Our column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. Read Forough Farrokhzad’s poems “After You” and “Window” in our Summer 2020 issue.

Forough Farrokhzad in 1965 (wikimedia commons)

In 1954, a nineteen-year-old poet walked unannounced into the office of the literary editor of Roshanfekr (The Intellectual), one of Iran’s most prestigious magazines. Her fingers were stained with green ink, and she trembled with nerves as she handed over three poems. One of them, the twelve-line “Sin,” described in explicit detail her affair with the magazine’s editor in chief. Different translations give different nuances to the opening of the poem: “I have sinned a rapturous sin / in a warm enflamed embrace” (Sholeh Wolpé), or “I have sinned, a delectable sin, / In an embrace which was ardent, like fire” (Hasan Javadi and Susan Sallée) or “I sinned / it was a most lustful sin / I sinned in arms sturdy as iron, / hot like fire and vengeful” (Farzaneh Milani). Across these variations, there are a few scandalous constants: the heat, the embrace, the pleasure, and the boldly unashamed I. The speaker declares herself as a sinner, but there is no repentance in the poem, no punishment. She is not her lover’s victim, but a joyous coconspirator, exhilarated by her power to arouse him: “Lust enflamed his eyes, / red wine trembled in the cup, / my body, naked and drunk, / quivered softly on his breast” (Wolpé).

The magazine printed the poem. At a time when many Iranian poets wrote under pseudonyms, the author of “Sin” not only used her real name, but her poem appeared alongside her photograph and a short biography, which revealed her to be a married mother of a two-year-old son. It also described her physical appearance, in sexualized terms, drawing attention to her “disheveled hair” and “penetrating eyes.” Here was a young woman confessing to a sexual awakening in the arms of a man who was not her husband, a deliberate “reversal of a thousand years of Persian literature” written by men about their lovers, at a time when autobiographical writing by women was nonexistent in Iran. The biography collapsed any distance between the loving wife and the libidinous poet, implying that this was not a work of imagination, but a report on experience—making readers wonder what their own wives might be getting up to.

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

Alice Dunbar-Nelson

In April 1895, the up-and-coming poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, whom Frederick Douglass had dubbed “the most promising young colored man in America,” saw a poem by a young writer, Alice Ruth Moore, accompanied by a photograph in which she appeared stylish and beautiful. He wrote to her immediately at her home on Palmyra Street in New Orleans, expressing his admiration, and they began an intense epistolary courtship that lasted two years. Six months in, Paul was declaring. “I love you and have loved you since the first time I saw your picture.” He called Alice “the sudden realization of an ideal!” She combined beauty with literary talent and the feminine accomplishments appropriate to an upper-class young woman of the day: “Do you recite? Do you sing? Don’t you dance divinely?” They modeled themselves self-consciously after Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, another pair of lovers and writers whose romance began by letter. Paul referred to “This Mr. and Mrs. Browning affair of ours,” and Alice, after they’d married, reflected on her role as a wife who was at once muse, colleague, and practical support: “We worked together, read together, and I flattered myself that I helped him in his work. I was his amanuensis and secretary, and he was good enough to write poem after poem ‘for me,’ he said.” The Dunbars embodied the aspirational ideal of the educated, cultured African American, allowed access to the white halls of fame and power as long as they were willing to remain, flattened and fixed, in the roles of representatives of their race.

Such a role did not allow for physical passion and disorder. When the couple met in person, the refinements of their written courtship became scrawled over with violence. In November 1897, in what Paul described as “one damned night of folly,” he raped Alice, leaving her with internal injuries. Five months later, the couple eloped. The marriage lasted four years, and ended as violently as it had begun, with a drunken beating. Alice left, and never returned. Paul tried to woo her back with letters, but she answered only once, with a single word delivered by telegram: No. When he died of tuberculosis in February 1906, at the age of thirty-three, she found out by reading a notice in the newspaper. Yet despite their estrangement, Alice worked hard after Paul’s death to keep his reputation and his work alive, reading his poetry in public and, in 1920, editing The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer, a hefty anthology of “the best prose and poetic selections by and about the Negro race,” including many selections by Paul, but also her own poetry and selections by writers from James Weldon Johnson to Abraham Lincoln, with the “Caucasian” writers denoted by an asterisk. (Alice’s portrait, rather than Paul’s, appears as a frontispiece.)

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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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