Two novels about old ladies

Two older women, each formidable in her own manner, are at the center of gravity of two NYRB re-issues that I recently read and highly recommend: Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (1971) and Joan Chase's During the Reign of the Queen of Persia (1983). That similarity notwithstanding, the two novels could hardly be more different in tone and style. Mrs. Palfrey is a near-perfect comedy of manners, gentle and sad but with just the right touch of acid. Mrs. Palfrey herself is a widow who has just moved into a small London residential hotel for older folks of limited means. Loneliness afflicts every character, including Mrs. Palfrey. What she does about it constitutes a small act of heroism, laughable on its face but brave and audacious in its context. Taylor's descriptive writing is crisp and concise, and the dialogue pitch-perfect. An unexpected delight.

The "Queen of Persia" character in Chase's novel is the embittered, aging matriarch of a family of daughters and granddaughters living on and around the family farm estate in 1950s Ohio. Loneliness is not their problem– as often as not, hell is other people, including one's mother or sisters. The novel is narrated collectively– sometimes permutationally– in the first-person plural by the four granddaughters, two each by two of the daughters. This odd contrivance works brilliantly and somehow adds to the unsettled mood created by the nonlinear arc of the story through time. The introduction tells us that Faulkner was a major influence on Chase, and that certainly comes through, but her strikingly unconventional metaphors and lyrical, crowded descriptions are a style all her own.

During the Reign is unquestionably a book about women and girls– mothers, daughters, and sisters; the handful of men in the story inhabit the peripheries and range from kind and ineffectual to menacing. Like the women, the men are a source of curiosity for the granddaughters, who observe the grownups warily throughout the book. A vibrant, angry, poetic, and haunted novel. 

Do read them both!

Mingus on states' rights

In honor of Justice Alito's "opinion." Lyrics here. 

Your FSA/OWI Photo of the Day

Wanda the Welder?
California shipyard workers. This woman worker pushes back her helmet during a moment's pause from her welding job at the Richmond shipyard in California. Ann Rosener, 1943.

People are smaller now

At the local public library used book sale yesterday, I picked up a couple volumes of poetry (hardly the first time!): a nice hardcover of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, and Li Ch'ing-chao's Complete Poems, translated by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung. Two great poets and Renaissance women.

Barrett Browning...

Before Barrett was ten years old, she had read the histories of England, Greece, and Rome; several of Shakespeare's plays, including Othello and The Tempest;portions of Pope's Homeric translations; and passages from Paradise Lost. At eleven, she says in an autobiographical sketch written when she was fourteen, she "felt the most ardent desire to understand the learned languages." Except for some instruction in Greek and Latin from a tutor who lived with the Barrett family for two or three years to help her brother Edward ("Bro") prepare for entrance to Charterhouse, Barrett was, as Robert Browning later asserted, "self-taught in almost every respect." Within the next few years she went through the works of the principal Greek and Latin authors, the Greek Christian fathers, several plays by Racine and Molière, and a portion of Dante's Inferno-all in the original languages. Also around this time she learned enough Hebrew to read the Old Testament from beginning to end. Her enthusiasm for the works of Tom Paine, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Mary Wollstonecraft presaged the concern for human rights that she was later to express in her poems and letters.

Li:

Li Qingzhao was born in 1084, in Zhangqiu located in modern Shandong province. She was born to a family of scholar-officials, and her father was a student of Su Shi. The family had a large collection of books, and Li was able to receive comprehensive education in her childhood. From very young age, she was unusually outgoing for a woman from a scholar-official family.

Before she got married, her poetry was already well known within elite circles. In 1101 she married Zhao Mingcheng, with whom she shared interests in art collection and epigraphy. They lived in present-day Shandong. After her husband started his official career, he was often absent. They were not particularly rich but shared enjoyment of collecting inscriptions and calligraphy which made their daily life count and they lived happily together. This inspired some of the love poems that she wrote. Li and her husband collected many books. They shared a love of poetry and often wrote poems for each other as well as writing about bronze artifacts of the Shang and Zhou dynasties.