Is The Personal Political?  Women’s Publishing 2024

“It is at this point a political action to tell it like it is, to say what I really believe about my life instead of what I’ve always been told to say.” – “The Personal Is Political,” by Carol Hanisch, 1969

 I do not remember how I became familiar with the saying, “The Personal Is Political.” I must have picked it up from an anthology, or perhaps from my friend’s feminist mother, a Women’s Studies professor, because Doris Lessing, my favorite writer, never used this jargon; nor was it the kind of thing we said at our short-lived (two meetings!) consciousness raising group in high school. And yet the slogan was around, as was “Tell it like it is.”

I have always admired the alliterative quality of “The Personal Is the Political,” a radical saying coined in the 1960s .  The sound and meter are not to be underestimated.   I would not mind having it on a button (though it would be a crowded button).

Women were speaking out in the ‘60s and ‘70s, “telling it like it is,” lobbying for legal abortion, free day-care, and equal pay for equal work, only one of which demands was ever met, legalized abortion, but now that has been taken away, too.  So telling it like it is and The Personal Is Political were powerful ideas but do we dare talk about them nowadays? It’s a bit awkward in a red state.

Still, the feminists made strides in the twentieth century. One of the most important offshoots of the Second Wave was the founding of women’s  presses and publishing companies. In 1970 in New York  The Feminist Press was established. It began by reprinting neglected women’s classics like Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God,  Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, Rebecca Harding Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills, Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth, Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue trilogy (SF), and Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio. Nowadays The Feminist Press has expanded its list to publish Barbara Ehrenreich and other non-fiction, as well the entertaining Femmes Fatales series, which includes pulp classics like Laura, Stella Dallas, and Now, Voyager.    

The Feminist Press had a leftist political agenda, so it cannot quite be compared to the women’s presses that sprang up in the UK.  Still, something was simmering in England, too.  The writer  Carmen Calil founded Virago in 1970, and soon began to publish neglected women’s classics.  And much later, in 1999, a rival women’s press, Persephone, dedicated mostly to publishing interwar women’s books, was founded by Nicola Beauman.

I’ve never heard of “Winged Seeds” (this is aomeone else’s collectiion)

Virago has the more “intellectual” list of the two British women’s presses.  Several of the books in the Virago Modern Classics series are really, truly classics (Mrs. Oliphant’s absorbing Chronicles of Carlingford, Elizabeth Taylor’s beautifully-written novels and short stories), while others were published because of their historical significance (Storm Jameson’s intelligent novels. Vera Brittain’s political novels), still others capture the zeitgeist of the ’60s (Nell Nunn’s Poor Cow, Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado).   On this impressive list, you will also find titles by  Molly Keane (M. J. Farrell), Barbara Comyns, Pamela Frankau, Rebecca West, Penelope Mortimer, Dorothy Baker, Kay Boyle, and Stevie Smith.  Over the years I have read but then prudently weeded several Viragos, not without regret.

And then there is Persephone, founded in 1999, not a direct descendant of Second Wave feminism, or not that I know of. I am less familiar with Persephone, but its charming interwar women’s novels strike me  as “cozier” than Viragos and Feminist Press titles.   

Nicola Beauman, the founder, is a literary scholar of interwar fiction, and her company in the early years seemed to have a brilliant marketing strategy: it appealed to women’s nostalgia by publishing adult books by the writers of children’s classic, two by Frances Hodgson Burnett, one by Noel Streatfeild, and one by Dorothy Canfield Fisher.  And then loyal customers bought her more literary novels. I was won over by two novels by Monica Dickens, one of my favorite writers, especially The Winds of Heaven, a classic about the fate of an older woman.  (A. S. Byatt wrote the introduction, or perhaps it was an afterword.) And it was a stroke of genius to reprint the once popular Dorothy Whipple, whose character-driven novels reflect deep insights into marriage, women’s wounded psyches, and the terrifying meaning of a dysfunctional family. 

Persephone’s publication of Dorothy Whipple represents the difference between Persephone and  Virago, or so Carmn Calil told  the Guardian.  She said that Virago never crossed “the Whipple line,”  implying that Whipple was an inferior writer. And much as I enjoyed my recent reading of a novel by Dorothy Whipple, I do understand the concept of “the line.”  Yet Virago and Persephone often overlap, both publishing books by Penelope Mortimer and Rachel Ferguson, for instance. And in recent years Virago has indeed crossed some kind of line by publishing Angela Thirkell’s light, humorous Barsetshire series.

It is a rich age for women’s publishing. I can lose myself in modern feminist theory or Stella Dallas from the Femmes Fatales series from the Feminist Press,  a Virago edition of a favorite novel by Sylvia Townsend Warner. or an intelligent, entertaining novel by Dorothy Whipple (Persephone), whom, by the way, I read with enthusiasm.

Drink and Debauchery:  George Moore’s “A Mummer’s Wife”

Perhaps you are familiar with George Moore’s Esther Waters, a curiously modern Victorian novel that tells the story of a servant girl who, seduced and deserted by a fellow employee, struggles to survive as a single mother. 

The influence of Zola’s naturalism permeates his books, which sets them apart from most Victorian novels. I recently devoured A Mummer’s Wife, Moore’s complex novel about the theater life and alcoholism. This virtually forgotten novel is stunning, just short of being a masterpiece. 

Moore is a bold storyteller, unafraid of tackling dark subjects.  Indeed, A Mummer’s Wife shares common elements with Zola’s L’Assommoir, a novel about alcoholism and its destruction of a family. Moore’s tragic novel charts an ordinary woman’s descent into alcoholism. What begins as the story of a naive, weary seamstress at the beck and call of her asthmatic husband turns into a romantic elopement with an actor and her brief rise to stardom and rapid downfall.   

Moore’s understanding of the destructive power of alcohol drives the characters and plays havoc with lives. At the beginning there is is no alcohol at all in the home where lovely Kate Ede, a talented dressmaker, lives with her husband and mother-in-law.  She often feels like a drudge and a slave, as she stays up all night to nurse her asthmatic husband, Ralph.  It is as though she has two jobs, nursing and running a full-time business as a seamstress. His asthma attacks frighten both of them, but he is bad-tempered with Kate, blaming her for opening windows and doors, though he may himself have requested that she do so.

To make extra money for the household, the Edes have decided to rent out rooms to theater people.  Mrs. Ede, Kate’s mother-in-law, fears their tenants will be immoral, but Ralph snaps at her, saying they need the money and that is that.  All are surprised by the charm and considerateness of their tenant, Dick Lennox, the director of the theater company. He is the most charming person they have ever met. And soon Kate is desperately in love.

But the sleepless Kate must also worry about business: she agonizes over the knowledge that she can’t make the deadline for an important customer’s dress. Fortunately, her laid-back, chatty assistant, Miss Hender, distracts her from her problems.  Miss Hender is full of salacious gossip about the traveling theater company. Her boyfriend is an actor.

Kate likes Miss Hender, but is disturbed by her “coarseness.”  Kate would love to go to the theater herself, but can’t see how she can leave Ralph alone with his mother.  Miss Hender, who is comically direct, like a bawdy character in a Restoration comedy, speaks to Kate as if not fully realizing the bond of marriage.

“But what’s the use of his coming if you can’t get out?  A man always expects a girl to be able to go out with him.  The ‘hag’ is sure to be about, and even if you did manage to give her the slip, there’s your husband.  Lord!  I hadn’t thought of that before.  What frightful luck!  Don’t you wish he’d get ill again? Another fit of asthma would suit us down to the ground.”

Kate is shocked, and I, too, am scandalized by Miss Hender’s babbling.

Kate thought it very provoking that Miss Hender could never speak except in that coarse way.  She was a very nice girl in her way; very good-hearted, and it would be nice, convenient indeed, to be friendly with her but if she could not keep from making nasty remarks, there was no help for it but to treat her just as a workwoman at so much a day.

Ironically, Kate’s morals are soon more compromised than Miss Hender’s.  She runs away with Dick, though she is reluctant to leave her mother-in-law, Mrs. Ede, her best friend, and she feels guilty about leaving Ralph, who has recovered from his asthma and is his old affectionate self.

But she adores Dick, and finds the theater life so exciting that she forgets her former life. She takes piano and singing lessons and begins to act on the stage. She likes being a star, but during hard times the company disbands. And while Dick struggles to establish a new theater company in London, Kate stays alone in drab rooms in a grimy suburb and takes to drink

One forgets that women can be just as violent as men when they drink. Soon she is making drunken scenes in public – even at Dick’s theater – accusing him of having affairs with women. She is also violent, and attacks him even in the theater..

 This is a bold, very modern novel about the disintegration of a woman’s personality in the hell of drink. And Kate becomes a harridan. The sweet Kate Ede has disappeared, killed by alcohol All that is left is a hard carapace.

And one cannot help but think that the theater is part of the cause. She can’t cope with anonymity after the excitement of stardom. And certainly no one can cope with days and nights all alone, with no work, with no acquaintances, with no hope of change.

So who is the monster? Well, Kate… but it is the drink.

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The Reader at Large:  Reading in a High Wind

My husband and I love to read in public. Sometimes we sit in a park quietly reading our books, other times we read aloud. Once we read aloud a short, hilarious play by Brigid Brophy, The Waste Disposal Unit, which was published in an old anthology of plays that the public library has so far neglected to discard.

Some of our reading-in-public dates are successful, others not. It was terribly windy today, but we bravely sat outside on a restaurant patio with our books.

I sat at a table under an umbrella while my husband dashed in and got the drinks. I was reading a pretty good novel by Mrs. Oliphant when a gust of wind lifted the napkins off the table.  I chased them across the parking lot, because nobody, NOBODY, calls me a litterbug on Earth Day!

My inadvertent littering always involves a high wind. Once at a bus stop,  the wind blew a kleenex out of my hand and an irritable man ordered me to “pick it up.”

I watched it sail across the street.  “Why don’t you pick it up?”

This time I caught the napkins, though. 

My husband finally ambled out to the patio with our drinks.  The latte had such a pretty design in the foam that I hated to disturb it. Meanwhile, my husband was also reading a Victorian novel, something obscure by Trollope. But our reading-in-public date was interrupted by our love of gab. And since we were gabbing, not reading, we decided to go indoors and photograph people reading in public. But people were only reading the menu or the merch, the t-shirts with slogans and the travel mugs.

Then I suggested going to a nearby bookstore, plopping down in the chairs, and having a reading contest. Who could read the longest without chatting? I was pretty sure I would break first.

My husband  hates the particular bookstore I mentioned:  he hates the unfriendly staff, the entire absence of a backlist, and the uncomfortable straight-backed wooden chairs.

And he doesn’t trust their drinks. “Would you drink anything they make there?”

Well, it’s a blender, not a cauldron, but I realized that the OTHER bookstore has a better cafe anyway.

At the cafe, we did manage to read for half an hour and then triumphantly treated ourselves to a cookie.  Did anybody win the contest? We decided it was a tie. Then we rode home against the wind, which seemed to be coming from the north, south, east, and west all at once. What a relief to get home and read our books, though it’s so cold with the thermostat at 60 that I had to put on an extra sweater, long underwear, and put another blanket on the bed..

But at least the wind didn’t blow away anything out of our bags on the way home. That antic only happens once a day.

Have a nice Earth Day!

Reading in Bed:  A History

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single reader in possession of a bed, must be in want of a good book.– Anonymous ( NOT Jane Austen)

I am a proponent of reading in bed.  Many are not. Some outlaw this practice.   One imagines the Moms for Liberty waving torches in front of houses where they have sussed out reading in bed.

Some readers find it cozier to listen to whale sounds before bed. They say it sends them instantly to sleep. Others apply numerous creams and moisturizers to their faces and arms and legs and then don a sleeping mask. Again they fall into immediate ZZZZZZs.

I regard reading in bed as a portal to sleep. Wherever I go, I proselytize its benefits. It puts me in touch with myself and the universe so I can make the transition to sleep.

The first book I read in bed was a mystery by Patricia Moyes, which I read one afternoon while waiting to go to Christmas dinner. It had a calming effect on an exciting holiday. Later, when I lived for several months with my father, I kept nocturnal hours and stayed up late reading Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, tucked cozily in a sleeping bag on top of the bed (because what teenage bookworm ever makes the bed, right?).

As an adult I have devoted many evenings to reading in bed.   I recommend getting lost in a Victorian classic, such as Trollope’s The Way We Live Now;  Golden Age Detective fiction by Margery Allingham and Ellery Queen; Elizabeth Bowen’s lyrical novels; and the latest by Tessa Hadley, After the Funeral and Other Stories, many of which explore the theme  of living in a hippie family.  The characters and situations can be comical and poignant, but on one occasion, the hippie children are tragically resentful and unbalanced at their mother’s wedding.

Speaking of which, has anyone noticed that Tessa Hadley is never nominated for the Women’s Prize or the Booker Prize?  I find that unfathomable, since she is one of the best English writers today.  She has won other awards, doubtless prestigious but unknown to me.  I hope her next book wins one of the big prizes.

Reading is bed is such a comfort, but over a period of weeks I put the practice on hold, because my husband objected to my reading the Poldark books in bed.  He claimed my reading woke him up in the wee hours,  because I was clearly so enthralled by it.  (Can you hear silent enthralling?) Yet I couldn’t put the Poldark books down even for his sake, and if you’ve read Winston Graham’s well-written, dashing historical novels, you’ll know what I mean.  So I took to reading Poldark in the spare room. 

The prolific, multi-talented Winston Graham also wrote Marnie, which was adapted as a film by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Sean Connery and Tippi Hedren.  It is a gripping movie, simmering with terror, neurosis and repressed sex. There is an eerie scene between Marnie and her mother that haunts me.

As for Poldark, I admit that I have not finished the series. Someday I’ll get back to it. I love the complex characters and the vigorous writing. It begins when the charming, smart Ross Poldark, a veteran of the Revolutionary War and the part-owner of a couple of disused mines, returns from America to Cornwall only to find that he was presumed dead, and that Elizabeth,  his former fiancée, has married his cousin, Francis.  Naturally, Ross is moody and upset, though later, he marries Demelza,  a young woman he rescued from her violent father, and who grew up as a servant in his house, and who becomes a charming woman. But it takes a long time for Ross to properly appreciate Demelza, though she is a far more sympathetic character than the neurotic Elizabeth. Demelza is a skilled gardener, a sympathetic listener with many friends,  a good mother, and capable of lying to the British soldiers to protect smugglers. The repair of the mines owned by Ross and Francis requires a glib tongue (Ross’s) to acquire money to get them into shape. The working conditions in the mines are as humane as possible, unlike the horrific practices described in Zola’s Germinal or in Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley. Still, there are accidents.

Lately I’ve reread lots of Henry James (The Ambassadors, The Spoils of Poynton), Mark Twain’s witty, inimitable novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and a couple of books from the Booker International and Women’s Prize longlists. All of these are appropriate bedtime reading.

But if you really want to go to sleep, why not try something by Dumas? Anything by Dumas!  Oh, dear, I wish I loved his books, but I feel myself falling asleep at the thought of reading one.

ZZZZZZZZZZ…

Good night, all!

New Post at “The Daily Write”: Is the Mirror a Portal?

Illustration from George MacDonald’s Phantastes

Have you ever wanted to walk through a mirror? Wondered what is on the other side? Wondered if it is a portal, like the antique mirror in George MacDonald’s remarkable Victorian fantasy novel, Phantastes?

Do visit my new companion blog, The Daily Write, and check out my new post, “Is the Mirror a Portal?”

Remember, my main site is still here at Thornfield Hall.

The Reader at Large

There you are, on the bus, head in a book, headed home. You even have bedhead.   The woman next to you told you this. 

Having done her hairdo duty, she asks, “Is your book good?”

Am I Holden Caulfield?  Is she Ackley?  Do I dare say, “This sentence is terrific”?  

Maureen Howard (1930-2022)

Now it’s not always like that.  Many passengers are readers, or at least sympathetic to readers.  Sometimes they read a library book.  Sometimes they read on their phone.  I am, at present, reading a Penguin of Maureen Howard’s autobiographical novel, Bridgeport Bus. 

But there is much bustling, what with bicyclists struggling to hitch their bike on the rack on the front of the bus  (Driver:  “I’ve got to get moving, man!”), the homeless guy dragging his garbage bags down the aisle (some of us give up our seats, so we don’t trip over his bags later), men getting hysterical over baseball chat (“Go, team?”), and overhearing noisy conversations about private subjects.

No food and drink are allowed on the bus..  I once had to leave a coffee on the curb. I asked the driver, “Do you want me to litter?” He just raised an eyebrow.

When the reader at large get off the bus, she gallops home, changes into her pajamas, and flops on the couch. And finally she can enjoy the following comic conversation between mother and daughter.

 “Tess Mueller is coming over with their nice son who works at the bank.”…

“That’s a shame,” I tell my mother, “because tonight I’m going to the library in New Haven.”

“The library, the library!” – shrieks of coronary outrage.

This witty early novel by Maureen Howard, published in 1965, is one of my favorites. Some, but not all, of her later books are less straightforward, even experimental, so I recommend Bridgeport Bus as a starter book,

The critically-acclaimed Howard doesn’t seem to be well-known anymore, and that’s a shame. Her books are uneven, but her best are stunning. She was a great American writer.

The Daily Write: Night Owls & Notebooks

After a few false starts, The Daily Write, my new blog, is up and running. Instead of writing about books, I’m writing informally about whatever comes into my head. I hope you’ll come by and read my first post, “Night Owls & Notebooks.”

I call it The Daily Write, but the posts will appear less often.

Thornfield Hall will continue to be my main site.

Here is the url for The Daily Write: the-daily-write.blog

No Home Like a Raft:  “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”

Everybody should read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which I enjoyed thoroughly on a fourth reading. It is not only a classic, but it is sui generis in American literature.

In Twain’s smart, witty, suspenseful masterpiece, Huck and Jim, a comic duo on the run, try to escape trauma as they raft down the Mississippi River.  Jim, a runaway slave, took off when he learned that he was to be sold for $800 and separated from his wife and child. And Huck, too, is a runaway who has escaped from his drunken, abusive father. 

Their experiences are in some ways parallel. Jim looks after Huck like a son, and the two repeatedly save one another from dangerous adventures. Both are flexible in the face of peril, and it is not always apparent, especially to Huck, how much danger they face from flim-flam men and violent feuding families.

Huck’s witty, optimistic voice dominates the narrative, and the tall tales he spins to survive are very funny indeed. Jim and Huck are happiest when they are on the raft.

Here is one of my favorite quotes.

We said there wasn’t no home like a raft, after all.  Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t.  You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.”

.

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The Controversial American Classic:  “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”

I first read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in tenth grade, with sighs and much boredom.  I disliked American literature and anyway as a child had read Twain. I was an Anglophile devoted to Jane Austen,  Lynne Reid Banks, John Fowles,  Doris Lessing, and  D. H. Lawrence.  “Oh, God, this is in dialect,” I whispered.

“And there is rafting,” my friend said.

We were not athletic.

So many classics are really intended for mature adults. We did not appreciate the brilliant rhetorical devices in Twain’s sentences at that difficult age. Check out the comic repetition of the phrases “didn’t rightly know” and “a good deal of instinct” in the following passage,.  This use of repetition and inversion is chiasmus, an  ABBA sequence of words.

 I didn’t rightly know what to say, because I didn’t know rightly whether the boat would be coming up or down.  But I go a good  deal on instinct; and my instinct said she would be coming down- from down toward  New Orleans.

Readers change. I fell in love with Huckleberry Finn when I reread it at age 20. I was so enthusiastic that I babbled to my Greek professor about a creation myth in Huckleberry Finn and the chiasmus. I urged my friends to read it. Not all had read it in high school, but that was the place where almost everybody lost interest in it.

Many years later, I read it for a book group.  By that time it had somehow or other become a controversial text, and some Black women in the suburbs were protesting its inclusion in the curriculum, objecting to the image of Jim and the “n” word.

There is a long history of censure and censorship of Huckleberry Finn, according to PBS American Experience. It was banned for the first time “shortly after its publication in 1885, white librarians in Concord, Massachusetts deemed it ‘trash’ and ‘suitable only for the slums.'”

Twain is, of course, using historically accurate dialect when he uses the word “nigger,” reflecting the language used in Missouri in the 19th century. In “Explanatory,” at the beginning of the book, he writes,

In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary ‘Pike-County’ dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guess-work; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

The use of dialect is one of the most striking aspects of Twain’s narrative. It bursts with archaic “I reckon”s and double negatives : “I don’t take no stock in dead people.” And it can be beautiful as well as irresistibly funny: “Well, we swarmed along down the river road, just carrying on like wild cats; and to make it more scary, the sky was darking up…”

The women in my book group were adamant about the necessity of reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in high school. It was a tradition… it must be done. As for the image of Jim, one woman claimed that he was a Christ figure.

I love Jim, but do not interpret his character in that way.

I do not know whether it is taught in the schools now. These book-banning battles are waged all over the country now.

All I can say is that white girls aren’t necessarily ready to read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in high school, either.

A Neglected Brazilian Writer:  Rachel de Queiroz’s “Dora, Doralina”

 Before online shopping, there was a plethora of subscription book clubs. 

 There were The Book of the Month, The Literary Guild, The Classics Book Club, and The Quality Paperback Book Club.  A pamphlet arrived each month,  and if you did not want the main selection, you checked the NO box and chose one of the alternatives. 

The Quality Paperback Book club was our favorite.  The books really were of high quality. and there  were fabulous selections:  Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, an omnibus edition of Anna Kavan, an  omnibus of Christopher Isherwood, and an advance copy of Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of the Aeneid.

I am especially fond of a QPB boxed set of South American literature. Of course it includes the work of famous Gabriel Garcia Marquez and  Mario Vargas Llosa, but there is also a little-known Brazilian novel, Dora, Doralina, by Rachel de Queiroz (1910-2003), who wrote novels, plays, TV scripts, and children’s books. The translator is Dorothy Scott Loos.  

I thoroughly enjoyed Dora, Doralina, the story of the narrator’s escape from the hell of a miserable girlhood to a life in a traveling theater.

Life itself is theater; her rise as an actress in a repertory company provides opportunities for reinvention. The members of the company are eccentric but, with a few exceptions, charming, kind, and generous.  And they become family to her.

The theatrical components of her life begin early, though, long before she performs in a theater;  : she sketches these scenes in the opening pages, cutting back and forth in time as if it to lessen the pain of memory. In the first sentence, her beloved second husband, the Captain, says, “It’s natural to be in pain.”

Doralina had a sad childhood and a painful first marriage. Her cold mother disliked being called Mother and insisted that Doralina call her Senhora, as the servants did.

And since Doralina is an heiress, money complicates her marriage. The estate, Soledade, belongs wholly to her, which seems to be the reason her cruel first husband, Laurindo, marries her and not her mother.  But the sly Senhora has an affair with Laurindo, and though Doralina never confronts them, she is appalled to hear them laughing about how they drug her so she will not wake up when they make love.

Their betrayal a hurts her but she recognizes them for the sociopaths they are. Fortunately, Laurindo, a sadistic man who kills his neighbor’s pet birds and then dines on them, dies of an “accident” with a gun, and that is when Doralina makes her escape to town where she meets a theater director and his wife at a rooming house. 

The Dickensian owner of the repertory company, Seu Brandini, is charming and persuasive, and soon has the inexperienced Doralina acting and singing on stage.  She is a terrible singer, but learns that it is all about presentation.  And even though Seu Brandini is often sued for plagiarism –  he does little besides change the names of the characters in the plays he “writes”– the company, often strapped for money, trusts and loves him, and he pays them whenever he comes into money. 

The passage below captures Seu Brandini’s joyful personality.

The second play of the theater, Darling of My Love, was Seu Brandini’s favorite.  It took place on the pampas.  Seu Brandini said he wrote it; at least he signed it. The authorship notwithstanding, it seemed tailored for him; he adored that role, especially the number, “The Andorhina,”which he sang.  He would then open up his thundering voice (he explained that he was a baritone) and I can only say that the audience went wild and asked for encore after encore.

This charming picaresque novel, published in 1975, reminds me faintly of Colette’s The Vagabond, another novel about a traveling repertory company, though Queiroz’s style is more straightforward, less lyrical. Like Renee in The Vagabond, Doralina falls in love with a charming man, the Captain, who is a vagabond himself. But Renee is ambivalent, while Doralina is enchanted.

The style is certainly nor what one would call fluid or graceful, but I admired this touching novel.

Thoroughly enjoyable, and if you like the theater, you will be entertained by this sad, funny, ultimately triumphant story of a woman’s rise from pain.