By Taylor Jasmine | On May 22, 2017 | Updated October 18, 2022 | Comments (0)
Anna Sewell (1820 – 1878) published only one book — Black Beauty — but what a book it was. At age 14, she fell while walking home from school and broke both of her ankles.
The treatment was shoddy, and she never fully recovered. For the remainder of her life she was unable to stand or walk for very long, and endured a great deal of pain.
Having become dependent on horse-drawn carriages to get around, Anna developed an empathy for the horses. Anna grew to love and care deeply about them, as well as that of all of animals. The treatment of horses she observed all around her was often less than humane. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On May 22, 2017 | Updated October 18, 2022 | Comments (0)
From the 1945 Harcourt, Brace, and World edition: In Delta Wedding, Eudora Welty brings into an immediate focus a memorable family, living in the rich Delta land Mississippi in the early 1920s.
“The day was the 10th of September, 1923 — afternoon. Laura McRaven, who was in nine years old, was on her first journey alone. She was going to visit her mother’s people, the Fairchild’s, at the plantation named Shellmound …”
Shellmound was the simple white house filled with the magnificent cousins, like a white bowl spilling over with bright flowers. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On April 23, 2017 | Updated October 17, 2022 | Comments (0)
From the 1970 Scribner’s edition of Madame de Treymes: Four Novelettes by Edith Wharton: The four novellas by Edith Wharton in this volume are Madame de Treymes, The Touchstone, Sanctuary, and Bunner Sisters, written between 1900 and 1916. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On April 21, 2017 | Updated October 17, 2022 | Comments (0)
Dorothy West (1907 – 1998) was the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance movement of the 1920s. The Richer, The Poorer, published in 1995, is collection of her short stories and essays spanning nearly seventy years of West’s writing.
Though she didn’t produce a large body of work, West’s writing is admired for its nuanced views of middle and upper middle-class African-American communities and its examinations of gender, class, and social structure.
Her first novel, The Living is Easy (1948), depicts the life of an upper-class black family. It remained her only novel for decades, until The Wedding was published in 1995, the same year that The Richer, The Poorer was published.
Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On April 10, 2017 | Updated October 4, 2022 | Comments (0)
Description of The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty (1960) adapted from the 1972 Random House edition: Laurel Hand, long absent from the South, comes from Chicago to New Orleans, where her father dies after surgery.
With Fay, the stupid young wife of her father, Laurel returns to her former Mississippi home and stays a few days after the funeral for reunions with old friends. In a night alone in the house she grew up in, she confronts elements of the past and comes to a better understanding of it and of herself and her parents. Read More→
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