Her writing spanned thirty years and nearly thirty books, covering subjects such as marginalization, oppression, and inequality, as well as racial, political, and sexual identity.

She was also passionate about the use of Black English in writing and in education, and had a thriving teaching career in several universities.

Early life in New York

June Millicent Jordan was born in the Harlem section of New York City in 1936 and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Her parents, Mildred and Granville Jordan were immigrants from Panama and Jamaica, respectively. An only child, she had a difficult relationship with her father, who never hid his disappointment that she was not a boy.

Later, she would write, “For a long while during childhood I was relatively small, short, and, in some other ways, a target for bully abuse. In fact, my father was the first regular bully in my life.” However, she credited him with passing along his love of literature, and by age seven, she began writing her own poetry. Her mother later took her own life. Fifteen years later, in a 1981 essay called “Many Rivers To Cross,” Jordan wrote:

“I thought about the idea of my mother as a good woman and I rejected that, because I don’t see why it’s a good thing when you give up, or when you cooperate with those who hate you…I came too late to help my mother to her feet. By way of everlasting thanks to all the women who have helped me to stay alive I am working never to be late again.”

She attended Midwood High School in Brooklyn for a year, followed by the elite Northfield School in Massachusetts. The student bodies of both schools were predominantly white. In 1953, she attended Barnard College in New York (the women’s college affiliated with Columbia University), but also felt alienated as a Black student, and by the white-centered curriculum. In her 1981 book of essays, Civil Wars, she wrote of the experience:

“No one ever presented me with a single Black author, poet, historian, personage, or idea for that matter. Nor was I ever assigned a single woman to study as a thinker, or writer, or poet, or life force.” Because of this disconnect, Jordan left Barnard without graduating.

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Marriage, divorce, and sexual identity

In 1955, Jordan met and married Michael Meyer, a white student at Columbia University. She followed him to the University of Chicago, where she also enrolled, but ultimately returned to Barnard and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1957.

In 1958, she gave birth to the couple’s only child, Christopher, and raised him alone after she and Meyer divorced in 1965.

Jordan always identified openly as bisexual, saying, “Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to love a man, and what about that? Isn’t that what freedom implies?” After her death in 2019, she was one of the first fifty American “pioneers, trailblazers and heroes” inducted into the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor at the Stonewall National Monument in New York City.

A life dedicated to activism

Jordan was active in the civil rights, feminist, anti-war, and gay rights movements. She attended rallies, marches, events and conferences throughout her life. She wrote in Civil Wars: Selected Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1981).

“It seems unreasonable that more than 400 million people, right now, struggle against hunger and starvation, even while there is an arable earth aplenty to feed and nourish every one of us. It does not seem reasonable that the color of your skin should curse and condemn all your days and the days of your children. It seems preposterous that gender, that being a woman, anywhere in the world, should elicit contempt, or fear, or ridicule, and serious deprivation of rights to be, to become, to embrace whatever you choose…”  

After the Harlem Riots of 1964 (in which James Powell, a Black teen, was shot dead by an NYPD officer – a shooting which sparked six nights of rioting and clashes between protestors and the police), Jordan was “filled with hatred for everything and everyone White.”

It was a conversation with civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer that led her to eventually believe that “this condition, if it lasted, would mean that I had lost the point: not to resemble my enemies, not to dwarf my world, not to lose my willingness and ability to love.”

After the riots, she collaborated with architect Buckminster Fuller on an architectural redesign of Harlem to improve living conditions for residents. However, the plan was never developed.

Jordan was also a passionate supporter of Palestinian rights, and said that the Palestinian struggle was the “moral litmus test” of her life. After traveling to Lebanon in 1982 and visiting the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, and seeing the devastation of the Israeli massacres there firsthand (and then returning in 1996), she wrote in the poem “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon”:

“Yes I did know it was the money I earned as a poet that / paid / for the bombs and the planes and the tanks / that they used to massacre your family… I’m sorry. I really am sorry.”

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Teaching career

Jordan’s teaching career began in 1967 when, after running poetry workshops for children in Harlem, she began teaching at the City College of New York. Later, she taught at Yale University and Sarah Lawrence College, and became Professor of English at Stony Brook, where she directed the Poetry Center.

In 1988, she became Professor of African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where, in 1991, she co-founded Poetry for the People with Janice Mirikitani – a program to train undergraduates to bring poetry into community groups as a form of political and social empowerment. 

She was known for using Black English both in her own writing and in her teaching. She saw it as a vital way of keeping the community and culture alive, and she encouraged her students to respect it as its own language and to use it in their own work.

Her essay, “Nobody Means More to Me Than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan,” criticizes the use of “White English” as standard English, saying that “compulsory education in American compels accommodation to exclusively White forms of ‘English.’”

“To rally the spirit of your folks”:
an extensive writing career

In 1969, Jordan published her first volume of poetry, Who Look at Me. This was followed by several books for children and young adults, including His Own Where (1971), Dry Victories (1972), New Life, New Room (1975), and Kimako’s Story (1981).

Later, she explored her own childhood in the memoir Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood (2000), and in a NewsHour interview with Elizabeth Farnsworth, she said of the book,

“I wanted to honor my father, first of all, and secondly, I wanted people to pay attention to a little girl who is gifted intellectually and creative, and to see that there’s a complexity here that we may otherwise not be prepared to acknowledge or even search for…” In a separate interview, she said, “My father was very intense, passionate, and over-the-top. He was my hero and my tyrant.”

She also wrote poetry and fiction, and librettos for the operas Bang Bang Uber Alles, and I was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky. Her journalism was published widely, and she was a regular columnist for The Progressive. Her essays were largely political, and in collections such as Civil Wars (1981), On Call (1985), and Technical Difficulties (1992), her topics ranged from conflicts in South Africa, Nicaragua, and Lebanon, to issues of race and class in the U.S.

Jordan often wrote about her personal experiences in her work, including the experience of being raped. In ‘Poem About My Rights’, she wrote, “I have been raped / be- / cause I have been wrong the wrong sex the wrong age / the wrong skin the wrong nose the wrong hair the / wrong need the wrong dream the wrong geographic / […] / but let this be unmistakeable this poem / is not consent I do not consent / […] / I am not wrong: wrong is not my name”

When she was asked about the role of a poet in society, she replied, “The role of a poet, beginning with my own childhood experience, is to deserve the trust of people who know that what you do is work with words … Then the task of a poet of color, a Black poet, as a people hated and despised, is to rally the spirit of your folks …”

She was awarded a number of prestigious grants, including Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Massachusetts Council on the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as the National Association of Black Journalists Award and a Rockefeller Foundation Grant. She was also a finalist for the National Book Award in 1972 for His Own Where.

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Later years

Jordan was diagnosed with breast cancer in the 1990s, but continued to teach, write, and protest. She died in June 2002 at her home in Berkeley, California.

In an obituary, Lynell George wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “[Jordan] spent her life stitching together the personal and political so the seams didn’t show,” while Jordan’s contemporary, Toni Morrison, said of her career, “I am talking about a span of forty years of tireless activism coupled with and fueled by flawless art.”

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Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is a writer and editor with a serious case of wanderlust. Her short fiction has been widely published online and is included in the Best Small Fictions 2022 Anthology published by Sonder Press. She is Books & Creative Writing Editor at Lucy Writers Platform, she is also co-facilitating What the Water Gave Us, an Arts Council England-funded anthology of emerging women writers from migrant backgrounds. She is currently working on a collection of short stories, and when not writing can usually be found planning the next trip abroad, or daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. Find more of her writings here and on Literary Ladies Guide.

More about June Jordan 

• June Jordan’s complete bibliography

Further reading

• • This Unruly Witness: June Jordan’s Legacy, ed. by Lauren Muller, Becky Thompson,
    Dominique C. Hill. Haymarket Books, 2025
  • The Essential June Jordan, ed. Jan Heller Levi and Christoph Keller, Penguin Classics, 2021
  • Passion (Poems), by June Jordan, Penguin Classics, 2025
  • Haruko/Love Poems, by June Jordan, Serpent’s Tail Classics, 2023
  • June Jordan on America’s Black Holocaust Museum
  • Poetry Foundation

The post “I Do Not Consent” The Life of Writer and Activist June Jordan appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

Photo at right: Miriam Karpilove, from the collection of David Karpilow.
 
Karpilove became well known for her serialized novels in the American Yiddish press, focusing on the lives of young Jewish women and exploring contemporary issues of gender roles, sexual mores, immigration, and cultural dislocation.

Early life and emigration from Belarus

Karpilove was born in a small town near Minsk, Belorussia (now Belarus) in 1888, though the exact date is unknown. She was the fifth of ten children in an observant household. Her father, Elijah, was a lumber merchant and builder. Her mother, Hannah, encouraged the secular and religious education of all their children, including the girls.

Karpilove was an early lover of literature, especially Russian, and composed her own poetry in the language. She trained as a photographer and photographic retoucher.

She emigrated to the US in 1905, one of thousands of Jews who were fleeing the Russian Empire as a result of economic hardship, antisemitic pogroms, and restrictions on Jewish life under Tsarist rule. She settled in New York City, among the growing communities of Eastern European Jews on the Lower East Side, and supported herself with work in a photography studio. Some of her brothers, who also emigrated, settled in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Writing life in New York

Karpilove published her first writing in 1906, in the Yiddish newspaper Di idishe fon. This was the start of a fifty-year career during which she wrote short stories, novels, novellas, sketches, criticism, and play scripts.

Nearly all her work appeared in Yiddish newspapers and periodicals such as Tog, Kibitser, Forverts, Yidisher Kemfe, and Fraye Arbeter Shtime, and more than twenty of her novels were serialized (only five appeared in book form in her lifetime).

The Yiddish press, like the wider American press at that time, was largely male dominated. Karpilove was one of the very few women able to make a living from writing. Her work was hugely popular with readers, particularly female readers, but was mostly ignored by (male) critics of the time.

Throughout her writing career, Karpilove explored American urban life from the perspective of Jewish women, often young and independent immigrants, and portrayed themes of emotional isolation, cultural dislocation, sexual vulnerability, and the rapid social changes of the period.

She was frank about romantic and sexual encounters, although virginity and marriage remained ideals for most of her heroines – not out of prudishness, but as a critique of the way the new social and sexual trends left women vulnerable and often exploited.

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Diary of a Lonely Girl and other writings

Her breakthrough novel, Tagebukh fun an elender meydele, oder Der kamf kegen fraye libe (Diary of a Lonely Girl, or the Battle Against Free Love) was serialized in Di Varhayt from 1916-1918, before being published in book form in 1918.

The story is told through the diary entries and letters of an unnamed protagonist as she writes, in wry detail, of her love life among the tenements of New York’s Lower East Side. She rejects both the idea of arranged marriages from the “old world culture” and “free love.” The latter, condoning extramarital affairs with no commitment, was advocated by the secular, radical Bohemians of the “new culture.”

The novel contrasts male entitlement with the lack of real autonomy for women, highlighting the disproportionate social and legal consequences that women could face as a result of men’s pursuit of “free love.”

Under the 1909 Tenement Act, for example, a woman could be evicted or arrested for prostitution simply for having a male visitor in her rented room. Unsurprisingly, there were no such consequences for the male visitors. In one diary entry, the protagonist writes, “If free is what you want, don’t force me.”

Similarly, Yudis (Judith) is an epistolary novel that explores the relationship between a small-town Jewish girl, uprooted by antisemitic violence, and her revolutionary lover Joseph. In her letters, Judith details the experiences and challenges faced by young Jewish immigrant women who move between old and new worlds and navigate shifting cultural ideas.

Karpilove often wrote from her own life experiences. Her 1909 play In di shturm teg (In the Stormy Days) drew on her childhood in the Russian Empire, while another serialized novel, A Provincial Newspaper (1926), explored an early-career female journalist’s struggles with overt sexism in the workplace.

From 1929 to 1937, she served as a staff writer for the renowned Yiddish newspaper Forverts. She published seven novels and several short stories there during that time, as well as reporting on current events, and contributing personal observations and opinion pieces on topics such as labor conditions and the culture of the Jewish community.

Travels to Palestine

Karpilove became active in the Labor Zionist movement upon her arrival in the US. Her brother Jacob, whom she was close to and who settled in Bridgeport, became a prominent Zionist leader in the Poale Tsion movement, and she was the secretary of the local chapter in New York.

In 1926, she traveled to Palestine, hoping to settle there permanently. Before departing (in something of a disorganized rush), she wrote to Chaim Liberman, Secretary of the Yiddish Writers’ Union:

“Yes, dearest of all secretaries, I am going to the land of Israel. I will be leaving in about a month, on the first of September, 1926 … My weak head is dizzy with all of the things that I have to do for myself in order to leave from golus [diaspora]. I am my own moshiyekh’te [lady messiah] and, as you know, I have no white horse and, as you also know, the subway is on strike to boot. Therefore please accept my apologies for my distance, my tardiness, in following the aforementioned rules and regulations …”

She returned from Palestine three years later, unable to make ends meet there. Her autobiographical novel A Novel About Israel: My Three Years in Israel chronicles her time there. It hasn’t been translated in full, but is held in her archive at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. An excerpt, translated by Jessica Kirzane, can be viewed here.

Karpilove wasn’t impressed with the British government mandate then in charge of the country. In the novel, she wrote of the government officials:

“They didn’t like us. I could tell. But we couldn’t ask them why…we just had to ignore their cold, dry demeanor towards us immigrants. I doubt if we’ll be able to accomplish much in Eretz Yisrael under the Mandate that they use to squeeze money out of us. We can only accomplish things that are in their interest. On the way to Eretz Yisrael, we heard our fill about their decency, but now all we could do was console ourselves with the hope that it won’t always be this way. Someday we’ll come to an agreement. We will prevail.”

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Recent scholarly resurgence

Karpilove has experienced a recent resurgence, thanks to the efforts of scholar Jessica Kirzane at the University of Chicago, whose translations have made her work more accessible. Syracuse University Press published Diary of a Lonely Girl, or the Battle for Free Love, in 2020, and A Provincial Newspaper and Other Stories in 2023. Judith: A Tale of Love and Woe was published by Farlag Press in 2022.

Karpilove kept scrupulous lists of what she wrote, where and when it was published. This makes it possible to get a fuller view of her writing life compared with other women’s, whose writing  has been lost. Contemporary scholars place her as a sophisticated observer of Jewish women’s life: Kirzane says that Karpilove gives the reader “a provocative, audacious portrait of Jewish womanhood that maybe we wouldn’t get in the same way elsewhere.”

However, there is also an acknowledgement that in many of Karpilove’s short stories, particularly those written during and after her time in Palestine, there is a distinct element of racism and orientalism that was common among Westerners at the time.

Her narrators often portray Arabs in a negative light, blaming their own moral failings and not systemic or political failure. Critic Sarah Imroff, in reviewing Kirzane’s translation of A Provincial Newspaper, wrote that, “With no critique internal to the stories, it is difficult to conclude that Karpilove herself did not also hold some of these views.”

Kirzane, in her introduction, wrote that, “It is important to note Karpilove’s racism in the text, particularly because she sees herself as outside of the ideologically strident voices calling for the exclusive use of Jewish labor over Arab labor.”

Personal life and later years

Karpilove never married or had children. Among her family, she was closest to her brother Joseph, and around 1938, she moved from New York to Bridgeport to help him care for his ailing wife, Annie. She then stayed to care for Joseph after Annie died.

From postcards written in the 1940s to her friend and fellow Yiddish writer Bertha Kling. It can be gleaned that she desperately missed the bohemian atmosphere of Yiddish New York and the gatherings at Kling’s home that she would once have been a part of.

She wrote that if she had still been in New York, she would not have missed a single meeting, and said, “I think it’s long overdue that women writers should have the chance to hear each other. The power has been in the hands of male writers for too long.”

In her later years, she suffered from ill health, although there are no specifics on record. She died in Bridgeport in early 1956, with various sources citing March or May. 

Her great-nephew, David Karpilow, remembered her as “a woman ahead of her time … a strong feminist, an early beatnik…unique within the family. I recall her reading a lot and having strong opinions … she was an intellectual, certainly in her own way. Her experiences were vast.”

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Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is a writer and editor with a serious case of wanderlust. Her short fiction has been widely published online and is included in the Best Small Fictions 2022 Anthology published by Sonder Press. She is Books & Creative Writing Editor at Lucy Writers Platform, she is also co-facilitating What the Water Gave Us, an Arts Council England-funded anthology of emerging women writers from migrant backgrounds. She is currently working on a collection of short stories, and when not writing can usually be found planning the next trip abroad, or daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. Find more of her writings here and on Literary Ladies Guide.

Further reading

Three books are available in English, all translated by Jessica Kirzane:

• Diary of a Lonely Girl, or the Battle for Free Love (Syracuse University Press, 2020)
• Judith: A Tale of Love and Woe (Farlag Press, 2022)
• A Provincial Newspaper and Other Stories (Syracuse University Press, 2023)

More about Miriam Karpilove

• Jewish Women’s Archive
• Diary of a Lonely Girl: A Queer Reading
• Miriam Karpilove’s FOMO

The post Miriam Karpilove, Yiddish-Language Writer appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

As a prolific essayist and journalist, her trademark skepticism, wit, and intimate writing style made her hugely successful, and she deserves to be remembered just as much for her prose as her screenplays.

Early life as part of a writing family

Nora was born in New York City in 1941 and had three younger sisters: Delia, Amy, and Hallie. Her parents, Henry and Phoebe, were both Broadway playwrights. At least two of their plays, Three’s A Family and Take Her, She’s Mine, were based on their family life. 

When Nora was five years old, the family moved to Los Angeles. Henry and Phoebe Ephron were scriptwriters for a number of movies, including Desk Set, starring Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, and other classics.

All four sisters learned to read early, and dinnertime — served promptly every evening at six-thirty — was seen as an opportunity for them to learn the art of storytelling. Hallie later said that “the competition for airtime was Darwinian.” All four later became writers.

Nora’s parents regularly sent her to summer camp, where friends described her as a “natural leader.” At Camp Tocaloma in Arizona, she would entertain her friends by reading her mother’s letters from home aloud: “My friends…would laugh and listen, utterly rapt at the sophistication of it all.” These letters helped to later forge Nora’s distinctive journalistic writing style. Phoebe told her to write essays and columns as if she were mailing a letter, and then “tear off the salutation.”

The phrase “everything is copy,” which later became synonymous with Nora herself, was also attributed to her mother and this period of letter writing. Later, Nora explained what she believed her mother had meant by it: “When you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you. But when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh, so you become the hero rather than the victim of the joke.”

Both Henry and Phoebe battled with alcoholism. Biographer Kristin Marguerite Doidge wrote that this was  “…a lifelong journey [for Nora], understanding how someone you love and admire and look up to can also be falling apart, how to love someone who isn’t just one thing.” The complexities of love in all its forms were later a major theme in her work.

Choosing not to be a lady: Wellesley College

Nora graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in political science but felt that her experiences there didn’t prepare her for life in any meaningful way. It certainly did nothing to prepare her for life as a woman in the modern world.

Later, she wrote, “It always seemed so sad that a school that could have done so much for women put so much energy into the one area women should be educated out of … What do you think? What is your opinion? No one ever asked.”

Doidge wrote that Nora was “critical of her classmates at Wellesley for what she perceived as a lack of toughness, an unwillingness to fight for better conditions for women. I think she also found it silly that that was a thing at all. She had a complicated relationship with the concept of feminism.”

In 1996, when Nora was invited to give the commencement address at Wellesley, she told the students: “Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women.”

Achieving an ambition: New York City and journalism

After a stint working as an intern in the White House when John F. Kennedy was president (which she later wrote about in an essay, “Me and JFK: Now It Can Be Told”), she moved back to New York City, renting a series of small apartments and working in the typing pool at Newsweek.

She had plans to become a fully-fledged journalist, with dreams of following in the footsteps of Dorothy Parker, who she had first met as a child at one of her parents’ Hollywood parties. “All I wanted in this world,” she later wrote, “was to come up to New York and be Dorothy Parker. The funny lady. The only lady at the table.” This dream was soon punctured when she read more of Parker’s work, and found it to be “so embarrassing … Before one looked too hard at it, it was a lovely myth.”

She has always read constantly throughout her life, but particularly during this time: Doidge describes her curling up “on her new, wide-wale corduroy couch with a cup of hot tea and her dog-eared paperback copy of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.”  Reading, for Nora, was not just for pleasure; it was also an education in the art of learning how to read people, how to interpret life onto the page, and how to make her writing her own.

Her chance came in 1962 when the newspapers went on strike, and every major paper in New York was shut down. Nora’s friend Victor Navasky, an editor, took the opportunity to print parodies of some of the papers and asked Nora if she would write a parody of a New York Post gossip column. Nora did it so well that it caught the attention of the Post’s publisher, Dorothy Schiff, who offered Nora her first job as a staff reporter. “If they can parody the Post,” she said, “they can write for it.”

Later, Nora wrote of her first weeks on the job: “The city room is dusty, dingy and dark. The desks are dilapidated and falling apart. It smells terrible. There aren’t enough phones … I am hired permanently. I have never been happier. I have achieved my life’s ambition, and I am twenty-two years old.”

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Everything is copy: essays and articles

In 1970 Nora moved from the Post to Esquire, where she remained a writer until 1989. Her essays were hugely popular — her style (described by Rachel Syme in The New Yorker as “light, fizzy, precise”) and her sense of intimacy with readers made her a hit, even when her sharpness verged on cruelty.

This sharpness was characteristic of all of her writing, even her later screenplays: Meg Ryan, who worked with Nora on When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and You’ve Got Mail, said: “Her allegiance to language was sometimes more than her allegiance to someone’s feelings.”

She wrote on diverse topics, universal and personal — politics, relationships, feminism, aging, and waxing. She recommended bikini waxes, but only if you were actually wearing a bikini. She implored the reader to employ the breathing exercises commonly taught in prenatal classes: “I recommend them highly, although not for childbirth, for which they are virtually useless.”

She also devoted entire essay to handbags, which she did not recommend in the slightest: “This is for women whose purses are a morass of loose TicTacs, solitary Advils, lipsticks without tops, Chapsticks of unknown vintage, little bits of tobacco even though there has been no smoking going on for at least ten years … This is for those of you who understand, in short, that your purse is, in some absolutely horrible way, you.”

Food was also a favorite topic. In the essay “Serial Monogamy: a Memoir” she scrutinized the “fancy” cooking of the 1960s, particularly her own fascination with the famous food writers of the time.

“We all began to cook in a wildly neurotic and competitive way,” she wrote. “We were looking for applause, we were constantly performing, we were desperate to be all things to all people. Was this the grand climax of the post–World War II domestic counterrevolution or the beginning of a pathological strain of feminist overreaching? No one knew. We were too busy slicing and dicing.”

Her essays were later collected into books, including Wallflower at the Orgy (1970), Crazy Salad (1975), and Scribble, Scribble (1978).

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Heartbreak and Heartburn

Nora married Dan Greenburg in the mid-1960s; they separated in 1974. She married Carl Bernstein two years later. She discovered that he was cheating on her with a mutual friend (Margaret Jay) while she was pregnant. Her first novel, Heartburn, is a thinly veiled account of their separation and subsequent divorce.

The protagonist, Rachel, is a food writer; recipes scattered throughout the narrative. Nora had longed for someone to include her original recipes in a cookbook but realized that “no one was ever going to put my recipes into a book, so I’d have to do it myself.”

The recipes in Heartburn include pears with lima beans, cheesecake, bacon hash, and key lime pie (which Rachel ultimately throws in her cheating husband’s face). Nora later wrote:

“The point wasn’t about the recipes. The point (I was starting to realize) was about putting it together. The point was about making people feel at home, about finding your own style, whatever it was, and committing to it. The point was about giving up neurosis where food was concerned. The point was about finding a way that food fit into your life.”

Heartburn was a bestseller, and Nora wrote the screenplay for the film adaption. Released in 1986, it starred Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson, and was directed by Mike Nichols.

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Success in screenwriting

Heartburn wasn’t Nora’s first screenplay or film. She had started writing scripts in the early days after her divorce from Bernstein, when she was single, broke, and living with two young children in an apartment owned by her editor.

She discovered that scriptwriting allowed her to combine everything that she loved about her essay writing and journalism – observing people, dissecting them, understanding them – while also allowing her to stay in one place and work from home.

Her first film, Silkwood (1983), was co-written with Alice Arlen. It was based on the true story of Karen Silkwood, a union activist who died while investigating safety violations at a nuclear plant. Her big Hollywood breakthrough came in 1989, when she wrote the screenplay for When Harry Met Sally. The film was a huge hit, and Nora received a BAFTA for Best Original Screenplay and an Oscar nomination.

Nora made her directorial debut in 1992 with the film This is My Life, and also co-wrote the script with her sister Delia Ephron. Further hits included Sleepless in Seattle (1993), You’ve Got Mail (1998; also co-written with Delia), and Julie and Julia (2009). Rachel Syme has described her films as “physically chaste but rhetorically hot … the idea of swooning over someone’s syntax so dramatically that you change your life appears again and again in Ephron’s work.”

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Nicholas Pileggi & Nora Ephron in 2010
photo by David Shankbone courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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Considering the Alternative and last projects

Nora’s third and final marriage was to Nicholas Pileggi (author of Goodfellas and Casino) in 1987. They remained married until her death.

She continued to write for theatre, and published two further collections of essays, I Feel Bad About My Neck (2006) and I Remember Nothing (2010). I Feel Bad About My Neck reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction.

In one essay in that collection, “Consider the Alternative,” Nora turned a wry,  poignant eye to the topic of aging, writing that “… the honest truth is that it’s sad to be over sixty. The long shadows are everywhere … A miasma of melancholy hangs there, forcing you to deal with the fact that your life, however happy and successful, has been full of disappointments and mistakes … There are, in short, regrets.”

She was diagnosed with myelodysplasia in 2006 but chose not to reveal her diagnosis to anyone beyond her immediate family. Her death in 2012 at the age of seventy-one was caused by pneumonia, a complication of leukemia.

The legacy of Nora Ephron

Beyond the obvious legacy of her films – still big hits and hugely popular – Nora’s essays and other writings continue to inspire countless readers, women in particular. In her new introduction to I Feel Bad About My Neck, Dolly Alderton said that through her writing, Nora was “the best friend every woman longs for – shrewd, hilarious and utterly unimpeachable, equal parts Dorothy Parker, Coco Chanel and Mrs. Beeton.”

The Most of Nora Ephron — a collection of her newspaper columns, blog posts, speeches and other works — was published posthumously in 2013, and in 2016 her son, Jacob Bernstein, directed an HBO film of her life, titled Everything is Copy.

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Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is a writer and editor with a serious case of wanderlust. Her short fiction has been widely published online and is included in the Best Small Fictions 2022 Anthology published by Sonder Press. She is Books & Creative Writing Editor at Lucy Writers Platform, she is also co-facilitating What the Water Gave Us, an Arts Council England-funded anthology of emerging women writers from migrant backgrounds. She is currently working on a collection of short stories, and when not writing can usually be found planning the next trip abroad, or daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. 

More about Nora Ephron

Biography and criticism

• Nora Ephron: A Life by Kristin Marguerite Doidge (2022)
• Nora Ephron At The Movies by Ilana Kaplan (2024)

Books by Nora Ephron (selected)

• Crazy Salad: Some Things About Women (1975)
• Scribble, Scribble: Notes on the Media  (1978)
• Heartburn (1983)
• I Feel Bad About My Neck  (2006)
• I Remember Nothing: and Other Reflections  (2010)
• The Most of Nora Ephron (2013)

Films and interviews

• Nora Ephron’s Filmography
• IMDB
• Nora Ephron Interview (on Life Stories)

The post Everything Is Copy: The Life and Writing of Nora Ephron appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

She was extraordinarily talented in her own right, moving with ease from the fashion circles of New York, to the Surrealist circles of Paris, to front-line photography in World War II.

Her life and work has been painstakingly documented and promoted by her son Antony Penrose, and most recently has been the subject of a 2023 film produced by and starring Kate Winslet.

Early life and education

Elizabeth Lee Miller was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1907. Her mother, Florence, was a nurse and her father Theodore was an engineer. She had two brothers: John (1905) and Erik (1910).

Theodore was a keen amateur photographer, and owned both a Kodak Brownie camera and a home darkroom. He taught Lee the basics of photography while she was just a girl. She was also his favorite model, and he took dozens of photographs of her, her friends, and her brothers over the years.

Despite having this loving family, Lee’s childhood was a difficult one. At age seven, while visiting relatives, she was raped by a family friend; this left her traumatized and suffering from a sexually transmitted disease. In the days before penicillin, the only treatment was douching with dichloride of mercury. As a nurse, it fell to Florence to administer these treatments, an experience which was horrendous for both her and Lee.

A few years later, Lee endured another tragedy when her teenage sweetheart died of heart failure while out on a lake in a rowing boat.

As a result, Lee struggled in school and was expelled several times. She did, however, show an interest in the theatre, and in an attempt to encourage her pursue something worthwhile, her parents agreed to send her to the L’École Medgyés pour la Technique du Théâtre in Paris for seven months.

She studied set design and lighting, but, as her son later wrote, she was “not one of the school’s star pupils. She was eighteen, gregarious, fabulously beautiful in the exactly the style of the period, and far more interested in celebrating her newfound freedom than in formal studies. Informally, what she was learning was what it meant to be a fully emancipated woman in charge of her own destiny.”

Lee returned to New York in 1926, where she attended the Experimental Theatre at Vassar College, studying Dramatic Production under Hallie Flannigan.

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Modeling in New York City

Lee’s career as a fashion model began that winter, when the publishing magnate Condé Nast reputedly saved her from being hit by oncoming traffic as she tried to cross the road in Manhattan. Impressed by her good looks, he offered her a job as a model for Vogue.

She was on the cover of both the British and American March 1927 editions. Subsequently, she worked with some of the greatest fashion photographers of the time including Edward Steichen and George Hoyningen-Huene.

Lee was hugely successful as a model, but quickly decided that she would “rather take a picture than be one.”

She abandoned modeling altogether when, in July 1928, a photograph taken of her by Edward Steichen was used as a advertisement for Kotex sanitary towels. At the time, feminine hygiene was considered far too personal and delicate to discuss in public, and after the image was the focal point of a massive nationwide advertising campaign, Lee found herself out on a limb — though also proud of the scandal it had caused.

On the other side of the camera in Paris

Lee moved to Paris in 1929, and sought out the Surrealist artist Man Ray. For several years she was his muse, lover, confidant, and collaborator, and she also established her own photographic studio in the city. Her portrait photography was highly sought after by writers, artists, socialites, and royalty — she even photographed the pet lizard of a French socialite.

However, it was her Surrealist photographs that are probably best known from this period. Alongside Man Ray, she experimented with juxtaposition — the technique of combining two elements within the same photo — and solarization, which partially reverses the positive and negative spaces of a photo, producing halo-like outlines that emphasize both light and shadow.

Even outside of the studio, her work had a quirky style. Later, her son Antony wrote, “The thing that became her distinctive, Surrealist style was what I call the ‘found image.’ She takes a photograph of, perhaps, an everyday occurrence, and she does it in such a way that it becomes an image that is containing ‘the marvelous.’”

While in Paris, Lee became part of the Surrealist circle of artists, including Paul and Nusch Éluard, Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, and Joan Miró.

According to Antony, “When Lee arrived in Paris she had, in a way, been a Surrealist for some time — before the movement even had a name — because she had that determination to pursue her life free of the constraints of society which the Surrealists were already rebelling against. They wanted to create a new world which was not governed by religion or law or whatever…The Surrealist movement was going in tremendous force, and she was ready-made for it, and it for her.”

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New York and Egypt

She and Man Ray separated in 1932. Lee returned to New York to establish another studio there with her younger brother Erik. She specialized in advertising and celebrity portraits, including photographs of actresses Lilian Harvey and Gertrude Lawrence, and continued to experiment with Surrealist styles and techniques.

Her work was included in Julian Levy’s exhibition Modern European Photographers in 1932, and he subsequently gave her a one-woman show which brought her work to the attention of the art world. Soon afterwards, she was listed by Vanity Fair as one of the “most distinguished living photographers.”

She married the wealthy Egyptian businessman Aziz Eloui Bey in 1934, and moved with him to Cairo. She became fascinated with the idea of desert travel, and photographed the pyramids, desert, villages and ruins.

The photographs show a sense of dislocation, perhaps drawn from her experiences as an expatriate, and her best-known Egyptian image, Portrait of Space, 1937, views the desert through a torn fly screen door, turning it into a dream-like, Surrealist space.

Lee continued to travel to Europe, and during a return visit to Paris in 1937 she met Roland Penrose, a Surrealist artist. They began an affair, and in 1939 she officially left Bey and moved with Penrose to London.

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Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
See also: 8 Female Journalists of the World War II Era
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Grim Glory: The World War II Years

In London, Lee met Audrey Withers, editor of British Vogue. It was a connection that would prove vital for both Lee and for the magazine when, in 1940, Lee photographed London during and after the Blitz. Vogue published these photos, along with several photo essays by Lee about the Auxiliary Territorial Service.

It not only gave Lee an outlet for her photography in a new country and with a new subject, but it also helped to change Vogue’s reputation from solely a luxury fashion magazine — an indulgence that wasn’t much in demand during the war years — to a magazine that also published serious news.

Lee also published her images in a book, Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire (1941).

By 1943 she had become an accredited war correspondent through Condé Nast Publications, one of the very few women to do so, and in 1944 teamed up with Life photojournalist David E. Scherman.

She became the first female photojournalist to follow the US Army as it advanced on the front lines, and photographed major events such as the battle of Saint-Malo, the Liberation of Paris, and the liberation of both the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps. She also taught herself to write articles, and the pieces that accompanied the photographs in print were almost always her own.

Lee was unsure whether the photos from the concentration camps would be publishable, given the horrific subject matter, but she sent them back to Vogue with a telegram: “I IMPLORE YOU TO BELIEVE THIS IS TRUE.” In June 1945, American Vogue printed the photos under the title, “Believe It.”

In 1945, she traveled throughout Eastern and Central Europe, documenting the horrific aftermath of the war on mostly ordinary people, and had an eye for the detail of combat that her male counterparts often overlooked.

As Meredith Herndon wrote for The Smithsonian, “Miller’s eye for Surrealist elements resulted in haunting photos that juxtaposed images of ordinary beauty with violence and destruction.”

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After the war

Lee married Roland Penrose in 1947, and gave birth to their son Antony at the age of forty. The family moved out of London to Farleys, a farm in the East Sussex countryside.

She continued to cover fashion, art, and celebrity culture for Vogue, and Farleys became known as a gathering place for the Surrealists. Many of Lee’s more intimate (and now iconic) photographs, of friends including Man Ray, Picasso, Eileen Agar, Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst, were taken here.

Sadly, she suffered from severe (and at that time undiagnosed) post-traumatic stress disorder, which manifested in alcoholism and depression, and never spoke of her war work to her son, Antony.

In the early 1950s, Lee moved away from professional photography. Her final tongue-in-cheek piece for Vogue, “Working Guests” (1953), showed major art world figures (such as Alfred H. Barr, Jr., then the director of the Museum of Modern Art in NYC) feeding the pigs at Farleys.

Last years

In the last two decades of her life, Lee managed what her son would later call “the most astonishing achievement of her whole career … self-recovery … somehow she found the strength to get her drinking under control.”

A large part of this recovery came through cooking. Lee had given up photography, but she still longed for a creative outlet, and sent herself to the Cordon Bleu cookery school in Paris for six months.

Cooking, her son wrote, was “a kind of displacement activity for the demons that must have been rushing around inside her head all the time.” She became an award-winning cook, known for her Surrealism-inspired dishes such as green chicken and blue fish.

Lee died at Farleys in July 1977 of cancer at the age of seventy.

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Legacy: Redefining femininity

After Lee Millers’s death, Antony and his wife discovered some sixty thousand negatives and twenty thousand photographic prints, along with contact sheets, writings, and documents, all boxed up in the attic at Farleys.

From the 1980s, Antony worked to archive and promote her photographic work, which had been largely forgotten by the art world. Farleys is now the home of the Lee Miller Archive, along with a gallery which hosts rotating exhibitions.

Her work has also been shown in several major retrospectives, including at the Imperial War Museum and V&A Museum in London, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico.

Most recently, her war work has been the focus of the 2023 film Lee, produced by and starring Kate Winslet. Years of research went into making the film, along with a great deal of collaboration with Antony, and Kate Winslet reportedly spent days in the archives at Farleys.

According to Antony, “Other attempts to make a feature film about Lee had failed in the past, but this one succeeded…it owes much of its force and integrity to being a film about a women made by women.” On Lee, Kate Winslet said, “I think we live in a time when femininity is starting to mean something new, but Lee was already redefining femininity as resilience and power and courage and tenacity.”

Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is a writer and editor with a serious case of wanderlust. Her short fiction has been widely published online and is included in the Best Small Fictions 2022 Anthology published by Sonder Press. She is Books & Creative Writing Editor at Lucy Writers Platform, she is also co-facilitating What the Water Gave Us, an Arts Council England-funded anthology of emerging women writers from migrant backgrounds. She is currently working on a collection of short stories, and when not writing can usually be found planning the next trip abroad, or daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. Find her online at  Elodie Rose Barnes.

More about Lee Miller’s work

• Women at War:  The National WWII Museum
• Photographer Lee Miller’s Second World War
• Lee Miller Archives

Further reading:

• Lee Miller: On Both Sides of the Camera by Carolyn Burke (2006)
• Lee Miller’s War: Beyond D-Day by Antony Penrose (2020)
• The Lives of Lee Miller by Antony Penrose (2021)
• Lee Miller: Fashion in Wartime Britain by Robin Muir and Amber Butchart
  (Lee Miller Archives Publishing, 2021)
• Lee Miller: Photographs by Antony Penrose and Kate Winslet (2023)
• Lee Miller Man Ray: Fashion, Love, War by Victoria Noel-Johnson (2023)
• Lee Miller: The True Story (Sky Original – Kate Winslet and Antony Penrose
  discussing the film Lee) on YouTube

The post The Many Lives of Lee Miller, Photographer & War Correspondent appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

The commercial and critical success of the books — Lark Rise, Over to Candleford, and Candleford Green — is such that they have never been out of print, and were adapted by the BBC for a four-season series in 2008.

Early life: The origins of Candleford

Flora Jane Timms was born in the rural hamlet of Juniper Hill, near Brackley, Oxfordshire. Her father, Albert, was a stonemason, whose ambitions to become a sculptor had been thwarted by his drinking and gambling.

Flora later remembered him as “a terrible spendthrift … he never seemed to grasp the fact that he was responsible for our upbringing … He had all of the bad qualities of genius and a few of the good ones.”

Her mother, Emma, had gone into service at an early age and had worked as a nursemaid before she married Albert. She gave birth to ten children between 1875 and 1898, but only six survived beyond the age of three. Despite her challenging life, Emma was a talented storyteller and delighted in creating imaginary worlds for her children through songs, games, and stories.

When Flora was growing up, Juniper Hill was barely touched by the Industrial Revolution that was sweeping across England. It was still a place where farm laborers earned a subsistence wage, and where women still drew water from a communal well.

Later, in the first of her famous trilogy, Lark Rise, Flora described it as “bare, brown, and windswept for eight months out of the twelve … only for a few weeks in later summer had the landscape real beauty.”

Reading, writing, and the post office

Flora attended school in Cottisford, a mile-and-a-half walk away from Juniper Hill. On those walks, she developed an intimate knowledge of the natural world that surrounded her, which she would later use in her writing. She left school at age twelve, like the other children in the hamlet, expected to go into service.

Her mother assumed that Flora would become a nursemaid like herself and was quietly disappointed when Flora showed no interest in babies. Instead, she preferred to read and write.

Flora left home at age fourteen to work in the Post Office in nearby Fringford, where her duties included selling stamps, working the new telegraph machine, and sorting letters.

Despite the lack of formal education, writing was already central to her life. Later, she would say that she “could not remember the time when [she] did not wish or mean to write,” and that she “never left off writing essays for the pleasure of writing.” She was also a voracious reader, and while lodging in Fringford took out a library ticket at the Mechanics Institute in a nearby town and read her way through Austen, Trollope, Scott, and Dickens.

In 1898 Flora left Fringford to work at the post office in Grayshott, Hampshire, where she served some of the well-known literary figures of the time who lived in the area, including George Bernard Shaw and Arthur Conan Doyle. Overawed by their celebrity, she nearly abandoned her own writing. It was likely here that she met her future husband, John William Thompson, a post office clerk and telegraphist from Aldershott (also in Hampshire).

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Marriage (and writing in secret)

By 1902 Flora was working at the post office in Twickenham. She married John Thompson on January 7, 1903, at the local St Mary’s Church. The couple then moved to Winton on the outskirts of Bournemouth, where two of their three children (Basil and Winifred) were born.

There they stayed there until 1916 when John became Postmaster at Liphook in Hampshire. Their third child, Peter, was born there as well, when Flora was forty-one. Another move followed in 1928, to Dartmouth in Devon, where the family settled.

Flora realized that her husband’s family did not approve of her “cottage origins” and regarded her passion for reading and writing as a waste of time. John did not encourage her writing either, so when the children were past infancy, she took to writing in secret.

Nature writing, literary essays, and poetry

In 1911, Flora had her first writing success when her essay on Jane Austen won a women’s newspaper competition. She subsequently sent the same newspaper another article and a short story, both of which were accepted and for which she received payment.

This seemed to precipitate a change of heart by her husband: so long as her writing paid and didn’t interfere with her responsibilities at home, then it could be tolerated.

She went on to write several short stories and newspaper articles, and when she was living in Liphook contributed two long series of articles to the Catholic Fireside magazine. One of these comprised literary essays, and the other consisted of nature writing.

Both series came from her own enthusiasm and dedication: she was a self-taught naturalist from childhood, and her literary essays were also the result of her own private study, carried out mainly in the newly established free public library system. These nature articles later went on to be collected in Margaret Lane’s A Country Calendar (1979) and in Julian Shuckburgh’s The Peverel Papers (1986).

Flora’s true real ambition was to be a poet. She lacked confidence — partly, perhaps, because of her childhood poverty and lack of formal education. She later said, “To be born in poverty is a terrible handicap to a writer. I often say to myself that it has taken one lifetime for me to prepare to make a start. If human life lasted two hundred years, I might hope to accomplish something.”

She was encouraged by Ronald Campbell Macfie, a Scottish physician and poet who had admired her writing in The Literary Monthly. This was an important friendship — the only real literary friendship she ever had — and it resulted in her first published book, a collection of poems titled Bog Myrtle and Peat, in 1921.

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Lark Rise to Candleford

Flora continued to write through the family’s move to Dartmouth. From 1925 until the outbreak of war in 1939 she ran a mail-based writing club called the Peverel Society, in which members shared their own work and critiqued the work of others.

It wasn’t until 1935 that she began to write about her Oxfordshire childhood — a vanishing world of rural and agricultural traditions — with the intention of giving “a true picture of the people and time … to describe things exactly as they were, without sentimentalizing or dramatizing.”

She sent the result to Oxford University Press, who accepted it for publication. Lark Rise was published in 1939, Over to Candleford in 1941, and Candleford Green in 1942. They were first issued together as a trilogy in 1945 under the title Lark Rise to Candleford.

The books tell the lightly fictionalized story of three closely-related Oxfordshire communities — a hamlet, a nearby village, and a small market town (based on Juniper Hill, Cottisford and Fringford) — and have often been used as sources for the social history of the period. Gillian Lindsay has written that “Few works better or more elegantly capture the decay of Victorian agrarian England.”

This success came relatively late in Flora’s life — she was by then in her sixties, and she claimed that by that point she was “too old to care much for the bubble reputation.” She had never been a part of any literary circles, preferring to keep to the fringes, and was surprised at how popular the trilogy was when so much of her writing had long been ignored.

She continued to write, although no further books were published until after her death. Heatherley, an account of her time in Grayshott and seen as a sequel to Lark Rise to Candleford, was unpublished until Margaret Lane included it in A Country Calendar. Her final book, Still Glides the Stream, was published after her death in 1948.

Her later work never achieved the popularity of Lark Rise to Candleford. The trilogy has never been out of print and has been adapted for both stage and television: two musicals based on the books, Lark Rise and Candleford, were performed at London’s National Theatre in 1978 and 1979, and a four-season series was produced by the BBC starting in 2008.

Last years

In 1940, Flora’s husband John retired from the post office, and the couple moved to a cottage in Brixham, Devon. By this time their oldest son Basil had left England for Australia, while their daughter Winifred was a nurse in Bristol. Their youngest son Peter was killed in 1941 while serving in the merchant navy, when his ship was torpedoed in the Atlantic.

Flora never recovered from the loss of her son. She died of a heart attack at home in 1947, and her ashes are buried at the Longcross cemetery, Dartford, Devon.

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Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is a writer and editor with a serious case of wanderlust. Her short fiction has been widely published online and is included in the Best Small Fictions 2022 Anthology published by Sonder Press. She is Books & Creative Writing Editor at Lucy Writers Platform, she is also co-facilitating What the Water Gave Us, an Arts Council England-funded anthology of emerging women writers from migrant backgrounds. She is currently working on a collection of short stories, and when not writing can usually be found planning the next trip abroad, or daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. Find her online at  Elodie Rose Barnes. 

More about Flora Thompson

Major Works

Poetry

• Bog Myrtle and Peat (1921)

Novels

• Lark Rise (1939)
• Over to Candleford (1941)
• Candleford Green (1943)
• Lark Rise to Candleford (1945 — the three novels published as a trilogy)
• Still Glides the Stream (1948, posthumous)
• Heatherley (1944, posthumous)

Nature writing

• The Peverel Papers (abridged,1986; complete, 2008)

Biography

Dreams of the Good Life: The Life of Flora Thompson and the Creation of
Lark Rise to Candleford by Richard Mabey (2015)

The post Flora Thompson, Author of Lark Rise to Candleford appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

As a writer, she is best known for her Pax Britannia trilogy (a social history of the British Empire) and her written portraits of cities including Trieste, Venice, Oxford, Hong Kong, and New York City.

She is also famous for her transition from male to female in 1972, making her one of the first transgender public figures.

Early life and education

Jan Morris was born James Humphrey Morris in Clevedon, Somerset, and was the youngest of three sons. As is customary for persons who have transitioned (notwithstanding when the transition took place) Jan will be referred to with the pronouns she/her from here on.

Her mother Enid was a church organist, and her Welsh father Walter was an engineer. Both brothers went on to have careers in music – Gareth as a flautist and Christopher as an organist.

At the age of nine she attended Christ Church Cathedral School in Oxford as a chorister and went to Lancing College in Sussex. Color blindness prevented her from joining the navy during the war, and she enrolled in the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers instead. For much of the 1940s she served as an intelligence officer in Palestine.  

After the war, she studied English at Christ College, Oxford, then went on to work at a news agency in Cairo.

Journalism and first books

Morris covered the ascent of Everest in 1953, traveling with Edmund Hillary as far as Base Camp as a correspondent for The Times, and broke the news of the successful ascent just in time for it to reach London on Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation day.

It was one of many lucrative and ground-breaking assignments, though she left The Times after disagreeing with the editorial support of the Suez Crisis and joined the Manchester Guardian instead. There she alternated six months of working on the paper with six months of book research.

Morris’s first book, Coast to Coast (1956) was an account of a cross-U.S. journey funded by a twelve-month Commonwealth fellowship at the University of Chicago. Reviews were excellent, with the Guardian calling it “deeply evocative,” and contracts for the further books followed.

The first of Morris’s best-known books, a biography of Venice, was published in 1960. By her own admission, her approach to researching it was to “run about the city like a mad dog … [first] the law court … Then the market. And then the railway station.”

The book was successful enough for Morris to give up journalism and move towards writing books full-time. It was well-received both by the public and critics: Harold Nicolson called it “a highly intelligent portrait of an eccentric city … never soppy or sentimental … a very virile book.”

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Personal life and “Conundrum”

Morris had married Elizabeth Tuckniss, a former Wren and tea planter’s daughter, in 1949. The couple had four children, Twm Morus, Henry Morris, Mark Morris and Suki Morus. Another daughter died in infancy.

Since she was a toddler, Morris had always been at odds with her male body. She recalled sitting at her mother’s piano at age three or four, realizing that “I had been born into the wrong body, and should really be a girl.”

At first she “cherished it as a secret” but for years felt a yearning “for I knew not what, as though there were a piece missing from my pattern…” By the 1960s she was effectively living a double life. “I was a member of two clubs in London,” she recalled, “one as a man and one as a woman, and I would sometimes change my identity in a taxi between the two.”

Elizabeth was supportive of Morris’s decision to undergo courses of hormone therapy, and then to have reassignment surgery in a Casablanca clinic in 1972. The surgery could have been performed in the U.K., but the law would have required that she and Elizabeth divorce, since two women could not be married at that time.

“I should have been terrified, but I wasn’t,” Jan Morris later said. “It was inevitable — I’d been heading there mentally all my life.”

Conundrum, published in 1974, was her account of the journey from male to female. In it, she detailed the clinic in Casablanca, the emotional journey and adjustment to life as a woman with a female partner, and the public reaction, which ranged from hostility to “kindly incomprehension” to acceptance.

She also expressed gratitude for Elizabeth’s support, saying that their marriage was a “living testimony…of love in its purest sense over everything else.” However, Morris’s daughter Suki would later claim that the transition brought a high cost to the rest of the family, in particular Elizabeth who “did not have a voice.”

Critics struggled with the book. A.N. Wilson admitted that he found it easy “to let a little bitchiness creep into one’s comments on Miss Morris’s most interesting book,” while fellow writer Rebecca West wrote that “now we are both women he mystifies me…[as a man] he had all the pleasures he wanted … she sounds not like a woman, but a man’s idea of a woman, and curiously enough, the idea of a man not nearly so intelligent as James Morris used to be…”

However, Morris’s most famous work, a trilogy on the social history of the British Empire, was also partly inspired by her exploration of gender identity.

“I thought how wonderful it would be if some Roman centurion in the last days of the empire had written not only a description of it, but also something about his own feelings. Then I thought, ‘here I am, on the collapsing frontiers of the British empire, why don’t I do it?’”

The result was the trio of books Pax Britannica (1968), Heaven’s Command (1973), and Farewell the Trumpets (1978). Later, Morris called the trilogy the “intellectual and artistic centre-piece of my life.”

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“A writer who travels”

Morris identified as Welsh, having always had an affinity with her father’s land, and became an ardent Welsh nationalist. She admitted being “emotionally in thrall to Welshness,” and after her reassignment surgery, the family moved to Plas Trepan in Llanystumdwy, Gwynedd, in northwest Wales.

By this point, she and Elizabeth had formally divorced, but they continued to live together as “sisters-in-law.” In 2008, when the law allowed them to do so, they registered a civil partnership at the Pwllheli registry office.

Morris continued to work and to travel. Writing had become a daily habit, and she often wrote upwards of 3000 words a day, more if a deadline was looming. Her single novel, Last Letters from Hav, was published in 1985 and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, while other later books included Fifty Years of Europe (1997), Lincoln: A Foreigner’s Quest (1999), and Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (2001).

Perhaps her most famous and well-read books were her biographies of cities, written in the same vein as her 1960 book on Venice. Places as diverse as Oxford, Trieste, Manhattan, and Hong Kong captured her attention, while in articles she wrote of Las Vegas (“the acrid smell of fun”), Aberdeen (“the brio of capitalism in the raw”) and the cathedral town of Wells (“the cathedral’s chief function was its own repair”). She also wrote about her beloved Wales in the book Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country.

She always rejected the term “travel writer,” insisting that she wrote books about place, “which are nothing to do with movement, but many more about people and about history.” She was, she insisted, a “writer who travels, not a travel writer.” That didn’t not stop her winning the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award for Outstanding Contribution to Travel Writing.

Her biographer, Derek Johns, wrote that “She involves the reader, while she remains unobtrusively present herself; who uses the particular to illustrate the general, and scatters grace notes here and there like benefactions. She is a watcher, usually alone, seldom lonely, alert to everything around her.”

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Last books and legacy of Jan Morris

In My Mind’s Eye (2018), a diary of memories written when Morris was ninety-one, was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. Think Again, a collection of her diaries, was published just before her death in March 2020. Her final collection of essays, Allegorizings, was published posthumously in 2021.

Morris was elected to the Gorsedd of Bards in 1992 and made a CBE in 1999. She also received an honorary doctorate from the University of Glamorgan, was an Honorary Fellow of Christ Church College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2005 she won the Golden Pen Award for outstanding contribution to literature.

Before her death, she and Elizabeth had a joint memorial stone made, intended for an islet in the river near Trefan Morys, which reads in both Welsh and English, “Here are two friends … At the end of one life.”

Jan Morris died on November 20, 2020, at the Ysbyty Bryn Beryl on the Llŷn Peninsula, Wales, and was survived by Elizabeth.

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Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is a writer and editor with a serious case of wanderlust. Her short fiction has been widely published online and is included in the Best Small Fictions 2022 Anthology published by Sonder Press. She is Books & Creative Writing Editor at Lucy Writers Platform, she is also co-facilitating What the Water Gave Us, an Arts Council England-funded anthology of emerging women writers from migrant backgrounds. She is currently working on a collection of short stories, and when not writing can usually be found planning the next trip abroad, or daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. Find her online at  Elodie Rose Barnes. 

Further reading and sources

• Jan Morris’s extensive bibliography of travel writing, essays, memoirs
• Jan Morris: Life From Both Sides by Paul Clements, Scribe UK, 2022
• Conundrum by Jan Morris, Faber & Faber, reissued 2018
• In My Mind’s Eye: A Thought Diary by Jan Morris, Faber & Faber, 2019
• Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere by Jan Morris, Faber & Faber, reissued 2022
• Venice by Jan Morris, Faber & Faber, reissued 1993
• Wales: Epic Views of a Small Country by Jan Morris, Penguin 2000
• A Writer’s World: Travels 1950-2000 by Jan Morris, Faber & Faber 2004
• Allegorizings by Jan Morris, Faber & Faber, 2021

For younger readers: Jan Morrison, Travel Writer and Historian – an introduction.

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Peggy Guggenheim (August 26, 1898 – December 23, 1979) was an American art collector, writer, and socialite. She was known for her extensive contemporary art collection, which spanned the range of Surrealism, Cubism, and abstract expressionism, and for her patronage of dozens of artists.

She was also a passionate supporter of writers and literature. Close literary friends included Djuna Barnes, Mary McCarthy, Antonia White, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Emma Goldman, many of whom she supported financially. Her autobiography, Out of This Century, is an incisive and witty account of her life.  

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Written by American author and playwright Helene Hanff, 84 Charing Cross Road is an eclectic, endearing collection of her twenty-year trans-Atlantic correspondence with London antiquarian bookshop Marks & Co. on Charing Cross Road. The book was a cult success in both America and the UK.

Today, the film is still available to watch on major streaming channels, and the play is regularly performed by theatre companies on both sides of the Atlantic.

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Helene Hanff (April 15, 1916 – April 9, 1997) was an American author and playwright. She is best known for her book 84, Charing Cross Road, an endearing collection of her twenty-year correspondence with the owner of the London antiquarian bookshop, Marks & Co., on the eponymous street.

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Rosamond Lehmann (February 3, 1901 – March 12, 1990) was an English novelist known for her sensitive portrayal of the emotional fabric of women’s lives and was part of the famous Bloomsbury Group in 1920s London.

Her first novel, Dusty Answer, caused a scandal for its subtle portrayal of lesbian characters, and is still her best-known work. Her novels as well as some of her non-fiction have been reissued by Virago and are now back in print.

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