Читать книгу Book of Awesome Women Writers - Becca Anderson - Страница 11
ОглавлениеInk in Their Veins
Theories of Relativity
Some women seem to have writing talent encoded in their DNA. This is especially true of several “literary dynasties” wherein several family members are extraordinarily gifted, each with a voice uniquely his or her own. How does this happen? Do the gods (and goddesses) look down from above and occasionally say, “Hmmm, let’s endow this family with writing genius through the end of time”? Or can a special relationship with the Muses can be arranged and passed down from generation to generation?
Certainly, these creative kin have some strange magic in remarkable quantity. To wit, just two examples: the legacy of the Brontë lineage hasn’t faded with time; new editions of books and films of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are released every few years like clockwork. Stateside, their doppelgängers, the Grimké sisters, were stirring up hot controversy with virulent abolitionist texts that helped ignite the Civil War.
Bonded by blood and shelved side by side, the women profiled here are invariably very different from each other. But they all have one thing in common: a love of the written word.
It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up by themselves like grass.
Eudora Welty
THE BRONTËS scribbling sisters
The Brontë sisters were originally a troupe of five girls born in the early 1800s in a rural parsonage in Yorkshire, England. Mary Ann and Elizabeth died before they reached the age of ten, Emily and Anne lived to adulthood, and Charlotte outlived them all. Emily Brontë tends to be the most beloved in the family, but Anne and Emily had much in common. They also had many differences; their personalities could not have been more dissimilar. And all three aspired to be writers.
To make family dynamics even more complex, their father, Reverend Patrick Brontë, a failed writer himself, saw Emily as a genius, Charlotte as very talented, and Anne as not worthy of attention. The truth is, however, that the self-absorbed and somewhat silly patriarch had a staggering amount of talent under his roof. To have one daughter become a famous writer is amazing enough, but to have three is almost unimaginable.
The reverend proved more successful in theatrics, at least at home. In constant possession of a pistol, he shot through the open door if irritated and took a knife to one of his wife’s silk dresses. When his wife died in 1821, he sent for his sister-in-law to care for the six children (there was one brother, Branwell). A few years later, all the girls except Anne were sent to boarding school, which turned out to be a horrible experience of physical deprivation; this is where the two oldest girls died. After their sisters’ deaths, Charlotte and Emily were sent home.
Typically for the period, Reverend Brontë pinned his hope on his son, Branwell, an aspiring artist. Branwell was sent to university in London to pursue his dreams and failed miserably. Instead, he squandered his tuition and allowance on gin. When he had run through all of the money, he returned home, telling lies about having been robbed. The sisters ended up as teachers and governesses, but their passion was always writing.
In 1845, Charlotte discovered that Anne and Emily had been writing verse, as had she. She collected their poetry into one volume and published it herself, using the male pseudonyms—Currer (Charlotte), Ellis (Emily), and Acton (Anne) Bell—that they would retain throughout their careers. The book sold one copy. Not to be deterred, they all continued writing. Soon they were publishing to great acclaim.
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre achieved spectacular success during her lifetime, and it has survived the test of time and been retold again and again in films. She also penned the well-received novels Shirley and Villette. Anne’s Agnes Gray and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall are less known now but were critical and popular successes in their day.
But it is Emily who is considered by critics to be the literary genius of the family, based on her poems and her opus Wuthering Heights, which shone with a brilliance and sense of drama and mystery nearly unmatched in all of British literature. Family and friends marveled that sweet-natured Emily, always cleaning and ironing, was capable of the volcanic passions and drama she unleashed in her tale of love on the moors. Her Heathcliff is a brute, a primal presence as wild as the wind, a perfect foil for the spoiled, difficult Catherine. When it came out that the author was a woman, some critics of the day declared that Wuthering Heights must actually be the work of Branwell, on the grounds that no woman, particularly one who led such a sheltered existence, could have written such a passionate book.
Emily and Anne died young (at her brother’s funeral, Emily caught the cold that would eventually kill her). Charlotte went on to be lionized as a literary giant and hobnobbed with the likes of William Makepeace Thackeray, Mrs. Gaskell, and Matthew Arnold. She married her father’s curate in 1854 and died the following year.
I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading;
It vexes me to choose another guide.
Emily Brontë
ALICE JAMES sibling rivalry
Baby sister to brainy overachievers William and Henry James, Alice James, born in 1848, was also a writer of intensity and introspection. But she suffered greatly as a product of the Victorian Age: her brothers were the recipients of all the glory, and Alice was relegated to the house. Given the times, despite her great familial connections, Alice had little chance of publication and gradually receded into the shadows of the brothers’ gargantuan reputations as geniuses in philosophy and fiction.
Alice was sick her whole adult life. Sadly, it seems that her frustrations about career and gender contributed to her illness and neurasthenia. She had her first spells at sixteen and was prescribed a regimen of treatments involving “blistering baths,” electricity treatments, and sulfuric, ether, and motor therapy sessions. These medical advancements didn’t seem to help so much as harm her, and she was depressed and suicidal by the age of thirty. Her father, a Christian mystic preacher and ambitious intellectual, magnanimously gave her “permission” to die, which lessened her interest in that option. The more sensitive sibling, novelist Henry James, noted that “in our family group, girls seem scarcely to have had a chance” and that his sister’s “tragic health was, in a manner, the only solution for her of the practical problems of life.” Alice and her longtime companion Katherine Peabody were the models for Henry James’s novel about a pair of suffragist lovers in The Bostonians.
Despite her ill health, she did manage to keep a diary. Published after her death, it is now regarded as a seminal text in nineteenth-century feminist studies and a window into the world of invalidism. Nearly forgotten until the mid-1980s, Alice James has recently come to the attention of critics: a volume of her letters and an in-depth biography recognize her as a “silenced” voice of her era and tell a tragic tale of a woman trapped in a time in which the role of wife was the only real choice for women. Her long period of decay and isolation led her to view her eventual death from breast cancer as a respite from a torturous existence that offered no option to exercise her talent or will.
A written monologue by that most interesting being, myself, may have its yet to be discovered consolations. I shall at least have it all my own way, and it may bring relief as an outlet to that geyser of emotions, sensations, speculations, and reflections which ferments perpetually….
From The Diary of Alice James
AMY LOWELL “maker of fine poems”
Sometimes, a strong woman following her own distinct destiny becomes better known for her strength of personality and the celebrity surrounding it than for her actual accomplishments. Amy Lowell is just such a person.
Born in 1874 at the tail end of the Gilded Age, she came from a family of accomplished intellectuals and writers; she was cousin to the legendary New England poets James Russell Lowell and Robert Lowell and nearly every other male running MIT or Harvard. As a girl, she agonized over her weight, and despite desperate and severe diets, she couldn’t surmount that personal issue. Her fears about her ability to fit in led to “nervous prostrations,” but her love of the written word kept her going. “I am ugly, fat, conspicuous & dull,” she wrote in her diary at the age of fifteen. “I should like best of anything to be literary.”
Though she was in her own right a skilled critic and a fine poet, her recognition came in large part for her eccentricities—in particular, wearing tailored men’s suits, smoking cigars, and keeping a pack of dogs. Her original approach to both her appearance and her personal habits certainly extended to her writing, and after her first traditionally lyric book of poetry in 1912, A Dome of Many-Colored Glass, she began working in the pioneering modernist and imagist style brought to international attention by Ezra Pound, H. D., and T. S. Eliot.
Indeed, Amy Lowell cited H. D. as a major influence on her open verse and cadence, what she referred to as “polymorphic prose.” She also had a fascination with Asian art, poetry, and aesthetics, and in 1921 published Fir-Flower Tablets, a group of original poems combined with avant-garde translations of Chinese poetry in collaboration with Florence Ayscough. A powerfully insightful literary critic, she also lectured, compiled anthologies of poetry by H. D. and others, and completed an immense biography of the great English poet John Keats.
Part of her legacy as a writer includes a group of love poems called The Letter and Madonna of the Evening Flowers, inspired by her lover and companion Ada Dwyer Russell. After her parents’ deaths, Amy invited Ada to live with her in their baronial mansion in a manner that caused several to compare them to the Paris-bound duo Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.
Indeed, they had the same relational dynamic, with former actress Russell playing Toklas’s role as cook, nurse, and companion. Ada was no mere muse, however; the two worked together and sparked each other’s creativity. Amy even talked about hanging up a shingle outside her family mansion, Sevenels, saying, “Lowell & Russell, Makers of Fine Poems.”
Amy Lowell also pursued her poetic vision by traveling to meet others and sought out Ezra Pound, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, H. D., Robert Frost, and John Gould Fletcher, with whom she forged lasting friendships. The success of her imagist masterpieces Can Grande’s Castle and Pictures of the Floating World prompted Ezra Pound, ostensibly the founder of that movement, to start calling the radical new style “Amygism.” In 1925, she wrote What O’Clock, which won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry after her death that year from a cerebral hemorrhage.
Little cramped words scrawling all over the paper
Like draggled fly’s legs
What can you tell me of the flaring moon?
Through the oak leaves?
Amy Lowell, from “The Letter”
MARY SHELLEY Gothic greatness
Nearly everyone in Mary Shelley’s life was a writer. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was one of the first feminist writers and thinkers; her father, William Godwin, wrote philosophical theory. Their home in England was a regular gathering place for the radical elite; Charles Lamb and Samuel Coleridge were among their regular visitors. Politically, her parents were revolutionaries who disapproved of marriage, but still went through with the legalities to legitimize Mary upon her birth in 1797. Mary Wollstonecraft died eleven days after the baby was born, and Godwin fell apart, neglecting his daughter terribly, perhaps even blaming her for his beloved wife’s death. He later remarried and let relatives, nannies, and his new wife take whatever care of Mary they chose. Mary recalled learning to write by tracing her mother’s name on her gravestone at her father’s urging.
At seventeen, Mary met the married playboy poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and ran away with him to Europe, returning after a few weeks to London as he was drowning in debt. By 1816, the couple had a more secure financial footing and headed for the continent again, this time to Switzerland’s Lake Geneva, to a party with Shelley’s friend Lord Byron. A bout of ghost stories told around the fire as a distraction from an unusually cold summer inspired nineteen-year-old Mary to pick up a pen. Written in one year, Frankenstein is now hailed as the first Gothic novel as well as a seminal work of science fiction.
In 1818, Frankenstein was published, and Mary and Percy Shelley returned to London and married after the death of his wife. What proved to be a watershed year for the pair because of the publication of her book was an extremely difficult one; Mary’s half-sister Fanny and Percy Shelley’s wife both committed suicide. Their marriage was met with extreme disapproval, and the newlyweds fled to Italy to escape the controversy. Mary had three children; all but one, a son, died. Mother and son survived husband and father when in 1822, an exiled Shelley and fellow rebel poets drowned in the Bay of Spezia in Italy.
His young widow and surviving son were left behind, virtually destitute. Mary managed to scratch out a living to support her father and two-year-old child, but she was an outcast from society. Mary wrote other romances, including The Lost Man, Lodore, and Valperga, but none reached the level of success or acclaim of her first. She idolized her late husband and memorialized him in her fiction, in addition to editing the first volume of his poetry in 1839. Mary Shelley died in 1851 of a brain tumor. Now, more than 150 years after her death, the book she wrote at the age of nineteen continues to inform, inspire, and amaze.
My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me.
Mary Shelley, from Frankenstein
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT feminist firecracker
Though her life was troubled and turbulent, Mary has gone down in history as a major contributor to feminist literature. Her works, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1793), are lucid and forward-thinking and are touchstones in gender studies. Born in 1759, Wollstonecraft worked for a London publisher, James Johnson, which bolstered her independence, but she left for Paris in order to see the French Revolution for herself. As a cover, she passed herself off as the daughter of American captain Gilbert Imlay, with whom she became involved, producing a daughter, Fanny. The affair broke up, and a brokenhearted Mary tried unsuccessfully to kill herself; ironically, her daughter Fanny would later succeed at suicide. She went back to London and her old publishing job in 1795. James Johnson had become involved with an extremist political group comprised of Thomas Paine, William Wordsworth, William Godwin, Thomas Holcraft, and William Blake. Mary and Godwin fell in love, and she became pregnant with her daughter Mary, who later attained enduring fame under her married name, Mary Shelley.
MODERN DUOS
At the turn of the twentieth century, Erica Jong’s daughter Molly has taken up her pen and shows no fear of flying, while siblings Eliza and Susan Minot are authoring critically acclaimed novels and nonfiction. To their mutual enjoyment, they are witnessing the shock of readers and listeners who marvel at how “different” they are, as people and as writers.
DOROTHY WORDSWORTH “wild lights in her eyes”
Beloved poet William Wordsworth was one of his sister’s biggest admirers and she his “dearest friend” during his life. She was the only girl of the five children born to the Dorsetshire family. When their mother passed away in 1778, when Dorothy was seven, relatives raised her away from her four brothers.
But despite being raised apart, William and Dorothy were extremely close. William, two years older than his sister, inherited some money of his own when he turned twenty-six and bought an English country cottage just for the two of them. William’s destiny as a poet was already unfolding. Dorothy, to aid her brother and amuse him, began to keep a series of journals that not only reveal the lives of important literary figures but also have a purity and merit all their own. The portraits of their daily existence alone are priceless, but her machinations to inspire and “preserve” her brother as a poet are also remarkable. Today scholars pore over the journals for their wealth of information about the poet.
When William met and married Mary Hutchinson, at first Dorothy felt betrayed and abandoned. Eventually, her loyalty and love won out, and she pitched in to care for his children, for whom she wrote her own poetry, including “Peaceful Is Our Valley.” The valley in which they lived, rhapsodized over by brother William, was peaceful indeed, an idyllic place visited often by friends William Hazlitt, Robert Southey, Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, Samuel Coleridge, and Robinson. De Quincey penned reminiscences about his visits to the cottage, where he was shocked by what he perceived as Dorothy stepping outside a proper feminine role: “The exclusive character of her reading, and the utter want of pretension, and of all that looks like bluestockingisms.”
Later writers, including Virginia Woolf, puzzled over her life. Was she stifled by the towering talent of her brother and held back by her gender? A closer look at her diaries and the beautifully sculpted entries there reveal one thing certainly: she was a happy person and one with nature and her own nature. While her brother sometimes labored over his works, under pressure to produce for the eyes of the world, she was free to allow her impressions to flow freely. However, not all was to remain rosy forever; she spent the last twenty-five years of her life struggling with both physical and mental illness.
The Sea perfectly calm blue, streaked with deeper colour by the clouds, and tongues or points of sand, on our return a gloomy red. The sun goes down. The crescent moon, Jupiter and Venus.
Dorothy Wordsworth
NALO HOPKINSON fabulous fabulist of Caribbean culture
Nalo Hopkinson, born in Jamaica in 1960, is a Canadian speculative fiction author and editor who has also been a professor of creative writing at UC Riverside since 2011; her teaching focuses on the fantasy, science fiction, and magic realism genres, and she is a member of a faculty research cluster in science fiction. Her writing draws on myth and folklore as well as Caribbean language, history, and storytelling traditions.
Her family moved around quite a bit; as a child, besides Jamaica and Canada, Nalo also lived in Trinidad, Guyana, and the United States. Her mother worked in libraries, and her father was a playwright, actor, and poet from Guyana who also taught both Latin and English. Literacy came early for her, despite learning disabilities that were only diagnosed when she was an adult; by age three, she could read, and at ten, she was reading Kurt Vonnegut and Homer’s Iliad. From the beginning, she preferred fantastical fiction, including “everything from Caribbean folklore to Ursula K. Le Guin’s science fiction and fantasy.” Nalo had a firsthand experience of culture shock when her family moved from Guyana to Toronto, Canada, when she was sixteen, and she has stated she is “still not fully reconciled” to that shift. She lived in Toronto before attending Seton Hill University in Pennsylvania, where she earned an MA in the writing of popular fiction.
After working in various civil service positions dealing with the arts and in libraries, Hopkinson began to write speculative fiction in her early thirties; by the time she participated in the Clarion Science Fiction Writing Workshop at Michigan State University in 1995, she had already sold a couple of short stories. Two years later, her magical realism and folklore-inflected novel Brown Girl in the Ring won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest; the prize included publication of the work by Warner Aspect. Her debut opus also won the Locus Award for Best First Novel. Her 2003 work Skin Folk garnered a World Fantasy Award and a Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, and 2004’s Salt Road won a Gaylactic Spectrum Award for positive exploration of queer issues in speculative fiction. Her novel The New Moon’s Arms drew both the Prix Aurora Award of Canada and a Sunburst Award, making Hopkinson the first author ever to receive the latter prize twice.
Despite this success, Hopkinson endured major financial difficulties when serious illness struck and she was unable to work for a lengthy period. She suffers from fibromyalgia and went through periods of acute anemia brought on by fibroids as well as serious vitamin D deficiency; due to these health challenges, she was unable to write or publish for a period of six years. She was even without housing of her own for a couple of years before beginning to teach at the University of California.
Hopkinson has written nine novels and about a dozen published short stories, as well as House of Whispers (2018), a graphic novel set in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman universe that draws on Caribbean mythic, magical, and spiritual traditions. She has also edited a number of anthologies, including Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction (2000); Mojo: Conjure Stories (2003); and So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy (2004). Besides folklore and Caribbean traditions, she incorporates feminist awareness and historical consciousness in her writing, often focusing on social issues and race, class, and sexuality. She draws inspiration from eclectic sources such as songs; her 2013 novel Sister Mine was inspired by Christina Rossetti’s poem Goblin Market.
Professor Hopkinson says of herself that she loves “bopping around in the surf” and enjoys sewing, fabric design, and crafting objects in various media; she dreams of “one day living in a converted church, fire station, or library…or in a superadobe monolithic dome home.”
JAMES TIPTREE, JR. the writer who came in from the cold
James Tiptree, Jr. was the main nom de plume of award-winning science fiction author Alice “Alli” Sheldon (1915–1987), née Bradley, who also wrote under a half-dozen other names. She was born in the Hyde Park district of Chicago to a lawyer/naturalist father and a prolific author mother. At age six, Alice ventured abroad to the Belgian Congo with her parents and naturalist Carl Akeley, a family friend. She visited Africa twice more as a child, in 1924–1925 (as part of a trip around the world) and in 1931. Mary Hastings Bradley, her mother, wrote books about their first two journeys, two of which Alice illustrated, the children’s books Alice in Jungleland and Alice in Elephantland.
At nineteen, Alice eloped with a Princeton student she had met days earlier, William Davey, which ended her studies at Sarah Lawrence. She tried her hand at painting, but it didn’t work out; in 1941, she divorced Davey and returned to Chicago, working at the Chicago Sun as their art critic. The next year, she joined the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps and later the Air Force, attaining the rank of major and working at the Pentagon as an aerial reconnaissance photograph interpreter. When World War II ended, she was transferred to a different unit; she ended up marrying her commanding officer, Colonel Huntington Sheldon. In 1946, the couple left the military, running a New Jersey chicken farm from 1948 to 1952. They were then asked to work for the CIA; she analyzed political shifts in Africa and continued her work with photographic intelligence, while he was director of current intelligence.
But Alice was not happy working at the CIA, and in 1955, she quit; she was having doubts about her marriage, so employing her intelligence skills, she “disappeared” for a time and went back to college, remaining apart from her husband for a year, although the reunited couple’s marriage then continued for three decades. In 1959, she graduated from American University and went on to earn a PhD in experimental psychology from George Washington University in 1967. While completing her dissertation, she authored several of the type of science fiction stories she enjoyed reading. She felt that a masculine pseudonym would be useful as “camouflage” and became James Tiptree, Jr., having seen the name Tiptree on a marmalade jar label. She “was surprised to find that her stories were immediately accepted for publication and quickly became popular.”
1973 was a banner year for Tiptree; in her pioneering, Hugo-winning cyberpunk novella The Girl Who Was Plugged In, set in a media-dominated future, a deformed homeless girl is enlisted to control the vacant body of a celebrity as a “remote” worker. This tale was ahead of its time in its portrayal of global corporations, product placement, and cultic devotion to celebrities. Tiptree also won a Nebula short story award for depicting alien psychology, making use of her academic background; “Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death” is narrated from the point of view of an enormous alien arachnid.
In the mid-seventies, Tiptree wrote stories with a feminist twist: “The Women Men Don’t See” (1973), in which a crashed airplane’s passengers encounter temporarily stranded aliens, ends with the human women deciding to leave Earth with the aliens due to the limitations on women in Terran culture, which Tiptree clearly chafed at in her own life. 1976’s Houston, Houston, Do You Read? told the tale of human male astronauts from the present day who travel in time to a future in which males have died out, where the astronauts must confront their sense of insignificance. Houston won a Nebula Award for best novella and tied for the 1977 Hugo Award.
“Tiptree” ended up being more than just an author name; it expressed an aspect of Alice Sheldon. But eventually she wanted to write from another dimension of herself and created “Raccoona Sheldon,” another pseudonym for her other works. In a circumstance indicative of the level of sexism in publishing at the time, she had difficulties selling the Raccoona Sheldon stories until “Tiptree” wrote to publishers on “Raccoona’s” behalf, describing Raccoona as an old friend and student of Tiptree’s. The first Raccoona stories were often received as light in contrast to the short fiction authored under the Tiptree name, but a few Raccoona outings went much deeper, including 1977’s Nebula-winning novelette The Screwfly Solution. It was a tale of men compelled by aliens to commit femicide to depopulate Earth for alien colonization and was eventually adapted as a made-for-TV film in Showtime’s Masters of Horror series in 2006. It was also the last story Alice wrote before her identity was revealed.
Tiptree communicated a great deal with editors and other writers by post but kept her actual identity secret for years; however, Tiptree did mention “his” mother was from Chicago and an explorer. Upon publication of Mary Bradley’s obituary in 1976, inquisitive Tiptree fans connected the dots; Alice Sheldon was revealed, overturning many suppositions by SF authors and others regarding “female writing” vs. “male writing.” Many were convinced Tiptree was male due to such things as a seemingly “masculine” level of experience with the military and intelligence fields, including Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg. She made efforts at damage control by reaching out to longstanding contacts such as Ursula K. Le Guin, hoping to tell them before they heard. Numbers of them were supportive, including Le Guin, whose response was very positive, but the fallout of the revelation worsened the depression with which Alice had long struggled. Her confidence and her work suffered. Early one morning in 1987, she shot her sleeping eighty-four-year-old husband in the head, then turned the gun on herself; people close to the Sheldons, including his son by an earlier marriage, Peter, believe it was a suicide pact. SF authors Karen Joy Fowler and Pat Murphy later founded the James Tiptree, Jr. Award for F/SF literature that “expands or explores our understanding of gender.”
Tiptree/Sheldon was complex in sexual orientation as well as gender identity; although she clearly had long-term connections with men, she stated, “I like some men a lot, but from the start, before I knew anything, it was always girls and women who lit me up.” Of the army, she declared she had “felt she was among free women for the first time.” One is left wondering what this brilliant author could have expressed in a more liberated time.
A male name seemed like good camouflage. I had the feeling that a man would slip by less observed. I’ve had too many experiences in my life of being the first woman in some damned occupation.
Alice Bradley Sheldon (known as James Tiptree, Jr.)
For many women writers, it took a masculine pen name to get published
Amandine Lucie Aurore Dupin, Baronne Dudevant: The famous French novelist George Sand
Mary Ann (or Marian) Evans: The great English Victorian novelist George Eliot
Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, and Emily Brontë: The beloved Brontës, published under the names Acton, Currer, and Ellis Bell, respectively.
Marion Zimmer Bradley: Lee Chapman, John Dexter, and Morgan Ives were all noms de plume of Marion Zimmer Bradley, the bestselling author of The Mists of Avalon
Olive Schreiner: She used the name Ralph Iron to write her acclaimed The Story of an African Farm
Frances Miriam Berry: The first woman humorist in the United States, she used the name Frank to get published
Adele Florence Cory: As was eventually revealed, she used the pseudonym Lawrence Hope. According to Womanlist by Marjorie P.K. Weiser and Jean S. Arbeiter, Adele Florence Cory was “respectably married to a middle-aged British army officer in India, who wrote passionate poems in the 1890s. One described the doomed love of a married English lady for an Indian rajah in the Kashmir. When Hope’s real identity was unmasked, all London was abuzz: was she telling the truth?”
MADELEINE L’ENGLE the physics of love and a wrinkle
in time
Just over a century ago, Madeleine L’Engle was born in 1918 in New York City, the only child of two highly creative socialites: father Charles was a journalist who also wrote novels and plays, and mother Madeleine was a pianist. They often left young Madeleine in the care of an Irish Catholic immigrant housekeeper they called Mrs. O; L’Engle later recalled time with her as being full of “laughter and joy, the infallible signs of the presence of God.”
When she wasn’t with Mrs. O, she spent hours alone; as soon as she was able to hold a pencil, the imaginative Madeleine started writing. Having read all the books she had, she created her own stories and poetry. Her father’s old manual typewriter was eventually passed along to her, which furthered her efforts as a novelist. But in 1930, Madeleine’s life changed when her parents moved to Europe; she was deposited at Chatelard, an elite girls’ boarding school in Switzerland. Besides missing her family terribly, she didn’t fit in with the boarding school cliques and couldn’t stand having no private space. She was forced to develop a “force field of silence” within which she “could go on writing my stories and my poems and dreaming my dreams,” which in time helped her become a writer, she later said.
In 1933, the whole family moved back to the US. Madeleine was soon sent away to another boarding school in Charleston, South Carolina. Although making friends was still challenging, she was able to find a place for herself at Ashley Hall. She joined the drama club, both performing and trying her hand as a playwright, following in her father’s footsteps. Her interest in various kinds of writing became a consuming passion. But her life was changed again when death touched her family, first taking her grandmother; then just before her eighteenth birthday, word came that her father was in the hospital, desperately ill with pneumonia. Young Madeleine traveled to Jacksonville to say farewell, but he had died by the time she arrived. Disconsolate, she pledged to herself in her journal that she had to succeed with her writing for her father’s sake as well as her own. A faraway or absent father marked a number of her novels; this is seen in A Wrinkle in Time, in which Meg, the teenaged heroine, rescues her father and triumphs over evil by the power of love.
Madeleine went on to graduate from Smith College with a BA in English in 1941 and moved back to New York to begin her theater career. On tour and on Broadway, she stole time to write while waiting in the wings, making use of her internal cloak of silence. Her first novel, The Small Rain (1945), was hailed as “evidence of a fresh new talent” by the New York Times. Funds from sales of the novel kept the wolf from the door for some years, and Ilsa, her second novel, saw print in 1946. That same year, she met and married fellow actor Hugh Franklin; they moved to a quaint farmhouse in Goshen, Connecticut, which they named “Crosswicks” after her father’s childhood home, and started a family. They bought the old Goshen general store, which she helped to run while also holding down full-time parenting duties and writing novels part-time. She later admitted that her force field of silence did fail in one set of circumstances: interruptions from crawling youngsters.
Nevertheless, she continued writing, and while a 1950s housewife, managed a wholly original creation: A Wrinkle in Time was both different from anything she’d ever written and distinct from anything by any author. This masterwork came after a time when she doubted herself both as a writer (since her works weren’t selling) and as a homemaker, with fifties expectations of domestic perfection dogging her. During her crisis, a minister advised her to read religious tomes, but they only bored her; eventually, though, she found herself reinspired by physics. Reading Heisenberg, Einstein, and Planck, she found herself recalling her earliest memory: seeing the starry sky by the seashore one magically clear night as a tiny child. She found a mysticism within these contemplations of natural law and the beauty of creation, and in the writings that followed, repeatedly expressed this joining of scientific knowledge with the realm of the spiritual.
L’Engle’s journals of the years previous to her breakthrough novel reflect its themes, from pondering her own shortcomings to the implications of relativity. She created a tale of the daughter of an unusual and creative family, with a father who had been torn from her and teachers who underestimated her, confronting an evil that controlled people by convincing them that not conforming was the problem. She eloquently expressed the interconnectedness of all things in her engaging work.
But editors didn’t think there was a market for the hard-to-categorize novel, and it took two years before L’Engle found a publisher who’d take a chance on it, with dozens of rejection slips on the way there. She inwardly reflected, “I know [this] is a good book.…. This is my psalm of praise to life, my stand for life against death.” In 1962, it at last saw print; though well reviewed, conservative evangelicals claimed it promoted witchcraft and ‘New Age’ spirituality and tried to have it removed from school libraries and Christian bookstores. L’Engle was disappointed that her book and its four sequels were targeted as controversial, since evangelicals had no problem with the popular Narnia series. A Wrinkle in Time now holds the contrasting distinctions of being one of the most banned American novels, as well as selling over sixteen million copies (and counting) in more than forty languages and winning the prestigious 1963 Newbery Medal.
Its success changed her life; the family, now including three children, moved to an apartment in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, keeping Crosswicks as a refuge for time away from the city. Madeleine volunteered as a church librarian, establishing a daily routine of work, worship, and writing accompanied by her Irish setters, and her husband Hugh returned to acting. She went on to write more than two dozen more books, as well as giving back to her community by on occasion giving free workshops on the writer’s craft, at times with author friends, at the Episcopal cathedral where she did volunteer work. L’Engle joined the rarified list of writers who are not only recognized as literary rock stars while still alive, but live long enough to enjoy it. In the four decades that followed, she was able to watch as the series that began with A Wrinkle in Time inspired young people, particularly girls, and positively shifted the landscape for both novels with female protagonists and female writers of speculative fiction. During those years, her fan base mushroomed as she achieved further recognition: a National Book Award, the National Humanities Medal, no less than seventeen honorary doctorates, and much more, including a 2018 major motion picture film adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time.
In 1970, Hugh, who had acted in series including Dark Shadows, found career success when he was cast as Dr. Charles Tyler in the pilot of All My Children, where he continued for thirteen years. He was often buttonholed by autograph-seeking fans when in public, which amused his less-recognizable wife.
In later life, L’Engle traveled extensively, appearing at schools and colleges, literary festivals, religious conferences, retreats, particularly women’s retreats, and doing children’s book tours. She was a charismatic speaker who employed her theater background to good effect, even using props. Even after her husband’s 1986 demise, she kept on with writing, speaking, and literary events as well as socializing with friends and family well beyond the milestone of turning eighty, until her death in 2007.
A book, too, can be a star, explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.
Madeleine L’Engle
