Classic Works from Women Writers
Page 1
Classic Works
from
Women Writers
Classic Works
from
Women Writers
Introduction by A. J. Odasso
© 2018 Canterbury Classics
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Publisher: Peter Norton
Associate Publisher: Ana Parker
Publishing/Editorial Team: April Farr, Kelly Larsen, Kathryn C. Dalby
Editorial Team: JoAnn Padgett, Melinda Allman, Dan Mansfield, Traci Douglas
Production Team: Jonathan Lopes, Rusty von Dyl
Cover and endpaper design by Ray Caramanna
eBook ISBN: 978-1-68412-562-3
eBook Edition: July 2018
CONTENTS
Introduction
The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Agatha Christie (1915)
The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892)
Why I Wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1913)
Letter to Fanny Knight, Jane Austen (1814)
Cousin Phillis, Elizabeth Gaskell (1864)
Luella Miller, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1903)
Life, Charlotte Brontë (1846)
Stars, Emily Brontë (1846)
Dreams, Anne Brontë (1846)
Silly Novels by Lady Novelists, George Eliot (1856)
From The Romance of the Forest, Ann Radcliffe (1791)
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (1818)
Contemplations, Anne Bradstreet (1650)
A Call, Grace MacGowan Cooke (1906)
Goblin Market, Christina Rossetti (1862)
On the Gulls’ Road, Willa Cather (1908)
Poems, Emily Dickinson (1890)
The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf (1915)
Renascence, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1912)
Xingu, Edith Wharton (1916)
Patterns, Amy Lowell (1917)
The Garden Party, Katherine Mansfield (1922)
Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein (1914)
The Shadowy Third, Ellen Glasgow (1916)
Afterward, Edith Wharton (1910)
Poems, Sara Teasdale (1920)
INTRODUCTION
The women whose works are collected in this volume represent no less than a selection of the most distinct and artistically accomplished voices to emerge in Anglophone literature between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Doubtless, the reader will find a familiar entry point and touchstone in Agatha Christie, whose broad and brilliant appeal has earned her the undisputed title of best-selling writer of all time; likewise, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is now recognized as the founder of an entire genre. In previous centuries, the survival of women writers’ work with their names attached—recognition beyond the finality of death—was relatively rare and therefore a luxury. Although such accomplished figures as Marie de France, Margery Kempe, and Julian of Norwich have survived from the Middle Ages with both their names and bodies of work startlingly intact, what sets the women in these pages apart is not only the prolific and accessible nature of their work but also our access to details about their lives.
In the course of this literary tour, you will encounter names both familiar and unfamiliar. What makes these women stand out is that their works were recognized for their exceptional merit and that they were published and circulated accordingly. Each of them led a diverse and active life beyond print, engaging with both their texts and their audiences in the public sphere. What’s more, their triumphs and losses informed their work at every turn.
As with so many literary journeys, it is often most enlightening to begin at the end. In the case of this volume, starting at the end helps us to appreciate why an anthology of classic writing by women is both timely and crucial. At the back of this book, the reader will discover three short poems—“Barter,” “There Will Come Soft Rains,” and “Winter Stars”—from Sara Teasdale. Writing against the ominous, all-pervasive backdrop of World War I, Teasdale underscores, with dazzling and introspective precision, the imperative of finding transcendence in what fleeting beauties the world has to offer. In the final stanzas of “Winter Stars,” which appeared in her 1920 collection Flame and Shadow, she writes:
From windows in my father’s house,
Dreaming my dreams on winter nights,
I watched Orion as a girl
Above another city’s lights.
Years go, dreams go, and youth goes too,
The world’s heart breaks beneath its wars,
All things are changed, save in the east
The faithful beauty of the stars.
The intrinsic musicality of Teasdale’s language was consistently praised by her contemporaries and critics, although she never attained what might be considered “major poet” status in her short lifetime. After a comfortable St. Louis childhood marked by solitary confinement due to illness, a divorce sought out of intense loneliness resulting from her husband Ernst Filsinger’s constant business travel, and some years of wistful rekindled friendship in New York with former suitor and poet Vachel Lindsay, Teasdale committed suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills in 1933. She was forty-eight.
What is rarely emphasized—let alone celebrated—in classroom discussion of Teasdale’s verse is that she was the recipient of the first Columbia Poetry Prize in 1918 (for her fourth collection, Love Songs, published the previous year). This award was later to be renamed the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. It is both shameful and shocking how seldom Teasdale is recognized for having been not only the first woman to attain this coveted honor but also the first winner of the prize. Teasdale’s verse at the end of this volume—when considered alongside the details of her brief, fraught life—demonstrate precisely why an anthology on the subject of women’s writing remains more urgent than ever. It is imperative that we recognize the transcendence of these writers and their works.
Traversing backward through these pages from the precedent set by Teasdale’s example, the reader will find still more work from women poets who, although their names will likely be recognizable from standard high school and university English syllabuses, are rarely given the depth of consideration they are due in comparison to the time spent analyzing their male counterparts. Gertrude Stein’s 1914 experimental Modernist volume, Tender Buttons, is a prime example. A sequence of meditations on everyday objects, consumables, and places, its premise is deceptively simple. Thanks to Stein’s playful, riddlelike, and highly unorthodox use of language, the words for her subjects take on as much sensory weight as the concrete things they signify.
Stein—not only a poet but also a playwright, novelist, and art collector—spent her seventy-two colorful years between Pennsylvania, California, and France. After making Paris her
home in 1903, Stein and her partner, Alice B. Toklas, hosted an interdisciplinary arts salon frequented by such luminaries as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. Stein authored more than fifty works across the genres in which she worked to staggering acclaim. Among them was her 1903 Q.E.D. (Quod Erat Demonstrandum), one of the first coming-out narratives ever to be published.
Her longevity and literary successes stand as a testament to her immense talent and incisive wit, as well as to the groundbreaking contributions she made to the Modernist movement. Her forays into both prose and verse were highly experimental, frequently stream-of-consciousness in narrative style, and answered to such approaches in visual art as Cubism, symbolism, collage, and other nontraditional movements. As an avid collector of modern art, particularly works from Picasso, Stein sought to thoroughly document her process in the fabric of her text. The images she creates are inimitably vivid.
Stein, like her contemporary Teasdale, also frequently penned lyrical ruminations, as well as scathing criticism, upon the subject of war—as did Massachusetts poet Amy Lowell, who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926 (for What’s O’Clock). Lowell’s poem in this volume, “Patterns,” begins as a bucolic, stiff-starched stroll through a garden filled with daffodils and lime trees. However, the lovers’ tryst at the heart of this narrative spins off, ominously mazelike, into weary and scathingly satirical territory. Lowell’s closing lines in particular are marked by her characteristic, refreshing bluntness. Known for being brash and outspoken even at school, Lowell went on to defy her wealthy family’s disapproval of educated women. Although she never pursued a higher degree, she became an avid reader and book collector. Lowell’s public image was larger than life. Short and rotund, she wore high-necked dark gowns, a pince-nez, and kept her hair in a tightly wound bun. She smoked cigars constantly, gave public readings of both her own work and that of other poets, and frequently butted heads with critics. An unstoppable force with frequent presence in the press, she even graced the cover of Time magazine on March 2, 1925. Lowell’s work is a master class in observation—both in outward voyeurism and in keen self-awareness.
Where the poets of this volume tend to address the experiences of feminine identity and existence through intensely personal (and often linguistically and structurally elaborate) micro-narratives, the prose writers develop their arguments in far more outward-facing frameworks. While poems can and often do contain dialogue and plot structure, the short stories and novels included in these pages convey a number of the same aspirations, observations, and themes on a broader scale. They engage with, and memorably express, the writers’ experiences of both womanhood and humanity. Each of these works, while crucial in a feminist context, transcends the experience of gendered existence. They ask and seek to answer universal questions.
Mary Wollestonecraft Shelley, the mother of modern science fiction, masterfully and scathingly critiques a world dominated by fatal hubris in Frankenstein. When the reanimated, so-called monster is abandoned by his neurotic and self-centered creator, he struggles to comprehend the cruelty he faces at every turn. Through Shelley’s masterful use of suspense and satire, the monster’s experience speaks to the experience of every marginalized population. Embedded in the monster’s struggle for acceptance, legitimacy, and the recognition of his full humanity is the experience not of inherently lacking a voice, but of actively being denied one. Similarly, no female character in Shelley’s seminal tour de force—from Elizabeth to Justine to the ill-fated female monster—has complete agency, let alone a say in her (inevitably tragic) fate. Shelley’s parents were staunch feminist/humanist writers who encouraged her talents from childhood, which no doubt accounts for the success of her ambitious, impressive writing career.
Even a century later, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose famous “The Yellow Wallpaper” joins Shelley’s novel as a masterpiece of both physical and psychological horror, struggled to define her sense of self and make herself heard. Raised in a poor but supportive extended family that included Harriet Beecher Stowe (one of Gilman’s paternal aunts), as a child Gilman was constantly berated at school for being what her teachers considered a poor student. Eventually, Gilman’s tenacity and broad scope of natural creative inclinations permitted her to enroll in the Rhode Island School of Design. A talented painter, she was able to support herself as an artist of trade cards (precursors to the modern business card), and she also supplemented her income by tutoring students in a range of subjects. Following her marriage to Charles Walter Stetson and the birth of her daughter, Katharine Beecher Stetson, Gilman suffered a severe bout of postpartum depression. From this experience, “The Yellow Wallpaper” emerged; the captivating follow-up essay in which Gilman explained her writing process is also included in this anthology. Gilman’s unflinching explorations of paranoia, mental illness, and self-doubt speak of being cast as an unreliable narrator in her own existence.
The inclusion of Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles as an opener for this volume states an unapologetic and necessary agenda from the beginning. Responsible for sixty-six detective novels and fourteen short-story collections, as well as six romance novels and a play penned under the alias of Mary Westmacott, Christie is the undisputed best-selling author of all time—with over two billion sales to her name. Penned in 1916, Styles was Christie’s first published novel. Without it, the mystery genre would never have acquired Hercule Poirot, the fictional detective whose reputation reaches the heights achieved by Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin. In comparison to many of the women whose works appear here, Christie seems to have enjoyed a relatively content and stable life. The one notable exception occurred after her husband, Archibald Christie, asked for a divorce, when the writer vanished without a trace for ten days. The discovery of her car, driver’s license, and clothes at Newlands Corner (a remote picnic spot above a chalk cliff in Surrey, England) led to wild speculation, but the writer was eventually located safe and sound in a Yorkshire hotel. Christie’s later life, marked by a happier second marriage and exotic travel, resulted in such masterpieces as Murder on the Orient Express. No woman’s life is an open book, and Christie’s was certainly not without episodes of heartache and a subplot of unsolved mystery.
It is worth remembering, too, that humor is as intrinsic to literary craft as the serious. Mary Anne Evans, who wrote in the nineteenth century under the pen name George Eliot, had ample reason to toe the line of levity. In addition to seven novels, the best known of which are The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch, Evans also wrote plays, verse, and essays. An example of the latter included in this anthology, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” lampoons without mercy the subjects upon which women in her day were expected to write. She was a proponent of sincere and realistic storytelling, and this is reflected fiercely in her works of fiction. Dogged by scandal in both marriages and affairs, Evans defiantly excelled in her substantial career as a critic, editor, and writer until she died in 1880.
In another striking departure from fiction, Jane Austen is represented in this volume by a letter she wrote to Fanny Knight on November 30, 1814. Responding to Fanny’s earnest desire for advice on marriage, Austen impressed upon her then twenty-one-year-old niece that no one’s opinion should carry greater weight in such a decision than Fanny’s own. “Impressed with the impossible evil that may arise to [Fanny] from engaging [herself] to him,” Austen implores her niece to exercise caution and prudence and not to rush engagement to her paramour. Concerned about how little opportunity Fanny has had to meet other potential partners, Austen’s heartfelt insights ring true to so many of the themes for which her subtle, witty, and eternally appealing social novels have endured as reader favorites.
More sobering, in some ways, than the presence of several of her contemporaries, Virginia Woolf lends incomparable gravitas with The Voyage Out. Written between 1910 and 1912 and not published until 1915, her debut novel
was produced while Woolf was in an exceptionally vulnerable state. Enduring depressive episodes so intense that at one point she attempted suicide, Woolf fashioned the sea voyage of her protagonist, Rachel Vinrace, as a receptacle for exploration and intersection of such themes as femininity, sexuality, and mortality. It is in this particular work that Woolf seems to have developed her inimitably poetic and unsettling narrative style, which would eventually reach its peak in Mrs. Dalloway—and fittingly, given that The Voyage Out first introduced Clarissa Dalloway as a character. At the time of her death by drowning at the age of fifty-nine, Woolf had written nine novels, forty-six short stories across five collections, and more than twice as many works of creative nonfiction. Where freedom was not possible for her due to social constraints and the constant presence of mental illness, Woolf nonetheless demonstrated that writing offered space in which a marginalized person, with the talent and means to do so, might explore the scope of their identity.
In similar fashion, Elizabeth Gaskell’s (1810–1865) Cousin Phillis demonstrates sterling character development set within an unadorned yet compelling plot. Its restless protagonist, the adolescent Paul Manning, moves to a rural setting in which he becomes acquainted with his mother’s extended family. He learns that his second cousin, Phillis Holman, is struggling with similar anxiety and a sense of displacement as she comes of age. This popular novel was published in four parts, giving it the distinction of having been a wildly successful serial.
The remaining pieces included in this anthology—all works of short fiction—each continue in the vital work of contributing an inimitable style and invaluable perspective. Neither as constrained as verse, nor as sprawling as the average novel, the short story offers a compact framework in which writers, since the form’s coming of age in the nineteenth century, have found freedom to construct self-contained narratives that are readable in a single sitting. As shown in the success of Gaskell’s serialized novel, broadsheets and magazines were an innovative medium through which high-quality fiction was circulated to an increasingly literate public. The cultural elitism that had once acted as a barrier to such access began to disintegrate not only due to affordability and wide availability, but also thanks to the progressive themes frequently explored in the fiction of the day. Women writers were instrumental in addressing social inequalities—not just in the realm of gender, but also in those of race and class.