Literary Ladies Guide

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896 – 1953), the Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and memoirist was known for her writings about her adopted home of Cross Creek, Florida, where she bought an orange grove in the late 1920s and lived for many decades.

She was fascinated by the people and local culture, and gathered her observations into Cross Creek, the memoir discussed here, and a compilation of recipes, Cross Creek Cookery. Both were published in 1942.

Rawlings was attracted to the people of Cross Creek, who were called crackers (though at the time, this wasn’t a disparaging term). At first they were wary of her as an outsider and  resisted her eager questions and interest. Eventually they warmed to her, and she began recording detailed descriptions of the people, their dialect, the flora and fauna, and the local food and folkways. Read More→

The Professor’s House by Willa Cather, published in 1925, is one of this American master’s mid-career novels. The story of Professor Godfrey St. Peter, one might say it tells of a midlife crisis before the term was coined.

When the professor and his wife move into a new house, he begins questioning the path that his life has taken. His daughters have grown up, and he loses much of his will to live, not finding anything to look forward to. 

Though it hasn’t achieved the enduring stature of some of Cather’s better-known works, The Professor’s House, in her skilled hands it becomes a touching story of personal and spiritual self-reflection. Read More→

Lucy Maud (L.M.) Montgomery, author of the ever-popular Anne of Green Gables, was a keen letter-writer. Her letters to George Boyd MacMillan over their thirty-nine year friendship show the full range of her interests, from domestic concerns, her cats, and gardening, to her professional literary career as best-selling author.

When L.M. Montgomery receives  the first letter from G.B. MacMillan (in 1903), she is coping with her domestic responsibilities and is struggling to establish herself as a poet and short-story writer with major American and Canadian magazines. Read More→

For Anaïs Nin, writing was essential as breathing. This need inspired her multi-volume The Diary of Anaïs Nin series. What started as a voyage of self-discovery eventually transcended the personal into the universal.

Her diaries became a touchstones for a generation of women (and Nin became a feminist icon), not merely one woman’s private quest for identity and meaning.

By the standards of today’s confessional media, Nin’s frank writings may no longer seem as revolutionary as they did just a generation ago. In the final volume of the Diary (Volume Seven, 1966 –1974), she delighted in sharing snippets from the countless letters of gratitude she received from women everywhere, in all walks of life: Read More→

Even after Louisa May Alcott had already achieved fame as an author, she continued to answer letters from readers.  Louisa seemed rather smitten with her own narrative and didn’t mind repeating it for her own benefit and that of others.

She was generous in her advice to aspiring writers — readers of her work, especially young women — who sought words of wisdom for achieving success.

On occasion, Louisa professed disdain for writing what she called “moral tales,” but any reluctance on her part gave way to willingness to write them anyway, because, as she said, they paid well. The money she earned allowed her to care for her dear mother and family.

There’s no easy road to success

Here’s a response Louisa sent to one female reader, a Miss Churchill, asking her advice on achieving success. It was written on Christmas Day, circa 1878:

“I can only say to you as I do to the many young writers who ask for advice —there is no easy road to successful authorship; it has to be earned by long and patient labor, many disappointments, uncertainties and trials. Success is often a lucky accident, coming to those who may not deserve it, while others who do have to wait & hope till they have earned it. This is the best sort and the most enduring.”

. . . . . . . . . .

I worked for twenty years …

“I worked for twenty years poorly paid, little known, and quite without any ambition but to eke out a living, as I chose to support myself and begin to do it at sixteen.

This long drill was of use, and when I wrote Hospital Sketches [see LMA’s Civil War Journals] by the beds of my soldier boys in the shape of letters home I had no idea that I was taking the first step toward what is called fame. Read More→

Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886) wrote some 1,800 poems, though only a handful were published during her lifetime. Here we’ll look at ten of her well-loved poems — though choosing is always tough. 

Dickinson remains something of a mystery, which fuels the continued fascination with her work and life. In The Penguin Companion to American Literature (1971), Eric Mottram offered this assessment of her poetic practices:

“She hoarded her poems, among them love poems, apparently addressed to Benjamin Newton, a student in her father’s office, with whom she corresponded until his death in 1853, and Charles Wadsworth, a distinguished married clergyman who may have left America because of her. Read More→

Moods by Louisa May Alcott was this beloved American author’s first novel (that is, the first that she published under her own name). It came out in 1864 — four years before her breakout Little Women. 

The novel unconventionally presents a “little woman” a true-hearted abolitionist spinster, and a fallen Cuban beauty, their lives intersecting in Alcott’s first major depiction of the “woman problem.”

Sylvia Yule, the heroine of Moods, is a passionate tomboy (as was the author herself) who yearns for adventure. The novel opens as she embarks on a river camping trip with her brother and his two friends, both of whom fall in love with her. These rival suitors, close friends, are modeled on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

Read More→

Charlotte Brontë was fiercely protective of the work and reputations of her literary sisters, Emily Brontë and Anne Brontë, both of whom tragically young of consumption (tuberculosis).

By default, she became the guardian of her sisters’ literary legacy. Following is Charlotte Brontë’s preface to Wuthering Heights, Emily’s only published novel.

The sisters first published their works under pseudonyms, thinking that their work would be more readily accepted for publication and general acceptance. Read More→