, clear dissection of the current situation, and incisive argument. ‘‘No one expected the vote to raise women’s wages or drastically reform the social order,’’ she wrote, ‘‘but what is. . .very seriously demanded, is that women be recognized as human beings.’’ Her letter on ‘‘Modern Female Invalidism’’ (1895) comments: ‘‘Too much attention is paid to women as objects’’ while they remain ‘‘insufficiently prepared to act as independent subjects.’’ Despite her talent for imaginative literature, Jacobi wrote little fiction and stopped entirely before she was thirty. She was a pioneer in medicine, both as a woman and simply as a physician, while successfully combining marriage and a profession and doing humanitarian social work. Commenting on her Paris thesis, a French medical journal noted her ‘‘poetic form, which does not detract from the value of the statement.’’ She excelled in clear, incisive writing on controversial topics. The voluminous medical writings are characterized by wit, clarity, and literate style.

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OTHER WORKS: De la graisse neutre et de les acides gras (1871). The Value of Life: A Reply to Mr. Mallock’s Essay, ‘‘Is Life Worth Living?’’ (1879). On the Use of the Cold Pack Followed by Massage in the Treatment of Anaemia (with V. A. White, 1880). Essays on Hysteria, Brain-Tumor, and Some Other Cases of Nervous Disease (1888). Uffelman’s Manual of Dietetic Hygiene for Children (edited by Jacobi, 1891). Found and Lost (1894). From Massachusetts to Turkey (1896). Mary Putnam Jacobi, M.D.: A Pathfinder in Medicine (1925). The papers of Mary Putnam Jacobi are at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Emerson, R., Journal of Ruth Emerson’s Travels in Greece, 1895- 1896 (1995). Hume, R. F., Great Women of Medicine (1964). Hurd-Mead, K. C., Medical Women of America (1933). Irwin, I. H., Angels and Amazons: A Hundred Years of American Women (1934). Marks, G., and W. K. Beatty, Women in White (1972). In Memory of Mary Putnam Jacobi (1907). Putnam, R., ed., Life and Letters of Mary Putnam Jacobi (1925). Reed, E.W., American Women in Science Before the Civil War (1992). Stille, D. R., Extraordinary Women of Medicine (1997). Truax, R., The Doctors Jacobi (1952). Creative Couples in the Sciences (1996). Reference works: DAB (Volume 1). NAW. Other references: Jour. Hist. Med. (Autumn 1949). Med. Life (July 1928). —CAROL B. GARTNER

JACOBS, Harriet Born Autumn 1813, Edenton, North Carolina; died 7 March 1897, Washington, DC Wrote under: Linda Brent Daughter of Deliah Horniblow and Daniel Jacobs; children: Joseph, Louisa Matilda The brief facts of Harriet Jacobs’ life—the date and place of her birth; the names of her parents and children; the year of her death—generate as many questions about the former slave, abolitionist, and author as they answer. Despite scholarly research into her life, it remains unclear how and when her last name became established as Jacobs. Her mother, Deliah, was a slave owned by a tavern keeper named John Horniblow. Jacobs’ father was reputed to be a carpenter named Daniel Jacobs, himself a slave owned by a Dr. Andrew Knox. It is unusual Harriet carried the name of her father; a slave was not characteristically given his or her father’s last name as paternity was often disputed or disregarded altogether. Her ‘‘naming,’’ then, proved as extraordinary as her life, conforming neither to the prevailing convention nor to the convention of ‘‘self-naming’’ common to such black men as Frederick Douglass upon undertaking literary excursions into slave narratives.

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Like 1845’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861) utilizes standard abolitionist rhetoric to provide an account of her life as a slave, her efforts to resist the advances of her master, and her eventual achievement of freedom for her children and for herself. Unlike male-authored slave narratives that tend to frame a cause-and-effect relationship between the attainment of literacy and the desire for freedom, Jacobs’ work—written almost two decades after its author’s escape to the Northern states in 1842—simply documents the chronology of such activities: her first mistress taught the young black girl to read, write, and sew as a matter of practicality. She represents her desire for freedom as stemming from her experiences as a slave woman rather than from an enlightenment gained from an exposure to ‘‘book learning.’’ An attractive, light-skinned black woman who was subjected to the unwanted advances of her owner from the time she was an adolescent, Jacobs presents herself in Incidents as a sexual object as well as a mother, but even more significantly as a protofeminist when she writes: ‘‘Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.’’ In the writings of Jacobs we are granted a rare perspective—a woman’s perspective—on a condition most commonly presented from the point of view of men. While Jacobs relates her story using the conventions of the sentimental ‘‘women’s’’ fiction of the 19th century, she breaks new ground in her candid portrayal of human sexuality and in expressing a personal fortitude, perseverance, and instinct for survival that was a far cry from the feminine ideal of the day. Hers, indeed, is a story of rebellion, not only against her powerlessness at the hands of a white owner, but also as a woman against a patriarchal society that equates a woman’s virtue with physical and emotional weakness. Matter of factly, Jacobs recounts her attempts to ward off continuous and unwanted sexual advances, her dispassionate selection of a white lawyer named Samuel Tredwell Sawyer as a proper father for her offspring, and her attempts to procure her two children’s freedom as exercises both of her agency and the collective agency of the African American community she was part of. As black feminist scholars such as Hazel Carby and Valerie Smith have noted, Jacobs’ adoption of many of the conventions of popular fiction caused several male literary critics and historians to challenge the authenticity of Incidents as a slave narrative. Fortunately, biographical details about Jacobs and her authorship were verified in 1980 through the research of Jean Fagan Yellin. Prior to the publication of Yellin’s discoveries, authorship of Jacobs’ narrative had been attributed to ‘‘Linda Brent,’’ the first person narrator who claimed the autobiographical Incidents had been ‘‘written by herself.’’ In addition to establishing the authenticity of Jacobs’ narrative in her introduction to recent editions of Incidents, Yellin traces the book’s complex history—Jacobs juggled work on her narrative with full-time work caring for the children of a white family and supporting the abolitionist cause in the years prior to the Civil War—and details the intricate editorial relations between Jacobs and prominent antislavery activists and writers Amy Post, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lydia Maria Child, and Frederick Douglass. She also documents Jacobs’ years as a fugitive from

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slavery, her flight to the North in 1842 and her settlement in Rochester, New York, where she was active in abolitionist politics. After the publication of Incidents in 1861, she and her daughter, Louisa Matilda, participated in Civil War relief efforts, bringing much needed supplies to soldiers stationed in Alexandria, Virginia, Washington, D.C., Savannah, Georgia, and even Edenton, until 1868. Several years after the war she moved to her daughter’s home in Washington, D.C., dying there in 1897 at the age of 84. OTHER WORKS: ‘‘Letter from a Fugitive Slave,’’ New York Tribune (21 Jun. 1853). The Deeper Wrong (British edition of Incidents, edited by Lydia Maria Child, 1862). Letters from Harriet Jacobs to Amy Post are in the Isaac and Amy Post Family Papers collection at the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Andrews, W. L., To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 (1988). Baker, H., Blues Ideology and Afro-American Literature (1984). Blassingame, J., The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (1979). Braxton, J., Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition within a Tradition (1993). Carby, H., Reconstructing Womanhood (1987). Davis, A., Women, Race, and Class (1981). Johnson, Y., The Voices of African American Women: The Use of Narrative and Authorial Voice in the Works of Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alice Walker (1995). Smith, V., Self-Discovery and Authenticity in Afro-American Narrative (1987). American Literature (Nov. 1981). Reference works: FC (1990). Feminist Writers (1996). —BEVERLY HORTON AND PAMELA SHELTON

JACOBS, Jane Born 4 May 1916, Scranton, Pennsylvania Daughter of John and Bess Robinson Butzner; married Robert H. Jacobs, Jr., 1944; children: two sons and one daughter After graduating from high school, Jane Jacobs worked on the Scranton Tribune, where she exhibited a special interest in the problems of working-class districts. As a freelance writer in New York City, she continued her study of the problems of urban centers. In interviews, Jacobs has often stated that her husband, an architect, has been a major influence upon her work. They have two sons and a daughter. In 1952 Jacobs joined the staff of Architectural Forum as associate editor and specialized in analyzing the problems of cities such as Washington, Baltimore, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Jacobs contributed to Columbia University Forum, the Reporter, and Harper’s. She also contributed to the new approach towards the study of city life in The Exploding Metropolis (1958). Jacobs’s essay entitled ‘‘Downtown Is for People’’ foreshadowed her future works in the study of urban affairs.


In her first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jacobs sought to overturn the more conventional attitudes of urban planners and regional developers in the interest of preserving the vitality of cities, which she believes makes them both interesting and safe for their inhabitants. Jacobs’s fresh approach to the subject brings into focus the uses of parks, sidewalks, and diversity on city streets. She stresses the importance of mixing residential and commercial needs in the same area and decries the urban planner’s desire to change the character of urban communities by ‘‘cleaning them up,’’ instead of rehabilitating old buildings. Jacobs correctly assesses the result of demolition of old buildings followed by the construction of massive housing projects as a loss of goods and services which undermines both the comforts and commerce of the city. Jacobs perceives both vandalism and decreased domestic spirit as a direct offshoot from the ‘‘blank walls’’ of the projects. The problems at the heart of American cities are the lack of interest and understanding on the part of the theorists who control the future of the cities. Jacobs objects to the contemporary situation of urban planning, where actual programs derive their conceptual foundation from utopian cities, not found ‘‘in the streets’’ of the real world. Jacobs’s work is subjective, but although it avoids the stereotypical urbanologist jargon, it remains painfully aloof. It seems to some readers that Jacobs is trying to impose her own upper class values on the cities. Ultimately, her contribution to the contemporary field of urban studies remains imaginative, but represents no great progress over the work of her predecessors. Her portrayal of what she believes is the ‘‘real life’’ of cities appears sensationalist when juxtaposed against scholarly works; it is artificial and indeed almost a work of fiction when compared to other ‘‘real life’’ perceptions of the city. In The Economy of Cities (1969), Jacobs modifies her tone to present a historical account of the growth of cities. She maintains that cities are not a mere outgrowth of an expanded rural economy, but were nourished on manufacturing and trade, which brought further growth to agricultural communities. Industrial growth is reliant upon innovation and a variety of types of work within a geographic area. Jacobs attempts to reverse the traditional approach to the study of urban areas by setting forth her belief that industry originated not in the household crafts, but in the cities, and then spread to the countryside. She uses the example of electrical power, which is sent to the city from the rural areas, but was first used in the city. As in the case of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs portrays a far nicer fantasy than the utopian ‘‘City Beautiful’’ of other urbanologists, yet there is insufficient evidence for her claims that cities are diverse and original for the reasons she sets forth. As one critic has written, her analysis of urban growth is limited by its admiration for the innovative entrepreneur and its inattention to the role of corporations and government. Jacobs’s work accurately describes the ‘‘other half’’ of the current urban plight, which has been overlooked by experts, yet she has made little effort to provide a bridge between the two

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extremes of urban ideology. It is her courage in the face of overwhelming ‘‘superblocks’’ that has brought Jacobs recognition for her ideas. Her works have been characterized as ‘‘spunky and informative cautionary documents,’’ and they remain, for this reason, invaluable to the student of the modern city. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Apolinsky, S. J., ‘‘Reweaving the Fabric Jane Jacobs at East Lake Meadows’’ (thesis, 1993). Ethics in Making a Living: The Jane Jacobs Conference (1989). Glaeser, E. L., Cities and Ethics: An Essay for Jane Jacobs (essay, 1998). Hill, D. R., Jane Jabobs’ Ideas on Big, Diverse Cities: A Review and Commentary (journal, 1988). Ideas That Matter: The Worlds of Jane Jacobs (1997). Zotti, E., Eyes on Jane Jacobs (1986). Other references: Architectural Forum (July 1969). Atlantic (July 1969). Book World (18 May 1969). CSM (26 June 1969). Commentary (Aug. 1969). Commonwealth (5 Sept. 1969). LJ (1 June 1969). NR (7 June 1969). NY (14 June 1969). NYRB (1 Jan. 1970). NYTBR (1 June 1969). SR (5 July 1969). —ILISE LEVY

JACOBS, Sarah Sprague Born 1813, Pawtuxet, Rhode Island; died death date unknown Daughter of Bela and Sarah Sprague Jacobs Born while her father was minister to a Baptist congregation in Pawtuxet, Sarah Sprague Jacobs grew up in Massachusetts, where her father became pastor of the First Baptist Church in Cambridge. One of the reasons for the move seems to have been the parents’ concern for the children’s education, Pawtuxet having no adequate schools. A few remaining details of Jacobs’ life are gleaned from a careful reading of her father’s letters and journals, which she edited with decorously impersonal commentary in 1837, the year after his death. The Reverend Bela Jacobs was apparently a demanding yet indulgent father in the Congregational New England tradition. Frequently ill, deeply concerned with providential matters and his own spiritual estate, he evidently expected reflection, control, personal and social responsibility, and intellectual achievement from his daughter; she seems not to have disappointed him. Throughout what is finally a traditional spiritual biography of her father—the Memoir of Rev. Bela Jacobs, A.M. (1837)— Jacobs agrees with his judgements and thus suggests her own personality. She notes, for example, his disapproval of Letters of Charlotte, the Beloved of Werther: He ‘‘was always decidedly opposed to the reading, even occasionally [of] novels of this class, on account of the absolute waste not only of the time employed in their perusal, but of the sensibilities they so uselessly excite.’’ He approved of Jacobs’ religious work, however, and praised her lengthy trips (in 1832-34) to the South, where she attended Bible classes and became in her father’s eyes ‘‘completely Southernized.’’

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Jacobs was certainly aware of religion’s role in mid-19th-century America, and her biography reveals a restrained and pious New England mind in its elegant formality. The precise, concrete, anecdotal but factual work is Latinate and discreet in style and suggests the caring duty of a minister’s daughter. Nonantum and Natick (1853), reissued as The White Oak and Its Neighbors in 1869, is an informal, nostalgic, and occasionally conjectural history of the Massachusetts Native American tribes. The work’s intimate tone suggests the author is directing her remarks to children. The account is divided into three parts: the first focuses on Nonantum, the Christian Native American settlement near Newton; the second section focuses on Natick, a settlement 18 miles southwest of Boston, to which the Christian Native Americans moved in 1651; the final part includes details of King Philip’s War (1675-76) and concludes in the present as Jacobs notes the few Native American names still extant in Massachusetts.

them and, by making it their own, rise above it.’’ Other criticism includes discerning poetry reviews and essays on contemporary writers—Lowell, Frost, Cummings, Williams, and Salinger.

Despite some sentimental phrasing, Nonantum and Natick reveals scholarly and disciplined erudition as Jacobs details the life of the Puritan minister John Eliot (1601-90), a successful missionary to the Native Americans and the first translator of the Bible into their tongues. She draws heavily and explicitly on primary sources, quoting for example Roger Williams, John Winthrop, John Endicot, Thomas Shepard, Cotton Mather, John Wilson, and Eliot himself. The work ranges from history to biography to anthropology as Jacobs amasses and organizes with apparent ease a great deal of disparate material and ends each chapter with an evidently original if standard poem. It is finally Jacobs’ good mind that impresses the modern reader and that places her firmly in the tradition of reflective New England scholars.

A 1975 National Book Award nominee, The Shade Seller (1974) contains 42 new poems as well as generous selections from the previous volumes and represents Jacobsen’s best work. Subjects are drawn from history, from travel, from nature, from religion, and from an analysis of the relation of the poem to the reader and of the poem itself. Particularly effective are her poetic vignettes, such as ‘‘My Small Aunt’’ and ‘‘The Shade Seller.’’ In ‘‘Birdsong of the Lesser Poet’’ and ‘‘When the Five Prominent Poets,’’ Jacobsen examines the power of the Muse who inexplicably visits the lesser poet and who should never be summoned casually (‘‘they dropped the Muse’s name. / Who came. / It was awful. / The door in shivers and a path / plowed like a twister through everything. . .’’)

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CAL. Daughters of America (1882). FPA. Woman’s Record (1853). —CAROLINE ZILBOORG

JACOBSEN, Josephine Born 19 August 1908, Cobourg, Ontario, Canada Daughter of Joseph Edward and Octavia Winder Boylan; married Eric Jacobsen, 1932 Although born in Canada, Josephine Jacobsen lived in Baltimore, Maryland, and Whitefield, New Hampshire; frequent and extensive travel enriched her poetry and fiction. Her interest in the drama has produced two critical studies with William R. Mueller: The Testament of Samuel Beckett (1964) and Ionesco and Genet: Playwrights of Silence (1968). Written for the intelligent lay reader, the volumes give keen insight particularly into these dramatists’ position regarding man’s loss of faith in traditional values: ‘‘Beckett’s protagonists lament the loss; Ionesco’s either lament it or are oblivious to it; most of Genet’s clasp the loss to

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The five volumes of Jacobsen’s poetry span nearly 40 years and explore the themes with which she contends the best poetry must deal—frustration, helpless pain, betrayed integrity, and a desolate and piercing sense of dislocation. Never shirking the dark side of human experience, Jacobsen finds that a lack of communication and the isolation of individuals are responsible for the misery of humanity. The poems insist people face up to mortality, recognize their animal nature, struggle to communicate, and mourn the sadness of old age and distress as much as the loss of childhood and innocence. Still, Jacobsen remains a steady poet of affirmation; she insists on our moral obligation to humankind and to nature, and she undergirds her poetry with vigorous religious convictions.

Jacobsen’s short stories are set primarily in the city (Baltimore), in the Caribbean Islands, in Mexico, or in Morocco. All of the stories with foreign settings share a Jamesian theme of the American away from home (as one character remarks, ‘‘We are, after all, strangers’’). ‘‘On the Island’’ (1965), ‘‘The Jungle of Lord Lion’’ (1969), and ‘‘The Gesture’’ (1976) present violent deeds (murder, betrayal, threatened execution) juxtaposed against the beauty of exotic birds, lush flora, and island animals. The lives and sufferings of the natives, however, remain alien domains the visitors cannot enter. ‘‘A Walk with Raschid’’ (1972), Jacobsen’s most successful story, is set in Morocco; against the symbolic call of the muezzin, Jacobsen writes an agonizing story of betrayed integrity. The city stories, particularly ‘‘The Taxi’’ (1967), ‘‘Help’’ (1971), ‘‘Nel Bagno’’ (1974), and ‘‘A Stroll around the Square’’ (1974) center on radically different women who face epiphanies of imminent danger, injustice, temporary isolation, or an unexpected kinship with the past. Rich imagery and detail abound: Mrs. Birdsong runs to answer the telephone ‘‘that was ripping the hot night silence’’; Violet throws away her accusing note and watches it ‘‘splinter with a fine, mild contempt, pity,’’ Jacobsen’s short stories have been included among the O. Henry prize stories (1967, 1971, 1973, 1975), as well as in Fifty Years of the American Short Story (1970). Poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (1971-73), Jacobsen was one of four women


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so honored in the history of that post. As critic, poet, and short story writer, Jacobsen herself evinces the trait she praised in Julia Randall: ‘‘a quality of underlying radiance—a sort of receptive joy under the full recognition of suffering and even horror.’’ OTHER WORKS: Let Each Man Remember (1940). For the Unlost (1946). The Human Climate (1953). The Animal Inside (1966). A Walk with Raschid, and Other Stories (1978). Prize Stories of 1985: The O. Henry Awards (1989). Prize Stories of 1993: The O. Henry Awards (1993). The Instant of Knowing: Lectures, Criticisms and Occasional Prose (1997). "The Poet and the Poem’’, at the Library of Congress (recording, 1990). What Goes Without Saying: Collected Stories of Josephine Jacobsen (1996). World Up Baltimore: A Poetry Collection (recording, 1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ivey, J. E., Notes Toward Time: Mezzo-Soprano, Flute/Alto Flute Harp (musical score, 1984). Prettyman, E. S., ‘‘Josephine Jacobsen: Commitment to Wonder’’ (thesis, 1985). Laurels: Eight Women Poets (1998). Poetry Baltimore: Poems about a City (1997). Truthtellers of the Times: Interviews with Contemporary Women Poets (1998). Other references: NR (4 Jan. 1975). NYTBR (11 Dec. 1966). Poetry (May 1975). Winston-Salem Journal (13 Aug. 1978). The Writing Life: Roland Flint and Josephine Jacobsen (audiovisual, 1995). —ELIZABETH EVANS

JAMES, Alice Born 7 August 1848, New York, New York; died 6 March 1892, London, England Daughter of Henry and Mary Walsh James The fifth and last child and only daughter of the elder Henry James, the theologian and Swedenborgian, Alice James’ education was desultory. She spent some childhood years living in Europe with her family. Prior to the Civil War, the family settled in Newport, Rhode Island, and at the war’s end moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where James’ neurasthenia became apparent. She did some charitable work in Boston; then, in 1882, after her mother’s death, she cared for her ill father, who died within the year. In 1884 James joined her friend Katharine Loring on a trip to Europe. James spent her remaining years abroad, living for the most part with Loring, in various places in England. Her diary (The Diary of Alice James, reprinted on many occasions, most recently in 1999) on which her literary reputation rests, was kept from May 1889 until she died from a breast tumor. Limited as she was by ill health and the confines of her room, her reading, and her visitors, James’ chief subject, inevitably, is herself. Her dying was long and, at the end, painful. Still, a spirited and outward-looking woman comes through the self-absorption:

‘‘The difficulty about all this dying is that you can’t tell a fellow anything about it, so where does the fun come in?’’ But James explicitly offers the accomplishment of her death as the hardest family task of all in the year her brother William published Principles of Psychology and her brother Henry published The Tragic Muse and saw his adaptation of The Americans onto the stage. Although she is often ironic, James obviously relishes her strength of mind and will. Perhaps since her twenties, when she first knew that she, too, ‘‘sensitive’’ in that masculine family of strong sensibilities, James continued to be grateful for her power truly to ‘‘see. . .the quarter of an inch’’ that came under her eye. She speculates that a formal education would probably have deprived her of her sense of power and promise by substituting for the ‘‘reality of dreams’’ mere ‘‘relative knowledge.’’ She was also aware, however, that humor, common sense, and her refusal to live ‘‘on the cry’’ sustained her against the ‘‘deep sea’’ of depression, which she had experienced terribly when she was thirty. As a diarist, James adopts several guises: a frail, reclusive woman seeking to find her intellectual place in a distinguished family; a student of the ‘‘minute events. . .illustrative of the broadest facts of human nature’’; a comic ironist building a hedge against loneliness and apparent failure; a rebel against tyranny— social, political, and psychological. James quotes Henry’s loyal response to some critics of William’s ‘‘mental pirouettes and. . .daring to go lightly amid the solemnities’’ in Principles of Psychology: ‘‘They can’t understand intellectual larking,’’ James could. Lacking her brothers’ trained discipline and knowledge, she nevertheless offers in the Diary an intellectual lark. Though closely acquainted with the night, she could laugh at herself and at us, asking ‘‘which of us has not a red nose at the core of her being which defies all her philosophy?’’ Much of her correspondence and William James’ copy of Alice’s Diary, were privately printed by Katharine Loring, around 1894, and are at the Houghton Library of Harvard University. OTHER WORKS: Alice James, Her Brothers—Her Journal (edited by A. R. Burr, 1934). Alice James: Her Life in Letters (1996). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bewley, M., Masks & Mirrors: Essays in Criticism (1970). Cargill, O., Toward a Pluralistic Criticism (1965). Edel, L., Henry James (1962). Grant, S., ‘‘Rewriting the Body Politic: The Art of Illness and the Production of Desire in the Diaries and Journals of Alice James and Achsa Sprague’’ (thesis, 1993). James, H., Autobiography (1956). Edel, L., ed., Henry James Letters (1974, 1975). Lewis, R. W. B., The Jameses: A Family Narrative (1993). Matthiessen, F. O., The James Family (1947). Misra, K., ‘‘A Look at the Patriarchal Background of the Diary of Alice James’’ (thesis, 1993). Perry, R. B., The Thought and Character of William James (1935). Strouse, J., Alice James: A Biography (1980, 1992). The Sweetest Impression of Life: The James Family and Italy (1990). Wylie, B. J., A Native of the James

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Family (1990). Yeazell, R. B., The Death and Letters of Alice James (1981, 1999). Reference works: NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Virginia Quarterly Review (Winter 1976). —BARBARA A. WELCH

JAMISON, Cecilia Viets Born 1837, Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada; died 11 April 1909, Roxbury, Massachusetts Wrote under: Mrs. C. V. Hamilton, Mrs. C. V. Jamison Daughter of Viets and Elizabeth Bruce Dakin; married George Hamilton, circa 1860; Samuel Jamison, 1878 When Cecilia Viets Jamison was in her mid-teens, her family moved to Boston; she was educated in private schools in Canada, New York, Boston, and Paris. Her first ambition was to be an artist, and shortly after her first marriage she went to Rome to study art for three years. (What became of George Hamilton or of their marriage is unknown.) While in Rome, she met Longfellow, who encouraged her writing and arranged for the publication of her book, Woven of Many Threads (1872). Throughout her life, she pursued careers in both painting and writing. Her second marriage was to a New Orleans lawyer. Her later novels take place in the South, and her use of this setting established her as a local-color writer. She attended the famous literary salon of Mollie Moore Davis in New Orleans, along with George Washington Cable and Lafcadio Hearn. Jamison contributed to Harper’s, Scribner’s, Appleton’s Journal, St. Nicholas, and the Journal of American Folklore. After her husband’s death in 1902, she returned to Massachusetts and remained there until her death. Jamison’s literary output can be divided into two groups: those works published in the 1870s, and those published in the later 19th and early 20th centuries. Her earlier works were written for adults, and it is easy to find fault with them. Something to Do: A Novel (1871) begins as an interesting story of two sisters, Cecilia and Alice Wilding. They are well-educated women who must work for a living and, as they acknowledge, to give meaning to their lives. The Wildings’ conversations with each other and with their suitors are lively discussions of women’s rights, corrupt politicians, and Darwinism. Nonetheless, midway through the book, the story becomes bogged down in flowery prose and in a plot of lost loves, unrequited loves, and false loves. Cecilia’s behavior epitomizes the erratic course of the plot as she continually changes her job, her whereabouts, and her identity in order to avoid her husband. His transgression (which prompts her behavior) seems minor in comparison to the agony suffered in the name of love. Jamison seemed to find her sentimental tales better suited to the European continent, and most of her adult books are set on

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foreign soil. She was particularly fond of France (and French phrases); in A Crown from the Spear (1872), she seems intent on recreating Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The novel incorporates many of Hugo’s conventions, characters, names, and settings; the end result, as Jamison admitted, is an ‘‘unsatisfactory endeavor.’’ She is obsessed in her adult novels with maintaining a pure love between a man and a woman that by definition survives all calamities. Jamison’s last five works display considerable talent for children’s literature. Her most popular work, Lady Jane (1891), was reprinted several times and was translated into French, German, and Norwegian. This tale about the adventures of an orphan girl, nicknamed Lady Jane, is both fantastic and believable. The plot and style of the story are much more restrained than in Jamison’s earlier books, and Lady Jane’s neighborhood friends in New Orleans are an engaging and lively set of people of all ages, races, and classes. Lady Jane resembles the protagonist of the well-known work by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886); although both books are well written, they now share the same problem: the story of a beautiful and pampered child who wins the approval and affection of everyone seems too sugary. Jamison’s earlier works, whose plots prompt only yawns and pity, can be ignored. Her later works for children deserve a reappraisal. OTHER WORKS: Ropes of Sand, and Other Stories (1873). My Bonnie Lass (1877). The Lily of San Miniato: A Story of Florence (1878). The Story of an Enthusiast (1888). Toinette’s Phillip (1894). Seraph, the Little Violiniste (1896). Thistledown (1903). The Penhallow Family (1905). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: AA. DAB. LSL. Other references: Boston Transcript (13 April 1909). New Orleans Daily Picayune (13 April 1909). St. Nicholas (April 1894). —AMY DYKEMAN

JANEWAY, Elizabeth Born 7 October 1913, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Charles H. and Jeanette F. Searle Hall; married Eliot Janeway, 1938; children: two sons The daughter of middle-class parents, Elizabeth Janeway attended Swarthmore College and graduated from Barnard College in 1935. She married a well-known economist and author and had two sons. The Janeways lived in New York City. Janeway’s first novel, The Walsh Girls (1943), is a psychological study of two sisters living in a New England town during the Depression. The younger, widow of a German intellectual killed at Dachau, experiences conflicting feelings about her new


husband, a businessman, and about the institution of marriage. The elder, both prudish and independent, is committed to remaining single. The Walsh Girls is typical of Janeway’s novels in its focus on a small group, often a family, whose members are struggling with a crisis or through a period of transition, their personal dilemmas and relationships intersecting with events in a carefully delineated social and historical milieu. For instance, The Question of Gregory (1949), set partly in Washington, D.C., and New England, studies the effects of a young man’s death in wartime upon his parents and their marriage. Leaving Home (1953, reissued 1987) follows two young sisters and a brother as they make their way into the world during the years 1933 to 1940. In The Third Choice (1959), an elderly and crippled woman, once a reigning beauty, and her niece, who is unable to substitute satisfaction in motherhood for satisfaction in marriage, struggle to salvage the past and come to terms with the present and future. And in Accident (1964), a complacent young man, his mother, and his self-made father are forced to reassess their lives by an accident involving the son and a friend, now paralyzed for life. The strengths of Janeway’s best novels—The Walsh Girls, The Question of Gregory, and The Third Choice—are subtle and lucid handling of psychology, clean-cut writing, and precise depiction of milieu. Her treatment of relationships among women is particularly noteworthy. Her works have sometimes been criticized, however, for lacking a unifying theme or point of view. Unable to deal with some of the large social issues of the 1960s in the kind of fiction she writes, ‘‘in which theme is carried by character,’’ Janeway turned to nonfiction in her best-known work, Man’ s World, Woman’s Place: A Study in Social Mythology (1971). The book, much praised for its clarity and undogmatic thoughtfulness, is based upon wide reading in history, philosophy, and the social sciences, as well as upon considerable personal experience. Janeway’s focus is the assertion that a woman’s place is in the home. She treats this from a contemporary perspective, showing it no longer describes the experience of most women in the U.S., and from a historical one, showing its association with the development of the nuclear family. The book’s most important contribution, however, is its scrupulous and well-developed treatment of the ways in which this concept functions as a myth, a complex of feeling, fact, and fantasy that satisfies emotional and social needs despite—and because of—its historical inaccuracy. Between Myth and Morning: Women Awakening (1974) is a collection of 13 essays, originally addressed to various audiences, on public and private aspects of women’s lives. Janeway regards the women’s movement as ‘‘irrevocable’’ because it is ‘‘rooted in reality, and reality has changed formidably.’’ Partly because of this certitude, the book looks toward the future; it also suggests that the most significant aspect of women’s past is the notions and limitations that have been applied to them, not the actions of women themselves. Individual essays are good, particularly on the difficulties both sexes experience in dealing with changes in the relationship between private life and work, but the book as a whole does not represent a new stage in Janeway’s thinking. Her

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next work, however, Powers of the Weak (1981), studied power as a process of interaction and used women as a paradigm of all weak groups, dealing in an original way with issues that have engrossed Janeway since the beginning of her writing career. OTHER WORKS: Daisy Kenyon (1945). The Vikings (1951, 1981). The Early Days of Automobiles (1956). Angry Kate (1963). Ivanov Seven (1967). The Twentieth Century Woman (recording, 1983). Cross Sections from a Decade of Change (reissue, 1984). The Future of Difference (reissue, 1985). A Language for Women and What That Doesn’t Mean (recording, 1985). Improper Behavior (1987). Making the Most of Aging (recording, 1990). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: TCAS. Other references: Harper’s (Sept. 1971). MR (1972). Nation (6 Nov. 1943, 2 Aug. 1975). New Republic (12 Oct. 1974). NYHTB (21 Aug. 1941). NYT (29 Sept. 1974). NYTBR (17 Oct. 1943, 21 Aug. 1941, 3 May 1964, 20 June 1971). Saturday Review (31 Oct. 1953). TLS (8 April 1960). YR (1946). —JANET SHARISTANIAN

JANVIER, Margaret Thompson Born February 1844, New Orleans, Louisiana; died February 1913, Moorestown, New Jersey Wrote under: Margaret Vandegrift Daughter of Francis de Haes and Emma Newbold Janvier Born into a literary family of Huguenot descent, Margaret Thompson Janvier was educated at home and in New Orleans public schools, but she lived most of her life in Moorestown, New Jersey. Consistently using her pseudonym, she wrote children’s literature, stories, and verse from 1879 until near her death. Her work appeared in popular magazines such as St. Nicholas, Harper’s Young People, Youth’s Companion, Wide Awake, Century, Atlantic, and Scribner’s. Janvier’s verse appealed to adults as well as to children. The popular title poem of The Dead Doll, and Other Verses (1889) is a ‘‘babytalk’’ lament of a child for her doll. One of her best poems is ‘‘To Lie in the Lew’’ (Scriber’s, April 1913). Her prose work includes sentimental family tales and adventure stories of teenage protagonists, as well as more whimsical tales of fairies and princesses for younger children. The family stories include Clover Beach (1880), about the activities of a family of children at a summer resort, and Rose Raymond’s Wards (1885), a story of New England family life. The Queen’s Body-Guard (1883) chronicles how the widowed and financially destitute Mrs. Stanley decides, with her seven children, to live on an old farm in Delaware. The invariably good-natured and morally upright family members mature and some marry—happily, of

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course—even with the ‘‘queen,’’ Mrs. Stanley, as a live-in mother-in-law. Doris and Theodora (1884) is a curious combination of a teenage maturation story and a historical adventure. From the fifteen-year-old Doris’ jealousy of her baby sister, Janvier progresses predictably to teenage romance and marriage, but the background setting of Santa Cruz is enlivened with a melodramatic handling of the slave revolt, the subsequent financial failure and fatal illness of Doris’ father, and the entrepreneurship of Doris and her young friends in coping with economic mishap. Stories for younger readers include fantasies such as Umbrellas to Mend (1905), an allegorically oriented romance of princes and princesses, and The Absent-Minded Fairy (1884), which charmingly shows the moral education of Dulcintentia (good intentions) as she meddles in human affairs. In the realistically set Little Helpers (1889), the young children of the lively and affectionate Leslie family learn moral lessons for character development, such as being independent but listening to parents and following God’s law. Janvier’s books are often sentimental and unrealistic for modern readers; they succeed best with whimsy and fantasy. OTHER WORKS: The Original Chatterbox Album of Animals (1879). Under the Dog-Star (1881). Holidays at Home: For Boys and Girls (1882). Little Bell, and Other Stories (1884). Santa Claus’s Picture Gallery (1886). Ways and Means (1886). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: AA. DAB. NCAB. —HELEN J. SCHWARTZ

JERAULD, Charlotte A(nn Fillebrown) Born 20 April 1820, Old Cambridge, Massachusetts; died 2 August 1845, Boston, Massachusetts Also wrote under: Charlotte A. Fillebrown Daughter of Richard and Charlotte Fillebrown; married J. W. Jerauld, 1843; children: one The daughter of working-class parents, Charlotte A. Jerauld received her education in Boston’s common schools. Although she left school at fourteen to work in a bookbindery, she read widely and was familiar with Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, while particular favorites were Byron, Scott, and Wordsworth. Jerauld soon began to publish poetry in the Universalist magazine, the Ladies Repository, and later her work appeared in the annual Rose of Sharon. Not until 1841, however, did she start to publish her prose sketches—the real beginning of her literary life, as her editor Henry Bacon notes. Jerauld had suffered for most of her life from ‘‘a determination of blood to the brain,’’ but it seems likely that complications

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after the birth of her son (born late in July 1845 and dying on 1 August) as well as a severe postpartum depression (Bacon writes that within days of her child’s birth she became ‘‘a raving maniac’’) contributed to her early death. Jerauld’s many letters to her close friend Sarah C. Edgarton Mayo reveal a sharp wit and sensitive eye for detail not often found in her poetry and abundant only in her later prose. This friendship produced dual poetic sequences and provided Jerauld with a confidant for the more personal reflections that were frequently absent from her published writings. Jerauld’s poetry does not reveal the increasing facility and acuity of her prose, but some of her efforts are clearly tighter and fresher than those of many of her contemporaries. Her subjects, forms, and themes are conventional, but the poems rise above the conventional when she assumes a voice different from her own (as in ‘‘The Meccas of Memory’’), when she experiments with form (‘‘No More’’ and ‘‘Isabel’’ echo Poe’s rhymes and rhythms), or when she adheres to the discipline of a strict form (her sonnets are generally better than her other poems, and those she writes with Mayo on alternate lines of ‘‘The Lord’s Prayer’’ are good poems). Thematically, her verse tends to be dull: She stresses heaven as a peaceful home where life’s problems are resolved; longs nostalgically for a happy childhood that will never return; and bewails sentimentally life’s tragedies—ill-fated lovers, general loss, and the cycles of nature. Jerauld’s early prose is much like her poetry; however, her later prose, as she moves away from heroines who die young and plots based on series of disasters, reveals a talented writer beginning to find herself. Her final prose sketches comprise two groups of tales—‘‘Lights and Shadows of Woman’s Life’’ and ‘‘Chronicles and Sketches of Hazelhurst.’’ In the first group, Jerauld explores different women’s lots. In each story the author uses a distinct tone—‘‘Our Minister’s Family’’ is essentially gay; ‘‘The Mother’s Heart’’ is grim but relatively unsentimental; ‘‘The Irish Daughter-in-Law’’ is light and witty. Jerauld’s concern with her characters’ inner lives dominates these tales. In ‘‘The Mother’s Heart,’’ she examines the jealous and obsessive personality of Isabel Sommers, who is unable to have a child until her 12th year of marriage. In ‘‘Caroline,’’ the protagonist becomes insane when forced to give up her daughter. Jerauld’s characters also grow more realistic in appearance: Hannah in ‘‘The Auld Wife’’ is rustically attractive if not beautiful by the standards of the 1840s; thus, Jerauld notes her ‘‘well-developed figure, which gave ample evidence that it had never suffered from compression or whalebone, or any other bones, save those which Nature had given her.’’ The conversational and intimate relationship Jerauld’s narrator creates with the reader pervades the tales of the first group and becomes a unifying element in ‘‘Chronicles and Sketches of Hazelhurst.’’ These connected stories prefigure in delicacy and tone Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs, as Jerauld’s unsentimentally nostalgic speaker invites the reader to join her on a walking tour of the village and ‘‘to gossip. . .about people and events, past and present.’’ Jerauld’s final prose suggests she might have attained a high level of literary artistry.


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OTHER WORKS: Poetry and Prose by Mrs. Charlotte A. Jerauld, with a Memoir by Henry Bacon (1850). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Douglas, A., The Feminization of American Culture (1977). Mayo, S. C. E., Selections from the Writings of Mrs. Sarah C. Edgarton Mayo, with a Memoir by Her Husband (1849). Reference works: Daughters of America (1882). —CAROLINE ZILBOORG

JERVEY, Caroline (Howard) Gilman Born 1823, Charleston, South Carolina; died 1877, Charleston, South Carolina Wrote under: Caroline Howard, Mrs. Lewis Jervey Daughter of Samuel and Caroline Howard Gilman; married Wilson Glover, 1840; Lewis Jervey, 1865; children: four Caroline Gilman Jervey was the eldest of four surviving children of author and magazine editor Caroline Howard Gilman and a Unitarian clergyman. Jervey married a South Carolina planter in 1840 and was left a widow with three children in 1846. She returned to her family, began teaching, and ran a successful school for many years. She had one daughter by her second marriage to a Charleston admirer of many years. With the exception of several years in Greenville, South Carolina, during the Civil War, Jervey spent her entire life in Charleston. Although her mother disclaimed any ambition to write a novel, Jervey wrote two fully developed novels. Vernon Grove; or, Hearts As They Are (1859) tells the story of Richard Vernon, a wealthy man blinded by a fever, who moves from the city to the country. Near his country home lives a 10-year-old girl, Sybil Gray, who grows up to reform his character, fall in love, and marry him. A contemporary critic found it an ‘‘interesting story, of marked but not improbable incidents,’’ but modern readers may dispute the probability of some incidents, especially those that seem too obviously designed to demonstrate the selfishness or piety of various characters. Although Vernon Grove first appeared as a serial in the Southern Literary Messenger (January-August 1858), a magazine whose every cover proclaimed it ‘‘alone among the monthly periodicals of America, in defence of the Peculiar Institutions of the Southern Country,’’ it is carefully devoid of any specific background. Indeed, the poor living near the hero’s country seat are described as ‘‘cottagers,’’ so the setting seems a novelistic never-never land. Atlantic Monthly (Jan. 1859) approves this lack of realism, noting that ‘‘a leading characteristic of ‘Vernon Grove’ is the extremely good taste with which it is conceived and written.’’ In Jervey’s second novel, Helen Courtenay’s Promise (1866) is made to her dying father, who demands that his 18-year-old daughter swear to protect his lifelong reputation for probity by secretly substituting her own fortune for the one that he has embezzled, although it was left him in trust for a friend’s son. She

never betrays her secret, even to the young man who wins her hand in the final pages of the novel. Its plot is weaker and even more dependent on coincidence than that of Vernon Grove, and is further marred by overly melodramatic and clichéd scenes. But Helen Courtenay’s Promise is saved by its heroine. Helen is a brave and steadfast young woman with superior intellect and judgment; still, she and the hero both agree with Milton’s dictum: ‘‘He for God only, she for God in him.’’ During the four years in which Helen supports herself and earns enough money to make up the difference between the two fortunes, she studies acting and goes on the stage. Although she gives up her career, her exemplary character and actions convince the hero that his denunciations of the stage are in error. In allowing the heroine to become an actress, in describing her interpretations of her roles, and in emphasizing the physical and emotional dangers of acting, Helen Courtenay’s Promise may have been influenced by the life and novels of Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie. Jervey’s poems, a dreadful play for children—The Lost Children (1870)—and some anemic fairy tales hardly merit resurrection, but her two novels can still hold a reader’s interest. OTHER WORKS: Stories and Poems by Mother and Daughter (with C. Gilman, 1872). The Young Fortune Teller (with C. Gilman, 1874). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Wright, L. H., American Fiction 1851-1875 (1957). Reference works: The Living Writers of the South (1869). Women of the South Distinguished in Literature (1861). The Living Female Writers of the South (1872). Southland Writers (1870). Other references: Atlantic Monthly (Jan. 1859). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH

JEWETT, Sarah Orne Born 3 September 1849, South Berwick, Maine; died 24 June 1909, South Berwick, Maine Also wrote under: Caroline, A. C. Eliot, Alice Eliot, Sarah O. Sweet Daughter of Theodore H. and Frances Perry Jewett Sarah Orne Jewett’s life and works are rooted in the southern tier of Maine. Her own life was a favored one: born into relative wealth, she was educated at Miss Raynes’s School and at Berwick Academy in South Berwick. She was, however, a somewhat listless student and later remarked that her real education came from her father, a country physician whom she often accompanied on house calls. He imparted his extensive knowledge of nature and literature to her, and it was to some extent through these house visits that she came to know the people of her region so intimately. Jewett earned success and modest fame as a writer at an early age. When she was eighteen, her story ‘‘Jenny Garrow’s Lovers’’

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was published in a weekly Boston periodical, The Flag of Our Union. Jewett was sustained throughout her life by a group of intimate female friends. In her earliest diaries (1867-79) she describes her intense emotional attachment to several young women. Her most important liaison was with Annie Adams Fields of Boston. Jewett lived part of each year at Fields’s Charles Street home, and the two traveled extensively together. Hundreds of letters remain to document the significance of this friendship; it seems likely many of Jewett’s stories were written at least in part for Fields’s amusement. Jewett also knew and corresponded with an extensive circle of artists, including Marie Thérèse Blanc, Violet Paget, Sara Norton, Sarah Wyman Whitman, Louisa Dresel, Louise Imogen Guiney, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Celia Thaxter, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and John Greenleaf Whittier. In her later years Jewett’s reputation was firmly established. Younger writers sought her advice, which she generously supplied. Her face was one of the few women writers on the ‘‘Authors’’ card deck of the time, which is supposedly where the young Willa Cather learned of Jewett. Some of Jewett’s most perceptive and poignant advice may be found in her letters to Cather, who later acknowledged the influence of her mentor by dedicating O Pioneers! (1913) to her, noting that in Jewett’s ‘‘beautiful and delicate work there is the perfection that endures.’’ Cather estimated Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896, latest reissued 1997) as one of three American works guaranteed immortality. Deephaven (1877), Jewett’s first book-length collection of stories, deals with a series of experiences and characters met by two young women during a summer vacation on the coast of Maine. The relationship between the two is handled somewhat sentimentally, but the character sketches display Jewett’s genius for the genre, although she later regarded this work as juvenile. Contemporary reviews were slight and mixed. Reviews were increasingly favorable for three subsequent story collections. Jewett’s first novel, A Country Doctor (1884, latest reissue 1999), perhaps her most feminist work, is semiautobiographical. It is a classic bildungsroman concerning the growth to maturity of a young woman whose ambition is to become a doctor. The woman faces considerable prejudice and discrimination in her pursuit. Eventually she rejects a suitor and resolves to pursue her career. A White Heron, and Other Stories (1886, 1997) marks the beginning of Jewett’s mature phase. Her mastery of style and a sophisticated sense of craft are quite evident in several of these stories, including the much-anthologized title story, ‘‘Marsh Rosemary,’’ and ‘‘The Dulham Ladies.’’ The title story, ‘‘A White Heron’’ is set in rural Maine and reflects Jewett’s intimate awareness of the natural environment. It concerns the dilemma a young country girl, Sylvia, faces when an ornithologist arrives at her farm looking for a rare white heron for his collection of stuffed birds. Sylvia is for awhile tempted to reveal the bird’s location, as she is swayed by the sophistication and authority of the urban visitor. However, she remains loyal to her woodland friend and preserves the secret of its whereabouts, as well as the sanctity of her pastoral world.

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This story expresses several of Jewett’s central themes. One is the clash between urban and rural values. In posing the clash as a male-female confrontation, she suggests what was a fairly common 19th-century notion, namely, that women are more in tune with life than men and are repulsed by killing, guns, and violence. The popularity of the story continues. A film version was produced in 1978 by Jane Morrison Productions, New York. In the decade following ‘‘A White Heron’’ Jewett put forth several further collections, and her best work is to be found among these. The Country of the Pointed Firs, generally considered Jewett’s masterpiece, is difficult to classify by genre. It is more unified than a collection of sketches but much looser than the traditional novel. Like Deephaven it uses the structural device of the relationship between two women, which anchors the character sketches to a continuing narrative event. The power of the work resides in the sense of mysterious personal depth many of the characters seem to possess. The protagonist, Mrs. Almiry Todd, one of Jewett’s enduring characters (prefiguring in many ways Willa Cather’s Antonia), is the town herbalist. She has a singular capacity for healing spiritual as well as physical ills, and is one of the prime sustainers of a sense of communication and of community among the scattered residents of the coastal settlement. Jewett’s own extensive knowledge of herbs is seen in this and other works. The Country of the Pointed Firs includes several vignettes of characters who have lost touch with the mainstream of human relationship. Jewett’s tone is elegiac; the lament is for these failed lives, and perhaps ultimately, as many critics have suggested, for the general economic and social decline of New England in the latter half of the century. There is, moreover, a sense of the fragility and fleetingness of human bonds, seen in the poignant parting scene between Mrs. Todd and the narrator, a thinly disguised persona for Jewett. But the work is not a tragedy, nor does it espouse the pessimism and fatalism of contemporary naturalistic novels. Rather, it conveys a sense of celebration, a sense of the triumph of the human community against the forces of spiritual destruction. Jewett’s last major work, a historical novel, The Tory Lover (1901), was by far her most popular (it went into five printings in its first three months), but it has received the least critical approbation. Jewett also wrote some verse published in her lifetime, a few selections of which were collected in a posthumous volume, Verses (1916). One of these lyrics, ‘‘Boat Song,’’ was set to music. She also wrote several works for children. Jewett was writing in the heyday of realism (the critical principles of her editor at the Atlantic Monthly, William Dean Howells, were those of the realists), but she can be classified as a realist only with qualifications. In her own critical comments she rejected slice-of-life ‘‘objectivity’’ as an artistic ideal and insisted personal point of view was an essential ingredient of competent fiction. Jewett wrote about ordinary people with gentle humor, respect, and compassion. Her mastery of style—her ability to fuse technique and content with her personality—has ensured her work will survive for years to come (many of her titles were reprinted again in the late 1990s).


OTHER WORKS: Play Days (1878). Old Friends and New (1879). Country By-Ways (1881). The Mate of the Light, and Friends Ashore (1884). A Marsh Island (1885). The Story of the Normans (1887). The King of Folly Island, and Other People (1888, reissued 1998). Betty Leicester: A Story for Girls (1890). Strangers and Wayfarers (1890). Tales of New England (1890, reissued 1997). A Native of Winby, and Other Tales (1893). Betty Leicester’s Christmas (1894, reissued 1990). The Life of Nancy (1895). The Queen’s Twin, and Other Stories (1899). The Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett (edited by A. Fields, 1911, reissued 1994). Sarah Orne Jewett Letters (edited by R. Cary, 1967). The Uncollected Short Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (edited by R. Cary, 1971). The Dunnet Landing Stories (1996). The Irish Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (1996). Novels and Stories (latest reissue, 1996). The Country of the Pointed Firs; and, The Dunnet Landing Stories (latest reissue, 1997). The Complete Poems of Sarah Orne Jewett (1999). The most extensive collection of Sarah Orne Jewett’s papers is housed in the Houghton Library of Harvard University. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Auchincloss, L., Pioneers and Caretakers: A Study of Nine American Women Novelists (1965). Baum, R. M., A Descriptive Catalogue of the Sarah Orne Jewett Collection: The Parkman Dexter Howe Library (1983). Bicksler, M. R., ‘‘Women in the Fiction of Sarah Orne Jewett’’ (thesis, 1995). Blanchard, P., Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Her Work (1994). Buchanan, C. D., Sarah Orne Jewett: Stories (1994). Buseman, L. J., ‘‘The Realism of Sarah Orne Jewett’s Characterization of Men’’ (thesis, 1993). Cary, R., ed., Appreciation of Sarah Orne Jewett (1973). Cary, R., Sarah Orne Jewett (1962). Donovan, J., Sarah Orne Jewett (1980). Dullea, G. J., ‘‘Two New England Voices: Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman’’ (thesis, 1996). Evans, M. A., ‘‘Deep Havens and Ruined Gardens: Possibilities of Community and Spirituality in Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman’’ (thesis, 1992). Ferris, R. M., ‘‘Pure or Perverse? Women’s Romantic Friendships and the Life and Fiction of Sarah Orne Jewett’’ (thesis, 1996). Fields, A., ed., Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett (1911). Frost, J. E., Sarah Orne Jewett (1960). Gale, R. L., A Sarah Orne Jewett Companion (1999). Hoffman, P. E., ‘‘The Search for Self-Fulfillment: Marriage in the Short Fiction of Kate Chopin, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Sarah Orne Jewett’’ (thesis, 1991). Hulme, C., Sarah Orne Jewett: A Great, and Greatly Underestimated, Writer (thesis, 1988). Harkins, E. F., and C. H. L. Johnston, Little Pilgrimages Among the Women Who Have Written Famous Books (1902). Matthiessen, F. O., Sarah Orne Jewett (1929). McCauley-Myers, J. P., ‘‘The Silent Influences in the Works of Sarah Orne Jewett’’ (thesis, 1991). McGuire, M. A., ‘‘Sarah Orne Jewett’’ (thesis, 1995). Nagel, G. L. and J. Nagel, Sarah Orne Jewett: A Reference Guide (1978). Sargent, R. S., Always Nine Years Old: Sarah Orne Jewett’s Childhood (1985). Sherman, S. W., Sarah Orne Jewett, an American Persephone (1989). Silverthorne, E., Sarah Orne Jewett: A Writer’s Life (1993). Sparks, L. V., Counterparts: The Fiction of Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Kate Chopin (1993). Stoddart, S. F., ‘‘Selected Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett: A Critical Edition with Commentory‘‘ (thesis, 1988). Thorp, M. F., Sarah Orne Jewett (1966). Weber, C. C., and C. J.

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Weber, A Bibliography of the Published Writings of Sarah Orne Jewett (1949). Westbrook, P. D., Acres of Flint, Writers of Rural New England 1870-1900 (1981). Reference works: AA. AW. American Short Story: A Collection of the Best Known and Most Memorable Short Stories by the Great American Authors (1994). DAB. Great American Short Stories I (1995). Great Women Writers: The Lives and Works of 135 of the World’s Most Important Women Writers, from Antiquity to the Present (1994). Modern American Women Writers (1993). NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Rediscoveries: American Short Stories by Women, 1832-1916 (1994). Other references: Sarah Orne Jewett Conference (1986). Sarah Orne Jewett’s Best Short Stories (recording, 1994). Stories of New England, Then & Now (recording, 1996). —JOSEPHINE DONOVAN

JOHNSON, Diane Born 28 April 1934, Moline, Illinois Daughter of Dolph and Frances Elder Lain; married B. Lamar Johnson, Jr., 1953; John F. Murray, 1968; children: four Diane Johnson has been published as a novelist, biographer, journalist and essayist. She grew up in the Midwest, received her B.A. from the University of Utah, and both M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles. In her novels, she often writes of the conflicts that attractive and intelligent women face when they confront cultural ideals of femininity. In her essays she has chosen topics from travel to politics, often presenting them with a sharp eye for the satiric or comical in people or situations. Her first three novels—Fair Game (1965), Loving Hands at Home (1968), and Burning (1971), are dominated by the satiric impulse and a comic vision of society. Each heroine tries to measure up to society’s abstract ideals of womanhood and/or personhood, or just to survive. Her next two novels, The Shadow Knows (1974) and Lying Low (1978), are a marked departure from this early work: the capacity for reflection and the talent for richly inventive symbolic detail remain, and the themes are the same. But the later work comes to grips with feminine survival in circumstances more horrendous and for stakes more final than any in her first books. The satire grows sharper and the comedic turns of plot can no longer effect a complete rescue of the heroine from the tragic possibilities of her situation. Lying Low was nominated for a National Book Award, and in 1979 won a Rosenthal Foundation Award. In it, one of the three heroines is wanted on a capital charge by the F.B.I. and another is a fully credentialed refugee from the Third World. For both the fugitive and the refugee, every moment of every day is a test of resolve and resourcefulness. Like all of Johnson’s novels, it is full of victories that are breathtaking when perceived, but are for the

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most part invisible to a society that defines success in very simple terms. While Johnson continues this theme in her fiction, her work has lightened in tone. Persian Nights (1987) set in Iran just before the shah’s fall, demonstrates both her characteristic rich use of symbol and an incisive humor toward her heroine and the other characters who are perplexed by both political and personal revolutions. Persian Nights was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Health and Happiness (1990) relies on a triple focus to include the perspective of a male physician along with those of the two heroines. Humorous and graceful, it offers a softened satire on individual integrity, contemporary California culture, and the politics of the medical profession. Le Divorce (1997) follows two American women to Paris where one seeks a divorce and the other seeks both adventure and direction for her life. The novel was called ‘‘sexy, graceful, and funny. . .a witty two-way FrancoAmerican guide to manners and attitudes’’ by the New York Review of Books. The New York Times Review of Books declared it ‘‘a genuinely wise and humane novel.’’ Johnson has also written two biographies. Lesser Lives: The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith, published in 1973, explores the life of Mary Ellen Peacock Meredith, who divorced George Meredith, the famous novelist, and was much maligned by him. Dashiell Hammett: A Life (1983), Johnson’s second biography, received mixed reviews. The biographical story was declared excellent, but its depth was questioned. In writing it, Johnson had access to Hammett’s personal papers, but also had to work in cooperation with author Lillian Hellman, Hammett’s executrix, whose desire was to perpetuate the myth of their larger-than-life union and exploits. Johnson has also worked in other genres. In 1980, she collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on the screenplay of Stephen King’s The Shining. She has been a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review and writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, San Francisco Chronicle, and Washington Post; many of her essays from the late 1970s and early 1980s were collected in Terrorists and Novelists (1982). She has also coauthored articles on the medical profession and on AIDS with her physician husband; and she authored Natural Opium (1991), a collection of travel essays and what Johnson calls ‘‘auto-fiction.’’ She has received an impressive number of literary prizes and grants: a Woodrow Wilson Foundation grant in 1965, an American Association of University Women grant in 1968, and a Guggenheim Fellowship for 1977-78. In 1987 she was a recipient of a five-year Mildred and Harold Strauss Livings grant. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hargrove, A. C., and M. Magliocco, eds., Portraits of Marriage in Literature (1984). LeClair, T., and L. McCaffery, Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists (1983). Yalom, M., ed., Women Writers of the West Coast: Speaking of Their Lives and Careers (1990). Reference works: CA (1974, 1980). CANR (1986, 1998). CLC (1988). DLBY (1991). WW of Writers, Editors, and Poets

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(1991). MTCW (1981). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Booklist (1 Dec. 1996). Clues (Spring— Summer 1991). Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction (1974). LJ (15 Nov. 1996). NYTM (22 Feb. 1998). NYRB (6 Feb. 1997). Modern Fiction Studies (Winter 1985). Partisan Review (Fall 1988). Sewanee Review (Fall 1984). —JUDITH HARLAN

JOHNSON, Georgia Douglas (Camp) Born 10 September 1886, Atlanta, Georgia; died May 1966, Washington, D.C. Also wrote under: Paul Tremaine Daughter of George and Laura Jackson Camp; married Henry L. Johnson, 1903 Little is known about Georgia Douglas Johnson’s early childhood or her parents. She studied at Atlanta University (through the Normal program) and Oberlin College, Ohio. In 1909 she moved to Washington, D.C., with her lawyer husband. While living in the capital, Johnson wrote lyrics, poetry, short stories, and plays. She established the Literary Salon, a weekly Saturday night meeting place for a burgeoning group of young poets, including many of the Harlem Renaissance writers. Johnson was active in several literary organizations, the Republican party, the pan-African movement, and human rights groups connected with the Congregational church. Following her husband’s death in 1925, she became a commissioner of conciliation with the Department of Labor (1925-34), held other government positions, remained active in racial and political organizations in New York and Washington, and continued to publish individual poems sporadically. Johnson was the first black female to receive national recognition as a poet since Francis Harper, an abolitionist writer. Although her three major volumes were published within a 10-year span, each represents a distinctly different period in her life, flowing from the naive inquiry found in The Heart of a Woman (1918), through the pain and deprivation of being black recorded in Bronze (1922), to the mature acceptance of grief expressed in Autumn Love Cycle (1928). Johnson received many awards not only for her poetry but for her plays and short stories. Although Johnson’s literary strength is found in her poetry, her plays and short stories remain significant to the development of black American literature from a literary as well as from a political and a historical perspective. The 62 poems in The Heart of a Woman are four-, eight-, and 12-line queries regarding the nature of womanhood. While many of these poems are trite, Johnson expresses a haunting sensitivity toward women’s unfulfilled aspirations in ‘‘The Dreams of the Dreamer’’ and ‘‘Dead Leaves.’’ Although sadness prevails in this volume, Johnson does not paint a bleak picture of womanhood.


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She finds solace in nature (‘‘Peace’’ and ‘‘When I am Dead’’) and fulfillment in requited love (‘‘Mate’’). Johnson apparently believed that women were destined to the life of a voyeur— declaring that they lacked the freedom to express themselves openly, that they lacked the means of fulfilling their dreams, and that only through their lovers could they fully experience life. Bronze is an energetic expression of the pain, humiliations, and fears of a 1920s black woman. The 65 poems in this volume are grouped under nine headings. Johnson’s greatest literary contribution to an understanding of womanhood and of her era is found in the 10 poems in the ‘‘Motherhood’’ section. ‘‘Maternity’’ expresses a mixture of emotions as a child is awaited: pride is coupled with fear that, at worst, the child would be lynched and, at best, rejected by the world. ‘‘Black Woman’’ implies that it is cruel to bring black children into this world. In Autumn Love Cycle, an obvious stylistic and thematic maturity is displayed. Johnson’s dominant theme is the depth of mature love, as expressed in ‘‘I Want to Die While You Love Me,’’ ‘‘Autumn,’’ and ‘‘ Afterglow,’’ but there is the fear that lost youth can result in infidelity or in impotency. Many of these poems were probably written during the period when her husband suffered three strokes and eventually died. A dozen of the poems describe her adjustment to life without the physical presence of love. Johnson, together with other black writers after World War I, was responsible for bringing black poetry out of the bonds of dialect and into the realm of a high art form. The poets of her period eventually were overshadowed by the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, but their importance to the movement should not be underestimated. Johnson’s significance as both a black and a woman writer cannot be denied. OTHER WORKS: Blue Blood (1927). Plumes: Folk Tragedy (1927). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bontemps, A., ed., American Negro Poetry (1974). Bontemps, A., The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (1972). Henderson, D. F., ‘‘Georgia Douglas Johnson: A Study of Her Life and Literature’’ (thesis, 1995). Hull, G. T., Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance (1987). Johnson, J. W., The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922). King, E. C., ‘‘The Construction of the South by Southern Woman Playwrights’’ (thesis, 1996). Locke, A., The New Negro: An Interpretation (1968). Martin-Liggins, S. M., ‘‘Georgia Douglas Johnson: The Voice of Oppression’’ (thesis, 1996). Mays, B., The Negro’s God As Reflected in His Literature (1968). Shockley, A. A., Afro-American Women Writers (1988). White, N., and W. Jackson, eds., An Anthology of Verse by American Negroes (1924). Whitmore, W., ‘‘Georgia Douglas Johnson: An Artist Out of Time’’ (thesis, 1981). Reference works: Black American Writers Past and Present (1975). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Crisis (Dec. 1952). Journal of Negro History (July 1972). Obsidian (Spring/Summer 1979). —LINDA S. BERRY

JOHNSON, Helen (Louise) Kendrick Born 4 January 1844, Hamilton, New York; died 3 January 1917, New York, New York Also wrote under: Mrs. Rossiter Johnson Daughter of Asahel C. and Anne Hopkins Kendrick; married Rossiter Johnson, 1869 Helen Kendrick Johnson grew up in an academic environment and from girlhood was interested in writing. A visit to Georgia soon after the Civil War provided the material for her first publication, ‘‘A Night in Atlanta’’ (1867), which appeared in the New Hampshire Statesman, a newspaper edited by her future husband. Johnson’s earliest publications were children’s stories. Her first book, Roddy’s Romance (1874), was written for a prize competition. Although it did not win the prize, it was successfully published and was followed by Roddy’s Reality (1875) and Roddy’s Ideal (1876), the series of children’s books known collectively as the Roddy Books. Tears for the Little Ones (1878) is a collection of verses from which Johnson had drawn solace after the deaths of her first two children and which she published in order to help other parents through similar periods of grief. In the late 1870s, Johnson began Our Familiar Songs and Those Who Made Them (1881), a popular success that went through numerous editions. The contents are a combination of ancient and current ballads, sentimental songs, and nonsense songs. The writers include Robert Burns, Stephen Foster, and contemporary writers now forgotten; some writers are anonymous. Johnson divided the anthology thematically and gave biographical information about the writers, histories of the songs, and piano arrangements of the music. She included all the known verses and frequently indicated variant tunes for the songs. The completeness of her biographical and historical material varies greatly because her methods of gathering materials were not systematic. Her book does, however, have the virtue of presenting, in useful form, the words and music for popular songs of the day. Johnson’s next literary endeavor was the compilation of a series of small books called the Nutshell Series (1884). These were collections of sayings of famous men published under the titles Philosophy, Wisdom, Sentiments, Proverbs, Wit and Humor, Epigram and Epitaph. All were subsequently collected into a single volume, Short Sayings of Famous Men (1884). Johnson’s only novel, Raleigh Westgate (1889), is a humorous account of the development of a romantic young man into a pillar of his community. Westgate’s search for himself and the girl of his dreams takes him through the Maine countryside and provides Johnson with ample opportunities for local-color depictions of the Maine people and for satire of modern commercial methods and nouveau-riche pretensions. The plot works on stock sentimental devices, but Johnson’s satire is humorously effective. Johnson was editor of the American Woman’s Journal from 1894 to 1896. In this capacity, she became involved with the

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woman suffrage issue and published several articles favoring woman suffrage. Further consideration of these articles convinced Johnson of the error of their positions, and she began actively participating in the antisuffrage movement. This led to her most significant work, Woman and the Republic (1897), in which she analyzes the arguments of the suffragists, refuting each point by point. Johnson scorns all of their arguments concerning women’s equality with men on the grounds that women are already superior to men. In Woman and the Republic, Johnson argues that women do not need, and in fact should not have, the vote because the enforcement of laws depends on the power implied in the support of law and order by men who have the physical strength to provide police action. She also declares that woman suffrage is antidemocratic because in the American republic the social order has been established according to God’s wishes with women as the moral force, building human character through Christian mothering, and with men as the physical force, building the social bodies that protect order. Johnson was a conscientious editor, a writer of witty fiction, and an ardent supporter of women’s work in traditional areas. Her arguments against suffrage are carefully structured. However, for the modern woman, her premises seem to be in gross error. Her conviction that women do not need the vote because they already have all of the necessary rights and perquisites demands acceptance of the view that woman’s place is in the home and beside the cradle. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Johnson, R., Helen Kendrick Johnson (Mrs. Rossiter Johnson): The Story of Her Varied Activities (1917). Reference works: AA. DAB. NCAB. Other references: NYTBR (10 July 1897). —HARRIETTE CUTTINO BUCHANAN

JOHNSON, Josephine Winslow Born 20 June 1910, Kirkwood, Missouri; died 27 February 1990 Daughter of Benjamin and Ethel Franklin Johnson; married Thurlow Smoot, 1939; Grant G. Cannon, 1942 (died 1969); children: three Josephine Winslow Johnson was reared on a 100-acre farm in south-central Missouri. Reflecting on her mother’s lineage, Johnson has noted the long dominance of Franklins, i.e., AngloSaxon freeholders, untitled agrarians with a fervent attachment to specific pieces of land. The strength of this passion is intensified in Johnson. At the age of eight, Johnson wrote a poem to mark the end of the war and glimpsed her vocation as a writer. Her first novel, Now in November (1934 reprinted in 1991), brought her the Pulitzer Prize. Another novel—as well as poems and short stories—soon appeared, for in these years, Johnson says she ‘‘wrote, if not endlessly, then enormously.’’ Her first marriage, to a Labor

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Relations Board lawyer, only perpetuated her growing sense that (as she said in her autobiography, Seven Houses: A Memoir of Time and Places, 1973), ‘‘I seemed to be waiting to begin to live.’’ Later in Grant Cannon she found a partner whose hopeful nature temporarily dispelled her own profound pessimism. With Cannon, an editor of Farm Quarterly, she raised three children. His death in 1969 took from her one who, in her words, ‘‘made no lifelong truce with despair as I have made.’’ Although her work covers many decades and genres, the important themes almost all appear in the early fiction. Now in November celebrates the land and the self-sufficient farm family even while it deplores the Depression and the tyranny of weather. The work is lit by occasional set pieces of nature description and by a clear attention to the limited point of view of the narrator, the middle daughter on a small Missouri farm, as she remembers her childhood and her growing understanding of her sister’s mental illness. The private drama of sister Kerrin’s suicide and the mother’s death is played out against the social background of financial disaster for small farmers during the 1930s. Although the novel betrays the influence of the social protest fiction of Sinclair and Steinbeck, much of it is more reminiscent of the naturalism of Hardy or Zola. Johnson’s second novel, Jordanstown (1937), about a small-town newspaperman and community organizer during the Depression, is less successful because the didactic ideology of socialist realism is too little camouflaged. Still, Jordanstown has memorable elements: Stefan, the baker, whose obstinate hope buoys the protesters as much as his hot breads do; the stifling July death of the child whose sick, malnourished mother does not even realize the girl has died. Johnson’s third and fourth novels, Wildwood (1945) and The Dark Traveler (1963), are disappointing. Slips into omniscience only remind us of the strength of the earlier limited point of view. The anguish surfacing in the earlier fiction is here completely unrelieved, and the loss of the idealism of the socialist movements of the 1930s is reflected in the agnostic’s cry in Wildwood: ‘‘A voice mocking and mechanical, final and unanswerable: and the Lord said, Let there be no light.’’ Johnson’s short fiction, however, shows that more compact forms better display both her descriptive talents and her facility with surprise endings. ‘‘Gedacht,’’ her first published short story, is the best of the Winter Orchard (1935) collection. It concerns a World War I veteran who, having lost his sight from poison gas, regains it briefly. Johnson’s early poetry incorporates the themes of her fiction: social protest, loss of religious faith, love of nature, and the struggle with cynicism. A publishing hiatus of almost 20 years occurred in Johnson’s mid-career, and when she resumed publication, some very different genre preferences manifested themselves. She produced essays, memoirs, and diaries instead of fiction. Johnson’s vision became quieter, more introspective, more ameliorated by the natural world, although social concerns and pessimism are still there. Thus The Inland Island (1969, reprinted 1996), a kind of nature journal in the style of Walden, laments the Vietnam War and promotes the environmental movement in the midst of solitary meditations and exquisite observations on the natural


year. With The Circle of Seasons (1974), the text for a book of nature photographs, Johnson reiterates the themes begun in Now in November. It is both an ode and an elegy that celebrates and questions: ‘‘Will there be any rhythm and difference of season left, any feeling of the great circular flow of living things [for our children]?’’ Johnson has contributed brilliantly to the ‘‘proletarian’’ tradition in American letters. Indeed, one is frequently tempted to rank her with the great shapers of that tradition, London, Sinclair, Norris, and Steinbeck. But Johnson’s activity displays other dimensions that make her difficult to categorize, for she is also a writer of naturalistic fiction, a didactic poet, a Thoreauvian essayist, and an anguished contemplative decrying militarism and the inhumanity of modern technology. In a time when the often divided currents of agrarianism, radical trade unionism, conservationism, and militant pacifism seem about to form a curious new merger, Johnson’s lifelong nurturing of these concerns may prompt a rediscovery of her achievement. OTHER WORKS: Unwilling Gypsy (1936). Year’s End (1937). Paulina: The Story of an Apple-Butter Jar (1939). The Sorcerer’s Son, and Other Stories (1965). The manuscripts and papers of Josephine Winslow Johnson are housed in the Rare Books Collection at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Carter, Q. R., ‘‘Josephine W. Johnson and the Pulitzer: The Shaping of a Life’’ (thesis, 1995). Reference works: CA (1971). CN (1976). NCAB. TCA. TCAS. Other references: Nation (21 Aug. 1935). NYHT (13 Sept. 1934, 13 Aug. 1935). NYT (16 Sept. 1934, 11 April 1937). NYTBR (2 Mar. 1969, 13 May 1973). Saturday Review (3 Apr. 1937, 15 Feb. 1969). —MARGARET MCFADDEN-GERBER

JOHNSON-MASTERS, Virginia Born 11 February 1925, Springfield, Missouri Daughter of Harry Hershel and Edna Evans Eshelman; married George Johnson, 1950 (divorced 1956); William H. Masters, 1971 (divorced 1993); children: Scott, Lisa Virginia Johnson-Masters, scientist and psychologist, contributed to the study of human sexuality in her work and writings with William H. Masters. Johnson-Masters began working with William H. Masters as a research assistant in 1957. They became the team known as Masters and Johnson, who pioneered the development of research methods, treatment of sexual dysfunctions, training of therapists, treatment of sexual offenders, and textbooks. Using a behavioral science approach, they defined human sexuality by extending knowledge about the physiology and

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psychology of sexual function. They cofounded the Masters Johnson Institute in 1970. Educated in music, Johnson-Masters studied at Drury College in Springfield, Missouri, from 1940 to 1942 and the University of Missouri in Columbia from 1944 to 1946. She continued with graduate study in voice directed toward operatic singing at Washington University in St. Louis from 1964 to 1965. Following her studies, she worked for the St. Louis Daily Record as an administrative assistant and editorial writer, and for radio station KMOX in St. Louis in the advertising department. Though she had no formal training whatsoever, from her position as a research assistant for Masters in reproductive biology in the obstetrics and gynecology department at the Washington University School of Medicine, she advanced to research instructor and lecturer. She held the positions of research associate, then assistant director when the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation was established in 1964. The Foundation became the Masters and Johnson Institute, with her as cofounder. She was codirector, then director and president, and then cochairman of the Board of Directors until 1994. Since 1983 she has been the president of MVM Enterprises, Inc., a video production company. As a scientist, she received two honorary Doctor of Science degrees from the University of Louisville in 1978 and the University of Rochester in 1987 and several awards, including the Paul H. Hoch award from the American Psychopathological Society in 1971; the SIECUS Citation award in 1971; the Distinguished Service award from the American Association of Marriage and Family Counselors in 1976; the Modern Medicine Award for Distinguished Achievement in 1977; the Biomedical Research award from the World Association of Sexology in 1979; she was named one of the Twenty-Five Most Influential Women in the American World Almanac for 1975, 1978, 1979, and 1980; and a Paul Harris Fellow from Rotary International in 1976. As coauthor with Masters, Johnson-Masters wrote the major textbooks in the study of human sexuality. Based on research in behavioral science and psychology, Human Sexual Response (1966) describes the sexual response cycle of men and women during intercourse and masturbation. A bestseller, the book took its place alongside the works of Sigmund Freud, Havelock Ellis, and Alfred Kinsey in its breakthrough in understanding human sexuality and in securing its study as a distinct discipline. Their next book, Human Sexual Inadequacy (1970), launched the field of sex therapy. Their later research and publications focused on the role of love and commitment, homosexuality, ethical issues, safe sex, AIDS, addictions, and aging. Although their work has received criticism for its masculinist bias, their influence in view of the presently extensive field of sexual research, therapy, and advice is evident in a remark by Johnson-Masters in a 1994 interview about their teamwork: ‘‘We are like Kleenex to tissue.’’ OTHER WORKS: Coauthored with William H. Masters and others: The Pleasure Bond: A New Look at Sexuality and Commitment (1975); Ethical Issues in Sex Therapy and Research, Volume 1

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(1977); Homosexuality in Perspective (1979); Textbook of Sexual Medicine (1979); Ethical Issues in Sex Therapy and Research, Volume 2 (1980); Crisis: Heterosexual Behavior in the Age of AIDS (1988); Heterosexuality (1994).

Colonel, starring Shirley Temple as Lloyd and Lionel Barrymore as old Colonel Lloyd. The story of the conflict of pretty, spunky Lloyd with her crusty old grandfather, who severed relations with his only daughter, Elizabeth, when she eloped with a Yankee, was a perfect vehicle for Temple’s talents.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bullough, V. L., Science in the Bedroom (1994). Fisher, W., and Azy Barak, ‘‘Bias and Fairness in the Diagnosis of Primary Orgasmic Dysfunction in Women,’’ in American Psychologis 44 (July 1989). Irvine, J. M., ‘‘From Difference to Sameness: Gender Ideology in Sexual Science, in Journal of Sex Research 27 (Feb. 1990). Schwartz, M. F., ‘‘The Masters and Johnson Treatment Program for Sex Offenders: Intimacy, Empathy and Trauma Resolution,’’ in Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity 1 (1994). Tiefer, L., ‘‘Historical, Scientific, Clinical, and Feminist Criticisms of ‘the Human Sexual Response Cycle’ Model,’’ in Annual Review of Sex Research 2 (1991). Reference works: Complete Marquis Who’s Who Biographies (1995). NYT (24 Mar. 1994). Virginia Johnson-Masters Web Page (1999).

Johnston’s work was commercially successful, and her publisher clearly took advantage of the popularity of the Little Colonel books. For example, in 1909 the Page Company issued The Little Colonel’s Good Times Book, with blank pages for children to record their ‘‘good times,’’ as Betty Lewis did in The Little Colonel’s House Party (1900). Many of the legends and tales in Johnston’s books were subsequently published as separate volumes, such as The Legend of the Bleeding Heart (1907) and The Road of the Loving Heart (1922), both of which first appeared in The Little Colonel’s House Party.

—KAREN J. MCLENNAN

JOHNSTON, Annie Fellows Born 15 May 1863, Evansville, Indiana; died 5 October 1931, Pewee Valley, Kentucky Daughter of Albion and Mary Erskine Fellows; married William L. Johnston, 1888; children: three Annie Fellows Johnston grew up on a farm outside Evansville, Indiana. Although her father, a Methodist minister, died when she was only two, Johnston was influenced by him, through his theological books, and by her mother, who had strong ideas about the importance of education for women. Johnston attended public schools in Evansville and the University of Iowa (for a year). After teaching for several years and working for a time as a private secretary, she married her cousin, a widower. After his death in 1892, Johnston turned to writing as a career. Eventually, she and her three stepchildren settled in Pewee Valley, Kentucky, which Johnston fictionalized as Lloydsboro Valley in her popular Little Colonel series. In 1899 Johnston’s stepdaughter Rena died; two years later Johnston moved to Arizona for her stepson John’s health, and then on to Texas, where they lived until his death in 1910. As a children’s author, Johnston was both prolific, with over 40 volumes, and popular—reportedly, at her death her books had sold over 1 million copies. Some readers today are still familiar with Johnston’s 13-volume Little Colonel series, which began with the publication of The Little Colonel (1896). Unlike many authors of series books, Johnston allows her characters to mature. For example, we see Miss Lloyd Sherman first as a five-year-old, impetuous and stubborn, and last as a young married woman, lovely and vivacious. Many people know Johnston’s most famous character only through David Butler’s 1935 Fox film, The Little

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Johnston’s works have the flaws of many children’s books of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The characters are idealized; the conflicts, resolved too easily; the themes, simplistic and naive. The typical world of Johnston’s fiction is one of wealth and aristocracy, in which separation of the races and the inferiority of blacks are assumed. But, interestingly, it is a world in which women are not automatically relegated to the life of wife and mother or to unfulfilled spinsterhood. Especially through the experiences of Lloyd Sherman and her friends, Johnston emphasizes the importance for women of education in academic subjects; likewise, she allows her young women the option of independence, through characters such as unmarried Joyce Ware, pursuing her career as a commercial artist in an apartment in New York. A strong moral code underlies every work by Johnston. Through legends and tales, some traditional and others original, she cleverly makes points her young characters are never allowed to miss. Readers of an earlier, simpler day took these lessons to heart and were inspired to model their lives after Lloyd, Betty, Joyce, and other characters; contemporary readers in our complex age often find Johnston’s stories more didactic than inspiring or entertaining. These tales, are nonetheless, still popular today with Johnston’s original The Little Colonel reissued once again in 1998. OTHER WORKS: Big Brother (1894). Joel: A Boy of Galilee (1895). The Little Colonel’s Holiday (1901). The Little Colonel’s Hero (1902). The Little Colonel at Boarding School (1903). The Little Colonel in Arizona (1904). The Little Colonel’s Christmas Vacation (1905). The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor (1906). The Little Colonel’s Knight Comes Riding (1907). The Little Colonel’s Chum: Mary Ware (1908). Mary Ware in Texas (1910). Mary Ware’s Promised Land (1912). Miss Santa Claus of the Pullman (1913). Georgina of the Rainbows (1916). It Was the Road to Jericho (1919). The Land of the Little Colonel: Reminiscence and Autobiography (1929). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Browne, R. B., et al., eds., Challenges in American Culture (1970). Duin, J. Waiting for True Love: And Other Tales of Purity, Patience, and Faithfulness (1998). McGuire, S. L.,


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The Little Colonel: A Phenomenon in Popular Literary Culture (1991). Reference works: Arizona in Literature: A Collection of the Best Writings of Arizona Authors from Early Spanish Days to the Present Time (1971). DAB. Indiana Authors and Their Books, 1816-1916 (1949). Junior Book of Authors (1934). NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA. Other references: St. Nicholas (Dec. 1913). —MARTHA E. COOK

JOHNSTON, Jill Born 17 May 1929, London, England Also writes under: F. J. Crowe Daughter of Olive Margaret Crowe and Cyril F. Johnston; married Richard J. Latham, 1958 (divorced); children: Richard, Winifred Jill Johnston’s mother, an American nurse, and her father, an English bell founder, lived together for four years but never married. Raised in England, Johnston was educated in an exclusive Episcopalian boarding school. In Autobiography in Search of a Father: Motherbound (1983), the first of two autobiographical volumes, Johnston details the pain of her early life. As a result of her father’s failure to marry Olive Crowe, her mother lived a life of deception and lies to hide her daughter’s illegitimacy. Led by her mother to believe that he had died years before, Johnston never met her father. Her perception of reality shifted in 1950 when she read of his death that year. By then he had married and had other children. From this moment on Johnston focused on discovering an identity, yearning to fill the paternal void. Johnston attended college in Massachusetts and in Minnesota, and received an M.F.A. (1954) from the University of North Carolina before making her home in New York City. She went to Columbia University to study dance, and, she says, worked in the ‘‘female slave market’’ to support herself. Trying to fight the desire she felt for women, Johnston conceded to societal pressure and married in 1958. The marriage did not last because of her resistance to convention and her husband’s infidelity. The Village Voice launched Johnston’s career as a writer and public figure, publishing her weekly ‘‘Dance Journal’’ column from 1960 to 1970; Marmalade Me (1974, reprinted 1998) is a collection of the columns. One of the original free spirits of the 1960s, Johnston used the column as a medium to celebrate nonconformity. Her debut article was the first review of the new avant-garde dance and choreography group at the Judson Memorial Church. Gradually, she reviewed less dancing and more of her private life, using the column one week to ‘‘come out’’ as a lesbian and increasingly converting it to an open theater of the wild behavior and public disturbances that by then had come to be expected of her. Johnston’s writing took on a confessional, fractured style eventually leading to the termination of her career as a critic. She was later hospitalized for an emotional breakdown.

Volume Two: Paper Daughter (1985), the second of her autobiographical series in search of a father, begins with an account of her first nervous breakdown and commitment to Bellevue Hospital. The book depicts her journey to gain control over her life, and the experience of another breakdown, as she tries to move in new directions. In 1973 Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution had brought Johnston into the feminist/women’s movement. This collection of journal entries and stories tracks her evolving consciousness as a political lesbian. Her attempts to force the issue of lesbianism into the public forum resulted in establishment portrayals of her as an anarchist outcast. Her next publication, Gullible’s Travels (1974) reflects Johnston after her second breakdown, in motion, open to revolutionary ideas. Feminism and lesbianism create the backdrop for a mixture of fiction and true stories. An experimental style is used to disrupt the readers’ preconceived ideas about fiction, sex, and reality. Between 1984 and 1991, Johnston wrote a review column for Art in America, covering artistic events and books on the arts. Throughout the years, she has also contributed to other periodicals, including Ballet Review, as well as books on dance (particularly the Judson Dance Theater). In this vein, she published Secret Lives in Art: Essays on Art, Literature, Performance (1994), followed by a trek away from dance into the art world with Jasper Johns: Privileged Information (1996). Her most recent work goes back to themes present in 1973’s Lesbian Nation, with Admission Accomplished: The Lesbian Nation Years (1970-75) (1998). OTHER WORKS: ‘‘Twentieth Century Sappho’’ (audio cassette, 1979). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Getz, L., Dancers and Choreographers, A Selected Bibliography (19995). Hapgood, S., Neo-Dada: Redefining Art, 1958-1960 (1994). Jowitt, D., Jill Johnston: The Critic Deconstructed by Art? (1993). Roy, S., Jill Johnston’s Marmalade Me (1998). Tomko, L., ed., Of, By, and For the People: Proceedings (1993). Thorne, B., et al eds., Language, Gender, and Society (1983). Reference works: CA (1975). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: New York (24 May 1971). Art in America (Jan. 1986, Feb. 1993). —SUZANNE GIRONDA, UPDATED BY NELSON RHODES

JOHNSTON, Mary Born 21 November 1870, Buchanan, Virginia; died 9 May 1936, Warm Springs, Virginia Daughter of John W. and Elizabeth Alexander Johnston Mary Johnston was the eldest of six children. Her father was a lawyer, a member of the Virginia Legislature, and a major in the

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Confederate Army. Because her frail health precluded her attending school (except for a few months in Atlanta), she was educated at home, first by her Scots grandmother and later by extensive reading in her father’s large library. Her mother died when Johnston was sixteen, and she took the responsibility of managing the large household. Her family moved to New York City, but in 1902 Johnston returned to Virginia. Although she traveled in Europe and the Middle East, she lived in Virginia the rest of her life. With proceeds from her bestselling novel, To Have and to Hold (1900), she built a large, beautiful country home in Warm Springs, Virginia, where she resided with three of her sisters and brother. All four of these Johnston siblings remained single. Johnston is remembered as an ardent feminist and popular novelist of romantic historical fiction. As one of the founders, in 1909, of the Equal Suffrage League in Richmond, she generously used her talents for the cause. In ‘‘The Woman’s War’’ (Atlantic Monthly, April 1910), she clearly stated her beliefs in the rights of women. She was a serious woman who was a diligent student of the history that formed the background for many of her novels. Johnston published 23 novels, a volume of history, Pioneers of the Old South (1918), and a blank verse drama set during the French Revolution, The Goddess of Reason (1907). The novels are generally divided into five categories: Virginia historical romances, European romances, realistic Civil War novels, sociological novels, and mystical novels. She also contributed poetry and short stories to periodicals. To Have and to Hold is Johnston’s best-known novel. Set in Jamestown in 1621, during the time of Governor Yeardley, it is a swashbuckling romance. Jocelyn Leigh, the ward of King James I, refuses to marry Lord Carnal and escapes from England disguised as Patience Worth. She joins a group of women coming to America to be sold as brides for the settlers. Jocelyn is ‘‘purchased’’ by Captain Ralph Percy for 120 pounds of tobacco. The novel tells the story of Jocelyn’s developing love for Ralph Percy. The language is florid, the dialogue stilted, and the plot melodramatic, but the novel has narrative power. It was the number one bestseller of the year. The Long Roll (1911) and Cease Firing (1912) constitute a two-volume account of the Civil War and of the fortunes of two Virginia families, the Carys and the Cleaves. Stonewall Jackson is the central figure in the first volume. The books are epic in vision and attempt to document in realistic detail the campaigns of the war. One reviewer of the time questioned whether the books were fiction or were indeed ‘‘military history.’’ Lawrence Nelson has called the books ‘‘a massive epical romance in prose, an extended ode or elegy for the dead Confederacy’’ and ‘‘the completest and most authentic embodiment of the Southern Myth.’’ Hagar (1913) is a feminist novel with a contemporary Southern setting. Hagar, aesthetic and intellectual, is frail in health. As a small child she observes the inequities in life and is punished when she is caught reading Darwin. She becomes a successful writer, rejects the proper Virginia suitor, and goes to New York. When she agrees to marry Ralph Cottsworth, she reminds him she will continue to work for the rights of women.

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Some reviewers complained that the book was ‘‘too much of a tract,’’ but others hailed it as the ‘‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the women’s movement.’’ This was the first of Johnston’s ‘‘sociological’’ novels, and it not only argued for the emancipation of women but also pointed out other social problems. A later feminist work by Johnston, The Wanderers (1917), consists of 19 sketches that trace the changing relations between men and women in history from the early days of humanity to the French Revolution. Johnston is almost forgotten today, and she has received little serious critical attention. Critics generally agree that her reputation is based on the historical novels. Beginning with her ‘‘sociological’’ works in 1913, her readership fell off. The later mystical and transcendental works perplexed reviewers and did not sell well. Johnston’s characters are limited and stilted, her plots melodramatic, her themes overused, and her metaphysics and politics often intrusive. Despite valid criticism of her style and plots, she was a good storyteller, and she knew well the history on which her novels were based; her depiction of setting and landscape has been praised. Her most enthusiastic critic, Lawrence Nelson, has called her ‘‘perhaps the most distinctive and valuable American historical novelist after Cooper and Simms.’’ OTHER WORKS: Prisoners of Hope (1898). Audrey (1902). Sir Mortimer (1904). Lewis Rand (1908). The Witch (1914). The Fortunes of Garin (1915). Foes (1918). Michael Forth (1919). Sweet Rocket (1920). 1492 (1922). Silver Cross (1922). Croatan (1923). The Slave Ship (1924). The Great Valley (1926). The Exile (1927). Hunting Shirt (1931). Miss Delicia Allen (1933). Drury Randall (1934). The Collected Short Stories of Mary Johnston (1982). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cella, C. R., Mary Johnston (1981). Goloboy, J. L., ‘‘Marrying the Future: Kate Langley Bosher, Mary Johnston, Ellen Glasgow, and the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia’’ (thesis, 1995). Hubbell, J., The South in American Literature: 1607-1900 (1954). Longest, G., Three Virginia Writers: Mary Johnston, Thomas Nelson Page, and Amélie Rives Troubetskoy: A Reference Guide (1978). Patterson, M. H., ‘‘Survival of the Best Fitted: The Trope of the New Woman in Margaret Murray Washington, Pauline Hopkins, Sui Sin Far, Edith Wharton and Mary Johnston, 1895-1913’’ (thesis, 1996). Quinn, A. H., American Fiction: An Historical and Critical Survey (1937). Rubin, L. Jr., ed., A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Southern Literature (1969). Simonini, R. C. Jr., ed., Southern Writers: Appraisals in Our Time (1961). Stone, P. S., ‘‘Mary Johnston: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Works’’ (thesis, 1981). Votes for Women! The Woman Suffrage Movement in Tennessee, the South, and the Nation (1995). Reference works: Cavalcade of the American Novel (1952). DAB. LSL. NAW (1971). NCAB. TCA. Other references: Richmond Quarterly (1981). SR (Apr.-June 1937). Virginia Cavalcade (Winter 1956). —DOROTHY M. SCURA


JONES, Amanda Theodocia Born 19 October 1835, East Bloomfield, New York; died 31 March 1914, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Henry and Mary Mott Jones

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While working on her inventions, Jones continued to write and publish collections of her poetry. A Prairie Idyl (1882) demonstrated her extensive knowledge of the wildflowers of the Midwest. Rubaiyat of Solomon, and Other Poems (1905) included a popular series of poems, ‘‘Kansas Bird Songs,’’ which revealed her knowledge of Midwestern wildlife.

Amanda Jones’ father was a master weaver; her mother was an avid reader. Both of them considered books to be ‘‘more necessary than daily bread,’’ and introduced Jones, at an early age, to Jane Austen, Bunyan, Dryden, Pope, and Scott. Jones attended the local district school and after the family moved to Black Rock, near Buffalo, New York, the East Aurora Academy. At fifteen she began teaching school.

Jones’ life and poetry reflected the dynamic character of 19th-century America. Her interests ranged from food preservation and woman suffrage to wildlife and psychic phenomena. She traveled extensively around the eastern half of the U.S. and seemed determined never to succumb to poor health. Her poetry not only reflects her strong sense of patriotism, but reveals Jones to be a sensitive woman, aware of and engaged in the society she lived in, and always hopeful of eternal salvation.

Four years later she gave up teaching when the Ladies’ Repository of Cincinnati accepted one of her poems. During the next decade she contributed a series of poems to the Repository. In 1859 Jones developed tuberculosis and spent six months at the Clifton Springs (New York) Water Cure. She never fully regained her health and periodically resorted to similar cures.

OTHER WORKS: Poems and Songs: Written in Spare Moments (1890). Poems, 1854-1906 (1906).

Jones’ first volume of poetry, Ulah, and Other Poems (1861), was dedicated to her father, who had died six years earlier. The title poem, based on an ancient Native American legend, tells the story of the Native American maiden Ulah and her lover. Death and the hope of eternal salvation are popular themes in the other poems. Her second volume, Poems (1867), was dedicated to the ‘‘Nameless Club,’’ a men’s literary society of which Jones was an honorary member. The first poem in this collection, ‘‘Atlantis,’’ describes the disappearance of the kingdom of Atlantis. The next 20 poems are classified as ‘‘patriotic’’ and are concerned with the Civil War. Several of them commemorate important battles; most glorify the Northern cause. One of the poems, ‘‘Forest Lawn,’’ is an especially moving tribute to Jones’ brother Porter, who died in battle at the age of eighteen. In these poems, once again, death is a recurring theme as are love, God, and the triumph of good over evil. The spiritualist movement was gaining popularity at this time; by 1854, Jones believed she was a medium and that her actions were governed by her spiritual guardian. She saw in spiritualism the hope of salvation she sought after the sudden death of her brother. Among her powers as a medium was the ability to heal, and during the 1850s and 1860s this ability secured for her the hospitality of other spiritualists. These long visits allowed her ample time to continue to write poetry. Her spiritual guardian led her to Chicago in 1869, where she found work as a writer with the Western Rural, Interior, and a juvenile periodical, Bright Sides. Years later she collected many of her psychic experiences in her Psychic Autobiography (1910). Just as she had been affected by the spiritualist movement, Jones was affected by the great pace of invention characterizing 19th-century America. Over the years, she developed a vacuum process to preserve food, patented an oil burner, established a working women’s home, and founded the Woman’s Canning and Preserving Company.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barker, N. G., Kansas Women in Literature (1915). Reference works: AA. AW. DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB. —DOMENICA BARBUTO

JONES, Edith See WHARTON, Edith

JONES, Gayl Born 23 November 1949, Lexington, Kentucky Daughter of Franklin and Lucille Jones Gayl Jones grew up in Lexington, Kentucky, a setting that is clearly influential in her novels. She earned a B.A. in English from Connecticut College in 1971. While there, she received the college’s award for the best original poem in both 1969 and 1970 and the Frances Steloff Fiction award for ‘‘The Roundhouse,’’ a short story that establishes the themes that dominate Jones’ work—the problems and possibilities of relationships between black men and women, the uniqueness of women, and the complexities of communication. Jones received graduate degrees in creative writing from Brown University. Corregidora (1975, reprinted 1988) is a lean book narrated by Ursa, the descendant of slaves and their Portuguese owner, in a dialogue style that Jones describes as ‘‘ritualized.’’ Despite the spareness of its presentation, the story is complex. At one level, it is an account of Ursa’s matrilineal heritage and her relationship to a line of female ancestors who are preoccupied with perpetuating, and perhaps redeeming, their oppressive history in new generations. This background illuminates Ursa’s attempts to create a

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constructive and loving relationship with a man despite centuries of misunderstanding between the sexes accentuated by profound social and economic injustice. Because an accident early renders Ursa incapable of producing her generation of children, the blues she sings and the tale she tells become her testimonial—her ‘‘generation’’—for ultimately the novel itself passes the story on. Jones has said Corregidora is a ‘‘Blues Novel’’ and in doing so compared it to her moving poem ‘‘Deep Song.’’ Stylistically, the book depicts the black female experience in terms of the unique language and oral tradition of the blues. Jones defines ‘‘Blues Art’’ as that which expresses the simultaneity of good and bad feelings; she says that she often creates ‘‘blues relationships’’ between men and women. Critics have praised her for her skill in adapting the linguistic, cultural, and emotional perspective of the black woman to the form of the traditional novel. Eva’s Man (1976, 1987), Jones’s second novel, is the story of Eva Medina Canada, a so-called ‘‘savage woman’’ who murders her lover by dental castration. Eva narrates the story from her cell in a psychiatric prison. Although the novel shares much in theme and setting with Corregidora, the emphasis here is more social than personal, as it points to the terror and squalor of Eva’s past, the destructiveness inherent in male-female relationships, and the violent nature of sexuality. Relationships between men and women in Corregidora mingle tenderness and brutality, but cultural and emotional brutality triumph in Eva’s Man. Jones says, ‘‘In many ways, Eva’s Man is a horror story. It really is. . . . Their ritual isn’t a blues ritual. I don’t know what it is.’’ Jones has published excerpts from another novel and a collection of short stories, White Rat (1977, 1991). Her powerful title story, ‘‘White Rat,’’ is being included in collections of short fiction. Jones, a versatile and prolific writer, has also written several plays and numerous poems, but her major works are the two novels. Although her writing is neither polemical nor explicitly political, it reveals a central concern with the issues of racism and feminism. Admirers of Jones’ novels of the 1970s assert that her construction of black women questions the ‘‘naturalness’’ of racist and sexist attitudes. Others, however, have faulted what they see as her lack of positive images of African American characters, especially of black men. In the 1980s, Jones’ work changed substantially, although it is unclear whether the transformation stemmed from criticism of her novels. Her three collections of poetry have received little attention. Still interested in the slave history of colonial Latin America, Jones continues to use mutilation themes as well as the richness of the oral tradition to create accounts of female subjectivity and the continuity of history. Set in 17th-century Brazil, Song for Anninho (1981, reissued 1999) tells of the atrocities committed by the Portuguese in their attacks on Palmares, an independent settlement of escaped African slaves. The poem is told by a young African woman who also relates others’ stories. Similarly, the title poem in Xarque and Other Poems (1985) weaves the voices of three women into a history told by a single female, the granddaughter of Almeyda from Song for Anninho. Thus tales of survival and oppression become a matrilineal heritage that finds its voice in song.

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The Hermit-Woman: Poems (1983), which also develops voices from colonial Brazil, includes two self-referential pieces. One of these, ‘‘Stranger,’’ closes the book with a couple’s love-making, ‘‘fierce / strong / soaring,’’ so that the joy of sexual union heals an African past of sundered relationships. The theme of tenderness in all three books is a departure from the brutality between black women and black men that critics had objected to in her fiction. While that tenderness exists often only in memory and is experienced through the pain of recollection, it closes the gap between women and men and locates violence in racist atrocities. By exploring memory’s painful burden as a necessity for the survival of the African race, Jones alters the feminist polemic many had noted in her novels to a dialogue of racial unity. Jones has received a number of literary awards, including fellowships from Yaddo (1974) and from the National Endowment for the Arts (1976), and the Henry Russell Award from the University of Michigan (1981), where she was professor of English from 1975 to 1983. In the later 1990s, Jones continued to write and travel. OTHER WORKS: Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature (1991). The Healing (1998). The Healing; Corregidora; Eva’s Man (bound together, 1998). Mosquito (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Allen, D. E., ‘‘The Role of the Blues in Gayl Jones’ Fiction’’ (thesis, 1993). Baker, H. A., and P. Redmonds, eds., Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s (1989). Bell, R. P., et al., eds., Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature (1979). Bloom, H., Black American Women Fiction Writers (1995). Bloom, H., Contemporary Black American Fiction Writers (1995). Broome, L. J., ‘‘Sex, Violence, and History: Images of Black Men in the Selected Fiction of Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison‘‘ (thesis, 1990). Burwell, S. L., ‘‘The Soul of Black Women: The Hermeneutical Method of Analysis as Applied to the Novel Corregidora’’ (thesis reissue, 1981). Coser, S., Bridging the Americas: The Literature of Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, and Gayl Jones (1995). Dubey, M., ‘‘Winged, But Grounded: A Contextual Study of the Fiction of Toni Morrison and Gayl Jones’’ (thesis, 1989). Flora, J. M. and R. A. Bain, Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook (1993). Fossett, J. J., and J. A. Tucker, Race Consciousness: African-American Studies for the New Century (1997). Gottfried, A. S., ‘‘Confessions and Accusations: Violence and Redemption in Contemporary U.S. Women’s Fiction’’ (thesis, 1994). Intemann, C., ‘‘The Blues Ache in Corregidora’’ (thesis, 1988). Kerr, L. A., ‘‘You Are My Face; You Are Me: Kristeva’s Semiotic as Site of Self-Erasure in Gayl Jones’ Corregidora and Toni Morrison’s Beloved’’ (thesis, 1995). Kester, G. T., ‘‘Writing the Subject Structure, Tropes, and Doubleness in Five African-American Novels’’ (thesis, 1991). McKoy, S. S., ‘‘Insanity and Creativity: The Psychic Trauma of Women in Texts by Gayl Jones and Gloria Naylor’’ (thesis, 1991). Murphy, C. M., ‘‘Shaping Space: Quilting Aesthetics and Black Feminist Writers’’ (thesis, 1990). Porter, S. D., ‘‘The Search for Wholeness is Completed: Gayl Jones’ Corregidora as a Rewriting of


Jean Toomer’s Cane’’ (thesis, 1991). Richards, C. S., ‘‘The Empowerment of Orality in the Novels of Gayl Jones’’ (thesis, 1992). Robinson, S., Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary Women’s Fiction (1991). Stallings, L., ‘‘Creating a Bodily Text: Orality and Sexuality as Means of Empowerment in Gayl Jones’ Corregidora and Eva’s Man (thesis, 1998). Tate, C., ed., Black Women Writers at Work (1983). Walker, S., Stories from the American Mosaic (1990). Wilcox, J., ‘‘Constructed Silences: Voice and Subjectivity in the Resistant Texts of Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, and Toni Cade Bambara’’ (thesis, 1995). Reference works: Black American Writers Past and Present (1975). Black Writers: A Selection of Sketches (1989). DLB (1984). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Who’s Who in Black Americans (1992). Other references: American Poetry Review (Sept.-Oct. 1976). Ariel (1992). Callaloo (Winter 1984). CLAJ (1984, 1986). MELUS (Winter 1980). MR (1977). New Republic (28 June 1975, 19 June 1976). Studia Africana (1977). YR (1976). —JUDITH P. JONES, UPDATED BY JOELLEN MASTERS

JONES, Hettie Born 16 July 1934, Brooklyn, New York Daughter of Oscar and Lottie Lewis Cohen; married LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka, divorced 1966); children: Kellie, Lisa Perhaps Hettie Jones’ chief distinction as a writer is as the author of a superbly written autobiography, How I Became Hettie Jones (1990), which, in chronicling her own story, also gives a discerning and loving portrait of LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). This book describes the lively bohemian artistic life in Greenwich Village during the 1950s, when writers Allan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, Joel Oppenheimer, and artists and musicians were friends and cohorts, and portrays the conflict of Baraka, especially, and for herself as the Black Power movement escalated in the 1960s. In addition, however, Jones is also an acclaimed and prizewinning writer of books for children. She earned a B.A. from the University of Virginia (1955), attended Columbia University (1955-56), and has lived since in New York City. She began her career as a staff writer for the Columbia University Press’ Center for Mass Communication, then became subscription manager for the Record Changer, a jazz magazine. When this journal met financial difficulties, Jones answered a New York Times advertisement from the Partisan Review and eventually became its managing editor. As the ‘‘Beat poets-Beat generation’’ gained status and celebrity, Jones and her husband founded a new journal, partly to showcase the writing and visual art of the Beat circle. Yugen, the magazine, debuted in spring 1958, followed soon by Totem Press,

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with the capability of publishing longer works. Following her divorce, Jones supported herself with freelance work as a clerk, proofreader, and eventually as an organizer for the Mobilization for Youth program, where she founded educational after-school programs, working also in day care and as a substitute teacher. From 1970 on, as a freelance writer she published poems, stories, and several children’s books. Her compilation of American Indian songs, The Trees Stand Shining, was chosen as a notable children’s book by the American Library Association in 1971 and was included in the American Institute of Graphic Arts Children’s Book Show (1971-72). Longhouse Winter: Iroquois Transformation Tales was chosen for the American Institute of Graphic Arts 50 Books of the Year in 1972. Her own acknowledged ‘‘favorite,’’ Big Star Fallin’ Mama (biographies of five women jazz musicians), was featured by the New York Public Library as a young adult best book in 1975 (a revised edition was published in 1997). About her writing, Jones has said: ‘‘Since 1957 I’ve been involved with literature and writers one way or another. . . .When I have time I like to write short stories for slow readers, textbook stories for kids. I write novelizations to support my children and my writing habit. Have been totally selfemployed since 1970, but am POOR.’’ What she likes about writing for children, she said, is that ‘‘it’s a challenge to simplify and clarify.’’ In her autobiography, which was reissued in paperback in 1998, Jones delineates her struggle to get from wanting to write to finished and published writing—a struggle common to women who find marriage and motherhood and their accompanying responsibilities to be insurmountable obstacles to creative fulfillment (as Tillie Olsen so movingly documented in the famous Silences, published in 1965). Jones also, echoing the theme of her title, describes her unremitting journey from a middle-class Jewish childhood in suburban New Jersey through her marriage to the self-realization that finally culminated in the autobiography. Throughout she is nonjudgmental of all the ‘‘others’’ whom she loved-her parents, her husband, her mostly unorthodox friends-all the while she is seeking to define the self she always instinctively recognized but came to terms with only after heartbreak and difficulty. Her writing is beautifully simple, though intense and moving. Assessing what happened with her father and her husband, Jones wrote: ‘‘Both these men, Cohen then Jones, first loved me for myself, and then discarded me when that self no longer fit their daughter/wife image. If I hadn’t been myself all along I might have been left next to nothing. Still, while they loved me they sometimes saw in me more than I did, and for those times I owe them.’’ Later, years after her divorce, she encountered an old acquaintance who obviously recognized her but could not quite place who she was. She wrote: ‘‘He wanted to recognize me. . .though it was hard to get past my intent withdrawal. . . .‘Are you. . .’ he asked, and I waited, caught. ‘Are you still. . .’ he tried again. . . .He was searching out a name for me and rejecting all the choices. Is she Cohen? No, she was Jones. Is she yet that, or is the

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name removed like the man from whom she got it?. . .But then he came out with it, what he’d decided to ask—and it was a smash! ‘Are you still. . .Hettie?’ he said. ‘By all means,’ I said laughing. By all means.’’ OTHER WORKS: Aliens at the Border: The Writing Workshop, Bedford Hills Correctional Facility (edited and with an introduction by Hettie Jones, 1997). Coyote Tales (1974). Drive (1998). Grace the Table: Stories and Recipes from My Southern Revival (by Alexander Smalls with Hettie Jones, 1997). How to Eat Your ABC’s: A Book about Vitamins (1976). I Hate to Talk about Your Mother (1980). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Authors of Books for Young People (1979). Belle Lettres (Summer 1990). Booklist (15 Jan. 1990, 15 Feb. 1995). CA 81-84 (1979). Essence (May 1994). LJ (15 Feb. 1990, Mar. 1995). Native Peoples (Spring 1994). New Directions for Women (Sept. 1990). New York (4 June 1990). NYTBR (11 Mar. 1990, 21 July 1991). Review of Contemporary Fiction (Fall 1990). SATA 27, 42 (1982, 1986). —JOANNE L. SCHWEIK

JONES, Mary Harris Born 1 May circa 1830, Cork, Ireland; died 30 November 1930, Silver Spring, Maryland Wrote under: Mother Jones Daughter of Richard and Helen M. Harris; married George Jones, 1861 (died 1867) A descendant of Irish freedom fighters, Mary Harris Jones attended public schools in Toronto, where her father had found railroad work. Her early career alternated between teaching and dressmaking in the U.S. and Canada. In 1867 her husband (an iron molder and union organizer) and four children perished in a yellow fever epidemic, and Jones began a new life as a Chicago dressmaker. Tragedy again intervened: the Chicago Fire destroyed her business in 1871. Jones’ lifework arose from the ashes when she became involved with the Knights of Labor. Her career as union gadfly, wandering wherever workers needed organizing, renewed commitment, or publicity, began with a Pittsburgh railroad strike in 1877. Jones expended her greatest efforts on behalf of miners, particularly in the bitter struggles in West Virginia and Ludlow, Colorado, where she was jailed for her organizing work. She also exposed abusive child labor, conducting undercover investigations in Southern mills and organizing a march of child strikers. She helped establish the radical labor publication An Appeal to Reason in 1895 and the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905, supported the Mexican Revolution in 1910, and spoke at the

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first Pan American Labor Conference in 1921. Before she died, shortly after claiming her 100th birthday, Jones had attained the status of labor’s guardian angel, able to unify workers with fiery rhetoric emphasizing principles that transcended union politics. Jones was primarily an activist and orator; her recorded speeches and testimony before Congressional committees reveal the power of her unminced words and florid metaphors. Her writings retain an oratorical quality; compelling calls to action, memories of earlier struggles, denunciations of capitalist ogres, and forthright statements of principle are loosely organized and dramatically presented. Jones’ articles in the International Socialist Review paint a horrifying picture of life in Southern mills and coal mines, and denounce church and legislative complicity supporting such conditions. Child labor aroused her maternal wrath; she warns of its dire consequences for the health of the children and the nation. Although she calls for the replacement of oppressive capitalism with socialism, her articles lack any theoretical strategies for social reconstruction. In her Autobiography of Mother Jones (1925, edited by M. F. Parton), Jones elaborates upon these themes, while presenting herself as the tireless, roving champion of the oppressed, conveniently disguised as an old woman more readily suspected of knitting ‘‘mittens for the heathens of Africa’’ than fomenting workers’ revolts. Although disorganized and inaccurate in details and chronology, Jones provides readers with graphic personal reminiscences of most major labor upheavals of her era and reveals her genius for dramatic strategies to publicize her cause. Jones’ class consciousness is paramount in her autobiography and explains her negative evaluations of prohibition and woman suffrage. Although a feminist in her personal assertiveness, her denunciation of the ‘‘lady,’’ and her insistence that the militancy of miners’ wives determines a strike’s success, Jones criticizes the concept of careers for women. She sees factory work, the career open to women of her class, as less satisfying than raising a family and states as her ultimate goal a society that provides amply for family welfare. Espousing no consistent theoretical dogma, she chooses her stands on all issues according to her convictions. Selflessly eschewing financial rewards for her work, Jones, in her autobiography, criticizes those union leaders who enrich themselves in the cause. She does not similarly reject the rewards of notoriety; seeing herself as an agitator in the tradition of Jesus and the American heroes of 1776, she takes pride in her designation by her foes as ‘‘the most dangerous woman in the country.’’ Jones provides us with one of the foremost American examples of the worldwide phenomenon of the power of postmenopausal women, who, exempt from the demands of childbearing, use maternal qualities in a new leadership role. Her importance as a union organizer and reputation as indomitable unionism personified have been undeservedly forgotten. Jones’s autobiography forces us to remember her and her philosophy, women’s activity in the developing labor movement, and the relationship of class to feminism.


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OTHER WORKS: Excerpt from The Autobiography of Mother Jones in Motherland: Writings by Irish American Women About Mothers and Daughters (1999). The papers of Mary Harris Jones are at the Department of Manuscripts and Archives, Catholic University, Washington, D.C. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ashby, R. and D. G. Ohrn, eds., Herstory: Women Who Changed the World (1995). Downing, C. A., An Examination of Rhetorical Strategies Utilized by Mary Harris ‘‘Mother’’ Jones Within the Context of the Agitative Rhetoric Model Developed by John Waite Bowers and Donovan J. Ochs (dissertation, 1987). Felder, D. G., The 100 Most Influential Women of All Time: A Ranking Past and Present (1996). Fetherling, D., Mother Jones, the Miners’ Angel (1974). Goldfarb, R. L., ‘‘A Rhetorical Analysis of Selected Speeches of Mary Harris ‘‘Mother’’ Jones’’ (thesis, 1966). Mikeal, J. E., ‘‘Mother Jones: The Labor Movement’s Impious Joan of Arc’’ (thesis, 1965). Nies, J., Seven Women (1977). Raffaele, Sister J. F., ‘‘Mary Harris Jones and the United Mine Workers’’ (thesis, 1969). Rolka, G. M., 100 Women Who Shaped World History (1994). Scholten, P. C., Militant Women for Economic Justice: The Persuasion of Mary Harris Jones, Ella Reeve Bloor, Rose Pastor Stokes, Rose Schneiderman, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (dissertation, 1986). Thompson, F., Introduction and Bibliography to The Autobiography of Mother Jones (1976). Tonn, M. B., ‘‘Effecting Labor Reform Through Stories: The Narrative Rhetorical Style of Mary Harris (Mother) Jones’’ in Constructing and Reconstructing Gender: The Links Among Communication, Language, and Gender (1992). Tonn, M. B., The Rhetorical Personae of Mary Harris ‘‘Mother’’ Jones, Industrial Labor’s Maternal Prophet (dissertation, 1989). Truman, M., Women of Courage (1977). Reference works: DAB. Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (1937). NCAB. NAW. Other references: Labor Hall of Fame (1996). NR (20 Feb. 1915). NYT Magazine (1 June 1913). —HELEN M. BANNAN

JONG, Erica Born 26 March 1942, New York, New York Daughter of Seymour and Eda Mirsky Mann; married Michael Werthman, 1963; Allen Jong, 1966; Jonathan Fast, 1977; Kenneth David Burrows, 1989; children: Miranda (‘‘Molly’’) The second of three daughters, Erica Jong grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. While an undergraduate English major at Barnard, Jong was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and won Woodrow Wilson and George Weldwood Murray fellowships, as well as the Academy of American Poets prize and other awards at Columbia. She earned an M.A. in 18th-century literature from Columbia in 1965. Jong spent 1966-69 in Heidelberg, Germany. Her first novel, Fear of Flying (1973), made her a celebrity.

Fear of Flying is about a woman’s discovery of her selfhood, through discarding cultural stereotypes and accepting responsibility for defining herself, first as a Jew, then as a woman—with all the vulnerability that this entails—and finally as a writer. Through strategically juxtaposed flashbacks, the first half of the novel provides the psychological motivations behind Isadora’s dilemma as she debates whether to leave her husband and go off with another man. Although she feels restless and frustrated, Isadora depends on her husband, as she always has depended on men for security. But Adrian, her new lover, awakens the part of her that loves to be wanton and carefree and not feel guilty. In the second half of the novel, Isadora and Adrian begin an erratic odyssey across Europe, zigzagging their way from Vienna to Paris. Away from time and social conventions, it becomes a journey of self-discovery for Isadora, as she describes in rambling conversations her past relationships with men. A pattern emerges: she has allowed them to exploit her, and they have never proved satisfying both physically and emotionally. By the end of the novel, abandoned by Adrian and waiting for her husband in his London hotel room, she has come to realize she can’t find fulfillment through another person, but only through achieving her own authenticity as a human being. Most of the controversy this novel stirred up focuses on its explicit sexuality. But such criticism overlooks its solid literary qualities—its use of allusions and symbols, as well as other imagery, to underscore its theme; its robust humor; and most of all its freshness, honesty, and abundant vitality. How to Save Your Own Life (1977) picks up Isadora’s story in New York, after she has written a bestselling novel and become even more estranged from her husband, and takes her through her disenchantment with the Hollywood producer for whom she is writing a film version of her novel to her decision to leave her husband and take up residence with Josh Ace, a struggling young writer in Hollywood. Both the style and themes of How to Save Your Own Life indicate Jong’s strengthening command of the novel form. The second book relies less on wisecracks and has a more lucid structure than the first. Also, in dramatizing her protagonist’s change from dependency to womanhood and her rejection of self-destruction in favor of life, Jong breaks away from traditional literary treatment of female characters by not eroticizing pain or making her ‘‘free woman’’ pay for her sins. Jong has also published several volumes of poetry. Fruits & Vegetables (1971), which treats a variety of experiences, is most notable for its experiments in style, such as its botanical imagery and the intermingling of prose and poetry. Half-Lives (1973) is more consistent in subject matter and tone. The main themes are a woman’s sexual and emotional longings; the tone predominantly wistful or angry. Loveroot (1975) announces a change in the author’s attitude—a joyous embracing of life, with all of its pain and uncertainty. These three volumes were highly praised and won several awards. Here Comes & Other Poems (1975) is a compilation of previously published poems and essays. At the Edge of the Body (1979) has received little critical attention; however, it reflects the author’s deepening maturity. The quality of Jong’s reviews and articles about writing places her in the front ranks of feminist literary critics. Jong’s fiction and poetry, with its

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willingness to take risks and experiment, demonstrates continuing growth and self-confidence.

early unpublished poems, poems included in other prose works, and more recent poems.

Jong’s work since 1979 has been prolific and varied. The travels and travails of Isadora, heroine of Fear of Flying and How to Save Your Own Life, are continued in Parachutes & Kisses (1984) and Any Woman’s Blues (1990). The first takes Isadora through the breakup of her marriage to Josh Ace, her recovery from the divorce, and rediscovery of love—all while raising her toddler daughter. The next begins with the breakup of the love affair begun at the end of the previous novel. Any Woman’s Blues diverges from its predecessors by continuing Isadora’s saga from a one-step removed point of view. The novel’s conceit is that another author has organized and finished the semiautobiographical novel Isadora had been working on shortly before her death. The author’s voice now interacts with the character she bases on herself. This structure reflects Jong’s new interest in experimenting with the borders between fiction and reality. Fanny: Being the True History of the Adventures of Fanny Hackabout-Jones (1980) and Serenissima: A Novel of Venice (1987) represent her work in this vein. The genesis of Fanny is Jong’s imagined response to Cleland’s heroine in Fanny Hill; or, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Fanny responds by writing her own version of her life to reclaim it for herself. In this way, Jong confronts the issues not addressed at the time, of incest, prostitution, and woman’s powerless position in society, and does so from within, by giving the very source of Cleland’s novel a voice. In Serenissima (later reissued as Shylock’s Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice in 1995), Jong continues to appropriate and rework older styles and language. The heroine is an actress at a Venice film festival who is about to play Jessica in a new film production of The Merchant of Venice. Becoming feverishly ill, she begins to hallucinate and dreams she is a Jew in Venice around Shakespeare’s time—in fact, the very woman who will inspire Shakespeare to write The Merchant of Venice. Accidents of fate bring her together with Shakespeare and, naturally, adventures ensue. Jong’s attempts to meld and confuse the border of time greatly test her reader’s suspension of disbelief. Serenissima could have used more of the refinement of Fanny in concept as well as structure; and the contrast between the critical and popular receptions of the two novels reflect these discrepancies.

In the early 1990s, Jong added yet another genre to her portfolio with Fear of Fifty: A Midlife Memoir (1994), an autobiographical blend of personal history coupled with biting social criticism. The book sheds additional light on Jong’s earlier works and reveals a broader picture of the author. She offers her insight into the world of women while investigating her own roles as daughter, sister, wife, mother, writer, feminist, and Jew. Jong classifies her generation of women as the ‘‘whiplash generation’’ because of the roller coaster of changing expectations through which they’ve lived, and includes her thoughts on the past, present, and future of feminism. Above all, though, the book is hailed as honest and frank. Jong even addresses the disenchantment liberal feminists have felt with her previous work and argues that women who insist on political correctness only foster separatism and sexism.

Jong has also ventured into two other genres: nonfiction and children’s literature. Witches (with Joseph Smith, 1981), a book about witches and witchcraft, utilizes poetry and illustrations—in addition to the expected prose—to educate its readers. Clearly the result of much research, it even includes a few spells and rites one might practice, if one dared. Megan’s Book of Divorce (1984), a self-proclaimed ‘‘kid’s book for adults,’’ takes on divorce, presumably from Jong’s daughter’s point of view. The view, however, seems a little unrealistically rosy. The book was reissued in a less candid title in 1996 as Megan’s Two Houses: A Story of Adjustment. Jong considers herself primarily a poet. She has published Ordinary Miracles (1983) and Becoming Light: Poems New and Selected (1991). The first covers the themes of motherhood and divorce, while the second is a comprehensive compilation, including poems from each of her previous collections as well as some

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Jong’s following work, Inventing Memory: A Novel of Mothers and Daughters (1997), goes back to novel form with the story of four generations of Jewish women struggling with the challenges of their time. The founding woman, Sarah, escapes Russia as a 15-year-old and makes her way to the U.S. to find a better life. She successfully navigates these trials and later bears a daughter, Salome. Salome becomes a freewheeling writer and moves back to Europe. She has a daughter, Sally, who grows up in the 1960s in the U.S. and becomes a popular singer. Sally delves into the world of drug and alcohol abuse, and when she gives birth to a daughter, Sara, the father is soon granted permanent custody. This woman is the final generation featured, and pulls the story together in search of her heritage. The early characters in the novel, particularly Sarah, are the most popular with critics. The story tends to drag, becoming more bogged down with each generational layer, and most do not consider it one of Jong’s best works. The topics she deals with (Jewish immigration to America, challenges for female artists, and women’s spirituality), says one critic, are better addressed in her autobiography. Jong’s more recent work, What Do Women Want? Bread, Roses, Sex, Power (1998), is a collection of her essays on a variety of topics. She deals with issues ranging from censorship to Bill and Hillary Clinton to her second home in Italy. While the book doesn’t answer the question posed in the title, the compilation is almost like a conversation between Jong and the reader. Criticism of the book varies depending on the essay, but most agree that Jong’s characteristic honesty once again shines through on every topic. OTHER WORKS: The Devil at Large: Erica Jong on Henry Miller (1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Packard, W., ed., The Craft of Poetry (1974). Reference works: CA (Online, 1999). Contemporary Poets (1975). Other references: Booklist (19 July 1994). Boston Review (March 1992). Denver Quarterly (Winter 1983). Harper’s Bazaar (May 1977). KR (1 May 1997). LAT (27 May 1979). LATBR (24


Nov. 1991). Nation (28 June 1971, 12 Jan. 1974). NR (2 Feb. 1974). Newsweek (5 May 1975). NY (17 Dec. 1973). NYTBR (12 Aug. 1973, 5 June 1988). Novel (Winter 1987). ReadersNdex Online (6 Apr. 1999). University of Dayton Review (Winter 1985-86). Web site: www.ericajong.com. —VIRGINIA COX, UPDATED BY GINA BIANCAROSA AND CARRIE SNYDER

JORDAN, Barbara C. Born 21 February 1936, Houston, Texas; died 17 January 1996, Austin, Texas Daughter of Benjamin M. and Arlyne Patten Jordan Congresswoman, orator, educator, and author Barbara Jordan first came to national attention as a member of the House Judiciary Committee charged with determining impeachment proceedings against then President Richard M. Nixon for his connection with the break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at Watergate Apartments. Jordan called for impeachment on 25 July 1974. A fellow committee member, Charles B. Rangel, was quoted as saying in an article by Francis X. Clines in the New York Times, ‘‘Barbara wasn’t really that concerned about the guilt or innocence of Nixon. She was most concerned that the Constitution not be distorted for political reasons.’’ As a defender of the Constitution, Jordan dedicated herself to a career in public service. Jordan was the great-granddaughter of Edward A. Patton of Evergreen, Texas. He was the only black man among the 150 members of the Texas Legislature in 1891. A Republican, he was one of the despised holdovers from what whites called the ‘‘nigger party’’ of the radical reconstruction of the Southern states after the Civil War. Like her great-grandfather, Jordan embodied ‘‘first’’ and ‘‘only’’ when she became the first black female state senator in Texas history. Elected from District 11 in Houston, Jordan was sworn in on 10 January 1967. Jordan was raised in a cocoon of respectability in the heart of Houston’s Good Hope Missionary Baptist Church. She attended Roberson Elementary and Phyllis Wheatley High School, where she was a member of the Honor Society and excelled in debating. She graduated in 1952 in the upper five percent of her class, then attended Texas Southern University, graduating magna cum laude in 1956 with a double major in political science and history. Her law degree came from Boston University in 1959. Houston was booming when Jordan returned in the fall of 1959. It was hard for her to believe, but Houston’s phenomenal population growth in the 1950s made it a larger city than Boston. When Jordan passed the Texas bar exam in the late fall of 1959, she was only the third female African-American attorney licensed to practice law in Texas. Little by little, Jordan began to build a law practice: she used her parents’ dining room table and the family telephone to conduct her law business.

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In the fall of 1960, with the presidential campaign heating up, she went down to the local Kennedy-Johnson campaign headquarters to volunteer her services. She started out licking stamps and stuffing envelopes, and it was almost by accident that her greatest gift was discovered. ‘‘One night there was a speech at a black church in the Fifth Ward. . .and the speaker who usually gave the pitch was sick and couldn’t show up. I was selected to do the pitch, and I was startled with the impact I had on people.’’ Jordan’s days of stuffing envelopes ended and she was assigned to the speaking circuit. Once on the speaking circuit, rallying mostly African-American groups, Jordan came to be noticed by some of Houston’s most prominent black citizens. And by the time the Kennedy-Johnson campaign ended successfully, Jordan was bitten by the political bug. She recalled, ‘‘My interest, which had been latent, was sparked. I think it had always been there, but that I did not focus on it before because there were certain things I had to get out of the way before I could concentrate on any political effort.’’ During the early 1960s Jordan campaigned twice on her own behalf for a seat in the Texas House of Representatives, but lost both times. In 1966, however, she received 80 percent of the votes cast in her successful bid for election to the Texas Senate. She served from 1966 to 1972, initiating and supporting much social reform legislation. During her second term, she was directly responsible for two major changes in Texas law: the state’s first minimum wage law and the first increase in benefits in 12 years for workers injured on the job. The liberal Texas Observer called the passage of the minimum wage by the Texas Legislature a ‘‘near miracle.’’ Social issues remained a focus for Jordan after she was elected to the U.S. Congress. She backed proposals to increase the minimum wage, to extend social security benefits to housewives, to provide free legal services for the indigent, and to expand existing programs to benefit the aged and ill. Jordan’s reputation for inspired oratory was confirmed in 1976 with her keynote address to the Democratic National Convention, when she was the first woman and the first African American to serve as party keynoter. In her oft-quoted remarks, she proclaimed, ‘‘We cannot improve on the system of government handed down to us by the founders of the Republic, but we can find new ways to implement that system and realize our destiny.’’ She went on to issue a call for ‘‘a national community’’ with everyone sharing in ‘‘the American dream.’’ Jordan was reelected to the House and continued to serve her constituents from the 18th District in Texas through 1978, when she retired from Congress after serving three terms as a representative. She explained her decision to leave politics in her autobiography, Barbara Jordan: A Self-Portrait (1979): ‘‘I felt more of a responsibility to the country as a whole, as contrasted with the duty of representing the half-million people in the Eighteenth Congressional District. I felt some necessity to address national issues. I thought my role now was to be one of the voices in the country defining where we were, where we were going, what the policies were that were being pursued, and where the holes in those policies were.’’ She therefore accepted a teaching post at the

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Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. In an interview published in Ms. in 1985, Jordan spoke about her career as an educator: ‘‘Now that I am teaching I think my future is in seeing to it that the next generation is ready to take over.’’ Until her death in 1996, Jordan committed her formidable talents and skills to her students. She wanted her students to be the premier public servants and guided by a core of principles. Jordan taught the way she legislated, with courage, tenacity, vision, and compassion. In 1996, 131 years after the end of slavery, 30 years after she entered the Texas Senate, and 24 years after she became the first African-American woman elected to Congress from the South, Barbara Jordan became the first black person to be buried in the State Cemetery in Austin, Texas. OTHER WORKS: Local Government Election Systems (1984). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bryant, I. B., Barbara Charline Jordan: From the Ghetto to the Capitol (1977). Rogers, M. B., Barbara Jordan: American Hero (1998). Reference works: Black Women in America (1993). CA (1988, 1996). —CELESTE DEROCHE

JORDAN, June (M.) Born 9 July 1936, New York, New York Daughter of Granville Ivanhoe and Mildred Maude Fisher Jordan; married Michael Meyer, 1955 (divorced 1965); children: Christopher Prolific and expansive in her interests and subject matter, June Jordan works in a variety of literary forms including poetry, essays, drama, fiction, and children’s literature. She combines writing with her roles as political activist, teacher, composer, and urban planner. Her parents, Granville and Mildred Jordan, emigrated from Jamaica to New York City, where Jordan, their only child, was born on 9 July 1936 in Harlem. When she was five, the family moved to a brownstone on Hancock Street in the BedfordStuyvesant area of Brooklyn, and it was there she began writing poetry at the age of seven. Her parents were working people who struggled to make ends meet, and both eventually went on the night shift to earn a little more pay, her father as a postal clerk and her mother as a nurse. The many difficulties of trying to survive took a toll on the family, and Jordan has written that her parents’ strictness and her father’s excessive use of physical punishment caused her a great deal of suffering and anger. Nevertheless, she has acknowledged her love for them and her gratitude for a home where poetry and the creative spirit were a part of everyday life. Her father introduced her to the Bible, Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe, and the dialect poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Her mother took her at an early age to services at the Universal Truth Center, where Jordan

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was exposed to the scriptural concept of the Word and the congregation’s belief that by declaring the truth, you create the truth. Mildred also confided to her daughter that she had once wanted to be an artist. In the Reid Lecture at Barnard College in 1975, and later in the introduction to Civil Wars (1981), Jordan honored the wish to be an artist as an inheritance from her mother and recognized the extent of her mother’s sacrifice in giving up not only her calling but also her very life when she committed suicide in 1966. After spending her childhood in a black environment, Jordan began her secondary education with a commute of one hour and twenty minutes to Midwood High School, where she was the only African-American in a student body of 3,000. The following year she went to Northfield School for Girls, a prep school in Massachusetts, and found herself once again in a white universe. When she entered Barnard College in 1953, the pattern continued with a program centered around only those thinkers and artists who were white and male. She drew upon her experiences as a student—and also upon her experiences as an educator in such projects as The Voice of the Children workshop in the mid-1960s—to formulate her ideas about the promotion of Black English and AfricanAmerican art, and the inclusion of women along with men as subjects of study in school. During her sophomore year at Barnard, she met Michael Meyer, a white student in his senior year at Columbia University. They married in 1955 and had a son, Christopher David, in 1958. At the time, interracial marriage was a felony in 43 states, and they often found themselves the object of insults and slurs. The situation within the larger society, part of which was the strife during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, put enormous stress on their relationship, and the marriage ended in 1965. As a single parent, Jordan supported herself and her son initially through freelance journalism, a field in which she has continued to be active as a columnist for The Progressive since 1989. Her long and varied career as a teacher began in 1967 with a position at the City College of New York. She subsequently taught at Sarah Lawrence College and Yale University, and from 1978 to 1989 at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where she also directed the Poetry Center and Creative Writing Program. In 1986 she was the Chancellor’s Distinguished Lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley and joined the faculty at Berkeley in 1989 as Professor of Afro-American Studies and Women’s Studies. Her first book, Who Look At Me, appeared in 1969, and since then there has been a steady stream of work that includes theater and performance pieces and books for young people and major collections of poems and essays. Written in Black English, her novel His Own Where (1971) reflects her interest in urban planning and her collaboration with R. Buckminster Fuller in rethinking the design of Harlem to foster black life. It was the basis for her winning the Prix de Rome in environmental design (1970-71), for which Fuller had recommended her. From the beginning, Jordan’s work has fused poetic expression and political statement as she balances her moral outrage with her belief in


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love and the transformative power of language. In recent years her concerns have become increasingly international in scope. She has addressed issues in such countries as Angola, Lebanon, and Nicaragua. She was presented the PEN Freedom-to-Write award in 1991 and the decade has seen a rich output of her political thinking in the collections Technical Difficulties: African-American Notes on the State of the Union (1992) and Affirmative Acts: Political Essays (1998). OTHER WORKS: Some Changes (1971). Dry Victories (1972). Fannie Lou Hamer (1972). New Days: Poems of Exile and Return (1974). New Life: New Room (1975). Things that I Do in the Dark: Selected Poetry (1977). Passion: New Poems, 1977-1980 (1980). Kimako’s Story (1981). Living Room: New Poems (1985). On Call: Political Essays (1985). Lyrical Campaigns: Selected Poems (1989). Moving Towards Home: Political Essays (1989). Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems (1989). Haruko/ Love Poems (1994). I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky: the Libretto and Lyrics (1995). Kissing God Goodbye: poems 1991-97 (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bowles, J., ed., In the Memory and Spirit of Frances, Zora, and Lorraine: Essays and Interviews on Black Women and Writing (1979). Davenport, D., ‘‘Four Contemporary Black Women Poets: Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Sherley Ann Williams’’ (dissertation, 1985). Smith, V., ed., African American Writers (1991). Reference works: CANR (1989). Contemporary Poets (1991). CLC (1976, 1979, 1983). DLB (1985). Other references: African American Review (Fall 1998). Callaloo 9 (Winter 1986). DAI (Jan. 1987). Essence (April 1981). Feminist Review 31 (Spring 1989). High Plains Literary Rev. (Fall 1988). —MARLENE M. MILLER

JORDAN, Kate Born 23 December 1862, Dublin, Ireland; died 20 June 1926, Mountain Lakes, New Jersey Daughter of Michael J. and Katherine Jordan; married Frederic M. Vermilye, 1897

producing plays, novels, a long list of stories in popular magazines, and one children’s book, The Happifats and the Grouch (1917). A world traveler, Jordan lived for long periods in England and France, joining writers’ clubs in London and New York. After her husband died, Jordan, failing in health and unable to finish the novel she had been working on, committed suicide by taking poison. In A Circle in the Sand (1898), Anne Garrick is a talented woman determined to succeed as a journalist and novelist. Her romantic life is less smooth than her professional life, but she ultimately turns down the man she once wanted to marry (who had fallen for her scheming cousin) and rushes to Brazil to join his half-brother, redeemed from a dissolute life by her faith in him. A Circle in the Sand comments on current feminism when Anne insists that she is not the ‘‘new woman,’’ whom she hates, but the ‘‘awakened woman,’’ who wants progress but ‘‘believes that marrying the man she loves. . .is the culmination of the purpose for which she was created.’’ Despite melodramatic use of coincidences, Jordan holds her reader with well-drawn scenes, skillfully created characters, and just enough suspense. Much of Jordan’s work involves vast swings of fortune and other fictional staples. In The Next Corner (1921), Jordan develops character more fully than in some of her other work and produces fine local color, but the plot, though engrossing, is full of marvelous coincidence. It includes murder just before an elopement, the devastating effect of war on the wife’s attempt at self-support, and her life of dread while awaiting a mysteriously overdue letter. Jordan’s plays were less successful than her novels. Theatre mgazine considered The Masked Woman (1922) ‘‘well constructed. . .save for long and tedious portions of conversation,’’ but Life felt it ‘‘might just as well never have been brought out.’’ Among her popular plays, apparently unpublished, were A Luncheon at Nick’s (1903), The Pompadour’s Protégé (1903), and The Right Road (1911). The plots of Jordan’s novels and stories are melodramatic and manipulative but enhanced by deft characterization, convincing psychological development, and good dramatic sense. The Boston Transcript gracefully described her in 1921 as a ‘‘born storyteller who can touch the veriest trifle and turn it out, not a joy forever, but a pleasure in the moment.’’ This summary is still valid. OTHER WORKS: The Kiss of Gold (1892). The Other House (1892). Time, the Comedian (1905). The Creeping Tides (1913). Against the Winds (1919). Trouble-the-House (1921).

Kate Jordan came to New York from Dublin at the age of three, when her professor father accepted a position at an American college. Always imaginative, she told classmates she was born on the high seas in a pirate ship, causing her teacher to warn Jordan’s mother that ‘‘either she will one day write fiction or she is one of those natural liars to whom truth is unattractive.’’ Jordan’s father so successfully converted her to fiction that her first story was published when she was twelve.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: DAB. Other references: Bookman (June 1913).

Stories like the popular ‘‘The Kiss of Gold’’ (1892) brought Jordan recognition as a short story writer. After her marriage to a New York broker, she continued writing under her own name,

JORDAN, Laura

—CAROL B. GARTNER

See BROWN, Sandra

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JUDSON, Emily Chubbuck Born 22 August 1817, Eaton, New York; died 1 June 1854, Hamilton, New York Wrote under: Emily Chubbuck, Fanny Forester, Mrs. Emily Judson Daughter of Charles and Lavinia Richards Chubbuck; married Adoniram Judson, 1846; children: three Emily Chubbuck Judson’s self-taught skills enabled her to teach in local schools from 1832 to 1840. Enrolled at the Utica Female Seminary for one year, she remained there as a teacher of English composition from 1841 to 1846. She rose from poverty eventually to find fame and wealth with her early children’s books. With the income from those books, she was able to buy her family a home and to make their lives comfortable. Judson’s short life span of 36 years was a full and varied one. Her writing career divides into three clearly defined phases; in each she wrote under a different name. Publishing under the name Emily Chubbuck, Judson wrote several successful children’s books between 1841 and 1844. Like other mid-19th-century writers, Judson writes consciously as an American and as a ‘‘republican.’’ Her fiction is for young Americans, and all the stories are heavily moralistic and didactic. For example, the stories in Charles Linn; or, How to Observe the Golden Rule (1841) have the theme of self-sacrifice. In ‘‘The Selfish Girl,’’ Julia has to cripple her schoolmate Sally before she realizes how selfish she is. Sally is, however, even improved by her accident; her brother ‘‘thought his sweet sister could scarcely be as lovely if she were not a cripple.’’ ‘‘The Mother’s Story’’ describes a vain little girl who has to contract smallpox to be taught humility. Publishing under the name of Fanny Forester, Judson wrote stories with a completely different tone, changing from the previously moral tone to one of irony and fancy. The sketches gathered into Trippings in Author-Land (1846) reveal a writer enjoying the world she was creating and perhaps enjoying the recreation of herself as Fanny Forester, a character in that world. Two more volumes continued to construct the village of Alderbrook, Lilias Fane, and Other Tales (1846) and Alderbrook (1846), which contained some of the same tales from Lilias Fane. Simplicity and unpretentiousness is praised; village life is uncomplicated and contains a community unknown to the larger, sprawling urban scene. Fanny Forester returned several times to the character Ida Ravelin, a genius, a poet, an angel (all synonyms in these stories), as she created her vision of the poet who is ‘‘not like them’’ but who can live completely in the ideal. By the time a revised edition (1847) of Alderbrook was published, Judson wished to suppress Ida Ravelin and substitute ‘‘Angel’s Pilgrimage,’’ a very different story of human greed, murder, and cruelty, in which the angels try to change the world by continuing the holy mission begun by their prototype, Christ. The work published under Fanny Forester continued to bring Judson money and fame. Alderbrook went through at least 11 editions.

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The third phase of Judson’s career began when she left the imaginary world of Alderbrook and entered into missionary life, marrying the Reverend Adoniram Judson, who was nearly 30 years her senior, and going to Burma with him and three of his children from his second marriage. In this phase, she published a Memoir of Sarah B. Judson (1849, reissued several times, including 1980), her husband’s second wife. This volume by its popularity furthered the cause of the missionaries. Printed in both London and New York, it was reprinted several times for a total of over 30,000 copies. Less popular, The Kathayan Slave (1853) is a defense of missionary activity and maintains that the barbarism of the natives of Burma and India can only be alleviated through Christianity. It is clear from The Kathayan Slave that Adoniram Judson’s pioneering efforts in missionary work were not always supported by his contemporaries; their attacks after his death in 1850 prompted Judson’s defense. Although she never became a legendary heroine on the order of Ann Hasseltine Judson, Adoniram Judson’s first wife, or of Sarah Boardman Judson, his second, she did much to further their fame and to support, by her writing, the work of her husband after his death. Her life and work indicate some of the tensions and contradictions inherent in mid-19th-century America, its commercialism and also its idealism. Perhaps these tensions led her to frame her literary answer to them by assuming three different identities. These three different literary personalities, the didactic Emily Chubbuck, the frivolous and charming Fanny Forester, and the defensive Mrs. Emily Judson, need not coalesce into one personality, although the prevailing opinion is that identity is such a synthesis. In some writers the paradoxes of their cultures cause them to produce ambiguous and morally contradictory works. In others these same paradoxes produce moral absolutism in the writing and ambiguity in the identity of the writer herself. Judson was such a writer.

OTHER WORKS: The Great Secret; or, How to Be Happy (1842). Allen Lucas: The Self-Made Man (1843). John Frink; or, The Third Commandment Illustrated (1844). How to Be Great, Good, and Happy (1848). A Mound is in the Graveyard (ca. 1851). An Olio of Domestic Verses (1852). My Two Sisters (1854).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Douglas, A., The Feminization of American Culture (1977). Hartley, C. B., The Three Mrs. Judsons: The Celebrated Female Missionaries (reissue, 1980). Kendrick, A. C., The Life and Letters of Mrs. E. C. Judson (1860). Pattee, F., The Feminine Fifties (1940). Stuart, A. W., The Lives of Mrs. Ann H. Judson and Mrs. Sarah B. Judson, with a Biographical Sketch of Mrs. E. C. Judson (1851). Wyeth, W. N., Emily C. Judson: A Memorial (1980). Reference works: AA. CAL. DAB. FPA. NAW (1971). NCAB. —JULIANN E. FLEENOR

K KAEL, Pauline Born 19 June 1919, Petaluma, California Daughter of Isaac P. and Judith Friedman Kael; children: Gina Pauline Kael grew up in California and attended the University of California at Berkeley, majoring in philosophy. She began her critical career as a freelance film reviewer for various monthlies, along with experimental filmmaking and playwrighting. Her work appeared in the San Francisco City Lights, Sight and Sound, Partisan Review, Kulchur, Film Culture, and Moviegoer, with a regular series in Film Quarterly. She was manager of the Berkeley Cinema Theatres through the early 1960s, inaugurating one of the first programs of film revivals, which featured W. C. Fields, Mae West, and the Busby Berkeley musicals, supplying her own program notes. Kael was also a frequent lecturer on film at various California universities. She has received a Guggenheim fellowship (1964), and several awards (a National Book Award, the San Francisco International Film Festival’s Mel Novikoff Award, the Newswomen’s Club of New York Front Page Award, and others), as well as eight honorary doctorates from colleges and universities across the nation. With her first collection of reviews, the best-selling I Lost It at the Movies (1965), Kael began her rapid ascendancy to dean of American film critics, her reputation already well on its way in film circles. Film critic for McCall’s (1965-66) and New Republic (1966-67), she soon found a more prominent association with the New Yorker. Kael is indisputably the most influential and innovative film critic of the 1960s and 1970s, one of the new breed of film critics led by a contingent of articulate women writers, which emerged with the coming of age of film as an intellectual as well as popular art form. From the beginning of her writing career, she was hailed as one of the most articulate and sensible in the field, although some fellow critics dissent. Her witty, candid, caustic, and opinionated style and encyclopedic knowledge of film history and of the film industry as a social institution gave her work immediate appeal and authority and served as a dominant model for the succeeding generation of young critics. In her embrace of movies as part of popular culture, rather than as a rarefied cult of fine film, Kael’s opinions are often at odds with those of more conservative reviewers working out of the tradition of drama criticism. Her very personal approach to film—as a dynamic between art and audience—disturbs those who consider the art a more objective matter of aesthetic standards. The Citizen Kane Book (1971) is perhaps her crowning achievement. In this intensive case study, the depths of her historical and analytical powers are shown to greatly exceed the conventional limits of film criticism. Here her style, a compound of what one critic recognized as ‘‘journalism, biography, autobiography, gossip, and criticism,’’ created a new model of film

biography. A storm of controversy followed her attack upon the long-standing legend of Orson Welles as the animating genius behind the film. Concerned that ‘‘movies should be a great popular democratic art form,’’ of social and mythic as well as aesthetic interest, Kael’s authority as the ‘‘Great Pop Critic’’ is the hallmark of her leadership of a field which has rapidly become the newest preserve of hip intellectual snobbery, pretentiousness, and a ‘‘new wave’’ of cultural elitism. In an age of the popular arts of the mass media, it is fitting that, as the leading critic of film, Kael should have command of both the strictly aesthetic vision and a wider, holistic, and interdisciplinary vision of film. She offers a promising model, a synthesis of the elite and the popular, for the study of contemporary life. ‘‘It is unlikely that anyone in the world has reviewed more movies than Pauline Kael,’’ William Shawn noted. ‘‘The quintessential movie lover’’ retired in 1991 at the age of seventy-one after a long and distinguished career. Kael’s announcement she would be leaving the New Yorker after 24 years as its film critic was a shock to the movie industry. Kael raised expectations for criticism as well as moviemaking. She was the primary advocate of the ‘‘cinematic pleasure principle,’’ as she called it, and she truly believed that moviegoers should not settle for mediocrity. Her reviews bashed the Hollywood ‘‘cloning process’’ where filmmakers try to sell the same film over and over again under a different title. In the 1970s, many films had risen to Kael’s heightened expectations of them. She praised bright young innovators such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola in her book of collected reviews, When the Lights Go Down (1980), as ‘‘directors who weren’t afraid to excite your senses.’’ If the 1970s proved anyone was listening to Kael, the 1980s seemed to prove no one was listening but everyone was making money. Kael’s reviews during the 1980s responded to the film standards of the decade. She criticized Hollywood for trying no bold undertakings, instead producing only cheap imitations of old clichés with overexposed actors regurgitating mass-produced messages. Four books assembling her 1980s reviews reflect her disgust, while noting the occasional successes. Taking It All In (1984) and State of the Art (1985) cover the early 1980s. Hooked (1989) includes reviews from 1985 to 1988, a period occasioning some of her most congratulatory comments. In the author’s note, she comments that the films ‘‘began rather lamely, and then suddenly there’s one marvelous movie after another,’’ citing as examples Blue Velvet and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Movie Love (1991), incorporating her reviews from the late 1980s to her retirement, contains only a few complimentary reviews and many examples of her distaste for the films of the 1980s. Although she was criticized for overbashing the popular film about Native

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Americans, Dances with Wolves, her response to it is a good example of her attractive irreverence and intolerance for films made simply to be ‘‘do-gooders.’’ Although many viewers have disagreed with Kael’s opinions, her reviews have had an important impact on the way movies are viewed. She has forced moviegoers to react instead of merely to watch. Kael’s contributions to the movie industry will continue to affect both moviemakers and moviegoers. For Keeps (1994, 1996) is a monumental anthology including the best of Kael’s 10 volumes of reviews and essays published between 1965 and 1991. A compendium of arguably the best and most thoughtful (if often irreverent and politically incorrect) criticism of a generation of filmmaking, Kael never fails to approach film as an art form to be dealt with on its own terms and within its own framework. She causes readers to consider the manner in which movies interface with life, the culture at the time, and the psyche of the populace. Kael has announced this is her last book because she is in her seventies and in failing health. In a 1998 interview with Newsweek reporter Ray Sawhill, seventy-eight-year-old Kael discussed the changes she has observed in the film industry over the years. When asked what critics are guilty of, she remarked, ‘‘We tend to exalt the works that we’re emotionally and intellectually ready for’’ and noted that what appeals to the critic may not be what appeals to the audience. Regardless of the critic’s feelings, Kael says, ‘‘Only a twerp would castigate an audience for its enjoyment of something. . . . The most a critic can do is to try to understand the audience’s responses—and maybe enlarge them a teeny bit.’’ OTHER WORKS: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1960). Going Steady (1970). Deeper into Movies (1973). Reeling (1976). 5001 Nights at the Movies (1982, expanded, 1991). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1974). CB (Mar. 1974). Other references: American Scholar (Winter 1989). Book World (23 Feb. 1969). Boston Globe (8 Sept. 1991). Commentary (April 1995). Kaleidoscope (Apr. 1989). Mirabella (Aug. 1992). Newsweek (18 Mar. 1991, Summer 1998). New York (5 Aug. 1974, 14 July 1975). Post (11 May 1966). PW (24 May 1971, 22 Aug. 1994). SR (Apr. 1973). Time (12 July 1968). —MARGARET J. KING, UPDATED BY SARAH E. MASON AND REBECCA C. CONDIT

KAVANAUGH, Cynthia See DANIELS, Dorothy

KEENE, Carolyn See ADAMS, Harriet Stratemeyer

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KEITH, Agnes Newton Born 6 July 1901, Oak Park, Illinois; died March 1982 Daughter of Joseph G. and Grace Goodwillie Newton; married Henry G. Keith, 1934 Reared in California, Agnes Newton Keith graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1924. Her brief career with the San Francisco Examiner ended when she was brutally attacked by a frenzied drug addict. A prolonged incapacitation, including the loss of eyesight, followed. Surgery eventually restored her to health. Married to an English tropical forestry expert, she found the materials for her sensitive and evocative books about Asia and Africa in their subsequent travels. From 1934 to 1952 the Keiths lived in North Borneo and four books are based on this experience. Land Below the Wind (1939), a bride’s sunny report on her Eden, examines the life of westerners in an outpost of Empire, describes her experiences there, and characterizes her native friends. Like most of Keith’s books, it is illustrated by her own sketches. Three Came Home (1947) is the story of imprisonment by the Japanese during World War II. Keith and her young son were interned together, her husband in a neighboring camp. Despite its subject, the book is strangely affirmative: she shows brutality and humanity in both jailers and prisoners, stressing that war, not race, has dehumanized them all. Her depiction of the heroism of many prisoners and their Asian friends outside the camp is moving, and throughout she stresses the courage and endurance enabling them to bring all 34 interned children through alive. White Man Returns (1951) rounds off this series by showing the return to North Borneo after the war; the beginning of the process of rebuilding is central to this book. Similar to Land Below the Wind in approach and structure, it lacks the happy idealism of the first book; the war experience had destroyed Keith’s Eden. Much later came yet another work based on the Borneo years, this time a novel, Beloved Exiles (1972). Only loosely autobiographical, it is less successful than the nonfiction works. Having retired from his government’s service, Keith’s husband was, in 1953, prevailed upon to go to the Philippines for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Bare Feet in the Palace (1955) resulted. Like her first and third Borneo books, it is a mixture of personal experiences, sketches of people, and information about the society and its history. A central theme is the creation of democracy in Asia; the title refers to the coming of poor natives to the 200-year-old former palace of Spanish governors, now the residence of a democratically elected president. Children of Allah (1966), Keith’s only non-Asian book, tells of their following assignment in Libya. Keith used her previously successful formula here, and this work is particularly notable for its studies of Libyan Moslem women in various stages of subservience to and liberation from the veil and all that its wearing implies.


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A more recent book, Before the Blossoms Fall (1975), must be paired with Three Came Home, which had been widely admired in Japan. In 1973 she was sent by the Japan Foundation on a six-week visit to Japan, the goal being to write something to increase understanding between Japan and the U.S. Important themes here are the young, the aged, and women’s changing status and attitudes. Like her other books, it is a perceptive and sympathetic study, though Keith admits she is unable completely to understand or trust these people, whom she nevertheless loves. Throughout her career, and hinging on her imprisonment experience, Keith’s attitude toward her Asian subjects altered subtly. While she was always sympathetic and even admiring, the earliest book also sometimes seems patronizing, and the idea of the white man’s burden is not totally absent. The later books reveal a truer sense of equality and a surer stress on the values of alien cultures, along with a more open admission of inability thoroughly to understand them. All of the works, however, are both informative and absorbing. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1967). TCAS. Other references: Atlantic (March 1966). NYHTB (6 April 1947, 5 Aug. 1951). NYTBR (12 Nov. 1939, 26 March 1972). SR (5 April 1947, 13 Dec. 1955). —MARY JEAN DEMARR

KELLER, Helen (Adams) Born 27 June 1880, Tuscumbia, Alabama; died 1 June 1968, Westport, Connecticut Also wrote under: Helen Adams Keller Daughter of Arthur H. and Katherine Adams Keller Helen Keller was nineteen months old when illness left her deaf and blind. She soon became wild and unmanageable, locked inside a dark, silent world no humanizing influence seemed able to penetrate. In the 1890s almost no hope existed for educating people both deaf and blind, but Keller’s parents turned to the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston for help. The institution sent Anne Sullivan, a new graduate who had recently had her own sight partially restored, to educate the child to whatever extent proved possible. Undreamed of success followed, and Keller eventually, in 1904, earned a B.A. cum laude from Radcliffe College. Keller became friends with many of the world’s greatest people, including Alexander Graham Bell, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Charlie Chaplin, and Andrew Carnegie. At least nine presidents received her, and a half dozen of the most prestigious universities in the world bestowed honorary degrees upon her. From 1924 until her death in 1968, Keller was associated with the American Foundation for the Blind, traveling to every state in the U.S. and to every continent in the world, working to enlarge the possibilities for disabled people.

Keller’s first book was The Story of My Life (1902, several reissues, including 1988), first published serially by the Ladies’ Home Journal. The book contains, in addition to her early autobiography, her letters from 1887 to 1901, passages from Anne Sullivan’s reports about Keller’s education, and comments by John Albert Macy. Keller describes the terrible isolation of the blind and deaf mute as a ‘‘twofold solitude’’ in which one can ‘‘know little of the. . .affections that grow out of endearing words and actions and companionship.’’ She tells about an incident of unconscious plagiarism, which happened in 1892, and about the fear that grew from this ‘‘disgrace,’’ saying ‘‘even now I cannot be quite sure of the boundary line between my ideas and those I find in books. I suppose that is because so many of my impressions come to me through the medium of others’ eyes and ears.’’ The Story of My Life is lively and interesting to read, and it contributed significantly to the body of knowledge about educating the deaf-blind. Midstream: My Later Life (1929) brings up to date the story of this remarkable woman and her teacher. It also gives the reader a lively picture of life in America during the first three decades of this century. Keller recounts vividly a long visit in the early 1900s with Mark Twain at his home. During the visit, she told Twain about her friend W. S. Booth having ‘‘discovered’’ that the literature usually attributed to Shakespeare was actually written by Francis Bacon. Twain was at first skeptical, she says, but less than a month later he brought out a new book attempting ‘‘to destroy the Shakespeare legend.’’ In Midstream, Keller seems to delight in using images of sight and sound, perhaps because some critics had questioned the honesty of this aspect of her style. Surely she had experienced in some physical way the scene she describes thus: ‘‘Out of the big, red, gaping mouths of the furnaces leaped immense billows of fire.’’ Such vivid sensory images enliven this entire book in a degree that would be noteworthy even in a writer without handicaps. Teacher: Anne Sullivan Macy (1955) is certainly, as the title page proclaims, ‘‘a tribute by the foster-child of her mind.’’ Keller memorably describes the incredible difficulties faced by Sullivan in introducing Keller to language. Once the child discovered things have names, her education proceeded with astonishing rapidity. Sullivan is presented as a human being with more than her share of human problems and foibles, but when compared with Keller’s earlier clean, concrete writing, the book seems somewhat repetitious and sentimental. Her many other books include poetry (Double Blossoms, 1931) and social criticism (Helen Keller, Her Socialist Years: Writings and Speeches, 1967). But her best work is found in her autobiographical books. OTHER WORKS: Optimism, an Essay (1903). The World I Live In (1908). The Song of the Stone Wall (1910). Out of the Dark: Essays, Letters, and Addresses on Physical and Social Vision (1913). My Religion (1927). We Bereaved (1929). Peace at Eventide (1932). Helen Keller in Scotland (edited by J. K. Love, 1933). American Foundation for the Blind, 1923-1938: A Report from Helen Keller to the Blind People of America (1938). Journal,

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1936-1937 (1938). Let Us Have Faith (1940). Open Door (1957). Light in My Darkness (1994). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barnett, G., Inspiration and Innovation: Helen Keller and the American Foundation for the Blind (1996). Benge, J., Helen Keller: Facing Her Challenges, Challenging the World (2000). Benjamin, A., Young Helen Keller: Woman of Courage (1992). Braddy, N., Anne Sullivan Macy: The Story Behind Helen Keller (1933). Brooks, V. W., Helen Keller: Sketch for a Portrait (1956). Cush, C., Women Who Achieved Greatness (1995). Einhorn, L. J., Helen Keller, Public Speaker: Sightless but Seen, Deaf but Heard (1998). Felder, D. G., The 100 Most Influential Women of All Time: A Ranking Past and Present (1996). Gibson, W., The Miracle Worker: A Play for Television (1957). Graff, S., and P. A. Graff, Helen Keller: Toward the Light (1965). Harrity, R., and J. G. Martin, The Three Lives of Helen Keller (1962). Hedin, L., Voices of Light and Grace: Reflections on the Lifework of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy (1991). Herrmann, D., Helen Keller: A Life (2nd edition, 1999). Hickok, L. A., The Touch of Magic (1961). Hunter, N., Helen Keller (1985). Klages, M. K., ‘‘More Wonderful Than Any Fiction: The Representation of Helen Keller‘‘ (thesis, 1989). Logue, M., Trust: The Story of Helen Keller (1999). Macdonald, F., Helen Keller: The Deaf and Blind Woman Who Conquered Her Disabilities and Devoted Her Life to Campaign for Other People (1992). Markham, L., Helen Keller (1993). Morgan, N., Helen Keller (reissue, 1995). Nicholson, L., Helen Keller: Humanitarian (1998). Peare, C. O., The Helen Keller Story (1959, 1992). Polcovar, J., Helen Keller (1988). Rolka, G. M., 100 Women Who Shaped World History (1994). Sabin, F., The Courage of Helen Keller (1998). Santrey, L., Helen Keller (1985). St. George, J., Dear Dr. Bell—Your Friend, Helen Keller (reissue, 1994). Sullivan, G., Helen Keller (2000). Tames, R., Helen Keller (1991). Waite, H. E., Valiant Companions: Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy (1959). Wepman, D., Helen Keller (1987). Woodhouse, J., Helen Keller (reissue, 1999). Zonderman, J., Helen Keller & Annie Sullivan, Working Miracles Together (1984). Reference works: CB (Dec. 1942, July 1968). LSL. NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). —PEGGY SKAGGS

KELLERMAN, Faye Born 1952, St. Louis, Missouri Daughter of Oscar and Anne Steinberg Marder; married Jonathan Seth Kellerman, 1972; children: Jesse, Rachel, Ilana, Aliza Faye Kellerman is best known for her mystery-detective series involving the recurring characters Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus. Decker, a Los Angeles Police Department detective, teams up, first professionally and then romantically, with a most unlikely crime-solving partner, Rina Lazarus, an orthodox Jewish

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woman whose introduction to the very secular world of crime occurs in Kellerman’s first mystery novel in the series, The Ritual Bath (1986), which received a Macavity award for best first novel. Since the publication of The Ritual Bath, in which Rina Lazarus (at this point in the developing saga, a young widow with two children) assists the police in their investigation of a brutal rape that takes place at the mikvah (the women’s ritual bathhouse) in the orthodox community in which she lives, Kellerman has published nine sequential mysteries involving Decker and Lazarus: Sacred and Profane (1987), Milk and Honey (1990), Day of Atonement (1991), False Prophet (1992), Grievous Sin (1993), Sanctuary (1994), Justice (1995), Prayer for the Dead (1996), and Serpent’s Tooth (1997). The narrative conceit and dramatic plots of Kellerman’s detective novels alone are compelling evidence of her mastery of the mystery genre. Most of the action takes place in Los Angeles or the surrounding areas (although she does move out into New York and Israel for an occasional foray), and the situations she describes are timely. In fact, Kellerman captures the drama of American life in the latter part of the 20th century with a recognizable and often chilling intensity and accuracy. The impetus for the central action of each novel always stems from the American scene, from family dramas, to the moral vacuity and despair and desperate acts that both define and reflect American culture: domestic violence, women targeted by uncontrollable rage, children as victims of neglect and abuse, gang affiliation, drugs, gratuitous sex, an ever-growing wayward sense of hopelessness, unanchored lives, the pathologies of our age. The dialogue that unleashes the action in her novels is terse, uncompromised by the jargon that often impairs the movement of such typical crime scenarios that compete on the mystery-detective market. Kellerman’s plots are consistently realistic and at the same time unconventional. The unconventionality is created by a particular aspect of Kellerman’s work that differentiates it from others in the mystery genre and gives her work its idiosyncratic appeal: while the central plot in all her work captures the drama of life on the streets of Los Angeles and the police investigation that brings it to its close, each novel works through a secondary plot, often a series of subplots involving the richly nuanced and complex life of the orthodox Jew attempting to maintain a life of traditional Jewish values and rituals in the midst of an increasingly secular world of contemporary America. Kellerman’s work deftly and engagingly introduces the practices, rituals, the very life of Orthodox Judaism into her fiction. And she does so framed within the evolving attraction, romance, and marriage of her two main characters, Peter and Rina. Peter, raised a Baptist by his adoptive parents, in the first novel of the series is held off initially by Rina, who is forbidden by her religious principles from a romantic involvement with someone outside the faith. The romantic tension is resolved when, in a subsequent novel, Peter discovers that his birth parents were Jewish, and so, by Jewish law, he too is Jewish. By the third novel in the series, Milk and Honey, Peter embraces Orthodox Judaism and officially converts. The two protagonists, in the novels that follow, go on to marry and have a child of their own.


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While such a narrative conceit might otherwise seem contrived, the plot too easily resolved in favor of the religious lessons it purports, Kellerman handles the unfolding romantic ‘‘mystery’’ and her clear interest in maintaining and celebrating Jewish culture and traditional values unobtrusively and smoothly. Kellerman works into her novels a range of issues from interfaith marriages and religious adherence to what it means to keep kosher and study Talmud. Her novels themselves reflect the revisions that Judaism has seen in contemporary America, such as the changing roles of women in Judaism and the ever-increasing necessity for a balance between the constraints of the religious and the freedom of the secular worlds. Kellerman achieves such a mingling of plots and subplots because her protagonists as well as the minor characters who reoccur throughout the series—such as the two Lazarus children, Decker’s daughter from his first marriage, his partner in the LAPD, the rabbi who oversees their congregation, and others— are all so likable, all such complex and realistic characters. Kellerman’s readers end up caring as much if not more about the fate of her characters as they do about the unfolding and resolution of the crime investigation. ‘‘Whodunit’’ competes in Kellerman’s fiction with the developing psychologies and relationships among the characters who scrutinize and often stand at the margins of the typically gruesome crimes she describes—thus Kellerman broadens the genre of the mystery-detective novel. Kellerman has written two other novels that depart from the Peter Decker-Rina Lazarus series: a historical romance, The Quality of Mercy (1988), set in England during the reign of Elizabeth I, and Moon Music (1998), a novel mixing mystery with fantasy. Kellerman is married to the psychologist-writer Jonathan Kellerman, also the author of a popular detective series featuring the psychologist-turned-sleuth, Alex Delaware. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers (1996). Other references: ANR 60. Atlanta Journal-Constitution (7 July 1991, 13 Sept. 1992, 2 Nov. 1995, 29 Aug. 1996). Booklist (15 Apr. 1990, 15 June 1991, 15 June 1992, July 1993, Aug. 1995, July 1996). Judaism 46 (Winter 1997). —VICTORIA AARONS

KELLEY, Edith Summers Born 1884, Ontario, Canada; died 1956, Los Gatos, California Also wrote under: Edith Summers Married Allan Updegraff, 1908 (divorced); Claude F. Kelley, 1915; children: two Like the protagonists of her two novels, Edith Summers Kelley struggled much of her adult life for financial security and for realization of her dream to be a writer. After taking an honors

degree in languages from the University of Toronto, the nineteen-year-old Edith moved to New York and began working on Funk and Wagnall’s Standard Dictionary project. In 1906 Kelley became secretary to Upton Sinclair and part of the staff at Helicon Hall, Sinclair’s socialist commune (inspired by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s plans for municipal housing, advanced in 1904). At the Hall, she met two other aspiring writerscum-janitors, Sinclair Lewis and Alan Updegraff. Both Sinclair and Updegraff (to whom she was engaged) remained lifelong correspondents. The marriage to Updegraff produced two children; Kelley apparently was primary breadwinner as a teacher in the Hell’s Kitchen area of New York City. After her divorce, she became the common-law wife of Claude Fred Kelley. The Kelleys pursued a series of mostly unprofitable jobs from 1914 to 1945: tenant tobacco farming in Kentucky; boardinghouse management in New Jersey; alfalfa and chicken ranching, and bootlegging in California. Thus unlike Sinclair’s journalistic fiction, Kelley’s novels reflect her own experiences and observations as an economically depressed rancher. In Weeds (1923, reissued 1972 and 1996), Judith Pipinger is different from other members of her tenant tobacco farming community in Kentucky because she is a throwback to purer pioneer stock, an exception to the usual results of inbreeding and poor nutrition. Her early repugnance to traditional female chores and her preference for ‘‘man’s’’ (outdoors) work isolate her from the closely knit female subculture. This isolation is underlined by imagery linking Judith with natural (as opposed to societal) objects, and by a character ‘‘double,’’ Jabez Moorhouse, an iconoclastic fiddler who shares Judith’s intuitive grasp of beauty and meaning in life. With her marriage and subsequent motherhood, Judith is trapped in the very role she has despised; when Moorhouse dies, her death in spirit concludes the novel. Encouraged by a monetary award from a civil liberties group, Kelley began work in 1925 on a second novel, a study of the Imperial Valley in Southern California and ‘‘the life it harbors.’’ From 1925 through 1929, Kelley wrote and revised as her knowledge of California development and the International Workers of the World increased, but The Devil’s Hand was not published until 1974, 18 years after her death (and reissued in 1982). Marriage proves to be a spiritual death for Rhoda Malone, an acknowledgment of defeat closing The Devil’s Hand. Tempted by her friend Kate Baxter to leave her passive and orderly life as an office clerk in Philadelphia, Rhoda takes on a partnership with Kate in a California alfalfa farm. Because Rhoda’s is the central consciousness through which the story is told, focus is equally on what she sees and who she becomes. Her awareness of the exploitation of people like herself, and the Hindu, Mexican, and Oriental laborers, by rapacious realtors and big landowners gradually intensifies; two male friends serve (as did Moorhouse in Weeds) as examples of the individual freedom that Rhoda, as a woman, cannot achieve. Disheartened by the loss of these friends, the drudgery of profitless farming, and her realization that to

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challenge the economic system is to suffer social and material martyrdom, Rhoda marries the very realtor who initially took advantage of her ignorance. In both novels the central character is sensitively drawn, but equally effective are the local-color sketches of California and Kentucky farmers, customs, and community life in general. The function of these characterizations is not, however, strictly for background interest. In Weeds, such material serves to heighten Judith’s alienation. Especially in the depiction of the other passive (and vicious) women, Judith’s behavior and emotions are seen as different and unnatural. It is an ironic contrast since Kelley’s point is that Judith is the sole ‘‘natural’’ person. Kelley is among several American women writers of the 1920s, such as Josephine Herbst, Frances Newman, Evelyn Scott, and Ruth Suckow, who have been ‘‘rediscovered’’ after being long forgotten or ignored. Kelley is also emerging as a master of fiction in the Dreiser, Garland, Howells vein. She does not limit her work to tedious cataloguing of realistic detail, but her work is firmly rooted in everyday experience. Although the imagery of her novels underlines the forgotten connection of men and women to nature, her fiction is oriented more toward sociological (even socialist) study; time and again she emphasizes the effect of social environment on individual fate. Thus, the feminist concerns grow naturally out of her realistic approach to life and fiction.

OTHER WORKS: Selected papers of Edith Summers Kelley are in the Special Collections of the Morris Library at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. Her letters to Sinclair Lewis and to Upton Sinclair are in collections of the Lilly Library at Indiana University.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ammons, E., Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century (1991). Irvin, H., Women in Kentucky (1979). Miller, D., Wingless Flights: Appalachian Women in Fiction (1996). Powderly, C., ‘‘Learning the Land: Survival of the Self in a Hostile World’’ (thesis, 1996). Samuelson, J. W., ‘‘Patterns of Survival: Four American Women Writers and the Proletarian Novel’’ (thesis, 1982). Schorer, M., Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (1961). Toth, E., ed., Regionalism and the Female Imagination (1985). Wanless, T. C., ‘‘Soil and Soul: The Experience of Southern Rural Womanhood in Selected Novels by Edith Summers Kelley, Ellen Glasgow and Elizabeth Madox Roberts’’ (thesis, 1984). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Frontiers (1980). Michigan Papers in Women’s Studies (June 1975). Regionalism and the Female Imagination (Spring 1977). —SALLY BRETT

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KELLOGG, Louise Born 12 May 1862, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; died 11 July 1942, Madison, Wisconsin Daughter of Amherst W. and Mary Phelps Kellogg A historian and editor, Louise Kellogg served for nearly 40 years as a researcher and executive for the Wisconsin State Historical Society. Her focus of concern was the Northwest through the Revolutionary War era. Kellogg’s earliest work was The American Colonial Charter (1903), for which she received the Justin Winsor Prize of the American Historical Association. She served first as editorial assistant to Reuben Gold Thwaites, executive director of the Wisconsin Society; together they edited three volumes from the Lyman Coleman Draper Collection. After Thwaite’s death, Kellogg continued the editing of the Draper Collection and published Frontier Advance on the Upper Ohio, 1778-1779 (1916) and Frontier Retreat on the Upper Ohio, 1779-1781 (1917, reissued 1993). In the introductions to these two volumes she reveals herself to be a historian writing with clarity and force, as well as an editor of high scholarly ability. She shows keen insight into the mixture of motives on both sides and incisively analyzes the factors that brought the British and the revolutionists into conflict. She saw the 15 crucial months from May 1778 to July 1779 as ‘‘the most momentous events of the Revolution in the West.’’ In Frontier Retreat on the Upper Ohio, 1779-1781, she portrays with sympathy ‘‘the most critical years of the Revolution’’ in the West and East alike. A third major editing work by Kellogg was Early Narratives of the Northwest, 1634-1699 (1911, reissued and recorded in 1987), in J. Franklin Jameson’s Original Narratives of Early American History series. Kellogg’s introductions are written in a fluid and dramatic style, and she shows keen appreciation of the role of French explorers, missionaries, and Canadian recruits. In The French Regime in Wisconsin and the Northwest (1925), Kellogg’s major work as a historian, she concentrates on the interaction of the French and Native Americans in the Northwest, arguing that the history of the Native Americans ‘‘forms the warp of the story, of which the coming of the French forms the woof.’’ A major purpose of her work is to reassess the impact of the French missionaries; her rereading of original sources convinced her that they had received an undue share of credit for ‘‘opening the West to civilization.’’ The real impact upon the Native Americans, she argues, came through the traders. As a Native American acquired new needs from the traders, he ‘‘lost the proud independence of a son of the forest.’’ Although she devotes half the book to the 18th-century experience, her real focus is the 17th-century world. She does not portray in depth the fall of New France. In The British Regime in Wisconsin and the Northwest (1935), Kellogg argues that British domination in the area continued from 1761 to 1816. Although there was only one two-year period (1761-63) during which a British army occupied a Wisconsin post, a British regime did in fact exist. Kellogg defines it as a ‘‘social system’’ built around ‘‘the regime of the fur trade.’’ She


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analyzes with skill the ways in which Britain nullified the terms of the Treaty of Ghent and how they later circumvented Jay’s treaty. As a historian, Kellogg had a firm grasp of the long-range issues and was insightful in her judgements. She wrote easily and with a sense of drama. Although at times her phrasing tended toward extravagance, on the whole she was even-handed and balanced in her portrayals. This evenness gave particular strength to her handling of the problems the Native Americans encountered from their exposure to French culture. As an editor and as a historian in her own right, Kellogg provided a masterly treatment of her chosen area of concern: the Northwest, and Wisconsin in particular. OTHER WORKS: The Fox Indians During the French Regime (1908). Organization, Boundaries, and Names of Wisconsin Counties (1910). Remains of a French Post near Trepealeau (1915). The Tercentennial of the Discovery of Wisconsin (1934). Report of the Daniel Boone Bicentennial Commission to the 1936 General Assembly of Kentucky (1936). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Cole, H. E., Stagecoach and Tavern Tales of the Old Northwest (reissue, 1997). Nettels, C., Louise P. Kellogg (Ms. in University of Wisconsin Archives). Reference works: NAW (1971). Wisconsin Lives of National Distinction (1937). Wisconsin Writers: Sketches and Studies (1974). Other references: AHR (July 1926, Oct. 1936, Oct. 1942). —INZER BYERS

KELLOR, Frances (Alice) Born 20 October 1873, Columbus, Ohio; died 4 January 1952, New York, New York Daughter of Daniel and Mary Sprau Kellor; partnered Mary Dreier, 1905 Frances Kellor grew up in Coldwater, Michigan, where her mother worked as a laundress and domestic servant. Her father left the family before she turned two and her only sister, 27 years older, married and left town at about the same time. Kellor helped her mother by collecting and delivering laundry, hunting rabbits and other fur animals, and doing laundry herself when she got older. She dropped out of high school for lack of money, but after a gun accident was informally adopted by the town’s librarians, Mary and Frances Eddy. The sisters encouraged Kellor’s love of learning, gave her a home during the two years she worked as a reporter for the local newspaper, then helped her attend Cornell University. At Cornell, Kellor studied sociology and law. Encouraged by her professors to investigate ‘‘practical’’ social problems, she decided to study crime and criminals and received an LL.B. in

1897. The following year, she went to the University of Chicago, where she spent four years but never finished her doctorate. Most people at the time believed criminal behavior was caused by biology and heredity, though some sociologists were beginning to consider psychology and social environments as well. Kellor’s first publications were articles in the American Journal of Sociology (1900) comparing the physical, psychological, and sociological characteristics of female prisoners and female college students. This was the first study ever done to compare female criminals and noncriminals, and Kellor concluded that their similarities made biological explanations of crime implausible. After taking a year to travel around the country and study prisons and prisoners, Kellor published her observations under the uninspiring title, Experimental Sociology: Descriptive and Analytical Delinquents (1901). In this book Kellor decried the unequal treatment of Southern blacks and the dangerous conditions of Southern jails. She reiterated that crime was correlated with poverty, not heredity, and called for nationwide reforms to guarantee prisoners opportunities for exercise, education, and religious observances, eliminate corporal punishment, and scientifically study how to prevent recidivism. For the rest of her life, Kellor’s writings would combine sociological analysis with policy recommendations. Kellor’s next book—Out of Work (1904, expanded 1915)— was her most significant. She and her associates posed as work-seekers and employers to expose the ruthlessness of private employment agencies. Unemployment, Kellor concluded, was not usually a result of personal laziness or character flaws, but of exploitative systems. Women seeking positions as domestic workers, immigrants, and migrants from the South or rural areas were particularly likely to encounter fraud, entrapment into prostitution, or quasi-slavery. Each state, Kellor concluded, should set up ‘‘Bureaus of Information’’ to help reputable employers and employees find each other. She founded the National League for the Protection of Colored Women, an interracial organization to help black women migrating from the South find decent housing, employment, and social services. Shocked by the suffering of poverty-stricken immigrants, especially women, Kellor began to study immigration. New immigrants, she concluded, need information about American laws and customs, instruction in English, and assistance in finding employment. With these resources they can rapidly become valuable members of the American public, but without them they often end up in squalid tenements. Arguing against the rising nativism of her time, Kellor wrote numerous books and articles urging state and federal governments to set up programs to help immigrants adjust to life in America. President Theodore Roosevelt was very impressed with Out of Work and followed Kellor’s later work closely. When Roosevelt broke with the Republican party in 1912 to run for president on the Progressive party ticket, Kellor became an at-large member of the Progressives’ National Committee. She used her position to press for women’s suffrage, federal programs for the poor, and

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government-funded studies of social problems such as unemployment, poverty, exploitation of workers, inadequate housing, and racial injustice. Experts, she hoped, would find solutions to these problems, and politicians would follow the experts’ advice. As director of the Progressive party’s research bureau, the National Progressive Service, Kellor fused research, education, and politics into a comprehensive program for economic, gender, and racial justice. She was dismayed when the Progressive Service, and then the Progressive party, collapsed. World War I focused Kellor’s attention on the international arena. She was a firm supporter of internationalism and the League of Nations and lobbied for American participation in the Court of International Justice. International dispute resolution by impartial experts, she believed, would prevent the world from descending again into war. Kellor also applied these ideas about arbitration to domestic problems. In 1926 she helped found the American Arbitration Association (AAA) to settle commercial and industrial labor disputes through mediation. Jurors, Kellor felt, were often ignorant, and litigation could be both lengthy and expensive. Arbitrators, in contrast, were informed and impartial and enabled businesses to regulate themselves rationally. In 1931 Kellor published the much-used Code of Arbitration, which outlined procedures for dispute resolution. For the rest of her life, Kellor devoted herself to the AAA and promoted arbitration as a solution to commercial, civil, and international conflicts. She greatly enjoyed her home life with Mary Dreier (with whom she became partnered in 1905), and refused to retire even when her health deteriorated. Only her final illness took her away from the AAA offices.

OTHER WORKS: The Immigrants in America Review (1915). Straight America, A Call to National Service (1916). Americanization of Women (1918). Neighborhood Americanization (1918). Immigration and the Future (1920). The Federal Administration and the Alien (1921). The United States of America in Relation to the Permanent Court of International Justice of the League of Nations and in Relation to the Hague Tribunal (1923). Security Against War (1924). The United States Senate and the International Court (1925). Protocol for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes in Relation to the Sanction of War (1925). Arbitration in the New Industrial Society (1934). Arbitration in Action (1941). Arbitration in International Controversy (1944). American Arbitration: Its History, Functions, and Achievements (1948). Arbitration and the Legal Profession (1952).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Fitzpatrick, E., Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (1990). Reference works: DAB Supplement 5. NAW:MP. Other references: Gustafson, M., ‘‘Partisan Women: Gender, Politics, and the Progressive Party of 1912’’ (Ph.D. dissertation,

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1993). New York State Department of Labor Industrial Bulletin (Mar. 1952). Reviews in American History (1991). —LORI KENSCHAFT

KELLY, Eleanor Mercein Born 30 August 1880, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; died 11 October 1968, Louisville, Kentucky Daughter of Thomas R. and Lucy Schley Mercein; married Robert M. Kelly Jr., 1901 Eleanor Mercein Kelly was born into a prominent and wealthy family of Scottish French ancestry. After a childhood in Milwaukee, she graduated with honors in 1898 from the Georgetown Convent of the Visitation in Washington, D.C. After her marriage, she settled in Louisville, Kentucky. Kelly’s first novel, Toya the Unlike (1913), was not well received by the critics, but she followed this failure with a trilogy of novels depicting life in Kentucky: Kildares of the Storm (1916), Why Joan? (1918), and The Mansion House (1923). After this apprenticeship, Kelly wrote her most successful novels, another trilogy, this time set in the Basque country of Spain. Basquerie (1927), considered by most critics as her best novel, chronicles the romantic adventures of Emily Weldon, a frivolous flapper who meets her true love in Esteban Urruty, a Basque nobleman. Kelly perpetuates those popular romantic stereotypes of the wealthy suitor disguised as a poor man, the strong-willed woman tamed by the dominating man, and the ennobling effect of childbearing on the flighty heroine. Basquerie, like her previous works, also explores the destructive effects of jealousy and suspicion on a marriage. The two other novels in the trilogy, The Book of Bette (1929) and Nacio, His Affairs (1931), concern the adventures of Esteban’s younger sister and brother, both of whom figure in Basquerie. Kelly wrote one biographical study, The Chronicle of a Happy Woman: Emily A. Davison (1928), but the majority of her works are romantic ‘‘women’s fiction,’’ set in such exotic locales as Syria, Ragusa, Corfu, and Moorish Africa. During the 1940s, she continued to travel throughout the world and wrote travel tales for a number of publications, including the Ladies’ Home Journal, Collier’s, and the Saturday Evening Post. Kelly returned to novel writing with Richard Walden’s Wife (1950). Dedicated to her grandparents and based on family diaries, the novel is a family saga of settlers in Wisconsin during the late 1850s. The chief characters are Walden and his spirited wife, Aurora Fairmont, an archetypal Southern belle; the couple’s estrangement is brought about by divided loyalties during the Civil War and by jealousy and suspicion. Overly sentimental, the


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novel nonetheless presents a vivid portrait of the ambivalence inherent in the woman who would play the Southern belle role. As a popular woman writer, writing primarily for women, Kelly’s strength lies in depicting a wide variety of strong women who engage her readers’ interest and concern.

OTHER WORKS: Arabesque (1930). Spanish Holiday (1930). Sea Change (1931). Sounding Harbors (1935). Mixed Company (1936). Proud Castle (1951).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: TCA, TCAS. —DIANE LONG HOEVELER

KELLY, Myra Born 26 August 1875, Dublin, Ireland; died 30 March 1910, Torquay, England Daughter of James and Annie Morrogh Kelly; married Allan MacNaughton, 1905 Myra Kelly came to New York City with her family when she was a child; they lived on the East Side, where her physician father developed a large practice. Educated first at convent schools, she attended Horace Mann High School and then Teachers College of Columbia University, receiving a diploma in 1899 as a teacher of manual training. Her experience at East-Side Public School 147, where she taught from 1899 to 1901, provided material for her popular stories about ‘‘Bailey’s Babies.’’ Kelly’s long stream of published stories began with the sentimental ‘‘A Christmas Present for a Lady,’’ which she had sent to two magazines, thinking both would reject it. When both accepted it, Kelly had complicated adjustments to make. She told friends later that no manuscript of hers was ever rejected. The story was included in her first book, Little Citizens: The Humours of School Life (1904). Little Citizens caught the attention of Allan MacNaughton, president of Standard Coach Horse Company, who arranged to meet her. They were married in 1905; their one child, a boy, died in infancy. The MacNaughtons lived briefly at Oldchester Village, Orange Mountain, New Jersey, while working to establish a literary colony there. In her scant 35 years, the prolific Kelly produced not only three books of East Side stories but popular romantic tales as well. She also wrote essays about educational methods and effects, some of which appeared in collections with her stories. Kelly died from tuberculosis in England, where she had gone in hope of a cure. Her last books were published posthumously.

Little Citizens is a collection of Kelly’s earliest stories about the children in Constance Bailey’s first-reader class, boys and girls primarily from poor Jewish immigrant families but including the son of the local Irish policeman for contrast and occasional conflict. Kelly wrote that she was not the model for Constance Bailey. ‘‘‘What I aspired to be and was not’ Constance Bailey was. Only her mistakes are mine and her very earnest effort.’’ The stories were intended as educational, but have the charms of novelty and originality, although verisimilitude suffers in both incidents and dialogue. The humor that tempers the message is usually at the immigrant’s expense and is often condescending, but it sometimes touches on the teacher’s embarrassment as she realizes the limitations of her knowledge or experience. Wards of Liberty (1907) contains more stories of Miss Bailey’s 58 students. There are disruptive influences like the nine-year-old ‘‘Boss’’ who is running his late father’s cellar garment shop. Kelly believed the schools played a crucial role in helping immigrants get along in America, but the Boss’ story shows that she recognized the system’s limitations. The Boss has previously avoided all schooling and other Americanizing influences, but comes to school when he decides learning to read will bring better-paid work for his shop. Discouraged by the slow pace and unessential busy work, he disappears. His life has no room for childhood activities. He lives in a world the schools could not reach. Although Kelly continues to emphasize the fun, under it rages revolt against conditions among the poor. After several less critically successful novels, Kelly returned, as her critics hoped she would, to the world of her schoolchildren in Little Aliens (1910). There is still humor and pathos but with a deeper understanding of children and the nature of alienation. ‘‘Games in Gardens’’ shows how immigrants can misinterpret the bits of America that filter into their ghetto world, as the children try to don proper costume for track and field events. Miss Bailey takes her share of the satire for her inadequate communication. Whereas earlier Kelly had saved discussion for her essays, here she explains how natural these misunderstandings are with children ‘‘alien to every American custom, and prejudiced by religion and precept against most of them.’’ Although generally unknown now, Kelly achieved tremendous popular success, publishing frequently in mass-circulation magazines like McClure’s. Even President Theodore Roosevelt sent her a letter of appreciation. She exaggerated both characters and incidents, looked for sentiment, and created wry humor always on the verge of pathos, but she was honest in her approach, often touching on serious issues such as the values of Americanization and the clash between immigrant and American traditions. Writing with warmth, sympathy, and as much understanding as she could muster, Kelly did much to acquaint the reading public with the harsh conditions of ghetto life and to suggest that Americans learn to know their immigrants before thoughtlessly attempting to Americanize them. When she left the narrow area of the East Side schools, her stories were less well received and less significant.

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OTHER WORKS: The Isle of Dreams (1907). Rosnah (1908). The Golden Season (1909). New Faces (1910). Her Little Young Ladyship (1911). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Fine, D. M., The City, the Immigrant, and American Fiction (1977). Friedman, L. M., Pilgrims in a New Land (1948). Lieberman, E., The American Short Story: A Study of the Influence of Locality in Its Development (1912). Reference works: DAB. NCAB. Other references: American Mercury (Feb. 1926). American Studies (Spring 1978). —CAROL B. GARTNER

KEMBLE, Fanny Born Frances Anne Kemble, 27 November 1809, London, England; died 15 January 1893, London, England Also wrote under: Frances Anne Butler, Mrs. Butler, Frances Anne Kemble Daughter of Charles and Maria Kemble; married Pierce Butler, 1834 (divorced); children: two daughters Born into London’s leading theatrical family, Frances Anne ‘‘Fanny’’ Kemble was an actress who became one of the most articulate Victorian women of letters in both America and England. Daughter of an actor who was also manager of Covent Garden Theatre, Kemble received all her formal education at boarding schools in France. Kemble’s first stage performance, as Shakespeare’s Juliet at Covent Garden in 1829, was a phenomenal success that transformed her life. She became the pinup girl of the London stage, enjoying admiration from people in England and the provinces. In 1832 she toured America. Her marriage to a wealthy Philadelphian initiated a period of emotional upheaval. Kemble gave up her acting career for marriage, but she never became the model 19th-century woman. Instead of accepting the role of subservient wife, she demanded equality. Furthermore, instead of accepting and approving of her husband’s homeland, she was quite critical of it. The record of her experiences, Journal of a Residence in America (1835), publicly announced her negative attitudes, much to the chagrin of her husband. A particularly crucial issue for him, as the owner of large Georgian plantations and hundreds of slaves, was Kemble’s passionate and outspoken opposition to the ‘‘peculiar institution.’’ After the birth of her two daughters, two return visits to England, and numerous attempts to sever her relationship with Butler, Kemble left her husband and daughters in 1844. Kemble returned to England, published a volume of poetry, and resumed her acting career. When Butler filed for divorce in 1848, she came back to America and spent her final years in public readings of Shakespeare, frequent visits to Europe, and, finally, in devoting herself to her lifelong ambition: writing. She wrote more memoirs, a critical work on Shakespeare, poetry, a comedy, and a novel (Henry James noted that not many people published a first

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novel at the age of 80). She developed friendships with a number of literary figures and died where she was born—in England. Written 22 years before the outbreak of the Civil War and published in the same year the slaves were emancipated, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 1838-1839 (1863) describes the condition of the slaves in brutally realistic terms. Among many of the inhuman aspects that Kemble denounces, the painful life of women slaves is carefully detailed. Decrying their oppressed state of manual labor and continual childbearing, Kemble speaks of the females’ ‘‘sorrow-laden existence’’ and their endurance of sufferings that appeared to be ‘‘all in the day’s work.’’ The book was well read during Kemble’s day, although its stark realism was disconcerting to the Victorian readership. While posterity tends to remember Kemble as an actress, perhaps her place as a chronicler of the American experience should be reevaluated. Her autobiographical works, especially Journal of a Residence in America and Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, have a particular psychological and historical significance as documents that reveal the struggles and challenges facing a 19th-century woman critical of national and regional narrowness. The memoirs, bestsellers of their day, also contain keen insights into the enormous changes transforming the nation; Kemble recognized and evaluated the movement away from Victorian America toward the modern age. Criticized by some reviewers for her ‘‘racy’’ language and for her subjective judgments of particular individuals, Kemble nonetheless had the rare ability to write vivid and insightful observations of places, people, and historical changes she witnessed. Her journals are neither carefully crafted nor totally consistent pictures of life in early America, but they are rich psychological and cultural documents because of their author’s complex personality, interests, and skills of observation. Perhaps Henry James’ evaluation is the best assessment of Kemble: ‘‘There was no convenient or handy formula for Mrs. Kemble’s genius, and one had to take her career, the juxtaposition of her interests, exactly as one took her disposition, for a remarkably fine cluster of inconsistencies.’’ OTHER WORKS: Francis the First: A Tragedy in Five Acts (1832). The Star of Seville: A Drama in Five Acts (1837). A Year of Consolation (1837). Poems (1844). Poems (1859). On the Stage (1863). Records of a Girlhood (1878). Notes upon Some of Shakespeare’s Plays (1882). Records of a Later Life (1882). Poems (1883). Adventures of John Timothy Homespun in Switzerland (1889). Far Away and Long Ago (1889). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Armstrong, M., Frances Kemble: A Passionate Victorian (1938). Bobbe, D., Frances Kemble (1931). Driver, L., Frances Kemble (1933). Furnas, J. C., Fanny Kemble (1982). Gibbs, H., Yours Affectionately, Fanny (1947). James, H., Essays in London and Elsewhere (1992). Marshall, D., Frances Kemble (1977). O’Grady, D. L., ‘‘Frances Anne Kemble: Actress to Abolitionist’’ (thesis, 1995). Ransome, E., ed., The Terrific Kemble: A Victorian Self-Portrait from the Writings of Fanny Kemble (1978). Scott, J. A., Fanny Kemble’s America (1973). Thompson,


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J. C., Everything in ‘‘The Garden’’ and Other Plays (1996). Wister, F. K., Fanny, The American Kemble: Her Journals and Unpublished Letters (1972). Wright, C. C., Frances Kemble and the Lovely Land (1972). Reference works: AA. British Authors of the Nineteenth Century (1936). DAB. LSL. NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the 19th Century (1997). —MARJORIE SMELSTOR

KENNEDY, Adrienne Born 13 September 1931, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Daughter of Cornell W. and Etta Haugabook Hawking; married Joseph C. Kennedy, 1953 (divorced 1966); children: Joseph, Adam Adrienne Kennedy had a middle class upbringing in Cleveland, Ohio, and what she has described as an excellent public school education. After high school (Glenville, 1949) she went to Ohio State University, where she briefly studied social work (her father’s profession) before majoring in elementary education (her mother’s). A few weeks before graduation (1953) she married, eventually moving with her husband and first child to New York City. There she studied writing at Columbia University (1954-56), the New School for Social Research, the American Theatre Wing, and Circle in the Square (1962), where she was a member of playwright Edward Albee’s workshop and saw her first play performed, Funnyhouse of a Negro. This play won an OffBroadway Obie Award in 1964; she followed it with The Owl Answers (1965), her favorite among her works. By this time she had developed her own intense one-act style, among whose literary influences she credits, besides Albee, Tennessee Williams and Federico García Lorca. Since the 1970s Kennedy has taught at universities around the country, among them Yale, Princeton, Brown, Berkeley, Rutgers, and Harvard. She has been on the PEN board of directors, and was a founding member of the Women’s Theatre Council (established 1972). Kennedy has been commissioned to write for, among others, the Juilliard School of Music, the Royal Court Theatre in London, the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Alvin Ailey Dance Company, and the Empire State Youth Theatre Institute. Her many awards include Rockefeller and National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Yale Fellowship. In March 1992 Kennedy’s work was celebrated in a month-long Adrienne Kennedy Festival organized by the Great Lakes Theatre Festival in her hometown of Cleveland. Her work has been described as gothic, expressionist, and surrealist, but Kennedy’s writings are also, as her interviews and autobiographical writings demonstrate, personal and introspective. It is difficult to keep the writer and her writing separate; and the absence of boundaries for establishing separate identities is a common theme and tactic in her work. Movie stars, dreams, her mother’s scrapbooks, political figures, paintings, music, and

statues are as alive in her writing as her own memories of childhood, her own rooms, her neighborhood. Commenting on the Wolf Man in her People Who Led to My Plays (1987), she writes, ‘‘Soon the characters in my plays and stories would be changing personae at an alarming rate.’’ The strange, blinding vividness of her stage images—animals, people who turn into animals, people with smashed heads, people with worms in their hair, exploding body parts, blood pouring out of a fractured moon—images of violent brilliance unleash the possibilities of imaginative juxtapositions on the stage, the complex beauty and horror of dreams, the power of memory, and the transforming magic of the movies, theater, art, beauty, and fame. Kennedy’s later plays seem more directly concerned with the filmic properties of her work. In A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White (1976) a black woman named Clara is partly spoken for by the female stars of classic Hollywood movies. In An Evening with Dead Essex (1973) a group of performers rehearses a production based on Mark Essex’s life and death, using music and photographs exhibited by a projectionist—the only white character in the play, and the only one dressed in black. Kennedy’s insistence on images of black on white, and her blazing use of color, are ‘‘typical’’ in more ways than one: race is both visual and felt in her work as the image and the tone of identity and conflict, which she suggests are complementary impulses. Her adaptations from Euripides, Electra and Orestes (1980), like her ‘‘Theatre Mystery’’ Deadly Triplets (1990), dramatize these tensions in somewhat more linear works about family loyalty and sibling rivalry. In The Alexander Plays (1992), Kennedy’s alter ego from Deadly Triplets, ‘‘Suzanne Sand. . . playwright,’’ seems to reappear as ‘‘Suzanne Alexander, a Writer.’’ These plays continue her exploration of narrative, while also experimenting with sound in their use of radio, offstage noise, and music. The Film Club is a monologue by Suzanne, and The Dramatic Circle is a radio play. Meanwhile, the mise-en-scène in She Talks to Beethoven and The Ohio State Murders is less violent than in Kennedy’s early work, and the narrator, Suzanne, seems more in control of the events she remembered. Kennedy’s American Eurocentric influences—from Charlotte Brontë to Bette Davis—were released into her plays, interestingly, after she visited Africa in 1960. There she ‘‘discovered the place of my ancestors,’’ bought an African mask, ‘‘a woman with a bird flying through her forehead,’’ listened to the owls at night and was afraid, and thought about herself as a separate person: ‘‘The solitude under the African sun had brought out a darkness in me. I wanted to be more separate.’’ This journey was a turning point in her writing and its influences are clear in the works that followed. OTHER WORKS: Cities in Bezique (1969). The Lennon Play: In His Own Write (with John Lennon and Victor Spinetti,1969). Adrienne Kennedy in One Act (1988). Sleep Deprivation Chamber: A Theatre Piece (1996). Plays included in: Poet Lore (1965), Collision Course (1968), New American Plays (1968), New Black Playwrights: An Anthology (1968, 1996), Best Short Plays of 1970, Black Drama: An Anthology (1970), Black Theater (1971), Scripts One (1971), More Plays from Off-Off-Broadway (1972), Broadway Book

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(1972), Spontaneous Combustion (1972), Kintu Drama (1974), Woman as Writer (1978), Wordplay Three (1984), Moon Marked and Touched by Sun: Plays by African-American Women (1994), Black Theatre USA: Plays by African Americans 1847 to Today (1996), Plays for the End of the Century (1996), and others. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brown, E. B., Shackles on a Writer’s Pen: Dialogism in Plays by Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, Adrienne Kennedy, and Ntozake Shange (1997). Martin, H. H., ‘‘Adrienne Kennedy: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography and Essay’’ (thesis, 1993). Page, J. A. Selected Black American Authors: An Illustrated Bio-Bibliography (1977). Peterson, B. L., Contemporary Black American Playwrights and Their Plays: A Biographical Directory and Dramatic Index (1988). Robinson, M., The Other American Drama (1994). Singh, Y. Stages in the Funnyhouse: The Dramaturgy of Adrienne Kennedy (dissertation, 1998). Thomas, C. ‘‘The Daughter and Her Journey of Self-Definition in the Familial Plays of Adrienne Kennedy’’ (thesis, 1985). Reference works: Black Writers (1989). CA (1982, Online 1999). CANR (1989). Contemporary Dramatists (1988). Dictionary of the Black Theatre (1983). DLB (1985). Notable Women in the American Theatre (1989). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Women in American Theatre (1981). Other references: American Literature (Sept. 1991). American Theatre (1988). College Language Association Journal (1976). Drama Review (1977). MELUS (Fall 1985). Modern Drama (Dec. 1985, March 1986, March 1989). Negro American Literature Forum (1975). NYT (reviews of first productions: 14 Jan., 20 June, 9 July, 14 July 1964; 13 Jan., 19 Jan., 1 Nov. 1969; 11 March 1976; 21 May 1980; 20 Sept. 1985). Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present (1989). Studies in Black Literature (1975). Theatre Journal (March 1992, 1996) Theatre Southwest (April 1989). —ANNE FLECHE

KENYON, Jane Born 23 May 1947, Ann Arbor Michigan; died 23 April 1995, Wilmot, New Hampshire Married Donald Hall, 1972; children: Philippa, Andrew Jane Kenyon was born and raised in the rural Midwest, outside Ann Arbor. She attended a one-room school until she was in the fifth grade, when she went into the Ann Arbor school system. Though Kenyon grew up in the country, her father was a musician, not a farmer, and as Donald Hall, her husband, said in an interview with Marian Blue (1993), ‘‘Her father and mother made a union of opposites: a sophisticated house and life in a country setting.’’ As there were few neighbors and children, this country setting provided Kenyon with the chance to create a rich interior life in conjunction with the natural world. She has said her childhood solitude may have contributed to her becoming a poet—that and, as she told David Bradt in a 1993 interview, ‘‘the

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fact that when I was introduced to poetry, which was not till junior high school, I was terribly drawn by strong emotions that I could see were the stuff of poetry.’’ Kenyon attended the University of Michigan, where she obtained her B.A. and then M.A. It was during her time there that she met Hall, a poet and teacher at the university. She and Hall married in the spring of her graduation in 1972. In 1975 Donald took a year leave from teaching, and the couple moved to New Hampshire to live in his family house. At the end of their year there, they decided to stay on in rural New Hampshire to write full time. Kenyon felt in moving to New Hampshire, she was regaining some sense of the life of her childhood. And it was here that Kenyon began, as she told Bill Moyers (interview 1993), ‘‘to work seriously as a poet.’’ Also in her interview with Bradt she said, ‘‘Moving here has been critical for both of us in our development as artists. This is ‘the vale of soul-making,’ as Keats says. This place has made us both considerably different people.’’ Kenyon published her first book, Room to Room, in 1978, only three years after their move. This first book is a poetic record of her transition from life in Ann Arbor and the Midwest to life in rural New England and of the difficulties of making a place for herself as a woman and wife in a house with many ghosts: ‘‘Here in this house, among photographs / of your ancestors, their hymnbooks and old / shoes. . . / I move from room to room, / a little dazed, like the fly. I watch it / bump against each window (‘‘From Room to Room’’). Kenyon published in journals and small magazines, but the next book of her own poems, The Boat of Quiet Hours, didn’t come out for another eight years. In the late 1970s, at Robert Bly’s urging, she began reading Anna Akhmatova’s poetry, and for pleasure and also because she was frustrated with the translations she was able to find, she began translating the Russian poet’s poems. When Bly read some of these translations, he asked her to do a book for his Eighties Press. These excellent translations came out in 1985 as Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova and are reprinted in the posthumously published A Hundred White Daffodils (1999). Kenyon felt working on the translations greatly impacted her own work; in the Bradt interview she said she ‘‘struggled not to change [Akhmatova’s] images. . . . Then I would turn to my own poems with this tremendous sense of freedom, and I would begin to feel some power in my own work for the first time. . . . I saw that there was nothing to limit me but my own imagination.’’ The Boat of Quiet Hours, like all her volumes, draws from life in rural New Hampshire. She looks outward at the seasons and cycles of nature in order to evoke and name what is inward. Her inward life lived in close proximity to the natural world is the ground of much of Kenyon’s work. Her lyric poems have a quiet force and are what she hoped would be ‘‘short, intense, musical cries of the spirit.’’ Kenyon suffered from depression throughout her life but was not properly diagnosed until she was in her late thirties. She struggled to keep her depression in check, but was not always able to and many of her poems come out of her experiences of deep melancholy. Poetry was a refuge for her, a ‘‘safe place,’’ and also


a way of making something constructive and hopeful out of painful and enervating experiences: ‘‘Nothing but white—the air, the light: / only one brown milkweed pod / bobbling in the gully, smallest / brown boat on the immense tide. / A single green sprouting thing / would restore me.’’ (’’February: Thinking of Flowers’’). In addition to her gardens giving her hope in winter, they were a much tapped resource for her poetry and for a column she wrote for the local paper, the Concord Monitor. Kenyon was a great gardener, and during gardening season she spent mornings writing and afternoons in the garden—a balance of time and activities she loved. Writing poetry was also a place to work through the spiritual, to exclaim and wonder about the world and all it can throw at one. In 1986 Kenyon had her first struggle with cancer, and then her husband was diagnosed with cancer of the liver. Kenyon drew strength from her faith, as well as from the act of writing. She told Bill Moyers, ‘‘It’s odd but true that there really is consolation from sad poems, and it’s hard to know how that happens. There is the pleasure of the thing itself, the pleasure of the poem, and somehow it works against sadness.’’ The title poem of her next volume, Let Evening Come (1990), evokes this spiritual strength: ‘‘To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop / in the oats, to the air in the lung / let evening come / Let it come, as it will, and don’t / be afraid. God does not leave us / comfortless, so let evening come.’’ Kenyon’s work has received critical recognition over the years: she won the Avery and Julia Hopwood Award for poetry at the University of Michigan, was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1981) and from the New Hampshire Commission on the Arts (1984), and received a Guggenheim fellowship for 1992-93. She was New Hampshire’s poet laureate when she died of leukemia at the age of forty-six in the prime of her writing life. Two books have come out since her death: Otherwise: New and Selected Poems (1996), which has been a bestseller (unusual for any book of poetry), and One Hundred White Daffodils (1999), a collection of her prose as well as some poetry. Unfortunately, we won’t know what more Kenyon would have produced as a poet in her prime; what we do have are six volumes of exquisitely crafted lyric and prose that tug at our souls and hearts with the weight of her lived life. OTHER WORKS: Constance: Poems (1993). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hall, D., Without: Poems (1999). Kinnell, G., How Could She Not: For Jane Kenyon (1947-1995) (1998). Moyers, B. D., The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets (1995). Reference works: CA. Contemporary Women Poets. DLB. Other references: Bright Unequivocal Eye: Poems, Papers, and Remembrances from the First Jane Kenyon Conference, 1998 (forthcoming, 2000). Hall, D., Poets Read Their Work: Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon (video, 1977). Jane Kenyon (audiocassette, 1987). Jane Kenyon (video, 1989). Jane Kenyon: A Memorial Tribute (video, 1996). A Life Together (video, 1993, 1994). Nation (Apr. 1996). NYTBR (June 1987, Mar. 1991, Jan. 1997).

KERBER

Poetry (July 1997). The Poetry of Jane Kenyon, Ai, Lawrence Kearney and Kathleen Spivak (video, 1978). Virginia Quarterly (Winter 1979). WP (25 Apr. 1995). —GLYNIS BENBOW-NIEMIER

KERBER, Linda Kaufman Born 23 January 1940, New York, New York Daughter of Harry H. and Dorothy Haber Kaufman; married Richard Kerber, 1960; children: Ross, Justin In April 1997, Linda Kerber’s dazzling career was recognized by her election to the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences for her seminal historical research on the place of women in American history. Then, in April 1999, Kerber became the first recipient of a new Radcliffe Award for Distinguished Academic Scholarship given by the Radcliffe College Board of Trustees. Radcliffe’s award honored Kerber for her research in areas of women, gender, and society. For nearly three decades, historian Kerber has been teaching, by example, precisely the history she writes about. In her professional life as author of a number of important books on American history (an area of scholarship defined by men in every sense of the word until Kerber came along) and professor at a major research university, and in her personal life as wife to cardiologist Richard Kerber and mother to Ross and Justin, she has lived and competed in public and private worlds dominated by males. Kerber has experienced firsthand the conflicts dominating the personal lives of every woman who wishes to have a productive and meaningful career as well as children to nurture. She has written with considerable skill about the dilemma of the Revolutionary woman juggling the world of intellect and the world of domesticity. She refers often to the language of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which describes as ‘‘separate spheres’’ the areas of interest and responsibilities belonging to men and women. She employs eloquent and complex strategies to untangle this simple linguistic device that has served to subjugate women for centuries. In all her books and essays, she makes one point repeatedly and definitely: ‘‘One day we will understand the idea of separate spheres as primarily a trope, employed by people in the past to characterize power relations for which they had no other words and that they could not acknowledge because they could not name, and by historians in our own times as they groped for a device that might dispel the confusion of anecdote and impose narrative and analytical order on the anarchy of inherited evidence, the better to comprehend the world in which we live.’’ In 1985 Kerber was named May Brodbeck Professor in Liberal Arts at the University of Iowa. She has been on the faculty of the history department at Iowa since 1971. Her academic background includes Barnard College, where she earned a B.A. (1960), New York University, where she took an M.A. (1961), and Columbia University, where she earned a Ph.D. (1968). Her teaching posts before Iowa were at Stern College for Women, San

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Jose State College, and Stanford University. She has successfully integrated a teaching and scholarly career of great distinction with a long, happy marriage and two wonderful sons. In Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (now in its third edition since 1980), Kerber has presided over a reassessment of American history that has been described as ‘‘radical re-thinking.’’ Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, this book looks at the American Revolution through the eyes of women. Kerber describes women’s history in America as the effort to gain for themselves what the Revolution did not accomplish. If most people would agree history describes human nature and events, it seems abundantly clear that history should include the experience of women along with that of men. Yet, for a very long time, it didn’t. Kerber argues that women’s history is American history. She has been a central figure in establishing the disciplines we understand today as feminism and women’s studies. What seems obvious to us now at the end of the 20th century—that the language spoken by women reflects the economic and social realities experienced by women—is comparatively recent as an understood phenomenon. Kerber’s essays in Toward an Intellectual History of Women (1997) were published together as one volume but written over more than two decades. These essays have not simply redirected the history of women in America but revised it. Gender is no longer a term of exclusion. She has addressed this issue directly in U.S. History AS Women’s History: New Feminist Essays (1995, a collection edited with Alice Kessler-Harris and Kathryn Sklar), which examines specific historical events from a feminist perspective. In an essay ‘‘The Obligations of Citizenship,’’ Kerber writes, ‘‘Skepticism of the state, however, has never been and should not be limited by gender; if public life is to be an arena of human freedom, men and women will have to find ways to make it so.’’ She maintains that obligation is not duty, not a social contract, more than a political order or law: it is a fundamental right; it is a fundamental right of women. Her arguments about obligation have evolved recently into a much longer work, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (1998). The central drama of women’s rights becomes their absolution from public service and corresponding obligation to family life. Democracy, equality, citizenship, responsibility, loyalty coalesce into a historiography out of which women’s history, in particular, can be understood and explained. OTHER WORKS: Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America (1970). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Rethinking Political History (1996). Other references: Iowa City Press-Citizen (8 Apr. 1999). Journal of American History (June 1988). University of Iowa Literature, Science and the Arts Culture Diversity and Identity Seminar (1997). —KATHLEEN BONANN MARSHALL

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KERR, Jean (Collins) Born 10 July 1923, Scranton, Pennsylvania Daughter of Thomas J. and Kitty O’Neill Collins; married Walter Kerr, 1943 Jean Kerr earned an M.A. in theater from the Catholic University, where she met her husband, a dramatics professor who later became the New York Times theater critic. Kerr regards herself principally as a playwright and her essays as a diversion, but it is the latter that have gained vast popularity. The typical style of her plays and essays is the carefully polished imitation of easy conversation. Kerr wrote three plays for her husband’s direction at the Catholic University. The third, Jenny Kissed Me (1948), opened on Broadway, starring the famous comic actor Leo G. Carroll. Collaborating with her husband and the musician Jay Gorney, Kerr won praise for energy and intelligence in the revue, Touch and Go (1949). In the successful Broadway production John Murray Anderson’s Almanac (1953), Kerr’s sketch ‘‘Don Brown’s Body’’ uses the violent, sexually suggestive style of Mickey Spillane’s detective stories to lampoon orchestrated readings of Stephen Vincent Benet’s Civil War poem. In her most successful play, Mary, Mary (1961), the title character discovers her true, timid nature through a new admirer’s eyes but returns to her first love just before he can divorce her for a less disarming wife. Kerr’s urbane wit is not only richly decorative but integral to character: Mary antagonizes her husband not with her superior insight into his publishing business but with the hilarious sarcasm that masks her personal insecurity. Mary draws audience sympathy for her clever vulnerability, but she wins her man because she learns to demonstrate sophistication. Kerr again reveals troubled characters through witty repartee in Poor Richard (1964), an intense romantic comedy featuring a self-doubting, wisecracking widowed poet, whose internal conflict with grief overwhelms the ubiquitous love-triangle plot. As a thin disguise for the sensitive poet’s anguish, Kerr’s bright clowning is less satisfying than the feeling poetry evident in Richard’s best monologues. A self-denigrating woman is the protagonist in Finishing Touches (1973), a predictable drawing-room comedy that briefly challenges middle-aged self-righteousness with modern sexual freedom. Central characters face their own smugness but end up celebrating it. Kerr’s humorous, perfectly paced, comic dialogue suggests an unspoken and unresolved uneasiness over contemporary social change. Her most successful book, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies (1957), collects 15 humorous sketches written for popular magazines. Intelligent literary allusion and stylish satire enliven the familiar essay form, making spirited fun of an alert woman’s irritations with rambunctious sons, slick-magazine advice, and a celebrated husband. Phrasing motherly boasting as complaints, Kerr idealizes family affections. She burlesques the distressingly clichéd 1950s prescriptions for glamorous or maternal feminine


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behavior by opposing them with precise details. In 1965 Kerr adapted her sketches for a two-season NBC situation comedy about a suburban freelance writer, a college dramatics professor, and their four sons. The best pieces in The Snake Has All the Lines (1960) portray Kerr less as a homemaker than as an author revising a play in a rehearsal or growing cynical over mixed critical reviews. Tributes to her determined Irish mother and her awkward Catholic school days show Kerr learning the value of her generous verbal wit. In the best essay of her collection Penny Candy (1970), Kerr combines her two personae of a mother and a student of literature to recall her success in bringing her sons to share her love of poetry. Unfortunately, the made-to-order sketches for Family Circle and the Ladies’ Home Journal, which outnumber the more original work, force Kerr to act the housewife flustered by babytalk, wilting houseplants, cocktail parties, and her weight. In her introduction to How I Got to Be Perfect (1978), a new edition of her essays published over 20 years, Kerr confides a humorous disorientation with her problems of lengthened memories, self-acceptance, and occasional isolation of middle age. Alert to nuances in popular taste, she deftly updates her punch lines and topical references, but contemporary reviews praised the collection less for its craft in portraying common absurdities than for its momentary glimpses of poetic perceptiveness. Humorously alert to absurd trivialities, the strong female character who dominates Kerr’s essays and plays saves herself from selfish insignificance by her own generous instinct. During the 30 years of her writing career, Kerr’s essays have grown loose and self-revealing while her stage comedies have faced increasingly difficult social issues within constricting dramatic unities. Wary of intimidating her readers, Kerr rarely mentions the strains her writing and successful marriage place on each other. With merry charm, in the early 1960s, she seemed to synthesize the careers of Larchmont homemaker and Broadway playwright and thus unexpectedly became an American ideal, without being forced to scrutinize the difference between the values she held and those she represented. OTHER WORKS: The Big Help (1947). King of Hearts (with E. Brooke, 1954; film version, That Certain Feeling, 1956). Goldilocks (with W. Kerr and L. Anderson, 1958). Lunch Hour (1982). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Kearns, C., Motherland: Writings by Irish American Women About Mothers and Daughters (1999). Owens, E. S. B., ‘‘The Changing Image of Women as Seen in Plays of Jean Kerr’’ (thesis, 1983). Reference works: Best Plays of 1980-1981: The Burns Mantle Yearbook (1981). CA (1969). CB (July 1958). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). WA. Other references: New York Theatre Critics Reviews (194673). NYT (18 Feb. 1973). Saturday Review (30 Nov. 1957). Theatre Arts (Mar. 1961). Time (14 Apr. 1961). —GAYLE GASKILL

KEYES, Frances Parkinson (Wheeler) Born 21 July 1885, Charlottesville, Virginia; died 3 July 1970, New Orleans, Louisiana Daughter of John H. and Louise Johnson Wheeler; married Henry W. Keyes, 1904; children: three sons An only daughter, Frances Parkinson Keyes received but seven years of formal schooling—in Boston, Switzerland, Berlin—as was appropriate for a ‘‘gently born girl.’’ Her husband, more than 20 years her senior, with whom she had three sons, was governor of New Hampshire and served three terms in the U.S. Senate. She describes her role as hostess in Capital Kaleidoscope (1937). Always a rapid and omnivorous reader, Keyes wrote as a child but was not encouraged. She began publishing after her marriage because of desperate financial need. Soon a regular contributor to Good Housekeeping, she was widely known for monthly ‘‘Letters from a Senator’s Wife,’’ which ran for 14 years, and for other political analyses. A contributing editor from 1923 to 1936, Keyes wrote about her world trip in 1925-26 and another to South America in 1929-30. These formative years are described in All Flags Flying (1972), an incomplete autobiography published posthumously. Keyes contributed to other magazines, was editor of the Daughters of the American Revolution’s National Historical Magazine from 1937 to 1939, and was a frequent lecturer. Keyes’ fame rests upon her extraordinary career as a bestselling novelist. Her first novel, The Old Gray Homestead, was published in 1919. Not until Honor Bright (1936) did she have a bestseller, but she was seldom without one throughout the next decades. In spite of frequent and severe illness and a crippling back injury, Keyes was a person of great vitality and enthusiasm, many interests, extraordinary dedication to work, and an urgent need for fulfillment. She produced very long and fluent novels that reflected careful and diligent research to ensure correctness of setting and circumstance. She reveled in descriptions of rich foods, elegant clothes, gay parties, and exotic locales. Older civilizations fascinate, but also evidence decay; in her novels promise in the modern world lies in simplicity and hard work. Keyes favored accounts of a family’s fortunes through several generations. The first novels are set in New England, Washington, and Europe. Perhaps the most lavish is Crescent Carnival (1942), sumptuously detailing complex New Orleans traditions through three generations. After its enormous success, she spent her winters in Louisiana and developed a pattern in which she wrote Louisiana books alternatively with other novels. The highly successful Dinner at Antoine’s (1948) added mystery to her customary romance. The typical Keyes heroine is young, beautiful, naive, and in love with an older experienced man who is ennobled by passion

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for her. Temptations abound, but high principle triumphs, though the rule that a Keyes heroine is never seduced altered in the later novels. Her women are competent, loyal, and stoic in their acceptance of hardships. Some have personal careers, but usually their lives are shaped by marriage, and fulfillment comes in motherhood, woman’s triumph for Keyes. Religion was important to Keyes. Though her family was Congregational, she was attracted to formal ritual and was confirmed at fourteen in the Episcopal church. In Along a Little Way (1940), she describes her gradual growth to Catholicism and recent conversion. She wrote about a number of saints’ lives and often described religious practice in her novels. Her novels had a large audience in England and were also translated into several languages. Keyes received many awards and honorary degrees. Although resigned to not receiving critical acclaim, she made a strong case for her craft in The Cost of a Best-Seller (1950). Admittedly sentimental and often rhetorical, her high romance is strengthened by common sense and diversified incidents. Keyes’ exposition of political and social circumstances and concern with international relations challenged American provincialism.

OTHER WORKS: The Career of David Noble (1921). Queen Anne’s Lace (1930). Silver Seas and Golden Cities (1931). Lady Blanche Farm: Senator Marlowe’s Daughter (1933). The Safe Bridge (1934). The Happy Wanderer (1935). Written in Heaven (1937). Parts Unknown (1938). The Great Tradition (1939). Fielding’s Folly (1940). The Sublime Shepherdess (1940). All That Glitters (1941). The Grace of Guadalupe (1941). Also the Hills (1943). The River Road (1945). Came a Cavalier (1947). Once on Esplanade (1947). All This is Louisiana (1950). Joy Street (1950). Therese: Saint of a Little Way (1950). Steamboat Gothic (1952). Bernadette of Lourdes (1953). The Royal Box (1954). Frances Parkinson Keyes Cook-book (1955). Mother of Our Saviour (1955). The Blue Camellia (1957). Land of Stones and Saints (1957). Victorine (1958). Frances Parkinson Keyes Christmas Gift (1959). Mother Cabrini: Missionary to the World (1959). Station Wagon in Spain (1959). The Chess Players (1960). Roses in December (1960). The Third Mystic of Avila (1960). The Rose and the Lily (1961). Madame Castel’s Lodger (1962). The Restless Lady, and Other Stories (1963). Three Ways of Love (1963). A Treasury of Favorite Poems (1963). The Explorer (1964). I, the King (1966). Tongues of Fire (1966). The Heritage (1968).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1969, 1971). Catholic Authors: Contemporary Biographical Sketches (1948). TCA, TCAS. Other references: Catholic World (Jan. 1943). CSM (28 Nov. 1950). NYHTB (19 Nov. 1939). NYTBR (8 Nov. 1936, 8 Nov. 1942, 9 Dec. 1945). Time (26 Dec. 1960). —VELMA BOURGEOIS RICHMOND

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KILMER, Aline Murray Born 1 August 1888, Norfolk, Virginia; died 1 October 1941, Stillwater, New Jersey Wrote under: Aline Kilmer, Aline Murray Daughter of Kenton and Ada Foster Murray; married Joyce Kilmer, 1908 (died); children: five Among the literary members of Aline Murray Kilmer’s family were her father, an editor; her stepfather, Henry Mills Alden, the editor of Harper’s magazine; and her husband, one of the more famous poets of the day and the poetry editor of the Literary Digest. Two of her sons were published poets. Kilmer was educated at Rutgers Prep and at the Vail-Deane School in Elizabeth, New Jersey. In 1913 both she and her husband entered the Roman Catholic church. They were the parents of five children. In 1918 Sgt. Joyce Kilmer of the ‘‘Fighting 69th’’ was killed in action in France. Although she had published a few poems before her marriage, selling her first poem to St. Nicholas magazine at age eleven, Kilmer was always overshadowed by her husband, both professionally and socially. Most critics concede, however, that she was the better poet. After his death, her reserve lessened, and she occasionally made lecture tours to help with expenses. She served as vice president of the Catholic Poetry Society of America. The death of her husband had been preceded by the death of one child from polio and was followed in a few years by the death of another. Both the subject matter and the tone of her work were largely determined by these events and her task of bringing up a family alone. In Candles that Burn (1919), Kilmer presents intensely personal poems, most of them about children, and many of these dealing with the still-raw pain of personal bereavement or the fear of loss. In some of these she is unable to transcend the experience, yet already in this first volume one can occasionally see the note of gentle irony that pervades her best mature poetry. Vigils (1921) continues Kilmer’s emphasis on personal preoccupations. A mere two strings of her instrument suffice, she writes in ‘‘The Harp’’: ‘‘One is for love and one for death. . . . I play on the strings I know.’’ Although the cry of pain reappears in many of these poems, the poet has learned to transmute her material and to choose more evocative imagery. The rhythms have become her own. Literary subjects—the Lady of Shalott and Sappho—appear. In The Poor King’s Daughter (1925), Kilmer has perfected her distinctive tone of gentle but unrelieved disillusionment, of irony delicate but never bitter. The intimacy remains, but a reticence disciplines it. The poet has now learned to maintain distance and to detach the poetic process from the experience. In ‘‘Favete Linguis,’’ the poet admires the plum tree heavy with blossom but warns: ‘‘You lift your lute to celebrate its beauty / And all its petals flutter to the ground.’’ The theme of enforced silence emerges again in the fine poem ‘‘Against the Wall.’’ Here the irony of the parent calmly mending armor for the sons’ fights, while silently lamenting the emptiness of victory and glory,


achieves tragic overtones by Kilmer’s use of conversational language and rhythms. Kilmer’s prose works include two children’s books and Hunting a Hair Shirt (1923), a collection of brief personal essays similar in theme and tone to her verse.

OTHER WORKS: Emmy, Nicky, and Greg (1927). A Buttonwood Summer (1929). Selected Poems (1929).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Catholic Authors: Contemporary Biographical Sketches, 1930-1947 (1948). CB (Dec. 1941). Other references: America (18 Oct. 1941). Bookman (Dec. 1921, May 1925). Catholic World (June 1929). Commonweal (17 July 1929, 14 Aug. 1929). —ARLENE ANDERSON SWIDLER

KIMBROUGH, Emily Born 23 October 1899, Muncie, Indiana Daughter of Hal C. and Charlotte Wiles Kimbrough; married John Wrench, 1926 (divorced); children: two daughters Emily Kimbrough graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1921, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and in 1923 began a career in advertising copywriting for Marshall Field & Co. that was to lead, four years later, to the managing editorship of the Ladies’ Home Journal, a position she held until 1929. In 1929 she gave birth to twin daughters; she was divorced after only several years of marriage. By 1934 Kimbrough’s articles had begun to appear in various national magazines, including Country Life, House and Garden, Travel, Readers’ Digest, and Saturday Review of Literature. Even a reader of Parents’ magazine would have come across her down-to-earth advice about raising twins. By 1968 she had devoted herself to accounts of her frequent travels to Europe and around America. Emily Kimbrough used to be a household name. ‘‘Oh, I LOVED Our Hearts Were Young and Gay’’ is the inevitable cry of almost anyone old enough to read in 1942. Kimbrough’s first and most famous work, written jointly with Cornelia Otis Skinner, was a chronicle of their 19th summer, spent in Europe contracting measles on an ocean liner, overnighting in an unsuspected brothel, lunching at the Ritz in Paris, and generally charming one continent with their exploits and another with the reminiscences of them. Kimbrough’s next volume, We Followed Our Hearts to Hollywood (1943), describes the summer she and Skinner spent writing a film script for Our Hearts. Amusement and satisfaction remain with the reader of any of Kimbrough’s subsequent books, which followed Our Hearts

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Were Young and Gay in rapid succession. At one time, Kimbrough’s travel books were standard guides to England, Italy, Portugal, Greece, France, and Ireland; that they have fallen out of currency is our loss. Full of Michelin-type restaurant and hotel lore, news of vistas and sights far beyond the guidebooks, and chatty stories of the people behind the walls and doors forming the boundaries of most tourists’ experiences, they were the guiding tour lights of an entire generation. Kimbrough does more than recount the sights seen or merely detail the humorous adventures of four middleaged women who ‘‘no speaka da language’’—she takes the reader into the atmosphere of the places she visits, and throughout she provides the reader with the most intimate historical details. But it is not only for her travel books that Kimbrough deserves to be remembered. Through Charley’s Door (1952) is an intimate biography of Marshall Field & Co. and takes the reader to the heart of Chicago’s venerable department store. Equally good are her stories of her childhood. How Dear to My Heart (1944, reissued most recently in 1991) introduces six-year-old Emily about to begin school. The innocence and imagination of childhood are recreated in this story of her extended family (including Indiana Senator Charles M. Kimbrough), of the birth of her baby brother, and of her growing understanding of the world. In The Innocents from Indiana (1950), 11-year-old Emily moves from Muncie to Chicago and learns to love the big city in a series of adventures that includes playing catch unawares with Douglas Fairbanks and driving around and around the block in an electric car that cannot be stopped because its clutch is stuck. In Now and Then (1972), Kimbrough goes back, through her twins’ childhood experiences, to more of her own. These delightful, low-key books, reminiscent of James Thurber, should be included among adolescent reading selections, for they reproduce the puzzlement and triumph of a child growing into herself. Kimbrough’s writing has a simplicity and directness that immediately attracts. Her own naive pleasure at what she has seen, heard, and experienced is communicated directly to the reader. Of course, such simplicity dates the travel books; they could hardly be written in these days of jet travel, inflation, and mass education. It is for this reason that Kimbrough is an important mid-20thcentury writer, for she manages to reproduce the wonderment of which the American, particularly the sophisticated American matron, is no longer capable. In addition to a sharp sense of the times, Kimbrough’s books present a great deal of information, even if much of it is dated, that provides the sort of rich historical background lately recognized in the writings of such regionalists as Jewett and Chopin. Kimbrough’s readers can hardly help but experience an otherwise unrecapturable past. Each book ends before we want it to and dances around the edges of our memories. It is little wonder Our Hearts Were Young and Gay (most recently reprinted in 1983), remains beloved to this day. OTHER WORKS: Forty Plus and Fancy Free (1954). So Near and Yet So Far (1955). Water, Water Everywhere (1956). And a Right Good Crew (1958). Pleasure by the Busload (1961). Forever Old,

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Forever New (1964). Floating Island (1968, reissued 1984). Time Enough (1974). Better Than Oceans (1976). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ball, E., A Suite of Poems (1984). Cavanaugh, K., Design Review Guidelines for the Emily Kimbrough Historic District (1990). Reference works: CA (1976). CB (Mar. 1944). Indiana Authors and Their Books, 1917-1966 (1974). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Atlantic (Dec. 1942). NYTBR (22 Nov. 1942). Saturday Review (11 Dec. 1943). —LORALEE MACPIKE

KINCAID, Jamaica Born Elaine Potter Richardson, 25 May 1949, St. John’s, Antigua Daughter of Annie Richardson; married Allen Shawn, 1979; children: Annie, Harold Until she was sixteen, Jamaica Kincaid spent her life on the nine-by-twelve-mile island of Antigua. Her father was a carpenter; her mother ran the household and became the dominant figure in Kincaid’s childhood. Kincaid excelled in her government schools and was an avid reader and library user. However, she felt stifled and isolated on her small island, and at sixteen she left for New York City as an au pair. Realizing she would need a high school diploma, she obtained one in New York and subsequently attended Franconia College for one year. She then moved back to New York City and began writing. With the publication of her first story in 1973, she changed her name from Elaine Potter Richardson to Jamaica Kincaid. In the mid-1970s Kincaid became a staff writer for the New Yorker, where editor William Shawn provided immense help and support. Ten of the stories she wrote for the magazine became her first book, At the Bottom of the River (1983). Kincaid married Shawn’s son Allen and in 1985 the couple moved to North Bennington, Vermont. They have two children, and Kincaid divides her life between her family, writing at home, and giving lectures and readings. Kincaid’s books closely reflect her island culture and experience, and are a blend of fiction and autobiography. Her fictional style has progressed from the dreamlike images in her early stories to a more linear narrative form in the novels Annie John (1985) and Lucy (1990). Her voice, however, remains uniquely lyrical and exotic. Often her sentences repeat phrases in musiclike cadences, lulling the reader into Kincaid’s very special poetic rhythms. Critics have heard in her work the voices of Caribbean folktales. At the Bottom of the River begins with her most frequently anthologized story, ‘‘The Girl,’’ a one-page sentence of combative dialogue between mother and daughter. This love-hate relationship continues in others of these stories and throughout Kincaid’s work. Fantastic folklike images appear and disappear: a

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mother becomes a lizard, yet she also makes her daughter a mat from her own hair. The book is both a child’s nightmare and a vision of bliss and innocence. As in all of Kincaid’s writing the sense of place and the rhythms and colors of the Caribbean are powerful. Annie John, a penetrating look at a perceptive and vulnerable adolescent’s world, recollects similar childhood images and themes, but is written in a simpler, more narrative style. The intimacy tenyear-old Annie feels with her mother evolves into anger and fear as Annie is told by her mother that she can no longer be ‘‘a little me.’’ She rebels, trying on new ‘‘forbidden’’ relationships, deciding finally to depart from her island home. The end of the novel finds her on a boat headed north. Antigua is seen from a different, and far more bitter perspective in A Small Place (1988), a work of nonfiction. The reader is a tourist, the ‘‘you’’ of the essay who plucks the beauty of the island, yet remains blind to the reality of its poverty and foreign domination. Kincaid describes Antigua as a ‘‘prison of beauty’’ where, despite the end of slavery and the departure of the English ‘‘criminals,’’ political corruption persists. She sees little hope for positive change. Kincaid’s anger continues to ferment in her second novel, Lucy (1990), told through the eyes of a young woman newly arrived from ‘‘an island’’ and now an au pair to four blond sisters. Lucy’s penetrating observations of the family’s white world relentlessly uncover their mirages and self-deception. She sees the family’s white culture as domineering, both within their home and as far-reaching as the domination of her own island, and suffers as she discovers she is just as detached from this family as she was from her own. Lucy remains critical and separate. Her mother’s letters are unopened, and even after her father’s death, she chooses to stay away from her mother. At novel’s end, she begins to write. Kincaid’s career has developed and expanded into new forms in the early 1990s, including an adaptation of a Chekhov short story for public television. She has also written for the newly revamped journal Transitions and continues to publish frequently in the New Yorker. Whereas her previous novels portrayed a mother who was cruel, selfish, willful, and only sporadically capable of maternal love from the daughter’s point of view, in Autobiography of My Mother (1996), the mother tells her own story. The title, however, is somewhat misleading; the narrator’s mother died in childbirth, and though that mother is endlessly grieved, it is not her story. Rather it is Xuela Claudette Richardson’s story, the story of a fertile woman who chooses not to bear children. Kincaid has explained that although she is glad to have been born, she believes her own mother should never have had children, and with this book Kincaid created an alternate life story for her mother. As she recounts her anguish and loss-filled childhood in Dominica, her colonial schooling, and her first sexual experiences, the only emotion Xuela allows herself is contempt. Exercising her incredible will, Xuela creates herself, but the act of creation is one of negation as she defines what she won’t do or be. Her pivotal act of self-definition is a messy, painful, self-inflicted


abortion. Autobiography ends with Xuela in her 70s; she has surmounted all obstacles, submitted to no one, and her hatred is unabated. In My Brother, her 1997 memoir tracing the life and death of her brother in Antigua, Kincaid embraces a much wider range of emotions. This is another story of family and its inescapable pull, and at the center, once again, is a formidable mother figure. Again Kincaid expresses her ambivalence toward the Caribbean, its beauty, poverty, and distorted sexuality. And of course the story’s familiar heroine, the daughter who flees, is Kincaid herself. Critics welcomed the emotional breadth of My Brother and praised Kincaid’s unsparing honesty. As Kincaid follows the arc of her brother’s life, she examines her emotions with scientific precision, seeking to identify and name each one. ‘‘Love always feels better than not-love,’’ she says, but she decides her own intense feelings for her brother, disguised by anger, are finally less than love. Kincaid’s language continues to dazzle. Corresponding to the nonlinear nature of memory, she writes long, lyrical, looping sentences whose rhythm and tone are most often described as ‘‘incantatory.’’ My Brother is ultimately Kincaid’s own story of what might have been. As she compares her life to her brother’s, she recognizes how her own ruthlessness in cutting herself off from the life of her childhood was what saved her. In recent years Kincaid has turned her obsessive attention to gardening. In 1998 she edited the anthology My Favorite Plant: Writers and Gardeners on the Plants They Love. She is also working on a book about her own garden.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Perry, Donna, ‘‘An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid,’’ in Reading Black, Reading Feminist, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed. (1990). Reference works: CA 125 (1989). CLC (1987, 1991). Contemporary Novelists (1986). CB (March 1991). FC (1990). Other references: Bennington Banner (27 April 1991). Commonweal (4 Nov. 1988). Missouri Review (1992). Nation (18 Feb. 1991). NYT (7 Oct. 1990, 16 Jan.1996). NYTBR (4 Feb. 1996, 19 Oct. 1997). Salon (13 Jan. 1996). Slate (21 Oct. 1997). WRB (Nov. 1985). —SUSAN SWAN, UPDATED BY VALERIE VOGRIN

KING, Grace Elizabeth Born 29 November 1851, New Orleans, Louisiana; died 14 January 1932, New Orleans, Louisiana Daughter of William W. and Sarah Miller King The eldest of four girls in a family of eight children, Grace Elizabeth King was raised in the French-speaking Creole society

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of New Orleans by her Protestant mother and staunchly Confederate lawyer father. A member of the state legislature prior to the Civil War, he was barred for a time from practicing law for refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the Union. King’s memories of antebellum life and view of Southern defeat and Reconstruction were shaped by her youthful experiences of flight from New Orleans, loss of the family home, and years of relative privation. Only gradually did her father reestablish a thriving law practice. Like other cultivated upper-class whites who had lost most in the war, King became a conservative. Upon the family’s return to the city at the end of Union occupation, King attended the Institut St. Louis and graduated with a prize in French at age sixteen, after which she continued her studies at the school of Heloise Cenas, where she developed an interest in writing. Her skill in French led her to Maupassant and other French authors from whom she learned techniques of realism influential in her treatment of regional subjects. In 1904, with a brother and two unmarried sisters, King purchased a permanent home in New Orleans, their residence for the remainder of their lives. She made three trips to Europe, finding Paris most congenial to her writing, interest in theater, and friendships with women. Her criticism of what she considered George Washington Cable’s negative portrayals of Creole society in a conversation with the Century magazine editor in 1885 led to his challenge that some local author might try producing better work. From this stimulus grew her first story, ‘‘Monsieur Motte,’’ published in 1886 through the efforts of a family friend and respected advisor, Charles Dudley Warner, editor of Harper’s. At Warner’s invitation she visited Connecticut in 1887 and met, among others of the Nook Farm group, Samuel Clemens and his wife Olivia, who became her longtime confidant. On the whole she detested the North, finding affection for only a few admirable ‘‘exceptions.’’ Minor praise in the northern press led to the acceptance of other stories in monthlies such as Century. To ‘‘Monsieur Motte’’ she added three stories and published them as a first collection in 1888. Her stories centered on women’s experiences. Later, she wrote articles for Harper’s Bazaar, introducing the French intellectuals she met in Paris to American readers, and contributed a number of short pieces about such figures as Baudelaire, Mérimée, and Paul Desjardins to Warner’s Library of the World’s Best Literature (1896-97). From 1893 to 1898, King turned her attention to writing historical works about the territory and state of Louisiana, following the example of Charles Gayarré, a distinguished conservative Southern historian and beloved family friend. Jean Baptiste le Moyne (1892) is a biography of the Canadian founder of Mobile and New Orleans. With H. R. Ficklen, a Tulane University professor, she wrote A History of Louisiana (1893), primarily a school text. New Orleans: The Place and the People (1895), a model municipal history, is her best historical work. King wrote few stories and articles and only two novels in the last 20 years of her life. The Pleasant Ways of St. Médard (1916) is

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an autobiographical work dealing with the economic struggle and humiliation of the Reconstruction period; and La Dame de Sainte Hermine (1924), a historical romance set in 18th-century New Orleans. Creole Families of New Orleans (1921), an interesting interpretive history, is based on the lives of French and Spanish families who contributed to the development of the city’s culture in the 18th and 19th centuries. ‘‘The past is our only real possession in life’’ begins King’s Memories of a Southern Woman of Letters, published posthumously in 1932. More a study of King’s friendships than a detailed picture of her life, it recalls in an overly refined manner the genteel society King sought to reestablish after her family’s misfortunes. King was a competent realist at her best. Her fiction offers instructive contrast with that of Cable and Kate Chopin; her most notable efforts can be found in Balcony Stories (1893), several uncollected stories, New Orleans, and in sections of her Memories.

OTHER WORKS: Tales of a Time and Place (1892). DeSoto and His Men in the Land of Florida (1898). Stories from Louisiana History (with J. R. Ficklen, 1905). A Splendid Offer: A Comedy for Women (1926). Mount Vernon on the Potomac (1929).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bush, R., Grace King: A Southern Destiny (1983). Bush, R., Grace King of New Orleans: A Selection of Her Writings (1973). Civil War Women: The Civil War Seen Through Women’s Eyes in Stories by Louisa May Alcott, Kate Chopin, Eudora Welty, and Other Great Women Writers (1990). Elfenbein, A. S., Women on the Color Line: Evolving Stereotypes and the Writings of George Washington Cable, Grace King, Kate Chopin (1989). Gehman, M. E., ‘‘The Creole Controversy Between George Washington Cable and Grace King: A Thesis’’ (thesis, 1987). Heidari, M. W., ‘‘Grace King in Her Journals, 1886-1910’’ (thesis, 1991). Kirby, D. K., Grace King (1980). Lyles, E. R., ‘‘A Transitional Generation: Grace King’s World, 1852-1932’’ (thesis, 1991). Ripples of Dissent: Women’s Stories of Marriage in the 1890s (1996). Shannon, A. W., ‘‘Women on the Color Line: Subversion of Female Stereotypes in the Fiction of Cable, King, and Chopin’’ (thesis, 1984). Signet Classic Book of American Short Stories (1985). Slayton, G. C., ‘‘Grace E. King: Her Life and Works’’ (dissertation, 1974). Sneller, J. E., ‘‘Man-Figs and Magnolias, Ladies and Lariats Humor and Irony in the Writings of Three New Orleans Women, 1865-1916’’ (thesis, 1993). Williams, C. A., ‘‘A Southern Writer’s Retrospective: Betrayal, Rage and Survival in the Reconstruction Fiction of Grace King’’ (thesis, 1986). Reference works: DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB, 2. Other references: AL (March 1972). Louisiana Historical Quarterly (Oct. 1934). SLJ (Fall 1974). Southern Review (April 1977). —THEODORA R. GRAHAM

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KING, Laurie R. Born 19 September 1952, Oakland, California Daughter of Roger R. and Mary Dickson Richardson; married Noel A. King, 1977; children: Nathanael, Zoe Laurie R. King is an acclaimed mystery writer who won both the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe award and the British John Creasey award for her debut book, A Grave Talent (1993). Her two primary series—one consisting of three psychological thrillers starring K.C. (Kate) Martinelli, a present-day lesbian detective, and the other of four historical mysteries centering on Mary Russell, who matches wits with and ultimately marries a retired Sherlock Holmes—are very different in setting and tone. Despite their dissimilarities, the two series have many attributes in common. These include their focus on strong, multifaceted female protagonists, their attention to detail, and their realistic treatment of complex relationships. Both are also distinguished by the author’s compassion for characters that would often be written as two-dimensional villains. King’s father was a furniture restorer and her mother a librarian and curator. In addition to receiving a B.A. from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1977 and a 1984 postgraduate degree from the same institution’s Graduate Theological Union, King raised two children, worked as a coffee roaster, and held several volunteer positions. She launched her writing career in 1987, at age thirty-five, as her second child entered preschool. A Grave Talent introduced Martinelli, a San Francisco police inspector who grows professionally and emotionally from book to book. It’s not until page 180 of this work that readers discover Kate is a lesbian (whose lover is a paraplegic psychotherapist). In addition to a page-turning mystery, the book focuses on Kate’s relationship with her older, male partner and the trust that gradually grows between them. Although a Publisher’s Weekly reviewer pointed out cracks in the plot and felt the two main characters were less developed than they should be, the book garnered primarily positive reviews (as did future King works). For example, Library Journal wrote of A Grave Talent, ‘‘King’s intricate plotting, intriguing characters, and eye for detail make this an outstanding mystery and a great start to the series.’’ The second title in the Martinelli series is To Play the Fool (1995), in which the detective enlists the help of the dean of King’s real-life alma mater, the Graduate Theological Union. Critics applauded the book’s sharply drawn characters, particularly the homeless Brother Erasmus, who speaks only in scripture and literary allusions. Publishers Weekly’s stated, ‘‘Like the holy fools whose purposes frame her latest modern mystery, King practices her own magic here, conjuring up, after a slowish start, an indelibly affecting narrative from unexpected material.’’ The third Martinelli book, With Child (1996), again highlights the protagonist’s compassion, as well as her intelligence.


Mary Russell, a scholarly, young, would-be detective growing up in World War I England, is introduced as a 15-year-old in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice; or On the Segregation of the Queen (1994). Although written before A Grave Talent, its publication was delayed, in part due to copyright issues involving Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation. Russell meets the retired detective, who is busy keeping bees, and becomes his apprentice, matching him in intelligence and temperament as they solve the case of a U.S. senator’s kidnapped daughter. According to Booklist, ‘‘Everything about this book rings true, from the ambience of World War I England to the intriguing relationship between Holmes and Mary to the surprising final confrontation between Holmes and Moriarty’s daughter.’’ In the second Mary Russell mystery, A Monstrous Regiment of Women (1995), Russell and Holmes fall in love, and in A Letter of Mary (1996) they become husband and wife. While the New York Times Book Review called the latter a ‘‘smartly researched and thoroughly enjoyable historical mystery,’’ many reviewers were most taken with the relationship between the two characters. As Publisher’s Weekly noted, ‘‘King’s achievement is her depiction of the complex relationship between two individualists.’’ In 1997 came The Moor, a retelling of the classic Holmes story The Hound of the Baskervilles, in which Holmes and Russell revisit the case 20 years after Holmes’ first encounter. The work expertly combines the evolving relationship between the two characters and key elements of the original story, while adding historical figures such as the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould into the mix. Publishers Weekly called it a ‘‘captivating story’’ and King ‘‘a fluent writer,’’ although the publication also noted that ‘‘this effort is slightly hobbled by the slow coalescence of its subplots.’’ The fifth Russell and Holmes adventure, O Jerusalem (1999) takes the couple back to 1919, revisiting occupied Palestine where they had visited in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. King introduced a new protagonist, Anne Waverly, in A Darker Place (1998). A university professor and FBI operative, her involvement with a cult nearly two decades ago cost her her husband and young daughter. In this psychological suspense novel, her experiences give her unique insight as she infiltrates a religious cult called Change, but also cause personal complications. The story is typical of King in that it deals with difficult emotional issues and intricate characters evenhandedly and compassionately. ‘‘King presents Change’s leaders as neither simplistic opportunists nor frenzied maniacs, but rather as methodical true believers who inhabit an ambiguous and dangerous middle ground,’’ wrote Publishers Weekly. ‘‘Anne is equally hard to pigeonhole, a feisty, independent woman whose guilt about her family tragedy leads to a misplaced sense of responsibility toward two of the commune’s young wards.’’ From this description, it can be seen that Anne shares many of the attributes of King’s previous heroines. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference Works:CA 140 (1993). CANR 63 (1998). SATA 88 (1997). Other references: Booklist (1 Feb. 1993, 1 Feb. 1994). LJ (Jan. 1993, 15 May 1994, Jan. 1997). NYTBR (19 Feb. 1995, 17

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Sept. 1995, 5 Jan. 1997, 23 Nov. 1997). PW (28 Dec. 1992, 2 May 1994, 12 Dec. 1994, 18 Nov. 1996, 17 Nov. 1997, 21 Dec. 1998). School Library Journal (June 1997). —KAREN RAUGUST

KING, Louisa Yeomans Born 1863, Washington, New Jersey; died 16 January 1948, Milton, Massachusetts Wrote under: Mrs. Francis King Daughter of Alfred and Elizabeth Ramsay Yeomans; married Francis King, 1890; children: three A well-known garden writer in her time, Louisa Yeomans King was an influential and active supporter of the Garden Club movement and many horticultural societies. The daughter of a Presbyterian clergyman, she was educated at private schools. She was the mother of three children and lived for many years in Alma, Michigan, but moved to South Hartford, New York, in 1928. She was a founder of the Women’s National Farm and Garden Association, belonged to various horticultural societies, and served as a vice president of the Garden Club of America. In 1921 she was awarded the George Robert White medal by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society and in 1923 the Garden Club of America Medal of Honor. All of her garden books are concerned with the practical aspects of gardening and garden planning. While she often referred to her own gardens, she did not write the sort of personal garden books associated with writers like Gertrude Jekyll and Elizabeth Lawrence. Her work belongs to the large group of books by American women for American women encouraging their active participation in the art of gardening. Illustrated with photographs of elaborate garden schemes, most of King’s works chronicle the gardening possibilities of the prosperous middleclass American. While her advice is sound and her writing style admirable, much of her work is dated because she devotes much space to discussing particular named varieties available at that time. Her first book, The Well-Considered Garden (1915), went through many editions. Basically, it is an introduction to gardening on a somewhat rich scale, with chapters on ‘‘Color Harmony’’ and ‘‘A Small Spring Flower Border.’’ In ‘‘The Question of the Gardener’’ she writes, ‘‘A book on gardening in its varying aspects could hardly omit mention of that man who must be constantly in sight of those who garden, the gardener, the paid, the earnest, and almost always the friendly, assistant in our labors with flowers.’’ Among other advice she gives in this chapter on the gardener is to pay him well, at least $100 a month. Two of her very popular books, The Little Garden (1921) and Variety in the Little Garden (1923), were, however, less remote from the average American gardener. The premise behind these two books is that the usual in gardening with taste is a large garden, so the small garden requires special attention. In The Little Garden , she mourns the rise of the automobile, partly because a

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garage is now needed with most homes, taking up valuable garden space, and partly for social reasons: ‘‘I see sometimes the deterioration of the family, physical and mental, brought about by the Ford and its kind.’’

biology at the University of Arizona. Her work as a journalist and political rights activist has been the source of many of the themes of her poetry and fiction, but her central concern in all of her writing is the way women relate to the world.

King wrote extensively for garden magazines and for newspapers like the New York Times, and often her chapters first appeared elsewhere. One of her most interesting pieces is a chapter in Pages from a Garden Note-Book (1921), originally read at the opening of a dormitory for women agriculture students at Massachusetts Agricultural College (now the University of Massachusetts). In ‘‘Vocations for Women in Agriculture,’’ she tells of the founding of the Women’s National Farm and Garden Association in 1913. The goal of the organization was to encourage women to seek jobs on the land and to serve as a sort of information bureau about such work. Centered in Chicago, the association had members who raised such things as poultry, bees, petunia seed, and Poland China hogs. This association was part of the growing consciousness of women’s ability to do physical work outside the home. King looked forward to an extension of such opportunities for women.

The 12 stories of Homeland and Other Stories (1989) depict enduring women who seek to reconcile their quest for individual fulfillment with their sense of responsibility to the community. Their progress is often thwarted by political, social, or economic circumstances. Magda of ‘‘Island on the Moon’’ is a woman who would have been an artist ‘‘if her life had been better.’’ Instead, she ‘‘just has to ooze out a little bit of art in everything she does.’’

King’s nine books, published over a short period of 15 years, were among the most widely read garden books of her day. While lacking the scope and influence of Louise Beebe Wilder and the scholarship of Helen M. Fox and Elizabeth Lawrence, King was probably closer than any of these women to the average middle class reader. OTHER WORKS: Chronicles of the Garden (1925). The Beginner’s Garden (1927). The Flower Garden Day by Day (1927). The Gardener’s Colour Book (1929). From a New Garden (1930). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: NAW (1971). Other references: NYT (18 Jan. 1948). —BEVERLY SEATON

KINGSOLVER, Barbara Born 8 April 1955, Annapolis, Maryland Daughter of Wendell R. and Virginia Henry Kingsolver; married Joseph Hoffman, 1985 (divorced 1993); Steven Hopp; children Camille, Lily Barbara Kingsolver, working as a journalist in 1983, drove into the mining town of Clifton, Arizona, to cover the strike against the Phelps Dodge Copper Corporation. Her book, Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 (1989), was Kingsolver’s tribute to the women who kept the strike alive. It was also her introduction to the way politics work for women— down and dirty. Born in Maryland, Kingsolver grew up in eastern Kentucky and subsequently moved to Arizona. She graduated from DePauw University (B.A., 1977) and later completed a master’s degree in

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Kingsolver’s novels focus on women seeking their place in community while developing a sense of self. In her first, The Bean Trees (1988), protagonist Taylor Greer flees rural Kentucky and entrapment in what happens to all her friends—pregnancy. Her odyssey includes finding a Cherokee baby, whom she names Turtle, in her car. They settle in Tucson, finding a place in the Jesus Is Lord Used Tire Shop, whose proprietor offers sanctuary to Central American refugees. In that world, Taylor and Turtle find their own sanctuary and become a family. In Pigs in Heaven (1993), the sequel to Bean Trees, the community Taylor and Turtle have forged is under threat. Annawake Fourkiller, a Cherokee lawyer dedicated to returning Native American children to the custody of the tribe, starts proceedings to gain custody of Turtle. The struggle for the child sends Taylor on another odyssey to escape her responsibility to Turtle’s people. Finally, she returns to the reservation and finds that, because of a Cherokee great-grandmother, it is also her tribe. Animal Dreams (1990) combines the personal quest for identity with the larger quest for human rights. Codi Noline, a medical doctor turned high school teacher, returns to Grace, Arizona, to understand her family’s past. Her sister, Hallie, chooses commitment to the politics of the future and goes to Nicaragua while Codi retreats into herself to try to understand her place in the cosmos of Grace. The balance of the personal and the political is a hallmark of Kingsolver’s fiction and has parallels in her poetry. Another America (1992), a dual-language text with Spanish translations by Rebeca Cartes, captures women’s entry into the arena of politics, violence, and survival. Kingsolver’s poems chronicle the struggle for community that keeps women strong. Throughout her work, Kingsolver seeks a dialogue among women of the many cultures of the U.S.—Native American, Latino, Anglo—as they encounter each other and find ways to establish community in difference. Among these women is the Cherokee great-grandmother who appears again and again in Kingsolver’s work and who, like the Great Mother, watches the unfolding history of all her children. Kingsolver writes about family, community, and the natural world. Her exploration of these themes continue in both the fiction and nonfiction of two recent works. High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never (1995) is a collection of 25 essays the author said gave her the opportunity to step from behind her mask of fiction and to say, ‘‘I, Barbara Kingsolver, believe this.’’ The


essays include her comments on motherhood, property, the place of humans in the animal kingdom, the effects of the Gulf War, her attitude toward housework, the art of fiction writing, as well as her stint as a keyboard player in a band of bestselling authors that included Stephen King and Amy Tan. Her honest and witty personal and political observations cover the defiance of her two-year-old daughter, the ethics of a wild pig who eats up her garden, and the experience of buying a love fetish in a West African market. In the early 1960s Kingsolver lived in the Congo when her parents were health care workers. Out of this experience came The Poisonwood Bible (1998), a symbolic parallel to the Congo’s struggle for independence, this novel is the story of a minister who comes to a small African village in 1959 to convert the natives. There he not only fails to deliver his message of Christianity because he mispronounces basic words in the tribal language, but he also refuses to seek help from the village community in times of flood, drought, malaria, and ant attacks. Ultimately, he and his family are ejected from the village when the villagers decide their traditional gods are better than Jesus. As always in Kingsolver’s books, the story unfolds from the perspective of the female characters—the preacher’s wife and four daughters. Kingsolver’s powerful and simple writing style addresses the problem of getting on with the business of living. While political issues such as race, sex, wealth, poverty, greed, and justice appear as driving forces, her emphasis is on probing into how personal relationships fit into the overarching picture. She continues to enlighten her readers as she delves into this question by expressing her views in her own words and in the words of her women characters. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: ANR 60 (1998). CA 129 (1989). CLC 55 (1992). Other works: Ms. (April 1988). NYTBR (10 April 1988, 5 June 1988, 11 June 1989, 7 Jan. 1990, 2 Sept. 1990, 28 July 1991). The Progressive (Dec. 1998, Feb. 1996). Time (24 Sept. 1990, 9 Nov. 1998). Trachtman, P., ‘‘High Tide in Tucson,’’ in Smithsonian (June 1996). WRB 5:8 (May 1988). Wootten, S., ‘‘In a State of Hopefulness: Barbara Kingsolver Swims At High Tide,’’ in Sojourners (May/June 1996). —MARY A. MCCAY, UPDATED BY PAULA C. MURPHY

KINGSTON, Maxine Hong Born 27 October 1940, Stockton, California Daughter of Tom and Ying Lan Chew Hong; married Earll Kingston, 1962 Maxine Hong Kingston’s parents immigrated from China in the 1930s, eventually setting up a laundry in Stockton, where Kingston worked as a child. She received a degree in English from the University of California at Berkeley and studied toward an

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advanced degree in education. In 1967 she moved to Honolulu and from then until 1977 taught English at the Mid-Pacific Institute, a private coeducational high school. In 1977 Kingston was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Hawaii, where she taught creative writing. She has contributed many articles and reviews to popular and literary magazines. Winner of the 1976 National Book Critics’ Circle Award for nonfiction, her first book, The Woman Warrior, has been variously viewed as a novel, a memoir, and an autobiography. In it Kingston recreates in five sketches the imagined life of a Chinese aunt who committed suicide after bearing a child out of wedlock; the training and exploits of a legendary Chinese woman warrior; the disjunctively similar training and exploits of Kingston’s own mother, first as a doctor in China and then as the mother of six children born after she arrived in America at the age of forty-five to run a Chinese laundry; the failure of another of Kingston’s aunts to adapt to modern life after the husband she came from China to reclaim after 30 years rejected her in favor of his modern American wife; and, finally, the author’s own struggles with all the ghosts of her past as she balances the Chinese heritage, largely unarticulated, and the American life which impinges so painfully and immediately upon her childhood. Throughout the book move ghosts. There are the shrouded villagers who terrorize the ‘‘no-name’’ aunt; the old-young couple who trains the woman warrior in their fantasy mountain fastness. We confront our everyday selves in the multitude of ghosts who populate the world of the young Kingston: garbage ghosts, meter-reader ghosts, newsboy ghosts, half-ghosts of Chinese immigrant children raised in America, and finally the unnamed but insistent ghost of Kingston’s own Americanized self as she torments a remnant of her past who, like her, refuses to speak in public. It is these ghosts that unite the five sketches— ghosts of the past, of otherness, of a larger, corporeal world which only gradually merges with emotional reality. It is only by attempting to retrace the legends told by her family and to remake them into her own life that Kingston comes to uneasy terms with them. And yet she is beset by difficulties: her mother will not tell what is truth and what desire, and the child cannot often distinguish. ‘‘I don’t see how [the Chinese] kept up a continuous culture for five thousand years,’’ she remarks. ‘‘Maybe they didn’t; maybe everyone makes it up as they go along.’’ But her attempt to shape the world through her own legends proves insufficient too, and she flees from the spectre of forcing another shy Chinese girl into the legend Kingston would, but cannot quite, create. With maturity comes the inevitable questioning: Perhaps the ghosts have nothing to do with the struggle; perhaps ‘‘what I once had was not Chinese-sight at all but childsight that would have disappeared eventually without such struggle.’’ Oneself becomes the ultimate elusive ghost. Kingston crosses the ultimate cultural barrier into the mind, where cultural patterns are but archetypes. The unheroic, vulnerable American-born child both embodies and is descended from the woman warrior, invulnerable symbol of heroism from whom all of us are descended and whose blood, both heroic and ghostly,

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runs in all veins. The Woman Warrior is short and elliptical. It sounds like a Chinese translation, with simple sentences and flat direct statements. As in poetry, much is left to the reader. The book achieves through style and tone a force of pure incontrovertibility which in large part creates its aura of universality.

and stereotypes that can sometimes seem completely different and at other times strangely conflated. He frequently invokes and identifies with the trickster King of the Monkeys of Chinese folklore, which becomes an ‘‘American Monkey’’ by the end of the book.

Since the publication of The Woman Warrior (1976), Kingston has become one of the most critically praised and best known contemporary writers in the U.S. and by far the most studied Asian-American writer. Devoting herself wholly to her writing since the late 1970s, she won the 1981 nonfiction American Book Award for her narrative China Men and the American Academy and Institute of Art and Letters Award for literature in 1990.

Kingston has been criticized by some for promoting a fake exotic Asian-American image or for catering to ‘‘mainstream’’ tastes at the expense of ethnic authenticity. It is precisely the notion of ‘‘authenticity’’ that Kingston questions while she affirms the existence and significance of tradition and history. She is one of the premiere interpreters of the fluctuating and persistent nature of those racial and ethnic categories in the U.S. that are impossible both to escape and to fix with any certainty.

A series of biographical/autobiographical narrations, China Men recounts the encounters of several generations of Kingston’s male ancestors with the U.S. and graphically examines the difficult questions of race, ethnicity, and nationality in America. These men often work in menial or marginal jobs—as a farmworker clearing land in Hawaii, as a laborer building the transcontinental railroad, as the owner of a small laundry. Yet these jobs are often at the foundation of the communities in which these men and their families live. The men whose stories are told remain outside ‘‘mainstream’’ U.S. society in many respects, victims of virulent racist discrimination, culturally enforced silence, and violence. Their identification as ‘‘Chinese’’ is also called into question, however: one uncle, deranged by dreams of the U.S. and the Communist Revolution in China, goes there, to a ‘‘home’’ he may never have previously seen, and disappears; the narrator’s father is cheated by his Chinese partners in a laundry. As in Kingston’s earlier work, dreams of China and American dreams collide with American racial constructions and the actual conditions of immigrant life in the U.S., producing an unstable story of hope, disappointment, and disquiet in which neither side of the hyphen in ‘‘Chinese-American’’ can be either erased or made to remain fixed. Kingston’s first novel, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), also deals with the unstable and inescapable categories of race and nationality in the United States. The protagonist of the novel, Wittman Ah Sing, is a fifth-generation Chinese-American living in San Francisco’s Chinatown during the 1960s. He can speak, though not read much Chinese, as well as recognize and speak a number of Chinese-American vernaculars produced by various Chinese encounters with American English in U.S. ‘‘Chinatowns.’’ He is also familiar with Chinese folklore and traditional culture. At the same time Wittman (named for Walt Whitman) is a poet, storyteller, and graduate in English at the University of California at Berkeley, familiar with both the ‘‘high’’ literary culture of Rilke and Joyce and the counterculture that seems on the cusp of the transformation from the period of the Beats, especially Jack Kerouac, to the hippies. He is also saturated and obsessed with American popular culture, particularly the images of Asians and Asian-Americans promoted in such movies as Flower Drum Song and The World of Suzie Wong. The son of Chinese-American vaudevilleans who traveled the country performing largely African American music, Wittman is at home, if not exactly comfortable, with theatrics, illusion, and ethnic types

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Kingston was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 1997. Since the publication of Tripmaster Monkey, she has been at work on a number of projects. She has also remained active in the literary community, participating on various panels throughout the country. Kingston’s method of writing has changed in recent years. Following the fire that destroyed her home (and her manuscript in progress), Kingston decided she no longer wanted to work alone. Thus her stage adaptation of The Woman Warrior and China Men (combined into one work) was the result of a decade-long collaboration with a number of producers, screenwriters, playwrights, actors, editors, and musicians. The play opened at the Berkeley Repertory Theater in 1994. Kingston has also been working on a new full-length piece, The Fifth Book of Peace. Like much of her work, it will be difficult to categorize as fiction or nonfiction, combining stories of her own experiences with those of invented characters. The Fifth Book of Peace is being created in her new collaborative mode; Kingston has been working extensively with a group of war veterans discussing and writing about their ideas of war and peace. OTHER WORKS: Hawaii One Summer (1987, originally published 1978). Through the Black Curtain (1987). ‘‘Cultural Misreadings by American Reviewers,’’ in Asian and Western Writers in Dialogue (edited by Guy Amirthanayagam, 1982). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Brown Ruoff, A. L. and J. Ward, eds., Redefining American Literary History (1990). Duke, M. S., ed., Modern Chinese Women Writers: Critical Appraisals (1989). Eakin, P. J., Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in Self-Invention (1985). Kessler-Harris, A. and W. McBrian, eds., Faith of a (Woman) Writer (1988). Yang, M. C. ‘‘From Ethnicity to a Wider World: The Education of Kate Simon and Maxine Hong Kingston’’ (thesis, 1992). Reference works: CANR (1987). FC (1990). Modern American Women Writers (1991). Other references: American Literary History (1990). Asian Week (17 June 1994, 31 Mar. 1995). Biography (Winter 1983, Spring 1986, Spring 1989). Humanities (1 Nov. 1997). MELUS (Winter 1982, Winter 1983, Fall 1985, Spring 1987, Spring 1988). Ms. (June 1989). Michigan Quarterly Review (1987). NYRB (3


Feb. 1977). NYTBR (7 Nov. 1976, 23 April 1989). PMLA (1988). Seven Days (28 Feb. 1977).VVLS (May 1989). —LORALEE MACPIKE, UPDATED BY JAMES SMETHURST AND VALERIE VOGRIN

KINNEY, Elizabeth (Clementine) Dodge Born 18 December 1810, New York, New York; died 19 November 1889, Summit, New Jersey Wrote under: Mrs. E. C. Kinney, Mrs. E. Clementine Kinney, Mrs. E. C. Stedman Daughter of David and Sarah Cleveland Dodge; married Edmund B. Stedman, 1830 (died); William B. Kinney, 1841 Elizabeth Dodge Kinney’s father was a prosperous New York merchant. Her first son was Edmund C. Stedman, American anthologist, literary critic, and poet. After her first husband’s death at sea in 1835, she became a regular contributor of poems and articles to popular magazines such as Graham’s, Sartain’s and the Knickerbocker. In 1841 she married William B. Kinney, ‘‘the leading political writer in the state of New Jersey’’ and owner and editor of the Newark Daily Advertiser, and combined work on essays and criticism for his paper with her duties as mother of a growing family. Her husband was appointed chargé d’affaires at Sardinia in 1850. For three years, the Kinneys lived in Turin, and then, for more than 10 years, they lived in Florence, before returning to New Jersey in 1865. Felicità: A Metrical Romance (1855), Kinney’s first work, is the supposedly true story of an unfortunate young French girl who is sold as a slave by her miserly father. It is long on bad rhymes and strained meters but short on credible characters or motives. Bianca Cappello: A Tragedy (1873), set in Venice and Florence in the latter part of the 16th century, is based on historical sources and told in blank verse, complete with comic scenes. The leading character, Bianca, is both desirous of power (she is involved in the murders of three people) and very much in love, and therefore her motives are often unclear. So prolific was Kinney that even her collection of Poems (1867) omits many of her contributions to magazines and newspapers from the 1830s through the 1850s. In 1854 critic Caroline May wrote of Kinney’s poems, ‘‘There is much genuine feeling, a delicate perception of the beautiful, and an honest love for the simple and true, in her effusions, which cannot fail to please.’’ To modern tastes, her verses mix bromide and saccharin, and only a few rise above the general mediocrity. ‘‘The Infant’s Miniature’’ (Knickerbocker, July 1842) manages to suggest some particularity and freshness, as does the topographical poem ‘‘Mount Hope Cemetery, Rochester’’ (Knickerbocker, Sept. 1840). Her tales, like her poems, suffer today because they suited all too well the popular taste of her era. Kinney’s journalism and travel pieces such as ‘‘A Sabbath Among the Mountains of Pennsylvania’’ (Graham’s, July 1845) retain far more interest.

KINZIE

Kinney’s best writings now seem to be her accounts, in letters and journals, of Italy and of the people she knew there. Her journal records a revelatory dispute between the Brownings, whom the Kinneys knew in Florence, and Kinney over George Sand’s morality or immorality, and many comments on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dabblings in spiritualism. Most of Kinney’s works published during her lifetime are now of interest chiefly as indices of mid-19th-century American popular taste; her letters, ‘‘Journal,’’ and ‘‘Personal Reminiscences’’ retain more lasting charm and power to please. OTHER WORKS: Elizabeth Dodge Kinney’s ‘‘Journal’’ and ‘‘Personal Reminiscences’’ are in the Columbia University Library in New York City. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Woodress, J., ed., Essays Mostly on Periodical Publishing in America: A Collection in Honor of Clarence Gohdes (1973). Reference works: AA. The American Female Poets (1854). CAL. DAB. The Female Poets of America, (1850). The Female Prose Writers of America (1857). NCAB. Other references: BIS (1976). —SUSAN SUTTON SMITH

KINZIE, Juliette (Augusta) Magill Born 11 September 1806, Middletown, Connecticut; died 15 September 1870, Amagansett, New York Daughter of Arthur and Frances Wolcott Magill; married John H. Kinzie, 1830; children: seven Born to a wealthy and established Connecticut family, Juliette Magill Kinzie was the eldest child and an only daughter. She was educated at home by her mother and an uncle, and then, in 1821, attended the Emma Willard Female Seminary in New Haven. Married to an Indian agent at Fort Winnebago, Wisconsin, Kinzie later used Winnebago as the scene for her novels. She and her husband settled in Chicago in 1834, where she quickly became the early settlement’s social force. She assisted in founding St. Luke’s Hospital and St. James Church, the first Episcopalian church in the settlement. The Kinzies were parents of seven children, only three of whom survived their parents. Narrative of the Massacre at Chicago, August 15, 1812, and of Some Preceding Events (1844) records the memories of ‘‘eyewitnesses of the events.’’ It contains a detailed description of the raid of Chicago conducted by the Pottowattamie Nation, the Ottawas, Shawnees, Winnebagoes, and Calumets. Kinzie claims her Narrative was ‘‘made simply for the purpose of preserving to the children of the writer a faithful picture of the perilous scenes through which those near and dear to them had been called to pass.’’ Focusing on personal incidents as remembered by members of the Kinzie family, the Narrative utilizes conversation and

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an anecdotal style. It was considered factual enough, however, to be used two years later by Henry Brown in his History of Illinois.

she returned to London, where she obtained employment with the family of the Reverend E. S. Gannet, who brought her to Boston.

Kinzie’s second work, Wau-Bun: The ‘Early Day’ in the Northwest (1856), is generally considered her best novel. A long work about the activities and experiences of settlers in the Midwest, it describes Kinzie’s journeys through Wisconsin and Illinois and includes ‘‘pictures of domestic life and experience.’’ As described in her introduction, her technique depends on the use of journals and letters written during the period, for her goal was to write with an ‘‘air of truth and reality.’’ Wau-Bun is also very much concerned with the Native Americans, and Kinzie alternately portrays their ‘‘Acuteness and Simplicity.’’ She reprints her vivid description of the massacre of the Chicago settlement, and the Battle of Lake Erie and the rebuilding of Fort Dearborn are prominently featured.

In 1841 Kirby joined the Brook Farm community at West Roxbury, Massachusetts, as pupil and teacher, initially to develop sufficient mathematical skills to obtain a teaching certificate. Eventually she took over the direction of the Infant School. Kirby readily embraced the liberal religious views of Brook Farm, where no formal religion was imposed. A rebel from early childhood, she found it difficult to respect ‘‘a Diety who had made such a botch of his universe.’’ in her autobiography, Years of Experience (1887), she wrote: ‘‘How much I wished that the Almighty had been a mother, an infinite mother! She would never have planned an endless hell.’’

Walter Ogilby (1869) is a departure from the scene and style of Kinzie’s earlier works. Set in New England during the 1820s, the novel is a sort of imitation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It concerns the romantic adventures of Alice Morton, who finally marries the Byronic Ogilby. Kinzie’s final novel, Mark Logan, published posthumously in 1871, returns to the subject matter of Wau-Bun. Set in Detroit at the turn of the 19th century, the novel depicts the experiences of English and French settlers, military families, and Native Americans as they interact on the frontier. The plot revolves around the hero’s disguise as an Native American, the surrender of Red Bird, and the Winnebago War. Though her writing is filled with the flaws of popular writing—stereotyped heroes and heroines, contrived plots, and stilted dialogue— her best work captures the everyday experiences of men and women struggling to survive on an alien frontier. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: NAW (1971). —DIANE LONG HOEVELER

KIRBY, Georgiana Bruce Born December 1818, Bristol, England; died 27 February 1887, Santa Cruz, California Daughter of Francis and Mrs. Stradwick Bruce; married R. C. Kirby, 1850 The second daughter of her mother’s first marriage, Georgiana Bruce Kirby was born three months after the death of her seaman father. Her childhood was a mixture of one happy year in the country, two years of formal education, and a number of years of deprivation in a small English seaport town. At fourteen Kirby became a governess for an English family who took her to France and later to Melbourne, Canada, where she taught school and learned the skills necessary for survival on the frontier. In 1837

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The radical social views of Brook Farm also appealed to Kirby. She enjoyed the intimate friendships, aesthetic pleasures, and intellectual contacts with people like Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, W. H. Channing, and Theodore Parker. She developed an interest in mesmerism, hydropathy, and phrenology and espoused abolition, women’s rights, and Fourierist reforms. Ultimately, she became so radicalized she believed revolution alone could effect social change. When Kirby decided to leave Brook Farm, Margaret Fuller, who had become her closest friend, arranged for her to meet Eliza W. Farnham, the matron of the women’s prison at Sing Sing. Farnham welcomed Kirby as her assistant, but, unable to endure the tensions of the work, Kirby left after a year. She endeavored to obtain a teaching assignment in the Midwest in order to help young blacks, but her strong abolitionist views made it impossible for her to keep a position. In 1850 Kirby moved to Santa Cruz, California, where, after living with Farnham for some time, she married R. C. Kirby. A decade after her marriage Kirby began to write for publication. Her initial piece, ‘‘My First Visit to Brook Farm,’’ appeared in the Overland Monthly in 1870. The narrative recreates the idyllic atmosphere of the early days at the farm. Kirby’s use of fictional names and her alteration of some events lessens the historical value of the work. Later publications concerning Brook Farm also fictionalize the life to some extent. Kirby also wrote at least one short story, ‘‘A Tale of the Redwoods’’ (1874). Transmission; or, Variation of Character Through the Mother (1879), Kirby’s most unusual work, consists of what Kirby calls ‘‘self-evident propositions’’ concerning the power which the pregnant woman exercises over the fetus. Drawing on observations made during nearly 40 years, Kirby refutes the notion that the woman ‘‘merely nourishes the germ given by the father.’’ She demonstrates, with many examples, that the mother’s occupations and attitudes during gestation strongly benefit or impair the child’s temperament and later actions. Kirby’s most extensive work is her autobiographical narrative Years of Experience, which recounts her life from her youth up to the point of her departure for the West. Although partially fictionalized, the work as a whole gives a good account of her life and thought. The book provides ample evidence for the remark of one Brook Farmer that Kirby was the most radical of them all.


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BIBLIOGRAPHY: Codman, J. T., Brook Farm: Historical and Personal Memoirs (1894). Curtis, E. R., A Season in Utopia: The Story of Brook Farm (1961). Farnham, E. W., California InDoors and Out (1856). Stern, M. B., ‘‘Two Letters from the Sophisticates of Santa Cruz,’’ in Book Club of California Quarterly News-Letter (Summer 1968). Swift, L., Brook Farm: Its Members, Scholars, and Visitors (1961). —LUCY FREIBERT

KIRK, Ellen Warner (Olney) Born 6 November 1842, Southington, Connecticut; died 1928, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Wrote under: Henry Hayes, Ellen Olney Kirk, Ellen W. Olney Daughter of Jesse and Elizabeth Barnes Olney; married John F. Kirk, 1879 Even in her childhood, Ellen Warner Kirk enjoyed a familiarity with the publishing world. Her mother was the sister of the New York publisher A. S. Barnes, and her father, in his time a well-known geographer and educator, was the author of numerous textbooks including Geography and Atlas (1828), a standard work widely used in American schools that went through nearly 100 printings. Although Kirk evidenced a love of literature and a penchant for creative writing throughout her extensive private education at schools in Connecticut and Boston, she did not actively try to get her work published until after the death of her father in 1872. The serialized publication of her first novel, Love in Idleness, in Lippincott’s (1876-77), brought her an immediate fame, which she enjoyed throughout her prolific career. She published 29 book-length works of fiction as well as numerous essays and short stories for various periodicals, primarily Atlantic Monthly. Following her marriage to an author of historical studies and editor of Lippincott’s, she lived in the Germantown area of Philadelphia. In Love in Idleness (1877), Kirk traces the adventures and misadventures of several characters spending a vacation together at the Connecticut country home of a wealthy bachelor. Nearly everyone falls in love, but almost never with each other. There is no actual plot other than that provided by the conversations that reveal the inevitable unraveling and recoupling. The novel ends happily, if predictably, with at least half a dozen marriages. Kirk repeated these basic elements in her second novel, His Heart’s Desire (1878). Here the setting is a stately ‘‘old Knickerbocker’’ family mansion, comfortably overlooking the Hudson River. The various complications originating from the tangled lives of the many characters are resolved only through an equally complicated series of misunderstandings, trysts, deaths, suicides, and blackmail schemes. This interest in combining a variety of characters in revealing social situations was to prove the mainstay of Kirk’s popularly received fiction throughout her prolific career. Kirk’s most favorably reviewed and financially successful novel was The Story of Margaret Kent (1886). Rumored to be a

fictionalized, and overly flattering, account of the life of the writer Katharine Sherwood McDowell (1849-1883), it relates the travails of a young author trying to support herself and her daughter after having been deserted by her weak, spendthrift husband. Many of the complications in the novel arise when Margaret is courted by several suitors who presume that she is a widow. Margaret is the most complicated, realistically portrayed, and continually intriguing of Kirk’s many heroines. Her struggles to earn an independent income and wrestle with the conflicting demands of passion and propriety are of lasting interest. Even the contrived death of her husband, which frees her to marry the worthy Dr. Walton and conveniently resolves the moral ambiguities surrounding divorce and fidelity, does not seriously undercut the novel’s worth. Kirk was less successful when she repeated the plot of a noble heroine married to the wrong man in a later novel, Walford (1890). Another of her better novels is Queen Money (1888). The focus is on the misadventures that befall Otto March, a naive young college graduate apprenticed to a prominent Wall Street financier and living with relatives involved in the publishing industry. The setting provides Kirk with a wide range of possible intrigues, humorous anecdotes, and social commentary upon which to capitalize. Although many of these complications arise as a result of the numerous characters’ attempts to heed the dictates of materialistic and overly fashionable society, Kirk’s motive seems less social criticism than entertainment. The menu at a dinner party and the program at an opera receive as much narrative attention as the vagaries of the stock market; events provide the background for the revelation of and interplay between characters. A calamitous stock market crash does solve most of the romantic complications, and the essentially unscathed Otto escapes with the idealized heroine, Lucy Florian. Kirk repeated this examination of the follies that befall the ‘‘Mammon worshippers of New York’’ in two subsequent novels, A Daughter of Eve (1889) and Ciphers (1891). Of the two, A Daughter of Eve is the more interesting. The novels Kirk wrote during the second half of her career are strikingly less memorable than her earlier novels. Her critics often bemoaned that she did not live up to the promise she initially demonstrated. The clever style and definitive ability to capture characters through their conversations becomes less controlled, the repetition of plots more tedious, and the powers of observation less acute. Although widely read in her own time, most of Kirk’s works will probably strike the modern reader as ephemeral. Only The Story of Margaret Kent and Queen Money seem to deserve any genuine resurrection. OTHER WORKS: Clare and Bebe (1879). Through Winding Ways (1879). A Lesson in Love (1881). Fairy Gold (1883). A Midsummer Madness (1884). In City and Camp (1886). All in the Wild March Morning (1887). Sons and Daughters (1887). Better Times Stories (1889). Maiden’s Choosing (1890). A Superfluous Woman (1892). Wooing of the Two Mr. Benedicts (1892). The Story of Lawrence Garthe (1894). The Revolt of the Daughter (1897). Dorothy Deane: A Children’s Story (1898). A Revolutionary Love Story, and the High Steeple of St. Chrysostom’s (1898). Dorothy

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and Her Friends (1899). Our Lady Vanity (1901). A Remedy for Love (1902). Goodbye Proud World (1903). The Apology of Ayliffe (1904). Marcia (1907).

the process of the transformation of the diverse aspects of pioneer life into a less precarious existence. Integrating her impressions, Kirkland comments on the scene in retrospect and with accumulated insight.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hill, V., Strategy and Breadth: The Socialist-Feminist in American Fiction (dissertation, 1979). Logan, J., The Part Taken by Women in American History (1912). Taylor, W., The Economic Novel in America (1942). Reference works: Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography (1900). A Critical Dictionary of English Literature (1863). A Dictionary of American Authors (1904). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Atlantic (June 1888). Epoch (Feb. 1888). Galaxy (May 1877). Harper’s (Apr. 1886). Independent (30 May 1889). Literary World (6 Feb. 1886, 5 Jan. 1889). Nation (13 Mar. 1879, 19 Mar. 1891, 11 Feb. 1892). Overland Monthly (Aug. 1887).

Kirkland returned to the East in 1843, where her husband would have better professional opportunities and their four children (Joseph Kirkland, the eldest son, later became a well-known novelist) could get proper schooling. After her husband’s death in 1846, Kirkland immediately took up his responsibilities at the Christian Inquirer, operated her school for girls, reviewed for Duyckinck’s Literary World, and shortly thereafter undertook the editorship of the Union Magazine of Literature and Art. In its earliest days under Kirkland’s leadership the Union was considered one of the best family magazines of its kind.

—VICKI LYNN HILL

KIRKLAND, Caroline M(atilda) Stansbury Born 11 January 1801, New York, New York; died 6 April 1864, New York, New York Also wrote under: Mrs. Mary Clavers, Aminadab Peering Daughter of Samuel and Eliza Alexander Stansbury; married William Kirkland, 1828 (died 1846); children: four Caroline Kirkland, an eldest child, came from a literary family (her mother was a writer and her great-grandfather was a Tory poet during the American Revolution). In the Quaker school of her aunt Lydia Mott she received an unusually good education for a girl born at the beginning of the 19th century. After her marriage to Kirkland the couple settled in Geneva, New York, where they established a school. In 1835, they crossed overland to Detroit, an already thriving ‘‘metropolis’’ on the edge of the frontier to direct the newly established Detroit female seminary. The land fever and get-rich schemes circulating through Detroit engaged their imagination, and two years later they located 60 miles west, in the tiny hamlet of Pinckney. The pioneering experience was the impetus for Kirkland’s writing career. A New Home—Who’ll Follow? (1839), written by Kirkland under the pseudonym ‘‘Mrs. Mary Clavers, an Actual Settler,’’ gives her slightly fictionalized account of the early years of a new community on the frontier. Loosely constructed of character sketches, brief essays on events unique to frontier life, tales, and a few mild adventures, the book covers the development of the town from the log cabin to the community. Though Kirkland claims that nothing very adventurous happens, the life she describes is, in fact, eventful and arduous. In her second book, Forest Life (1842), the device of a tour of Michigan allows Kirkland to comment on the developing institutions of the frontier, to generalize on events, and to describe the natural terrain and

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A New Home—Who’ll Follow? brought immediate popularity; Forest Life followed to enthusiastic reviews. Poe thought Western Clearings (1845), a collection of sketches leaning toward the short story form, the best of all. Though best known for this Western writing, Kirkland also completed a travel book, a biography of Washington, a novel, and three collections of essays. But the work of the last 20 years of her life remains unexplored and unevaluated. Though never identified with the women’s rights movement, Kirkland’s introduction to Reid’s A Plea for Women (1845) appeared three years before the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls. Kirkland advocated equal legal and political rights, and was especially bitter on the problem of women’s financial dependence. She was also deeply concerned about the slavery issue and by 1856, after completing her Washington biography, wrote a friend, ‘‘I am terribly low-spirited about public affairs. I see nothing but civil war and disunion before us.’’ Though a pacifist, she supported and worked for the Union. In the early 1850s, her short stories and essays were brought out as gift-book collections: The Evening Book (1852); A Book for the Home Circle (1853); and Autumn Hours (1854). The major topic in each was the correction and improvement of American manners and morals, which she managed to urge with sophisticated, disarming simplicity quite different from the saccharine and somber utilitarianism that characterized most literature on the same topics. In one essay, ‘‘Literary Women,’’ a spirited defense of women authors, Kirkland with tongue in cheek suggests shopkeepers not sell pens to women who write, and that women should be excluded from school—at least till they are over forty. At a time when popular literature consisted of moralizing essays on self-improvement and sentimental tales, Kirkland, in contrast, expressed herself clearly, concisely, and humorously. Her themes, settings, characters, and moral vision were a realist’s. Her range of female characters gives a more complete picture of the nature and condition of women than can be derived from the work of the first-ranking American authors of the period. Kirkland wrote, ‘‘It has been thought necessary to dress up and render conspicuous a certain class of events, while another class, perhaps far more efficient in producing the real features of the age, are unnoticed and forgotten.’’ Kirkland, with her realist’s perspectives, makes a significant contribution to our own times.


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OTHER WORKS: Principles of Morality by J. Dymond (edited by Kirkland, 1847). Spenser and the Faery Queen (edited by Kirkland, 1847). Holidays Abroad (1849). The Book of Home Beauty (1852). Garden Walks with the Poets (1852). The Helping Hand (1853). Memoirs of Washington (1857). The School-Girl’s Garland (1864). Patriotic Eloquence (1866). Some of Caroline Kirkland’s papers are housed within the Chicago Historical Society. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Dondore, D. A., The Prairie and the Making of Middle America: Four Centuries of Description (1926). Keyes, L. C., ‘‘Caroline M. Kirkland: A Pioneer in American Realism’’ (dissertation, 1935). Kolodny, A., The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 16301860 (1984). Leverentz, D., Manhood and the American Renaissance (1989). Osborne, W. S., Caroline M. Kirkland (1972). Parra, J. M., ‘‘Altered Vision: Three Nineteenth-Century Western Authors: Caroline Kirkland, Mary Hallock Foote and Mary Austin’’ (thesis, 1995). Riordan, D. G., ‘‘The Concept of Simplicity in the Works of Mrs. Caroline M. Kirkland’’ (dissertation, 1973). Roberts, A. J., ‘‘The Letters of Caroline M. Kirkland’’ (dissertation, 1976). Stickney, G., ‘‘Oh, the Troubles We’ve Seen: Women’s Pioneering Portrayals of Hardship in the Development of American Literature’’ (thesis, 1993). Reference works: AA. CAL. DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United Stated (1995). Other references: Godey’s Lady’s Book (August 1846). Legacy (Fall 1991). MichH (Sept. 1956, March 1958, Dec. 1961). —AUDREY ROBERTS

much praise for her ‘‘interpretations’’ of Chinese poetry, she remarked that her mother (credited in YIN: New Poems, 1984, as her muse) had read Arthur Waley’s translations to her when she was as young as eight. High-minded and intense, Kizer missed other children, but her childhood and her remarkably individual education suggest the freedom available to many important creative personalities. Living in the western U.S. may also have contributed to the sense of possibility essential to becoming a writer. In a valuable brief autobiography, Kizer captures the bravery and the variety of her ancestors’ achievements as they struggled toward the far edge of the continent. Similar pride might have also inspired her first public success: a patriotic poem published in the Ladies’ Home Journal and set to music for radio when she was just fifteen. Looking for a college far from home to match the seriousness and eccentricity of her upbringing, Kizer settled on Sarah Lawrence, a school that challenged her self-image but also provided encouragement for her writing. When the New Yorker published one of her poems, the seventeen-year-old author received over 500 letters—public endorsement for an unsure commitment. Going on to Columbia University after graduation to study comparative literature on a Chinese Cultural Fellowship, Kizer subsequently continued her studies in China. But her poetic inspiration remained more imaginative than linguistic. Waley’s translations suggested the imitations included in her second collection of poems, Knock Upon Silence (1965). Praising her sensitivity to the spirit of the Chinese poems, critics admired her ability to include many perspectives in her work. Comparisons with Waley suggest entirely new dimensions of psychological insight.

In the second half of the 20th century, Carolyn Kizer emerges as one of a powerful group of women poets for whom motherhood is a crucial aspect of identity. These women, Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Audre Lorde, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath, among others, helped expand the range of metaphor and the depth of meaning for all poets and for all women. Not simply a feminist poet, a gifted translator, a committed internationalist, Kizer has an inclusive generous intellect that offers a strong stand against the petty visions attributed to ‘‘women’’ poets of the past.

It was, Kizer said, her study of the craft with Theodore Roethke at the University of Washington in the early 1950s that finally turned her into a self-assured poet. The Ungrateful Garden (1961, reissued 1999), her first volume, was a polished offering reflective of the highly valued stress on workmanship characterizing the earlier decade. Poems like ‘‘The Great Blue Heron’’ and ‘‘The Death of a Public Servant’’ hold up as elegantly crafted artifacts. Perhaps reacting to Roethke’s mocking hostility to women poets as much as she admired his teaching techniques, Kizer also began to record the range of women’s sensibilities finally included in her assembled poems for women, Mermaids in the Basement: Poems for Women (1984). But the idea that women writers were the custodians of the world’s best-kept secret, ‘‘merely the private lives of one-half of humanity,’’ has always been with her. A protofeminist, as were many of her gifted contemporaries (women poets trained by men), she early saw beyond the college English Department into life. With the ‘‘Pro Femina’’ sequence in Mermaids, she distinguished herself as a pioneer in forging new traditions in American women’s writing.

Born when her politically active biologist mother was in her forties and her distinguished planner-lawyer father fifty, Kizer flourished on the attentions afforded an only child with extraordinary parents. Her father introduced her to a parade of accomplished friends such as Lewis Mumford, Percy Grainger, and Vachel Lindsay, and her mother gave up her own work to encourage her daughter’s talents. When Kizer later garnered

The roles Kizer has played as poet are various and international. In 1959 she became an editor and founder of Poetry Northwest, which she served until 1965. She acted as cultural ambassador to Pakistan in 1964-65 and continued a life of public service as the first director of Literary Programs for the National Endowment of the Arts, where good sense distinguished her choices. During these years, she managed to raise three children

KIZER, Carolyn Born 10 December 1925, Spokane, Washington Daughter of Benjamin H. and Mabel Ashley Kizer; married Charles S. Bullitt, 1948 (divorced); John M. Woodbridge, 1975; children: Ashley, Scot, Jill

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who make their presence felt in a number of moving poems. And she has continued to share her knowledge of poetry as a teacher: from North Carolina to Ohio to Iowa to Stanford to Arizona and Princeton, young writers have profited from her critical advice. Fellow professionals have appreciated her talents enough to award her a Pulitzer Prize in 1985 and a Robert Frost medal in 1988. What we continue to value most highly in Kizer’s work is her deep sense of engagement with life on every level, personal, political, and aesthetic, an involvement that makes all readers more human by sharpening our awareness of the possibilities in every kind of experience. OTHER WORKS: Midnight Was My Cry: New and Selected Poems (1971). The Nearness of You (1986). Carrying Over: Translations from the Chinese, Urdu, Macedonian, Yiddish, and French African (1988). The Shattered Mirror: Poems from the Chinese Democracy Movement (with D. Finkel, 1991). Proses: Essays on Poets and Poetry (1993). The Essential Clare (edited by Kizer, 1993). Picking and Choosing: Essays on Prose (1995). Election Day, 1984 (1996). Harping On: Poems 1985-1995 (1996). On a Line from Valery (1996). 100 Great Poems by Women: A Golden Ecco Anthology (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Howe, F., ed., No More Masks! An Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets, Newly Revised and Expanded (1993). North, A. F., ‘‘Carolyn Kizer: Contemporary Feminism’’ (thesis 1988). O’Connell, N., At the Field’s End: Interviews With 22 Pacific Northwest Writers (1998). Rigsbee, D., ed., An Answering Music: On the Poetry of Carolyn Kizer (1990). Schumock, J., Story, Story, Story: Conversations with American Authors (1999). Simic, C. and D. Lehman, eds., The Best American Poetry, 1992 (1992). Reference works: CAAS (1987). CA (1977, 1999). CANR (1988). CLC (1980, 1986). DLB (1980). FC (1990). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Carolyn Kizer, 17 November 1987 (video, 1987). The Writing Life. A Conversation About the Writing Life Between Lucille Clifton . . . and Carolyn Kizer (video, 1985). —EUGENIA KALEDIN

special interest in archetypal criticism, but she has written in several genres on a wide range of literary, theatrical, and religious figures. She has stated that, through her study of an individual writer, she attempts to explore the deeper levels of the mind and psyche in an effort to approach the collective unconscious. Indeed, her books are an engaging combination of biography and literary criticism viewed from Jungian, mythic, or mystical perspectives. Knapp’s most courageous and, she says, most painful work is Céline: Man of Hate (1974), in which Knapp, a Jew, frankly and intelligently studies Céline’s anti-Semitism. Characteristically, Knapp approaches her subject armored with historical and biographical facts, makes sense of Céline’s art with psychoanalytic insights, forces our attention on the universality of his malady with a passionate rhetoric, and pushes the reader toward healing perspectives with the sheer weight of her conviction. For Knapp, Céline is an example of a man who was unable to confront his ‘‘shadow,’’ unable to establish a rapport between his conscious and his unconscious selves. This failure resulted in ‘‘eruptions,’’ Knapp’s term for Céline’s novels. Céline, she argues, is a symbol of a similar failure in the larger world, as evidenced by the cataclysms that have rocked the century. His usefulness is as a ‘‘guide’’ to help us ‘‘peer. . .into our own. . .depths,’’ so that we can develop the means for our own self-transformation. Perhaps Knapp’s most ambitious work is Dream and Image (1977). Highly praised by reviewers, it analyzes from the point of view of psychoanalysis and myth various aspects of the relationship between dreams, as expressions of the unconscious, and creativity in 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century French figures from Descartes to Mallarmé. She coins the term oneirosphere to describe that region of the mind in which the personal and collective unconscious converge and ‘‘in which dreams and images become discernible to the individual.’’ Her method is to allow the writer or work being analyzed to suggest the pattern she describes: the Great Female Archetype in Racine, the battle with Thanatos in Mallarmé, the conflict between Christian and pagan values in Gautier. Yet the unifying emphases are on the way dreams influence, inspire, and enrich the creative process, and on the way creative works express or resolve the eternal struggles of the psyche.

Born 9 May 1926, New York, New York Daughter of David and Emily Gresser Liebovitz; married Russell S. Knapp, 1949; children: two sons

The Prometheus Syndrome (1979) is a provocative work studying the Promethean impulse: that force, endemic to Occidental man, compelling him to create, to surpass limits, and to outdo the achievements of former centuries. Knapp divides the Prometheus myth into several stages: Prometheus’ ‘‘fashioning of the human race, stealing of fire, being punished for his crime, and reintegration with dignity into the society he rejected.’’

Bettina Liebowitz Knapp, the mother of two sons, is a prolific writer and has taught Romance languages and comparative literature at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of a score of books and the recipient of a number of coveted awards. Knapp has a

Each stage in the myth corresponds to the efforts of fictional and real figures representative of a certain age. The first section, ‘‘Man as Creator,’’ studies figures who strained against the ordinary limits of their time but who were nevertheless in harmony with their world. In the second section, ‘‘The Ordeal of

KNAPP, Bettina Liebowitz

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Reason,’’ Knapp deals with the Promethean hubris—the increasing overvaluation of human powers to understand and control the universe—in Voltaire, Balzac, Hesse, and others. This hubris results in a feeling of alienation that has pervaded the modern sensibility. It is perhaps the last section, ‘‘Toward Integration’’—in which Promethean man, still determined and searching, is reconciled to but not subdued by his place in the world—that expresses the essence of Knapp’s stand on life and literature. She is a critic with a clear vision, who writes lucidly, feels comfortable in any century, in the Occident as well as the Orient, and among a variety of psychological and religious systems. By the end of the 20th century, Knapp was still going strong, publishing at least one of her now nearly trademarked style of historical or psychological insighted studies per year, while also contributing to other works with a similar bent.

OTHER WORKS: Selected: Louis Jouvet: Man of the Theatre (1957). Louise Labé (1964). That Was Yvette: A Biography of Yvette Guilbert (1964). Cymbalum Mundi (1965). Aristide Bruant: A Biography (1968). Jean Genet: A Critical Study of His Writings (1968). Antonin Artaud: Man of Vision (1969, 1993). Jean Cocteau: A Critical Study of His Writings (1970). Jean Racine: Mythos and Renewal in Modern Theatre (1971). Georges Duhamel: A Critical Study of His Writings (1972). Anthology of Modern French Theatre (1974). Maurice Maeterlinck (1975). Off-Stage Voices (1975). French Novelists Speak Out (1976). Anaïs Nin (1978). Fernand Crommelynck (1978). Gérard de Nerval: The Mystic’s Dilemma (1978, 1980). Emile Zola (1980). Theater and Alchemy (1980). Sacha Guitry (1981). Paul Claudel (1982). Andrée Chedid (1984). French Theatre: 1918-1939 (1985). Alfred Stieglitz’s Letters to David Liebowitz, 1923-1930 (1985). Word, Image, Psyche (1985). Women in 20th Century Literature: A Jungian View (1987). Liliane Atlan (1988). The Reign of the Theatrical Director: French Theatre 1887-1924 (1988). Music, Archetype, and the Writer: A Jungian View (1988). Machine, Metaphor, and the Writer: A Jungian View (1989). Emily Dickinson (1989). Gertrude Stein (1990). Exile and the Writer: Exoteric and Esoteric Experiences—A Jungian Approach (1991). Images of Chinese Women: A Westerner’s View (1992). Images of Japanese Women: A Westerner’s View (1992). Walt Whitman (1993). Nathalie Sarraute (1994). French Theatre Since 1968 (1995). Manna & Mystery: A Jungian Approach to Hebrew Myth and Legend (1995). Women in Myth (1997). Women, Myth, and the Female Principle (1998). Gambling, Game, Psyche (1999).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1975). Other references: AR (Winter 1979). Choice (Mar. 1976). FR (May 1978). MLJ (Feb. 1970, Nov. 1975). NYTBR (5 Aug. 1969). Saturday Review (24 May 1969). —ELLEN FRIEDMAN

KNIGHT, Sarah Kemble Born 19 April 1666, Boston, Massachusetts; died 25 September 1727, New London, Connecticut Daughter of Thomas and Elizabeth Trerice Kemble; married Richard Knight, 1689; children: one daughter When Sarah Kemble Knight was born, her family had already been in New England for a generation. Her husband was by some accounts a shipmaster, though a more recent study suggests he may have been the Richard Knight listed in two records as a publican. Upon her father’s death, Knight inherited a house on Moon Street in Boston, where she maintained a large household including her mother, her daughter, and several lodgers, some of whom may have been relatives. Knight herself was active in the copying and witnessing of legal documents and in the settling of estates. She kept a shop in the Moon Street house and is said to have run a writing school, though this has not been verified. In the fall and winter of 1704-05, in order to settle an estate for one of the relatives in her household, Knight traveled on horseback from Boston to New York and back. She was the first woman to accomplish such a feat, securing guides and stopping at various post-houses, inns, and occasionally homes in the towns she passed through. There remains no further record of Richard Knight after 1706. In 1713, when Richard and Sarah’s daughter married, Knight sold the Boston house and moved to Norwich and New London, Connecticut. There she speculated in Native American lands, ran several farms, and kept a house of entertainment. During the journey from Boston to New York, Knight kept notes, which upon her return she fashioned into a journal. At this time, overland travel between the colonies was difficult; there were no main roads, and a traveler had to secure local guides to get from one town or posting place to another. The colonies were separate in government and customs; there were as yet no newspapers; it was only through letters or travelers’ tales that colonists learned about events and customs elsewhere. Knight’s racy narrative describes the difficulties of travel, the inconveniences of inns, and the people she met, ranging from the governor of Connecticut, with whom she supped, to the poor family who allowed her refuge in their drafty hut. Her perceptive, sharp wit spares no one, not even herself. The narrative is a series of episodes pulled together by the vitality and strength of character of its author. Brief as it is, and though it remained in manuscript until 1825, the journal is a landmark in our literature for several reasons. Along with the journal of Samuel Sewall, it represents the lay view as opposed to that of the ministers, who until this time dominated American letters. As Knight’s account rushes along, she displays several of the types of humor and characters that were to develop as typically American: the pompous judge making a fool of himself, the laconic master of understatement, the country ‘‘bumpkin’’ who later may be seen as Yankee Doodle, and a succession of other tobacco-chewing yokels. Her use of generic names for characters, such as ‘‘Bumpkin Simpers,’’ ‘‘Joan Tawdry,’’ and ‘‘Gaffer,’’ perhaps based on a reading of Pilgrim’s

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Progress, presages the use of stereotyped characters in the newspapers soon to be started in England and America. In one passage where Knight is riding at night, she imagines the towers of towns and palaces, displaying a longing for Europe that recurs in much of American literature through Henry James and later expatriates, and her descriptions of the terrors of night resemble the Gothic effects later used by Irving. Her journal indicates throughout that its author was well versed in the popular literature of the day. Its prose is interlaced with poems in a variety of current styles; in one poem she uses the kind of couplets in vogue in England but not in America at the time. Her journal represents an early movement toward the satire and other forms that were used throughout the 18th century and presents an unusual and vivid series of pictures of the ordinary and extraordinary people of New England.

OTHER WORKS: The Journal of Madam Knight, and Rev. Mr. Buckingham (1825, reprinted with an Introduction by M. Freiberg, 1971). The Private Journal of a Journey from Boston to New York in the Year 1704 Kept by Madam Knight (1865).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Andrews, W., ed., Journeys in New Worlds: Early American Narratives (1990). Levernier, J. A., and D. R. Wilmes, eds., American Literature Before 1800 (1983). Spengemann, W. C., The Adventurous Muse: The Poetics of American Fiction, 17891900 (1977). Springer, M., ed., What Manner of Woman (1977). Reference works: AA. DAB. NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Bostonian Society Publications (1912). CLAJ (Mar. 1964, Dec. 1966). Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America (1964). —ANN STANFORD

KNOX, Adeline Trafton Born 8 February 1845, Saccarappa, Maine; died date unknown Wrote under: Adeline Trafton Daughter of Mark and Eliza Young Trafton; married Samuel Knox Jr., 1889 (died 1897) Adeline Trafton Knox was educated in private and public schools in Massachusetts. She married a lawyer from St. Louis, where they apparently resided until her husband’s death in 1897. Knox’s last-known residence was Springfield, Massachusetts. Although biographical information on Knox is sketchy, material on the life of her father, a Methodist clergyman, is not. He was a one-term congressman, an author, and a temperance and antislavery advocate. These are themes that his daughter uses in her fiction.

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Knox wrote four novels, all of which appeared first as serials in magazines. She contributed numerous stories to Scribner’s magazine. Her works, originally written for adults, continued to have popular appeal with adolescent readers into the 20th century. Three of her works were reprinted in the American Girl series. Knox’s first book, An American Girl Abroad (1872), is apparently an account of a European trip that the author took as a young woman. In a chatty first-person narrative, this guidebook presents the travels of a young woman (unnamed) and her chaperone. The narrator describes the various countries of Europe, most often observing scenic landscapes and comic or quaint local customs. This work ends with a list of recommendations to would-be women travelers: that women can travel alone safely through Europe, that they should bring little baggage, dress warmly, and be equipped with ‘‘an abundant supply of patience and good nature.’’ The heroine in Katherine Earle (1874) is an upright, independent young girl who at one point even harbors a fugitive slave in her home. As she matures, she fancies herself in love with Dacre Home, a man she had hated as a child. He returns her affections initially; nevertheless, after she accepts a teaching job away from home, he becomes a negligent suitor. Dacre’s possible role in a bank robbery and the discovery of his unfaithfulness cause Katherine much unhappiness, with the impending Civil War, a nasty colleague, and her stern supervisor, Professor Dyce, aggravating the situation. Through the treachery of another, Katherine and Dyce lose their way in the woods overnight and, to save their reputations, get married. After a shaky beginning, the marriage proves to be a happy one. Dorothy’s Experience (1890) is Knox’s most moralistic tale. It uses a familiar theme of 19th-century popular fiction: the affluent, well-educated woman who finds herself and religion in unselfish work for others. Dorothy’s work involves the establishment of a mission home for women who work in a shoe factory by day and have too much free time at night. The idea is a noble one, although to the modern reader Knox’s description of the working-class people will seem both condescending and naive. Adeline Trafton is a name few now recognize. It is doubtful her works made an impression on (or were even read by) the better writers of her time. Her plots, by modern standards, seem contrived and sentimental, yet she wrote lively, interesting stories. Since she was more intent on providing entertainment than a moral message, Knox remained popular with young readers for at least a few decades.

OTHER WORKS: His Inheritance (1878).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography (1900). AW. A Dictionary of American Authors (1904). —AMY DYKEMAN


KOHUT

KOCH, Adrienne

engaged in a study of the Grimké family and its place in American life.

Born 10 September 1912, New York, New York; died 21 August 1971, New York, New York Daughter of John D. and Helen Koch; married Lawrence R. Kegan, 1947

As a historian of ideas, Koch brought to bear on her work a disciplined mind and finely sharpened powers of critical analysis and judgement. Though sympathetic to the liberal democratic philosophy, she explored cogently and persuasively the diverse strands woven into the American political tradition. She sought to convey with objectivity and fair-mindedness the differences in ‘‘angles of vision’’ of the philosopher-statesmen. In her writing Koch displayed clarity and wit and an elegance of style reflective of the Enlightenment. She saw the American Enlightenment as ‘‘a glorious time of thought and human constructive activity’’ and wrote of it, as she said, ‘‘con amore.’’ With acuteness of vision and lucidity of expression, she sought to lay open the values and achievements of that age and their continuing relevance to the darker contemporary age.

Adrienne Koch began her career in philosophy, but became in time one of America’s leading historians. She took as her particular province the era of American Enlightenment, defined as the period from 1765 to 1815, concentrating on political philosophy. Her first work was her doctoral dissertation, The Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson (1943), for which she won the Woodbridge prize at Columbia University. In it she explores the major influences on Jefferson’s thought and tries to establish his originality and significance as a philosopher. Koch’s next two works were The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson (1944) and The Selected Writings of John Adams and John Quincy Adams (1946). Although she is basically more sympathetic to Jefferson’s position, both works reveal her keen appreciation of these shapers of early American political thought, to her the heart of American Enlightenment.

OTHER WORKS: Power, Morals, and the Founding Fathers: Essays in the Interpretation of the American Enlightenment (1961, reissued 1984). Adams and Jefferson: Posterity Must Judge (1963).

In Jefferson and Madison: The Great Collaboration (1950, reissued 1987), Koch explores their personal friendship, intellectual changes, and political cooperation over a 50-year span. Drawing heavily on unpublished primary sources, she underscores the impact of Madison’s strongly, logical mind on Jefferson. The collaboration, she concludes, was of mutual weight, and they shared equally in formulating early American democratic philosophy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Jefferson, T., The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson (reissue, 1998). Other references: AHR (Feb. 1972). Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (Jan. 1944). Journal of American History (June 1965). Maryland Historian (Spring 1972). NR (4 Sept. 1950). SR (20 Feb. 1960). Virginia Quarterly Review (Summer 1966).

In 1959, Koch published Philosophy for a Time of Crisis, a work reflecting her deep concern over the postwar threat to Western civilization and its crisis in values. In response to ‘‘the felt universal need. . .for an answer to nihilism,’’ she drew on the writings of 15 modern thinkers, among them Einstein, Buber, and Sartre, men concerned with ‘‘the root values of man and society.’’ Koch edited The American Enlightenment (1965), in which she focuses on the work of five major philosopher-statesmen: Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, Madison, and Hamilton. Brilliant individually, they shone with increased splendor as a constellation, she concludes. She stresses the importance of their intertwining roles as theorists and activists, meeting ‘‘the historical imperative of their time. . .the advancement of human freedom.’’ The Whig-Clio lectures Koch gave at Princeton were published as Madison’s ‘‘Advice to My Country’’ (1966). In this short, cogent analysis, she sums up a lifetime of thought on Madison, tracing the threads of three major concerns: liberty, justice, and union. With thoughtful intensity she traces the evolution of his thought and the relevance of his stance to contemporary society. Her last work was Jefferson (1971), edited for the series Great Lives Observed. She draws on autobiographical material, observations of contemporaries, and the views of historians to provide perspective on his life. At the time of her death, Koch was

—INZER BYERS

KOHUT, Rebekah Bettelheim Born 9 September 1864, Kaschau, Hungary; died 11 August 1951, New York, New York Daughter of Siegfried and Henrietta Weintraub Bettelheim; married Alexander Kohut, 1887 Rebekah Bettelheim Kohut was the second daughter of a rabbi and physician father, and her mother was the first female Jewish schoolteacher in Hungary. In 1874, the family emigrated to America, finally settling in San Francisco, where Kohut attended the University of California. After the death, in 1895, of her husband, a renowned Hebrew scholar and rabbi, she founded a school for girls that she headed for five years. Her major interest revolved around the newly developing Jewish women’s organizations; she served as first president of the National Council of Jewish Women and of the World Congress of Jewish Women. Concern for the problems of working women led her to investigate the opportunities available to them, and to create and to serve on numerous local and national employment commissions. During World War I, she was active in mobilizing women’s participation,

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and after the war she surveyed the refugee problems for the overseas relief organizations. Kohut’s first book, My Portion (1925), written when a long illness limited her community activities, is a description of her early years in Hungary, her first experiences in America in wardevastated Richmond, and her coming to maturity in the exciting atmosphere of post-Gold Rush San Francisco. Despite considerable restraint in discussing personal affairs, she nonetheless chronicles her spiritual crisis as an adolescent, the trials of being a rabbi’s wife and stepmother to eight children, and her sorrowful adjustment to widowhood. The bulk of the story, however, is bound up with her activities in Jewish organizations and the difficulties of transforming women’s groups from sewing circles and ladies’ auxiliaries into significant philanthropic organizations. As I Know Them: Some Jews and a Few Gentiles (1929) provides an informal history of Jews in the U.S. Kohut’s main concern in this work, which is essentially anecdotal, is to explain the aims and attitudes of American Jews, the differences between the early Spanish, mid-19th-century German, and late-19thcentury East European immigrants, and their common anxiety over the rising anti-Semitism. She is particularly concerned with detailing the tensions within the Jewish community between the Reform and Orthodox sectors, and the conflicting needs of Jews to retain traditional values while adapting to American customs. She reveals an acute awareness of women’s peculiar position both in America and within Judaism, and though she eschews radical changes, she strongly supports suffrage and career training for women. In His Father’s House (1938) is Kohut’s moving tribute to her stepson George Alexander Kohut, who died after becoming a leader in American education, a prolific writer, and a philanthropist. A warm relationship between stepmother and stepson underlies the story. Kohut’s last book, More Yesterdays (1949), written when she was an invalid, was intended as a supplement to her earlier autobiography but covers much of the same material. Kohut describes the pleasures of cosmopolitan life, the horrors of the severe economic depression of the 1920s and 1930s, the rising fascism and its companion, anti-Semitism, and her conversion to Zionism by Theodore Herzl. Despite her four essentially autobiographical books, the dynamic quality of Kohut’s life remains untold. The formal, somewhat pedantic tone of her writing is partially responsible for this, but more significant is her attitude towards herself emphasizing her role as a member of a group rather than as an achieving individual. Her extraordinary accomplishments in social work, in education, and in the development of public unemployment agencies are presented primarily as external events rather than the struggles of a particular person. Her contributions to women’s rights lie more in her assumption of responsibilities than in advocacy, yet she never lost the focus of an earlier tradition. For her the family was ‘‘a sacred and hallowed responsibility,’’ and

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throughout her life she followed the injunction that ‘‘while woman’s interests ought to begin at home and ought to end there, they need not necessarily confine themselves to it alone.’’

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Askowith, D., Three Outstanding Women (1941). Baum, C. et al., The Jewish Woman in America (1976). Reference works: NCAB, E. Other references: American Jewish Yearbook, Vol. 46 (1944-45). —CAROL B. SCHOEN

KONIGSBURG, E. L. Born 10 February 1930, New York, New York Daughter of Adolph and Beuhlah Lobl; married David Konigsburg, 1952; children: three E. L. Konigsburg grew up in a small town near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She received a B.S. from Carnegie Institute of Technology, and did graduate work in chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh. Before starting to write, she taught science at a private girls’ school, married, and had three children. Konigsburg, feeling that there were few books geared to suburban children, started writing to fill this gap, and culled ideas from her own children’s experiences and imagination. Konigsburg writes for children between the ages of eight and 12, and believes that by the time children reach this stage in their development, they should be able to recognize their inner selves—or consciences—and be answerable to them. Konigsburg’s books, however, are not of the sort that hold together thinly developed plots only to proclaim morality; her plots are intricate and her characters disarmingly real. She is principally concerned with telling a good story and says, ‘‘When you write for children, they do not have any self-consciousness about putting down a book that is boring.’’ From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1967, reprinted more than 50 times), a Newbery winner, is probably Konigsburg’s best-known work. It is the story of two upper middle-class children who run away from their suburban Connecticut home to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They become involved in solving a mystery and return home, having grown in the sense that they have gained an inner secret to cherish and have taken an admirable first step toward adulthood. Konigsburg considers Father’s Arcane Daughter (1976), which deals with the problems of handicapped children, her best book. By comparison with many others of this genre, it is distinctive in that the reader does not find out until the middle of


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the book that Heidi, the protagonist’s little sister, is not clumsy and awkward simply because she is the pesky little sister but because she has a physical disability. The child’s mother had been disguising all of the child’s problems under a veil of cuteness. Unable to admit that a problem existed, the mother had virtually forced it to disappear. It is only after Heidi admitted that she needed help and underwent physical therapy that she was able to lead a satisfactory life—although not one without bitterness toward the overprotective mother. Konigsburg has also written two historical novels for children, one delving into the mystery of the Mona Lisa, and the other bringing to life Eleanor of Aquitaine, whom Konigsburg depicts as a strong-willed, highly intelligent woman who, Konigsburg claims, is ‘‘everything the woman’s movement is.’’ Here Konigsburg has one of her characters state: ‘‘True simplicity is elegance.’’ This philosophy permeates Konigsburg’s writing, which is candidly simple and unpretentious, yet not without depth and elegance. Konigsburg treats her material with sophistication, trusting that her readers have the capacity to consider complex ideas. Like the characters in her books, Konigsburg’s readers grow after having been exposed to the intellectual stimulation of her books. OTHER WORKS: Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth (1967, recorded 1992). About the B’Nai Bagels (1969). George (1970). Altogether, One at a Time (1971). A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver (1973). The Dragon in the Ghetto Caper (1974). The Second Mrs. Giaconda (1975). Talk, Talk: A Children’s Book Author Speaks to Grown-Ups (1995). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barrett, P. A., To Break the Silence: Thirteen Short Stories for Young Readers (1986). Greenberg, M. H. and Waugh, C., eds., A Newbery Christmas: Fourteen Stories of Christmas by Newbery Award-Winning Authors (1998). Greenberg, M. H., Waugh, C. and Alexander, L., eds., A Newbery Halloween: A Dozen Scary Stories by Newbery Award-Winning Authors (1998). Hanks, D. T., E. L. Konigsburg (1992). Smith, S. N., ‘‘Father Doesn’t Know Best Anymore: Realism and the Parent in the Junior Works of Judy Blume, E. L. Konigsburg, and Richard Peck’’ (thesis, 1981). Reference works: CA (1969). Children’s Literature Review (1976). Other references: Book List (June 1995). Commonweal (23 May 1969, 20 Nov. 1970). CSM (2 Nov. 1967, 1 May 1974). E. L. Konigsburg (audiovisual, 1983). E. L. Konigsburg Interview (audio, 1980). Good Conversation! A Talk with E. L. Konigsburg (audiovisual, 1995). Horn Book (Apr. 1967, Aug. 1968, Dec. 1970, Aug. 1971, Oct. 1973, Oct. 1975). New Statesman (4 June 1971). Newbery/Caldecott Medal Acceptance Speeches (recording, 1997). NYTBR (5 Nov. 1967, 30 Mar. 1969, 8 Nov. 1970, 30 May 1971, 14 Oct. 1973, 5 Oct. 1975, 7 Nov. 1976). Profiles in Literature [E. L. Konigsburg] (audiovisual, 1983). SR (22 Apr. 1967, 21 Oct. 1967, 9 Nov. 1968, 22 Mar. 1969, 4 Nov. 1970). —RISA GERSON

KROEBER, Theodora Born 24 March 1897, Denver, Colorado; died 1960 Daughter of Charles E. and Phebe Johnston Kracaw; married Clifton S. Brown, 1920 (died 1923); Alfred L. Kroeber, 1926; children: three sons, one daughter Theodora Kroeber grew up in the mountains of Colorado, an environment permeated by Native American cultures. She attended the University of California at Berkeley, receiving an M.A. in psychology in 1920. Kroeber’s husband, with whom she had two sons, died three years after their marriage. She later married the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and had two more children, a son and a daughter, Ursula K(roeber) LeGuin, the science fiction writer. Kroeber died in 1960. From her early interests in ethnology and art and from her access through Alfred Kroeber and his associates to Native American informants, Kroeber drew the inspiration for her first book, The Inland Whale (1959), a retelling of nine California Native American legends with notes on the literary, cultural, and psychological implications of each tale. In this book, Kroeber balances commitments to ethnological authenticity and to the demands of literary form. In its simplicity and directness, the style of The Inland Whale is remarkable for its evocation of the oral style of its sources: ‘‘The first people were the Wogè. The world was the same in Wogè time as it is today; it has always been the same.’’ The nine tales are of many literary types—morality tale, masque fantasy, lyric, idyll, epic—but they are unified by origin and by the recurrent figure of an enigmatic woman. Kroeber’s next two books drew heavily on the life of one particular Californian, Native American Ishi, who walked out of the Mount Lassen foothills in 1911. Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America (1963) provides an ethnologist’s careful account of the life of the Yahi people from the Stone Age through the days of the gold rush and an account of Ishi’s life among his 20th-century scholar friends, including Kroeber’s husband Alfred. At the time of its appearance, the book was hailed as a contribution ‘‘not only to our history but to our literature.’’ A year later, Kroeber produced a children’s book, Ishi, Last of His Tribe (1964), in which Ishi’s story is seen through his own eyes. The alternation of a limited third-person as well as a first-person point of view is handled without confusion, and Kroeber’s characteristic cadenced prose, coupled with the impressive command of material, justifies the book’s immediate acceptance as a classic. In both Ishi books, Kroeber’s greatest achievement is the creation of the character of her hero. The portraits of Ishi, both as boy and as man, catch his humanity, his dignity, and his essential kindness, gentleness, and competence. Some contemporary reviewers objected to the violence in the description of the massacre of the Yahi, but Kroeber’s history is accurate on this point. And though the level of violence in Ishi, Last of His Tribe may have seemed high at the time of its publication, we can now appreciate by comparison Kroeber’s refusal to sensationalize.

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A Green Christmas (1967), also a children’s book, is a prose poem about two children celebrating their first California Christmas, fearing that Santa Claus will not be able to find them because there is no snow for his sleigh. Again, the cadenced language is present, as is the psychological/ethnological motive. The book has an attractive gentleness about it, but the slight plot and the book’s awkward stance between fantasy and realism undercut its effectiveness. Carrousel (1977), also a children’s book, is a more fully realized depiction of the elements of classical mythology in collision with the prosaic realism of the modern world, represented by the Inspector of Strange and Foreign Objects’ desire to cement the winged horse, Pegason, to the ground. Kroeber draws on mythological motifs and details, but reforms them to create a new story of her own making. Kroeber’s three books on Native American themes establish her literary reputation. She has said, ‘‘When I write, I turn most often to something Indian. This is not because I am an Indian ‘specialist,’ or feel that I have anything novel to say about Indians, but because I find their stories beautiful and true and their way of telling a story to be also my way.’’ That way includes a celebration of each person’s individual humanity, a love of naming and detailing features of the environment (‘‘Manzanita berries and acorns, and hazel nuts and pine nuts were ripe. The brown-red of ripe buckeye nuts shown through their husks’’), and an overriding commitment to pattern, expressed in the cadences of her prose and in the structures of her stories. OTHER WORKS: Almost Ancestors (with R. Heizer, 1968). Alfred Kroeber: A Personal Configuration (1970). Drawn from Life (1978). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1969). Other references: AA (Aug. 1969). American Scholar (Summer 1968). Horn Book (Dec. 1964). NYHTB (3 May 1959, 29 Oct. 1961). Saturday Review (20 June 1959). Spectator (1 June 1962). —KATHARYN F. CRABBE

KÜBLER-ROSS, Elisabeth Born 8 July 1926, Zurich, Switzerland Also writes under: E. Kübler-Ross, Elisabeth K. Ross Daughter of Ernst and Emma Williger Kübler; married Emanual R. Ross, 1958 (divorced); children: two Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, one of a set of tiny triplets, lived in Europe until after receiving her M.D. from the University of Zurich in 1957. She came to the U.S. in 1958 as an intern at Community Hospital in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York. She spent the next three years in residency in psychiatry at Manhattan State Hospital, Montefiore Hospital, and Colorado General Hospital. She has taught at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and at the University of Chicago.

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Kübler-Ross travels throughout the world, giving hundreds of lectures, seminars, and workshops on death and dying. She has served on the advisory boards of more than 20 hospices and institutes on grief and dying and has received honorary degrees from 17 colleges and universities as well as numerous other awards. In 1976 Kübler-Ross founded Shanti Nilaya, a nonprofit organization ‘‘dedicated to the promotion of physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual health.’’ She served as president of the board of directors. She married another physician and they had two children before divorcing. Kübler-Ross holds both U.S. and Swiss citizenship. Although she does not administer medication or perform surgery, few people have Kübler-Ross’ power to heal. On Death and Dying (1969, reprinted numerous times, including 1991, 1997), her groundbreaking book, and her subsequent lectures, writings, and workshops, have helped, as Anne Hudson Jones noted, to revolutionize ‘‘the way Americans think about death and dying, and consequently, about living as well.’’ In On Death and Dying, Kübler-Ross reports on her work with terminally ill patients at the University of Chicago, where for several years she taught an interdisciplinary seminar on death and dying. She begins by outlining the changes occurring in the last few decades in the treatment of the dying. Instead of dying among family and friends, most people now die in impersonal institutional settings surrounded by medical personnel who are trained to prolong life but who do not know how to manage dying patients humanely. Kübler-Ross has identified five stages dying patients go through: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Not all patients go through all stages, but those who reach acceptance die more peacefully, according to Kübler-Ross. The book includes some interviews with patients as well as a chapter assessing the reactions of the medical staff and students to her seminar. In Questions and Answers on Death and Dying (1974, reprinted with two other titles, 1992), Kübler-Ross attempts to answer the questions most frequently asked of her by audiences. Although she reviews the material in her earlier work, there is useful new information about suicide and terminal illness, euthanasia, caring for the dying at home, the family’s problems, funerals, problems of the medical staff, and beliefs in life after death. Death: The Final Stage of Growth (1975), an anthology edited by Kübler-Ross, includes essays, poems, and letters, many of them written especially for this collection by former patients, colleagues, and her students. Selections address the psychological difficulties of patients dying in institutions, tell how other cultures handle death, and insist that death can be the final stage of personal growth. Of special interest is an autobiographical essay by Kübler-Ross, relating her early experiences with death, both in her community and in Europe during World War II, which she believes led her to her work with death and dying. To Live Until We Say Goodbye (1978) is a volume of photographs by Mal Warshaw with text by Kübler-Ross. The first part of the book has photographs and interviews with three dying patients. The second part presents alternative settings for care of the dying—hospices, homes for the dying, and personal homes of


the dying. The photographs are haunting; the text is informative. In this volume, Kübler-Ross says more about the death of children than she does in any of her other works. The final chapter tells of her teachings about life, death, and transition at Shanti Nilaya (Sanskrit for ‘‘home of peace’’). In Working It Through: An Elizabeth Kubler-Ross Workshop on Life, Death and Transition (1981, 1987, 1997), her second collaboration with photographer Mal Warshaw, she briefly recounts the history behind Shanti Nilaya, and then describes the workshops, integrating photographs and letters from former participants. In AIDS: The Ultimate Challenge (1987, 1997) Kübler-Ross recounts her ongoing efforts to help AIDS patients accept their condition with strength and serenity. She believes AIDS presents ‘‘the ultimate challenge’’ because the stigma attached to the disease has been as devastating as the disease itself. In one fascinating section, Kübler-Ross reprints a transcript of a town meeting held to discuss the founding of a hospice for babies with AIDS; she encounters hostile resistance from town members, whose concerns and prejudices reflect the fear and uncertainty shared by many across the country. Contrasting society’s support for victims of ‘‘acceptable’’ illnesses such as cancer to the isolation and condemnation faced by AIDS sufferers, KüblerRoss addresses her book to those who would still deny or ignore the tragedy of AIDS and withhold compassion from its sufferers. Kübler-Ross’ work has helped effect a much needed revolution in the way Americans think about death and dying and, consequently, about living as well. She has helped change medical education to include teaching about death and dying, and she is cited as an authority by almost everyone doing work in the field. She has received many honorary degrees, from Albany Medical College, Smith College, the University of Notre Dame, Hamline University, and the Medical College of Pennsylvania. At the turn of the century, Kübler-Ross faced her own declining health, and the need to practice what she had so long, and so eloquently preached. In 1999, after six strokes, she spoke candidly to the media about her own imminent demise. She said she was already in the fifth stage (acceptance), and has been for nearly five years. Talking to ABC News in August, Kübler-Ross said, ‘‘That I could die tonight would be a good death. Not 10 years or even two years from now—that would be lousy. The sooner the better.’’ Yet some wonder if Kübler-Ross is simply giving up, or depressed. For an independent woman, with an overactive, workaholic life, to be confined to a chair for better part of every day, has indeed been difficult. Her friend and holistic doctor, Gladys McGarey, told ABC News, ‘‘The strokes have been really devastating for her. . .another person, who was less in charge, might not be as deeply affected.’’ For her part, KüblerRoss states she is not truly living, just ‘‘existing.’’ One hopes Kübler-Ross will achieve the peaceful passing she has advocated, the kind of death she helped many accept through her writings and seminars. OTHER WORKS: Living with Death and Dying: How to Communicate with the Terminally Ill (1981, 1997). Remember the Secret (1982, 1998). On Children and Death: How Children and

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Their Parents Can and Do Cope with Death (1983, 1997). Psychoimmunity and the Healing Process: A Holistic Approach to Immunity and AIDS (1987). On Life After Death (1991). On Death and Dying; Questions and Answers on Death and Dying; On Life After Death (bound in one volume, 1992). Death is of Vital Importance: On Life, Death and Life After Death (1995). Healing in Our Time (1997). The Meaning of Suffering (1997). Say Yes to It (1997). The Wheel of Life: A Memoir of Lving and Dying (1998). The Tunnel and the Light: Essential Insights on Living and Dying (1999). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Chaban, M., The Life Work of Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and Its Impact on the Death Awareness Movement (1998). Elliott, W., Tying Rocks to Clouds: Meetings and Conversations with Wise and Spiritual People (1995). Felder, D. G., The 100 Most Influential Women of All Time: A Ranking Past and Present (1996). Groen-Colyn, S. M., ‘‘The Influence of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross on the Field of Thanatology: A Historical Analysis’’ (1998). Haney, D. M., Healing Waters Farm Cookbook: Favorite Recipes of Elisabeth and Friends of the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Center, Head Waters, Virginia 24442 (1997). Molnar, L. A., ‘‘The Attitudes and Knowledge of Kübler-Ross’ Stages and the Fears of Death and Dying in Junior and Senior Nursing Students an Exploratory Study’’ (thesis, 1981). Skog, S., Embracing Our Essence: Spiritual Conversations with Prominent Women (1995). Stille, D. R., Extraordinary Women of Medicine (1997). Reference works: Biographical Directory of the American Psychiatric Association (1977, 1991). CA (1999). Other references: Book World (17 Oct. 1982). Christian Century (14 Apr. 1976). Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (transcript, 1997). Family Circle (Sept. 1975). Life (21 Nov. 1969). McCall’s (Aug. 1976). New Statesman (9 July 1982). NYTBR (10 Apr. 1988). People (Nov. 1975). Psychology Today (Oct. 1982). Readers’ Digest (Aug. 1976). Register (Dec. 1966). Time (10 Oct. 1969). Web site: ABCNews.com, 1999. —ANNE HUDSON JONES, UPDATED BY JEROME CHOU AND NELSON RHODES

KUMIN, Maxine W. Born 6 June 1925, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Daughter of Peter and Doll Simon Winokur; married Victor M. Kumin, 1946; children: Jane, Judith, Daniel Maxine W. Kumin received her B.A. and M.A. degrees from Radcliffe College. She married an engineering consultant; they have three children. A nature lover and an equestrian, Kumin lives with her husband on a farm in Warner, New Hampshire, where her avocations include raising most of her own fruits and vegetables, and riding and breeding Arabian and quarter horses. Although Kumin remembers writing from a very early age, during her late teens and early twenties she stopped altogether. She began writing and publishing children’s stories and light verse while she was pregnant with her third child in 1953, when

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she felt a rising discontentment with her life. Her first book of poetry, Halfway, appeared in 1961. Since then, Kumin has published nearly a dozen other books of poetry, several novels, and many children’s books. Kumin has also spent two years as a scholar of the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, has conducted workshops at Columbia, Brandeis, and Princeton universities, and has served on the staff at Washington University, the University of Massachusetts, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her literary prizes and awards include the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1973 for Up Country: Poems of New England (1972); both the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize (1972) and the Levinson Prize (1986) from Poetry magazine; an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award (1980); fellowships from the National Council on the Arts (1967) and the Academy of American Poets (1985); the Poet’s Prize (1994) and the Aiken Taylor Poetry Prize (1995) for Looking for Luck (1992); the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences’s Centennial Award (1996), the New Hampshire Writers Project Lifetime Achievement award (1998); and most recently, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 1999. Kumin has also been awarded two honorary doctorates of humanities.


they do not work (organically) in the poem. Even though she is fascinated by and preoccupied with the irrational unconscious, sanity and a conscious choice within and for life are essential keys to Kumin’s voice. Clear, practiced talent for the close image and the penetration of patterned sounds, as well as successful transformation of traditional forms such as the sonnet into contemporary usage, enable her to render honestly and artistically her life experiences in her preferred medium, the poem. Kumin often writes pastoral poetry about New England; yet she is more than either a mere nature poet or a regional writer. She is, without doubt, what she has and continued to strive for, to be ‘‘a good poet.’’ Kumin’s considerable output attests to the power of nature and mortality as literary subjects. In the 1970s and 1980s, Kumin published more poetry, novels, and children’s books, as well as making regular contributions—essays, poetry, and fiction—to a number of journals, while making appearances and teaching at Washington University, the University of Massachusetts, Columbia, Princeton, Brandeis, and the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference.

As a poet, Kumin has been influenced most by W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Karl Shapiro, Marianne Moore, and Elizabeth Bishop—either by their careful craft, by their intensity of observation, or sometimes by their stanza pattern. She has been placed by one critic as existing within the ‘‘Bishop-Lowell-Sexton’’ school of contemporary American poetry, which is an indication that Kumin’s work, like much of theirs, reveals a close attention to objective details yet an astute ability to metamorphose her observations into descriptions that resonate with more than mere imagery.

Kumin’s work remains impressive. The well-received Retrieval System (1978) was followed by To Make a Prairie: Essays on Poets, Poetry, and Country Living (1979), and her first collection of stories, Why Can’t We Live Together like Civilized Human Beings? (1982). Although Kumin’s work makes much of the positive coexistence with nature, these works pursue another common theme: ‘‘loss’’ and ‘‘relinquishment,’’ especially as experienced in intimate relationships such as family. Kumin communicates these themes by juxtaposing scrupulous attention to the detail of everyday life with transcendent communion with the natural world.

The tenor of Kumin’s poems ranges from horror to love. Even when descending into the theme of the grotesque, particularly in the poems from The Nightmare Factory (1970), her sensibility is one that funds the ordinary events of life more wonderful than desperate. One reviewer has rightly contrasted Kumin’s Up Country with Sylvia Plath’s Winter Trees. While both Plath and Kumin take the pose of a transcendentalist nature poet in these volumes, Plath’s transcendence pushes her toward cessation in death while Kumin’s leads her more intensely into the progression of life.

While Kumin amuses readers with characterizations of her neighbors in New Hampshire in Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief: New and Selected Poems (1982), the willfulness, almost maliciousness of nature that seems not to care for connections, familial or neighborly, is a powerful presence. Henry Manley, a recurring character in Kumin’s poems, provides a way of exploring both sides: the little foibles of day-to-day existence and the large specter of mortality looming over everyone. Paradoxically, nature allows for continuation and extinction at the same time, and Kumin is determined readers will understand both.

Kumin’s The Retrieval System (1978) includes all the predominant themes of her ouevre: transcendence via absorption in nature, the love of animals, the importance of personal relationships, and the horrors of separation and death. This book deals specifically with the attempts at integration of the self at midlife, and with loss. The poet writes especially of her separation from her adult children because of geographical distance, and of the separation of herself from her best friend, Anne Sexton, because of the latter’s suicide.

In her eighth book of poems, The Long Approach (1985), Kumin not only continues with the subject of farm living, but also takes on social issues such as pollution, religious persecution, nuclear holocaust, and famine. These poems mark somewhat of a turning point in Kumin’s career in that her essentially personal, intimate voice transforms into one that is more public and critical. The critics were quick to notice this alteration, and not all of them were pleased. Although her appraisal of these issues was sometimes perceived as underdeveloped, the growth into new areas of expression was welcome from a poet who had brought such understanding to the paradoxes of nature.

Kumin has most often been praised for her original description of detail, particularly in the natural world. She has been criticized, though much less frequently, for the creation of similes that attempt to be perceptive but are artificial or forced because

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Kumin continued to mix the personal with the globally relevant in Nurture (1989). The intimate voice recurs in such


autobiographical poems as ‘‘Marianne, My Mother, and Me.’’ But she further develops the socioecological voice that expresses concern over pollution and consequent extinction. Kumin understands animals’ perceived cruelty to each other; conflict inherent in survival is one of the foundations of nature. But the argument for survival does not extend to humanity’s abuse and neglect of animals. This concern for animals and their relationship with human beings is also important in Looking for Luck: Poems (1992). But animals do not take center stage in this collection; Kumin is equally interested in the universalities of her own personal relationships, with her daughter who has departed to another country and with fellow writers Flannery O’Connor and Sexton. Kumin’s relationships with family, friends, and nature are the settings for a deeper consideration of nature and mortality. Connecting the Dots (1998) reinforces her disillusionment with society. Ben Howard noted in Poetry, ‘‘From her earliest poems to her most recent, she has held fast to her dominant themes, her inductive methods, and her darkly ironic outlook, which has altered only in the respect that it has become more recognizably itself. At once ardent and skeptical, her vision has grown more stringent over the years, and the strain of social criticism has become more insistent. What has not changed is Kumin’s earthy realism, her generous receptivity.’’ Kumin’s productivity has not been confined to poetry. She continues to write essays, specifically In Deep: Country Essays (1987), and children’s books, such as The Microscope (1984). An accomplished horsewoman, she makes regular contributions to equestrian journals. Her essays and columns also encompass such topics as organic gardening. She has continued to teach, with visiting stints at MIT (Boston, 1984), University of Miami (spring 1995), Pitzer College (California, 1996), Davidson College (North Carolina, spring 1997), Florida International University (spring 1999). As the turn of the century approaches, Kumin is still writing: Quit Monks or Die, her first mystery, was published in 1999, and two new books of essays are forthcoming in 2000 (Always Beginning: Prose Essays and Inside the Halo and the Journey Beyond). OTHER WORKS: Sebastian and the Dragon (1960). Follow the Fall (1961). Spring Things (1961). A Summer Story (1961). A

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Winter Friend (1961). Mittens in May (1962). No One Writes a Letter to the Snail (1962). Archibald and the Traveling Poodle (1963). Eggs of Things (with A. Sexton, 1963). The Beach before Breakfast (1964). More Eggs of Things (with A. Sexton, 1964). Speedy Digs Downside Up (1964). The Privilege (1965). Through Dooms of Love (1965). Paul Bunyan (1966). Faraway Farm (1967). The Passions of Uxport (1968). The Wonderful Babies of 1809 (1968). When Grandmother Was Young (1969). When Mother Was Young (1970). The Abduction (1971). Joey and the Birthday Present (with A. Sexton, 1971). When Great Grandmother Was Young (1971). The Designated Heir (1974). House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate (1975). The Wizard’s Tears (with A. Sexton, 1975). What Color Is Caesar (1978). Women, Animals, and Vegetables: Essays and Stories (1994). Connecting the Dots (1996). Selected Poems 1960-1990 (1997).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: A Separate Vision: Isolation in Contemporary Women’s Poetry (1984). Grosholz, E., ed., Telling the Barn Swallow: Poets on the Poetry of Maxine Kumin (1997). Reference works: CA (1967, 1999). CANR (1981, 1987). CAAS (1989). CLC (1976, 1980, 1984). CP (ca. 1975). DLB (1980). MTCW (1991). Modern American Women Poets (1984). Modern American Women Writers (1991). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: America (18 Nov. 1989). Belles Lettres (Fall 1992). Commonweal (29 Nov. 1985). CSM (9 Aug. 1961, 10 July 1975). Hudson Review (Winter 1982-83). LJ (1 Mar. 1989). MR (Spring 1975). Nation (24 July 1982). NYHTB (27 Aug. 1961). NYTBR (19 Nov. 1972, 7 Sept. 1975, 8 Aug. 1982, 5 Nov. 1989, 21 Mar. 1993). Poetry (May 1966, June 1998). SR (6 May 1961, 25 Dec. 1965, 26 Dec. 1970, 25 Mar. 1972). Virginia Quarterly Review (Summer 1991). WRB (May 1992). Yankee (Dec. 1987). YR (Mar. 1962). —SYBIL ESTESS, UPDATED BY LINDA BERUBE AND ALLISON A. JONES

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L LAING, Dilys Bennett Born October 1906, Pwllheli, North Wales; died 14 February 1960, Norwich, Vermont Wrote under: Dilys Bennett, Dilys Laing Daughter of Alfred James and Eve Bennett; married Alexander Laing, 1936 Dilys Bennett Laing, who became a U.S. citizen in 1941, and her husband are associated with the Dartmouth group of poets, which includes Philip Booth, Ramon Guthrie, and Richard Eberhart. Laing’s poems frequently appeared in Poetry, the Nation, The New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Saturday Review. Although Laing’s poetic vision is authenticated in personal experience, her eye, especially in her early volumes, is turned outward, surveying politics, history, culture, and nature. Her strong antiwar stance is expressed in many poems and in the Responsibles, a group Laing and her husband formed in the 1950s in protest against the Cold War. Some of Laing’s later poems reflect the profound influence of her visit to Mexico in 1950. In her last years, she was preoccupied with Aztec studies and with the manuscript of Corazon, a tale that, according to her son, reflects the schizophrenia Laing saw as the era’s disease. Laing’s first volume, Another England (1941), opens with poems of bitter protest against war, which Laing cautions submerges the individual in ‘‘the mass impulse’’ and ‘‘mass objective’’ and pulls us down from our position of superiority on the evolutionary ladder to become ‘‘hawks’’ in our airplanes and ‘‘crabs’’ in our tanks and submarines. The anger with which the volume opens gives way in Part II to gentler reflections of the redeeming power of poetry and art. In ‘‘The Maker,’’ Laing objects to the ‘‘falling cadence of disillusion’’ of fashionable poetry, asserting that ‘‘It is the gift of the poet / to contradict chaos, to hear the YES! of the womb . . . / making another space, and a new time.’’ In Birth Is Farewell (1944), Laing offers appraisals—sardonic, wry, humorous, laudatory, and poignant—of human achievements and of the evolutionary achievement that humankind itself represents. In the couplet that comprises ‘‘Note to Charles Darwin,’’ Laing writes: ‘‘Sorrow took the swinging ape / and twisted it to human shape.’’ Laing devotes particular attention to juxtaposing man’s scientific and technical achievements with the moving fullness, the unpredictability, the majesty, and the eternalness of nature. The verses in Poems from a Cage (1961) celebrate, in Laing’s words, ‘‘two conditions basic to poetry as to life’’: ‘‘captivity’’ and ‘‘release.’’ Within the thematic framework, there are some deliciously feminist poems. ‘‘Let Them Ask Their Husbands’’—the title comes from Corinthians—declares, ‘‘In

human need / of the familiar / I see God / woman-shaped / and I have my Pauline pride.’’ Laing, in this volume as in her others, often employs metaphors of pregnancy, motherhood, and wifehood, metaphors so naturally woven into the fabric of her poetry that they reveal a poet neither self-conscious nor ashamed nor unduly prideful of her sex. Laing neither followed in the poetic fashions of her time nor blazed new trails and thus did not achieve fame. However, she always enjoyed and still enjoys the high regard of fellow poets, including Marianne Moore. Her poems are gracefully and economically shaped and are often aphoristically brilliant. They have solidarity, maturity, and wit. Readers will recognize in Laing an accomplished craftswoman. They will be rewarded by the fullness of her vision and will enjoy a poetry rife with a sympathetic humanity. OTHER WORKS: The Great Year (1948). Walk through Two Landscapes (1949). The Collected Poems of Dilys Laing (1967). BIBLIOGRAPHY: NYHTB (10 Oct. 1948; 20 Aug. 1950). NYT (7 Dec. 1941; 10 Dec. 1944). NYTBR (21 Jan. 1978). SatR (29 Nov. 1941; 25 Nov. 1944; 15 April 1950). —ELLEN FRIEDMAN

LAMB, Martha (Joanna Reade) Nash Born 12 August 1826, Plainfield, Massachusetts; died 2 January 1893, New York, New York Wrote under: Aunt Mattie, Mrs. Martha J. Lamb Daughter of Arvin and Lucinda Vinton Nash; married Charles A. Lamb, 1852 Martha Nash Lamb began her career as a writer of children’s stories and a romantic novel. It was, however, as a historian of the city of New York and as an editor (1883-93) of the Magazine of American History that she did her most significant work. Lamb’s major publication is her History of the City of New York, the first volume appearing in 1877, the second in 1880. The two comprise the history of New York from the era of Hudson’s discovery to the inauguration of Washington. After Lamb’s death, Constance Cary Harrison contributed a brief supplementary volume to the history, Externals of Modern New York (1896). Lamb’s perspective in the History of the City of New York is that of the narrative historian, and she concentrates particularly on political developments. In the Dutch era, she traces with acuity the

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internal conflicts, giving special stress to the role of Peter Stuyvesant. She discusses with sympathetic insight the efforts of the British to peacefully amalgamate the two communities in the colony of New York. In the 18th-century history, Lamb particularly stresses the growing conflict with the British and the city’s role in the Revolution and the new nation. She also gives some attention to the social history of New York, noting particularly the roles of the emerging major families and their interlocking interests. On the other hand, she does not attempt to deal in any depth with the city’s economic development. Lamb’s The Homes of America (1879) is an account of historic homes, primarily of political leaders, from the early 17th to the mid-19th centuries. For the 19th century, she included residences of artists and writers. The work was not a history of American architecture but rather a descriptive account, including biographical sketches and a number of brief family histories. As editor of the Magazine of American History, Lamb contributed some 50 signed and many unsigned articles. Her Wall Street in History (1883) consists of material that first appeared in three issues (May-July 1883). The book is a lively, well-researched account of three stages of the history of the street: the early Dutch and English developments; its 18th-century role as ‘‘seat of fashion, aristocracy and state government’’; and its 19th-century role as financial center. Lamb’s account is descriptive rather than analytical, and she deals in very general and positive terms with Wall Street’s financial role. Lamb also wrote fiction. Her novel Spicy (1873) is a romantic mystery, with the recent Chicago fire giving dramatic climax to the work. She also wrote several children’s stories, generally moralistic, and edited such publications as The Christmas Basket (1882), a collection of poetry. It was as a narrative historian that Lamb was most successful. She handled with clarity and balance the broad developments of public life; she had a keen eye for character, and wrote with a dramatic flair of such events as the Zenger trial. Her style is somewhat stilted at times, but she wrote with ease. Though somewhat discursive and occasionally preoccupied with minute detail, on the whole she developed forcefully and with balanced judgment the major political themes. Lamb was a thorough if untrained researcher with a great interest in primary sources. She utilized manuscript collections, public records, private letters, and personal interviews. Accordingly, her historical work has depth and solidity. She wrote primarily for an educated general public. In her History of New York, she best achieved her goal of combining sound historical scholarship with popular appeal. OTHER WORKS: Laughing Kittie and Purring Kittie, with Other Little Folks at Robinwood (1868). The Playschool Stories for Little Folks (1869). Aunt Mattie’s Library (1870). Drifting Goodward (1870). Fun and Profit (1870). Snow and Sunshine: A Story for Boys and Girls (1882). A Guide for Strangers to General Grant’s Tomb in Riverside Park (1886). Our Country Fifty Years

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Ago: Some Incidents in Connection with Lafayette’s Visit (1887). The Washington Inauguration (1889).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Lyman, S. E., Lady Historian: Martha J. Lamb (1969). Reference works: AA. AW. DAB. NAW (1971). NCAB. Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Godey’s Lady’s Book (Nov. 1887). NYT (3 Jan. 1893). —INZER BYERS

LAMOTT, Anne Born 10 April 1954, San Francisco, California Daughter of Dorothy and Kenneth Lamott; children: Samuel Anne Lamott grew up and has spent most of her life in San Francisco and surrounding Marin County. She has supported herself primarily as a writer for much of her adult life. The most significant events in her life, as they have affected her writing, are her father’s illness and death from brain cancer during the late 1970s; the death of her friend Pammy, also from cancer; her decision to quit drinking in 1986; the birth of her son in 1989; and her subsequent decision to embrace Christianity. Much of her fiction is at least semiautobiographical. All of her writing is marked by an edgy wit. Her personas in her nonfiction and the narrators of her novels are likeably quirky. Lamott is that rare type of writer whose tone can be sarcastic and ironic without becoming bitter or jaded. Much of the time, she is herself the target of her own sarcasm. The many paradoxes of modern life inform her plots and the development of her characters. Over time, her novels have grown increasingly complex and more successfully structured, and her popularity has steadily increased until Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (1999), a memoir of her journey toward and into Christianity, reached the New York Times bestseller list. Her most prestigious award is a Guggenheim fellowship, which she received in 1985. Lamott attended Goucher College in Baltimore for two years but didn’t begin writing until after she had left the school. Relying on her father’s connections to a literary agency in NewYork, she started submitting short fiction but had difficulty publishing until she began the novel that was to become Hard Laughter (1980). Begun soon after her father was diagnosed with cancer and nearly finished when he died, Hard Laughter is the story of a family just after the adult children have received the news that their father has brain cancer. The narrator is one of the daughters, Jennifer. Despite its subject matter, the novel is amusing and joyful; the characters often rely on humor as a strategy for reconciling


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themselves to their situation. Though none of the members of this family is perfect, the novel conveys the strengths of a family that functions well together under stress. Family life in imperfect families is a consistent theme in Lamott’s work. Her second novel, Rosie (1983), features a child whose father has been killed in an automobile accident and whose mother, despite her ability to maintain a positive public image, descends into alcoholism and neurosis. Rosie, the protagonist, is sexually abused by the father of a friend, but her mother, Elizabeth, is too consumed by her addiction to help her daughter. The novel ends happily, however, as Elizabeth recognizes her alcoholism and other minor characters also tame their neuroses. Crooked Little Heart (1997) is a sequel to Rosie. In this novel, Rosie is an adolescent who has achieved success as a competitive tennis player. Because she fears failure more than she assumes success, however, Rosie enjoys the sport less and less, especially after she begins to cheat. She becomes consumed by the weight of this secret, as well as by the secret that her friend and doubles partner, Simone, is pregnant. This novel, with its shifting points of view, successfully conveys the confusion inherent to adolescence as well as the frustration and anguish involved in parenting an adolescent. Lamott’s nonfiction has been even more commercially and critically successful than her fiction. Her first memoir, Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year (1993), delineates Lamott’s experience as a single parent. Sam’s father did not support Lamott’s decision to have the baby, and he is most noticeable by his absence from the book. The book is primarily a chronicle of Lamott’s shifting identity as she accepts and understands the appellation ‘‘mother.’’ In a similar vein, Bird by Bird (1994) is less an instruction manual than a revelation of Lamott’s identity as writer. Her suggestions to aspiring writers are less stylistic or pragmatic than philosophical; it’s a how-to text only in the broadest sense, and some sections are among Lamott’s most wickedly witty.

LANDERS, Ann Born Esther Pauline Lederer, 4 July 1918, Sioux City, Iowa Daughter of Abraham and Rebecca Friedman; married Jules W. Lederer, 1939 (divorced); children: one daughter Having graduated with honors from Central High School in 1936, Ann Landers majored in psychology and journalism at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa. Though married in 1939 before graduating from college and devoting herself to being a wife and then a mother to her only daughter, Landers engaged in many charitable and political activities. In 1955 her life changed dramatically when she won a Chicago Sun-Times competition to become the writer-editorship of the ‘‘Ann Landers’’ column—a job previously held for five years by Ruth Crowley until her death. As Ann Landers, Landers gained instantaneous fame, doubling, tripling, and quadrupling subscriptions to the syndicated column within the first two years. Landers is often cited as one of the most admired or most influential women in the United States. Since 1965 she has been showered with awards and citations from Jewish associations and from foundations as varied as those for mental health and psychiatry. Whatever problems Landers may have had to face in her own life, including a divorce after 36 years of marriage, she proved able to answer—with pungent wit or a sympathetic understanding that is not only intuitive but also well informed and based on expert advice, and with brisk as well as open-minded intelligence—questions as naive as ‘‘Is incest hereditary?’’ and as anguished as ‘‘Should I leave him?’’ or ‘‘What are we to do about these kids?’’ While her answers as well as the inquiries prompting them seem as American as apple pie, it is reassuring to remember that the need for such advice has been timeless and universal and only the answers have had to change in conformity with changing mores.

Traveling Mercies is a discussion of Lamott’s circuitous and wayward route to faith; such a choice was neither natural to nor expected of her. She delineates her childhood experiences with religion, generally among families other than her own. The fact that she has become an active member of a Christian church is as bizarre and puzzling to her as it is to many of her friends, and Lamott approaches religion with the same zealous irony that characterizes her interpretation of other more secular contemporary topics. But her irony remains affectionate, and she treats spirituality as one more quirky yet significant human need. Throughout her writing, Lamott is forthright about her weaknesses and failings, public and private, as well as her desires and beliefs.

Perhaps unwittingly, Landers is continuing a tradition with antecedents—naturally without the benefits of modern communication media—in medieval Love Courts, Italian Renaissance novels, and romances of 17th-century France, wherein questions concerning love were urgently posed, discussed, and answers provided. In essence, Landers’s advice to teenagers to keep ‘‘all hands on deck and four feet on the floor’’ and her ecstatic hope that ‘‘all of you someday will know this most exquisite of all experiences, the moment when you give your most precious gift—yourself—to your beloved in marriage,’’ is not so different from that of France’s Mlle. de Scudéry, who in 1656 mapped out a chart for lovers to show them the way and the obstacles they might encounter on departing from ‘‘New Friendship’’ toward ‘‘Tenderness.’’

OTHER WORKS: Joe Jones (1985). All New People (1989). Home and Other Stories: Catherine Wagner (1993).

If it is reassuring to find, in perusing such past discussions, that certain human problems are universal and answers to them were welcomed by as many national and international readers then as today, it is also interesting to realize these answers are of immense importance to our understanding of how people lived— even if only as portrayed in fiction. In return, though in a more

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: CA (1994). —LYNN DOMINA

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documentary sense, Landers’s columns will provide present and future historians increasingly interested in exploring the lives of ordinary people rather than those of a country’s rulers and their wars with invaluable material concerning the ever-changing mores of mankind. OTHER WORKS: Since You Asked Me (1962, 1983). Teenagers and Sex (1964, 1987). Truth Is Stranger (1968). The Ann Landers Encyclopedia, A to Z: Improve Your Life Emotionally, Medically, Sexually, Socially, Spiritually (1978, 1979). Ann Landers’ New Bride Guide (1983). Gems (1988). Nuggets and Doozies (1991). A Collection of My Favorite Gems (1994). Wake Up and Smell the Coffee! Advice, Wisdom, and Uncommon Good Sense (1996). The Best of Ann Landers: Her Favorite Letters of All Time (1997). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Grossvogel, D. I., Dear Ann Landers: Our Intimate and Changing Dialogue with America’s Best-Loved Confidante (1989). Howard, M., Eppie: The Story of Ann Landers (1982). Pottker, J., Dear Ann, Dear Abby: The Unauthorized Biography of Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren (1987). Whitelaw, N., They Wrote Their Own Headlines: American Women Journalists (1994). Other references: Bon Appetit (November 1995). Canadian Business (October 1994). CQ Researcher (March 1993). JAMA (Oct. 1992). Ladies’ Home Journal (June 1996). Psychology Today (May 1993). Quill (March 1993). Skeptical Inquirer (1995). Virginia Journal of Education (March 1993). U.S. News & World Report (Nov. 1993). —EDITH KERN

LANDON, Margaret (Dorothea Mortenson) Born 3 September 1903, Somers, Wisconsin; died 4 December 1993 Daughter of Annenus D. and Adelle Estbourg Mortenson; married Kenneth P. Landon, 1926 Margaret Landon received her B.A. degree from Wheaton College, Illinois, in 1925. While teaching Latin and English in Bear Lake, Wisconsin, Landon felt that perhaps she had chosen the wrong career. She did, however, continue her interest in education after her marriage to a Presbyterian missionary (who later was associate dean of area and language studies at the U.S. Department of State Foreign Service Institute). After a one-year stay in Bangkok, largely spent in learning the language, the Landons were stationed in Siam (now Thailand) from 1927 to 1937. Landon was principal of the Trang Girls’ School there for five years. The Asian experience led to writings by her husband such as Southeast Asia (1949) and to her own novels, Anna and the King of Siam (1944) and Never Dies the Dream (1949).

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Anna and the King of Siam is the story of Anna Leonowens, a spirited Welsh woman who, in the 1860s, became secretary to Siam’s King Mongkut and governess to his 60-plus children and his favorite concubines. Landon based the story on two books of memoirs by Mrs. Leonowens, The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870) and The Romance of the Harem (1872), but she supplemented this information with her own research in Siamese books and documents in the Library of Congress and in consular records in the National Archives. In addition, Landon was able to meet Mrs. Leonowens’s granddaughter, who gave her diaries, letters, and other family materials. This novel, Landon’s best-known work, appeals to the reader through its descriptions of the unusual nature of the household, the exotic setting of the palace of Siam, and the spunky character of the heroine, who bravely speaks out on freedom and individual rights to her employer. Anna and the King of Siam was a bestseller and has been translated into many languages. The hit musical comedy The King and I was first produced in 1951 but has been an international success on stage with many revivals in the 1970s and ’80s, as well the most recent in the late 1990s. The original movie version of the novel also had much success, and it, too, was remade in the late 1990s, along with an animated version on video. Rheumatic fever in 1946 interfered with Landon’s writing for an extended period of time, but in 1949 she published Never Dies the Dream, a novel which seems to be drawn largely from her own mission-teaching experience in Bangkok. The heroine is India Severn, a native of Chicago and missionary for 25 years. She is head of Jasmine Hall, a mission school for girls that she established 11 years before the story begins in 1930. Attitudes toward education for women provide interest in this tale of a land where, in the 19th century, the proverb ‘‘Teach a buffalo before a woman’’ was commonly accepted. The most successful aspect of Never Dies the Dream is the delineation of setting. It provides the reader with a strong sense of having been in Bangkok along with the characters. Landon uses intimate details drawn from her own stay there to give a realistic dimension to the fictional scene. The great success of Anna and the King of Siam was not duplicated by Landon’s second novel. For a number of years, she worked on a history of Southeast Asia in the colonial period, which remains unpublished. Had ill health not interfered, Landon might well have published much more. Her two novels, however, stand as worthwhile literary contributions in their examination of cultural differences and as adventure tales. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Lehmann, J. D., Landon Family History: Descendants of Samuel and Margaret Landon of Tioga County, Pennsylvania, and Descendants of Daniel and Ann Landon of Greenwood, Nebraska, 1727-1987 (1988). Reference works: CA (1975). CB (Feb. 1945). TCAS. Other: Anna and the King of Siam (recording, 1980). Anna and the King of Siam (video, 1994). The King and I (audiovisual, 1982). —DOROTHY H. BROWN


LANE, Gertrude Battles Born 21 December 1874, Saco, Maine; died 25 September 1941, New York, New York Daughter of Eustace and Ella Battles Lane Gertrude Battles Lane was educated at Thornton Academy in Maine. She first worked in Boston as an assistant editor and, in her spare time, edited the Boston Beacon, a small society weekly. In 1903, Arthur T. Vance of Woman’s Home Companion, newly published by the Crowell Publishing Company, offered her a job as household editor. She rose rapidly, becoming managing editor in 1909 and editor-in-chief in 1912, a position she held until her death. Already a director of the Crowell Publishing Company, she became a vice president in 1929, the same year Colby College of Maine awarded her an honorary LL.D. When Lane entered the publishing world, many high-quality, low-circulation periodicals were disappearing. Competing for a new mass market, the Companion supplemented the entertainment sections—fiction and features—with ‘‘a great deal of material to whet the reader’s appetite for advertized products’’ (Fortune, Aug. 1937). ‘‘In editing the Woman’s Home Companion, ’’ Lane wrote, ‘‘I keep constantly in mind . . . the housewife of today as I see her . . . the woman who wants to do less housework, so she will have more time for other things.’’ To attract her, Lane developed an enormously successful editorial formula: ‘‘two serials, four or five short stories, six special articles, and a full complement of service departments for each number.’’ The Companion took a moderate pro-woman-suffrage stance and, later, was the first of its kind to oppose prohibition. Frequent special articles were aimed at working women. Lane enhanced the Companion’s long-established reputation for fiction. In the 1910s she bought stories by Mary Wilkins Freeman, Mary Dawson, and William Chester Estabrook. During the 1920s and 1930s she garnered work by Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pearl Buck, and Sinclair Lewis, along with Booth Tarkington, Sherwood Anderson, John Galsworthy, and Ellen Glasgow. In 1916, the Companion’s 1,000,000 circulation still trailed Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, and Pictorial Review. By 1934, the Companion led the circulation race, with five women’s magazines close behind. Against this fierce competition, Lane successfully exploited new techniques in merchandising and market research. In 1935, she supplemented her highly trained corps of subeditors with 1,500 reader-editors, who were regularly surveyed on everything from manners and morals to cosmetics and salad recipes. Under Lane’s astute leadership, the Companion became a top national magazine, its circulation growing from approximately 738,000 to 3,608,000. According to Fortune this profitable magazine was successful due to Lane’s ‘‘intelligent, purposeful editing.’’ Her Times obituary described her as ‘‘the dean of magazine editors in this country.’’ Through three decades of tremendous

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change, she kept her rapport with her audience. Although she encouraged a pervasive consumerism, Lane also provided her readers with solid, factual advice and introduced them to America’s finest writers. As a businessperson, Lane proved an innovative leader. Her lasting reputation doubtless will depend upon that of the general woman’s magazine, a type of periodical which she helped create and which flourishes still. OTHER WORKS: American Naval Heroes, 1775-1812, 1861-1898 by J. H. Brown (edited by Lane, 1899). Gertrude Battles Lane’s letters are at the Library of Congress. Her papers are owned by Mrs. Edward E. Lane, of Wayne, Pennsylvania. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Ferber, E., A Peculiar Treasure (1939). McBride, S. E., ‘‘Woman in the Popular Magazines for Women in America: 1830-1956’’ (Dissertation., 1966). Mott, F. L., A History of American Magazines, Vol. 4: 1885-1905 (1957). Peterson, T, Magazines in the Twentieth Century (1956). Seaton, E. K., ‘‘The Changing Image of the American Woman in a Mass-Circulation Periodical: The Ladies’ Home Journal, 1890-1919’’ (Dissertation, 1967). Woodward, H., The Lady Persuaders (1960). Reference works: CB DAB. NAW. Other references: Fortune (Aug. 1937). NYT (26 Sept. 1941). Time (27 July 1936). Woman’s Home Companion (Nov. 1941). —SARAH W. SHERMAN

LANE, Rose Wilder Born 5 December 1886, De Smet, South Dakota; died 30 October 1968, Danbury, Connecticut Daughter of Almanzo and Laura Ingalls Wilder; married Gillette Lane, 1909 Unconventional from the first, Rose Wilder Lane left her parents’ Mansfield, Missouri, home to work as a telegraph operator for Western Union. She married a land speculator whose ne’erdo-well behavior soon forced Lane to fend for herself as the first woman real estate agent in California. She was a reporter for the San Francisco Bulletin from 1914 to 1918. Written during this period, and indicative of her admiration for American heroes, are Henry Ford’s Own Story (1917) and The Making of Herbert Hoover (1920), both panegyrics to men she considered archetypally American in their resourcefulness and individualism. After formally divorcing her husband, Lane worked for the American Red Cross during World War I, primarily in Russia, Turkey, and Albania. The Peaks of Shala (1923) is a travelogue of her adventures in Albania. In the 1920s, her articles and short stories filled the most popular magazines and journals. In 1922, she received the secondplace O. Henry best short story of the year award for ‘‘Innocence.’’ ‘‘Yarbwoman’’ was included in O’Brien’s The Best Short Stories of 1927, and her ‘‘Old Maid’’ was singled out for O.

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Henry honors again in 1933. Lane became one of the highest-paid writers in the U.S. ‘‘Innocence’’ and ‘‘Yarbwoman’’ are both set among poor whites of the South. Ironically, Lane’s two prizewinning stories have an atypically eerie air. The dark forces are eventually shown to be those cruel and ignorant aspects of human nature coming from within man himself, especially as he is limited by moribund social structures. Her Ozark novels, Hill Billy (1925) and Cindy (1928), were followed by her pioneer novels, Let the Hurricane Roar (1933, reprinted 1985) and Free Land (1938). In Let the Hurricane Roar two young pioneers struggle with the most intolerable conditions of the Dakota frontier, finding at last a sort of sad strength in themselves, even after their most cherished illusions are gone. The novel celebrates the capacity of the individual pioneer. Free Land takes a sardonic view of the governmental scheme to settle the frontier by the free grant of land. Lane’s portrait of foolish expectations is satirical, but tempered by sympathy for the real sufferings of the naive settlers. In Old Home Town (1935, reissued 1988), a collection of stories about women in a Midwestern town, Lane dissects smalltown life. Convention, intolerance, and gossip force the various women characters into unhappy marriages, into shame at being old maids of twenty-six, and even into suicide and murder. In the most overtly feminist story, ‘‘Immoral Woman,’’ the lovely and talented Mrs. Sims is unjustly driven from the town by her clod of a husband and by the townspeople, who are held in thrall by the meanness of their accepted mores. She becomes a liberated woman and an internationally famous designer. Give Me Liberty (1936) began Lane’s overtly political career, and her belletristic efforts correspondingly diminished. In The Discovery of Freedom (1943), she maintains the progress of human civilization is towards ‘‘individualistic libertarianism’’ (with emphasis on private ownership) and individual freedom from coercion by collective society. Her adamant refusal to support New Deal programs such as social security and her opposition to taxation led her into increasingly conservative political company. Lane was editor of the National Economic Council’s Review of Books from 1945 to 1950, but after some of her more bitter political disputes, she retreated from the public arena, concerning herself with domestic arts, local politics, and behind-the-scenes encouragement of individualistic libertarianism. In 1965 Woman’s Day magazine called Lane out of retirement to serve as their war correspondent in Vietnam. She died suddenly of a heart attack just before a projected trip abroad in 1968. Lane was a woman of varied adventures and several careers, but the greatest proportion of her prolific literary production centered around intensely American life. She wrote in praise of the American capitalist and of the pioneer woman of the American West. In many ways her style is simple, but delightful in its factual detail and portraiture of life from a primarily feminine point of view. Lane’s thought and work resist traditional labels. Brilliant, adventurous, and self-sufficient, she was very opposed to the socialistic idealism historically connected with revolutionaries of

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her type in America. She saw governmental authority and smalltown propriety as abstractions that had no right to control the actual pragmatic course of real people’s lives. This fierce elevation of the actual is the bedrock theme of her literary celebration of the quintessential American spirit. OTHER WORKS: Art Smith’s Story (1915). Diverging Roads (1919). White Shadows in the South Seas (1919). The Dancers of Shamahka (1923). He Was a Man (1925). Woman’s Day Book of American Needlework (1963). The Lady and the Tycoon (1973). Rose Wilder Lane: Her Story (1980). Travels with Zenobia: Paris to Albania by Model T Ford: A Journal (1983). Islam and the Discovery of Freedom (special reprint, 1997). Young Pioneers (1998). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Anderson, W., Laura’s Rose: The Story of Rose Wilder Lane (1986). Doughty, J. A., ‘‘Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane: The Cooperative Duo’’ (thesis,1994). Holtz, W. V., The Ghost in the Little House: A Life of Rose Wilder Lane (1995). Laura Ingalls Wilder & Rose Wilder Lane, 1937-1939 (1992). MacBride, R, ed., The Lady and the Tycoon: Letters of Rose Wilder Lane and Jasper Crane (1973). MacBride, R., Rose Wilder Lane: Her Story (1977). MacBride, R. L., Rose & Alva: Adapted from the Rose Years Books (2000). MacBride, R. L., Rose at Rocky Ridge: Adapted from The Rose Years Books (2000). Thompson, D., Dorothy Thompson and Rose Wilder Lane: Forty Years of Friendship: Letters, 1921-1960 (1991). Weaver, H., Mainspring; Based on the Discovery of Freedom (1947). Wilder, L. I., On the Way Home; The Diary of a Trip from South Dakota to Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894 (1990). Reference works: Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCA, TCAS. Other references: NR (24 April 1944). Signs (Spring 1990). —L. W. KOENGETER

LANGDON, Mary See PIKE, Mary Green

LANGER, Susanne (Katherina) K(nauth) Born 20 December 1895, New York, New York; died 17 July 1985 Daughter of Antonio and Else Uhlich Knauth; married William L. Langer, 1921 (divorced); children: two sons Susanne K. Langer received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees all from Radcliffe College; she also studied for a year (1921-22) at the University of Vienna. Langer served as a tutor in philosophy at her alma mater from 1927 to 1942 and taught at the


University of Delaware in 1943 and at Columbia University from 1945 to 1950. She was professor of philosophy at Connecticut College for Women from 1954 to 1962. She has been the recipient of numerous research grants and honorary degrees. Langer had two sons, was divorced in 1942, and lived in Olde Lyme, Connecticut. While Langer is best known for her philosophy of art, her extensive writings in aesthetics are part of an exploration of a larger question about the workings of the human mind. It is her interest in the human ability to symbolize that unifies works as seemingly dissimilar as her study of symbolic logic, her works on the creation and appreciation of art, and her Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (1967, 1972, 1982), which comprised three volumes. In her first major work, The Practice of Philosophy (1930), Langer introduces many of the themes that engage her later thinking. Intended as an introduction to philosophy, the book defines philosophy as the search for the logical connections between meanings and contrasts it with science, which seeks the empirical connections between facts. The study of symbolic logic, the logic of relations, is therefore an indispensable preliminary to the study of the more engrossing problems of metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. Langer outlines a theory of meaning intended to present a general pattern common to all the various ‘‘meaning situations,’’ including dictionary definition and emotional import. This common pattern is the triadic relationship between object, symbol, and interpreter, when the symbol and the object have some similar internal structure. The notion of similarity of structure in symbol and object symbolized leads to the suggestion that emotional and aesthetic experiences, which have structures so unlike that of our ‘‘discursive’’ syntactical languages, are best symbolized by the structures of myth, ritual, and art. In this early work, Langer presents the outlines of a theory of a form of understanding that, even though nondiscursive, is reasoning; that, like all understanding, ‘‘involves the appreciation of symbolic structures qua symbolic’’—and that, as the ‘‘personal discovery of meanings through myth, ritual, and art, highly individual, and awe-inspiring by its subtlety, is the very acme of logical procedure, and the refinement of intelligence.’’ In An Introduction to Symbolic Logic (1937), Langer sets out at length the system whose value she had proposed in The Practice of Philosophy. Yet Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbols of Reason, Rite, and Art (1942) is the explicit exposition of the theory of symbolism which had only been indicated in her two earlier works. The ‘‘new key’’ is the focus upon symbol-using as the essence of such diverse enterprises as mathematics, science, psychology, and art. Langer does not claim to have been the first to strike this new key, but only to have recognized it and to have shown how some of the chief questions of philosophy have been transposed into it. In Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key (1953), Langer applies the theory of art proposed in the earlier book to the various major art forms. The

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arts are alike in that they all create forms symbolic of human feeling; they differ in that each creates a different ‘‘primary illusion.’’ The function of artistic illusion is not ‘‘make-believe,’’ but rather, ‘‘disengagement from belief’’—the contemplation of sensory qualities without any practical overtones. In art, forms are freed from their common uses; this is in order that they may act as symbols, may become expressive of human feeling. All the essays in Philosophical Sketches (1962) are preliminary studies for a complete philosophy of mind, which is attempted in Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. Langer’s stated purpose in this work is to understand ‘‘the nature and origin of the veritable gulf that divides human from animal mentality, in a perfectly continuous course of development of life on earth that has no breaks.’’ She develops the thesis that the departure of human from animal mentality ‘‘is a vast and special evolution of feeling in the hominid stock,’’ a development so great it adds up to a qualitative difference that sets human nature apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. The fault she finds in most previous theories of mind is that they borrow their images from physics, and such images are inadequate to the richness of mental phenomena. Langer, in contrast, turns to works of art, which, as ‘‘images of the forms of feeling,’’ can more adequately reveal the psychic life. Langer’s own works exhibit what she finds in the course of evolution: a process of growth in which there is no break in continuity from the beginning to the present and yet in which there is considerable development and enrichment. Her writings are from the earliest characterized by an exceptional sensitivity to both art and the dynamisms of the subjective life; she has combined with this sensitivity a familiarity with a broad range of scientific research. Langer has acknowledged the influence of such diverse thinkers as Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sigmund Freud, and Ernst Cassirer; however, she is an original thinker whose insights have transformed what she received from others. She presented her insights within the framework of an overall empiricist philosophy, but even those who question this framework find much to value in her work. Langer’s sensitivity to the life of feeling and her refusal to consign art (and myth, and ritual) to a place of less importance than that held by the discursive enterprises assure her a place of lasting influence among philosophers, art theorists, and the lay public. OTHER WORKS: The Cruise of the Little Dipper, and Other Fairy Tales (1923; revised 1963). Problems of Art: Ten Philosophical Lectures (1957). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Abel, S., ‘‘Susanne Langer and the Rhythm of Dramatic Action’’ (thesis, 1984). Barth, E. M., Women Philosophers: A Bibliography of Books Through 1990 (1992). Blair, R. L., ‘‘A Langerian Analysis of Chekhov’s Major’’ (thesis, 1986). Cochrane, J. S., ‘‘Toward a Satisfactory Approach to Religion and the Arts Based Upon Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism and Susanne K. Langer’s Philosophy of Art’’ (thesis, 1986). Curran, T.,

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‘‘A New Note on the Film: A Theory of Film Criticism Derived from Susanne K. Langer’s Philosophy of Art’’ (dissertation on film, 1980). Feder, M., ‘‘The Semblance of Self: A Critique of Susanne Langer’s Expressionist Aesthetics’’ (thesis, 1980). Greenfield, G., Literary Cognition (dissertation, 1986). Harding, S. and M B. Hintikka, Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and the Philosophy of Science (1983). Johnson, J. R., ‘‘The Primacy of Form: A Study of the Philosophical Development of Susanne K. Langer with Implications for Choral Music’’ (thesis, 1990). Kidneigh, B. J., ‘‘The Potential Rhetorical Power of Myth: An Account Based on the Writings of Cassirer, Langer, and Burke’’ (thesis, 1990). Lathy, E. D., ‘‘Metaphor, Symbol, and Utterance the Reality of Relation in Susanne Langer and Mikhail Bakhtin’’ (thesis, 1985). Liddy, R. M., Art and Feeling: An Analysis and Critique of the Philosophy of Art of Susanne K. Langer (1970). Light, L. W., ‘‘Formalism, Expression Theory, and the Aesthetics of Susanne Langer’’ (thesis, 1980). Malhotra-Hammond, V., ‘‘Toward a Sociology in a New Key: An Inquiry into Dramatistic Social Theory’’ (thesis, 1980). McCall, M., ‘‘Symbol, Art, and Human Feeling in Susanne Langer’s Philosophy of Art’’ (thesis, 1983). Morosoff, D. A., ‘‘Humans as Symbol Makers and Symbol Users: The Development of Susanne Langer’s Philosophical Anthropology’’ (thesis, 1997). Nolan, F. J., ‘‘The Aesthetic Theory of Susanne Langer’’ (thesis, 1984). Phelan, C. M., The Influence of Susanne K. Langer’s Symbolic Theory of Aesthetic Education (1981). Smith, N. R., ‘‘The Usefulness of Susanne K. Langer’s Structural Analysis for Philosophy of Religion’’ (thesis, 1984). Waithe, M. E., A History of Women Philosophers (4 vols., beginning 1987). Watkins, G. K., ‘‘A Dramatic Application of Susanne Langer’s Aesthetic Symbolism’’ (thesis, 1989). Young, C. M., ‘‘Similarities in the Symbolic Theories of George Herbert Mead and Susanne K. Langer’’ (thesis, 1986). Reference works: CA (1974, 1986). CB (Nov. 1963). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). TCAS. Other references: BJA (Oct. 1968). Gregorianum (1972). JAAC (1955-56, 1968, 1970, 1972). Personalist (1965). Process Studies (Fall 1974). Review of Metaphysics (1954, 1961-63, 1970). —HELENE DWYER POLAND, UPDATED BY NICK ASSENDELFT

LARCOM, Lucy Born 5 March 1824, Beverly, Massachusetts; died 17 April 1893, Boston, Massachusetts Daughter of Benjamin and Lois Barrett Larcom Lucy Larcom grew up in the seaport town of Beverly. Her father was a retired shipmaster; her mother raised a family of 10 children, of which Larcom was next to the youngest. The events and experiences of her early childhood are vividly described in her autobiography, A New England Girlhood, Outlined from Memory (1892, latest reissue 1986). This work remains one of our

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most important authentic descriptions of the daily experience of a young working woman in the 19th century. Remarkably unsentimental, Larcom captures the sights and sounds of a bustling port town and relates the reactions of a growing girl to her social environment. When Larcom was nine years old, her father died; having no other means of support, her mother moved the family to the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, where even the children could earn enough to contribute to the family income. Her mother ran a boarding house for the factory girls, and Larcom herself went to work in the mills at the age of eleven, as a ‘‘bobbin girl,’’ changing the bobbins on the spinning frames. The hours of work were from 5:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. daily. Despite this use of child labor, the Lowell mills were considered an enlightened advance over the sweatshop conditions of European industry. Young women workers were encouraged to seek ‘‘self improvement’’ through various educational opportunities provided for them, such as the night schools and a special lecture series, the Lowell Lyceum. Larcom and her sister Emeline initiated a series of biweekly journals to which they and other women in their boarding house contributed creative pieces. Larcom’s own contributions were mainly poetical, following a bent she had developed in early childhood. By 1840 creative works of the mill women were being published in two literary magazines, the Lowell Offering and the Operatives’ Magazine. In 1842 these merged as the Lowell Offering, edited by Harriet Farley and Harriot Curtiss. It continued until 1847 and at its height had a subscription list of 4,000. Larcom contributed regularly to this journal, which is now recognized as a unique literary expression of working-class women. In A New England Girlhood, Larcom reveals some of the attitudes these women shared. She resists class prejudices, urging we not consider a woman’s station or occupation but rather her character: ‘‘It is the first duty of every woman to recognize the mutual bond of universal womanhood.’’ Larcom observes that many of the mill women were there so a less talented brother could be sent to school. Larcom also notes the concern of the mill women for the problem of slavery; petitions for its abolition were circulated each year among the workers and received thousands of signatures. Larcom herself was a strong abolitionist and wrote many antislavery verses. Her experiences in Lowell are further described in ‘‘Among Lowell Mill-Girls: A Reminiscence’’ (Atlantic Monthly, Nov. 1881). At age sixteen Larcom was transferred to the position of bookkeeper in the Lawrence Mills. There she had more time to study and to write. In 1846 she moved with her sister Emeline’s family to Illinois, where she graduated in 1852 from the Monticello Female Seminary in Alton. She then returned to the East and in 1854 began teaching at the Wheaton Seminary in Norton, Massachusetts. That year she published her first book, Similitudes from the Ocean and the Prairie , a series of prose parables, which she later dismissed as an immature work. During this period she published poetry in newspapers and in the Atlantic Monthly. In 1862 she resigned her teaching position


and in 1865 became, along with Gail Hamilton (Mary Abigail Dodge) and J. T. Trowbridge, an editor of Our Young Folks, a leading juvenile magazine. In 1868 she was named sole editor. Larcom never married, mainly because she wished to remain independent enough to pursue her career as a writer. Her first collection of verse, Poems (1868), was reissued in 1885 in the popular ‘‘household edition.’’ Larcom’s most important poetical work was An Idyl of Work (1875), a long poem in blank verse, which dealt with the Lowell factory women she had known in the 1840s. Larcom edited several anthologies with her friend John Greenleaf Whittier. These included Child Life (1871), Child Life in Prose (1873), and Songs of Three Centuries (1875). These collections were all published under Whittier’s name, but it is clear she had the major hand in their creation from the fact that he split the royalties with her. In the preface to Child Life in Prose, Whittier acknowledges that Larcom did most of the work. Works by both Larcom and Whittier were included in these collections. She also herself compiled several popular books of collected poems. Larcom’s reputation today rests not so much on the popular verse which brought her fame in her own day, but rather on the straightforward, unsentimental picture of her life and times she has given us in her prose works. OTHER WORKS: Lottie’s Thought-Book (1858). Ships in the Mist, and Other Stories (1860). Leila Among the Mountains (attributed to Larcom, 1861). Breathings of a Better Life (1866). Childhood Songs (1875). Roadside Poems for Summer Travellers (compiled by Larcom, 1876). Hillside and Seaside in Poetry: A Companion to ‘Roadside Poems’ (compiled by Larcom, 1877). Snow Bloom, and Other Poems ( circa 1880). Wild Roses of Cape Ann, and Other Poems (1881). Wheaton Seminary: A Centennial Sketch (1885). The Cross and the Grail (1887). Easter Gleams: Poems (1890). As It Is in Heaven (1891). At the Beautiful Gate, and Other Songs of Faith (1892). The Unseen Friend (1892). Beckonings from Every Day: A Calendar of Thought (1895). Lucy Larcom: Life, Letters, and Diary (edited by D. D. Addison, 1895). Letters of Lucy Larcom to the Whittiers (edited by G. F. Shepard, 1930). The papers of Lucy Larcom are at the Essex Institute, James Duncan Phillips Library in Salem, Massachusetts. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Conway, J. K., Written by Herself: Autobiographies of American Women: An Anthology (1992). Eisler, B., The Lowell Offering (1971). Gray, J. and Bigsby, C. W. E., She Wields a Pen: American Women Poets of the 19th Century (1997). Marchalonis, S., The Worlds of Lucy Larcom, 1824-1893 (1989). Myers, B. J., ‘‘Moving About in Worlds Unrealized’’—A Look at the Life of Lucy Larcom’’ (thesis, 1986). Robinson, H. H., Loom and Spindle; or, Life Among the Mill Girls (1898). Selden, B., The Mill Girls: Lucy Larcom, Harriet Hanson Robinson, Sarah G. Bagley (1983). Shapazian, K., ‘‘The Poetry of Lucy Larcom: Nineteenth Century Woman of Letters’’ (thesis, 1984). Walker, C., American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century: An

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Anthology (1992). Ward, S. H., ed., The Rushlight, Special Number in Memory of L. L. (1894). Westbrook, P. D., Acres of Flint, Writers of Rural New England 1870-1900 (1951). Reference works: AA. AW. DAB. FPA. NCAB. Norton Book of American Autobiography (1999). NAW (1971). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Women’s Studies (1973). —JOSEPHINE DONOVAN

LARSEN, Nella Born 13 April 1893, Chicago, Illinois; died 30 March 1964, New York, New York Also wrote under: Nella Larsen Imes Daughter of Mary Hansen; married Elmer Imes, 1919 (divorced) Although Nella Larsen’s name is associated with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, she was somewhat estranged from the coterie of Harlem writers. Her background and the peculiarities of her personal experience helped set her apart from her fellows. The daughter of a Danish immigrant mother and a West Indian father, she was educated both at Fisk University and the University of Copenhagen. Later she attended nursing school in New York, and in 1915 accepted a position at the hospital at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. On her return to New York, she decided to change her profession from nurse to librarian and was subsequently employed at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library. Larsen’s two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), enjoyed considerable critical success. In recognition of her accomplishment, Larsen was awarded a Bronze Medal from the Harmon Foundation in 1928, and in 1930 became the first black woman to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1933 Larsen was divorced from her husband, a professor of physics at Fisk. Soon afterward she moved to Brooklyn and resumed her work as a nurse. Little is known about her life after 1934, because she achieved the anonymity which by that time she preferred. Quicksand, a largely autobiographical novel, depicts the long and ultimately unfulfilling journey toward self-realization of Helga Crane, a young woman of mixed black and Danish ancestry. As the novel opens, Helga is teaching at Naxos, a small Southern black college; she feels out of place in the closed, fearful, unintellectual environment of the school. She escapes to New York City and is drawn into the sophisticated circles of New York’s black elite. Despite her initial enjoyment of Harlem’s nightlife and its cosmopolitan veneer, Helga concludes that Harlem is too restricting. She escapes again, this time to Denmark. In the home of her affluent relatives, Helga is free to indulge her taste for expensive things. The constant attention she attracts in the drawing rooms, shops, and streets of Copenhagen also serves at first to reenforce her battered ego. Eventually though, she begins to feel objectified by the curiosity of her relatives and friends. She returns to Harlem, but finds it even less congenial than before.

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Acting out of passion and desperation, she marries the Reverend Pleasant Green, an illiterate backwoods preacher. She goes with him to Alabama, where she soon finds herself mired in a life of rural poverty and continual pregnancies. Like many novels of the Harlem Renaissance, Quicksand explores the theme of cultural dualism. Unlike many of her fellow writers though, Larsen analyzes the theme from a psychological, rather than a sociological, perspective. To a great extent, the division in Helga’s psyche is manifested in her often conflicting desires for material possessions and spiritual fulfillment. The fact that she is a mulatto is used to symbolize her inner turmoil. Her dilemma lies in her inability to accept the white world’s definition of black people; she knows she is neither exotic nor primitive, neither ‘‘savage’’ nor sharecropper. Blacks’ definitions of themselves are equally unsatisfactory, for they too are dependent on the white world’s images. Helga struggles to claim both her European and African cultural heritages. Helga also aspires to a complete womanhood that is denied to black women in her society and to white women as well, as Larsen’s novel explores the twin evils of racism and sexism. Larsen’s literary skill is most apparent in her use of metaphor. The novel is tightly unified by the central metaphor of quicksand, supported throughout by concrete images of suffocation, asphyxiation, claustrophobia, and confinement. The images are introduced at every critical point in the narrative, and they are presented with great care and subtlety. Less successful is Larsen’s handling of language; the dialogue is often stilted and unconvincing. Certain portions of the novel seem rushed, and the ending, though compelling, seems contrived. Nevertheless, the novel succeeds admirably in its main objective, the presentation of a detailed psychological portrait of an educated black woman set against a backdrop of American and European life. In Passing, Larsen presents a less complex, less engaging situation. Two characters, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, dominate the novel; both are attractive, well-to-do, and able to ‘‘pass.’’ Irene identifies with blacks, choosing to ‘‘pass’’ only for occasional social convenience, while Clare has moved completely into the white world. Theirs are two possible responses to the racial dilemma, but neither is very inspiring. Although this novel is probably the best treatment of a very popular theme in early African American literature, it serves primarily to demonstrate how inconsequential the ‘‘passing’’ theme was. OTHER WORKS: An Intimation of Things Distant: The Collected Fiction of Nella Larsen (1992). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Barker, A., ‘‘Either/Or: The Resolution of Racial Ambiguity in the Works of Nella Larsen’’ (thesis, 1996). Bone, R., The Negro Novel in America (1965). Bontemps, A., ed., The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (1972). Branzburg, J. V., ‘‘Women Novelists of the Harlem Renaissance: A Study in Marginality’’ (thesis, 1983). Brauer, S. F., ‘‘Strategies for Survival in AfricanAmerican Women’s Literature’’ (thesis, 1996). Centers of the

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Self: Stories by Black American Women from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (1994). Chu, P. E., ‘‘Modernist Itineraries: Gender, Geography, Genre’’ (thesis, 1997). Coleman, A. R., ‘‘The Mulatto Syndrome and the Novels of Nella Larsen’’ (thesis, 1991). Cooke, M. G., Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century: The Achievement of Intimacy (1984). Davis, A. P., From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers 1900 to 1960 (1981). Davis, T. M., Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled (1996). Edwards, J. A. C., ‘‘Creative Reverence: Self-Defining Revisionary Discourse in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston’’ (thesis, 1998). Hollins, T. Z., ‘‘The Production of Identity in Three Harlem Renaissance Movements’’ (thesis, 1997). Johnson, B., ‘‘The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender’’ (thesis, 1998). Larson, C. R., Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer & Nella Larsen (1993). Major, C., Calling the Wind: Twentieth Century African-American Short Stories (1993). Marren, S. M., ‘‘Passing for American: Establishing American Identity in the Work of James Weldon Johnson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nella Larsen and Gertrude Stein’’ (thesis, 1995). McLendon, J. Y., The Politics of Color in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen (1995). McManus, M. H., ‘‘African- American Modernism in the Novels of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen’’ (thesis, 1992). Miller, E. M., The Other Construction: Where Violence and Womanhood Meet in the Writings of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Angelina Weld Grimke, and Nella Larsen (1999). Motley, A. E., ‘‘Gender and Culture: The New Woman in the Fiction of Nella Larsen and John Galsworthy’’ (thesis, 1996). Newman, R., Words Like Freedom: Essays on African-American Culture and History (1996). O’Banner, B. M., ‘‘A Study of Black Heroines in Four Selected Novels (1929-1959) by Four Black American Women Novelists: Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, Paule Marshall, Ann Lane Petry’’ (thesis, 1985). Roberts, M. O., ‘‘Writing to Liberate: Selected Black Women Novelists from 1859 to 1982’’ (thesis, 1987). Royster, B. H., The Ironic Vision of Four Black Women Novelists: A Study of the Novels of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston and Ann Petry (1980). Singh, M., The Novels of the Harlem Renaissance (1976). Tate, C., Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (1998). Whitehead, B. M., ‘‘The Treatment of Women in the Novels of Nella Larsen’’ (thesis, 1981). Wilkerson, A. M., ‘‘Sanctuary: The Critical Protection Which Silenced Nella Larsen’’ (thesis, 1997). Williams, B. J., ‘‘Nella Larsen: Shaping African-American Female Representation in Quicksand and Passing’’ (thesis, 1993). WitherspoonWalthall, M. L., The Evolution of the Black Heroine in the Novels of Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker (1988). Reference works: African American Writers (1991). Black American Writers Past and Present (1975). Classic Fiction of the Harlem Renaissance (1994). Great Short Stories by American Women (1996). Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995). Other references: Austin, S. M. C., A Conversation about Nella: A Story of Nella Larsen (audiovisual, 1998). CLAJ (1973, 1974). Ms. (Dec. 1980). —CHERYL A. WALL


LASSWELL, Mary Born 8 February 1905, Glasgow, Scotland; died 19 July 1994 Daughter of William R. and Mary Caskey Lubbock; married Clyde Lasswell, 1938; Dudley W. Smith, 1964 Mary Lasswell, born to a prominent Texan family, spent her childhood in Brownsville, Texas, where she learned to speak Spanish before she learned English. She taught for a few years after receiving her B.S. degree in 1930 from the University of Texas. In 1938 she married, and her husband’s career in the U.S. Navy took them away from Texas for a time. Upon returning to the state in the late 1950s, Lasswell, who by this time had achieved considerable success as a humorous writer, became active in many professional and civic organizations. These affiliations included the Texas Civil War Centennial Commission, Authors League, Dramatists Guild, Texas Institute of Letters, Daughters of the Republic of Texas, and Theta Sigma Phi (Women in Communications). She remarried in 1964, and after many years of residence in Texas, moved to Los Alamos, California. Lasswell’s first novel, Suds in Your Eye (1942), portrays three elderly ladies living in a junkyard in Southern California. The New York Times called it ‘‘one of the funniest, jolliest books of the season’’ when it appeared. Mrs. Feeley, Mrs. Rasmussen, and Miss Tinkham are also central characters in High Time (1944), One on the House (1949), Wait for the Wagon (1951), and Tooner Schooner (1953). These warm-hearted, down-to-earth women refuse to let old age, physical infirmity, or lack of funds keep them from enjoying life. They look at the rules of society as something they can leave or take as they wish, and they have grown old and wise enough not to be concerned with the superficialities of life. The rowdy women make their way from the junkyard to running a bar to operating an outlandish motel, and they exert prodigious efforts to achieve their goals. Although these characters were considered vulgar by some reviewers, many readers have found them enjoyable; Suds in Your Eye has sold over 300,000 copies. Two books of recipes, Mrs. Rasmussen’s Book of One-Arm Cookery (1946) and Mrs. Rasmussen’s Book of One-Arm Cookery with Second Helpings (1970), were a by-product of these comic novels, when readers wrote to request instructions for the dishes prepared by the three old women. A serious novel, Bread for the Living (1948), set in Brownsville in the early 20th century, was not very favorably received. Several other publications were more successful. I’ll Take Texas (1959), a descriptive, anecdotal guide to the state, was described as ‘‘affectionate and enthusiastic’’ and ‘‘told with charm.’’ In 1962 Lasswell compiled and edited the 1861-65 memoirs of Valerius C. Giles, who had been a nineteen-year-old recruit with Hood’s Brigade. The resulting volume, Rags and Hope, received favorable notice. Lasswell wrote a comic novel, Tio Pepe (1963), which she developed into a musical comedy in 1968. It is named for its protagonist, the elderly Mexican owner of a bar, Cada Noche un Amor (A Love Every Night), whose wife is a religious fanatic. Professor Elijah Potts, bachelor, folklorist, and professional Kinsey

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researcher, provides an unbiased view of this amusing household. Lasswell’s intimate knowledge of Mexico and its people is evidenced in both the novel and the play. It is a somewhat bawdy story, but, as Dr. William Madsen, professor of anthropology at the University of Texas, noted, ‘‘The book is full of respect for life. In it there is compassion and tenderness for all human things.’’ Lasswell’s works include a variety of literary types, all of which are competently written. She is at her best, however, in her amusing tales of the rowdy trio of old ladies, where she manages to tell funny stories without losing the sense of human dignity underneath the foolishness. OTHER WORKS: Lonely Star (1951). Let’s Go for Broke (1962). John Henry Kirby, Prince of the Pines (1966). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: American Novelists of Today (1951). CA (1965). TCAS. Other references: Boston Globe (11 Oct. 1944). LJ (15 Oct. 1951). NY (19 Nov. 1949). NYT (13 Dec. 1942). NYTBR (18 Dec. 1949). Saturday Review (17 Mar. 1951, 2 Sept. 1961). Springfield Republican (8 Oct. 1961). —DOROTHY H. BROWN

LATHAM, Jean Lee Born 19 April 1902, Buckhannon, West Virginia; died 13 June 1995 Daughter of George R. II and Winifred Brown Latham Jean Lee Latham received a B.A. from West Virginia Wesleyan College, Buckhannon, and a Bachelor of Oral English and M.A. from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. While at Cornell, she studied drama at the Ithaca Conservatory. After six years as editor-in-chief of Dramatic Publishing Company in Chicago, she resigned to write her own stage and radio plays. Teaching and writing have been integrated throughout her career. Latham’s key to success in the genre of drama and fictionalized biography is careful planning. Her first published play, Thanks Awfully! (1928), a one-act farce, was followed by the 1940s by more than 40 plays. They ranged from a psychological suspense drama, The Nightmare (1943), to a Christmas play, People Don’t Change (1941). Old Doc (1940), a three-act comedy, was adapted for Kraft TV Theater in 1951. She also wrote 140 episodes about the Lewis and Clark expeditions for a children’s radio serial and radio plays for various network programs, including First Nighter, Grand Central Station, and Skippy Hollywood Theater. Her Do’s and Don’ts of Drama: 555 Pointers for Beginning Actors and Directors (1935) was required reading in some college and university courses. Latham debuted in the field of children’s books with The Story of Eli Whitney: Invention and Progress in the Young Nation (1953). She selected the subjects from among those men who

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overcame unusual hardships, such as James Cook, Sam Houston, and David Glasgow Farragut. Reading just one paragraph of Nathaniel Bowditch’s The American Practical Navigator prompted her to pursue facts that resulted in the writing of her most popular book, Carry On, Mr. Bowditch (1955, reissued 1991), which won the Newbery Medal. Her goal in research was to become ‘‘backyard familiar’’ with the subject, and reviewers never challenged her facts. When asked how long it took her to write This Dear-Bought Land (1957), she responded: ‘‘Twenty years to gather information and ten months to write and rewrite.’’ Latham often wrote two books about the same subject with two audiences in mind. For example, the substantial fictionalized biography, Medals for Morse: Artist and Inventor (1954), was intended for adolescents, while the shorter Samuel F. B. Morse: Artist Inventor (1961, reissued 1991) was written for grades two to four. The Chagres: Power of the Panama Canal (1964), in the Great River Series, relates closely to an easy-to-read biography, George W. Goethals: Panama Canal Engineer (1965). Latham has covered a span of more than 350 years in her historical writing, from This Dear-Bought Land about Jamestown to Rachel Carson, Who Loved the Sea (1973, 1991). For 22 years the annual book list for children included a new fictionalized biography by Latham, mostly about inventors and adventurers. A contributor in an area where few others competed—fictionalized biography about leaders in the industrial revolution—she contributed some lasting titles. With school curricula changing, a number of Latham’s notable books are now out of print, while others, such as Carry On, Mr. Bowditch, have been translated into Arabic, Japanese, and Slovenian, and were reprinted again in the 1990s. With her sense for the dramatic, her strength in the children’s books is dialogue. A teacher both in the formal sense and through her books, Latham has offered substance graced with humor in her fictionalized biographies.

OTHER WORKS: The Alien Note (1930). The Christmas Party (1930). Christopher’s Orphans (1931). Crinoline and Candlelight (1931). Lady to See You (1931). Sign Unto You (1931). The Blue Teapot (1932). Broadway Bound (1933). The Giant and the Biscuits (1934). The Prince and the Patters (1934). Master of Solitaire (1935). Tommy Tomorrow (1935). All on Account of Kelly (1937). And Then What Happened? (1937). Bed of Petunias (1937). Have a Heart! (1937). Here She Comes! (1937). Just the Girl for Jimmy (1937). Mickey the Mighty (1937). Smile for the Lady! (1937). Talk Is Cheap! (1937). Well Met by Moonlight (1937). What Are You Going to Wear? (1937). The Ghost of Rhodes Manor (1939). They’ll Never Look There (1939). The Arms of the Law (1940). Nine Radio Plays (1940). Gray Bread (1941). Minus a Million (1941). Senior Freedom (1941). The House without a Key (1942). The Nightmare (1943). Trail Blazer of the Seas (1956). On Stage, Mr. Jefferson (1958). Young Man in a Hurry: The Story of Cyrus W. Field (1958). Drake: The Man They Called Pirate (1960). Aladdin (1961). Ali Baba (1961). The Cuckoo That Couldn’t Count (1961). The Dog That Lost His

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Family (1961). Hop O’ My Thumb (1961). The Magic Fishbone by Charles Dickens (retold by Latham, 1961). The Man Who Never Snoozed (1961). Nutcracker (1961). Puss in Boots, Le Chat Botté (1961). Wa O’Ka by P. Ramirez (retold from the Spanish by Latham, 1961). When Homer Honked (1961). The Brave Little Tailor, Hansel and Gretel, and Jack and the Beanstalk (1962). Man of the Monitor: The Story of John Ericsson (1962). The Ugly Duckling, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and the Little Red Hen (1962). Eli Whitney: Great Inventor (1963, 1991). The Frightened Hero: A Story of the Siege of Latham House (1965). Retreat to Glory: The Story of Sam Houston (1965). Sam Houston: Hero of Texas (1965, 1991). Columbia: Powerhouse of North America (1967). David Glasgow Farragut (1967). Anchor’s Aweigh: The Story of D. G. Farragut (1968). Far Voyager: The Story of James Cook (1970). What Tabbit the Rabbit Found (1974). Who Lives Here? (1974). Elizabeth Blackwell: Pioneer Woman Doctor (1975, 1991). The papers of Jean Lee Latham are in the Kerlan Collection of the University of Minnesota Libraries.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Livingston, W., ‘‘A Bio-Bibliography of Jean Lee Latham’’ (thesis, 1960). Reference works: CA (1963). More Books by More People (1974). Newbery and Caldecott Medal Books, 1956-65 (1965). SATA (1971). —KAREN NELSON HOYLE

LATHEN, Emma Pseudonym of Martha Henissart and Mary Jane Latsis; Henissart: Born 4 June 1929, New York, New York; Latsis: Born 12 July 1927, Oak Park, Illinois, died 1997 Also wrote as: R. B. Dominic Writing jointly under two different pseudonyms, Emma Lathen and R. B. Dominic, Martha Henissart and Mary Jane Latsis created murder mysteries that rank among the best. For their day jobs, Henissart also worked as a corporation lawyer and corporate banker, Latsis as an administrator for the federal government and an economist at the United Nations. Both held graduate degrees from Harvard University. The Dominic novels focus upon a continuing character, Senator Ben Safford of Ohio, an amateur detective. Safford’s legislative duties draw him into murder cases, all of which are briskly plotted. Murder in High Places (1970) features Karen Jenks, ousted from her studies in South America by political pressure. The portrait is candid and refreshing, an interesting example of this series’ realism. Here Henissart and Latsis combine humor and social comment, a pattern apparent in all their


books. There is No Justice (1971) deals with a Supreme Court appointment, and Epitaph for a Lobbyist (1974) treats political corruption. John Putnam Thatcher, described by the Los Angeles Daily News as ‘‘the Agatha Christie of Wall Street,’’ is the continuing character, whose adventures, stemming from his work as senior officer at the Sloan Guaranty Trust of Wall Street, often include murder investigation in the Lathen books. All the plots arise from some facet of business practice: tax-loss farming in A Place for Murder (1963), fast food chains in Murder to Go (1969), and real estate development in Ashes to Ashes (1971). The titles are often sources for sly humor, as in A Stitch in Time (1968), which deals with medical fraud. Thatcher, representing the Sloan Guaranty Trust, goes wherever money and mayhem are being made. An urbane, deliberate, clever widower, the banker is comfortable in all settings, from the hockey rink in Murder Without Icing (1972) to Detroit’s auto empires in Murder Makes the Wheels Go ’Round (1966). Thatcher knows that sport can involve high finance; his creators know that high finance can provide recreation through mystery fiction. The portraits of female characters are particularly interesting, for they illustrate careful attention to detail and realism. Thatcher’s secretary, Rose Teresa Corsa, is no office wife; instead, she values herself and her work, wisely exercising the power she has accrued and acknowledging that she is indispensable. Through her, sharp comments about women’s traditional business roles are often made, as in When in Greece (1969). The Corsa characterization is nicely rounded, for readers are allowed some knowledge of her extended family and are aware she has a life of her own. A contrasting example of fully realized characterization is lonely, undervalued Tessie Marcus in Murder Against the Grain (1967). At first Marcus appears to be merely the stereotyped girl Friday who has invested her energy and affection in the firm for which she works. But actually a multidimensional portrait is drawn, for Marcus proves capable of decisiveness and vigorous self-interest. The portrayal of labor leader Annie Galiano in The Longer the Thread (1971) saves this novel, for the business manipulations central to the main plot are a bit more cumbersome than usual. Galiano is a major character, a powerful, astute, and effective woman marked by years of strenuous work. She is a tough, victorious bargainer in the strike that provides the subplot, and her presence also serves to augment unity in the novel. Much of the success of this series stems from detailed portraits such as hers, which never deter the swift pace but do flesh out the stories. Full of comments about American culture, the Thatcher books are novels of manners. Few facets of modern living escape observation, and they range from Americans’ adoration of automobiles in Sweet and Low (1974) to campus radicals in Pick Up Sticks (1970) and civil rights in Death Shall Overcome (1966). Unfortunately, the social commentary in the latter is flawed. Both Edward Parry (the first black to sit on the stock exchange) and a

LATHEN

racist Southerner are too stereotyped to be fully effective; here characterization is not saved by caricature. Yet the book is redeemed by marvelously humorous moments, a device that never fails in this series. In Brewing up a Storm (1996), regular characters Tom Robichaux, Everett Gabler, and Walter Bowman are left out of the story, not as much emphasis is placed on the world of high finance as on the whodunit itself, and the critics were less than kind in their reviews of this book, saying it is not ‘‘her’’ (Lathen’s) best book. The pair redeems Lathen’s good name in A Shark Out of Water (1997), which marked the 23rd novel in the Thatcher series. The book, which won an Edgar award from the Mystery Writers Association, keeps the character fresh, despite his longevity. Thatcher remains a great character, and in Shark the storyline is filled with irony targeted at the slapstick efforts of governments and international corporations and the capitalization of the remnants of the former Soviet Union. Lathen also took a look outside the U.S. in East is East (1991), in which Thatcher travels to Japan and becomes involved in a murder there. The plot line was similar to the film Rising Sun (1993) starring Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes caught up in a shadowy world of Japanese business and terrorism. The Henissart and Latsis team produced consistently strong, thoughtful books, and they avoided the formulaic limitations of many mystery novels through skillful use of characterization, social criticism, and splendid humor, which is often based on irony. The authors’ special professional knowledge informed the novels, which hold a secure place among well-written mysteries capitalizing on the popularization of unusual expertise. In 1983 Henissart and Latsis shared an Ellery Queen award, given by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, along with their 1967 Crime Writers Association Silver Dagger. In 1997 the pair shared an Agatha award for Lifetime Achievement. Latsis passed away in 1997, leaving the fate of the two pseudonymous authors undecided in the hands of her longtime collaborator and friend, Henissart. Lathen’s fans have included such stalwarts in the legal profession as the late Professor James Willard Hurst (1910-1997) of the Wisconsin Law School (who, coincidentally, has a prize for the best book in American legal history named after him) and Stewart Macaulay, Malcolm Pitman Sharp Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

OTHER WORKS: Banking on Death (1961). Accounting for Murder (1964). Come to Dust (1968). Murder, Sunny Side Up (1968). Murder Out of Court (1971). By Hook or By Crook (1975). Murder out of Commission (1976). Double, Double, Oil and Trouble (1978). The Attending Physician (1980). Going for the Gold (1981). Green Grow the Dollars (1982). Banking on Murder: Three by Emma Lathen (1984). Unexpected Developments

13

LATHROP


(1984). Something In the Air (1988). Right on the Money: A John Thatcher Mystery (1996). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bargainnier, E. F., Ten Women of Mystery (1981). Klein, K. G., Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary (1994). Reference works: Detecting Women (1994). Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection (1976). St. James Guide to Crime & Mystery Writers 1996. Other references: Armchair Detective (Nov. 1974, June 1976). Forbes (1 Dec. 1977). Harvard (July/Aug. 1975). Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly (Winter 1977). Tablet (22 Aug. 1970). —JANE S. BAKERMAN, UPDATED BY DARYL F. MALLETT

LATHROP, Rose Hawthorne Born 20 May 1851, Lenox, Massachusetts; died 9 July 1926, Hawthorne, New York Wrote under: M. M. Alphonsa Lathrop, O.S.D., Mother Alphonsa, O.S.D. Daughter of Nathaniel and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne; married George P. Lathrop, 1871 (died 1898); children: Francis (died 1881) Rose Hawthorne Lathrop spent seven of the first nine years of her life in England, Portugal, and Italy. Although culturally enhanced by the European travels, her formal education was random and erratic, provided mainly by her parents and by instructors at home. Like both her brother, Julian, and her sister, Una, Lathrop felt compelled to further the Hawthorne literary fame. She began writing stories when she was eleven, married a writer when she was twenty, and spent the next 25 years of an unfulfilled, stormy marriage writing and publishing poetry, short stories, and sketches. Her only child, Francis, died in 1881 at the age of four. Restless and rootless, Lathrop renounced her Unitarian faith in 1891, and she and her husband were received into the Catholic church. In 1895 with church permission, she formally separated from her husband to devote her life to the care of impoverished, dying victims of cancer, and she organized a group who called themselves Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer. In 1900, two years after the death of her husband, Lathrop was named Sister Mary Alphonsa in the Dominican Order. A year later, as head of two resident homes she had established for the incurably ill, she became Mother Alphonsa. She directed one of these homes, Rosary Hill, in Hawthorne, New York, until her death. Lathrop’s single volume of poetry, Along the Shore (1888), is a collection of generally traditional lyrics and ballads, many of which had been previously published in Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Monthly, and Scribner’s. The poems reflect Lathrop’s deep

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grief over the deaths of her father, her mother, her son, and the loss of a friend; they show her despair over the world’s deceits—the unrealities of faith, love, and hope. She struggles to resist depression, to find something besides illusion in her life. Her frustrations and disappointments emerge in this poetry in images of death, graves, burials, gloom, and darkness. In Lathrop’s most significant piece of writing, Memories of Hawthorne (1897), her tone has noticeably altered. She examines her parents’ lives and her own childhood from a position of comfort and security in the Catholic faith, editing the family letters and diaries carefully and writing lovingly and admiringly. She works from a spiritual serenity and a moral consciousness that she confidently believes are inherited from her father. Drawing extensively from her mother’s letters and diaries, Lathrop narrates the lives of her parents from the period of their courtship in 1838 until the death of her father in 1864. Her mother, Sophia, tends to romanticize any account of Nathaniel and the children, but she has a talent for selecting the significant and interesting detail. Thus, Sophia’s letters and diaries, given interpretation and continuity by Lathrop’s commentary, provide intimate and fascinating records of the family’s Concord years and their European experiences. Lathrop’s best writing in the volume is inspired by her own personal recollections of her father, which vividly portray the private Hawthorne—his attentiveness to his wife and children, his sense of fun, his generosity, his compassion, and his moral stature. For a full and rich chronicle of the Hawthorne years in Liverpool, Memories of Hawthorne is an excellent companion piece to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s English Notebooks. Except for this biographical work, Lathrop’s later writing derived from her interests and experiences in the Catholic church. She wrote and published informative and imaginative accounts of her work with cancer patients in a little magazine that she created, Christ’s Poor (1901-04). The series of Reports of the Servants of Relief for Incurable Cancer (1908-22) excited enough interest to be reviewed in the New York Times: ‘‘Reports, even of the best charitable institutions, are generally dull reading; but these reports are a flaming exception.’’ None of Lathrop’s early work—the poetry and fiction written before she joined the Catholic church—is remarkable; it lacks both originality and artistic control. However, her later work—the study of Hawthorne and the records of her work with the poor—is well written and valuable. For Lathrop, the work in Rosary Hill Home ended her long search for personal fulfillment and provided a true stimulus for her creative imagination. OTHER WORKS: A Story of Courage: Annals of the Georgetown Convent of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary (with G. P. Lathrop, 1894). The papers of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop are in collections at the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley; the Beinecke Library, Yale University; the Essex Institute, Salem, Massachusetts; the New York Public Library; the Rosary Hill


LATIMER

Home, Hawthorne, New York; and the Cambridge University Library, Cambridge, England. BIBLIOGRAPHY: Burton, K., Sorrow Built a Bridge: A Daughter of Hawthorne (1938). Hawthorne, J., Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife (1888). Joseph, Sister M., Out of Many Hearts (1964). Loggins, V., The Hawthornes: The Story of Seven Generations of an American Family (1951). Maynard, T., A Fire Was Lighted: The Life of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (1948). Walsh, J. J., Mother Alphonsa: Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (1930). Reference works: Appleton’s Cyclopaedia of American Biography (1887). DAB. Dictionary of Catholic Biography (1961). NCAB. Other references: Atlantic (Sept. 1928). Ladies’ Home Journal (Feb. 1893). NYT (16 Apr. 1922). —JANE STANBROUGH

LATIMER, Elizabeth W(ormeley) Born 26 July 1822, London, England; died 4 January 1904, Baltimore, Maryland Also wrote under: Elizabeth Wormeley Daughter of Ralph R. and Caroline Preble Wormeley; married Randolph B. Latimer, 1856 Elizabeth W. Latimer’s family roots were planted in three soils: her father, although raised in England and a rear admiral in the British Navy, was of old landed Virginia stock; her mother was the daughter of an East India merchant of Boston. In her youth, Latimer lived in London, Paris, Boston, Newport, and Virginia. In London and Paris, she attended the funeral of William IV and the reburial of Napoleon, saw Queen Victoria in coronation regalia, met William M. Thackeray, and attended Louis Philippe’s balls. In Boston, in 1842, she met George Ticknor, William H. Prescott, and Julia Ward Howe, who encouraged her to write. Her first publication was a translation of a Mexican poem for the appendix of Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico. In 1848, after witnessing the revolution in Paris and Chartist demonstrations in London, the Wormeley family moved back to New England. Latimer published several novels before marrying and moving to Maryland. She then spent 20 years rearing children and, during the Civil War, caring for wounded soldiers. Although her eyes were weak, she read assiduously, and during the last 30 years of her life, she published prolifically: novels, magazine articles, translations from French and Italian, and popular European histories that went through many editions. Latimer’s best works are her histories, anecdotal in style. As a compiler and editor, she read copiously from magazines, newspapers, books, and private papers, then presented her information in lively, compact, confident prose. She did not claim to be a historian, but stated in her prefaces that she concentrated on the

historical figures who interested her. She was fascinated by the adventures of royalty, explorers, and military people. Occasionally she inserted information from her family’s experiences. In France in the Nineteenth Century (1892), for example, she wrote from personal observation, and in Europe in Africa in the Nineteenth Century (1898), she mentioned some personal letters she had received from Liberians in 1854. In all the histories, one senses her desire to keep abreast of events in the world and, at the century’s end, to sum up historic achievements. Some of her novels are quite bad. Salvage (1880), for example, is largely a diatribe against easy divorce and in favor of long-suffering, dutiful love, especially of a wife toward her husband. The plot is wholly predictable and the characters are flat. Latimer’s characters lack the roundness of good fiction. They are like figures frequently described by historians and news reporters—despite imputed motives and feelings, the characters sound made up, for the writers do not know them from the inside. Amabel: A Family History (1853), however, blends history and fiction interestingly. The flat narrator, ostensibly Amabel’s granddaughter, is primarily a compiler of other people’s narratives about her grandmother’s history. The history is lively, but when the narrator becomes a character, the sentimentality is overwhelming. The novel is further burdened by the moral announced in the preface (‘‘that love, the principle, infused into our duties works its own reward’’), which is representative of all Latimer’s novels. Our Cousin Veronica (1855) is probably Latimer’s best novel. Its vividness of action and description derives from her own experiences in England and Virginia. At the novel’s end, the female narrator marries a slave owner only after a serious discussion of abolition. He opposes freeing his slaves outright, for they would be harassed in their own state and unprotected if they moved north. Quoting Wilberforce, she impresses her husband with the responsibility they have as masters, not just for their slaves’ physical needs, but for their souls. Husband and wife both hope for a general emancipation and in the meantime free and aid those of their slaves who are willing to emigrate to Liberia. In her novels, Latimer is strongest when she is closest to historical anecdote. Her histories are valuable for the interest she generates in people and for her amassing of historic information often inaccessible to others. OTHER WORKS: Forest Hill: A Tale of Social Life in 1830-31 (1846). Recollections of Ralph Randolph Wormeley, Rear Admiral, R.N.; Written Down by His Three Daughters (with A. R. W. Curtis, 1879). My Wife and My Wife’s Sister (1881). Princess Amelie: A Fragment of Autobiography (1883). Familiar Talks on Some of Shakespeare’s Comedies (1886). A Chain of Errors (1890). Russia and Turkey in the Nineteenth Century (1893). England in the Nineteenth Century (1894). Italy in the Nineteenth Century and the Making of Austro-Hungary and Germany (1896). Spain in the Nineteenth Century (1897). Judea from Cyrus to Titus, 537 B.C.-70 A.D. (1899). The Last Years of the Nineteenth

15

LAUT


Century (1900). Men and Cities of Italy (1901). The Prince Incognito (1902). BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hayden, H. E., Virginia Genealogies (1891). Logan, M. S., The Part Taken by Women in American History (1912). Preble, G. H., Genealogical Sketch of the First Three Generations of Prebles in America (1868). Reference works: AA. AW. A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors (1872). A Dictionary of American Authors (1897). DAB. Index to Women of the World, from Ancient to Modern Times: Biographies and Portraits (1970). NCAB. Other references: Baltimore American (3 Jan. 1904, 4 Jan. 1904, 7 Jan. 1904). Baltimore Sun (4 Jan. 1904, 5 Jan. 1904). Dial (1 Feb. 1904). Harper ’s (Feb. 1856). London Athenaeum (1853). London Literary Gazette (1846). New England Historical and Genealogical Register (Oct. 1868). NYT (5 Jan. 1904). Putnam’s (Feb. 1856). —KAREN B. STEELE

LATSIS, Mary Jane See LATHEN, Emma

LAUT, Agnes C(hristina) Born 11 February 1871, Ontario, Canada; died 15 November 1936, Wassaic, New York Also wrote under: A. C. Laut When Agnes C. Laut was a child in Winnipeg, Canada, it was still a frontier town where the Hudson’s Bay Store traded for furs with trappers who came down from the mountains. Their stories provided the stimulus for her interest in the exploration and settlement of the North American continent. As a journalist, Laut wrote numerous historical articles for newspapers and magazines before publishing her first book. She then worked primarily on books and later moved to upstate New York to be nearer the major publishing centers. Laut’s first two books are novels set at the time of the opening of the Canadian fur trade. Lords of the North (1900) is a romance set against the intrigues between the North-West [fur] Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company over the establishment of territories. Heralds of Empire (1902) tells the story, set against a similar background, of Pierre Radisson’s adventures as one of the first explorers of the Canadian wilderness. The Story of the Trapper (1902) established the genre in which Laut excelled—a combination of history, biography, and folklore. It opens with a history of the conflicts among the great fur companies, then moves backward in time to tales of the French trappers and of the Native Americans, and finally to animal lore.

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The book displays Laut’s typical strengths and weaknesses as a writer. Much of the history of the fur trade is confused, and the point is lost in her attempts to glorify the personalities involved. However, when she is repeating the tales she must have heard from the trappers of her childhood and recreating the adventures of anonymous Native Americans, the narrative achieves the compelling force of fine fiction that is better, in fact, than her own fiction ever is. Laut’s next books followed in a similar vein by chronicling adventures of the men who opened North America to the fur trade. The material in some of her books was reworked for Laut’s contribution (volumes 18, 22, and 23) to the series of popular histories known as The Chronicles of Canada; however, volume 23, The Cariboo Trail (1916), is her first treatment of the Canadian gold rush that began in 1858. In many ways, these short books are superior to Laut’s longer works because she achieves here a clarity and succinctness missing in the books that were intended to be more serious. Also, she uses a more temperate stylistic tone in describing her heroes. In the earlier works, the biographical sections suffer from the excesses of hagiography. The Canadian Commonwealth (1915) is a combination of social history and commercial promotion in which Laut foresees the emergence of Canada as a world power in the 20th century. This promotional chauvinism is repeated in Canada at the Cross Roads (1921), and promotion of a slightly different sort dominates The Fur Trade of America (1921), which Laut wrote in response to an outcry against fur trapping. Her thesis is that the trapper is more humane than nature because he kills the animal quickly, a sentiment expressed in many of her earlier books about the fur trade. In some of her later books, Laut treated the establishment of various overland trails by which settlers came west; there were also travel books about Glacier Park and the American Southwest. Laut was a prolific writer of popular histories. Her work is at its best when she draws on oral and folk traditions and writes narratives of the life of the early adventurers and settlers on the North American continent. She follows Frederick Jackson Turner’s conviction that settlement comes in waves: the explorers, the traders, the settlers. Her special sympathy and interest was with the explorers and traders, but she also studied and wrote about the settlers. OTHER WORKS: Pathfinders of the West (1904). Vikings of the Pacific (1905). The Conquest of the Great Northwest (1908). Canada, the Empire of the North (1909). The Freebooters of the Wilderness (1910). The New Dawn (1913). Through Our Unknown Southwest (1913). The ‘‘Adventures of England’’ on Hudson Bay (1914). Pioneers of the Pacific Coast (1915). The Quenchless Light (1924). The Blazed Trail of the Old Frontier (1926). Enchanted Trails of Glacier Park (1926). The Conquest of Our Western Empire (1927). The Overland Trail: The Epic Path of the Pioneers to Oregon (1929). The Romance of the Rails (1929). Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, 1657-1730 (1930). John Tanner, Captive Boy Wanderer of the Border Lands (1930). Marquette (1930). Cadillac, Knight Errant of the Wilderness,


Founder of Detroit, Governor of Louisiana from the Great Lakes to the Gulf (1931). Pilgrims of the Santa Fe (1931).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Reference works: Canadian Writers; a Biographical Dictionary (1966). Junior Book of Authors (1951). Other references: Canadian Magazine of Politics, Science, Arts, and Literature (Apr. 1909). NYTBR (17 May 1902, 13 Jan. 1906, 28 Nov. 1908, 1 Aug. 1926, 29 Sept. 1929). —HARRIETTE CUTTINO BUCHANAN

LAUTERBACH, Ann Born 1942 Daughter of Elisabeth Stuart Wardwell and Richard E. Lauterbach When Ann Lauterbach writes, ‘‘The dictionary / is part of the clutter,’’ in the poem ‘‘For Example (1) Stepping Out,’’ she voices an ambivalence toward language that her poetry both resolves and redoubles. The lexicon extends the promise of expression, of catharsis, but the words required to bring about this state are mired in usages too numerous to count. To borrow a title from John Ashbery, a poet with whom she is often grouped, Lauterbach’s work is a self-portrait in a convex mirror, though the breadth of her vision exceeds the limits of the subjective self. Critic Charles Altieri has written that ‘‘Lauterbach invites us to dwell in the moment when everything is in an unstable transition.’’ Nothing remains still in Lauterbach’s poems, and the language mirrors this state of ever-shifting uncertainties. Titles of her collections sound like phrases snatched from the mouths of passersby—Many Times, But Then, Later That Evening, And For Example—and yet even these apparently random phrases reveal the poet’s fixed focus on the transitional nature of everyday life. Lauterbach has written about an early impression of the writing life. Because her father was a foreign correspondent, he often had to leave for Moscow and other destinations for long periods, taking his manual type

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