la_marquise (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
la_marquise) wrote2014-05-10 04:42 pm
la_marquise) wrote2014-05-10 04:42 pm
Entry tags:
Forgotten writers?
So, The Guardian has an interesting article today about forgotten writers. Literary Hero to Zero
Being me, I am of course certain that I will be forgotten myself (without having ever reached the heights of minor recognition, let alone 'hero') apart perhaps for some of my academic pieces. And that's fine with me, too. Also being me, I've read at least 3 of the 'forgotten' writers mentioned here (Morgan, Dreiser, Wilson) and heard of all the others apart from Mary Mann. But I'm not typical, I suspect (I have a widely -read mother and I have been known to read historical literary criticism for fun and then tracked down the books.)
The article focuses on 'literary' writers. There are names it doesn't mention -- Rosamund Lehman, John Fowles, Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Bowen -- which I hope means people are still assumed to be reading them. There are, of course, far more 'forgotten' genre writers who were huge in their time -- Weyman, Sabatini, even Michael Innes, who was A N Wilson under a pseudonym.
As the article shows in the case of Virigina Woolf, writers can go out of fashion and be rediscovered, or indeed rescued from obscurity entirely. Dumas has never stopped being read or being in print but he has only begun to be accepted by the literary establishment as more than just a 'popular' writer in the last quarter century or so. On the flip side, Dickens was canonised almost at once, despite his popularity, and remains so despite the problems of misogyny, classism and sentimentality in is work. (I do not like Dickens. If I'm going to read social realism of that period, I'll take Balzac and Dostoyevsky.)
Who are your favourite forgotten writers? And who do you predict may be the writers canonised into fame by later generations? I'd like to see a rise in the recognition of Anne Bronte over her sisters, of Emily Eden, Rosamund Lehman and Rumer Godden. And, moving closer to now, Patricia Geary, Pat Murphy, Tanith Lee (who really belongs up there with Angela Carter already), Justina Robson, Judith Tarr and Zenna Henderson.
Skirt of the day: embroidered jeans.
Being me, I am of course certain that I will be forgotten myself (without having ever reached the heights of minor recognition, let alone 'hero') apart perhaps for some of my academic pieces. And that's fine with me, too. Also being me, I've read at least 3 of the 'forgotten' writers mentioned here (Morgan, Dreiser, Wilson) and heard of all the others apart from Mary Mann. But I'm not typical, I suspect (I have a widely -read mother and I have been known to read historical literary criticism for fun and then tracked down the books.)
The article focuses on 'literary' writers. There are names it doesn't mention -- Rosamund Lehman, John Fowles, Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Bowen -- which I hope means people are still assumed to be reading them. There are, of course, far more 'forgotten' genre writers who were huge in their time -- Weyman, Sabatini, even Michael Innes, who was A N Wilson under a pseudonym.
As the article shows in the case of Virigina Woolf, writers can go out of fashion and be rediscovered, or indeed rescued from obscurity entirely. Dumas has never stopped being read or being in print but he has only begun to be accepted by the literary establishment as more than just a 'popular' writer in the last quarter century or so. On the flip side, Dickens was canonised almost at once, despite his popularity, and remains so despite the problems of misogyny, classism and sentimentality in is work. (I do not like Dickens. If I'm going to read social realism of that period, I'll take Balzac and Dostoyevsky.)
Who are your favourite forgotten writers? And who do you predict may be the writers canonised into fame by later generations? I'd like to see a rise in the recognition of Anne Bronte over her sisters, of Emily Eden, Rosamund Lehman and Rumer Godden. And, moving closer to now, Patricia Geary, Pat Murphy, Tanith Lee (who really belongs up there with Angela Carter already), Justina Robson, Judith Tarr and Zenna Henderson.
Skirt of the day: embroidered jeans.
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Where would you class Rebecca West? I'm not sure she's forgotten, but she's not as famous as she deserves. I'm half-way through A Train of Powder, and suspecting that Angela Carter read one of the pieces in it, Opera in Greenville. It has the same exquisitely focussed anger that she could do so well.
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I'm fascinated by Mary Davys, who wrote straight out of the id vortex when the novel was still flailing about finding its form. Eliza Haywood had plots stolen (and made more famous) by male writers such as Richardson and Fielding, but to be fair, I think they had a better grasp on wit. But then I haven't read everything of hers--so hard to get hold of over here.
So much of fame rests on happenstance--something in conversation with something else, often through another medium, such as a song that catches fire, and of course movies. Everyone has heard of the Wizard of Oz but very few know that Baum wrote a dozen Oz books, stage plays, and a great deal else. Including the lovely Enchanted Island of Yew which features a cross-dressing heroine, with whom the rescued princess falls in love. Then there was the Tip/Ozma switch, which stopped many children's librarians cold in decades back. (And there are some very, very unfortunate racist bits in Baum as well.)
Thirty years ago I would have thought Jane Austen's resurgence impossible to predict. But that's another tangle that includes not only media, but the resurgence of silver fork novels, which are inextricably tied to Austen just because of the period.
Impossible to predict who will have staying power among our generation, but I am hoping that more women are read, and older ones discovered, with the digitalization of text. I know I've been able to gain access to so many more writers since the net . . . gone, I am grateful to say, are the days when I had to wait twenty-five years before I could get a copy of Mrs.Gore'sPin Money that I could afford/
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I hope Anthony Hope won't be forgotten. The Dolly Dialogues are one of the consistent delights of my life, warts and all. It's the graceful wit that even manages to disarm the rampant snobbery.
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Jane Austen never lost traction over here, I think, even at the height of structuralism, because she's a staple of school curricula, along with Chaucer and Shakespeare and Dickens.
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Love, C.
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I'd read it, she preens, back in my undergrad combined history and lit major, having taken two semesters of Balkan history taught by one of the founders of the by then long defunct League of Nations.
Love, C.
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I prefer Becky Sharp to Little Nell and suspect I'm not the only one.
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I suspect Bramah is now 'difficult' because of cultural sensitivities. Same is true of some of Godden. Both were accomplished and gifted writers and immensely sympathetic to the cultures they wrote about, but they were outsiders with attitudes that have dated (and deservedly so) and it can show sometimes.
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Going a fair bit further back, one author I never expect people to have heard of is Frank R. Stockton, a late 19th century fantasy writer - very occasionally, I am pleasantly surprised.
And here is a quote from even further back from an essay on much the same topic as the Guardian article:
'How do you like your heroes, ladies? Gentlemen, what novel heroines do you prefer? When I set this essay going, I sent the above question to two of the most inveterate novel-readers of my acquaintance. The gentleman refers me to Miss Austen; the lady says Athos, Guy Livingston, and (pardon my rosy blushes) Colonel Esmond, and owns that in youth she was very much in love with Valancourt.
"Valancourt? and who was he?" cry the young people. Valancourt, my dears, was the hero of one of the most famous romances which ever was published in this country. The beauty and elegance of Valancourt made your young grandmammas' gentle hearts to beat with respectful sympathy. He and his glory have passed away. Ah, woe is me that the glory of novels should ever decay; that dust should gather round them on the shelves; that the annual cheques from Messieurs the publishers should dwindle, dwindle!'
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My favourite forgotten author is Samuel Shellabarger. Several of Sabatini's and Weyman's were reprinted a few years ago. Persephone Books has brought a lot of Victorian and early 20th century writers, mostly women, back into print.
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