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 20th
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.”
