Our column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. 

In 1854, one of America’s most popular newspaper columnists, the pseudonymous Fanny Fern, published Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of The Present Time, an autobiographical novel so thinly veiled as to be downright scandalous. In a preface, Fern announced that her book was “entirely at variance with all set rules for novel-writing,” eschewing an intricate plot, elaborate descriptions, and cliff-hanging suspense. Instead, the author likened herself to a casual visitor, dropping by unannounced with gossip to share—and, clearly, some scores to settle. Fanny Fern’s identity had been an increasingly open secret, but now the life of the woman born Sara Payson Willis in Portland, Maine, in 1811, was revealed, yoked to that of the novel’s long-suffering, noble heroine. Yoked, too, and thoroughly skewered, were Willis’s family: her monstrous mother-in-law, her mean and hypocritical father, and especially her brother, Nathaniel Parker Willis. A famous man of letters and newspaper proprietor, “N.P.” was flayed in the pages of the novel via the character of Ruth’s brother Hyacinth Ellet, a fop, fortune-hunter, and fraud.

Unlike many sentimental fictions of the time, Fern’s book did not claim to impart any obvious moral lesson. Instead, the author wanted to “fan into flame … the faded embers of hope” among readers who felt abandoned and abused—who were, like her heroine, victims of fate rather than of their own failings. Ruth starts the story a lucky young woman: intelligent, beautiful, and about to marry a man she loves. We meet her on the eve of her wedding, reflecting back on her unhappy childhood as an awkward, solitary child, who craved true love but was surrounded by people who cared only for flattery. She appears to have triumphed over her past, however, in a marriage that is blissfully happy. It can’t even be marred by the obsessive malice of her husband’s parents, who are determined to see the worst in Ruth. Their power is limited—until Ruth is widowed. Then she is vulnerable to the neglect and cruelty of her in-laws and her own family. She struggles to keep herself and her two young daughters housed and fed, trying all the limited employment options open to a woman, while her family members duck and twist to avoid providing for them. At her lowest ebb, Ruth decides to become a freelance journalist.

In the second half of the book, Ruth and her creator slowly claw back pride and power, as the sentimental tale transforms itself into a fantasy of vengeance for every downtrodden and underestimated Victorian woman. “I tell you that placid Ruth is a smouldering volcano,” her mother-in-law observes, reluctantly admitting that she’s met her match. One hard-won draft at a time, Ruth ascends to fame and fortune, vanquishes her familial and professional enemies, reclaims the daughter her in-laws tricked her into giving up, and leaves her bleak city lodgings for a country home, paid for with her own pen.

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Our column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors.

The French writer Inès Cagnati was not unknown during her lifetime, but she was deeply unwilling to play the public role that helps a writer secure a place in the canon, or to spread her fame beyond national borders. Her three novels, written over the course of the seventies, each won or was nominated for France’s most prestigious literary prizes, but the recent New York Review Books edition of Free Day (Le jour de congé, her 1973 debut), is the first English translation. The irony of her embrace by the French literary establishment lies in Cagnati’s deep sense of alienation from the country in which she was born and raised. The daughter of Italian immigrant farmworkers, Cagnati grew up poor and isolated in the small town of Monclar, in southwestern France. She spoke no French until she went to school, and although she eventually became a teacher and a novelist in the language, she described her naturalization as a French citizen as a “tragedy.” The weight of multiple forms of estrangement—of language, culture, class, and gender—settled heavily on her as a child and shaped her as a novelist.

The popular vision of rural southern France as a place of sun-dappled ease and beauty is not the southern France that appears in Cagnati’s books; hers is a place where tough, alienated people scratch out a thankless existence. Cagnati’s parents were part of a wave of immigration from Italy to southwestern France between the wars, agricultural workers who were lured by the promise of lush and abundant farmland to fill the gap left by the twin depopulating forces of World War I and mass migration to cities. Faced with a “marshy, rocky,” unforgiving reality, they nonetheless dug in and helped revive the rural economy. By the time Cagnati was born in 1937, more than eighty thousand Italians were living in the region around Monclar, and running more than half of the farms. Yet because the stories of poor rural people, often unable to read and write, are easily overlooked, it’s a period and place that could have been forgotten. Cagnati’s novels are of primary importance in shaping the memory and bearing witness to this history. They help complicate the widely held French faith that the country’s rural areas hold some kind of true and unsullied national identity.

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Our column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. Originally begun by Emma Garman, it will now be written by Joanna Scutts. 

Mary Heaton Vorse.

Mary Heaton Vorse, prolific novelist, journalist, and labor activist, spent most of her long life trying to escape her upper-middle-class origins. The heroine of her 1918 novel I’ve Come To Stay calls the inescapability of a bourgeois upbringing life’s “blue serge lining”—a reference to the practical fabric that protected the inside of coats and suits, forming a barrier between the self and the world. The lining stands for the inevitable conformity of class, getting, if not quite under the wearer’s skin, then next to it, holding her upright, constraining her imagination and her freedom. Camilla is constantly on the run from it. She embraces the pretensions of bohemian Greenwich Village—anarchist friends, artistic aspirations, a Polish violinist lover, and nights spent in smoky bars. She repeatedly rejects her neighbor and suitor, the equally middle-class Ambrose Ingraham, out of fear that he will wrap her up in blue serge once again, and strangle her with it. Subtitled A Love Comedy of Bohemia, the novel is more of an archaeological find than a timeless classic. Yet its ironic depiction of young people caught between ambition and gender-based expectation dramatizes the central conflict of its author’s life, and that of her generation of American “New Women.”

Mary Heaton was born rich and rebellious in 1874, and spent most of her childhood in Amherst, Massachusetts, a place that was, by contrast, rural and religious. She was close to her bookish father and idolized her distant mother, Ellen, who paid more attention to her five older children from her first marriage. Mary watched her intelligent, energetic mother struggle to fill her days with meaningful activity. Other women of her era and class threw themselves into social reform and the fight for women’s suffrage, but Ellen believed too many people already had the vote, and that a woman’s place was in the home. This did not preclude plenty of European travel and culture to burnish her daughters’ marriage prospects, and Mary had a rich, if haphazard education, bolstered by voracious private reading. Although she belonged to a generation of women who were breaking down the doors to academia and the professions, she had no interest in submitting to the rules of a women’s college. She longed for a greater freedom, and begged to go to Paris to study art.

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Our column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors.

Iris Origo (courtesy La Foce)

Iris Origo might be the most self-effacing writer ever to gain renown as a diarist. Her reputation rests on her unique perceptions of others. As an aristocratic landowner in mid-twentieth-century Italy, she bore witness to all strata of Italian society during the long rise and precipitous fall of fascism.

The external circumstances of her life were unquestionably extraordinary. She participated in the final glittering years of prewar Europe’s cosmopolitan society; transformed a region of Italian countryside into a home still visited today for its beauty; and housed, during World War II, escaped prisoners and fleeing refugees. Her writing about this time evinced truths rarely seen in the narratives of historical texts, and did so through illustrative anecdotes that captured the people of the period and what they were feeling. In her diary of the years leading up to the war, A Chill in the Air, there is, for instance, an ever-increasing sense of being shut off from the rest of the world. Letters from England arrive a month late. What little reading material people can access becomes restricted. Origo recounts meeting, at a dinner party, a grad student who spends his nights, with fellow students, sitting up copying by hand an illicit New Republic essay about dictatorship. Iris writes of him, “I wish I could convey his odd mixture of childish pride at belonging to ‘the minority’ of real intelligence, and of something very sincere and tragic.” More than simply remain an anecdote about censorship, her observation captures the tragic paradox of this young man’s pride and sincerity, and his powerlessness in the face of what is to come.

A Chill in the Air and the diary that originally made Origo famous during her lifetime, War in Val d’Orcia, both belong to a retinue of Origo works being reissued by New York Review Books. The NYRB has followed up the diaries by publishing Images and Shadows, Origo’s autobiography, this month. Both volumes of diaries were reissued in 2018, two years after Donald Trump’s election and amid the widespread sense that Americans stood to learn something from the rise of fascism. Origo shows us the complacency of the upper classes, the questions over what news is true or false, which bears uncanny resemblance to our own era.

Origo’s autobiography shows that her reticence on personal matters ran deep. Comparing it with Caroline Moorehead’s definitive  biography, Iris Orgio: Marchesa of Val d’Orcia, displays an extensive gallery of omissions. Origo had, over the course of her life, three passionate and protracted affairs with men who get no mention in her autobiography. But her hesitation to talk about these relationships is not simply out of propriety; Moorehead also uncovers an intense friendship with a woman named Elsa Dallolio that was a major part of Origo’s late life. Her unwillingness to allow her intimate relationships into her autobiography exemplifies how Origo was always least interested in herself as a subject. She shifted her focus entirely to the people around her, and it was as much a benefit to her diaries as it was a detriment to her autobiography. But ultimately, her reserved narrative voice produced empathetic, sensitive work that uniquely illuminates a crux of modern history.

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Our monthly column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. 

Cora Sandel

“In everything one writes,” said the Norwegian novelist Cora Sandel, “there is woven in a thread from one’s own life. It can be so hidden that nobody notices it, but it is there and it must be there, I suppose, if it is to be seen as a piece of living writing.” Sandel, born Sara Fabricius in Kristiania (now Oslo), tried to avoid undue conjecture on her fiction’s autobiographical basis by using a pseudonym. When she published her first novel, Alberta and Jacob, in 1926 at age forty-six, she gave her publisher no author photo, nor did she ever agree to be interviewed on television. The two other books in the acclaimed Alberta trilogy appeared shortly thereafter: Alberta and Freedom in 1931, and Alberta Alone in 1939. After Alberta and Jacob drew a wide and appreciative Scandinavian readership, an uncle wrote to her in Sweden, where she was living, to tell her: “I have just read a book by a woman who calls herself Cora Sandel. Everyone here says that it is you.” He had always known, he added, that she would achieve something significant.

The demands placed on today’s authors, the all but mandatory self-disclosure and endless media promotion, would have horrified Sandel. “I have always been of the opinion,” she said, “that no more needs to be expected of an author than she should write books.” Though she lived in Paris for fifteen years she didn’t, on principle, engineer an encounter with Colette, whom she idolized and whose novel The Vagabond she translated into Norwegian. “I considered it too presumptuous to have friends arrange a meeting—Colette was forced to meet so many people anyway.” Sandel valued solitude above all, and spent long hours in silent contemplation of the precise words she needed to capture a mood or sentiment. In the final novel of the trilogy, the eponymous writer-heroine reflects of her manuscript: “Each word had come floating up singly from the unknown depths, where the truth hides itself and then rises again, in different guise, unrecognizable as a dream, but irrefutable.”

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Our monthly column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors.

Ingeborg Bachmann. Photo: Heinz Bachmann.

In early 1973, the year she died, the celebrated Austrian poet and novelist Ingeborg Bachmann visited Auschwitz and Birkenau during a reading tour of Poland. She remarked: “I don’t understand how one can live with them nearby … There is nothing to say. They are simply there, and it leaves you speechless.” Bachmann had spent her career grappling with the inadequacy of language, in pursuit of the inexpressible. “If we had the word,” she argued in a 1959 speech, “if we had language, we would not need the weapons.” She believed in the potential of poetic language to expand the limitations of communication, but had become disillusioned with poetry as a medium. “Believe me,” says the writer-narrator of Bachmann’s cult-classic 1971 novel, Malina, “expression is insanity, it arises out of our insanity.”

Bachmann was twelve when Germany invaded Austria in 1938, but her schoolteacher father already belonged to the Austrian branch of the National Socialist Party. She later described the marching of Hitler’s troops into her southernmost border state, Carinthia, as the “specific moment which destroyed my childhood … It was something so terrible, that my memory begins with that day: with that early sorrow.” When World War II ended she was nineteen, and a fervent leftist. Her diary entries from the summer of 1945 were published posthumously alongside letters from Jack Hamesh, the object of her innocent yet deeply formative first love.

Hamesh was an Austrian Jew who, having fled Vienna for the British Protectorate of Palestine as an eighteen-year-old orphan in 1938, returned to Austria with the liberating British army. Though Bachmann and the young soldier were from such different worlds, they recognized each other’s loneliness and alienation. They bonded over conversations about literature, “Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig and Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal … he told me he never thought he’d find a young girl in Austria who’d read all that despite her Nazi upbringing.” (Mann, Zweig, and Arthur Schnitzler were all banned under the Third Reich.) It was “the loveliest summer of my life,” the teenage Bachmann recorded in her diary, “and even if I live to be a hundred it will still be the loveliest spring and summer.” In a 1946 letter from Tel Aviv, where he had settled, Hamesh wondered: “Was our life together just a chance episode? I felt it was something much deeper … for me it was proof that despite everything that has overtaken our two peoples there is still a way—the way of love and understanding.”

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