More on Ima’s Reading List, Summer 1918

      The reading list [see earlier blog] comes after a page or pages torn out of the notebook. What had happened? What was on Ima’s mind when she chose these to read?

Outland  (1910) was a utopian novel, some said a socialist tract, about obsessive love, betrayal, and a happy ending.

Iron City, Hedges’s 1919 novel, a “portrait of industrialization in Beloit, Wis., presaged the modern women's movement and contemporary labor struggles.”

Jacobsen’s novel, Marie Grubbe. A Lady of the Seventeenth Century (1917) “is the first Danish treatment of a woman as a sexual creature. Based upon the life of an authentic 17th century Danish noblewoman, it charts her downfall from a member of the royal family to the wife of a ferryman, as a result of her desire for an independent and satisfying erotic life.”

The Prestons (1918) was a humorous novel about an American family in “everyday life.”

James McKaye, Americanized Socialism: A Yankee View of Capitalism (1918) was the author of several books on economics, politics, and philosophy.

Henry Adams’s now-classic autobiography was just out in 1918.

John [St. J.] Ervine was an Irish playwright. His John Ferguson is a 1915 melodrama set in the “1880s, in rural Ulster, Northern Ireland; John, his wife Sarah, and their children Hannah and Andrew, are awaiting a letter from America that will save them from financial ruin.” Foolish Lovers is another Irish love story.

[Maureen and its author remain a mystery.]

Wind Beneath the Worlds: A 1920 novel about the efforts of a mother whose son was lost in the war to communicate with him through spiritualism.

Lilith: An anti-war play (1920).

An article in “Woman” magazine about Jenny Marx, wife of Karl.  Ima may have been thinking of The magazine Independent Woman (1920-1956).

Book of Susan: A 1920 novel about a young orphan girl brought up by a wealthy benefactor in the early 20^th century.

Poet/novelist Masefield’s 1920 book with the long poem, “Enslaved” is based on two stories of young lovers challenged by fate.

Ima may have meant Arthur Schnitzler’s Bertha Garlan: “This 1901 novel by the great Austrian writer deals with a young widowed woman who, following the lead of a libertine friend, travels to Vienna and undertakes an affair with a great violinist she had previously known.”