Posts Tagged ‘harper lee’

One of the questions I get asked most often is “I’m a fan of [insert author here].  What books and resources should I read to find out more?”

When I wrote The Heroine’s Bookshelf, I very deliberately decided to make the book as accessible as possible…which meant excluding a bibliography or academic footnotes.  However, the history major in me demanded a very rigorous research process, and I consulted multiple books and primary sources for each chapter.

Rather than bore you with my long, snarled list of primary sources and books, I’d like to recommend some great further reading to serve as an entree into the lives of my literary heroines.  Please bear in mind that I could have written an entire book on the research materials alone, so this represents a very truncated list!

Jane Austen: If you’re looking for a comprehensive guide to all things Jane, by all means start at The Republic of Pemberley’s most impressive Selective Jane Austen Bibliography.  Great starting places include Jane’s Fame:  How Jane Austen Conquered the World by Claire Harman and A Memoir of Jane Austen: And Other Family Recollections, by James Edward Austen-Leigh, a great period document that informs Jane bios to this day.

Zora Neale Hurston: Nobody wrote about Zora’s life quite as well as Zora herself, notably in Dust Tracks on a Road, but I particularly enjoyed Valerie Boyd’s Wrapped In Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston and Zora Neale Hurston: A Biography of the Spirit by Deborah G. Plant.

Lucy Maud Montgomery: Maud scholarship is making huge strides, thanks in part to the L.M. Montgomery Institute and the Lucy Maud Montgomery Literary Society.  I found true inspiration and great information in Irene Gammel’s Looking for Anne of Green Gables, Mary Henley Rubio’s Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings, and the lovely Annotated Anne of Green Gables edited by Wendy Elizabeth Barry, Margaret Anne Doody, and Mary Doody Jones and published in a gorgeous edition by the Oxford University Press.

Alice Walker: Alice Walker is still living out her own biography.  I enjoyed Alice Walker: A Life by Evelyn C. White and Alice Walker: Critical perspectives past and present, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K.A. Appiah.

Betty Smith: I was disappointed at the dearth of biography on this amazing figure of literature, and hope that more authors take up the call to document Betty’s life in greater detail.  That said, I devoured Valerie Raleigh Yow’s Betty Smith: Life of the Author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and found Carol Siri Johnson’s online dissertation on Betty Smith to be quite helpful.

Colette: Though she was a formidable, fascinating figure indeed, Americans don’t tend to pay too much attention to Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, and many of her biographies are out of print.  I enjoyed Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman and found interesting information in Michele Sarde’s Colette and Colette: A Life by Herbert R. Lottman.  If anything, any book on Colette is worth peeking into for ravishing photos of the famously beautiful Colette!

Margaret Mitchell: Peggy Mitchell was notoriously…unreliable when it came to relating her own biography.  That said, Ellen Firsching Brown and John Wiley have done a stunning job with their recently-released Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind: A Bestseller’s Odyssey from Atlanta to Hollywood. Darden Asbury Pyron’s Southern Daughter is an entertaining starting point for more biography on Peg as opposed to the book for which she is famous.

Harper Lee: Nelle was the only other living author featured in my book, and she is notoriously private about her life to the chagrin of her fans and the detriment of her biographers.  That said, it is hard to find a biography as lovingly researched and thorough as Charles J. Sheilds’s Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee.

Laura Ingalls Wilder: Laura’s another writer who is currently undergoing a scholarship renaissance, helped along by the amazing folks at Beyond Little House and Laurati who are doing interesting work nationwide and even worldwide.  I was particularly entranced by Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer’s Life by Pamela Smith Hill, which is hands-down my favorite Laura biography.  Other great bios include John E. Miller’s Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder, Anita Clair Fellman’s Little House, Long Shadow, and the ever-controversial The Ghost In the Little House by William Holtz, which chronicles the life and work of Rose Wilder Lane.  As far as Laura expertise, you can’t be savvier or more well-informed than the legendary William Anderson, who has made a place for himself as THE Laura expert of the ages.  Click here for a bibliography of his books and pamphlets on Laura.

Charlotte Brontë: Charlotte’s one of those women who has had books written on the books about her…there’s that much incredible information about the Brontë family.  I personally love Elizabeth Gaskell’s warm, chatty memoir about her friend, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, though it’s been criticized for its insistence that Charlotte was proper rather than passionate.   In case you care to read a biography on Charlotte not written in the nineteenth century, you can’t go wrong with Rebecca Fraser’s The Brontës or Lyndall Gordon’s Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life.

Louisa May Alcott: On last count, I personally own over 10 books about Louy.  My favorites include the very innocent, anachronistic yet informative Invincible Louisa by Cornelia Meigs and John Matteson’s unforgettable, Pulitzer-prize-winning double biography of Louisa and her father, Bronson…Eden’s Outcasts gets special mention as one of the only biographies that has both made me cry and that I have dreamt about.  Highly recommended.  That said, 2010 was a banner year for Alcott scholarship, producing both Harriet Reisen’s Louisa May Alcott:  The Woman Behind Little Women and Susan Cheever’s Louisa May Alcott:  A Personal Biography.

Frances Hodgson Burnett: “Fluffy” Burnett was another woman I found it hard to research, since she has been shunted off to the kidlit category by many dismissive biographers.  Her lovely autobiography, The One I Knew Best of All, is barely worth mentioning for its obvious unreliability.  That said, we must content ourselves with Anne Thwaite’s dual Frances bios and Gretchen Gerzina’s Frances Hodgson Burnett, and with Gerzina’s perceptive biographical notes in the W.W. Norton Annotated Secret Garden.

My favorite part of readings and bookstore events is, by far, the Q&A period.  Opinions mesh and mingle, I am inevitably surprised by a question I’d never thought of, and I get to try to make sense of some really snappy and insightful quandaries.

At one of my recent events, the conversation turned to Harper Lee, mysterious author of To Kill A Mockingbird and subject of the Compassion chapter in The Heroine’s Bookshelf.  What’s behind her mystery?  Why, nothing more than the fact that she decided to drop off the face of the earth a few years after her first and only novel became one of the greatest sensations in American letters.

Nelle isn’t the only one of “my” authors who didn’t exactly savor the literary limelight.  Charlotte Brontë didn’t care much for her role as famous author; Louisa May Alcott actively skewered the expectations that came along with her fame in Little Women and its sequels, and Margaret Mitchell claimed to hate being recognized wherever she went.

Now that I have entered a very public phase of my own author-ness, I have to ask…what do they owe us?

Harper Lee faced something a tad more onerous than obligations as a debut author…she was expected to be a literary celebrity, a female writer in a time of male ones, a Southern writer in a slew of New York voices and one whose book was a challenged to established norms of American racism and complacency.  And it shocks me again and again how possessive her readers still are of her, a living writer who has chosen to step out of the limelight.  Is it as bad as it would have been if she hadn’t given us those tantalizing interviews?  Maybe not.  But can we really expect to know everything about her life and her emotions?

Being an author in 2010 is obviously a tad different from being one in 1960 or 1847.  Instead of fan letters and inquisitive callers, there are e-mails to be answered, tweets to attend to, and librarians and indie booksellers to get to know.  I am expected to help promote my own book to the best of my ability, to give of my time as generously as possible and to cultivate relationships with the people I am fortunate enough to connect with through this process.  But I also have the liberty at this phase of my career to decide what I want to reveal and what I don’t. Simply put, I’m lucky enough not to be Harper Lee (as if there could be more than one!).  And this entire process has given me increased respect for the information my favorite authors did choose to reveal…the precious time they chose to give to me, a young woman from the twenty-first century with the chutzpah to read their words in the bathtub, on the bus and on blinky devices.

It may be the classic historian’s question, but next time you think about your favorite author, ask yourself what expectations you are bringing to the table.  We are exceptionally lucky to know what we do about our favorite literary heroines.  I think it’s good to acknowledge that…every once in a while.

*Please don’t construe this post as a complaint about the public nature of my work…it’s a pleasure and a joy! It’s just made me think about these issues from a slightly different perspective.

I have a terrible confession to make:  I didn’t read To Kill A Mockingbird in high school, or junior high, or elementary school…or until I was a grown woman.

I’m not sure if it’s because I missed 11th grade English (I was an exchange student in Germany that year) or what, but the book never entered my consciousness until I was already an adult.  Of course, it had been in the public consciousness for a long, long, time by then.  Harper Lee was already the shy, hidden queen of American letters.  Everyone already knew what the words “Scout” and “Atticus” meant.  Except for me.

I read Mockingbird eventually, and I loved it, enough to include it in the slender list of 12 books that make up The Heroine’s Bookshelf. Aside from Mary Lennox, Scout Finch is the youngest heroine of the lot, her creator the most mysterious.  And she’s arguably the one with the widest and most vocal audience, though many would think of Atticus as the book’s hero.

A heady, proud, almost sick with pleasure and agony feeling steals over me whenever I let myself think of all that this book meant in the past and means today.  Think about what it really signified, fifty years ago.  Of course, we wouldn’t have the book at all if Nelle Harper Lee had not failed to be a little lady like her Scout.  When you talk about her, it’s hard not to get caught up in something like resentment for speaking so strongly one time, then being content to take a backseat to her book.  I try to remind myself that as much as I’d like to sit on a porch with Harper Lee, that’s a privilege it’s her right to withhold.  I’ll content myself to having written about her, fifty years on.

Learn more about To Kill A Mockingbird at its 50th anniversary site.

Scout Finch – To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

“Atticus, he was real nice….”

Born in 1900, Margaret Mitchell made her mark first as a rebellious debutante, then an intrepid newspaper reporter. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Gone With the Wind, which remained her only published novel upon her death in 1949.

For Book Clubs:

1. Why does Harper Lee choose to tell her story through Scout’s eyes?

2. Though To Kill a Mockingbird was an instant literary sensation, author Harper Lee has chosen to stay out of the spotlight for most of its publication history. Do you agree or disagree with this decision? What question would you ask Harper Lee if you could interview her?

3. Compassion is a central theme of Lee’s novel. Discuss Scout’s changing relationship with compassion throughout the book.

4. What is Scout’s real name? What does her nickname suggest about her character…and is that suggestion borne out in the book?

5. Atticus Finch is famous for changing the perspective of Maycomb (and his daughter) in To Kill a Mockingbird. Does Scout ever change Atticus’s mind?