Recovering with Austen: post-texts, detective & other archetypes, & literary feminist books

Dear readers and friends,

I’ve been slowly recovering since I last wrote and will soon tell that autobiographical story on my Sylvia II blog. Here I want to return to our more usual postings: life as I see it through my reading and writing about Austen and all that concerns her, women’s art across the Ages, admittedly a Eurocentric, and Anglophilic point of view, and through my long 18th centuries studies. The slant here is how I am recuperating through several interconnected pathways at once, some of which I am in the midst of and not sure what I shall eventually want to do more of and where and how. Through Austen, women’s art and extensions from my first interest, among these, the 18th century, I, another women writer and reader, am coming back to myself and rebuilding my life (once again).

I will be teaching this summer: online I’ll finish that women’s detective course I had begun, I’m working on two reviews, one about how Austen’s unfinished books (which arguably include Persuasion), manuscripts, and some of the intelligent post-texts (book or video form) sometimes use these to enable us to learn more about Austen.

First up, Gill Hornby’s Miss Austen, which title refers both to Cassandra and Jane. This is the story of Cassandra returning to Kintbury in 1840 — PBS/WETA will be presenting an adaptation featuring Keeley Hawes. I like the book. I feel the tone is appropriate, which is always central to my response to these things. The last one I tried which I also liked is The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow (reviewed here under the Observer) imprint: Hadlow’s deeply sympathizing with the plain intellectual Mary, rightly (I think) critical of Elizabeth’s failure in understanding. Hadlowe transformed elements of Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney’s stories in a plot-design which in part follows the outline of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. it takes elements of Catherine Morland and Henry Tilney’s character in a plot-design that revamps P&P.

This Miss Austen, I hope, will be a new story using elements of the traditional biography. I agree with the reviewer Miss Austen is actuated by a spirit of deep kindness towards its principal characters; it also reveals hoe few opportunities for even any fun, much less an individually fulfilling existence, women of Austen’s class and income level had. Hornby has imbibed the lessons of Charlotte and Anne Bronte’s novels. Soon after the opening, Cassandra is finally reading Jane’s letters. The great joy I too felt comes from how frustrating it is to realize two-thirds of Jane’s letters have gone and from a point of view that seeks to hide Austen’s authentic ideas and feelings from us with a view to destroying them. We are made to see how perceptive Jane was — already there are hints hoe much she is attached to Martha Lloyd. I want eventually to compare this book to the coming film and an overview of Jane and Cassandra’s letters.

Hornby sees Cassandra compassionately as a tragic figure … You will love this recreation of Jane’s voice.

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I’ve stayed with my studies – and enjoyment of women writing and how they appear in both detective-mystery-thriller (today called crime novels) and the political-nationalistic (most of the time – though anti- and post-colonialist points of view are dramatized increasing, as begun in the later Prime Suspect and Foyle’s War seasons). Instead of extensive (trying to cover lots of authors) I’ve been proceeding intensively, that is going deeply into one or two authors, because, honestly it’s easier to do.

I am trying to read as much Dorothy Sayers and books about her as I can. I admit sometimes I love the studies of her fictional work, more than the work itself – and her non-fiction essays, which have such an authentic living voice. Unnatural Death is a case in point. She shows us the plight and anger of unmarried women, lesbian as well as heterosexual: Miss Climpson and her Cattery (an agency for women to give and receive support for one another), supported by Lord Peter. We see their peculiar predicaments (Valerie Pitts, “Dorothy Sayers: The Predicaments of Women,” Literature and History, 13:2 (1988), 172-80). Now I’ve begun the entertaining epistolary novel, The Documents in the Case where she alludes to Walter Scott’s epistolary Redgauntlet with its ant-macho male characters.

The trouble is the book is written early in the 1930s, at the height of the puzzle-clue narratives which can be (to me) so tedious we lose sight of what makes the book important. Here I recommend Catherine Kenney’s wonderful The Remarkable Case of Dorothy Sayers. Here is a succinct synopsis

I’m combining this with reading Cornish texts (I’m taking via zoom an OLLI course, from York University in Northern England) with its inspiring readings from Marsden’s Rising Ground (what kinds of landscapes attract to them mythologies?) to Virginia Wool’s To the Lighthouse, to Graham’s Poldark world, DuMaurier’s Cornwall (with A. L. Rowse and a Blakean visionary John Betjeman thrown in). The result: I’ve begun P. D. James’s The Lighthouse, and returning to Josephine Tey’s Shifting Sands, set in the Highlands, edge and liminal places of the mind heart and in reality.

So that’s where I am. Medicine for my still somewhat muddled soul. Haunted stuff. How I long to be haunted by my Clarycat and even Jim, painful as such ghostly recreations might be (I do not reread his letters or listen to his voice, though I keep pictures of him all around the house). They did not survive their encounters with death; it seems, with help from my loving daughter, Laura, I may have Here is a poem by Charles Causeley, a relatively unknown (outside Cornwall) poet

Who?

Who is that child I see wandering, wandering
down by the side of the quivering stream?
Why does he seem not to hear, though I call to him?
Where does he come from, and what is his name?

Why do I see him at sunrise and sunset
taking, in old-fashioned clothes, the same track?
Why, when he walks, does he cast not a shadow
though the sun rises and falls at his back?

Why does the dust lie so thick on the hedgerow
by the great field where a horse pulls the plough?
Why do I see only meadows, where houses
stand in a line by the riverside now?

Why does he move like a wraith by the water,
soft as the thistledown on the breeze blown?
When I draw near him so that I may hear him,
why does he say that his name is my own?

My territory includes the dream landscapes of historical and modernist Bloomsbury fictions (like Hilary Mantel’s, E.M. Forster’s, mentioned in my postscript in my return to Ellen and Jim blog), realism, long-inhabited hard-worked worlds and haunting music

Elinor Tomlinson as Demelza in Poldark

A Cornish church filmed in the 2015 series

Ellen

Halloween/Samhain & a talk on Bookstore fiction: includes ghosts, historical fiction, mysteries

Opening episode of Outlander: Frank in the rain sees a ghostly highlander looking up at Claire through a window, he enters the room which feels haunted … (Outlander s1:E1, Sassenach)

Fantasies of the Bookstore: combine community & retail space, with meaningful location; you know you are in one when you walk in. Where it is on the planet, what’s across the street matters. The staff, which kinds of books, the atmosphere, language behavior of everyone … (see below, 2nd half of blog)

Isabella Thorpe (Carey Mulligan and Catherine Morland (Felicity Jones) in a Bath bookshop, Northanger Abbey, 2007, scripted A Davies)

Dear Friends and readers,

I’ve been meaning to write a blog for ever so long — on a foremother poet, Anne Stevenson (1933-2020), whose poetry tribute to Jane Austen I’ve put here more than once (“Re-reading Jane,” scroll down), but it is taking me time to read through her collected poems, essays on her, and essays by her (on Elizabeth Bishop, the biography of Sylvia Plath). Tonight I am only ready to share one poem by her, which relates to my eventual topic for this blog: bookstore fiction

Paper,

the beauty of it,
the simple, strokeable, in-the-handness of it,
the way it has of flattering ink,
giving it to understand that
nothing matters
until it is printed or written down
to be cherished on paper.

The way old paper levels time,
is the archive’s treasure,
is evidence talking to your fingers
when passion, two hundred years dead,
filters through the ink-net that,
pen in and, a lover once spread for his mistress,
ignorantly scooping the archivist
into his catch.

The connoisseur of wine
keeps company with the connoisseur of paper,
as the typesetter, rag-testing, rice-testing,
escapes from the glaze of the computer
to explore with a fingertip
an elegant topography
reserved exclusively for types he likes
and faces that delight him.

All the same,
the virtual truths of the TV
and the on-going game of what happens
sluice through the global drain
in a torrent of paper.
Throw it away or save it,
every day as it dies
instantly becomes news on paper.

Why, say the silicon people,
keep house in a paper graveyard?
The future is digital, clean indestructible,
the great web’s face book and bird’s nest.
No fingerprint can be lost,
no fact of identity missed.
All’s for the best
in the best of all paperless worlds.

The afterlife? To live on, on line,
without a mind of one’s own?
I can’t love these fidgety digits!
I want to go home,
I want to keep warm in my burrow
of piled up paper —
fool’s passion, dried grief, live hands of dead friends,
story I’ll keep turning the pages of,
until it ends.

You cannot have a bookstore without paper.

I had been thinking — as appropriate to Halloween — to write on the connection of ghosts to historical fiction, how the deep roots of historical fiction is the ghost, a desire to bring to life revenants who once lived and the world they inhabited, so author and her readers can take refuge there too. The best historical fiction writers, and in my view, these include Winston Graham, Diana Gabaldon (who Anne Stevenson wrote a short column in praise of), Hilary Mantel and Penelope Fitzgerald, are aware of this, discuss it, exploit it.

Only the second writes nothing but historical fiction, but all discuss ghosts in, and sometimes while they as author-narrator, are in their historical novels. Thus it is at Halloween, Samhain in Outlander that Claire is spirited away to the mid-18th century in Inverness, Scotland by means of an ancient or neolithic circle of stones. In the third episode of the first season, Claire listens to a bard sing in Gaelic, the core of the journey story she has just begun as one repeatedly met with:

[audience muttering] [singing in Gaelic] Now this one is about a man out late on a fairy hill on the eve of Samhain who hears the sound of a woman singing sad and plaintive from the very rocks of the hill.
[eerie music] [Gaelic singing continues] “I am a woman of Balnain.
“The folk have stolen me over again, ‘ “the stones seemed to say.
“I stood upon the hill, and wind did rise, and the sound of thunder rolled across the land.
” [singing in Gaelic] “I placed my hands upon the tallest stone “and traveled to a far, distant land “where I lived for a time among strangers who became lovers and friends.
” [singing in Gaelic] “But one day, I saw the moon came out “and the wind rose once more.
“so I touched the stones “and traveled back to my own land “and took up again with the man I had left behind.
” [applause] She came back through the stones? Aye, she did.
They always do.
It was a folktale, madness to take as fact, and yet half of what Gwyllyn had described had actually happened to me.
Why not the other half, the part where the woman returned home? What had Geillis said? As I told you, there’s many things in this world we can’t explain. (Outlander S1:E3, The Way Out)

Elinor Tomlinson and Aiden Turner as dream figures, Demelza and Ross Poldark (2016 Poldark season)

I know more than a couple of times Winston Graham has thoughtful discussions of how difficult it is to know the past, how much of what we think we know about it is more than half-imagination, and dreaming imagination at that. See my paper called “After the Jump.” Historical Fiction and Films seem to exist at a kind of cross-roads of remembered and researched revenants and today’s analogous worlds — sometimes inhabited by sleuths and book writers and lovers (as in A. S. Byatt’s Possession). See my blog quoting a wonderful evocation of this by Caryl Phillips (on Crossing the River).

How I love especially to go back to the 18th century and Scotland: I reveled in Naomi Mitchison’s Bull Calves and the movie, Chasing the Deer (about Culloden). I told of this in my blog on a paper (linked in) and conference and (would you believe?) actual real trip to Culloden.

Yesterday afternoon I was much stirred by books on Mantel’s fiction by Lucy Arnold: Haunted Decades and a collection of essays gathered by Eileen Pollard and Ginette Carpenter where spectral realism is the terrain re-imagined. Thomas Cromwell becomes more crowded in by ghosts as we move through his life, and that of Mantel’s stealth heroine, Anne Boleyn, whom Henry Fielding wrote a ghostly history of in his A Journey from this World to the Next. Haunted all her life, says a Slate column.

Mark Rylance and Natasha Little as Thomas Cromwell fearful as he walks up the stairs to where Elizabeth Cromwell now dead has become a ghost (Wolf Hall, the serial)

My previous blog is about my friend Tyler Tichelaar’s fiction and non-fiction, which moves between historical and gothic supernatural stories.

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Early important writer of these books in series forms

But today I was stirred by a talk I heard (on zoom) with a Book History group, the WAPG (Washington Area Print Group) I’ve long attended (though the last three years online): by Dr Eben J. Muse, who has recently written a study of the bookstore novel, Fantasies of the Bookstore. His book is partly a bibliographical tool for finding these books, for which he provides two sites on the Net: a full bibliographies of bookstore novels: https://bit.ly/bookstore_novel
And a bookselling Research Network: http://booksellingresearchnet.uk

And now I finally have a topic for blog fitting for the autumn season — and Halloween.

His talk was about the other part of his book: in “In her Own Right: Women Booksellers in the Bookstore Novel” he described what he said was a intertwined set of tropes found across bookstore novels, especially when they are owned or managed by women, which motives seemed to me are all found in one of my favorite of all books, Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop: I’ve taught the book and film more than once, and written about it here too.

What is a bookstore today? why, it’s a cultural interaction space, combining a community with retail space, whose location, kinds of books, atmosphere, staff and customers’ behavior matters. They are usually indie stores, with the subgenre beginning in 1917, becoming more widespread in the 1980s, and reaching a high peak of numbers first between 1985-1995, and since then multiplying especially 2016-17. They are often series, combine mysteries with ghosts (Fitzgerald’s book has a spiteful poltergeist). What happens is the heroine invents an identity for herself by becoming a bookstore owner and manager, who knows how to make a profit from books, how to sell them, make them appealing. She often herself does not care for them herself as reading matter (Fitzgerald’s Florence Green does). The bookstore becomes her way of integrating with the community at a distance, and is often an act of defiance (which in the case of Florence, she tragically loses), but can also be her sanctuary. When there is a murder, it may be that the bookstore becomes a place where someone abusive is killed. There is a deep intimate tie between the place, the space, and the heroine’s role in the story. They are frequently literary fictions, often romances too. We should ask why is the central figure repeatedly a woman?

It’s in the last 30 years that women authors have begun to dominate this subgenre — though it would seem the bookseller character has usually been a woman

Afterwards the talk ranged far and close. We talked of how Victorian got Their Books (the title of someone’s paper published in a book on Victorian bookselling, buying, reading. Bookstores on Cape Cod recently where one kept a map of other bookstores. Someone mentioned The Ghost of Mrs McClure by Cleo Coyle, pseudonyn of Alice Kimberley. Peter Shillingsburg’s formidable sounding Textuality and Knowledge was mentioned: if you don’t know the original form the book took when printed (unabridged, uncensored) you are not grounding yourself in reality. So much for what passes for a book with so many people now. The way we read now.  Shorter, easily more entertaining try this book chapter: Schillingsburg, Peter. “The Faces of Victorian Literature.” The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998. pp. 141-156.

Well, Muse just made me want to rush over to Amazon and buy some of these — in practice I have read a few — the apparently early Arnold Bennett’s Riceyman Steps (the grimness or “grumpyiness” as Dr Muse characterized its aging bookseller is another trope of such books), but mostly non-fictions, which seem not to count as they do not have this mythos at their center, though they may well tell a tale of publishing, what books are, the bookish life which has many elements found in the fantasy book. For example, Marius Kociejowski’s A Factotum in the Book Trade: A Memoir. They may tell a cultural anthropology tale.

While this bookshop name was cited as the title of a book by Deborah Myler (Stephanie Butler our heroine) — this does look like a real bookshop in Lyme Regis

And this its inside

In practice I also used to be a constant visitor of bookstores. Hours in second hand bookstores were the delight of my life here in Alexandria, in DC, in New York City, and in many places in England. I remember those blocks on Fourth Avenue, in lower New York, ancient, filled to the brim with books, some of which were rotting. The Argosy is a rare one still to be found in business (59th Street on the East Side). Blocks in Edinburgh harbored stunningly expensive ancient tomes (Renaissance) normally found in research libraries. How few are left in London; our recent visit took us to one small store, beautifully culled books, but it was the same one we visited the last time we were in London, 4 years ago. Can London be reduced down to one or two (Foyle’s) bookstores when it comes to independent ones? I enjoy the chains but the ambiance and feel and purpose of the store is quite different: they are more for casual visitors, tourists; they do not function as a home away from your library home.

My happiest hours have been spent in bookstores (as when I find a book I didn’t know existed but when I saw it, knew I would enjoy it so mightily) — and yes libraries. My favorite place in Washington DC is the Folger Shakespeare Library (or was, as I’ve no idea what it’s like in the new renovated building). It was my idea for Izzy, my daughter, to become a librarian. And she loved when she was an intern in Fairfax and worked in the children’s area of the library.

Someone at the WAPG asked if there is a subgenre of books about a heroine in a library: he said the problem is the library is usually an institution, and right away it cannot be the expression of just one person’s character or outlook, but of course (thought I) it can have a “body” in it (as do an early Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers book). There seems a link between the amateur woman sleuth and the woman bookseller.

This is one Prof Muse recommended — I didn’t catch the heroine’s name

So these bookstore fictions may be included in all my favorite kinds of books, first of all heroine’s fictions, second gothics and ghost stories beyond the traumatic uncanny kinds, from M. R. James to Edith Wharton about which I’ve written much here in these blogs too. And most recently women’s detective fiction. This week I’m rereading P. D. James’s even profound A Time to Be In Earnest.

Our WAGP used to meet at the Library of Congress itself, the concrete building at 3:30 and by 5 walk over to a nearby Asian restaurant and eat together. We are hoping to do that for the first time in three years this coming spring.

Ellen

Foremother poet: Mary Leapor (1722-46): satirical melancholy; wry, warm, affectionate, a housekeeper, held in high regard

An eighteenth century print of a girl feeding a bird

Dear friends and readers,

I’ve another foremother poet blog, one which I hope will now prompt me to read a literary biographical study, Richard Greene, Mary Leapor, a Study in 18th Century Women’s Poetry. I’ve had it for years and this is long overdue.

Mary Leapor was the daughter of a gardener, self-educated (discouraged by her mother from writing), said to be “a cook-maid in a gentleman’s family at Brackley (probably Weston Hall, owned by the Sitwell family); like Mary Chandler she is (in effect) said to have been disabled (“extremely swarthy, and quite emaciated, with a long crane-neck, and a short body”). Her poems circulated and attraction the attention of Bridget Freemantle (Artemisa), the daughter of a Rector of Hinton; the became friends and Freemantle assisted Mary to circulate her poems, and organized a subscription to publish her poetry, sent her play and samples to London. She was proud but uncomfortable, had worried rather that if her father were to die, she’d end up “naked and defenseless,” and longed to be able to build a subsistence income for herself. Alas, in “poor health,” she died of measles at age 24. Isaac Browne, Samuel Richardson and Christopher Smart were among those who were responsible for the printing of an extensive volume, which was liked and a substantial selection printed in the 1755 Poems for Eminent Ladies. I find her satiric and wryly melancholy tone very appealing, her reversals of conventions, an identity, a personality emerges.

I first came across Mary Leapor in Donna Landry’s book, The Muses of Resistance: Laboring class women’s poetry in Britain, 1739-96, and I was struck by how she felt marginalized — this in a class system where this should have been taken for granted. Also that she said she learned by reading, her mentors were people in books because there was no way she could reach such people otherwise; when I wrote my translation of Vittoria Colonna, I wrote that I was mentored by the poets and critics who had studied poetry like hers. I too had no one to speak to. Then the accusations that she was “repugnant,” and her satiric pastoral responses. The poems are skilled, alive with life, innovative, says Bill Overton (who wrote one of the best books ever written on Anthony Trollope’s art). She fits very much into the image of 18th century woman poet, especially her friendship poetry. She is a feminist in her Essay on a Woman, where the injustice of her lot is the result of the social order not women themselves.

Here’s how it opens:

Woman, a pleasing but a short-lived flow’r,
Too soft for business and too weak for pow’r:
A wife in bondage, or neglected maid;
Despised, if ugly; if she’s fair, betrayed.
‘Tis wealth alone inspires ev’ry grace,

I have not forgot my promise to keep these blogs shorter. So I refer the interested reader to the Eighteenth Century Archive (to which I add a few essays I have read), where many of her poems are printed, there’s a link to a facsimile of the contemporary book, books and essays are cited.

A contemporary photo of Weston Hall

This is what she wrote when her play was returned to her: to me it is so touching how her play is a living thing, how she feels it was not respected (because she felt herself not respected); how she wanted to protect it.

Upon her Play being returned to her, stained with Claret.

Welcome , dear Wanderer, once more!
Thrice welcome to thy native Cell!
Within this peaceful humble Door
Let Thou and I contented dwell!

But say, O whither hast thou rang’d?
Why dost thou blush a Crimson Hue?
Thy fair Complexion’s greatly chang’d:
Why, I can scarce believe ’tis you.

Then tell, my Son, O tell me, Where
Didst thou contract this sottish Dye?
You kept ill Company, I fear,
When distant from your Parent’s Eye.

Was it for This, O graceless Child!
Was it for This, you learn’d to spell?
Thy Face and Credit both are spoil’d:
Go drown thyself in yonder Well.

I wonder how thy Time was spent:
No News (alas!) hadst thou to bring.
Hast thou not climb’d the Monument ?
Nor seen the Lions, nor the King?

But now I’ll keep you here secure:
No more you view the smoaky Sky:
The Court was never made (I’m sure)
For Idiots, like Thee and I.

The long country house poem she wrote as Ursula (one of the pastoral-classical-romance pseudonyms she used; another was Mira); is a burlesque on the house she served in (and doubtless had limited space in), which she called Crumble Hall (one source said it was Edgecote Hall but I could find no further information about the asssertion). Presumably it could’ve needed fixing.

From Crumble Hall:

We sing once more, obedient to her Call,
Once more we sing; and ’tis of Crumble-Hall;
That Crumble-Hall , whose hospitable Door
Has fed the Stranger, and reliev’d the Poor;
Whose Gothic Towers, and whose rusty Spires,
Were known of old to Knights, and hungry Squires …
Of this rude Palace might a Poet sing
From cold December to returning Spring …
Tell how the Building spreads on either Hand,
And two grim Giants o’er the Portals stand;
Whose grisled Beards are neither comb’d nor shorn,
But look severe, and horribly adorn …

Then step within—there stands a goodly Row
Of oaken Pillars—where a gallant Show
Of mimic Pears and carv’d Pomgranates twine,
With the plump Clusters of the spreading Vine …
From hence we turn to more familiar Rooms;
Whose Hangings ne’er were wrought in Grecian Looms:
Yet the soft Stools, and eke the lazy Chair,
To Sleep invite the Weary, and the Fair.

Shall we proceed?—Yes, if you’ll break the Wall:
If not, return, and tread once more the Hall.
Up ten Stone Steps now please to drag your Toes,
And a brick Passage will succeed to those.
Here the strong Doors were aptly fram’d to hold
Sir Wary ‘s Person, and Sir Wary ‘s Gold.
Here Biron sleeps, with Books encircled round;
And him you’d guess a Student most profound.
Not so—in Form the dusty Volumes stand:
There’s few that wear the Mark of Biron ‘s Hand …

Would you go farther?—Stay a little then:
Back thro’ the Passage—down the Steps again;
Thro’ yon dark Room—Be careful how you tread
Up these steep Stairs—or you may break your Head.
These Rooms are furnish’d amiably, and full:
Old Shoes, and Sheep-ticks bred in Stacks of Wool;
Grey Dobbin ‘s Gears, and Drenching-Horns enow;
Wheel-spokes—the Irons of a tatter’d Plough.

No farther—Yes, a little higher, pray:
At yon small Door you’ll find the Beams of Day,
While the hot Leads return the scorching Ray.
Here a gay Prospect meets the ravish’d Eye:
Meads, Fields, and Groves, in beauteous Order lie.
From hence the Muse precipitant is hurl’d,
And drags down Mira to the nether World.

Thus far the Palace—Yet there still remain
Unsung the Gardens, and the menial Train.

[In “her” kitchen]

O’er-stuff’d with Beef, with Cabbage much too full,
And Dumpling too (fit Emblem of his Skull!)
With Mouth wide open, but with closing Eyes
Unwieldy Roger on the Table lies.
His able Lungs discharge a rattling Sound:
Prince barks, Spot howls, and the tall Roofs rebound.
Him Urs’la views; and, with dejected Eyes,
“Ah! Roger , Ah!” the mournful Maiden cries:
“Is wretched Urs’la then your Care no more,
That, while I sigh, thus you can sleep and snore?
Ingrateful Roger ! wilt thou leave me now?
I baste the Mutton with a chearful Heart,
Because I know my Roger will have Part.”

Thus she—But now her Dish-kettle began
To boil and blubber with the foaming Bran.
The greasy Apron round her Hips she ties …

Strange Sounds and Forms shall teaze the gloomy Green;
And Fairy-Elves by Urs’la shall be seen:
Their new-built Parlour shall with Echoes ring:
And in their Hall shall doleful Crickets sing.

An amazing fantasia.

Here we find her quite like Shakespeare in one of his sonnets, making fun of the stereotypes of beauty so often uttered so banally, except here she is talking of illness and disability in such a way as I feel she must herself have known some of this: she also captures the absurdity of male idealized aggression (it’s) against women.

The Headache

Aurelia, when your zeal makes known
Each woman’s failing but your own,
How charming Silvia’s teeth decay,
And Celia’s hair is turning grey;
Yet Celia gay has sparkling eyes,
But (to your comfort) is not wise:
Methinks you take a world of pains
To tell us Celia has no brains.

Now you wise folk, who make such a pother
About the wit of one another,
With pleasure would your brains resign,
Did all your noddles ache like mine.

Not cuckolds half my anguish know,
When budding horns begin to grow;
Nor battered skull of wrestling Dick,
Who late was drubbed at single-stick;
Nor wretches that in fevers fry,
Not Sappho when her cap’s awry,
E’er felt such torturing pangs as I;
Not forehead of Sir Jeffrey Strife,
When smiling Cynthio kissed his wife.

Not lovesick Marcia’s languid eyes,
Who for her simpering Corin dies,
So sleepy look or dimly shine,
As these dejected eyes of mine:
Not Claudia’s brow such wrinkles made
At sight of Cynthia’s new brocade.

Just so, Aurelia, you complain
Of vapours, rheums, and gouty pain;
Yet I am patient, so should you,
For cramps and headaches are our due:
We suffer justly for our crimes,
For scandal you, and I for rhymes;
Yet we (as hardened wretches do)
Still the enchanting vice pursue;
Our reformation ne’er begin,
But fondly hug the darling sin.

Yet there’s a might difference too
Between the fate of me and you;
Though you with tottering age shall bow,
And wrinkles scar your lovely brow,
Your busy tongue may still proclaim
The faults of every sinful dame:
You still may prattle nor give o’er,
When wretched I must sin no more.
The sprightly Nine must leave me then,
This trembling hand resign its pen:
No matron ever sweetly sung,
Apollo only courts the young.
Then who would not (Aurelia, pray)
Enjoy his favours while they may?
Nor cramps nor headaches shall prevail:
I’ll still write on, and you shall rail.

Her epitaph or Mira’s Will

Imprimis — My departed Shade I trust
To Heav’n — My Body to the silent Dust;
My Name to publick Censure I submit,
To be dispos’d of as the World thinks fit;
My Vice and Folly let Oblivion close,
The World already is o’erstock’d with those;
My Wit I give, as Misers give their Store,
To those who think they had enough before.
Bestow my Patience to compose the Lives
Of slighted Virgins and neglected Wives;
To modish Lovers I resign my Truth,
My cool Reflexion to unthinking Youth;
And some Good-nature give (‘tis my Desire)
To surly Husbands, as their Needs require;
And first discharge my Funeral — and then
To the Small poets I bequeath my Pen.
Let a small Sprig (true Emblem of my Rhyme)
Of blasted Laurel on my Hearse recline;
Let some grave Wight, that struggles for Renown,
By chanting Dirges through a Market-Town,
With gentle Step precede the solemn Train;
A broken Flute upon his Arm shall lean.
Six comick Poets may the Corse surround,
And All Free-holders; if they can be found:
Then follow next the melancholy Throng,
As shrewd instructors, who themselves are wrong.
The Virtuoso, rich in Sun-dry’d Weeds,
The Politician, whom no Mortal heeds,
The silent Lawyer, chamber’d all the Day,
And the stern Soldier that receives no Pay.
But stay — the Mourners shou’d be first our Care,
Let the freed Prentice lead the Miser’s Heir;
Let the young relict wipe her mournful Eye,
And widow’d Husbands o’er their Garlick cry.
All this let my Executors fulfil,
And rest assur’d that this is Mira’s Will;
Who was, when she these Legacies design’d,
In Body healthy, and compos’d in Mind.

Another blog in appreciation (Tom Clark) where you can find comments in the form of appreciative verse about her. I love his choice of image to evoke her

Jean-Baptist-Camille Corot, In a Park

Ellen

Foremother poet: Mary Chandler (1687-1745): a disabled and by choice unmarried poet, milliner, shopkeeper

The better known women writers across the century

Dear friends and readers,

It’s been a long while since I wrote a foremother poet blog and so I am happy to contribute this one, though I don’t have the extensive or full printed sources I like to have before writing one of these.

Mary Chandler (1687-1745) was one of a growing number of women poets of the 18th century who were working women, not pseudo-gentry, not gentlewomen. It’s usually put (and was at the time) that because she “had a crooked spine,” she did not marry but instead opened a milliner’s shop in Bath (nearby the Pump Room where Elizabeth Montagu and her friends, in history called the Bluestockings would sometimes meet). From Chandler’s poems she seems not unhappy (a number of friendship poems of great warmth), and the most famous is her long comic (and successful) “Description of Bath.”

However, it’s also said (remember what Virgil said about Rumor) that under the “care” of George Cheyne (famous physician who recommended dieting and exercise), she became anorexic (a girl who wanted “out” or was continually
made to feel her body was unacceptable). Let us hope not, and I doubt this because there are records to show she stayed in business successfully for 35 years before that. Her life and publications are told in detail in Roger Lonsdale’s excellent anthology, Eighteenth Century Women Poets, pp 151-52.

Her epitaph (18th century poets would write their own ironic epitaphs) does harp again on her looks. It does not begin with her life and success but rather “Here lies a true maid, deformed and old …” Is not it terrible a woman should endlessly judge herself as an object a man might want to go to bed with? Like the comic Horatian “True Tale,” her epitaph does have a combination of wry self-acceptance and stalwart Horatian ideals of being content with what you can manage to wrest from life: “Her book and her pen had her moments of leisure” is apt line expressing this idea.

Here is a central online source for her life, poetry and criticism about her: Eighteenth Century Poetry Archive. Out of all these I feature her A True Tale:

To Mrs. J-S.

Written at her Request

Why, Madam, must I tell this idle tale?
You want to laugh. Then do so, if you will.
Thus take it, as it was, the best I can;
And laugh at me, but not my little man:
For he was very good, and clean, and civil,
And, though his taste was odd, you own not evil.
You know one loves an apple, one an onion;
One man’s a Papist, one is a Socinian:
We differ in our taste, as in opinion.
Not often reason guides us; more, caprice,
Or accident, or fancy: so in this.
His person pleased, and honest was his fame;
Tis true there was no music in his name,
But, had I changed for A the letter U,
It would sound grand, and musically too,
And would have made a figure. At my shop
I saw him first, and thought he’d eat me up.
I stared, and wondered who this man could be,
So full of complaisance, and all to me:
But when he’d bought his gloves, and said his say.
He made his civil scrape, and went away.
I never dreamed I e’er should see him more,
Glad when he turned his back, and shut the door.
But when his wond’rous message he declared,
I never in my life was half so scared!
Fourscore long miles, to buy a crooked wife!
Old too! I thought the oddest thing in life;
And said, ‘Sir, you’re in jest, and very free;
But, pray, how came you, Sir, to think of me?’
This civil answer I’ll suppose was true:
‘That he had both our happiness in view.
He sought me as one formed to make a friend,
To help life glide more smoothly near its end,
To aid his virtue, and direct his purse,
For he was much too well to want a nurse.’

He made no high-flown compliment but this:
‘He thought to’ve found my person more amiss.
No fortune hoped; and,’ which is stranger yet,
‘Expected to have bought me off in debt!
And offered me my Wish, which he had read,
For ‘twas my Wish that put me in his head.’
Far distant from my thoughts a husband, when
Those simple lines dropped, honest, from my pen.

Much more, he spake, but I have half forgot:
I went to bed, but could not sleep a jot.
A thing so unexpected, and so new!
Of so great consequence. So generous too!
I own it made me pause for half that night:
Then waked, and soon recovered from my fright;
Resolved, and put an end to the affair:
So great a change, thus late, I could not bear;
And answered thus: ‘No, good Sir, for my life,
I cannot now obey, nor be a wife.
At fifty-four, when hoary age has shed
Its winter’s snow, and whitened o’er my head,
Love is a language foreign to my tongue:
I could have learned it once, when I was young,
But now quite other things my wish employs:
Peace, liberty, and sun, to gild my days.
I dare not put to sea so near my home,
Nor want a gale to waft me to my tomb.
The smoke of Hymen’s lamp may cloud the skies
And adverse winds from different quarters rise.
I want no heaps of gold; I hate all dress,
And equipage. The cow provides my mess.
‘Tis true, a chariot’s a convenient thing;
But then perhaps, Sir, you may hold the string.
I’d rather walk alone my own slow pace,
Than drive with six, unless I choose the place.
Imprisoned in a coach, I should repine:
The chaise I hire, I drive and call it mine.
And, when I will, I ramble, or retire
To my own room, own bed, my garden, fire;
Take up my book, or trifle with my pen;
And, when I’m weary, lay them down again:
No questions asked; no master in the spleen
I would not change my state to be a queen.

Another beautiful poem on how much friendship meant to her:

A Poem on Friendship.

Written in 1729. [*from The Description of Bath* (1736)]

Friendship! the heav’nly Theme I sing;
Source of the truest Joy;
From Sense such Pleasures never spring,
Still new, that never cloy.

‘Tis sacred Friendship gilds our Days,
And smooths Life’s ruffled Stream:
Uniting Joys will Joys increase,
And sharing lessen Pain.

‘Tis pure as the etherial Flame,
That lights the Lamps above;
Pure, as the Infant’s Thought, from Blame;
Or, as his Mother’s Love.

From kind Benevolence it flows,
And rises on Esteem.
‘Tis false Pretence, that Int’rest shews,
And fleeting as a Dream.

The Wretch, to Sense and Self confin’d,
Knows not the dear Delight;
For gen’rous Friendship wings the Mind,
To reach an Angel’s Height.

Amidst the Crowd each Kindred Mind,
True Worth superior spies:
Tho’ hid, the modest Veil behind,
From less discerning Eyes.

From whose Discourse Instruction flows,
But Satire dares not wound.
Their guiltless Voice no Flatt’ry knows,
But scorns delusive Sound.

While Truth divine inspires each Tongue,
The Soul bright Knowledge gains.
Such Adam ask’d, and Gabriel sung,
In heav’nly Milton’s Strains.

Such the Companions of your Hours,
And such your lov’d Employ;
Who would indulge your noblest Pow’rs,
But know no guilty Joy.

And thus as swift-wing’d Time brings on
Death, nearer to our View;
Tun’d to sweet Harmony our Souls,
We take a short Adieu.

Till the last Trump’s delightful Sound
Shall wake our sleeping Clay; [hmm…]
Then swift, to find our Fellow-souls,
As Light, we haste away.

I speculate that Mary Chandler belonged to one of several circles of “learned” and unmarried women at the time whom Emma Donogue has identified as conforming to patterns we may call lesbian spinsterhood. See also my Lisa Moore’s Sister Arts, the Erotics of Female Landscape; and Lesbian aesthetics: an aspect of women’s art. We need not of course reify any rigid categories to enjoy this woman’s art, but rather see her as a proto-feminist avante la lettre and rejoice for her that she enjoyed her life, fulfilled her gifts, and can speak to our eyes today.

The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain by Richard Samuel, 1779. The sitters are (standing, left to right): Elizabeth Carter, Anna Barbauld, Elizabeth Sheridan, Hannah More, Charlotte Lennox; (seated, left to right): Angelica Kauffmann, Catherine Macaulay, Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Griffith — there was a strong tendency in 18th century portraiture of women artists to idealize them in classical garb

For other 18th century working class women poets, see my blogs on Mary Leapor; Mary Whateley Darwell; Mary Collier; Elizabeth Hands.

And don’t miss a treasure of a book: Donna Landry’s The Muses of Resistance: Laboring-class women’s poetry in Britain, 1739-1796.; a wonderful literary study (filled with close readings of other women’s poems and all sorts of historical and autobiographical details): Reconsidering the Bluestockings, edd. Nicole Pohl and Betty A. Schellenberg, and Elizabeth Eger’s Brilliant Women: 18th Century Bluestockings, an art book chock-a-block with pictures of the people and their surroundings.

18th century image of a milliner’s shop in the US

Ellen

Politics & Prose classes on women’s fiction & authors; genre fiction for, by, about women; Lot’s wife re-seen

Hilary Mantel’s superb non-fiction essays, a selection from the London Review of Books

A rare almost Radcliffean female gothic fiction for Oates

Dear friends and readers,

For about 12 weeks now I’ve been taking on-line courses at Politics and Prose and the quality and level of the discussions, the information and insights offered have been as excellent as those I’ve been taking now online from Cambridge, early evening British time, early afternoon East Coast on Saturdays and/or Sundays.  These have occurred across the pandemic and I chose mostly women and mostly Bloomsbury era women (exceptions include a session on E.M. Forster, and a session each on Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and Christina Rossetti’s poetry).

At Politics and Prose I can’t recommend highly enough Helen Hooper, Elaine Showalter, and at Cambridge University in their programs just about every Literature professor I’ve been privileged to listen to and watch (as these are video zooms). I’ve read books I’ve never read before by Mantel, Shirley Jackson and Joyce Carol Oates — including Black Water, the astonishing tour-de-force retelling of the drowning and suffocation of Mary Jo Kopecknek at the close of her mad drive with Ted Kennedy down unpaved roads over an unsteady bridge. I’ve now a rounded point of view on Mantel, a way of putting her works together coherently for the first time. Maybe my favorite session from Cambridge in the last few months was on Vita Sackville-West by Alison Hennegan. I discovered Sackville-West’s love of animals.

The question I asked myself about Mantel was how much of her fiction was an escape for and protest against her from her fraught family life, traumatic health problems, and religious ways of thought (especially her interest in seance mediums). Paradoxically it’s not her imaginative fiction-writing self that is most aggressive in building a new identity, but her non-fictional arguments and the first two of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy.  For Shirley Jackson she takes on the type of the older woman alone, unable to navigate herself in a deeply hostile world (“The Bus”); she cannot escape cruelty it seems. To me Joyce Carol Oates in much of her fiction is herself living vicariously thrills and adventures at whatever price these cost her heroines (death, fearsome rape), with no concern for safety – so often so central to women’s stories. There is something troublingly irresponsible in Oates. It seems to me that American female gothic as practiced by these two women almost avoided the supernatural in order to make concrete to women readers what the life of an American woman is today. By contrast, Mantel is drawn to it in her contemporary British gothic comedic novels.

At the same time I’ve been going further in my popular genre books by, for, about female characters and discovered I can enjoy P.D. James’s Cordelia Grey books (detective fiction), Italian women women’s fiction: I just began Alba de Crespedes’ Forbidden Notebook, as translated by Ann Goldstein:

This last, perhaps not as well known in English-readers’ circles as I hope it might become is about a woman who after WW2 decides to keep a prohibited notebook. The closer word in Italian is prohibited. (Another instance of Goldstein’s inadequacy). The whole set of attitudes Valeria has to get beyond to even purchase and then hide her notebook brings home the inner world of Lila when she keeps a series of notebook and the profound betrayal Elena enacts when she throws them in the river in Florence. Purchase laws are against her, she has no space for it, little time because she hasn’t a maid and she has a job (this money is why she can buy it); she’s afraid to tell her husband who might suggest she give it to her son. I can see that the tragedy might be that she discovers herself … Very modern tale. Jhumpa Lahiri provides an insightful contextual introduction, and Elena Ferrante is quoted urging us to read it

For a couple of weeks I immersed myself in the fiction of Natalia Ginzburg, and the poetry and life of Elsa Morante in the course I’m teaching on Italian memoirs and novels and poetry of the 20th century — more than a couple of weeks because this was a culmination of several months on and off.

With my friend and mate over on Trollope&Peers, Tyler Tichelaar, a historical novelist, I read the whole of Devoney Looser’s very long study of Jane and Anna Maria Porter, two early historical fiction (and other genre) writers around the time of, or just before Jane Austen and the Brontes: Sister Novelists: Trailblazing Sisters. The Porter sisters left a huge treasure trove of candid letters from which Looser constructed their hard and fascinating lives as independent women writers. Their courage, stamina, ability to network and live on very little, their romances and enormous amount of fiction produced puts before us a new angle on the world Austen lived in, a lot freer sexually than is usually supposed: the question was did they invent historical fiction or did what they call historical fiction lack a deep consciousness of the past (and real research into it) as shaping force of what was and is, such as we find in Scott.

As I found myself thinking about the archetypal heroine’s journey, so I’ve been looking to see if when women take over popular genres, there is some subset or continuous underlying themes, tropes, norms that cross these genres (each having to conform to readers’ expectations). An image one sees on many of the covers of their detective fiction is the typewriter:

I’ve not come to any conclusion that will allow me to concretize the l’ecriture-femme elements in these books but the topic is on my mind and I’m not alone as I pursue it.

I’m neglecting no one; I’m now watching serial dramas based on Agatha Christie’s famous series of Miss Marple: two nights in a row found me really engaged by one of the original episodes with Joan Hickman (The Body in the Library) and tonight I began a brand-new one: Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, which includes Emma Thompson and Jim Broadbent in a hilarious scene as our amateur female sleuth’s parents.

At night I’ve re-begun Christie’s Autobiography, read by me 40 years ago and still remembered.

So this is some of what has been occupying me over these past weeks — some eighteenth century matter in Looser’s book while I listened to David Rintoul’s exhilarating reading aloud of Scott’s Waverley (very entertaining tones and Scots accent). I will end on a poem by Anna Akhmatova as translated by Annie Finch. The poem was brought to mind by Graham Christian’s writing of postings about poets daily for this month of April on face-book

Lot’s Wife

“But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.” –—Genesis 19:25-26

The righteous man followed where God’s angel guide
shone on through black mountains, imposing and bright —
but pain tore his wife’s breast. It turned her aside
and said, “Look again! There is time for one sight
Of towers, and Sodom’s red halls, and the place
Where you sang in the courtyard or wove on your loom
By windows now empty — where you knew the embrace
Of love with your husband—where birth filled the room —.”

She looked. And the sight was more bitter than pain.
It shut up her eyes so she saw nothing more;
She shimmered to salt; her feet moved in vain,
Deep rooted at last in the place she died for.

Who weeps for her now? Who can care for the fate
Of someone like that—a mere unhappy wife?
My heart will remember. I carry the weight
Of one who looked back, though it cost her her life.

I like this one because the POV is not the implicitly masculine POV or Lot’s male POV. We begin with an impersonal verse; at “it turned her aside” we move into the woman’s perspective (whose name we are still not told. Then we move into the second person, “You” and the last three lines are the torture she’s feeling — just for wanting a sliver of freedom within enslavement unto death.

Just arrived! and this was a hard one to find for a reasonable price ($9.99 at WorldofBooks): The other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow (Mary at last)

And Isobel completed this beautiful puzzle: that’s Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Nora Zeale Hurston and Virginia Woolf

Ellen

A winter syllabus 2023: The Heroine’s Journey at OLLI at Mason online

Catherine Morland (Felicity Jones) and Henry Tilney (J.J. Feilds) entering the realm of the ancient Abbey, crossing the bridge (2007 Granada/WBGH Northanger Abbey, scripted Andrew Davies)

For a course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at George Mason University
Day: 4 Thursdays midday, 11:50-1:15 pm online,
F405Z: The Heroine’s Journey
Office located at 4210 Roberts Road, Fairfax, Va 22032
Dr Ellen Moody

Description of Course:

We will explore the archetypal heroine’s journey across genres and centuries in the western Eurocentric tradition, from classical times to our 21st century female detectives. Our foundational books will be Maria Tatar’s The Heroine with 1001 Faces (written as a counterpart to Joseph Campbell’s famous and influential The Hero with a Thousand Faces), and Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey (click to reach the whole text online for free). Our four books will be Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Tales; Elena Ferrante’s Lost Daughter; and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. We will discuss what are journeys, the central experiences, typical plot-designs, characterizations, and events of the lives of our heroines of classical myth, fairy & folk tales (and connected to this historical romance and time-traveling tales), realistic fiction, and the gothic (and connected to this mystery/thrillers, detective stories). There are two recommended films as part of our terrain to be discussed: Outlander, S1E1 (Caitriona Balfe as Claire Beauchamp transported), and Prime Suspect S1E1 (Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison). I will supply some poetry (Atwood, Carol Ann Duffy, Marge Piercy), two scripts (for the serial episode of Outlander and the 2022 film adaptation of The Lost Daughter by Maggie Gyllenhaal), and one parodic modern short story (“Rape Fantasies” by Atwood), all as attachments.

Leda (Olivia Colman) stopping off to look at the sea sometime during her journey there and back (Lost Daughter, 2021)

Required Books (these are the editions I will be using but the class members may choose any edition they want):

Margaret Atwood. The Penelopiad. NY: Grove Press (originally O. W. Toad), 2005, ISBN 978-1-84195-798-2
Angela Carter. The Bloody Chamber and Other Adult Tales. NY: Harper and Row, 1981. ISBN 0-06-090836X (reprinted with new codes many times)
Elena Ferrante. The Lost Daughter, trans. Ann Goldstein. NY: Europa, 2008.
Jane Austen. Northanger Abbey, ed. Susan Fraiman. NY: Norton Critical Edition, 2004. ISBN 978-0-393-097850-6. Another excellent (good introduction, good materials at the back of the book) modern edition is the Longman Cultural text, ed. Marilyn Gaull. NY: Longman (Pearson Educational), 2005. ISBN 0-321-20208-2

Strongly suggested films:

Outlander, Season 1, Episode 1, called “Sassenach” Written Roger Moore, directed John Dahl. Featuring: Caitronia Balfe, Sam Heughan, and Tobias Menzies. Available on Netflix (and Starz), also as a DVD. I can supply a script for this one.
Prime Suspect, Season 1, Episode 1, called “Price to Pay 1 & 2.” Written Lynda La Plante, Directed Christoper Menaul. Featuring Helen Mirren, John Benfield, Tom Bell. Available on BritBox, YouTube and also as a DVD

Kauffmann, Angelica: Penelope Taking Down the Bow of Ulysses (18th century fine painting)

Format: The class will be a mix of informal lecture and group discussion

Jan 26th: Introduction, Atwood’s Penelopiad, with a few of her Circe poems, and Carol Ann Duffy’s “The Big O” (from The World’s Wife)

Feb 2nd: From Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Adult Tales read “The Bloody Chamber” (Bluebeard), “The Courtship of Mr Lyon,” (Beauty and the Beast)”Puss-in-Boots,” “The Lady of the House of Love” (Sleeping Beauty plus), “The Company of Wolves” (Little Red Riding Hood). Please have seen Outlander S1, E1. Another movie you could see is the 1984 Company of Wolves, an extravagant fantasy bringing together a number of Carter’s fairy tales and fables; she is one of the scriptwriters. It’s available on Amazon Prime.

Feb 9th: Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, with Marge Piercy’s “Morning Athletes” If you are interested, see the film adaptation, The Lost Daughter, scripted & directed Maggie Gryllenhaal; while much is changed, it is absorbing and explains the book (Netflix film, also available as a DVD to buy); it features Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Dakota Johnson, and Jack Farthing (as Leda’s husband). I can supply a script for this one too.

Feb 16th: Austen’s Northanger Abbey, with discussion that links the gothic to modern mystery-thriller and detective stories. I will send by attachment Margaret Atwood’s “Rape Fantasies” (a very short story). Please have seen Prime Suspect S1, E1-2. If you are interested, see the film adaptation, Northanger Abbey, scripted Andrew Davies, directed by Jon Jones; while much is changed, this one is also absorbing and adds to the book (available as a YouTube and DVD); it features beyond the two principals, Carey Mulligan, Liam Cunningham (General Tilney) and Sylvestre Le Touzel (Mrs Allen)

First still of Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison, late arrival at crime scene, driving herself (Prime Suspect, aired 6 & 9 April 1991, “Price to Pay”)

Select bibliography (beyond Tatar’s Heroine with a Thousand Faces and Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey):

Beard, Mary. Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovations. Liveright, 2013. Early refreshingly jargon-free feminist readings of documents left to us.
Bojar, Karen. In Search of Elena Ferrante: The Novels and the Question of Authorship. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018.
Carter, Angela. Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings [non-fiction, essays, sketches, journalism], ed Jenny Uglow, introd. Joan Smith. NY: Penguin, 1998
Cavender, Gray and Nancy C. Jurik, Justice Provocateur: Jane Tennison and Policing in Prime Suspect. Urbana: Univ of Illinois Press, 2012.
Cooke, Nathalie. Margaret Atwood: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn: Greenwood, 2004.
Frankel, Valier Estelle. 3 books: Symbolism & Sources of Outlander: Adoring Outlander: On Fandom, Genre, and Female Audience; Outlander’s Sassenachs: Gender, Race, Orientation, and the Other in the TV series. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015-17 (also on later books, Duane Meyer, The Highland Scots of North Carolina, 1732-1776. Chapel Hill: Univ of North Carolina, 1961.)
Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. 1983; rep, rev Harvard UP, 1993.
Gordon, Edmund. The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography. London: Chatto & Windus, 2016.
Hirsh, Marianne. The Mother-Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Indiana: Bloomington UP, 1980
Klein, Kathleen Gregory. The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre. 2nd Edition. Chicago: Univ of Illinois, 1995.
Moody, Ellen, “People that marry can never part: A Reading of Northanger Abbey, Persuasions Online, 3:1 (Winter 2010): https://jasna.org/persuasions/on-line/vol31no1/moody.html ; The Gothic Northanger: A Psyche Paradigm, Paper delivered at a EC/ASECS conference, November 8, 2008 online: http://www.jimandellen.org/austen/gothicna.html ; The Three Northanger Films [includes Ruby in Paradise], Jane Austen’s World (Vic Sandborn, April 6, 2008: online: https://janeaustensworld.com/2008/04/06/the-three-northanger-abbey-films/
Pratt, Annis. Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1981.
Southam, B.C., ed. Northanger Abbey and Persuasion: A Casebook. London: Routledge, 1968.
Stevenson, Anne. “Diana Gabaldon: her novels flout convention.” Publishers Weekly 6 Jan. 1997: 50+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 15 Apr. 2016. Online.
Sullivan, Rosemary. The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood, Starting Out. Canada: Harper Flamingo, 1998.
Tomalin, Clair. Jane Austen: A Life. NY: Vintage, 1997.
Williams, Anne. The Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago: Univ Chicago P, 1995.

Claire (Caitronia Balfe) among the stones, just arrived in 1743 (Outlander S1, E1, 2015)

Do you hear their hair? — on the Iranian women’s rebellion

Ghazaleh Hedayat (2008)

Dear friends and readers,

I’m honored today to have as a guest blogger M. Mansur Hashemi’s essay, “‘Do you hear their hair?’: About a piece of conceptual art” as translated by Fatemeh Minaei

Three months ago, a protest movement began in Iran. It was instigated by the tragic death of a young girl (Mahsa-Zhina Amini) while detained by the “morality police” who arrested her for not dressing according to the rules of compulsory hijab. The media echoed the event that moved the nation in the name of “woman, life, freedom”.

The following is a translation of a Persian writing that reflects some debates over hijab. It was written about nine years ago highlighting the problem through an interpretation of a work created by an Iranian female artist. The author has written other detailed articles criticizing the mandatory hijab, in which he has predicted the present situation in Iran. But this short poetic writing on an artwork (created by Ghazaleh Hedayat) extracts the essence of the matter. Naturally, the discussed conceptual art can be interpreted in various ways. The author has put it in the context of two bans in Iran, trying to emphasize the complexities of a social conflict. A conflict manifested now in the violent confrontations between the government and persevering teens and youth who fight for their freedom.­ Fatemeh Minaei, 2022 December.

***

Imagine the broad plane of a wall. From a distance, you might miss it. But if you look closely, you will see nails. Eight nails, to be exact. Getting closer, you will see the eight iron nails connected by four strands of hair. You feel a tension between the stiffness of the nails against the tender strands of hair. It looks as if the strands are chained to the wall. You hear the daunting sound of a hammer that heightens that feeling. But, with all their fragility, the strands of hair are there. They are not destroyed, despite the collusion between the hammer and nails. They are stretched on the hard surface and this tautness on the broad area, this being tied to the iron nails, enhances their presence.

The strings on a musical instrument are stretched on it and tied to its body, just as those hair strands are tied to the wall. Nevertheless, the very tied-up strings make the unrestricted sound of the music. Those four strands of hair are like strings on the wall. We do not even need to hear any sound those imaginary strings would make. We’ll hear them as soon as we take a look. Apparently, the strands of hair are not supposed to be visible. But they are. Just as for a while, under the new Islamic regime in Iran, musical instruments were not supposed to be seen. Showcases got cleared from any musical instrument. Yet the sound kept on coming out from behind the veils the government ordered. Music survived. It survived until one day the musical instruments came back to the windows and now the only place the musical instruments are not seen is on the Islamic regime’s TV. However, musical instruments are not for watching; they are to be heard. And their sound, the music they create, is now filling up even the official broadcastings of the regime. So seems to be the state for the sound of the locks that were supposed to not be heard. Now the sound that sneaks out from under the slipping scarves can no longer be ignored. The sound of the objecting strands of hair that display themselves despite the morality police, despite the violent surroundings. The veil is no longer working.

A piece of conceptual art sometimes represents a situation not easy to express otherwise. “The Sound of My Hair” by Ghazaleh Hedayat (pictured below) can be interpreted as a representation of a situation. A metaphorical visual translation of a conflict.

I grew up in a pious family and spent my childhood mostly in mosques and Islamic schools. So, I understand how much symbolic that ‘sound’ can become. I feel the taboos and their dreadful power. The imposed patriarchal mentality puts unbearable pressure on a religious man. His mind gets overwhelmed by obsessions that are extremely hard to overcome.

People raised outside the religious stratum of Islamic societies would never comprehend the Hijab issue. Just like the issue of music being impermissible (Haram), sounds being sinful, or musical instruments being devices of ‘libidinous pleasure’, makes no sense to them. The hair of Iranian girls and women not raised in religious families is covered by the force of the regime rules. Just as decades ago, a patriarchal government (ruled by Reza Shah) unveiled the hair of religious Iranian women by force because of a shallow understanding of modernity. The value of individual freedom is missed in both cases. And since the logic of force is not convincing, it was and is doomed to fail.

Now the times are changing. Besides women forced to have hijab or those who chose hijab for a while under the influence of the Zeitgeist, nowadays, even many Iranian girls from religious families prefer not to cover their hair. In an ironic turn of events that can be called, in the words of Hegel, “die List der Vernunft” (the cunning of reason), those girls participated in civic life because the Islamic regime prepared the circumstances their families required, and now they do not see the need for veils.

When you wander in the streets of Iranian cities now, it will be strange if you don’t hear the sound of the strands of hair that want to get free. To get their voice heard despite the repressive surroundings. That reminds me of the interpretable work of Ghazaleh Hedayat. She has visualized a situation that I am sure will continue to cause a stir in our society for a long time. The issue is as complicated and intricate as that work of art: The Sound of My Hair.

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Women’s Rights Activist on Protests Sweeping Iran, the Intensifying Gov’t Crackdown & Executions:

https://www.democracynow.org/2022/12/15/iran_protests_sussan_tahmasebi

Sussan Tahmahsebi:

Over nearly 500 people have been killed — 480, I think, is the last figure that the Human Rights Activists Network reported. Sixty-eight of them are children who have been killed. And the majority of those who have been killed — I mean, at least 50% of those who have been killed are from ethnic minority regions, Kurdish areas and Balochi areas. In Balochistan, just in one day, on Black Friday, which was September 30th, 103 people were shot dead. These were peaceful protesters leaving Friday prayers. And most of them were shot in the back, running away from bullets that the police were shooting at them.

Now, as you mentioned, the violence has reached a new level, where protesters are being sentenced to death. They’re being charged with enmity with God or waging war against God, and they’re being sentenced to death in these sham trials that, you know, don’t take very long, where people are not afforded — allowed to have access to their lawyers. And it’s extremely concerning …

On the women’s reproductive rights front: “How quickly anti-abortion activists abandon plans never to be punitive: demand jail time for “pill trafficking:”

https://tinyurl.com/2fzsvd6a

But it is true that the democrats’ solid wins in many states and for many offices, and putting into state constitutions women’s rights to autonomy, care, and choices over their bodies show who in the US are also in the majority

Posted by Ellen

Renaissance Society of America: A virtual conference, the first I’ve attended in many years … (1)

Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1652) — self portrait of herself as a painter

Dear friends and readers,

Although I have only a few sessions to describe out of the many that the RSA presented online for a few days, that is, from November 30th, to December 1st, I want to record what I heard and participated in. The primary reason is in two of the sessions I heard ideas and information which will help me the next time I want to write and deliver at a conference a paper on Anne Finch. But I also want to record some sense of how wonderful in tone and content the conference seemed to me — and perhaps therefore will be of interest to others outside the early modern scholars who attended it.

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I can no longer take stenography the way I once did, and spare my reader my attempts in other sessions than those on women studies which is the aspect of the Renaissance I’ve been most interested in. Here I do provide longer synopses because both of the panels taken together will provide me with a new perspective for a new paper on Anne Finch. These two panels are on Women Leaders and Their Political Behavior, and Reworking Literary Representations of Women’s Bodies and Voice. for the second blog I’ll be reviewing: the depiction of women in the era; dance, gender and sexuality; women on the stage, women during plague time, and creative approaches to telling the lives of women. For the second I will keep the synopses short, giving the gist of the talk and omitting details. I have enough material for two not overlong blog reports.

There were three presentations in the session on Women Leaders and their Political Behavior.

Elizabeth I when a princess (attributed to William Scrots, 1564)

Yafit Shachar talked about Elizabeth I, and how since she was a woman and ceaselessly regarded from the point of view of her literal woman’s body, during the early years of her reign she was under severe pressure to marry. Parliament made every attempt to exclude her from knowing about their talk on other issues! They regarded her refusal to marry as an attempt to ungender herself. Her female body was seen as a conduit for continuing the Tudor regime (and all the people in place staying in their places). At the same time a foreign man could potentially lead the country into wars. She responded in words by insisting they should see her body metaphysically (the queen’s two bodies) and that paradoxically her not marrying was their safety. She would protect the kingdom by bodily staying outside the world of matter. As time went on and she was not able to conceive, and her astute political behavior, especially during the threatened invasion by Spain, the pressure gave way.

An imagined statue for Anne Murray, Lady Halkett at Abbot House, Dunfermline — she was a spy!

Caroline Fish discussed the transterritorial power of Costanza Dora del Carretto, a widow. When her son died, and her grandson was still a young child, she was given the legal authority (power of attorney) to administer the family’s estates. Women were apparently usually disenfranchised, but she was very effective also in provisioning and maintained squadrons of ships (that included enslaved people working in the galleys). She also appointed governors wisely. Andrea Bergaz discussed Anna Colonna, a marquise (first in Madrid?). During her seven years in Vienna she initiated and ran public mostly musical events at court, became an active patron of the arts. The idea was to show how a woman could use the spaces of allowed sociability to contribute to the arts. There was much interesting general talk from inferences the speakers made from their material; among the most interesting to me was the assertion that women did act as spies far more than we realize (lacking documents).

There were three presentations on Reworking Literary Representations of Women’s Bodies and Voices, and one respondent (Anne Larsen).

Giulia Andreoni spoke of how women’s association with elements of nature, specifically trees, enabled women to assert their identities. Her main stories were derived from Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered and Ovid’s Metamorphosis. We see heroines dress up as shepherds, mark up trees which become a kind of containing vessel for the female characters’ bodies (women turn into trees to escape rape). Trees protect the women, are pleasant places to dwell in, and become the woman’s tomb after she dies. She showed illustrations of pregnant trees, trees with female imagery. Some of the women are sorceresses whom the impassive hero refuses to pity. Julia Varesewski told of the mother daughter team Madeleine (1520-87) and Catherine des Roches (1542-87). They wrote within Renaissance poetic genres, e.g., the blazon. The poetry they produce is lyrical, ecstatic, erotic (women are touching, touchable) and their virtue is never questioned. In one story the women behave reciprocally and restore one another’s health and beauty. They adapted a literary tradition from men and made it serve a community of women. The style fits the kind of writing Helene Cixous describes as l’ecriture-femme and very aggressively through women’s collaboration. The mother and daughter invented a textual space within which women were seen to converse and live.

A modern Echo and Narcissus (David Revoy) — the early modern & beautiful Victorian ones might be taken for or responded to as soft-core porn and Revoy has imagined the relationship between these two: the man loving his image, the woman compelled to hang on his every gesture or sound …

Nancy Frelick discussed male and female writers of the French Renaissance (Louise Labe, Marguerite de Navarre), their motives for writing and the reception of their work. She dwelt especially on the figure of the disembodied echo. Echo stands for the sorry state of a desiring subject or poetic persona where women repeat male forms: Echo was cursed and could repeat only the last sounds she hears; she haunts places and then dissolves away. Her predicament can be read as women’s powerlessness, but also make visible or felt a poignant poetic inner struggle, a divided self. She quoted playful poetry; and a critic talking about male poets as capable of inspiring stones (Orpheus?). She went through poems by men, e.g., Donne, and then went on to the Des Roches women, showing the daughter using this figure to echo her mother’s voice with a sense of deference and respect. They were creating a poetry of mutual support which gained prestige. There were contests as to who was a muse, seeking immortality, but they turned back to Sappho. The daughter stayed single, so she does not become someone’s property and does not support the patriarchy. And they get away with their subversion. In a poem called “Echo” (1586) in response forms the characters show how to find comfort; in a poem of a Sybil reads, writes and is simply herself. Frelick argues the figure of Echo is multifaceted and used to evoke different aspects of subjectivity; Echo is not unidimensional.

In the talk afterwards the women talked of landscape poetry of the era where we see gender and concerns over environment mingle. One woman was much interested in Gaspara Stampa; another what women do with epic genres. I brought up how Anne Finch read Tasso (and Ovid too), translated Tasso, wrote poems on trees, and one on Echo, aligned herself for immortality with Sappho. It seemed to me their way of talking could give new perspectives to Anne’s so-called romantic lyrics by moving backwards to the early modern women poets. They spoke of a Tasso poem where trees were cut down, reminding me again of Finch. The tree is creative, alive, beauty in itself. They seemed to appreciate what I had to say.

So I bring forward from a blog I wrote in 2020, Finch’s poem to a “Fair Tree,” in an early form not in print (so it’s a text you will not read in the new standard edition), from one of the minor manuscripts:

Fair Tree! for thy delightfull shade
‘Tis just that some return be made;
Sure some return, is due from me
To thy cool shadows, and to thee.
When thou to birds doest shelter give,
Thou musick doest from them receive;
If Travellers beneath thee stay
‘Till storms have worn themselves away,
That time in praising thee, they spend
And thy protecting pow’r, commend.
The Shepheard here, from scorching freed,
Tunes to thy daancing leaves, his reed;
Whilst his lov’d nymph, in thanks bestows
Here flow’ry Chaplets on thy boughs.
Shall I then, only silent be,
And no return be made by me?
No, lett this wish upon thee waite,
And still to florish, be thy fate.
To future ages may’st thou stand
Untoutch’d by the rash workmans hand,
Till that large stock of sap is spent,
Which gives thy somers ornament;
Till the feirce winds, that vainly strive
To shock thy greatnesse, whilst alive,
Shall on thy lifelesse hour attend,
Prevent the axe, and grace thy end,
Their scatter’d strength together call,
And to the clouds proclaim thy fall,
Who then their evening dews, may spare
When thou no longer art their care,
But shalt, like Ancient Hero’s, burn,
And some bright hearth be made thy Urn.

Here it is, read aloud accompanied by “Epping Forest” from John Playford’s “The English Dancing Master 1670, 11th Edition,” the painting which emerges, “The Oak Tree”, is by Joseph Farrington, 1747-1821.

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My header includes the phrase “the first I’ve attended in many years.” In the later 1980s my husband wanting me to return to my Renaissance world, partly because I had embarked on a many year project to learn Italian and translate the poetry of Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Gambara, and continued during that decade to keep up reading about the early modern period, its poetry, drama, and doing research at the Folger Shakespeare Library an Library of Congress on my own. I was what’s called an Independent Scholar. He meant very well. He took care of our two children while I went. I had been writing reviews that were published in the Renaissance Quarterly by that time; I had gone to Renaissance sessions at the MLA and published a paper on Katherine Philips in Philological Quarterly. Well for me to go to that conference by myself was a disaster for me. I knew no one any more, and when I talked to a few people, I was greeted with silent stares. I will not tell the social faux pas I made; suffice to say I refused to go to another early modern conference for many years. The trauma of what had happened remained with me.

Then one year after I had returned to scholarship and conferences through my work on the 18th century and Austen after 1999 (2000 I published my first book, Trollope on the ‘Net), gone to and delivered a talk on Trollope in London at the Reform Club. Also gone to a Virginia Woolf session and then party at one MLA. Jim said we should go to Florence one April (during spring break). There was another early modern conference there. He thought we could have good time in that city during the times I was not at the conference. I now feel very bad that I refused to go to an early modern conference in Florence in 1998 or so. He never went to Florence and is now dead and will never go. I now realize what I should have done is ask him to come with me to the conference proper (we could have paid) and I would have recovered. Rien à faire. Irretrievable.

Antonio Canaletto (1867-1786), Northumberland House

I just got off a zoom where I told friends how getting on the Internet in 1995 had transformed my life beyond what I’ve written above: it had enabled me to make friends without having to cross official thresholds: I began by writing on listservs, and that eventually brought me friends, respect, an invitation to write my book, and to write reviews regularly, to attend small regional conferences. The pandemic caused events to occur online which I could never have gone to even with Jim. Online you are welcomed as the image of someone in a tile and if you behave conventionally, no one questions you.  For example, I’ve now attended two virtual Virginia Woolf conferences in isolated obscure places in the mid- and Northwest USA — and joined in during the talks after the papers — I read and study Woolf a lot, have written a number of blogs on her here.

Come to our topic at hand: it was the second year of the pandemic and the RSA had its first virtual conference. I was brave enough to register, and tried to join in. I don’t know now why I didn’t manage but I found the site user-unfriendly, and managed at most to attend two sessions and gave up. Not this time. They have learned how to present the sessions and it’s now easy to get in and find things. I heard in the sessions that this year’s virtual conference had been set for Dublin, Ireland but now had added a virtual conference in November. People were lamenting they had decided to go virtual. I regret for them, they could not have the more fulfilling time they imagined (plus travel), but for me it was the first time since 1998 I was at an early modern conference, and for the first time successfully joined in.

So there we are. I broke the barrier at last. I finally also spoke during the talk afterwards in two of the sessions.

Ellen

My review of the Cambridge edition of the works of Anne Finch

Said to be a portrait (miniature) of Anne Finch; the portrait resembles in features a miniature of her father …

Friends and readers,

Here is the second paper that connects to the EC/ASECS meeting this year which I didn’t go to. It is a review-essay which I worked on and off for 2 years or so, and was published in the Intelligencer that was published just before the meeting, NS Volume 35, No 2, September 2022, pp 25-35. It’s obviously too long and complicated for a blog, so here too go over to academia.edu to read it:

Editing the Writings of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea

Digital photo from Northamptonshire MS

Ellen

Foremother Poet: Forough Farrokhzad (1934-1967): a courageous Persian woman

Forough Farrokhzad (1934-1967)

“If my poems, as you say, have an aspect of femininity, it is of course quite natural. After all, fortunately, I am a woman. But if you speak of artistic merits, I think gender cannot play a role. In fact to even voice such a suggestion is unethical. It is natural that a woman, because of her physical, emotional, and spiritual inclinations, may give certain issues greater attention, issues that men may not normally address. I believe that if those who choose art to express their inner self, feel they have to do so with their gender in mind, they would never progress in their art — and that is not right. So when I write, if I keep thinking, oh I’m a woman and I must address feminine issues rather than human issues, then that is a kind of stopping and self-destruction. Because what matters, is to cultivate and nourish one’s own positive characteristics until one reaches a level worthy of being a human. What is important is the work produced by a human being and not one labelled as a man or a woman. When a poem reaches a certain level of maturation, it separates itself from its creator and connects to a world where it is valid based on its own merits.”[10][11] Emphasizing human issues, she also calls for a recognition of women’s abilities that goes beyond the traditional binary oppositions …” Forough Farrokhzad (from an interview)

I am delighted and honored to say that tonight we have a guest blogger who sent to Wompo (a list for and about women’s poetry) and now has given me permission to put here an (in effect) foremother poet posting.

By Farideh Hassanzadeh.. For her poetry and more about her: she is also a translator and freelance journalist. On Poem Hunter

Farideh began with one of Farrokhzad’s poems (in translation)

It is Only Sound That Remains

Why should I stop, why?
the birds have gone in search
of the blue direction.
the horizon is vertical, vertical
and movement, fountain-like;
and at the limits of vision
shining planets spin.
the earth in elevation reaches repetition,
and air wells
changes into tunnels of connection;
and day is a vastness,
which does not fit into narrow mind
of newspaper worms.

why should I stop?
the road passes through the capillaries of life,
the quality of the environment
in the ship of the uterus of the moon
will kill the corrupt cells.
and in the chemical space after sunrise
there is only sound,
sound that will attract the particles of time.
why should I stop?

what can a swamp be?
what can a swamp be but the spawning ground
of corrupt insects?
swollen corpses scrawl the morgue’s thoughts,
the unmanly one has hidden
his lack of manliness in blackness,
and the bug… ah,
when the bug talks,
why should I stop?
Cooperation of lead letters is futile,
it will not save the lowly thought.
I am a descendant of the house of trees.
breathing stale air depresses me.
a bird which died advised me to
commit flight to memory.
the ultimate extent of powers is union,
joining with the bright principle of the sun
and pouring into the understanding of light.
it is natural for windmills to fall apart.

why should I stop?
I clasp to my breast
the unripe bunches of wheat
and breastfeed them

sound, sound, only sound,
the sound of the limpid wishes
of water to flow,
the sound of the falling of star light
on the wall of earth’s femininity
the sound of the binding of meaning’s sperm
and the expansion of the shared mind of love.
sound, sound, sound,
only sound remains.

in the land of dwarfs,
the criteria of comparison
have always traveled in the orbit of zero.
why should I stop?
I obey the four elements;
and the job of drawing up
the constitution of my heart
is not the business
of the local government of the blind.

what is the lengthy whimpering wildness
in animals sexual organs to me?
what to me is the worm’s humble movement
In its fleshy vacuum?
the bleeding ancestry of flowers
has committed me to life.
are you familiar with the bleeding
ancestry of the flowers?

Forough Farrokhzad was born in Tehran into a middle class family of seven children. She attended public schools through the ninth grade, thereafter received some training in sewing and painting, and married when she was seventeen. Her only child, the boy addressed in “A Poem for you,” was born a year later. Within less than two years after that, her marriage failed, and Farrokhzad relinquished her son to her ex-husband’s family in order to pursue her calling in poetry and independent life style. She clearly voices her feelings in the mid-1950s about conventional marriage, the plight of women in Iran, and her own situation as a wife and mother no longer able to live a conventional life in such poems as “The Captive,” “The Wedding Band,” “Call to Arms,” and “To My Sister.”

As a divorcee poet in Tehran, Farrokhzad attracted much attention and considerable disapproval. She had several short lived relationships with men-“The Sin” describes one of them,–, found some respite in a nine-month trip to Europe, and in 1958 met Ebrahim Golestan (b. 1922), a controversial film-maker and writer with whom she established a relationship that lasted until her death in an automobile accident at thirty-two years of age in February 1967.

Iranian Culture (A Persianist View), Michael C. Hillmann (translator, editor) page. From an Interview by Farideh of Larissa Shmailo (the translator), p 149

Dear Farideh:

Forrokhzad’s imagery is strong and uncompromising. I hear this poem aloud, spoken with force: “Why should I stop?” the poet queries, when around her is sound, the capillaries and cells and sperm become music in verse. Proclaiming “the bleeding ancestry of flowers,” the poet takes on the entire natural world and the cosmos, “shining planets” and the “uterus “of the moon and the human body. We follow her invitation to the motion of the horizon and the dead bird which taught her flight. Birds, worms, and “day is a vastness.”-this poem awakens us to the splendor of the variegated universe. This is an exciting voice which should not have been stopped at such an early age. Why should it have stopped?

Thanks so much for sharing!

Love,
Larissa

Here too Wendy Varaman’s interview with of Farideh:

When I first encountered the poems of Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad, I immediately thought of Sylvia Plath.

Here, for example, are the opening lines of “Let us believe in the beginning of the cold season” (trans., Michael C. Hillmann):

And this is I
a woman alone
at the threshold of a cold season
at the beginning of understanding
the polluted existence of the earth
and the simple and sad pessimism of the sky
and the incapacity of these concrete hands.

To what extent do you think it is useful to link these two women, both of whom died tragically in their early ۳۰’s during the cold month of February, each apparently still at the mercy of love and in a white-hot fervor of writing? Are women poets in Iran and the United States today more similar to each other or more different?

Farideh Hassanzadeh-Mostafavi:

Even Death in a cold season and at the peak of Forough’s creativity is not a good reason to find much resemblance between these two women poets. Sylvia killed herself because she was suffering from the betrayal of her husband. She was a faithful wife and a mother in love with her children. Forough left her husband and her little son to find her fate and mate in poetry. Regrettably, feminists and antireligious people in Iran and overseas, try to introduce Forough as a victim of a patriarchal religious society. It is not true. They claim she was forced by her father to marry in her teens, but now everybody knows that she threatened her parents to commit suicide if they don’t let her marry the man she loved. They introduce her husband as a dogmatic man who didn’t let Forough write poetry and deprived her from her right as a mother to see her son.

Forough’s letters to her husband, published thirty years after her death by her son, prove that even after divorce she was deeply supported by her kind, generous, and loyal husband who never married again and devoted all his life to their son. He was himself a writer and painter.

As for her poetry, Forough s poems could make themselves free from personal problems and pay attention to the world around her, while Sylvia Plath’s poems speak of “self,” even when she writes about others. “Lack of love” for Forough, was a universal wound, not a personal pain:

And my wounds are all the wounds of love
I have piloted this wondering island
Through raging tempests and volcanoes
And disintegration was the secret of that unique being
Each little particle of which gave birth to the sun

I see more resemblance between Forough and Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva. Both women were more loyal to love than to the men of their life, and both of them were more devoted to the truth of poetry than to the reality of life. Yet let me admit that if Iran has one Forough Farrokhzad, America has many, many, many “Forough Farrokhzads.” As a translator of women’s poetry and world poetry, I can attest that North America and Latin America have the best women poets of the world” (Wendy Varaman)

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To which I can add:

A photograph of Farrokhzad

Thank you Farideh. I also like that photo on the cover of the DVD (her poetry read aloud).

I own another book of her poetry, Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season, introduced and chosen and translated by Elizabeth Gray, Jr (ISBN 978-0-8112-3165-7)

This slender book contains a short life of the poet who died so young: Farrokhzad had a difficult life; she was brave and took off from conventional ways and traveled and wrote and published and made films and lived intensely at the same time as she must have been strapped for money and subject to lots of abuse in the media of her country. I can understand the content better om the book I own. I am thinking the tradition of being so inexplicit comes from inhibition, a desire not to let your private life be vulnerable to ugly public arenas, especially when you are a woman

Honestly, I have trouble understanding such allusive poetry where we are given metaphoric images but they have little concrete explanation or referents. Farideh, I am wondering if there is a tradition for this kind of imagery but I can think of “middle east” (I don’t have the right word for it) poetry where the referent is obvious, e.g., Constantine Cavafy (a male Greek poet). I also understand the content in general of the book I own. I am thinking the tradition of being so inexplicit comes from inhibition, a desire not to let your private life be vulnerable to ugly public arenas, especially when you are a woman. Perhaps candor and explicitness, which would make the poetry more accessible, understandable, might lead to a prison sentence or death.

Gray tells of her own education in the US at Stanford; that in the 1970s she learned Persian. Here’s her website where you are told all her credentials

Farideh replied that most of Farrokhzad’s poems were simple [in diction]; in her final days she was more than a poet: she became a thinker and philosopher, and her poetry departed from Iranian traditions.

Here is the poem from this volume which provides the volume’s title:

Let Us Believe in the Beginning of a Cold Season

And here I am
a lonely woman
at the threshold of a cold season
coming to understand the earth’s contamination
and the elemental, sad despair of the sky
and the impotence of these concrete hands.

Time passed,
time passed and the clock chimed four times,
it chimed four times.

Today is the first day of winter,
I know the secret of the seasons
and understand the moments well.

The savior is asleep in his grave
and earth, the kind acceptor, earth,
invites me to peace.

Perhaps those two young hands were true, those two young hands
buried below ¸in the never ending snow
And next year, when spring
sleeps with the sky beyond the window
and shoots thrust from her body
the green shoots of empty branches
will blossom O my dearest one, my dearest only one

Let us believe in the beginning of a cold season

Farrokhzad also painted; this is from the wikipedia website

A brief literary biography of Forough, Michael Hillmann’s A lonely woman: Forough Farrokhzad and her poetry, was published in 1987.[5] Farzaneh Milani’s work Veils and words: the emerging voices of Iranian women writers (1992) included a chapter about her. Abdolali Dastgheib, literary critic writer, published a critical review of Forough’s poems titled ‘The Little Mermaid’ (Farsi title پری کوچک دریا) (2006) in which he describes Forugh as a pioneer in modern Farsi poetry who symbolizes feminism in her work.[16] Nasser Saffarian has directed three documentaries about her life: The Mirror of the Soul (2000), The Green Cold (2003), and Summit of the Wave (2004), and Sholeh Wolpé has written a short biography of Farrokhzad’s life in “in: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad (2007).

Posted by Ellen