Mrs. Gaskell, Classics, and Me

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Mrs. Gaskell is in the canon now, but that wasn’t always the case.  Years ago, on a visit to my boyfriend’s parents, I was reading her unfinished novel, Wives and Daughter, which I’d bought at a university bookstore.

And then Somebody’s Boyfriend (I can’t remember to whom he belonged) mocked Mrs. Gaskell.

“What are you reading?” 

I looked over my glasses.  “It’s a rediscovered classic by Mrs. Gaskell, a Victorian writer.”

“Gotta be careful of those rediscovered writers.”  He thought it was a scream that anyone would read Mrs. Gaskell.  “It’s a con to sell books.”

I said coolly. “It’s a great book. Want to look at it?”

He did not take up this challenge.  He thought it was too, too funny.

This is the kind of interaction women used to have with men about women’s literature. The professors (mostly male then) were vague about women writers. Occasionally they’d teach Jane Austen or Emily Dickinson. It was in Women’s Studies classes that you readSusanna Rowson, Kate Chopin, Tillie Olsen, and Dorothy Richardson.

I am a great fan of the liberal arts. I graduated with honors in School of Letters (a major long ago eliminated by the university), with an emphasis on classical languages.  I was so attuned to Latin that I won the Latin Prize.  But it’s when you start dreaming in Latin that you realize you’ve been enchanted by Roman magic.

And then I went to graduate school to get my M.A., in classics, a mystic, if rigorous experience.  I was elated by the strange sound and sense of lucid, mysterious Greek tragedy but I relate more to the exquisite Rpman poetry. In graduate school, I taught first-year Latin and Virgil as a T.A., then worked for a year as a Visiting Lecturer.

How can I explain the enchantment of the classics? In T. S. Eliot’s brilliant essay, “What Is a Classic?”, he vigorously claims Virgil’s Aeneid is the only classic in the Western canon. He believes the Latin language was at the height of maturity in the first century BCE, and Roman civilization at its apex during Augustus’s reign. 

And so I was devastated to read in a newspaper that the state university is considering cutting six low- enrollment programs, among them classical languages, Italian, Russian, women’s studies, African-American studies, and applied physics.

IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE. The university has hung on to classics for years, even when some eastern colleges eliminated it.

We don’t believe in signs in the yard, but I may be the first on the block with a SAVE THE LIBERAL ARTS sign.

To celebrate and promote the endangered classics, I am posting a link below to an essay I wrote in 2022 about Ovid’s two poems about abortion (Amores).  These are, to my knowledge, the first poems about abortion. 

https://thornfieldhall.blog/ovid-on-his-mistresss-abortion-2/

Sadness at the Party: Arturo Vivante’s Writing Class

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Arturo Vivante as a young man.
Have you heard of Arturo Vivante?  He was my Fiction Writing teacher when I was 19. He published many short stories in The New Yorker and several collections of short stories.  His books are out-of-print, but if you are a New Yorker subscriber you can read his stories at the website.  He was a writer’s writer, a member of the literati. 

This was my second Fiction Writing class. I loved writing fiction.  You could take Fiction Writing and Poetry Writing  again and again for credit.  You wrote your heart out, the secretaries made copies for the class, the students picked them up at the office, and in class the students’ criticism was polite.  And my first Fiction Writing teacher was a very kind T.A. who gave helpful advice. He went on to became a famous writer.

Fiction Writing was a delightful break from academic subjects. The writing was fun, even if the critique was stressful (though inevitably positive).  But the visiting professor, Arturo Vivante, an Italian doctor who gave up his medical practice to write, seemed astonished to find himself in the Midwest. “What am I doing here?”That was in a bubble above his head, I swear to you.   One look at us tragically hip midwesterners and he wondered, “Why did I agree to teach summer school?”  (That was another bubble above his head.)
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You’re here, deal with it.  That was my motto.   But he didn’t want to deal with it.  That was part of the problem.

I can see it from his point of view:  we were not the kind of people a guy like him wanted to hang out with.  Most of us were undergraduates. You know, we all wore t-shirts, often bearing political slogans (mine said KEEP ABORTION SAFE AND LEGAL), or proclaiming that the wearer had run a 10K race.  There were also two high school teachers from a town 30 miles away, a busker who played a violin, and a couple of Vietnam vets.
 
Vivante’s focus was on the Vietnam vets.  We all were concerned about them at the university. Some of them were not – quite there. They were dazed and silent, or joked around constantly, but the jokes were a wall. They seemed old and weary, and a bit desperate, as if they had just dropped Agent Orange on a village or seen their whole squadron killed in battle.  And yet they couldn’t have been much older than I was. I never quite took that in. They were bitter, partly because of their reception when they returned from this much-protested war. But one told me that the army was the best thing that happened to him, because of the G.I. bill.

Here’s what happened in class:  Vivante shot down the short stories of both the teachers.  RAT-A-TAT-TAT. He told them they needed more than good grammar to write a story.  Was he insulting them for being high school teachers?  Yes, he was. 

I butted in. “I really believed in the woman’s sadness at the party. That was moving. That’s what parties are.”

What that meant I couldn’t tell you, but I wanted her to know that she shouldn’t take Vivante too seriously. I wish I could remember what I wrote, but it is a complete blank in my mind.  I don’t remember what Vivante said about it, either.  That means it was neither too good nor too bad. I got an A, but I threw the story away long ago.

Now we get to the sad part.  One of the Vietnam vets wrote a story about rape. The guy was a mess.  This story should not have been discussed in class, but in a one-on-one conference. It was offensive, crazy, and terrifying.  Was this graphic rape scene based on an experience in Vietnam?  Or was it a warped fantasy that had nothing to do with that?  At 19, I did not know.  Vivante actually praised the story. I felt myself derealizing during his critique.  But I think he felt he had to praise the Vietnam vet.  He himself had been through a lot during World War II: in 1938 his family fled to England because of growing anti-semitism. The British sent Arturo to an internment camp in Canada, separating him from his family. We didn’t know that, of course.

Still, his disrespect for women’s feelings felt unforgivable.

So these are the two things I remember about the class:  his dismissing the high school teachers’ stories as exercises in grammar, and his praise of a rape story.

N.B. I would never have written this if Vivante was still alive.

Adventures of Ms. Ph.D.

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I have a new routine. Just call me Ms. Ph.D. If I need to clean the house or run an errand, I murmur, “I’m working on my Ph.D.”

Getting a master’s required discipline, daring, and caffeine. I rushed from the coffeehouse to seminars to teaching a class and then to the library and back to the the downtown apartment where our wild Siamese cat perched on dictionaries and batted my pen, resulting in Sortes Virgilianae and Ouiji-like messages from the dead. 

Now why would I want to return to that busy life-style? Well, it is (a) something to do, and (b) more intriguing than looking at screens. This winter I’ve been spinning theories about classical writers, because I figure, at my age, it’s better to write the dissertation before you apply to graduate school. 

Of course, there is a down side:  I need to include “three letters of recommendation from faculty who know you well.” I’d happily comply, if they weren’t dead.  Perhaps I could submit affectionate reminiscences and translate passages from my profs’ favorite writers.

The other down side:  I’d have to move to a university town, and my life is here in a city.  Do I want to move at this point?  Perhaps I could attend classes on Zoom and breeze into town once a month for a face-to-face meeting.

So is it better to be an official Ms. Ph.D?  Or continue work on my personal Ph.D.?

If I can do a Ph.D. at home, you’ll hear about it.

International Booker Prize:   Shahrnush Parsipur’s “Women Without Men”

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“How can they tell people their daughter or sister has turned into a tree?” –  “Women Without Men,” by Shahrnush Parispur

Penguin UK edition

Shahrnush Parsipur’s Women Without Men, translated by Faridoun Farrokh, is longlisted for the International Booker Prize. The style is lyrical and hypnotic, and the book laced with magic realism. I am spellbound by the imagery of the garden.

In this brilliant, original novel, set in the 1950s, five Iranian women resist the bonds of sexist society, and, by luck and magical agency, find themselves in an Edenic orchard. A teacher walks out on her job without giving notice: she plants herself as a tree.  A former prostitute gives birth to a water lily.  A spinster, murdered by her brother and rescued from the grave by a spinster frenemy, helps the gardener gather dew drops.  A wealthy widow, formerly an oppressed housewife, hopes to build a literary movement around the woman-tree.

The Edenic garden heals and renews. The women escape from the dysfunctional city, with its crime and riots. Wouldn’t it be lovely to live in a garden?  The magical gardener has only to touch a plant to make it flourish.

I predict this stunning book will win, or at least make the shortlist. It is not technically a new book, but it has an unusual history. The Islamic government banned it when it was published in Iran in 1989 and Parsipur went to prison for it. She now lives in the U.S.

Feminist Press edition, U.S.

Penguin recently published the English translation by Faridoun Farrokh,which was first published in 2011 by the Feminist Press in the U.S.

This book is truly an international venture, with roots in many countries.

THE THORNFIELD HALL NEWSLETTER

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Volume 3, February 2026

In this winter issue of The Thornfield Hall Newsletter, I muse on Mary Shelley’s Matilda,a novel posthumously published in 1959; the new Wuthering Heights sensation; and the International Booker Prize longlist.

Mary Shelley’s Radical Novel, Mathilda

Don’t let anyone tell you differently: Mary Shelley’s Matilda is a masterpiece. This brilliant short novel, like Shelley’s Frankenstein, can be read as psychological horror.

It begins with the narrator Matilda’s reunion with her father. She has never met him: after her mother died in childbirth, he deserted her and turned her over to his stern older sister. Now he is entranced by 16-year-old Matilda, who closely resembles her mother. The father and daughter develop an unusually close relationship, and he admits to incestuous love for Matilda.

Their relationship is shattered. Matilda, weeping and tearing her hair like the heroine of a Greek tragedy, rushes to her room. After reading the letter he wrote before leaving, Matilda, fearing he might commit suicide, takes off in a carriage to track him down. The scene resembles the scene in Bleak House, in which Esther and Inspector Bucket try to find Lady Dedlock. I would say that Dickens read Mary Shelley, except Matilda wasn’t published yet.

Matilda is as Gothic as Shelley’s Frankenstein, and shares similar themes.  Just as Dr. Frankenstein’s repulsion and abandonment turn his ugly creature into a monster, Matilda’s father’s confession and flight change her from a joyous girl into a miserable, lonely, faded young woman.

Is her father, as he says, “a monster”?  Or a “fallen Archangel?”  Perhaps he is too forgiving of himself.  After his admission of love for Matilda, he says he’s a “worm,” but soon becomes manic. He teeters from hatred to joy. 

“Yes, yes, I hate you!  You are my bane, my disgust, my poison! Oh, no! …  You are none of all these, you are my light, my only one, my life – My daughter, I love you!”

Matilda begins to believe that she is the monster. She moves to a desolate place in the country where she meets a poet (Percy Bysshe Shelley?), who is also grieving a loss. (This friendship is not romantic.) By the way, Shelley took the name Matilda from the guide in Dante’s Purgatorio. Dante’s Matilda is a Persephone figure who acts as Dante’s guide through the Terrestrial Paradise.

Although Mary Shelley sent the manuscript of Matilda to her father, William Godwin, the philosopher, he was scandalized and refused to sent it to a publisher. He had a complicated relationship with his daughter, and was a reluctant father. His wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, died two weeks after giving birth to Mary. Godwin married a second time to find someone to do child care. 

Matilda was finally published in 1959.

The Wuthering Heights Hullabaloo

Emily Brontë is my favorite Brontë sister, and I suspect that the new film of Wuthering Heights sells books. There is a new edition of the novel published in Simon & Schuster’s Female Filmmakers Collection, a series of books curated by female filmmakers. Emerald Fennel, the writer and author of the new film of Wuthering Heights, wrote the introduction to this new edition.

It’s Book Award Season Again!

The International Book Prize longlist was announced today.  The nominees are:

Shida Bazyar, The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran, translated from German by Ruth Martin

Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, We Are Green and Trembling, translated from Spanish by Robin Myers

Anjet Daanje, The Remembered Soldier, translated from Dutch by David McKay

Mathias Énard, The Deserters, translated from French by Charlotte Mandell

Ia Genberg, Small Comfort, translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson

Rene Karabash, She Who Remains, translated from Bulgarian by Izidora Angel

Daniel Kehlmann, The Director, translated from German by Ross Benjamin

Ana Paula Maia, On Earth As It Is Beneath, translated from Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan

Matteo Melchiorre, The Duke. translated from Italian by Antonella Lettieri

Marie Ndiaye, The Witch, translated from French by Jordan Stump

Shahrnush Parsipur, Women Without Men translated from Persian by Faridoun Farrokh

Olga Ravn, The Wax Child, translated from Danish by Martin Aitken

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, Taiwan Travelogue, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King

Hawthorne’s Commune in “The Blithedale Romance”

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During freshman year at the university, I enrolled in a Women’s Studies class.  I was excited: in high school I’d read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics,  Sisterhood Is Powerful, edited by Robin Morgan, and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying.  I also organized a feminist consciousness group, and circulated a petition to add a homecoming king to the homecoming rituals (this was to point out the sexism of the homecoming queen tradition).  Almost everyone signed it, but the principal vetoed it. 

How is this pertinent to Nathanael Hawthorne, you may ask. It has to do with the way we read him in the Women’s Studies class.  Hawthorne’s novel The Blithedale Romance is set in a socialist community, Blithedale Farm.  This fictional community is based on Brook Farm, a socialist community in Massachusetts where  Hawthorne lived for several months.  I’m fascinated by the New England communities of this era. It was the transcendental philosophers’ 1960s.

In The Blithedale Romance, the poet-protagonist, Miles Coverdale, arrives at the farm in a snowstorm.. He asks Zenobia, a feminist and an enchanting raconteur, how the labor will be divided. He and the men will work on the farm, while the women will do housework.  Miles adamantly defends the cause of women: “It is odd enough, that the kind of labor which falls  to the lot of women is just what chiefly distinguishes artificial life – the life of degenerated mortals – from the life of Paradise.”  But Zenobia, “with mirth gleaming out of her eyes,” says, “We shall have some difficulty in adapting the Paradisical system, for at least a month.” 

In my superb class, we read The Blithedale Romance with a kind of feminist knowingness, because we were familiar with the many collectives and communes that dotted the American landscape.

Because Blithedale Farm is a collective community, not a commune, it is dedicated to radical politics and living according to these beliefs. Collectives are sometimes organized by principles of feminism, socialism, communism, anarchy, and philosophy. These modern collective inhabitants not only shared the housework and child care, but founded free schools, held political rallies, established underground newspapers, had consciousness-raising groups, and gave lectures.

On the other hand, communes in the late 20th century were more hippie-ish and free-wheeling, known for drugs,  STDs, and sharing LSD with their children. (Cf. Joan Didion’s essay ‘”Slouching towards Bethlehem.).

In every family there is one sad case, and in ours – on the wrong side of the family, of course – an aunt left her whole estate, including a trailer for him to live in, to the family waif, clearly to rescue him from a commune where he’d stagnated for more than 20 years. But this aunt left no money at all to her son, which horrified everyone. The heir wanted to institutionalize him, but my dad would not allow it. And, to make sure he didn’t get put away after Dad’s death, Dad left him some money in his will. One hopes that the cunning ex-commune dweller, who has traveled to the Cayman Islands, doesn’t have power-of-attorney.

Here are two other novels about communes.

Drop City, by T. C. Boyle (comic novel about a commune in Alaska)

Kinflicks, by Lisa Alther (in one hilarious chapter the heroine lives in a commune)

Any favorite commune novels?

The Alternative Newspaper Scene

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The alternative newspaper had two things going for it: (1) it was free, and (2) it had one excellent columnist.  The very sound of the word “alternative” raised my expectations, though I clearly confused it with “underground” newspapers.  Would it be like The Village Voice, with music reviews by Nat Hentoff and humor columns by Cynthia Heimel?

“What it means,” said my friend, the editor of a local magazine, “is that I can cancel my subscription to Marcus’ newsletter and read him for free.”

I had never heard of Marcus, a columnist who lived off his newsletter.  It’s no wonder I never heard of him, since local politics was his thing, and politics bored me.  To me, his stuff read like typical op/ed pieces, but I never read those, either, so I’m no judge.  In retrospect, he was a daring radical who deconstructed the dark powers of the city

Every columnist has his or her fans, but I skipped all “news” columns, such as they were, and stuck to the lighter stuff. My motto is:  Give me fluff!  Give me art! (There’s nothing funnier than local art: sorry, but it’s true!)  Give me movies (comedies, please, and remakes of Jane Austen)!  Give me literary fiction!  It took me all of three minutes to read the the alternative paper.

I especially enjoyed the art column. The whimsical art critic created a gossip column/travel writing gig.  He/she would travel with friends to an art show in a big city, but get distracted by shopping. Once, they got gigs as paparazzi. Well, obviously he exaggerated or made some of it up! But it was great fun to read.

The paper folded, as these things do. Another free paper replaced it. But I still miss The Village Voice. That was the template for underground excellence.

Jean Kerr, American Humorist

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Jean Kerr (1922-2003)

“Who is your favorite humor writer of the 20th century?”  

 Your mind goes blank. Humor? You remember humor. You may, if you’re lucky, blurt out Dorothy Parker and J. S. Perelman.  They were famous, and they wrote for The New Yorker.  

But, honestly, they are not my favorites. I am a great aficionado of women’s humor columns, the kind published in the Ladies’ Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post in the 20th century.

My favorite is Jean Kerr (1922-2003), a playwright, humorist, and the wife of Walter Kerr the drama critic. She was, and is, one of the wittiest American humor writers.

First, let me say I am a great fan of the film version of Kerr’s play, Mary, Mary.

And I am mad about her humor books.  I recommend How I Got to Be Perfect, a collection of essays, most from her previous books, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, The Snake Has All the Lines, and Penny Candy.

 In the introduction to How to Be Perfect, Kerr reflects wittily on reading and writing.

“As a matter of fact, I will read anything rather than work.  And I don’t mean interesting things like the yellow section …  The truth is that, rather than put a word on paper, I will spend a whole half hour reading the label on a milk of magnesia bottle.”

I was fascinated to learn that she does “about half” of her writing in the car, where there is nothing to read except Chevrolet manuals.

I have tried writing on mass transit, to no avail. I tried to write an essay on a train once, but there was no room to spread out the necessary books. I have, however, read widely on planes. Recommendations: E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View or Gerald Heard’s mystery, A Taste for Honey.

Reading in public is possible, though not without its hair-raising moments.  On a recent bike ride, I carried three books in my panniers, because I might require three reading choices when I sat down to take a break. And then suddenly a woman yelled repeatedly at me, “Stop, stop! There’s an eagle.”  

I am not interested in eagles.  I saw one once.  It was enough.

When I stopped reluctantly, she put her hand firmly on my arm and attempted to pull me off my bike. Something was off: no stranger has ever gripped my arm before – and then there was the undeniable fact that there was no eagle.  I left, despite her repeated orders: “Turn around. Here, here.” I biked away.. Captain Nemo suggested she was after my billfold.  

Anyway, it was a forgettable, if unpleasant, incident. I took refuge in Kerr’s humor columns, as I often do, because nothing is ever too awful in her world. and if it is, she makes fun of it.  

I laughed aloud over “Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, I Don’t Want to Hear a Word from You,” in which she wittily recounts her husband’s skepticism about beauty products. 

“He is always trying to explain to me that dermatologists have proven that lard, or even bacon drippings, will do just as much or just as little to lubricate the human skin as any cosmetic invented…. When I consider the dreadful samples of lumbering humor I am subjected to when I apply the merest dab of Formula 22 (“Oh, you’re coming to bed?  With all that grease, I thought you were getting ready to swim the Channel”) I can’t bring myself even to contemplate the low-comedy scenes we’d have if I came to bed covered with bacon fat.”

I’d love to live in Jean Kerr’s world.  She turns disappointments and irritations into funny, charming episodes.  There’s nothing quite comparable to Jean Kerr’s columns today. There’s plenty of humor, but this is a different time.

The Condition of “Mrs. Bridge”

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The other day, I came across a first edition of Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge (1959) in the mud room. “I didn’t know we had this!” I exclaimed.

The ’50s cover art is whimsical: the old-fashioned black phone on a white table, dwarfed by a large pink mass (Mrs. Bridge’s knitting? A hat?), and white gloves and a white scarf tucked beneath the pink. The white paper cut-outs are juxtaposed and contrasted with the black table legs.

“I adored this when I read it, ” I said. Back then I related to Mrs. Bridge, a housewife in Kansas City, who has ups and downs. and becomes less conventional as the year pass. I have nothing in common with Mrs. Bridge, but that’s the wonderful thing about fiction: sometimes we become the characters as we read.

I found a handwritten receipt tucked inside the cover.  I bought the book on Jan. 12, 1991, at an antiquarian bookshop. I suppose it closed long ago.

And the price of the book was $9.

“You got robbed,”   said the captain.   “This isn’t in good condition.”

 I didn’t think about condition when I bought used books back then. 

I wonder what I would think about Mrs. Bridge now.  I reread it some years back in a paperback and was less enthusiastic.  At different stages of life, we read things differently.

But I am inspired by the old-fashioned jacket copy.  This writer says, “Mrs. Bridge is a totally delightful reading experience.  It brings in turn the wry smile, the outright laugh, and shows the pang of a deep and willing sympathy.”

That’s a book I want to read.

Responsibility and Abandonment:  Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”

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Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, is a timely novel.  In this horror classic, published in 1818, Shelley describes a hubristic scientist’s abandonment of the life-form he assembles from corpses and electricity.  Affectionate and innocent, the new creature is so hideous that Frankenstein himself rejects it.  The lonely monster, who terrifies all humans, becomes a murderer to avenge himself.

There are two ways to approach this, first, as a traditional horror novel (it is that), second as a dark commentary on Darwinism, the Prometheus myth, and the dangers of abstractions.

The theme of loneliness overrides all abstraction, though.  Frankenstein himself is, ironically, blessed with social skills and not lonely.  But Captain Walton, who rescues Frankenstein from a melting iceberg (long story!), is as lonely as Frankenstein’s creature. In fact, Captain Walton has no friends on his ship.

The novel is framed by letters from Captain Walton to his sister.  In an early letter he confides. “I bitterly feel the want of a friend. I have no no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my plans.”

This letter could be a personals ad, and a perfect dating match for the Creature, who is even lonelier than Walton. The creature does beg Frankenstein to make a mate for him, but Frankenstein refuses, and he has his reasons, but… Was it ethical to refuse and doom him to loneliness?

The creature is at first filled with wonder and longs to make friends, but human beings are terrified of him.  He hides in a shack attached to the cottage of a poor genteel family who love music and books . By watching and listening through a crack in the wall, he learns language and the rudiments of history.  He is inspired by their stories about the Greeks and Romans, and chivalry and Christianity.  He wonders, “Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so vicious and base?”  Alas, when he reveals himself to the family, they scream and run away. 

The novel is layered with references to philosophy, Shelley was influenced by Clement of Alexandria, a second-century gnostic.  The following quote certainly illuminates her thoughts about the birth of Frankenstein’s Creature.

What liberates is the knowledge of what we were, what we became; where we were, whereinto we have been thrown; whereto we speed, wherefrom we are redeemed; what birth is, and what is rebirth.

Shelley, the daughter of the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the political philosopher William Godwin, was a radical intellectual whose storytelling is interwoven with subtle philosophical observations. Her father, William Godwin, a political philosopher, was eloquent about social-psychological theory. He emphasized the necessity of putting esponsibility before abstractions.

“..Knowledge, and the enlargement of the intellect, are poor, when unmixed with sentiments of benevolence and sympathy… and science and abstraction will soon become cold, unless they derive new attractions from ideas of society.”

This is a great read – I galloped through it – and it raises pertinent questions.