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Jane Carlyle + The black novelist history forgot + Vivian Maier

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Jane Welsh Carlyle: Woman of letters
https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2017...tters-8813

EXCERPT: The nineteenth-century writer Thomas de Quincey once wrote that if you wanted to read the best English prose of his day, you should mug a postman and make off with all the letters written in feminine handwriting. Fortunate indeed the person who purloined the letters of a woman of De Quincey’s acquaintance, Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801–1866). And that’s not just my opinion: she is now identified by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as almost indisputably the “greatest woman letter writer in English.” Margaret Oliphant, the novelist and a younger friend of Jane Carlyle—she is mentioned in the last letter Jane wrote—noted that her correspondence kept “half-a-dozen men of letters—the best of their time, Mill, Darwin, Forster, many more—in delighted attention.” In Oliphant’s view, Jane Carlyle’s letters show her to be a woman “of observation lively and keen, of whimsical humour, and a gift of self-revelation as rare as it is delightful.” She was not always likable—with her “constant caustic, sharp-biting criticism, her indisposition to run in the rut of ordinary opinions, her jibes and satirical vein,” she could sometimes be “a puzzle and pain” to her friends. Nonetheless her “infinite variety of moods”—“of intolerance and patience, of kindness, irritability, quick anger, love, enthusiasm, cynicism”—helped make her a “keen-sighted critic, so independent and outspoken in her judgment.” In short: a “woman of genius.” But ever since Jane Welsh had been a precocious and determined little girl the question has been: a genius of what?

MORE: https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2017...tters-8813



The black novelist history forgot
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/t...story.html

EXCERPT: Chester B. Himes was born in 1909 into an educated, prospering black family living in Jefferson City, Mo., across Lafayette Street from the Lincoln Institute, the African American college where his parents taught. This places him in that generation of black Midwesterners including Langston Hughes, Aaron Douglas and Josephine Baker — artists who would bring so much talent and creativity to Harlem, Paris and the New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s. But Himes’s early years did not follow that path.

As his family fell apart, Himes became derelict, delinquent and “out of control.” In 1928, he was arrested for breaking into the home of a wealthy Cleveland couple and robbing them. Himes pleaded guilty, seeking leniency. No doubt because he already had a record, the judge sentenced 19-year-old Himes to 20 years in prison. He entered the state prison in Columbus, where Ohio State University is also located — and where Himes had briefly been a student.

In his vivid, engrossing biography, Lawrence Jackson, a professor at Johns Hopkins, gives us an in-depth portrait of Himes, an African American writer whose 20 published books stirred controversy with their depictions of sexuality, racism and social injustice. The writings were often more sensational than revered — and raised questions as to Himes’s place in modern literary history. Jackson takes on those questions in a biography that is a revisionist literary history accommodating and embracing a black author who wrote about black detectives, white women, labor struggles, Harlem streets — and did so while living outrageously both here and abroad....

MORE: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/t...story.html



Camera Obscura
http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/024_03/18453

EXCERPT: Vivian Maier was an ambitious and prolific photographer who conducted her work in the open but kept its results almost entirely to herself. No one has any idea why that is. We know about her work only by chance, and through cultural and economic circumstances specific to the early twenty-first century. Had her end come even a decade earlier, it is quite likely that her photographs would have been destroyed and her name relegated to a mere census entry and a dim memory in very few minds. Instead she has been propelled to posthumous fame, and fortune by proxy. She has attained that rarefied position by virtue of her talent, to be sure, but also because of the romance of serendipity as well as the singular opportunities afforded by the internet to certain kinds of beaverish promoters. Thus her story, as patiently and lucidly detailed by Pamela Bannos in her nearly forensic biography—which unties many knots and brings order to what was previously a chaotic welter of information and misinformation—moves along two timelines at once, before and after death, both of them labyrinthine and marked by passages of seemingly permanent obscurity...

MORE: http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/024_03/18453
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