Women in the time of the Revolution - Book essay

When I first began to study Literature for my first college degree at what was then, Glassboro State College in Glassboro, New Jersey back in the late 1960's, I looked for the women writers. I had read male authors my entire life and I was a book worm, so I read a LOT. In fact, I had cut my teeth, so to speak, on the classics of American Leterature and European Literature, thanks to a bookshelf in my Grandmother Lavinia Lyon's basement. No one else had any interest in those books but to me it wa like discovered treasure. My Mother read to me and bought me books and that must have been the origin of my enchantment, because enchanted I was! For most of my childhood, all I wanted to do was read, read, read! I was particularly captivated by sea stories for some reason, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson. Perhaps I felt that after I had been in the amniotic sea, I had found myself shipwrecked on a mysterious island too.

Among the many sets of books in my Grandmother's basement book shelf, were the whole collection of Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. I read them all, although I must confess I didn't finish A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, by Twain. I couldn't understand it at all. Among the classics of European literature in the set on the shelf were books by Boccacio and de Maupassant. I read the Last Days of Pompei from that set as well as The Decameron. In my teens, after I moved from Philadelphia to New Jersey and got a library card, I expanded my reading with sets of books more appropriate to my age, which I devoured like candy: Cherry Ames. Student Nurse, Nancy Drew, Detective, and others. They had been inspired by one book from the basement shelves called OUTDOOR GIRLS ON A HIKE, which I loved wih all my heart. It was in a special class of beloved books which was shared with Anne of Green Gables also from the basement. Later in my more turbulent teens, I came under the sway of the Russians, Turgenev, Dostoevski, Pasternak. Their work seemed to suit my tormented teenaged soul.

What I loved about all of those books was my TOTAL IMMERSION in those other worlds. I was that kind of strange child with that kind of strange concentration. Those other worlds transported me and also prepared me for a life among humans, for better or for worse. So, of course, when I went to college to study literature, I wanted to learn the magic art of writing books, and having met, by that point mostly male authors, I was eager to see the world through the eyes of women, but where were they? After a dispute with a literature professor over a coarse called Survey of World Literature which included NOT ONE female author, I did my own indepencdent study and created a bibliography of lost, forgotten, or ignored women authors and I read them beginning at the beginning with Lady Murasaki and the Tales of Genji, the first novel written around 1000 a.d. I worked my way through the famous ones like George Sand and Edith Wharton, and the Bronte' sisters, and I sought out women who had been good enough to be published but who had later fallen into the dustbin of history, Dorothy Canfield Fisher.

Similarly when I studied Art in my 2nd Bachelor's degree at Rutgers, I looked for the Women Artists and again it was a true excavation through the lives of male artists. But I found Artemisia Gentileschi, Marie Laurencin, Mary Casatt, Georgia O'Keefe (soon to become famous again thanks to the Women's Movement). Fortunately I had a woman professor who had written a book on lost women artists, Wendy Slatkin: Women Artists - Antiquity to the Present.

I am going to finish this in a new entry because the blog has limited the amount of text space I can use. to be continued.