My Dear Governess: The Letters of Edith Wharton to Anna Bahlmann
Edited by Irene Goldman-Price

An exciting archive came to auction in 2009: the papers and personal effects of Anna Catherine Bahlmann (1849–1916), a governess and companion to several prominent American families. Among the collection were one hundred thirty-five letters from her most famous pupil, Edith Newbold Jones, later the great American novelist Edith Wharton. Remarkably, until now, just three letters from Wharton’s childhood and early adulthood were thought to survive. Bahlmann, who would become Wharton’s literary secretary and confidante, emerges in the letters as a seminal influence, closely guiding her precocious young student’s readings, translations, and personal writing. Taken together, these letters, written over the course of forty-two years, provide a deeply affecting portrait of mutual loyalty and influence between two women from different social classes.

This correspondence reveals Wharton’s maturing sensibility and vocation, and includes details of her life that will challenge long-held assumptions about her formative years. Wharton scholar Irene Goldman-Price provides a rich introduction to My Dear Governess that restores Bahlmann to her central place in Wharton’s life.

Irene Goldman-Price has taught literature and women’s studies at Ball State University and Penn State University. She serves on the editorial board of the Edith Wharton Review and has consulted and taught at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s house museum in Massachusetts. In 2010–2011 she was a visiting fellow at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where the Wharton letters are held.

Related Beinecke Collections: Anna Catherine Bahlmann Rapers relating to Edith Wharton; Edith Wharton Collection; Henry James Collection

More about the Collection: Anna Catherine Bahlmann Papers Relating to Edith Wharton

New from the University of Iowa Press: The American H. D., by Annette Debo

In The American H.D., Annette Debo considers the significance of nation in the artistic vision and life of the modernist writer Hilda Doolittle. Her versatile career stretching from 1906 to 1961, H.D. was a major American writer who spent her adult life abroad; a poet and translator who also wrote experimental novels, short stories, essays, reviews, and a children’s book; a white writer with ties to the Harlem Renaissance; an intellectual who collaborated on avant-garde films and film criticism; and an upper-middle-class woman who refused to follow gender conventions. Her wide-ranging career thus embodies an expansive narrative about the relationship of modernism to the United States and the nuances of the American nation from the Gilded Age to the Cold War.

Making extensive use of material in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale—including correspondence, unpublished autobiographical writings, family papers, photographs, and Professor Norman Holmes Pearson’s notes for a planned biography of H.D.—Debo’s American H.D. reveals details about its subject never before published. Adroitly weaving together literary criticism, biography, and cultural history, The American H.D. tells a new story about the significance of this important writer.

Written with clarity and sincere affection for its subject, The American H.D. brings together a sophisticated understanding of modernism, the poetry and prose of H.D., the personalities of her era, and the historical and cultural context in which they developed: America’s emergence as a dominant economic and political power that was riven by racial and social inequities at home.

Beiencke Collections: H. D. Papers; Bryher Papers; Norman Holmes Pearson Papers

“In The American H.D., Annette Debo examines the importance of the history and identity of America—in the context of theories of nation-state and nation-building—to H.D.’s artistic vision. Debo’s opening chapters invoke the world into which H.D. was born—a mere generation after the end of the Civil War, a decade after the end of Reconstruction—as characterized by a diverse country defining itself as homogenous. Debo’s analysis of the telling influence of the Harlem Renaissance on H.D.’s work comprises a nuanced reading of H.D.’s study of whiteness itself. A final chapter addressing the fraught relationship between women of H.D.’s class and the concept of nation will take its place as a significant corrective to the field of H.D. scholarship. This magisterial study of H.D. as a quintessentially American writer will forever change how we read and teach this great twentieth-century poet.”—Cynthia Hogue, Arizona State University

“The American H.D. reminds us that the nomadic lives of expatriate modernists contain within their transnational scope a rootedness in the landscapes, literary cultures, histories, and politics of their place of national origin. Doing for H.D. what Wendy Flory’s The American Ezra Pound did for its subject, Debo charts the biographical, political, and literary traces of H.D.’s Americanness. The land- and seascapes of H.D.’s national identity constitute a kind of ‘environmental determinism’ that shapes her literary identifications and placement within an American literary canon that includes Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, and Moore. A valuable addition to the growing corpus of work on H.D., The American H.D. is a thoroughly researched and illuminating examination of the tensions between the exilic and the national as they played out in her life and work.”—Susan Stanford Friedman, author, Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle

(Re)Storing Happiness: Toward an Ecopoetic Reading of H.D.’s The Sword Went Out to Sea (Synthesis of a Dream), by Delia Alton, from Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 2011, an essay by Cynthia Hogue, 2005 H. D. Fellow at the Beinecke Library — Full text PDF

Introduction:

The modernist poet H.D. described her postwar novel, The Sword Went Out to Sea (Synthesis of a Dream), as an “exploratory” roman vecu, a description which points to the work’s experimental structure and its basis in autobiography. Sword is a palimpsest; the contemporary plot and characters in the first section, “Wintersleep,” are layered over—and recast in earlier eras—in the second section, “Summerdream.” The novel’s subject, Spiritualism and reincarnation, is esoteric. H.D. wrote the novel under the name she also gave her main character, the Spiritualist Delia Alton, a nom de plume that she adopted, as Demetres Tryphonopoulos suggests in his scholarly edition of H.D.’s Majic Ring, “for her psychically ‘gifted’ and mystically inspired authorial alter ego.”¹ Sword includes details not only about H.D.’s Spiritualist activities, but also about her acquaintance with Lord Dowding, a Spiritualist who had been Air Chief Marshal of the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain. The novel was drafted soon after H.D. recovered from a psychotic breakdown in 1946 that is often attributed to Lord Dowding’s repudiation of her psychic gifts, a series of events that has colored the novel’s reception.

In the essay that follows, I shift the terms in which this work has been placed. I begin with its esoteric context and proceed to its ecopoetic concerns, in order to explore the novel’s environmental awareness and what I argue is a gynocentric vision of a replenished natural world. Sword cultivates a precision of attention—an “ethics of looking,” to invoke Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s definition of feminist ecopoetics³—brought into sharp focus by duress. The novel is a poet’s prose, so highly attuned to its environment—dramatically, insistently, a city under siege in a world at war—that H.D.’s experience of the intensity of civilian life in London during war-time is palpable even some 60 years later. To be sure, she testifies to that intensity more lyrically in Trilogy, written before the war ended, and the contrast between the two works is instructive. Sword spells out what Trilogy encodes, as if its author were too traumatized by war’s aftermath to sublimate the actual events, the personal and global devastation in the context of which she wrote. Sword does not transcend its circumstances, because the novel is grounded in them, literally thinking-through war’s aftermath. But in the end, I suggest, H.D. transposes what she construes from the Second World War into a profoundly ecopoetic vision of a healed and restored earth.

Read the rest of the essay here: (Re)Storing Happiness, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 2011 18: 840-860

Image: Bookplate from H. D.’s library

Susan Howe, Poetry Reading &
Performance with Musician David Grubbs
Thursday, April 5th, 4:00pm
Beinecke Library, 121 Wall Street
Yale Collection of American Literature Reading Series
Contact: nancy.kuhl@yale.edu

Poet Susan Howe, winner of the 2011 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry, and musician David Grubbs will perform a collaborative piece based on Howe’s award-winning volume That This.   This is the third collaborative work Howe and Grubbs have created together; they performed their second collaboration, “Souls of the Labadie Tract,” at Beinecke Library in 2009 (see a description of the event here:  http://beineckepoetry.library.yale.edu/2009/01/21/performance-souls-of-the-labadie-tract/).

Poet Susan Howe is the author of numerous books of poems including: That This (winner of the 2011 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry awarded by the Yale University Library) , Souls of the Labadie Tract, The Midnight, Pierce-Arrow, and Singularities.

Musician David Grubbs has made many solo records, played in a number of groups (Squirrel Bait, Bastro, Gastr del Sol, Red Krayola, Wingdale Community Singers), and frequently collaborates with writers and artists. He is an Associate Professor in the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College, CUNY. He teaches in Brooklyn College’s MFA program in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) and Brooklyn College’s MFA program in Creative Writing, and is a member of the faculty of the Brooklyn College Center for Computer Music (BC-CCM).

Image: Susan Howe and David Grubbs performing in Cork, Ireland; photograph by Keith Tuma.

Generalists, rejoice! Students and researchers whose interests scatter all over history and to every corner of the map will now have greater access to the papers of a literary woman with similarly diverse tastes. Twentieth-century American writer, editor, and translator Ruth Stephan’s son, John J. Stephan, has made a generous donation to Beinecke that will highlight his mother’s archive, the Ruth Stephan Papers and The Tiger’s Eye Records, by providing broad funding for new acquisitions, exhibitions, and student projects, as well as fellowships for graduate students and international scholars.

The Ruth Stephan Papers (http://hdl.handle.net/10079/fa/beinecke.stephan) consist of 148 boxes of various papers, photographs, and audiovisual material. A visitor to Beinecke who pages 5 boxes at random from the collection could find correspondence with Thornton Wilder, annotated drafts of Stephan’s poetry, research files on Queen Christina of Sweden, translations of Quechua songs, and materials from the filming of a documentary on Zen Buddhism. Stephan was born Charlotte Ruth Walgreen, and her papers also include a small amount of material documenting the history of the drugstore chain that her father started.

The Walgreen family had little use for contemporary art, and Stephan found her artistic wings clipped by their expectation that she should devote herself wholly to a role as mother and wife. She divorced her first husband Justin Dart in 1939 and asserted her independence through poetic output, publishing her first verses in venues such as Harper’s, Poetry, and Forum. She would find out, upon her father’s death, that she had been disinherited.

In the meantime, Stephan married the painter John Stephan, who encouraged her writing and with whom she founded the little magazine The Tiger’s Eye in 1947. The Stephans founded the publication to promote challenging new art. “The selection of material will be based on these questions,” they wrote in the first issue: “Is it alive? Is it valid as art? How brave is its originality? How does it enter the imagination?” In its two-year run, the groundbreaking magazine served as an important site for aesthetic discussion and featured the work of literary and artistic heavyweights like T.S. Eliot and Picasso, as well as of previously unknown creators. Records of production and distribution of The Tiger’s Eye can be found in Stephan’s papers and in the Tiger’s Eye Records (http://hdl.handle.net/10079/fa/beinecke.tigerseye).

With the closing of The Tiger’s Eye, Stephan traveled extensively in Europe, Japan, and southeast Asia. In addition to further volumes of poetry, her work includes two novels based on the life of Queen Christina of Sweden, The Flight (1956) and My Crown, My Love (1960); a volume of translated Quechua stories and songs, The Singing Mountaineers (1957); an audio compilation, The Spoken Anthology of American Literature (1963); and a documentary film, Zen in Ryoko-in (1971). Her philanthropic work included establishing a poetry center at the University of Arizona in 1960 (http://poetry.arizona.edu/).   –Charlotte Parker, Y2013.

Images: John Stephan, Photograph of Ruth Stephan at her desk, (1960); The Tiger’s Eye, number 1 (1947).

Shakespeare has always seemed too good to be true–or, for some, too good to be Shakespeare. The known biographical facts about the glover’s son from the small midland English market town of Stratford-upon-Avon frustrate our desire for a robust biography of the author of the works that have become, as Arthur Murphy wrote in 1753, “a lay bible.”

In 1794, a cache of documents came to light which offered to solve many of the mysteries that surrounded the life of England’s “demi-god,” including his own handwritten “Profession of Faith,” a letter to his wife-to-be Anne Hathaway (“Anna Hatherrewaye”), a catalogue of Shakespeare’s library, a deed appointing his actor friend John Heminges executor of his estate, specifying that should his plays be again republished, they be so from his “true writtenn Playes” rather than published “from those now printed,” and even a letter from Queen Elizabeth expressing her thanks for the “prettye Verses” he had sent her. The following year, continued searching turned up a manuscript of King Lear and a “small fragment” of Hamlet (Hamblette). The papers were publicly displayed and then published later in 1795 (dated 1796) in a large volume entitled Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments under the Hand and Seal of William Shakespeare, and soon news circulated that even more papers existed, including manuscripts of Julius Caesar, Richard II, and two hither-to unknown plays: Henry II and Vortigern.

Understandably, the new discoveries created a furor of excitement. “How happy am I to have lived to the present day of discovery of this glorious treasure,” wrote James Boswell, the friend and biographer of Samuel Johnson. “I shall now go to my grave in peace.” And though sadly soon he would indeed go to his grave, quickly he must have been turning over in it. Everything was a forgery.

William Henry Ireland, the 19-year-old son of an engraver and art and antique dealer, had faked it all, beginning with a forged mortgage agreement between Shakespeare and Heminges, which he had written on a piece of old parchment he had taken from the records of the law office in which he worked.

In a sense it is amazing the young Ireland knew to forge so much and convince so many. But all-too-quickly the fraud was revealed. On 31 March 1796, Shakespearean scholar Edmond Malone published an exhaustive study of the documents, An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Certain Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments, declaring them fakes, and though Ireland mounted an impassioned defense, Malone’s evidence was irrefutable, and Ireland eventually confessed the forgery.

What is perhaps most significant about this odd episode is not that it was attempted but that so many educated people were taken in by it. Once exposed, it seemed an obvious enough fake: the use of words not yet in use, reference to the Globe Theatre before it was built, and signatures that didn’t correspond at all to known examples (leading Ireland to claim, for example, that there were two actors named John Heminges).

But the desire for information about Shakespeare made people eager to believe, especially information that showed him intimate with aristocrats, even royalty. The known biography of the middle class man from the English midlands, who had come to London as an actor, seemed for many inadequate to explain the genius of England’s “demi-god.” Ireland sought to fill these gaps with his own inventions (nor would he be the last to do so); others would take another tack: suggesting that someone other than Shakespeare wrote the plays. Since the early nineteenth century, thousands of articles and books have been written arguing against Shakespeare’s authorship of the poems and plays, many by respected writers and thinkers convinced that “the man from Stratford” was incapable of it. It is an interesting list of doubters: “I can think of little else,” writes James Shapiro, “that unites Henry James and Malcolm X, Sigmund Freud and Charlie Chaplin, Helen Keller and Orson Welles, or Mark Twain and Sir Derek Jacobi.”

But what this all proves–the work of the forgers, the passion of the doubters, and the efforts of scholars for the last three hundred years–is that Shakespeare matters to us. We want to solve the mystery of his genius. In an exhibition, Remembering Shakespeare, on view at Yale’s Beinecke Library until June 4, the story of that desire is memorably told in books, objects, and pictures, from the earliest editions of Shakespeare and the handwritten evidence of his first readers, to the later Shakespeare editions that have spread the plays across the entire world and the non-literary evidence of their extraordinary impact. And all of it is real.

David Scott Kastan and Kathryn James are the authors of Remembering Shakespeare [Yale University Press, $25.00], and the curators of the accompanying exhibit.

In the 1950s, Yale University Press published a number of Gertrude Stein’s posthumous works, among them her incomparable Stanzas in Meditation. Since that time, scholars have discovered that Stein’s poem exists in several versions: a manuscript that Stein wrote and two typescripts that her partner Alice B. Toklas prepared. Toklas’ work on the second typescript changed the poem when, enraged upon detecting in it references to a former lover, she not only adjusted the typescript but insisted that Stein make revisions in the original manuscript.

This edition of Stanzas in Meditation is the first to confront the complicated story of its composition and revision. Through meticulous archival work, the editors present a reliable reading text of Stein’s original manuscript, as well as an appendix with the textual variants among the poem’s several versions. This record of Stein’s multi-layered revisions enables readers to engage more fully with the author’s radically experimental poem and also to detect the literary impact of Stein’s relationship with Toklas. The editors’ preface and poet Joan Retallack’s introduction offer insight into the complexities of reading Stein’s poetry and the innovative modes of reading that her works require and generate.

Students and admirers of Stein will welcome this illuminating new contribution to Stein’s oeuvre.

Order from Yale UP: Stanzas in Meditation