Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Remarkable Kinship of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Ellen Glasgow by Ashley Andrews Lear

2020; Southern Historical Association; Volume: 86; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/soh.2020.0068

2325-6893

Akiyo Ito Okuda,

Irish and British Studies

Reviewed by: The Remarkable Kinship of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Ellen Glasgow by Ashley Andrews Lear Akiyo Ito Okuda The Remarkable Kinship of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Ellen Glasgow. By Ashley Andrews Lear. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, 2018. Pp. xiv, 251. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8130-5696-8.) In The Remarkable Kinship of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Ellen Glasgow, Ashley Andrews Lear traces the relationship of two women, which lasted only a few years at the height of their literary careers—Ellen Glasgow’s first letter to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was sent in 1939, the year Rawlings’s [End Page 217] novel The Yearling (1938) won the Pulitzer Prize. Though Lear’s book does not assemble Rawlings and Glasgow’s previously published correspondence, “a handful of letters,” and is not intended as a literary analysis of their works, it explores how the outwardly successful women who were of different generations felt the need as writers to rely on each other’s encouragement and the wealth of experiences they shared (p. 10). The book begins by detailing Rawlings’s and Glasgow’s personal histories and emphasizing their similarities. The women’s biographies aside, Lear suggests that they shared a literary style, that they avoided popular nostalgic writing about the southern past and the grotesque experimental writing of the twentieth-century South, and that they offered realistic portrayals of what they considered the truth. Their themes, too, were alike; Lear stresses that both Glasgow and Rawlings were concerned with contemporary social issues regarding class, gender, race, and the environment. While Lear credibly reveals the struggles the two faced in writing and publishing their works, Glasgow’s and Rawlings’s sometimes difficult relationship with their family members, and their involvements in social activism, some readers will wonder how much such commonalities actually influenced their relationship as writers. Their letters attest to “their similar experiences with the writing process” and their sincere support for one another, especially from Glasgow to Rawlings; it is unfortunate that the period of their correspondence was not longer to reveal how their relationship affected their writings (p. 50). Later chapters project the theme of the book much more clearly, showcasing Rawlings’s attempt to place Glasgow in the canon of American literature, while vindicating her own merit as a writer, and their similar choices of southern settings with universal themes. Lear shows that Rawlings collected articles “in which Glasgow was heralded as a critic of Southern idealism, a woman writing texts of female disillusionment, and a literary revolutionary,” and Lear claims Rawlings meant to render Glasgow “one of America’s greatest writers and a game-changer in the literary movements of her day” (p. 133). Rawlings, too, struggled to define her literature as universal while choosing the Florida backcountry as her subject. Lear’s project is worthy, especially in reclaiming the two, often forgotten authors; unfortunately, not all the details of the book contribute to this goal. Glasgow struggled as a woman seeking to publish her work and, as Rawlings noted, later depicted female characters outside the gender norm. At the same time, the political climate for women changed for Rawlings, making it less necessary to voice feminist concerns. Lear does not expand on such differences but could have examined how the age gap of these two writers exposed the progress of the society and their progressive views on gender as well as race. Glasgow also exchanged letters with writers like Mary Johnston, Signe Toksvig, and Radclyffe Hall, and their correspondences are chronicled in Pamela R. Matthews’s Perfect Companionship: Ellen Glasgow’s Selected Correspondence with Women (Charlottesville, 2005). Rawlings’s interracial relationship with Zora Neale Hurston is described in Anna Lillios’s Crossing the Creek: The Literary Friendship of Zora Neale Hurston and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (Gainesville, Fla., 2010). In light of such recent studies [End Page 218] focusing on female writers’ bonding, Lear’s book shows promise. A personal and literary kinship with Glasgow inspired Rawlings to break beyond regional literature and to enhance the merits of both Glasgow’s writings and her own. In this way, The Remarkable Kinship of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Ellen Glasgow is a welcome addition to...