As
a few of you already know from a previous mention of it, a few years ago, before
I ever started blogging, I put my fantasy publishing energies to use by
self-publishing an anthology of short stories by American women. This was just
at the beginning of my interest in women writers that most people had never
heard of, and I wanted to learn about the process of putting together an actual
book.
At
that time I had not the foggiest notion of tracking down heirs or creating
rights contracts, so I chose stories from the middle of the 19th century up to
1922, because under U.S. copyright law nothing published in the U.S. before
1923 can still be under copyright. (Thanks to Disney wining and dining the U.S.
Congress a while back in order to obtain changes to our copyright laws, it's possible
that that year will never change—and it's not a coincidence that Mickey Mouse
came along later in the 1920s and was in danger of lapsing out of copyright,
but that's another story.)
Putting
together the book took a crazy amount of time, since I was figuring out each
step on my own, but it was a lot of fun, and what I ended up with was a book
called Her Peers: Stories by American
Woman, 1852 – 1917. I was pleased with the result overall. It was also a
marvelous excuse for reading writers like Harriet Prescott Spofford (whose
"Circumstance" can stand alongside anything Hawthorne ever wrote),
Rose Terry Cooke, and Susan Glaspell, and probably led me to the greener
pastures of exploring women writers from the other side of the pond. If I were
doing it again I might make the book a bit shorter and therefore more
affordable (a valuable learning experience about nice big reader-friendly fonts
and how quickly they add to the cost of a book), and although I thought it was
nice to use a picture of a quilt made by my grandmother for the cover, I might
actually use one showing the design to better effect instead of just some of
the blocking. And don't remind me of the several typos I found too late. But oh
well, not bad for a first attempt.
 |
| I was amused to find that Her Peers is yet another example of insane overpricing on Amazon--presumably an algorithm gone berserk? |
You
can still view the book on Amazon here,
and I'm delighted to report that it's current sales rank is #6,388,680—clearly
they can barely keep up with demand! (You can also see the pretentious and
utterly embarrassing little blurb I wrote about "Canon Fodder Press,"
as if it was going to be the next Random House. Ugh.) But this is NOT a pitch
to get you to buy the book, as I will hasten to add that since the stories are
all public domain, they are also all available for free online, so please save
your money for the next batch of Furrowed Middlebrow titles… :-)
 |
| Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman |
But
on to the happy coincidence: One of my favorites of the authors I read in
researching Her Peers was Mary
Eleanor Wilkins (later Wilkins Freeman, following her own unhappy marriage),
best known for her story "A New England Nun" and the 1891 collection
from which it came. Although I didn't read enough of her work to make a broad
generalization, several of her best-known stories deal with single women who
choose or have already chosen to retain their independence and their solitary
happiness. In an age, of course, when most writers still wrote as if happy
endings must necessarily include marriage.
Although
scholars these days are perhaps a bit more aware of Wilkins than they used to
be, and some literature students might happen to read something of hers, she is
still not widely known. So imagine how happy I was to find another of my
favorite authors, the brilliant Sylvia Townsend Warner, devoting an entire,
very charming, late story to Wilkins.
I've
been reading several of Warner's later collections recently and loving every
second of them (spoiler alert: her abilities just kept improving with age), and
in the middle of reading The Music at
Long Verney, a volume of previously uncollected stories which only appeared
in 2001, comprised mostly of stories that first appeared (as almost all of her
stories did) in The New Yorker, there
was "Item, One Empty House," a lovely, humorous, presumably
autobiographical tale from 1973 that centers entirely around Warner's fondness
for Wilkins!
Here
Warner is irresistibly describing her first experience of Wilkins' work:
After I had been taught to read I was left to read on
unassisted. If a title looked promising I tried the book (and thus for years
and years never opened Gogol's Dead Souls,
being convinced it was a work of piety). One day I pulled out a volume called A New England Nun. There were two
convents in our town, and a nun was a regular feature at the fishmonger's—but
nuns in fiction led more animated lives; though my notions about New England
were of the vaguest kind and Mary E. Wilkins not a compelling name, the title,
I thought, warranted a try. There was no word of a nun; but from the moment
when Louisa Ellis tied on a green apron and went out with a little blue
crockery bowl to pick some currants for
her tea I lost all wish for nuns and animated lives. I had found something
nearer the bone. Though I could not have defined what I had found, I knew it was
what I wanted. It was something I had already found in nature and in certain
teapots—something akin to the precision with which the green ruff fits the
white strawberry blossom, or to the airy spacing of a Worcester sprig. But,
scampering between balderdash and masterpiece, I had not so far noticed it
could happen in writing too.
Having found it, this mysterious charm, I read on how Louisa, after
she had finished her tea and washed up the tea things, took off her green
apron, disclosing a pink-and-white apron beneath it, which was her sewing
apron. This in turn she took off when she heard a man's steps coming up the
walk. Beneath the pink-and-white apron was her company apron, of white linen.
The man came into the room; he was her suitor, and his entrance, as usual,
frightened the canary. He was honest and good and had wooed her faithfully, but
in the upshot she dismissed him and remained alone among the currant bushes;
and that was the end of the story.
She
goes on to think of Wilkins in relation to her more famous contemporary,
Maupassant:
He would have thought her a quaint character and put her into
one of his stories. She would have surmised him to be a bad character and kept
him out of any story of hers.
And
she also delineates Wilkins' limitations, including that "lettuce juice
too often flowed through the veins of her characters instead of blood," with
which I might have to quibble with dear Sylvia, however much I adore her. But
there is a clear genuine affection for Wilkins, and it may be no coincidence
that I feel that both Warner and Wilkins are kindred spirits.
I
can't spoil the story by revealing the ending, but Warner, in just a couple of
final paragraphs, describes how, walking in the New England woods one day, she
came upon an intriguing scenario that perfectly evoked Wilkins, and concludes:
This was no business of mine. I had come on a story by Mary Wilkins—a
story she did not finish.
If
you haven't read any of Wilkins' work, I do add my recommendation to Warner's,
and I just stumbled across this
site which has a number of her stories as well as stories and even novels
by many other authors (including some British authors, strangely enough
considering the site's name, so I have made a note to revisit it and explore
further). Under "Authors" at the top, there's an option for
"Women Writers," which leads to an array of options.
