By Taylor Jasmine | On March 20, 2017 | Updated October 4, 2022 | Comments (0)
Excerpted from review of The Violent Bear it Away by Flannery O’Connor in The Kansas City Star (Kansas City, Missouri), March, 1960: Flannery O’Connor, a comparatively young Southern woman, writes with such skill and control that to praise her novel to excess would come easily and willingly.
Suffice it to say that The Violent Bear It Away is the best of her three books and that a comparison between this neo-Gothic tale and the novels written by William Faulkner at the height of his literary powers, could in no way harm Miss O’Connor. Read More→
By Adam Burgess | On March 13, 2017 | Updated October 4, 2022 | Comments (1)
Sanditon, though unfinished, is perhaps Jane Austen’s most exciting, unusual, and promising piece of literature. Unlike The Watsons, whose plot and ending can be relatively inferred, Sanditon, the novel she worked on in 1817, the year of her death, is quite different from any of her other stories.
The narrative of Sanditon could probably have followed a variety of paths, so predicting its resolution is difficult to do.
The story’s heroine, Charlotte Heywood, is a somewhat-exaggeratedly sensible young woman. She comes to the small coastal tourist town of Sanditon upon the urgings and guardianship of its proprietor, who is attempting to build the town’s reputation. Read More→
By Susan Bailey | On March 6, 2017 | Updated October 4, 2022 | Comments (2)
This article is part of a series of posts on Work A Story of Experience as found on the Louisa May Alcott is My Passion blog. To read all the posts associated with this book, explore this link.
“…Work is an expression of Alcott’s feminist principles and a major effort toward synthesizing in popular, readable form the broad set of beliefs encompassing family, education, suffrage, labor and the moral reform of social life that defined feminist ideology in the nineteenth century.” (from Critical Essays on Louisa May Alcott edited by Madeleine Stern) Read More→
By Susan Bailey | On March 6, 2017 | Updated October 17, 2022 | Comments (2)
Historical fiction is a risky genre, especially if the author is tackling a beloved American classic. Geraldine Brooks presents a bold and provocative story centered on the “shadow” character of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Mr. March, in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, March (Penguin Books, 2005).
She takes that risk a step further by fleshing out Marmee, the quintessential mother figure. March succeeds in taking characters of mythical proportion and bringing them down to earth, turning them into living, breathing people, vastly more interesting, with decided with feet of clay.
Reader beware: you must be willing to set aside any pre-conceived, black and white notions about Little Women in order to appreciate March. Brooks places you in a decidedly gray-shaded world which is not for the faint of heart. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On February 26, 2017 | Updated October 8, 2022 | Comments (0)
Dorothy West (1907 – 1998) was the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance movement that was in full swing in 1920s New York City. She was quite young in the movement’s heyday and was affectionately called “the kid” by fellow authors and artists.
Dorothy quickly became known for well-crafted short stories. Her first novel, The Living is Easy, didn’t appear until 1948; then there was a gap of some forty-seven years until her last novel, The Wedding, was published in 1995.
Dorothy West was part of the circle of upper-class black residents of Martha’s Vineyard, having lived there since 1943. She drew from her background to create this slim yet impactful novel. One of her neighbors was Jackie Kennedy Onassis, who pressed her to finish this book. Read More→
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