Posts Tagged ‘the heroine’s bookshelf’

Yay!  I can finally talk about something that definitely put an extra spring in my step last week.  Harper sold the audio rights for The Heroine’s Bookshelf to Blackstone Audio, the country’s largest independent producer of audiobooks!  This means that THB will be appearing in DRM-free CD and MP3 form in November…and that I get an inside view on the process of how a book gets from the page to the ear.

Here’s the deal report from PM *beam*:

March 5, 2010:  Audio rights
Erin Blakemore’s THE HEROINE’S BOOKSHELF, a look at literature’s greatest and most enduring female characters — such as Jo March, Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Bennet, Laura Ingalls and others — and their authors, who have helped shape the inner lives of generations of women, teasing out universal tenets of strength, wisdom, and survival, to Blackstone Audio, for publication in November 2010, by Janice Suguitan at Harper.

Wintry Colorado can be an unforgiving place, especially with single-digit temperatures and March (usually our snowiest month) still ahead.  I’ve got tea to warm my fingers, but my thoughts are turning to food…the kinds of food my literary heroines would have enjoyed.  This morning I saw an article featuring a Mock Cherry Pie (recipe below) attributed to none other than Lucy Maud Montgomery of Anne of Green Gables fame.  It made me wonder what other recipes actually attributed to “my” authors could be found online?

The yummy results follow.  Each is directly attributed to one of my favorite authors or one of her family members.  Also, how awful is it that I’ve given up sweets for Lent?  I know what I’ll be preparing Easter Sunday.

Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Mock Cherry Pie

Food fakery is a vital heroine skill.  Don’t have cherries?  Cranberries and raisins will do just as well!  This recipe is attributed to Maud, whose Marilla admonishes:  “You’ve got to keep your wits about you in cooking and not stop in the middle of things to let your thoughts rove all over creation.” (Prefer raspberry cordial or some other dishes mentioned in the Anne books?  This link’s for you.)

Pastry for a double-crust 9-inch pie
2 cups cranberries, chopped
1 cup raisins, chopped
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
2 tablespoons flour
1 cup cold water
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla

Line a 9-inch pie plate with half the pastry. Make a lattice crust with remaining dough.  In a saucepan, combine cranberries, raisins, sugar, flour and water; bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat and let cool slightly. Stir in vanilla.  Turn filling into pastry-lined pie plate. Moisten edge with water and top with lattice crust.  Bake at 425 degrees F for 15 minutes. Reduce heat to 350 degrees F and bake another 20 to 30 minutes, or until crust is nicely browned and filling is bubbly. Serves six.

Louisa May Alcott’s Blancmange

Did you ever read Little Women and wonder, like me, what the heck blancmange is?  I am led to believe that it is a kind of sweet, white flan, as sweet and white as the plump hands of Meg March, whom I can imagine creating this blancmange and complaining over her unfashionable gowns.  You will recall that Jo brings a blancmange to Laurie when he is sick as a sort of wedge into his house and heart.  She succeeds.  This recipe is attributed to Abba Alcott, Louisa’s mother.

2 tbsp arrowroot
1 quart milk
1/2 cup sugar, more to taste
1 pinch salt
Something savory – orange water, rose water, or lemon peel

Take two tablespoonfuls of arrowroot to one quart of milk and a pinch of salt. Scald the milk, sweeten it with sugar to taste and then stir in the arrowroot, which must first be wet with some milk. Let it boil once. Orange water, rose water, or lemon peel can be used to flavor it. Pour it into molds to cool.

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Gingerbread

Whenever I gain a pound, I blame Laura, whose description of crackling pig tails, bountiful pies, and tables laden with the goodness of hardy, sensible pioneer cooking are enough to drive any girl face-first into a pile of biscuits.  Though it’s easy to find recipes inspired by the Little House books, it’s harder to find ones directly attributed to Laura that aren’t protected by copyright.  Here’s one to start with:

1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup lard (fine, shortening will do)
1 cup molasses
2 tsp baking soda
1 cup boiling water
3 cups flour
1 tsp ginger
1 tsp allspice
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp ground cloves
1/2 tsp salt
2 eggs

Blend brown sugar with lard.  Mix in molasses until well-coated.  Dissolve baking soda in boiling water (be sure cup is full of water after foam runs off into cake mixture).  Mix well.  In a separate bowl, mix flour with spices and salt.  Sift into wet mixture and mix well; mixture will be “quite thin.”  Finally, add two well-beaten eggs and bake in a moderate (350 degrees) for thirty minutes.

At the beginning of this whole entire process, I faced a nervewracking choice:  I wanted to write about great heroines of literature.  But did I want to limit my perspective to just female authors?

In the end, I decided yes and focused on heroine/author pairs whose qualities complimented or offset one another.  But with the same stroke, I cut out a whole set of incredible heroines written by men.  In apology, and in tribute, here are some of my faves:

• Mary Mackenzie – The Ginger Tree by Oswald Wynd:  This book was given to me by a friend who apparently knew my tastes inside and out.  Mary is a proper English girl who travels to China to fulfill an engagement to a man she barely knows.  Her slow liberation from a corseted existence and her torrid affair with a mysterious Japanese nobleman makes for gut-wrenching, page-turning reading.  Better yet, this book is epistolary (and pulls it off!) and deals with a facet of imperialism I had never thought of before.
• Lucy Honeychurch – A Room With a View by E.M. Forster:  Oh, A Room With a View.  I have watched your Merchant Ivory loveliness a million times, but I never really appreciated you before reading the book upon which you were based.  Lucy is annoying, flawed, and hopelessly muddled, and her story is easily one of my favorites ever.
• Matilda Wormwood – Matilda by Roald Dahl:  A reader, an adventurer, and a brave little soul, Matilda stands at the center of a book that completely galvanized eight-year-old me.  Her antics may be unrealistic, but her pluck and spunk aren’t.
• Anna Karenina – Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy:  You know those characters you love to hate?  This was a book I loved to hate…it just didn’t resonate with me the first time around.  But I gave it a second chance (somehow), and discovered a petty, selfish, insecure, nuanced, and miserable character in the lovely, corrupt Anna.  If you were forced to read this book in high school or college, consider giving it a second chance (I recommend the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation).

This is a woefully incomplete list, but it’s good to remember that women aren’t the only people who can write incredible heroines.  So…who’s on your list of favorite guy-authored heroines?

Now that the illustrious day has arrived, I can let the cat out of the bag:  My panel with fellow Laura fan and writer Wendy McClure, Loving Laura in a Lindsay Lohan World, has been accepted for the 2010 Laurapalooza Little House on the Prairie fan and academic convergence this July in Mankato, MN!  My inner Ingalls is doing a brisk jig.

In celebration of Laura, here are some fun facts about the mother of the Little House on the Prairie books:

• In her later years, Laura was notoriously frugal, probably because of the many years of disaster she endured both as a girl pioneer and as wife in a family plagued by economic and physical hardship.  When financial times got hard (the family lost much of their money in the stock market crash of 1929), a standard money-saving suggestion was to turn off the electricity.
• Laura was a fierce competitor and once declared that she would live to 90 because her husband, Almanzo, had.
• Laura wasn’t “just” a writer…she was a poultry and farming expert who was widely sought after for her advice and input on rural life.
• Rose Wilder Lane wasn’t Laura’s only child.  She had a son, never named, who died soon after his birth in 1889.
• When Laura’s books took off, she didn’t keep her earnings all to herself.  Instead, she sent several young people through college and provided for her parents in their old age.
• Laura was truly a “half-pint of cider half drunk up”…she stood four feet eleven inches tall.
• The Little House on the Prairie books were originally written as a long-form memoir for an adult audience, but Laura’s daughter Rose convinced her to try it for the children’s market after it failed to sell.  Laura’s sister Carrie apparently provided both moral support and supplemented Laura’s writing with her own memories.

There are some books you come back to again and again at different points in your life. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is that kind of book, so imagine my pleasure to see that Harper Perennial’s 2010 book club covered the book for January.

Writing a chapter on ATGIB and Betty Smith was one of the most challenging tasks ahead of me when I set out to write The Heroine’s Bookshelf.  It wasn’t just that Betty Smith’s life is so poorly documented overall, it’s that ATGIB is a tome, a weighty book with tons of moving parts.  It’s hard to wrap your brain around. Part of that, I think, is because it is a book of myriad intentions. Betty wrote it after an incredibly challenging childhood and adult life, from her roles as a tormented mother, a jilted wife, an uncomfortable harborer of desperate alcoholic men, and a sometimes quite literally starving artist.  She also wrote it as an advocate for the poor, a woman who worked for a radical WPA-sponsored theater project and who had gotten her education in poverty firsthand.  So I think it makes sense that the readings and comments I’m seeing are grappling with the book as a mother/daughter tale, a family drama, and a kind of anti-poverty social document.

Katie Nolan isn’t the main character of the book per se, but she becomes its core and its focal point, the woman who’s trying to hold her family together even as she drives it apart with her own desperation.  On my latest reread, I was astonished at how much nuance and pain Betty was able to give Katie.  Sometimes the book is physically hard to read.  You see Katie, her body broken and her life prospects completely dashed, covering up the hands that she’s used to drag her family through some semblance of life in shame, and you want to curl up in the fetal position or start drinking or something.  Except that that would never, ever fly with hard Katie.

For me, Katie’s uncompromising way of looking at the world pairs perfectly with Betty Smith’s mission in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn:  to make us look at the sordid, ugly, filthy sides of life alongside the beautiful and uplifting ones and to take all sides into our final reckoning.  And with so much nuance and pain, it’s no wonder I come back to the book I first read as a Francie-aged girl every few years, scared but hungry for Betty’s unvarnished look at life.