That is, until recently, when Independent press Quite Literally Books reissued it in a handsome new edition in 2025.

It’s surprising that a writer of her caliber would be so thoroughly forgotten. Her books were well reviewed and sold well. She was even a pioneer in the realm of what we now call biofiction: Daughter of Time (1942) is a novelization of the tragically brief and brilliant life of short story master Katherine Mansfield. It was warmly reviewed in the New York Times.

You have to do some persistent digging to find good copies of Nelia Gardner White titles. Other novels include Woman at the Window, The Merry Month of May, The Thorn Tree, David Strange, Hathaway House, and others, including No Trumpet Before Him, which will be briefly discussed ahead.

Learn more about Nelia Gardner White. The new edition of The Pink House is available from Quite Literally Books. See a roundup of QLB’s current titles here on Literary Ladies Guide.

The following appreciation of The Pink House is by Tyler Scott, a Literary Ladies Guide contributor:

The Pink House: An Appreciation

“Out of the fullness of my heart I write down this story of my life. The snow is falling, silently, gently, beyond the panes. Every branch is limned with snow.”

Thus opens the novel The Pink House (1950) by Nelia Gardner White. When I was about twelve years old, my mother handed me this novel and explained that it had been her favorite when she was my age. This was in the Adirondacks, where we had a summer place, and every year after that, I read the book during vacation. It became my favorite. 

Nelia Gardner White (1894 – 1957) was an extremely popular and prolific writer. She was born in Andrews Settlement, Pennsylvania, one of five children. Though they weren’t wealthy (her father was a Methodist minister), hers was a happy childhood. As she grew up, she worked odd jobs so she could attend Syracuse University (1911 to 1913). She then attended Emma Willard Kindergarten School from 1913 to 1915 to become a teacher. She married a lawyer and had two children. 

In her early career, White wrote children’s stories, articles on child-rearing, and young adult novels, mostly set in small towns. Over time, she began writing for adults. She wrote some twenty-five novels, all (save for the 2025 reissue of The Pink House) out of print, as well as countless stories and articles for the top magazines, reaching millions of readers. The magazines in which her work was published included Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and McCall’s. A shorter version of The Pink House was serialized in The Woman’s Home Companion.

One of her career highlights was during World War II, when she was hired to write articles for the British Ministry of Information while living in England.

Now even more obscure than The Pink House, White’s 1948 novel, No Trumpet Before Him,, is the story of a Black man falsely accused of a crime and sentenced to death. It explores the power of a community coming together in the face of of racial injustice. No Trumpet Before Him was awarded the prestigious Westminster Fiction Prize, which came with a generous cash prize of $8,000 (equivalent to more than $100,000 today).

The Pink House is the story of Norah Holme. When the novel opens, seven-year-old Norah’s mother dies. Her father, who works overseas, doesn’t know what to do other than leave her with his sister and her family in their grand New England house, The Grange. Quiet and shy, Norah has scoliosis and uses a cane. Three of her cousins take an immediate dislike to her; only the oldest, Paul, shows her kindness. The spoiled cousins tease her, call her Toad, and won’t play with her.   

Norah’s Aunt Rose is elegant, icy, and distant: the type of woman who has breakfast in bed and overspends. Her husband, Norah’s Uncle John, mostly keeps to himself and worries about money. Aunt Poll (John’s sister who lives with the family) takes Norah under her wing. Poll is stern and plain-speaking, but she ably educates Norah and teaches her to be tough, set goals, and live well despite her disability. 

Norah’s growing strength and self-acceptance are qualities that may have appealed to post-war readers. It’s easy to see why the book made an impression on so many young women. The story is timeless and speaks to anyone who struggles with loneliness and lack of confidence while growing up.  

White had a knack for building character and description. Her early works were sometimes criticized as sentimental women’s novels, but The Pink House defies this description. It’s a tableau of family life, with dynamics both good and bad. Secrets to be revealed keep the story moving forward, and, as the flyleaf of my original 1950 edition reads, “undercurrents of hate and frustration and mystery.” 

I don’t want to divulge spoilers by give away the ending; however, in the end, good people prevail. With The Pink House, White wrote a novel in which even today, readers may find much to identify with, just as they did when it was originally published. 

Excellent authors often leave us with wonderful quotes; this was one of my favorites from Nelia Gardner White on writing:

“One must have discipline, and discipline comes from failure, through writing thousands of words and using a few hundred of them, through filling the mind with great literature, through stretching the imagination to the utmost, through forgetting markets and concentrating on the immediate work. A surface cleverness is not enough.”

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Contributed by Tyler Scott, who has been writing essays and articles since the early 1980s for various magazines and newspapers.  In 2014 she published her novel The Excellent Advice of a Few Famous Painters. She lives in Blackstone, Virginia where she and her husband renovated a Queen Anne Revival house and enjoy small town life. Visit her at Pour the Coffee, Time to Write.

A sampling of original 1950 reviews of The Pink House

The Pink House was reviewed in dozens of newspapers, large and small, attesting to the author’s reputation. While occasional reviews were somewhat mixed, most were quite positive. It’s a testament to a fairly lengthy book that’s more character-driven than plot-driven, that many reviewers noted that it was hard to put down. 

The Hartford (CT) Courant, Feb. 19, 1950:

“This is a drama of selfishness and greed and of warring personalities … The characters don’t quite ring true — they’re either too good or too bad. As a psychological study of Norah Holme alone, the book is fairly successful. And it has other points, too. Some of the descriptions of the New England countryside (the Pink House is in central Connecticut) are excellent. And it’s the kind of book you won’t want to put down until you’ve finished.”

The Pittsburgh (PA) Press, March 19, 1950:

“Hobbling around on crutches, our heroine learns many things in the gabled mansion — things that everybody has to learn sooner or later. She discovers things that are hateful in the midst of things that are full of love. Life, she learns, can be a cruel illusion as well as a beautiful reality. She loses none of her own charm, however, in the process. And the happy ending comes along, as the reader knew it inevitably would.”

The Lewiston (ME) Daily Sun, Feb. 27, 1950:

“It is well that not too many books like The Pink House are published often. People can’t sit up every night forgetting all about bedtime to finish a book. And The Pink House is that kind of a story. Once started, it is hard to put down this New England family story … Not that the family is charming. Far from it. or are they all blackguards. They are simply human beings, bad ones and good ones. And that is why the book casts such a spell.”

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Published in 1987, The Shell Seekers was an international bestseller. I hadn’t read it in decades and had forgotten what a jewel of a book it was – a 500-page tome of a family saga. Rereading it around a recent Christmastime, I couldn’t wait to go upstairs in the evening and delve back into its pages  despite being surrounded by family and friends,   

The Shell Seekers has beautiful descriptions and many memorable characters. The story reflects the tapestry of life — good times and bad, heartbreak, and passion.

Rosamunde Pilcher (1924 – 2019) was born in Lelant, Cornwall. She began writing at age seven and published her first short story at eighteen. In the World War II years, she served in the Women’s Royal Naval Service, and was posted to Sri Lanka for a time. 

In 1946 she married Graham Hope Pilcher, a decorated veteran and textile businessman. They moved to Dundee, Scotland where they lived happily ever after and raised four children. Her son Robin Pilcher ended up being a successful novelist in his own right.

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Pilcher’s early novels were published under the pen name Jane Fraser. Within ten years, she was writing under her real name. She was prolific: twenty-five novels and five short story collections. She became an icon and a household name. She won many awards and honors, including an Officer of the Order of the British Empire given by The Queen in 2002. 

The Shell Seekers and other novels by Pilcher have been adapted to movies starring actresses like Angela Lansbury and Vanessa Redgrave. One critic said that Pilcher’s books were based on three principles: money, happiness, and a happy ending.

Novelist and onetime president of the Romantic Novelists Association in England, Katie Fforde, said this about Pilcher: “Her houses are full of secrets, families full of lies, beautiful settings, page-turning plots. She changed the face of romantic fiction.”

When I look at the picture of Mrs. Pilcher on the dust jacket of her novel September, I see a grandmotherly figure in a favorite pullover with a smile crinkling her face— the type of person I would have liked to have had a cup of tea with.

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The Shell Seekers in brief

The Shell Seekers is the story of Penelope Keeling, an older woman who has had a long and rich life and realizes a painting she owns by her late artist father is worth a lot of money.  The children discover this; some are very focused on the money, and of course, this brings dissension. 

The book is also written in flashbacks going back to World War II, and has three themes:  

• The bohemian life – something Pilcher knew well having grown up in Cornwall where there were a lot of painters in the town of  St. Ives,
• The impact of large inheritances on a family – building bridges or tearing people asunder,
• The days before the war in England.

A quote from The Shell Seekers:

“Time had lost its importance. That was one of the good things about getting old: you weren’t perpetually in a hurry. All her life, Penelope had looked after other people but now she had no one to think about but herself. There was time to stop and look, and looking to remember. Visions widened like views seen from the slope of a painfully climbed mountain, and having come so far, it seemed ridiculous not to pause and enjoy them.”

There is a story behind Pilcher’s writing of this novel: In my paperback, there is an introduction to the 10^th anniversary edition written by Pilcher. It was 1984, and she had already written several successful books. When Tom Dunne, her editor and publisher from St. Martin’s Press, came to visit Pilcher in Scotland, her children chaffed him, asking why he couldn’t make their mother rich and famous — and them as well. 

Good-naturedly, he responded she needed to write a book that merited “advance publicity and global promotion.” Pilcher observed, “He told me I needed to write ‘A big fat novel for women. A good read. Something to get the teeth into.’ And something, above all, that tapped into my life and the experiences of my generation.” Pilcher, at sixty, accepted the challenge and two years later presented her manuscript.  

In 2019, The Guardian wrote that The Shell Seekers had sold over 60 million copies by then, and had been translated into multiple languages. Interestingly, Pilcher always had an enormous following in Germany.

Pilcher retired from writing in 2000, at the age of seventy-six, choosing to put her pen down while at the peak of talent, and not fading away from age or ability. She died at ninety-four of a stroke in 2019, surrounded by her loving family.    

I read both The Shell Seekers and September (a story about a coming out party in Scotland, pulling characters and stories from all over, including some characters from The Shell Seekers). What I admire about Pilcher’s style is that it is so graspable. Mother Nature plays a huge role in her writing, and her characters are accessible. Even bad guys have a quality about them that a reader can almost like. In the novels I’ve read, just as you think you’ve predicted what will happen, it turns out you are wrong.

I appreciate that there’s no bad language, and sex is suggested rather than described in detail for paragraphs on end. As my late mother once said, “Rosamunde Pilcher wrote books the way they used to be written.” And she was right. 

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Contributed by Tyler Scott, who has been writing essays and articles since the early 1980s for various magazines and newspapers.  In 2014 she published her novel The Excellent Advice of a Few Famous Painters. She lives in Blackstone, Virginia where she and her husband renovated a Queen Anne Revival house and enjoy small town life. Visit her at Pour the Coffee, Time to Write.

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Vivid illustrations by Helena Pérez García that burst with colorful expression on every page. Angelica presents the story of Frances Hodgson’s insecure childhood on both sides of the Atlantic, and her challenges and triumphs as a writer.

Marrying Dr. Swan Burnett, having two sons, experiencing triumph as well as hardships and tragedies and writing through it all is part of the fascinating story of this author’s life. Frances’s story is one of perseverance, finding moments of joy in complicated circumstances, and the solace of creative pursuit.

Because her few enduring books are so very famous —The Secret Garden (1911), A Little Princess (1905), and Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), it’s not well known how incredibly prolific Frances was. She wrote far more books for adults than for children — dozens of novels, and at least thirteen stage plays. But it’s this trio of books for children of all ages that endure, with their timeless messages of kindness, generosity, hope, and healing.

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Learn more about
The Secret Gardens of Frances Hodgson Burnett
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Other things special things about this book include: a brief, fascinating biography of Frances Hodgson Burnett plus a timeline of her life; a selected list of some of her many books for children and and adults; and a bibliography of titles for those who’d like to delve more deeply into her life.

As icing on the cake there’s a letter to young readers from Keri Wilt, the great-great granddaughter of Frances. It’s followed by a set of “keys” to prompt children (and even adults) to gain a deeper understanding of The Secret Garden, a story that works on so many levels.

Kudos to Angelica Shirley Carpenter for her charming text and to Helena Pérez García for her stunning art. Together they have created not only a lovely picture book, but a keepsake. The cover even has a die-cut keyhole, inviting the reader to enter the adventure within.

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The Secret Gardens of Frances Hodgson Burnett is available
on Bookshop.org, Amazon, and wherever books are sold
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From the publisher, Bushel & Peck Books: “Frances Hodgson Burnett—best known for writing The Secret Garden, Little Lord Fauntleroy, and The Little Princess—had a difficult life, losing her father when she was very young, moving to a new country in the face of economic turmoil, and suffering the loss of a son and a marriage later in life. But Frances? She could imagine anything, and she used her gifts to transform grief and hardship into beautiful works of literature that lifted the spirits of millions around the world. This is her story.”

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Learn more about Frances Hodgson Burnett
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Praise for The Secret Gardens of Frances Hodgson Burnett
by Angelica Shirley Carpenter

“Beauties blossom aplenty in this welcome volume. The Secret Gardens of Frances Hodgson Burnett can’t fail to captivate the minds and hearts of young readers and even, perhaps, plant some seeds there.” —Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked, co-founder of Children’s Literature New England

“The gray drudgery of industrial Manchester, England, contrasts with the vivid floral hues of Burnett’s gardens in stunning illustrations that perfectly pair with the book’s timeless message: ‘hope is never far for those who can imagine.’”—Foreword Reviews, Starred Review

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“Burnett’s own rags-to-riches story is compelling, too. The distinctive illustrations bring her gardens to life on the page through the graceful forms and rich, varied colors of trees, bushes, vines, and flowers….the theme of gardens as a source of beauty and healing is evident throughout this engaging biographical narrative.” —Booklist

“I am delighted to think that this lovely picture book will encourage children (and indeed their parents) to read The Secret Garden, one of the best children’s books ever written.” —Ann Thwaite, prize-winning British biographer, author of Beyond the Secret Garden: The Life of Frances Hodgson Burnett

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See also:
4 Classic Books by Frances Hodgson Burnett
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This post contains Bookshop.org and Amazon affiliate links. If a product is purchased after linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps us to keep growing.

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In the 1920s, urban American women experimented with sexual freedom more openly than ever. Popular novels by writers — male and female — held up a mirror to the times.

Dorothy, or “Dot,” as she’s familiarly called, succumbs to one instance of premarital sex and quickly marries Eddie (who’s not a bad sort, but not the sharpest tool in the shed) after he offers to make her “respectable.”

Some months later (not from the premarital episode) Dot becomes pregnant. The novel is then preoccupied with her pregnancy and childbirth. The cover of a later edition, above right, sensationalizes the contents, as was typical of pulp novels.

There’s nothing scandalous about this novel, but the realities of a young wife’s pregnancy and her experiences in a birthing hospital were enough to catch the eyes of The New EnglandWatch and Ward Society, who put Bad Girl on the notorious “Banned in Boston” list. 

Watch and Ward’s primary mission was book censorship, with a scattering of performing arts. It was most active from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s.

For the most part, publishers welcomed a book being “banned in Boston,” as this kind of controversy boosted sales. Winning these censorship cases in court, however, really did mean that the books in question couldn’t be sold in Massachusetts under severe penalty of law. Booksellers caught selling these banned titles could be subject to trials, fines, and even jail time. 

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Being banned in Boston drove Bad Girl onto national bestseller lists and helped make its 23-year-old author an overnight sensation. The 1931 pre- Hayes Code film adaptation received great reviews, making the most of its thin material and breathing new life into the novel’s notoriety just a few years later.

“Bad Girl is Popular” read the headline of a brief blurb that was syndicated to several newspapers in 1928:

Vina Delmar’s novel, “Bad Girl” which attracted so much attention before and after it was “banned in Boston,” has reached (so its publishers, Harcourt, Brace and Company announce) its seventh large printing, not including the 40,000 to the Literary Guild. During the last two weeks in has been reported to be the best selling novel in the country, supplanting, at least for the present, “The Bridge of San Luis Rey.”

Reviewers were generally quite kind to the novel and its young author. Whether it holds up to contemporary tastes in books is a matter for each reader to decide (granted, it’s very difficult to find copies).

One of the most poignant episodes is when Dot considers having an abortion. Sure, she’s fairly contentedly married, but the prospect of childhood scares her. Her visit to a shady, handsy abortionist is humiliating and terrifying and she decides to go through with the pregnancy.

Following is a fairly typical review from the period, after which are two articles about its banning in Massachusetts.

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Another sensationalized cover of Bad Girl. See also —
Her First Time: Seduction and Loss of Innocence in 1920s Women’s Novels

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Bad Girl is a Poignant Transcript of Life

Tulsa Daily World, Tulsa, Oklahoma, June 17, 1928: Viña Delmar has written a rough and honest tale of loving. Bad Girl by Viña Delmar has been so widely heralded as a precocious first novel that a cautious reader is to be pardoned if it has been catalogued among books that can wait. And yet caution, in this instance, is totally unnecessary.

A first novel it may be, but it is free from the taint of precocity, and from the blight of conscious straining for style. It is a spontaneous and honest piece of writing. It concerns the meeting, mating, and marriage. It depicts one year of married life of two young people from that strata whose constituents consider themselves educated and ready for life when the eighth grade is behind them.

Mrs. Delmar’s Dorothy is an eager, slim, pliable young thing exactly like all the other millions of lipsticked, bobbed, silk-stockinged young women whose bright eyes shone with life. Her Eddie is an unbelievably sensitive, consistently staunch youth, outwardly like all the other swaggering boys who seek and accept the challenge of bright eyes.

Eddie and Dorothy (often referred to as Dot) pick each other up on an excursion boat. For all the shield of their rude, self-protective banter they understand one another. They marry and have a child.

Dorothy and Eddie are real people. So is Edna, the strange girl who Dorothy’s brother loved, so far as he could love. And so are the sly-eyed, perfumed Maude, the noisy Sue, the kind, matter-of-fact doctors who took Dorothy through the hell of labor into the blessed haven of her motherhood.

Viña Delmar has written a poignant, moving story of honest thought and action. There’s no reticence in Bad Girl. Perhaps that’s why Boston banned it. But its frankness is that of reality, and is not offensive. The book takes its its title form Dot and Eddie’s prenuptial adventure, out of which she emerged panic-stricken an afraid, and Eddie came out of grim and purposeful.

There’s something intensely appealing about Eddie. He is sullen, he is rude, he is profane, but underneath this rough exterior is a man who is tender, wonderfully kind, oddly wistful, and ready to sacrifice anything for the little flame of a girl he married.

When Dot found out she was to have a baby, she trembled for fear that Eddie didn’t want it. She was ready to go any lengths if he didn’t. And Eddie, interpreting her fear as an aversion to the baby, thought that it was Dot who didn’t want it. He feigned disgust at the thought of a third member coming into the family. Love makes such strange tangles sometimes!

Anyone who could produce such a vital book as this one will go a long way. The reader feels that Viña Delmar knows what she’s writing about in this, her first book — that she has felt the pain and joy that color it. And knowing and feeling as she does, she was able to write about simple and elemental things.

Bad Girl isn’t, from any standpoint, an important book. But it is a true one, which makes it good.

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Viña Delmar in 1928
An Interview with Viña Delmar, author of Bad Girl
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Boston Bans “Bad Girl”

The Springfield Daily Republican (Springfield, Massachusetts), May 4, 1928: Literary Guild selection novel by Viña Delmar, former actress, held by booksellers to be “Actionable” under Massachusetts. “Obscenity” ignores truth, says author.

Bad Girl, a novel that raised Vina Delmar to literary fame at the age of 23, has been banned from sale in Boston. Harcourt, Brace & Co.. the publishers. received notice today from the Boston Booksellers’ association that the book is “actionable.”

The association. by agreement with the district attorney. has the power to rule on the counters of its members any books which it believes violate the Massachusetts “obscenity” law.

When Miss Delmar was informed of the action. she said Boston ignores the truth. Propagation is evidently obscene, The Lord was less cautious in his personal contacts than the Boston book banners in their reading. They are witch burners, truth hiders, and killers of the seeds of sincerity.

Bad Girl, by being barred from Boston. now joins the company of Elmer Gantry, An American Tragedy, The Plastic Age, and other recent novels that have won praise elsewhere.

Bad Girl was selected by the Literary Guild as its book for the month of April. This made Miss Delmar. a former actress and writer of short stories. famous overnight. She contends that Bad Girl is true to the lives or the people in her neighborhood” and that she took all the characters from her acquaintances.

The heroine in the book was married at the age of seventeen and the story goes on with her married life until the first baby is born.

Boston Bans New Novel, Bad Girl; Editor Is Angry

The Dispatch (Moline, Illinois). May 12, 1928: Bad Girl. a new novel by Viña Delmar, has been banned in Boston, The Watch and Ward Society having disapproved it. The Boston Booksellers’ association has sent word to Harcourt. Brace & Co. of New York that they will not handle the book.

“The book has one pretty strong chapter in it,” said a leading Boston publisher, “and the Watch and Ward society, I’m frank to say, under Massachusetts statutes anyone who sold it could be prosecuted. We care neither to push out such books, nor to furnish our contemporaries over in New York with just much free advertising.

“We read the book, of course, before submitting it to the Watch and Ward society. The banning by the society didn’t cause even a ripple among us. Dare say we will sell plenty of books without adding this one to our stock.”

“The exploitation of ‘Banned in Boston’ or ‘puritan Boston’ gives any such book a certain boost in New York. I suppose. but the New York publishers are welcome to it.”

Silly, says editor

A letter from the Boston Booksellers’ association was received by Harcourt, Brace & Co. publishers. notifying them that Viña Delmar’s novel, Bad Girl was actionable. No other reason was given by the association for its refusal to handle the book in Boston.

The author of the book is twenty-three, a former usher, stenographer, and vaudeville actress. Its banning was termed an act of  “a crazy bunch of madmen” by Harrison Smith, editor for Harcourt, Brace & Co.

“What’s the use?” he said. Asked if the prohibition from sale would be contested. “It’s incredible that the book should be thought obscene, even in Boston. A baby is born in it; can’t babies be born in books Boston reads?”

The theme of the novel—Mrs. Delmar’s first—is pregnancy. A Bronx stenographer, Dot, flirts with a “white Harlem” radio mechanic, Eddie. on board a steamer. They marry, and Dot, believing her husband does not want a baby, suffers in silence because she is pregnant, Eddie, too, thinking his wife dreads childbirth, suffers quietly. The birth, it’s hinted at the very end, will clear up these misunderstandings.

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More about Bad Girl by Viña Delmar

• Full text on Internet Archive
• Viña Delmar, Flapper Fiction, and Snappy Stories Magazine

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The title of Targoff’s book comes from Woolf’s assertion that if Shakespeare had had a sister, whom she names Judith Shakespeare, who shared his talent for writing, she never would have been able to achieve anything like her brother’s success, given the oppressive conditions women faced in sixteenth and seventeenth century England.

In fact, Woolf claims, she would have “gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at … so thwarted and hindered by other people … she must have lost her health and sanity.”

Targoff doesn’t dispute the limitations placed on women in Shakespeare’s England. She recognizes that the vast majority of women were barred from educational opportunities. If married, they were not allowed to own property. Nor could they vote nor hold political office, or become lawyers, doctors, or actors.

Even so, Targoff contends, there were women who managed to write, who were in fact, despite restrictions and obstacles, driven to write, and not just write but to challenge some of the assumptions of the world in which they lived by writing poetry, history, religious texts, and plays.

Four Remarkable Women

Ramie Targoff focuses her book on four of these remarkable women—Mary Sidney, Æmilia Lanyer, Elizabeth Cary, and Anne Clifford—and in doing so, invites readers to see the history of women’s literature with fresh eyes. The work of these women was literally lost for centuries—and as a result it was not discussed, not taught—even in academic programs focusing on this era.

Recognizing the work of these women, Targoff argues, changes our perception of women’s literary history and of the possibilities for women writing today. Unlike others of their time and place, whether through social status or through sheer luck, they succeeded in what was an excellent education for their time. Some even managed to become significant property owners.

Their work is important not simply because they were women and writers, but because they shared their perspective as women, questioning the patriarchal structures that ruled their lives and bringing the lives of women to the forefront. And these women challenged these structures not only through what they wrote, but also in the ways they lived their lives.

The Death and Funeral of Queen Elizabeth I

Targoff begins her account of the literary careers of Sidney, Lanyer, Cary, and Clifford in 1603, with a vivid description of Queen Elizabeth I and the aftermath of her death. Thirteen-year-old Anne Clifford’s mother Margaret was among those who sat up with the Queen’s coffin for several nights during the many weeks it lay in state before burial.

Æmilia Lanyer’s father, a musician in the Queen’s court, marched in Elizabeth’s funeral procession, as did newly married Elizabeth Cary’s father-in-law, Sir Edward Cary, the Master of the Jewel House.

Mary Sidney’s son, the Earl of Pembroke, carried the Great Banner of England hat day. Right behind him, four horses pulled an open chariot that carried the queen’s velvet-draped coffin, a life-size wax-and-wood effigy atop it.   

Thus the lives of all four of these women were closely linked to that of the queen. Yet Targoff warns against any assumptions regarding the role of this powerful woman on any sense of entitlement on the part of these four women. She makes it clear that Elizabeth was “both a woman and more than a woman, or not woman at all.” She refused to become a wife or a mother.

She never experienced the lack of power and agency over her body or her property that affected her female subjects. “I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman,” she famously said, “but I have the heart and stomach of a king.”

Nor did she look for ways to identify with the women of her realm: “Thou has willed me,” she wrote in a prayer she published in 1563, “to be not some wretched girl from the meanest rank of the common people who would pass her life miserably in poverty and squalor, but to a kingdom.”

In other words, the concerns of ordinary women were not the concerns of Elizabeth. But Clifford, Lanyer, Cary, and Sidney, though they married and bore children, were like the queen in one important way: like Elizabeth, all were widely read and highly educated.

Interconnected Lives

The lives of these women were interconnected, even beyond their shared proximity to the queen. Mary Sidney’s writing was cited as an inspiration by Æmelia Lanyer; Lanyer served briefly as Anne Clifford’s tutor.

And yet they came from different economic strata of their era: Anne Clifford came from the highest levels of wealth and aristocratic background; Mary Sidney, who was descended from an aristocratic mother and a bureaucrat father, married into another aristocratic family despite her father having to go into debt to cover her dowry.

Æmelia Lanyer was the daughter of a court musician and married the same, but only after becoming pregnant by her lover, one of Queen Elizabeth’s cousins. Elizabeth Carey’s father had no aristocratic connections, yet he accumulated significant wealth through his legal practice.

With the exception of Anne Clifford, all were able to read and write in multiple languages, including French, Latin, and Italian. Clifford was highly educated as well, but her xenophobic father forbade her learning any language other than English.

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Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke

Mary Sidney (1561– 1621) first took over the work of her brother, a poet, completing and polishing work he had started but had yet to publish at the time of his death.

But she went beyond his work, expanding on his translations of the first 43 Psalms to complete all 150, and thus becoming the first person to translate the Book of Psalms into English at least a decade before publication of the King James Bible in 1611.

Sidney didn’t just translate the Psalms; some refer to her work as paraphrasing, because she added numerous literary elements and perspectives. Rather than supplying a simple literal translation, she included additional lines which reflected at times on the perspective of women.

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Æmelia Lanyer

Æmelia Bassano Lanyer (1569–1645) is credited with having written the first “country house” poem written in English. A “country house” poem was one written in praise of a house, its inhabitants, and its surroundings—the house she praised was that of the Margaret Clifford, mother of Anne Clifford.

By 1611, the year when the King James Bible first appeared in print, she had become the first woman in the 17th century to publish a book of original poetry, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. Part of Salve Deus is narrated by the wife of Pontius Pilate, who warns her husband that he will be killing the son of God if he allows Christ to be crucified. She then argues that if men crucify their savior, women should be exempt from their patriarchal rule

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Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland

Elizabeth Cary (1585–1639) was the first woman in England to publish an original play. The Tragedy of Mariam portrays the wife of Herod, falsely accused of infidelity, as a heroic figure. She proclaims her own innocence in a time when wives were barely allowed to speak on their own behalf, much less contradict their husbands.

Elizabeth was never comfortable with the Protestantism of England. After she converted to Catholicism, she was placed on house arrest and driven out of her husband’s household. Unbowed by the punishment for her religious views, she translated a French text, A Reply of the most illustrious Cardinal of Perron to the answer of the King of Great Britain.

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Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset, Pembroke and Montgomery; 
14th Baroness de Clifford  

Anne Clifford (1590–1676) was a woman who believed in the importance of her own life and went to the trouble of recording it. Few women of this era kept diaries, and those who did tended to simply list their activities and prayers.

Clifford recorded her thoughts and reactions and engaged in self-reflection, making her the most important female diarist of her time. In 1923, her descendant Vita Sackville-West published her surviving diaries and a 1603 memoir under the title The Diary of Anne Clifford, with a Long Preface.

In 1649, Clifford wrote another memoir, The Life of Me, covering her life from 1590–1649, and she chronicled her family’s history in the Great Books of Record. This collection of over one thousand oversize pages is a history of the Clifford estate and dynasty, including short biographies of each of her ancestors.

She gave special attention to her female forebears, and transcribed numerous charters, royal grants, petitions, deeds, wills, and any other documents that confirmed that women had been the source of much of the property of this extremely wealthy family.

Structure of Shakespeare’s Sisters

Targoff made what seems to me to have been an unusual choice in the structuring of her account of these four women’s and their achievements. Their lifespans overlapped, and Targoff proceeds chronologically cutting back and forth among the women.

This was an intriguing approach but made a confusing read. It wasn’t easy for me, at least, to keep track of which woman I was reading about as we moved from one character to another in each chapter. Targoff could have employed other techniques to help readers keep track of these thematically connected lives.

For example, she includes several pages of Family Charts in the book’s front matter. These would have been far more useful had some dates (even if not exact) had been included. Likewise, a page of timelines of the four women’s lives would have been extremely helpful.

Targoff’s account ends by reflecting on her own experience as a Yale undergraduate and then as a graduate student at Berkeley immersed in Renaissance literature. During her studies, she never read anything written by a woman before 1800 and assumed that Virginia Woolf was right when she said that no woman of Shakespeare’s era could have been a writer.

She takes some responsibility for this: she never asked one of her professors about women writers of this era. Yet she suspects that even if she had raised the issue, she would not have found out about the women in this volume.

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Feminist Scholarship

What changed? Targoff credits the work of a number of feminist scholars with the increased visibility of these women. She cites in particular Margaret W. Ferguson, Margaret P. Hannay, Jessic L. Malay, Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, Heather Wolfe, and Susanne Woods. I would have liked more details about what exactly these researchers have done.

She mentions that a number of the works produced by these women were finally made available to the general public in the 1990s. These include The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford; Lanyer’s Salve Deus, Carey’s Tragedy of Mariam and her biography, The Lady Falkland, written by her daughters; and The Collected Works of May Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke.

Publication of these works laid the groundwork for further research, and since then, Targoff says, there have been numerous dissertations, anthologies, and scholarly articles about these women and others of their era.

Some of these works are starting to make their way into the occasional syllabus, but Targoff points out that it is still quite possible for a student to graduate with a degree in English without knowing anything about these women or any of the others who wrote in this era.

By extension, she says, many of those who study and read about this era of English history and literature know very little about the experiences and perspectives of the women who lived through it.

Access to such information, Targoff argues, has the potential to provide models and inspiration for women writing today. Access to such works, in fact, might have led Virginia Woolf to more fully imagine her Judith Shakespeare and give her greater possibilities than Woolf had previously considered.

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Contributed by Lynne Weiss: Lynne’s writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review; Brain, Child; The Common OnLine; the Ploughshares blog; the [PANK] blog; Wild Musette; Main Street Rag; and Radcliffe Magazine. She received an MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and has won grants and residency awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Millay Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. She loves history, theater, and literature, and for many years, has earned her living by developing history and social studies materials for educational publishers. She lives outside Boston, where she is working on a novel set in Cornwall and London in the early 1930s. You can see more of her work at LynneWeiss.

The post Shakespeare’s Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance – a review  appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

This review of The Paris Bookseller is contributed by N.J. Maher, from her site, Herstory Revisted: Biofiction Book Reviews. Reprinted by permission.

Certain people stick with you, whether you meet them in person, or, as with historical fiction, you meet them on the page. Such is the case for me with the protagonist in The Paris Bookseller, by Kerri Maher. It isn’t often a reader gets a front-row seat to a period in literary history, but Maher gives us one through Sylvia Beach, an American living in post-World War I Paris.

The book’s title hooked me before I opened the covers and smelled the familiar scent of fresh ink on pristine paper, before I ran my fingertips across the smooth, glossy jacket. I am a glutton for books. Some women go for shoes, but catchy titles and alluring cover art seduce me. I suppose that makes me a sinner and bookstores my house of ill repute. I love bookstores.

The Paris Bookseller reminded me just how special a bookstore is and why I appreciate bricks and mortar as compared to ordering online. I do my share of that, too, but it doesn’t result in the same experience. An actual store surrounds book lovers with something irresistible: books and like-minded individuals who value and appreciate the printed word as much as they do. Everyone inside those walls is a kindred soul.

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Sylvia Beach: Legendary Paris Bookseller and Publisher
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The digital age has robbed us of that kind of gathering space. I don’t want to take away anything from the online book groups I belong to. The energy is invigorating. And I’m thrilled at the number of authors we can interact with on Zoom these days. Woo-hoo! At least one good thing came out of the pandemic.

Libraries offer book lovers a similar experience to a bookstore, and to them, I offer a hearty shout out as well. But, if possible, I like to own my books. When I read a book, a part of me goes into that story, and the story becomes a part of me. The characters and I become intimate friends. I memorialize the setting in my mental travel log. The Paris Bookseller now occupies a place on my shelves and in my heart.

The post The Paris Bookseller by Kerry Maher – a novel of Sylvia Beach appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Sixteen-year-old Amber escapes her humble rural roots after an encounter with a troupe of traveling soldiers. This becomes her ticket out of the countryside – and her journey of social advancement begins.

Amber’s fictional narrative is interwoven with true historic facts of the English Restoration; she is born of circumstances resulting from the English Civil War, becomes a survivor of the plague, and witnesses the Great Fire of London.

Amber meets a vast array of characters from all the English classes, her adopted farmer parents, the mischievous highwayman Black Jack Mallard, her true love royalist Lord Bruce Carlton, and King Charles II. These encounters amount to a sweeping portrait of the English Restoration.

On the nearly 1,000-page path to becoming the lover of Charles II, Amber leaves a trail of scandal in her wake — theft, three husbands, lovers, abortion, and lots of sexual escapades (though none graphically described). She climbs up the ranks of 17th-century society as the mistress or wife of ever richer and more important men, all the while loving the one man she could never have.

Forever Amber scandalized and enthralled the reading audience. Despite middling-to-scathing reviews and attempted bans, the novel skyrocketed in popularity, and in 1947 was made into a film. 

Kathleen Winsor was just twenty-five when Forever Amber was published; it would remain her most successful work. 

Publishers’ synopses of Forever Amber

From the  Chicago Review Press edition (2000): “Abandoned, pregnant, and penniless on the teeming streets of London, 16-year-old Amber St. Clare manages, by using her wits, beauty, and courage, to climb to the highest position a woman could achieve in Restoration England—that of favorite mistress of the Merry Monarch, Charles II.

From whores and highwaymen to courtiers and noblemen, from events such as the Great Plague and the Fire of London to the intimate passions of ordinary—and extraordinary—men and women, Amber experiences it all. But throughout her trials and escapades, she remains, in her heart, true to the one man she really loves the one man she can never have.”

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The 1947 film adaptation of Forever Amber
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Anticipating Forever Amber, and a movie deal

From the Lexington Leader, (KY) October 1, 1944:  The Macmillan Company will publish its big fall book Oct. 16, and you can mark the occasion as a red-letter day in your reading. The book is Forever Amber, a novel by Kathleen Winsor.

When I said “big” I was not thinking of size, but of quality, sales, and popularity. But the novel is far from short in length, running close to a thousand pages. Unless I miss my guess, Forever Amber, a story of turbulent Restoration England, will outstrip that other Macmillan story, Gone With The Wind, in every department of public appeal. I think it a much better story.

Kathleen Winsor is really Mrs. Robert John Herwig, wife of a Marine on duty in the South Pacific. (Those who read the sports pages will recall that Herwig was an all-American gridder at the University of California back in 1936 and 1937 and an all-American basketballer that former year.)

She graduated from the University of California in 1938 and her only writing for publications prior to this novel were football feature articles for the Oakland Tribune in 1937, the year that California went to the Rose Bowl.

Macmillan reports that Miss Winsor’s novel had its inception in a term paper which her husband did on the death of Charles II. The young bride picked up one of the books he was using for reference, became fascinated with the Restoration, and got the idea for a novel. She worked as a receptionist on the Oakland paper for about six months in hopes of becoming a reporter but gave up and started writing the story which turned out as Forever Amber.

You would never guess it from the novel nor from looking at her, but Miss Winsor is a plodding methodic worker. In setting out on her tremendous novel she outlined a definite schedule and stayed with it.

She took one week off every month, and even when she was trailing along with her husband from camp to camp her manuscript was a constant companion. If she were obliged to miss a day, she made up for it, and in the final stages was busy eight hours a day, seven days a week.

Miss Winsor kept tabs on how much time she spent on this novel. She wrote six complete drafts. This amounted to 9,241 pages or 2,310,250 words. She used 1,303 hours for reading and researching, 380 hours indexing her notes, and 3,284 hours writing the book, a total of 4,967 long hours on the whole job spread over about five years.

Macmillan paid the usual advance for a novel amounting to about a dollar an hour for the time spent on this particular one. The first printing which goes on sale Oct. 16, is 150,000 copies at three dollars each.

Miss Annie Laurie Williams, noted for big deals involving movie rights to the books, got hold of Miss Winsor soon after the manuscript reached Macmillan. That was before the record-breaking $125,000 MGM novel award.

But Miss Williams did not submit Forever Amber in the contest, because she believed that the movies would pay considerably more for the picture rights than a mere $125,000!

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Back cover of a later edition in paperback
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A 1944 review of Forever Amber

From the original review in The Rutherford Courier, Oct. 13, 1944: This is the Gone With the Wind of the Restoration period of Old England. Instead of Scarlett, the heroine’s name is Amber. Rhett Butler, here, becomes Bruce, Lord Carlton. The scene, instead of the Southland, is all England, from the debtor’s pens in Newgate prison to the bedroom of King Charles II.

The theme is–well, just to make every page as magnetically interesting as possible. The result is a book that one finds hard to put down, though every one of its 900-odd pages.

Like Gone With The Wind, Forever Amber is the story of a beautiful yet resourceful and determined woman who gets everything she wants except, in the end, the man she really loves. Amber is the daughter of high blood, but this is a secret that only the reader knows, and that Amber never learns.

Reared in a peasant household, she meets Lord Carlton as he, with other Cavaliers, passes through her tiny town en route back to London with Charles II. From the violent episode of her first meeting with Bruce, she never forgets him. She accompanies him to London but is left alone when he sets off privateering.

Amber, through a succession of marriages, “keepings,” and responses to the King’s night-time summons, eventually becomes the king’s mistress, a duchess, and perhaps the most influential woman in the Court, and hence all of England. Ruthless and scheming, she stops at nothing – and if there is any experience a woman ever had which Amber missed, it was omitted from the book surely unintentionally.

But the frank and violent action and the sex of this book are merely what make it run fast. Underneath there is good solid writing in the vivid picture of old England as it must have been in those times, with all its squalor and ignorance as well as extravagance and luxury.

The account of the bubonic plague epidemic in London is a truly sharp scene. Lord Carlton had the plague too, and Amber nursed him back to life, and in doing so caught the plague herself. This part of the story is told at length and is realistic detail, and it is a tribute to the author’s skill that interest never lags even here. 

The author, Kathleen Winsor, until she wrote this book had never written anything for publication except a few newspaper articles.

She is the wife of Lieut. Robert John Herwig, All-American football center from California U. in 1936 and 1937. They met in college; she became interested in the subject of Charles II when her husband had to write a term paper on the subject, and this book is the result.

The publishers state that they intended to give the book unprecedented promotion, and this can hardly help being a best-seller, perhaps THE best-seller of the 1940s. It is a natural for the movies. And there’s no justice unless Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh get the leading roles. In technicolor. — R.C.L.

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First edition cover
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Further reading about Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor

• Original review in the Atlantic (December 1944)
• Review in Austenprose
• 1947 film adaptation on Rotten Tomatoes

The post Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor (1944), Bawdy, Banned & Bestselling appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Her harelip leads the others in her superstitious village to treat her as an outsider due to the association it shares with witchcraft. Despite the hardships of rural life, her disfiguration and its resulting perceptions Prue endearingly finds beauty and compassion for all around her. 

 The colorful cast of Precious Bane includes Prue’s brother Gideon, whose temperament is the of polar opposite of hers. Gideon, the inheritor of the family farm, cannot see anything in his environment outside of its potential to be exploited for personal monetary gain.

In contrast Prue’s romantic interest Kester Woodseaves, a skilled weaver, shares a profound empathy for his world and sees this same beauty in.

English traditions and folklore fill out the world around Prue as her disfigurement encourages the suspicion of her community and ultimately the false accusation of murder and witchcraft to which Prue must defend. Ultimately Mary gifts her audience with a happy ending deserved by such a kindhearted and empathetic protagonist.

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A 1929 review of Precious Bane by Mary Webb

From an original review in The Hartford Courant, April 7, 1929.

Mary Webb’s Precious Bane is a Charming Novel with Shropshire Background

 Perhaps the first dominant thought of any sensitive reader as he lays down these two books after perusal, is that of rebellion and protest against the baffling cruelty of a fate which sends such a writer as Mary Webb to her untimely death and permits the continued existence of the myriad literary pigmies who supply their futile grist to the vast mill of contemporary fiction.

A portrait of Mrs. Webb faces the title page of Armour Wherein He Trusted. Like the fabled Lady of Shalott, who worked her spells so close to the scenes of Precious Bane Mary Webb had a lovely face – intellectual, thoughtful, and sweet. Not bearing any actual likeness to the face of Anne Douglas Sedgwick, but of the same type-sensitive, delicate, and fine.

Of mixed Welsh and Scottish ancestry, Mrs. Webb (Mary Meredith) spend the greater part of her life in her native Shropshire, at one time working with her husband as a market gardener, and with him selling their produce at their own stall in Shrewsbury market. In 1921, however, the Webbs came to London, making their home at Hamstead.

As all the reading worlds knows now, the grand vogue for Mrs. Webb’s novels was started when Mr. Stanley Baldwin, himself of Shropshire descent, became so impressed with Precious Bane that he wrote a warmly appreciative letter to its author. Precious Bane had, however, already won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for 1924-5, this prize being given annually, for “the best work of imagination in prose or verse descriptive of English life by and author who had not attained sufficient recognition.”

A Sweet Character

Like Mrs. Webb’s other novels, Gone to Earth, Seven for a Secret, and the rest, Precious Bane is a tale of remote country life, and it is a story so beautiful in spirit, so exquisitely told, so instinct with a sort of spiritual exaltation, that the sense aches at it. There is a quality of high nobility in all of Mrs. Webb’s novels, uneven as they are in point of literary excellence, but her whole splendid gift crystalizes in Precious Bane which stands like a tall tower among its fellows.

Precious Bane is the story, related in the first person of a farmer’s daughter, Prudence Sarn, who was born with a disfigured lip, the result, so the neighbors believe, of a crossing of her mother’s path by a hare; the child is always looked at askance in the little community, and is even suspected of witchcraft.

Very skillfully and beautifully does Mrs. Webb contrive to convey, through Prudence’s own narrative, the impression of the girl’s lovely nature; of her innate loving kindness toward all creation, her loyalty, her sweet, sound, trustworthiness.

And, interwoven inextricably with the tale of Prue’s personal experience, are the threads of strange superstitions, folk lore, weather wisdom, homely philosophy, ingrained custom, stark brutalities, and the sounds, sights and scents of the farmstead and the woods and fields at all seasons of the revolving year.

Sympathetic Introduction

Mr. Baldwin has written a deeply sympathetic and a really penetrating introduction to Precious Bane, in which he truly notes that the strength of the book lies “in the fusion of the elements of a nature and man, observed in this remote countryside by a woman even more alive to the changing moods of nature than of man.”

And again, Mr. Baldwin writes – “Her sensibility is so acute and her power of words so sure and swift that one who reads some passages in Whitehall has almost the physical sense of being in Shropshire cornfields.”

There is something in Prue Sarn’s telling of her own story which will remind certain readers of Geoffrey Dennis’s splendid and unappreciated novel, of a poignant childhood. Mary Lee, a book which one hopes may someday come into its rightful heritage of fame; and there are country folk in Precious Bane who will inevitably suggest their Wessex prototypes – the uncanny figure of the local wizard, Beguildy, for example and many of the farm people.

The strange burial customs, the games, such as “The  Game of the Costly Colors,” in playing which the village women indulge their love for gambling, the “Love Spinning,” reminiscent of the old-time New England quilting-bee, the hiring fair, with those waiting to be hired each carrying a sign of his trade.

The bull-baiting, the romance of the traveling weaver – all of these combine in a rich tapestry of sound and color, which sets us in the very core and center of remote rural Shropshire in the first quarter of the n ineteenth century.

The book fairly demands quotation, for every page is spangled with shrewd pithy sayings, descriptions of a breath-taking beauty, and quaint expressions which come to the reader with a sense of curious sub-conscious familiarity, seeming to link him with the past in which he shared.

There is the expressive work – “tuthree,” ­– “there’s a tuthree people know you, Prue,” says Kester Woodseaves the gallant weaver; and again, Prue writing of Beguildy’s house, notes that –“all was dimmery in the room.”

Precious Bane comes naturally and simply to a “happy ending,” for which one is glad; it is a book which arouses a sense of reverence, a book brimming with beauty, plain-spoken tender, a book for which to be devoutly grateful.

More about Precious Bane by Mary Webb

• Precious Bane – a review 
• Precious Bane full text
• Precious Bane (1989) movie

The post Precious Bane by Mary Webb, the 1926 Classic Novel appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Praisesong was initially published in 1983 and reissued in 2021 in a handsome edition by McSweeney’s as the second volume in its Diaspora series.

Praisesong is the first of Marshall’s novels to feature a middle-class Black American woman at its center, a woman who experiences what was also a defining moment in Paule Marshall’s own life: the Big Drum ceremony on the tiny Caribbean island of Carriacou.

The witnessing of the Big Drum ceremony, recounted in Triangular Road, Marshall’s 2009 memoir, allowed her to break through writer’s block to write The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969). It constitutes the climactic moment in Praisesong for the Widow.

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Learn more about Paule Marshall
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A Decision to Jump Ship

Compared with Marshall’s earlier novel, The Chosen Place, The Timeless People, which has a broad array of characters with complex interrelationships and an intricate plot that unfolds over a period of months, the plot of Praisesong is a simple one.

Avey Williams Johnson, the protagonist, is a middle-aged African American widow with adult children. She lives in a large and comfortable suburban home in prosperous North White Plains, a suburb of New York City. A supervisor in the state motor vehicle department, she dresses well, eats well, and enjoys all the pleasures of a hard-won upper-middle-class lifestyle.

Avey embarks on an expensive Caribbean cruise on the Bianca (white) Pride with two friends, also widows, and six pieces of matched luggage filled with her well-chosen wardrobe, but a few days into the cruise she succumbs to her feeling of increasing unease and decides, for reasons she cannot explain, to jump ship off the coast of the island of Grenada. She plans to fly back to New York as soon as possible.

A few days earlier, she had dreamt about her great-aunt, whom Avey visited on Tatem Island in North Carolina during childhood summers. The old woman told stories of the landing of enslaved people. Avey is disturbed by the dream, but she doesn’t connect it to her sudden impulse to abandon her cruise and the ship.

Arrival on Grenada

Avey arrives in Grenada to find “a crowd of perhaps two hundred men, women and children … clearly from the more respectable element on the island” who pay her no attention as they stream onto a waiting line of schooners and sloops. She learns that there are no more flights to New York until late the next day; her taxi driver tells her that the people she saw boarding boats were headed for Carriacou, an island “so small scarcely anybody has ever heard of it.”

Avey checks into the best tourist hotel in Grenada and the next day she goes for a walk along the beach. Finding herself disoriented and lost, she encounters an old man, Lebert Joseph, who is about to embark on the same expedition to Carriacou as the people she saw the day before.

Although Avey insists she is a tourist, the old man recognizes something in her that she has yet to discover in herself and he eventually overcomes her resistance and convinces her to join him on the trip to Carriacou to witness the Big Drum ceremony.

Journey to Carriacou

Despite her objections, Avey delays her flight again and makes the journey to Carriacou with a boatload of people, including two old women who nurse her through a bout of vomiting that she attributes to seasickness, but which readers will recognize as a metaphorical purging.

Once on the island of Carriacou, she is initially disappointed when she sees the “large denuded dirt yard” where the dance is to be held. But as the dance proceeds, women from different “nations,” or ethnic groups, take their turns to dance. Avey begins to “feel the reverberation” of the dancers’ powerful tread.

Eventually, “…an arm made up of many arms” reaches out to draw her in and soon she is also “doing the flatfooted glide and stomp with aplomb … in the company of these strangers who had become one and the same with people in Tatem.” Later, Lebert Johnson and his daughter Rosalie tell Avey that after watching the way she danced and after considering her height and the way she carries herself, they have determined that she is descended from the Arada people.

Avey has a history, and the costs of her success

By the time she heads back to New York, Avey knows what she is going to do: she will pass this history along to the “young, bright, fiercely articulate token few for whom her generation had worked the two and three jobs,” sell her house in North White Plains, and restore her great aunt’s house.

She makes plans to turn it into a place where she can bring her grandchildren to tell them the stories of their people.

An immensely readable and straightforward story, Praisesong for the Widow takes place over just a couple of days. Yet Marshall incorporates so much into this account: Avey and her husband Jerome’s endless work to move from a cramped and cold apartment in Brooklyn to the comfortable home in North White Plains; the costs of that striving to her marriage and relationship with her children; the brutality of the racism that always surrounds them as she and her husband watch helplessly (in this era before cell phone cameras) from the window of their Brooklyn apartment as police drag a Black man from his car and beat him until he bleeds; the joyous childhood outings among her Harlem neighbors setting out for a summer picnic.

We see the yearning of Avey’s youngest child, Marion, to share her struggle for equality and the history of their people with her mother and Avey’s refusal to acknowledge that history for fear of losing what she and her husband have worked so hard to attain.

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The Chosen Place, the Timeless People
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Paule Marshall’s Own Transformation

Much of this story is mirrored in Marshall’s own life. Though she wasn’t on a cruise, in 1962 she was living on the island of Grenada, having gone there as a single mother intending to write after receiving a Guggenheim grant.

Despite her preparations for the opportunity—stacks of research—and the ideal conditions—Grenada’s beauty and the money that allowed her to hire a housekeeper, a cook, and a nanny, and rent a house with large rooms and tall windows—she found herself suffering, for the first time in her life, from a paralyzing case of writer’s block.

When a couple of friends insisted that she make the trip to Carriacou (a smaller island two hours away by schooner) to witness The Big Drum/Nation Dance, she reluctantly agreed to go.

“The drums,” she wrote, “were nothing more than a few hollowed-out logs with a drumhead of goatskin. The drummers themselves were elderly men who couldn’t possibly, it seemed, open their stiff, work-swollen hands to beat a drum.”

The men drum throughout the night as aged women dance. “Who we is, oui!” the dance caller cries. “Where we’s from in truth! Our true-true nation: Manding, Arada, Cromanti, Congo, Yoruba, Igbo, Chamba.”

As Marshall watched the dance, she recalled James Weldon Johnson’s description of the Ring Shout in his memoir of growing up in segregated Florida, Along This Way. Inspired, Marshall joined the dancers, and when she returned to her study the next morning, she packed up her steno pads of research notes and locked them away.

It was only then that she was able to begin writing the novel that would become The Chosen Place, the Timeless People:

“… finally understanding, fledgling that I still was, that as a fiction writer, a novelist, a storyteller, a fabulist … my responsibility first and foremost was to the story … the old verities of people, plot and place; a story that if honestly told and well-crafted would resonate with the historical truths contained in the steno pads.”

Contributed by Lynne Weiss: Lynne’s writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review; Brain, Child; The Common OnLine; the Ploughshares blog; the [PANK] blog; Wild Musette; Main Street Rag; and Radcliffe Magazine. She received an MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and has won grants and residency awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Millay Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. She loves history, theater, and literature, and for many years, has earned her living by developing history and social studies materials for educational publishers. She lives outside Boston, where she is working on a novel set in Cornwall and London in the early 1930s. You can see more of her work at LynneWeiss.

You may also enjoy Lynne’s piece, Inspiration from Classic Caribbean Women Writers.

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Brown Girl, Brownstones

The post Praisesong for the Widow by Paule Marshall (1983) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Elinor Glyn: A Portrait of the Woman Who Gave IT a new meaning — and of the fabulous world in which she lived  originally appeared in the Orlando Sentinel, July 17, 1955:

Elinor Glyn is the writer who made the word IT synonymous with sex appeal. That was Sam Goldwyn’s idea, though Mrs. Glyn had a much more involved definition.

Glyn was a legend in her own time. Born on the Isle of Jersey (UK), she died a few weeks before her seventy-ninth birthday.

Marriage, affairs, and good living

She was a young woman in the reign of Queen Victoria, a welcome guest at the house parties at the fabulous estates during the high-living Edwardian era. The object of these festivities was good living, good food, good company, exclusive society, sport, and discreet philandering.

Elinor, a slim, queenly, green-eyed red-haired beauty, had fastidiously refrained from love affairs, for she was determined to make an advantageous marriage. At the age of twenty-eight, in April 1892, at a fashionable wedding at St. George’s, Hanover Square, she married Clayton Glyn, “The most perfect grand seigneur that I have ever met.”

Clayton Glyn was a descendant of Sir Richard Carr Glyn, banker and Lord Mayor of London. he had no business interests and lived the life of a wealthy country gentleman. He was a fine sportsman, a connoisseur of food and wine, a great traveler, and absolutely irresponsible about money. He had a dry, caustic sense of humor.

Elinor’s beauty enchanted him and her pretensions and romantic silliness amused him for a time. Although they soon became indifferent to each other, they remained married until his death in 1915.

She consoled herself with other love affairs, the most famous being her eight-year romance with Lord Curzon. He evidently tired of her possessiveness and probably to avoid the dramatic scene of which he knew she was capable, let her read of his coming marriage to another woman without any advance preparation.

Elinor Glyn was an intimate of famous statesmen as well as of the nobility of Great Britain and the continent. She was a celebrated hostess and a war correspondent at the front in World War I.

A darling of the Jazz Age, she was a contradictory creature. Having inherited from her indomitable grandmother (the daughter of an Irish peer set down in the Canadian wilderness) an intense regard for the importance of aristocratic lineage.

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Hollywood of the 1920s and beyond

Glyn was a dazzling figure in Hollywood of the twenties. She could yet have a wonderful time among her something less than aristocratic colleagues in the movie business — Charlie Chaplin, Clara Bow, Sam Goldwyn, Gloria Swanson, William Randolph Hearst, Marion Davies, Aileen Pringle, Rudolph Valentino, and others.

When she learned that her husband’s considerable fortune was gone, she could turn out bestsellers, articles, and short stories by the dozen. Even when almost destitute, her normal entourage consisted of a personal maid and chauffeur.

She rented or bought big houses in England, France, and the U.S., decorating them with her favorite color, purple. Willfully uneducated, except in the classics, she consorted with some of the brainiest men of the era.

Bestsellers that were pure tripe

Glyn’s writings were purest tripe, erotic and as fruitfully purple as her favorite color scheme. Yet Three Weeks sold five million copies and many of her other books were also bestsellers.

Remember when Paul, the titled Englishman in Three Weeks, is enchanted by the mysterious royal stranger at a hotel in lucern, is invited to her rooms, and in a dizzy perfume of tuberoses, lilies of the valley, and roses, roses, roses, falls madly in love?

His queen reclines on a couch covered with a tiger skin. (Elinor Glyn liked tiger skins. She received five as gifts, one from Lord Curson and one from Lord Milner.)

“Then a madness of tender caressing seized her. She purred as a tiger might have done, while she undulated like a snake. She touched him with her fingertips, she kissed his throat, his wrists, the palms of his hands, his eyelids, his hair. Strange subtle kisses, unlike the kisses of women. And often, between her purring she murmured love-words in some fierce language of her own, brushing his ears and his eyes with her lips the while.”

Literally thousand of people, including American men and women, wrote Glyn for advice on love. She found that even Rudolph Valentino had a lot to learn in the art of making love convincingly before a camera.

“Do you know,” she would murmur, “he had never even thought of kissing the palm, rather than the back of a women’s hand, until I made him do it.”

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Vain, willful, courageous, spirited

Glyn was a beautiful woman until the day she died. She worked at it. Two of her startling aids to beauty: To scrub the face hard with a dry nailbrush until the skin glowed crimson (Not recommended!), and to sleep with one’s head to the magnetic north (pure common sense, she said).

She was always impeccably, fashionably gowned in clothes designed by her sister Lucile, Lady Duff-Gordon.

Glyn earned a great deal of money, and she spent it recklessly. One of her sons-in-law, Sir Rys-Williams, finally organized a limited liability company to hold copyrights of all her works and receive all royalties, so that she would be protected from her own wild investments and lavish spending.

Anthony Glyn wrote his biography of his grandmother “as objectively as possible, consistent with the demands of filial piety,” using material from Elinor’s published and unpublished books, articles, film scripts, the intimate diary that she kept intermittently from 1879 to 1942, her journals, notebooks, recollections of her family, friends, and business associates, press clippings, and hundreds of her own inimitable letters.

Vain, willful, romantic, and snobbish, Elinor Glyn also was quite resourceful, full of courage, pride, energy, and spirit. The world bought her awful love stories and rolled in their eroticism like catnip. The life story of this woman is delightful and fascinating.

(reviewed by Ruth Smith, July 17, 1955)

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