{"id":134341,"date":"2019-03-12T11:00:40","date_gmt":"2019-03-12T15:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=134341"},"modified":"2019-03-12T12:07:28","modified_gmt":"2019-03-12T16:07:28","slug":"feminize-your-canon-eliot-bliss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/03\/12\/feminize-your-canon-eliot-bliss\/","title":{"rendered":"Feminize Your Canon: Eliot Bliss"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our monthly column\u00a0Feminize Your Canon<\/a>\u00a0explores the lives of underrated and\u00a0underread female authors. Here, the life of Eliot Bliss, a prolific lesbian writer from the British Caribbean who may have had a strong influence on the work of Jean Rhys.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Eliot Bliss<\/p><\/div>\n

I don\u2019t want to go out into the world and earn my living. I don\u2019t want to have to say goodbye to a quiet scholar\u2019s life, to smooth, civilized hours around a Wedgwood teapot. I want to be able to watch the evening in the sky, to dream on some far hill, to make things slowly out of patterns that I have been finding for years. I don\u2019t want to feel cramped, jostled, frightened, herded among thousands of people; to work among the noise of machines, the incessant clamor of traffic vibrating on the nerves. I don\u2019t want to be terrorised into a set formula of life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These are the thoughts of Louie Burnett, the heroine of Eliot Bliss\u2019s enchanting and lyrical first novel, Saraband <\/em>(1931). After an English convent school education, Louie has her independence thrust upon her: her army officer father is dead and her mother\u2019s upper-class Anglo-Irish family, thanks to the Great War, is no longer rich. \u201cPerhaps you\u2019ll pick up some nice young man, my dear,\u201d says an uncle. But marriage isn\u2019t on the cards. It is clear, though unspoken, that Louie is a lesbian. The female friends who move in and out of her life are irresistibly, lovingly drawn, so real they leap off the page. There\u2019s boarding school classmate Zara, with her brilliantined ebony hair and reassuring fearlessness; aspiring actress Jonquil, a \u201ctall boyish girl with a certain lackadaisical look about her\u201d; artist Mark, ne\u00e9 Marcelle, who \u201cgave one an extraordinary sense of vividness.\u201d The most significant relationship Louie forms, however, is with her beautiful Parisian cousin, Tim, a talented violinist who, the reader intuits via the subtlest of hints, is also gay. Their relatives suspect a romance, but Louie\u2019s affinity with Tim, whom she considers \u201cmarvellous and holy,\u201d is deeper and more steadfast for being platonic.<\/p>\n

Like all of Bliss\u2019s work, Saraband<\/em> is autobiographical, a faithful portrait of the author as a young woman. It was certainly true that Bliss refused to be \u201cterrorized into a set formula of life,\u201d sometimes to her own detriment. As an Eton-cropped twenty-two year old in twenties London, she rechristened herself Eliot (her given name was Eileen) after both T.\u2009S. and George. Semiestranged from her family, she also left Catholicism and, at least among friends, was open about her sexuality. She had dalliances with women including the modernist poet Anna Wickham (from whom emanated, Bliss wrote, a \u201ctremendous electric force\u201d), moved in the storied lesbian literary circle of Natalie Clifford Barney, and eventually settled down with the artist Patricia Allan-Burns, who remained her partner for more than fifty years. Throughout her life, Bliss wrote prolifically\u2014novels, poetry, plays\u2014despite almost constant financial insecurity, recurrent depression and illness, and scant success. The elderly Bliss told her literary executor, the publisher Alexandra Pringle, that her second novel, Luminous Isle<\/em> (1934), had failed in part because poverty kept her from socializing. \u201cI refused invitations because I had no clothes, and you ought to go about when you have a book out.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Bliss\u2019s career had begun with great promise. After almost giving up on Saraband <\/em>when one publisher rejected it for being \u201ctoo nice,\u201d she was introduced to Patience Ross of the A.M. Heath literary agency. A fellow poet, Ross became Bliss\u2019s lover, friend, and agent. A few years earlier Ross had encouraged her senior colleagues to represent Radclyffe Hall\u2019s The Well of Loneliness<\/em>, and she now placed Saraband<\/em> with Peter Davies Ltd., the eponymous publishing house run by Daphne du Maurier\u2019s cousin. When Bliss was twenty-eight, Saraband<\/em> debuted to a warm reception. In a Daily Express<\/em> review, Harold Nicolson (Mr. Vita Sackville-West) praised Bliss\u2019s \u201cquality of reserve\u2014the unexpected silence of feet upon fresh snow.\u201d Another reviewer compared her to Ivy Compton-Burnett. In the U.S., where Saraband<\/em> was published by William Morrow, the influential Saturday Review of Literature<\/em> hailed it as \u201ca first novel of unusual power.\u201d<\/p>\n

The power of Saraband<\/em> comes not from plot or drama\u2014it has little of either\u2014but from its extraordinary impressionistic prose, which with great psychological acuity lays bare Louie\u2019s inner turmoil while she struggles, as a poet and an \u201cindolent dreamer,\u201d to escape a milieu where women \u201calmost had to have permission to exist.\u201d Though Bliss was fond of Proust, it was primarily modernist women writers who shaped her technique, particularly Dorothy Richardson, whose pioneering literary aesthetic broke new ground. At age seventeen, Bliss started reading Richardson\u2019s novel sequence,\u00a0Pilgrimage<\/em>, and thought, \u201cMy God, this is the only person who\u2019s writing a real book.\u201d Later, when they became acquainted, Bliss was disappointed to find in Richardson \u201ca curious blind spot\u201d in terms of her sympathy for people. Richardson, meanwhile, wrote to a friend that \u201cE.\u2009B. who is a great friend of Anna Wickham, has been so to speak, running after me for years. This, for me, is a mystery, for I cannot like her. I fail, however I may try.\u201d<\/p>\n

Richardson\u2019s antipathy to Bliss was unusual; most people thought her possessed of great charm and compassion. Jean Rhys, whom Bliss got to know in London in the late thirties, became her close friend. Rhys, Bliss recalled, \u201cused to make me delightful West Indian suppers, and we used to drink an awful lot.\u201d Sometimes Rhys would fall into a characteristic drunken rage and, writes her biographer Carole Angier, accuse her friend \u201cof belonging to the snobs and prigs and respectable people.\u201d Yet Bliss brushed it off. \u201cJean didn\u2019t mean it,\u201d she insisted. \u201cShe wasn\u2019t attacking me, she was attacking the world. I\u2019d seen it before, in other artists.\u201d<\/p>\n

The women\u2019s shared roots in the British Caribbean\u2014the disorientation of being bred by two cultures but not properly belonging to either\u2014created a special bond. Rhys grew up in Dominica, as she depicted with poignant clarity in her 1934 novel Voyage in the Dark<\/em>; Bliss was born and spent part of her childhood in Jamaica, where her father was a captain in the West India Regiment. At age nineteen, after convent school in England, she returned to the island to live with her parents for two years, an interlude that inspired her second novel Luminous Isle<\/em>. In this scathing portrayal of an English military community, a claustrophobic atmosphere of racism, sexism, and class snobbery induce in the protagonist, Em Hibbert, a profound sense of alienation and rebellion. \u201cThe only thing to do,\u201d Em decides, \u201cwas to try to extract from the spectacle all possible amusement and not to become too moved by anything.\u201d Nevertheless, she is appalled by \u201cthe senseless grouping of people, their sexual attitudes, their endless trivial gossip \u2026 their social code with its hypocrisy and hidden indecencies.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Italian scholar Michela A. Calderaro suggests that Luminous Isle<\/em> was an influence on Wide Sargasso Sea<\/em>, Rhys\u2019s 1966 postcolonial masterpiece. Calderaro, whose research on Bliss has almost single-handedly saved her from oblivion, points out that not only did the two writers exchange feedback on each other\u2019s work, but that Rhys read a revised version of Luminous Isle <\/em>shortly before beginning work on Wide Sargasso Sea<\/em>. The openings of both novels feature lush, sensuous, and sinister evocations of the Jamaican natural world. In Wide Sargasso Sea<\/em>, the \u201clarge and beautiful\u201d garden of Antoinette Cosway\u2019s family has \u201cgone wild,\u201d with a \u201csmell of dead flowers.\u201d In the garden of Em\u2019s childhood, a mango tree are \u201ctrembled violently,\u201d the \u201cgreen scented\u201d odor of cut grass wafts on the breeze, and crickets emit their \u201cshrill humming.\u201d Antoinette invokes the biblical Tree of Life, while Em \u201cwould not have been surprised to see evil spirits standing there.\u201d<\/p>\n

But whereas Rhys spins a tale as tightly structured as it is inexorable, Luminous<\/em> Isle<\/em> is sprawling and untamed, with countless minor characters and a fuzzy-edged indeterminacy that reflects Em\u2019s irresoluteness. Unfulfilled and enervated by the round of formal dinners and tea parties, by gossipy colonels\u2019 wives keeping an eagle-eye out for flirting, and especially by her restrictive status as a woman, Em drifts into an engagement with an older man. A wife, she reflects, is like a bird in a cage. \u201cBirds get used to their cages, and they are much safer in them than they would be fluttering about\u2014free spirits in a dangerous, delightful world.\u201d But her attempt to regard marriage in this \u201ccold unfastidious spirit\u201d is doomed to failure, not least because she loves someone else: her friend Rebekkah.<\/p>\n

A beautiful, independent black woman who lives in the mountains, Rebekkah visits Em with gifts of flowers and her favorite fruit, star apples. Em, thrilled by Rebekkah\u2019s presence and the \u201calmost lover-like glow\u201d in her eyes, tells her: \u201cYou bring me happiness.\u201d When Em\u2019s artist friend announces plans to paint Rebekkah, \u201cwith that delicious yellow handkerchief on her head,\u201d Em can barely conceal her jealousy. (On Bliss\u2019s bedroom wall hung a painting of a woman said to resemble the real-life Rebekkah, whose name, unlike others in the story, wasn\u2019t changed.) It is hard to overstate Bliss\u2019s boldness, as a young writer in the thirties, in so coolly writing about an interracial lesbian attraction, on top of an extended critique of white colonial culture, in a novel obviously drawn directly from her own life. Em\u2019s \u201cdisruptive escapades,\u201d contends the black studies scholar and author Omise\u2019eke Natasha Tinsley, are a welcome subversion of imperial order:<\/p>\n

Thwarting the reproductive labor of elite wifehood, Em\u2019s attraction to a black Jamaican may not be liberating for the hardworking Rebekkah; but neither is it a metaphor for colonial domination. It may just be something else<\/em>. And in being something else, the desiring imagination of this white Caribbean woman may become, if not decolonizing, then anticolonial.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bliss\u2019s astringent take on British prejudice and hypocrisy may have contributed to Luminous Isle<\/em>\u2019s failure. Sackville-West, who helped find a publisher for the novel, initially recommended cutting some of the racist remarks spoken by Em\u2019s mother. \u201cOf course I was so bloody obstinate I didn\u2019t take her advice,\u201d said Bliss. She came to regret this: her own mother, with whom she had a fraught relationship, was hurt to be portrayed so negatively. At a time when jingoistic attitudes about empire were commonplace, even those without a personal connection to the author may have found her perspective disquieting. Reviews were nonetheless admiring, although more so in the U.S. A critic for the New York Times Book Review<\/em>, praising Luminous Isle<\/em> as \u201ca novel of very superior quality,\u201d declared: \u201cMiss Bliss convinces one that she is by temperament genuinely an artist\u2014not a poseuse nor a prig\u2014and that her struggles to reconcile her inner and outer life have emotional significance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mystery surrounds Bliss\u2019s subsequent books. Calderaro was intrigued to find a third novel,\u00a0The Albatross<\/em>, listed in Bliss\u2019s entry in Who Was Who Among English and European Authors<\/em>, 1931\u20131949. <\/em>But this title\u2019s only tantalizing trace is a 1935 letter and a proposed cover from T.\u2009J. Cobden-Sanderson\u2019s press. Bliss would have been thirty-two at the time. It is unclear whether The Albatross<\/em> was ever printed. After that, the world saw no new books from her. This wasn\u2019t for lack of labor (or, as her diaries show, ambition) on Bliss\u2019s part. On her death in 1990, she left many manuscripts, including collections of poems and two more novels that Calderaro describes as \u201cvivid, often abrasive and unsentimental\u201d: Hostile Country<\/em> and Return to the Wilderness<\/em>, both based on the author\u2019s isolated post\u2013World War II life in the English countryside.<\/p>\n

The saving grace of Bliss\u2019s later obscurity was the reissue, when she was in her eighties, of Saraband<\/em> and Luminous Isle<\/em>. She contacted Virago Books herself, explaining that she\u2019d always wanted to see her work republished before she dies. \u201cIt is perhaps a publisher\u2019s greatest pleasure to be able to fulfill such a wish,\u201d writes Pringle in her introduction to Luminous Isle<\/em>. Bliss didn\u2019t live to see a collection of her poetry published, but in 2015 Calderaro edited and introduced Spring Evenings in Sterling Street<\/em>. Bliss\u2019s poems, like her novels, reveal an audacious imagination dedicated to blurring the lines between the intellectual, the spiritual, and the sexual. The book\u2019s opening poem begins: \u201cWrap up my body in your wise thought, \/ That I may unlearn what I know and again be taught. \/ Transpose me into water and rain, \/ A scent on the wind or floating grain.\u201d It is a poetics of female transcendence far more in tune with our era than Bliss\u2019s own. Bliss\u2019s desires are distilled perfectly in Em\u2019s musing as, leaving Jamaica and her fianc\u00e9, she inhales the sea air from a ship\u2019s deck: \u201cTo be sexless, creedless, classless, free. A soul swinging wide across the universe…\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Read earlier installments of Feminize Your Canon here.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Emma Garman has written about books and culture for\u00a0<\/em>Lapham\u2019s Quarterly Roundtable,\u00a0<\/em>Longreads,\u00a0<\/em>Newsweek,\u00a0<\/em>The Daily Beast,\u00a0<\/em>Salon,\u00a0<\/em>The Awl,\u00a0<\/em>Words Without Borders, and other publications.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The lesbian author of a radically anti-colonialist precursor to Jean Rhys’s “Wide Sargasso Sea” was only just barely rescued from complete obscurity<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1048,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34367],"tags":[50684,2842,50683,569,4444,50680,50685,50686,50681,23921,50679,12414,50682],"class_list":["post-134341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-feminize-your-canon","tag-british-caribbean","tag-daphne-du-maurier","tag-em-hibbert","tag-ivy-compton-burnett","tag-jean-rhys","tag-luminous-isle","tag-michela-a-calderaro","tag-omiseeke-natasha-tinsley","tag-patience-ross","tag-radclyffe-hall","tag-saraband","tag-vita-sackville-west","tag-william-morrow"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFeminize Your Canon: Eliot Bliss by Emma Garman<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"March 12, 2019 \u2013 The lesbian author of a radically anti-colonialist precursor to Jean Rhys's "Wide Sargasso Sea" was only just barely rescued from complete obscurity\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/03\/12\/feminize-your-canon-eliot-bliss\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Feminize Your Canon: Eliot Bliss by Emma Garman\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"March 12, 2019 \u2013 The lesbian author of a radically anti-colonialist precursor to Jean Rhys's "Wide Sargasso Sea" was only just barely rescued from complete obscurity\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/03\/12\/feminize-your-canon-eliot-bliss\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2019-03-12T15:00:40+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2019-03-12T16:07:28+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/eliot-bliss-cover001-e1498310422313.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1781\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1967\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Emma Garman\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Emma Garman\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"11 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/03\/12\/feminize-your-canon-eliot-bliss\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/03\/12\/feminize-your-canon-eliot-bliss\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Emma Garman\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/7cf3b32183da239f23c45d5821f1b9bb\"},\"headline\":\"Feminize Your Canon: Eliot Bliss\",\"datePublished\":\"2019-03-12T15:00:40+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2019-03-12T16:07:28+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/03\/12\/feminize-your-canon-eliot-bliss\/\"},\"wordCount\":2242,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/03\/12\/feminize-your-canon-eliot-bliss\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/eliot-bliss-cover001-e1498310422313-927x1024.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"British Caribbean\",\"daphne du maurier\",\"Em Hibbert\",\"Ivy Compton-Burnett\",\"Jean Rhys\",\"Luminous Isle\",\"Michela A. 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