Sandra M. (Mortola) Gilbert – Sunday 27 December 1936 – still living as of this post and Susan Gubar – 1944 – still living as of this post

Introduction

The first volume (The War of the Words) of Sandra M. Gilbert’s and Susan Gubar’s three-volume opus – overall title No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century - on women and writing, was a present from a long-time friend, Kathryn. I was so inspired by this first volume, that on a visit to London, I bought volumes two (Sexchanges) and three (Letters From the Front) from a bookstore on famed Charing Cross Road. My experience with actual writing is a hate/love one (hated writing papers in college/loved the positive feedback). Even though I am primarily a visual woman, I do enjoy a well-turned phrase and without the pressure of academic deadlines, I someday may turn some phrases – well I hope.

Dedication in The War of the Words

“In memory of Alexis J. Mortola and Frank W. David”

Excerpt from Chapter 5 – Sexual Linguistics, Women’s Sentence, Men’s Sentencing of The War of the Words

“In this chapter, attempting to integrate the divergent forces of power, language, and meaning, we will examine this relationship between sexual difference and the symbolic contract in an effort primarily to trace the permutations of the modern battle over language and secondarily to place recent ideas about sexual linguistics in a larger historical context. For, as we shall suggest, contemporary language theorists-female and male-participate in a long, bifurcated tradition of feminist and masculinist linguistic fantasy. That such a tradition demonstrably exists, moreover, implies an intuition of the primacy of the mother rather than the father in the process of language acquisition that assimilates the child into what Kristeva calls the “symbolic contract.” Thus questioning Kristeva’s identification of the symbolic contract with the social contract, we will draw upon precisely the complex literary history that we have already discussed-the history of the last one hundred years in England and America-to argue that the female subject is not necessarily alienated from the words she writes and speaks.

Significantly, the English woman who most publicly entered into the linguistic fray by defining a female literary tradition saw gender-marked words as potentially central to that tradition’s vitality. In one of the most famous yet opaque passages in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf introduces her notoriously puzzling concept of “a woman’s sentence.” Remarking that the early nineteenth-century woman novelist found that “there was no common sentence ready for her use,” she declared that the “man’s sentence” inherited by “Thackeray and Dickens and Balzac” from “Johnson, Gibbon and the rest” was as alien to her mind as “the [hardened and set] older forms of literature” were to her imagination (78-80). Her comment, like the literary history in which it is embedded, seems appealingly empirical. Those of us who wish to understand the relationship between genre and gender, Woolf seems to imply-even those who wish to examine the more ontological connection between sexuality and creativity-need merely analyze and classify linguistic structures.”


Yesterday’s writer – Marilyn French
Tomorrow’s writer – Doris Kearns Goodwin

Source: Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan. The War of the Words. Yale University Press, 1987. ISBN 0-300-04587-5. Dedication: page v, Excerpt: pages 228-229.

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of The War of the Words

Center Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar from the website virtual.clemson.edu

Marilyn French – Thursday 21 November 1929 – Saturday 2 May 2009

Introduction

Marilyn French’s novel was one of the first feminist themed books I read. Sometimes it’s a struggle to remain self-defined and to know exactly who you are and where you should be. Or what you should do. The Women’s Room presents these wonderings in an era of awakening for women.

Dedication in The Women’s Room

“TO ISABEL, TO JANET- SISTERS, FRIENDS”

Excerpt from Chapter 1 of The Women’s Room

“Mira was hiding in the ladies’ room. She called it that, even though someone had scratched out the word ladies’ in the sign on the door, and written women’s underneath. She called it that out of thirty-eight years of habit, and until she saw the cross-out on the door, had never thought about it. “Ladies’ room” was a euphemism, she supposed, and she disliked euphemisms on principle. However, she also detested what she called vulgarity, and had never in her life, even when handling it, uttered the word shit. But here she was at the age of thirty-eight huddled for safety in a toilet booth in the basement of Sever Hall, gazing at, no, studying that word and others of the same genre, scrawled on the gray enameled door and walls.

She was perched, fully clothed, on the edge of the open toilet seat, feeling stupid and helpless, and constantly looking at her watch. It would all have been redeemed, even translated into excitement, had there been some grim-faced Walter Matthau in a trench coat, his hand in a gun-swollen pocket, or some wild-eyed Anthony Perkins in a turtleneck, his itching strangler’s hands clenching and unclenching-someone glamorous and terrifying at any rate-waiting for her outside in the hall, if she had been sitting in panic searching for another way out. But of course it that were the case, there would also be a cool and desperate Cary Grant or Burt Lancaster sliding along the walls of another hallway, waiting for Walter to show himself. And that by itself, she thought mournfully, feeling somehow terribly put upon, would have been enough. If she had one of them, anyone at all, waiting for her at home, she would not be hiding in a toilet booth in the basement of Sever Hall. She would have been upstairs in a corridor with the other students, leaning against a wall with her books at her feet, or strolling past the unseeing faces. She could have transcended, knowing she had one of them at home, and could therefore move alone in a crowd. She puzzled over that paradox, but only briefly. The graffiti were too interesting.”


Yesterday’ writer – Fannie Flagg
Tomorrow’s writers – Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubor

Source: French, Marilyn. The Women’s Room. Jove/HBI, October 1978. Dedication: page 4, Excerpt: pages 7-8

Images:

Left: Front cover of my personal copy of The Women’s Room

Center: Marilyn French from the website washingtonpost.com

Fannie Flagg – Thursday 21 September 1944 – still living as of this post

Introduction

Well here’s another novel - Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café by Fannie Flagg - that I haven’t read, but I did see the movie. My reading list keeps getting longer and longer and longer… I suppose I’d have more time to read if I stop going to the movies. Stop going to the movies?? Nah!

Excerpts from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café

“THE WEEMS WEEKLY (WHISTLE STOP, ALABAMA’S WEEKLY BULLETIN) JUNE 12, 1929
Café Opens

The Whistle Stop Café opened up last week, right next door to me at the post office, and owners Idgie Threadgoode and Ruth Jamison said business has been good over since. Idgie says that for people who know her not to worry about getting poisoned, she is not cooking. All the cooking is being done by two colored women, Sipsey and Onzell, and the barbecue is being cooked by Big George, who is Onzell’s husband.

If there is anybody that has not been there yet, Idgie says that the breakfast hours are from 5:30-7:30, and you can get eggs, grits, biscuits, bacon, sausage, ham and red-eye gravy, and coffee for 25¢.

For lunch and supper you can have fried chicken; pork chops and gravy; catfish; chicken and dumplings; or a barbecue plate; and your choice of three vegetables, biscuits or cornbread, your drink and dessert-for 35¢.

She said the vegetables are creamed corn; fried green tomatoes; fried okra; collard or turnip greens; black-eyed peas; candied yams; butter beans or lima beans.

And pie for dessert.

My other half, Wilbur, and I ate there the other night, and it was so good he says he might not ever eat at home again. Ha. Ha. I wish this were true. I spend all my time cooking for the big lug, and still can’t keep him filled up.

By the way, Idgie says that one of her hens laid an egg with a ten-dollar bill in it.

…Dot Weems”


“FRIED GREEN TOMATOES

1 medium green tomato (per person)
Salt
Pepper
White cornmeal
Bacon drippings

Slice tomatoes about ¼ inch thick, season with salt and pepper and then coat both sides with cornmeal. In a large skillet, heat enough bacon drippings to coat the bottom of the pan and fry tomatoes until lightly browned on both sides.

You’ll think you died and gone to heaven!”



Yesterday’s writer - Noël Riley Fitch
Tomorrow’s writer - Marilyn French

Source: Flagg, Fannie. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café. McGraw-Hill, 1988.
ISBN 0-07-021257-0. Excerpts: pages 3-4, 403

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café.
Center: Fannie Flagg from the website flixster.com

Noël Riley Fitch – 1937 – still living as of this post

Introduction

I met Noël on a lovely Parisian June afternoon in 2002 at a reception in her honor and we actually had a brief conversation in which geographical connections were discovered. Here’s the entry from my journal. “Went over to the Abbey Bookshop, but was a little early, so I went for a walk along St. Michel. When I returned to the bookstore, there were a number of people already there. Turns out that Noël Riley Fitch had led a walk on Île St. Louis in the morning and this is where they finished – just in time for Noël to be here for her reception….sign the three books of hers that I had….she has roots in Massachusetts. She and her husband live in LA (Brentwood) from January to April – she teaches at USC and then they spend the summer in Paris where Noel teaches an expatriate literary course at the American University. Her husband writes and edits books on food and wine. And there was wine, cheese and crackers (and water) for the reception. The owner of the bookstore, Brian, gave a little background talk about the street on which the Abbey Bookshop is located and then he introduced Noël Riley Fitch. She talked about the books she has written and told some Paris-related literary stories. After her talk, I hung around and talked to some of the people….There was a violinist playing at the end of the street….having the violinist come over to the bookstore and play. Such a pleasant afternoon – Literature, food and wine, music and meeting new people.” – personal journal, Sunday 23 June 2002. In my copy of her book, Literary Cafes of Paris, that she graciously signed, Noël wrote: “For Adrean With best wishes and happy drinking Noël Riley Fitch 23 June 2002 Paris.”

Dedication in Literary Cafes of Paris

“Dedicated to Gailyn Fitch, café sitter par excellence”

Excerpt from the Café de Flore entry in Literary Cafes of Paris

“’This afternoon I’m upstairs at the Flore, near the window; I can see the wet street, the plane tree swaying in the sharp wind; there are a lot of people, and downstairs there’s a great hubbub.’ So wrote Simone de Beauvoir in the late 1940s, on one of the many days that she worked at a table at the Flore. She wrote portions of her journal, Second Sex and novels such as The Mandarins in this venerable neighborhood café. Flore was founded in 1865 and named for a small statue of Flore, the goddess of flowers and mother of spring, that once stood in front of the door.

The café is homey, with its worn Art Deco interior of red banquettes, mahogany and mirrors. Outside it is characterized by cream-colored awnings with green and gold letters and by its location on the corner of two busy streets: the little Rue St-Benoit is crowded with foot traffic in the evenings when the restaurants are full; on the wide boulevard, the Flore sits between an excellent postcard shop and a distinguished bookstore, La Hune, next to the Deux-Magots.

Beginning with Huysmans and Remy de Gourmont in the late 19th century, nearly every French writer has spent time at the Flore. Yet the Flore has been identified with several distinct groups at different times, and each one has in turn determined the personality of the café. One of the first significant groups to make the Flore home was the political Right. L’Action Française wrote its first manifestos here in 1899 (they were printed nearby in Rue Cassette). The leader of L’Action Française was Charles Maurras, who lived at 60 Rue de Verneuil. He called his political memoirs Souvenirs de vie politique: Au signe de Flore.

In the first decade of this century, Apollinaire and his friends funded Les Soirees de Paris magazine here. The group that dominated the Flore environment in the following decade included Léon-Paul Fargue, André Breton and his Surrealist colleagues, and Picasso. After he moved to live in his studio nearby in Rue des Grands-Augustins. Picasso patronized first the Deux-Magots. He moved to the Flore in the late 1930s, where he engaged in lengthy political discussions joined occasionally by Marc Chagall. At the end of an evening the two exiled artists would exchange the matchbooks on which each had doodled. Janet Flanner says she saw Picasso there every night after 1945, sitting at the second table in front of the main door, sipping a small bottle of mineral water and speaking with his Spanish friends.”


Yesterday’s writer – Anne Fine
Tomorrow’s writer – Fannie Flagg

Source: Fitch, Noël Riley. Literary Cafes of Paris. Starrhill Press, 1989. ISBN 0-913515-42-6. Dedication: page 4, Excerpt: pages 23-24

Images:
Left: Front cover of my personal copy of Literary Cafes of Paris
Center: Noël Riley Fitch from the website noëlrileyfitch.com
Right: Signed title page of my personal copy of Literary Cafes of Paris

Anne Fine – Sunday 7 December 1947 – still living as of this post

Introduction

I met (in the casual, one-of-a-crowd way that occurs at book signings) Anne Fine at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2001. She gave a talk before the obligatory signing and this is what I wrote in my journal. “…Anne Fine…talked about each of the adult books she has written (…mainly known as a children’s writer). Anne was funny – she says her books have a dark humour to them…will enjoy reading her…has an open and easy personality.” – personal journal, Monday 20 August 2001. Anne signed my copy of her book, Taking the Devil’s Advice, as follows: “For Adrean, With all good wishes Anne Fine.”

Dedication in Taking the Devil’s Advice

“For Tik Enif”

Excerpt from Chapter 1 of Taking the Devil’s Advice

“Look at this. Look! What a cheek. Look what I’ve found hidden away at the back of the bloody airing cupboard.

She has been writing in my autobiography again. She so annoys me. Why must she poke her nose in everything, meddling and prying, forever insisting on her right to be taken into account? Sometime I think my last few waking hours of Perfect Privacy must have passed by, unnoticed and unvalued, the day before I met Constance. How long is it since we parted – three years? Four? Yet here she is, snooping around my room whenever I’m out, leafing through papers on my table, reading the (few) bits that interest her and scribbling her irritating little comments and additions down the margins and over on the back. I can’t put up with this for three more months. I should never have agreed to spend the summer here in the first place. It was a foolish idea, and I’m not sure it’s even very good for the children. I’ll have to move out and find somewhere else. Or buy a large tin box with a good lock.

And yet, let’s face it, I’m not here by accident, am I? I did choose of my own free will not to spurn Constance’s offer of a place to stay, and I can’t argue that I didn’t live with her long enough to know exactly what she’s like. I must have realized Constance could no more stay peacefully and incuriously outside a room in which her former husband is writing anything of a remotely personal nature than she could fly unaided to the moon. I must have known that she’d be in and out all the time, rooting through, checking, complaining, criticizing; that even the most casual attempt to pin down a few simple dates would turn one mealtime after another into great atavistic wrangles about the reasons for this move, that baby, those blinding arguments; that it would be three months of pure hell. It isn’t even as if what Constance remembers is of any relevance. I’m not writing that sort of autobiography, and if I were, this is the last place on earth I’d choose to write it. I’m here because all my philosophical papers are still in the attic. Why else would I suffer the indignity of living and sleeping up in my old study while this great shambling amiable Ally sleeps in my old bed with my old wife?”


Yesterday’s writer – Colette
Tomorrow’s writer - Noël Riley Fitch

Source: Fine, Anne. Taking the Devil’s Advice. Black Swan, 1999. ISBN 0-552-99826-5. Dedication: page 5, Excerpt: pages 11-12

Images:

Left: Front cover of my personal copy of Taking the Devil’s Advice
Center: Anne Fine from the website annefine.co.uk

Right: Signed title page of my personal copy of Taking the Devil’s Advice