A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl by Jean Thompson

Women hold a family together. They plan the social activities and family gatherings, act as a buffer between butting heads, ease the high emotions of family conflict, and provide the meals for the family table that brings generations together.

It is not an easy job, or an easy life. Especially in families afflicted with personality disorders, addictions, mental illness, anger issues, conflict--or even with the usual garden variety issues common to all families.

A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl by Jean Thompson is about three generations of women who have struggled with holding the family together even when their personal dreams are sacrificed for their family. The characters, Evelyn, Laura, and Grace, are vital and distinct while recalling to mind our own mothers and daughters.

It is a heartbreaking story that spans from WWII to the present, each generation of women hoping to find self-fulfillment and true love yet putting the interests of others first.

Each woman who reads this novel must ask herself in what way has she repeated her mother's life, in what ways has she sacrificed her dreams, and if it was worth it in the end. And do we make these choices out of societal or familial expectation or out of the love we have for our children?

I received a free ebook from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl
by Jean Thompson
Simon & Schuster
Pub Date 09 Oct 2018
ISBN 9781501194368
PRICE $26.00 (USD)

The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters

2018 marks the 150th anniversary of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, a novel which became a trendsetter best seller, influencing generations of girls. 

Anne Boyd Rioux's new book Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: the Story of Little Women and Why They Still Matter celebrates the novel's history, legacy, and influence. 

I don't recall when I first read Little Women. I was given a copy of Alcott's later novel Eight Cousins when I was in elementary school. Madame Alexander created Little Women dolls, and in 1960 to 1962 my great-grandmother gifted me Marmee, Beth, Amy and Meg. I never got a Jo or Beth doll for sadly my great-grandmother passed away in 1963. By then, I must have read the book or seen the movie, because I recall thinking that Amy was spoiled and I did not like her. I always liked Jo because she was a writer and at age nine I had decided I wanted to be an author when I grew up. 

my Madame Alexander Little Women Dolls, 1960-62

Meg, Beth, Jo, Amy is more than a nostalgic look at the novel, for Rioux seeks to answer the question of what the novel offers to young readers today. Is it still relevant?

But first, she turns her attention to The Making of a Classic, presenting Alcott 's family and personal history, how they were fictionalized in the novel, how she came to write the novel and its early success. 

Although the novel was inspired by the Alcott's family experiences, it was a very much idealized version of their life. Bronson Alcott held ideals that did not include worldly considerations so that his wife and daughters had to struggle to provide for their daily needs. He may have had episodes of mental instability. Louisa was perhaps a genius, but she also had to write to contribute to the family coffers. 

Alcott never meant to marry off all the March girls, save Beth who dies. But the publisher insisted. Jo was at least allowed to marry on her own terms, and her husband and she run a school together.

This section alone was fascinating for those of us who love the novel.

The various printings of the novel, the illustrators (including those by May Alcott) are also presented.

In Part II, The Life of a Classic, follows the novel's adaptation for the screen and stage--including a musical and an opera--and their influence. I recently viewed the last adaptation, the BBC/PBS television series on Masterpiece Theater, which I very much enjoyed.

Rioux then turns her attention to the novel's Cultural and Literary Influence, including how it has dropped off the literary canon and has been marginalized as a 'girl's book.' And yet the novel had "more influence on women writers as a group than any other single book," Rioux writes, and she quotes dozens of writers extolling its inspiration. Little Women's legacy includes novels such as Anne of Green Gables by L. M Montgomery and Hermonine Granger in the Harry Potter novels by J. K. Rowling. 

Is the novel an idealized version of life, or does it reflect reality? G. K. Chesterton thought Alcott "anticipated realism by twenty or thirty years," while many 20th c writers found it preachy and, in short, too feminine. Gloria Steinem and Germaine Greer both loved Little Women, while other feminists rejected the novel.

Is Little Women still relevant today, and why should it continue to be read, is probed in Part III: A Classic for Today. 

In recent years fewer children have read Little Women, and that is in part because educational standards became slanted toward boys and their needs and interests. Even if Teddy Roosevelt liked the book as a boy, today's boys won't pick up a book that is girlish. That's why some writers use initials instead of first names--so the boy readers won't know the books are written by a female! Sadly, few books by women appear on school reading lists.

What is lost when boy don't read about family and community? Have we 'hypermasculinized' boys and condoned intolerance of the feminine?

Last of all, Rioux looks at the role models girls today have, from Disney princesses to the action heroines and warrior princesses, Rory Gilmore to  Girls.

As a novel about young girls growing up, the March sisters offer readers images of what it means to be a girl and the choices girls have.

The novel, Rioux says, "is about learning to live with and for others," and it is about the compromises we make in life.

I highly recommend this book.

Anne Boyd Rioux is also the author of Constance Fenimore Woolson (read my review here) and editor of Miss Grief and Other Stories by Constance Fenimore Woolson.

Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters

by Anne Boyd Rioux

W. W. Norton & Company

Pub Date 21 Aug 2018 

ISBN 9780393254730

PRICE $27.95 (USD)

“Reading Anne Boyd Rioux’s engaging Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters, has made me pick up Alcott’s novel yet again with renewed insight and inspiration. Every fan of Little Women will delight in reading this book. And all the women―and men―who haven’t read the novel will race to it after reading Rioux.”
- Ann Hood, author of Morningstar and The Book That Matters Most

*****

Little Women has influenced quilters as well.

Copy of pattern  by Marion Cheever Whiteside Newton 

Artist Marion Cheever Whiteside Newton established Story Book Quilts, a cottage industry of quiltmakers who sewes quilts based on her applique designs inspired by children's literature.

Little Women made by Nancy A. Bekofske

In 1952 her Little Women pattern was sold through Ladies Home Journal Magazine. I purchased a copy of the pattern online and made my own version.

Kaye England's Voices of the Past: A History of Women's Lives in PatchworkVolumee II includes an essay and quilt pattern for Louisa May Alcott

Terry Clothier Thompson offered Louise May Alcott: Quilts of Her Life, Her Work, Her Heart in 2008.

 The applique quilt features scenes from the life of the Alcott family.

See more Little Women quilts:

International Quilt Study Center and Museum:

https://www.quiltstudy.org/quilt/20060530002

The Quilt Index

http://www.quiltindex.org/fulldisplay.php?kid=4F-88-146

The Quilt Show:

https://thequiltshow.com/see-quilts/quilt-gallery/item/11275-little-women

Quiltville Blogspot:

http://quiltville.blogspot.com/2013/05/susans-little-women-quilt.html

Little Women Quilt from Flickr

https://www.flickr.com/photos/luanarubin/26664280967/

The Enchanted Quilters of Lopez Island on Karen Alexander's collection

http://enchantedquiltersoflopezisland.blogspot.com/2015/02/who-is-marion-cheever-whiteside-newton.html?m=1

The "Unmentionable" Revealed: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners

Therese Oneill made my week: I was down for the count, having lost to a marauding virus. I was not sure I could manage anything more demanding than sit-com reruns...until I decided to check out this scandalous-looking book, aptly named Unmentionable.

LOL! Yep, I was laughing out loud in spite of having a head about the size of a pumpkin and a throat redder that St. Nicholas' coat.

Women have sighed and longed for the glamour and elegance of high Victorian days, or the diaphanous, Greek inspired gowns of Austen; a time when men where men and girls were girls--- Get real, Oneill warns, and with a series of essays drawing from historical documents and 19th c books, she delineates what life was really like two centuries ago.

1841 Graham's Magazine. Those dresses were never washed.

Chapters cover every aspect of female experience, from arsenic in beauty products and crotchless pantaloons, to 'female problems' and the hysteria that results from 'female problems'. And we learn what men wanted--and didn't want-- from their women and wives. With running gags (don't chew on your umbrella handle!) readers are addressed with irreverent familiarity.

Consider some of the chapter heads:

• Getting Dressed: How to Properly Hide Your Shame 
• Bowels into Buckets
• Menstruation: You're Doing it Wrong
• Birth Control and Other Affronts to God
• The Secret Vice: "Where Warts and Tiny Nipple Come From"

The limits imposed on ladys were strict. Without a man or an older woman companion, a woman could not be trusted to walk down the street. And once allowed out of the house, there were injunctions against window shopping, greeting friends from across the street, and carrying your own money. You never raised your skirt, even when wadding through piles of manure.

At least a gal could use her handkerchief to communicate: dropping it in front of a man invited friendship; twirling it connoted indifference; and drawing it across the check meant love. Fans, parasols, and gloves were also eloquent vehicles---for those with guidebooks for interpretation.

Great-Great-Grandmother Elizabeth Hacking Greenwood,
 looking very exhausted but elegant. She had 7 children, most of whom,
like their dad, worked in the cotton mills.

Dr. Kellogg especially gets a rightful bum rap for misunderstanding females, but he is not alone. Male doctors thought they knew everything. Consider the ideal of the uterine orgasm, when the uterus convulses to meet the male organ, or the advice for women to lay on their back with their legs stretched out flat because all 'unnatural positions' lead to serous injury!

Great-Great-Grandmother Ramer, later mother

to eight children plus raising some of

her husband's eight children from his first marriage!

At least Kellogg advised against marital rape and believed mothers prepare daughters for 'marriage and its duties'.

When you married a man you hardly knew, and failing to be a paragon of ideal womanhood, lost his interest to another woman, what could you do? A 1840  book offered the example of a good wife who outfitted the mistress's flat in a style befitting her husband's status, then arranged an annuity to the other woman when hubby gave her up!

Illustrated throughout, with nothing left to the imagination, women are reminded of how good we have it over the Crinoline Ladies of yesteryear.

What we imagine the 19th c was like...

You will be glad the information Oneill imparts is veiled in humor, for the indignities of Victorian age female life is horrifying. Women today still face inherited prejudices and attitudes.

But at least our undies have crotches.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Unmentionable
Therese Oneill
Little, Brown, and Company
Publication October 25, 2016
$25 hard cover
ISBN: 9780316357913

The Poetry of Anne Sexton

The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton is now available in ebook from Open Road Integrated Media. The book includes the complete poems and posthumously published work. It is a substantial volume of work. Sexton plumbed her own life as a woman, mother, daughter, wife and lover, addressed her struggle with depression, institutionalization, and suicide attempts.

The Publisher's Note explains how the poems were adapted to the ebook form. And How It Was: Maxine Kumin on Anne Sexton,  a revealing essay about Kumin's professional and personal relationship with Sexton.  Kumin writes that an elderly priest told Sexton that "God is your typewriter"; those words kept Sexton going for another year as she wrote her last book of poetry, The Awful Rowing Toward God.

I found The Awful Rowing Toward God by Anne Sexton shortly after it's publication in paperback. I did not have much money in those days, and buying a book was a thoughtful decision. I did not know Sexton. I did not know about 'confessional' poetry or about Sexton's demons and suicide. The title caught my attention and I brought it home.

Sexton was a revelation. Her imagery was so novel and individualistic, unlike anything I had ever read before. Her voice was clear and honest. I fell in love with these poems. She impacted my own poetry more than I care to admit, but I was young and trying new things.

The volume begins with Rowing with its imagery of God as an island the poet endeavors to reach, an imperfect island but where

"there will be a door
and I will open it
and I will get rid of the rat inside of me
the gnawing pestilential rat.
God will take it with his two hands/and embrace it."

She tells us she is on a quest.

In the poem Courage she writes about what courage means in life, "it is in the small things we see it./The child's first step,/as awesome as an earthquake," to the courage of enduring despair, and the courage of old age when "at the last moment/when death opens the back door/you'll put on your carpet slippers and stride out."

At times the poems reflected me back to other poets. For instance, in The Poet of Ignorance Sexton writes,

"I try to forget it, go about my business,
cook the broccoli, open and shut books,
brush my teeth and tie my shoes."

And I recalled Emily Dickinson's poem about performing the mundane as a way of carrying on:

"I tie my hat--I crease my shawl--
Life's little duties do--precisely--
...
Therefore--we do life's labor--
Though Life's Reward--be done--
With scrupulous exactness--
To hold our senses on--"

Sexton refers to an animal, a crab clutching fast to her heart; Dickinson to a Bomb held to her bosom.

The last poems were my favorites.

Not So. Not So.,  beginning "I cannot walk an inch/without trying to walk to God" and ending "You have a thousand prayers/but God has one."

In The Rowing Endeth, the poet has arrived "at the dock of the island called God" and plays a game of poker with the deity. God wins and laughs, "the laughter rolling like a hoop out of His mouth/and into mine,/and such laughter that He doubles right over me/laughing a Rejoice-Chorus at our two triumphs." And as the whole universe laughs, she ends, "Dearest dealer/I with my royal straight flush/love you for your wild card/that untamable, eternal, gut-driven ha-ha/and lucky love."

The Christian faith is a comedy: God always wins for out of death comes the joy of resurrection. Death brought Sexton death respite from her demons. I  pray that she found peace.

I received a free ebook through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

"[Her poems] will be understood in time--not as 'women's poetry' or 'confessional poetry'--but as myths that expand the human consciousness." Erica Jong

The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton

Open Road Integrated Media

Publication Date: April 5, 2016

ISBN: 9781504034364

$9.99 ebook