Author: clerlewis

Betweenity, Friendship Across Miles and the Making of Mary Taylor’s Graphic Biography

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Rae Joyce got in touch to tell us that she shared our fascination with Mary Taylor, the radical classmate who pushed Charlotte Brontë to earn her living by the pen. We were keen to learn more – not least since, like Taylor, Joyce is a Yorkshire woman living in New Zealand.

I drew Mary Taylor – in truth, she drew me to her.

109 port nicholson image ref As if a great planet fell out of the sky

In early 2016, I was sitting at the kitchen table with my partner batting around ideas for a project in which I could reconcile both of my hemispheres: Yorkshire and Aotearoa. As an English woman in New Zealand, I occupy a position of privilege that doesn’t sit comfortably with my working-class roots. I had always considered myself an underdog in the UK. But I’d recently finished co-editing Three Words, An Anthology of Aotearoa Women’s Comics (Beatnik), a book that sought to redress the erasure of women’s comics history in New Zealand, which forced me to acknowledge the link between comics and colonialism in Aotearoa. The book, and my essay included in it, was something of a stick to the wasps’ nest of the dominant culture of New Zealand comics. My partner, Māori poet Robert Sullivan, a former librarian, knew better than most what I was trying to achieve when he said, “Didn’t Charlotte Brontë have a friend who lived in New Zealand?”

I had read Jane Eyre in my teens and still had my copy. I put it in the laundry room where I had a small school desk and opened my laptop. Although I had a copy of Shirley, I hadn’t read it, so hadn’t yet encountered Rose and her family whose depictions Charlotte drew from Taylor and her family. But as I accumulated Brontë biographies and articles, an outline emerged of a woman I felt a strong pull to make out. Only one academic biography of Taylor had been published, and while I waited for a copy to arrive in the post, I began to draw.

For as long as I can remember, as well as writing, I have drawn and painted. I grew up in a small South Yorkshire mining town, until I didn’t. Which is to say, when the pits were closed, the pit head gear demolished and slag heaps overplanted the way kids scribble to hide their mistakes, I grew up on the edge of a ground-down town, cut off from all but a few houses by the new by-pass road that meant nobody had to drive through the place. At night, I would look out over the whips of birch at the brown-orange haze of streetlights above and the terraces silhouetted against them and wonder why the terrace I lived in was all on its own. Stories were my imaginative escape in lieu of the real thing.

It was a shift in circumstances that drove Taylor to Te Whanganui-a-Tara, as Wellington was known to Māori before Pākehā/Europeans arrived. After the death of her father, the family woollen mill passed to her eldest brother, and with it, her home. Taylor’s father had taught her never to marry for money, encouraging her in the belief that would underpin her writing: women must work. She differed from her best friend Charlotte in that she did not pay heed to social mores that considered work for women to be degrading – she referred to the working-classes as an example for the equality that could exist between the sexes. And by working and living independent of men, Taylor lived by her words. She set sail alone. But she maintained her friendship by letter.

Like Taylor, I travelled to New Zealand to improve my circumstances and to write. I have lived in Auckland almost as long as Taylor lived in Wellington, during which time I have corresponded with my best friend via letter. When my research for Taylor’s biography took me to New York in February 2017, I met my own Brontë in person for the first time.

Unlike the real Charlotte Brontë, Loredana Tiron-Pandit migrated, from Romania to Massachusetts. She is no coward. She is also the best supporter and encouragement a woman could have, and she never baulks from telling me what she thinks (Taylor would have loved her). She also helped me draft the copy of my graphic biography with text boxes that resemble torn fragments of Taylor and Brontë’s letters, because she is brilliant at all things ‘computer’ and I am a Luddite. (Taylor had a lot of sympathy for the Luddites. What an amiable bunch we four lasses would have made!).

As I pored over Taylor’s correspondence with Brontë I could not help but reflect on the letters – proper old fashioned paper letters – I had shared with Lori, how she was my first reader; how much I valued her honest opinion; how much I had come to rely on her and looked forward to her letters the way Taylor did – my driveway is no Mount Victoria, but I climb it with no less enthusiasm to check the mail box! My friendship with Lori was my first port of call for answering my questions of ‘How would Mary feel?’ Always at a distance, always waiting for a reply. And the satisfaction of handling the paper and reading the words in my friend’s own hand – Lori was never far from my thoughts as I shaped my book.144 gomersal brier hall image ref I can hardly explain to you the queer feeling of living...

And this is how my thoughts ran throughout the whole process of researching and drawing then inking the book; it wasn’t me finding out about Taylor, it was me and Lori talking to Charlotte and Mary. Sometimes I confused us. Sometimes I wanted to shake Taylor for her part in colonising Aotearoa. And once, in the Brontë Parsonage Library, I called Brontë a bitch. Taylor found the process messed with her head. Concerned for her health, she wrote to Brontë afraid she would slip into a state of “betweenity”. Body in New Zealand, head in Yorkshire.

I empathised.

Writing as Rae Joyce, Rachel J Fenton co-edited Three Words, An Anthology of Aotearoa Women’s Comics(Beatnik, 2016) and her participation in the NZ Book Council Graphic Novelist Exchange Residency in Association with the Publishers Association of NZ and the Taipei International Book Exhibition resulted in Island to Island, a Graphic Exchange between Taiwan and New Zealand(Dala/Upstart Press). Winner of the Auckland University of Technology Graphic Fiction Prize, Rachel is currently looking for a publisher for her graphic biography of Mary Taylor, Charlotte Brontë’s best friend, which she researched and drew with arts grant funding from Creative New Zealand.

Edited by Clêr Lewis.Clêr has an MA in creative writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is  working on her first novel.

If you too have an idea for a future Something Rhymed post, please do get in touch. You can find out more about what we are looking for here.

Dorothy Parker and Elinor Wylie

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Regular Something Rhymed readers will remember Kathleen Dixon Donnelly’s post on Mabel Dodge and Gertrude Stein (and Alice B. Toklas). For our last post of 2018, Kathleen has written a follow-up piece on another absolutely fascinating literary friendship.

Dorothy Parker purportedly said, ‘The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.’ Well-known for her nasty comments about anyone who had just left the room – sometimes before – she didn’t forge many strong bonds. But she rarely said anything negative about her female friend, poet and novelist Elinor Wylie.

Both were born in New Jersey to affluent families, Wylie eight years before Parker.

In the first few years of the 20th century, Parker—then Rothschild— was struggling with guilt over her hated stepmother’s sudden death, and writing poems about dogs to her father. She left Catholic school, later claiming she was fired for insisting ‘that the Immaculate Conception was spontaneous combustion’.

Dorothy Parker.                                      This image is in the public domain.

Meanwhile, Wylie—then Hoyt—eloped with an emotionally unstable Harvard graduate, but soon found herself being followed by an older married Washington attorney, who encouraged her poetry. She abandoned her husband and son to run off to England with the lawyer, where they lived under assumed names.

By the time war broke out in 1914, Wylie’s husband had committed suicide and her new partner’s wife had agreed to a divorce. Returning to the States, the socially ostracised couple moved from city to city, and Wylie suffered two miscarriages, as Parker would later.

Now that Parker’s father had died, she was teaching dance classes on the Upper West Side and sending couplets to the most popular newspaper column in the city, ‘The Conning Tower’ penned by FPA (Franklin Pierce Adams). By 1917 she had talked herself into a job at Vanity Fair, and by the 1920s, she was writing for all the main periodicals, lunching and drinking regularly with the writers of the Algonquin Hotel’s Round Table.

220px-Elinor_Wylie
Elinor Wylie This image is in the public domain.

Wylie had dumped her second husband and moved to New York City with incoming husband number three, who, in his role as founding editor of the Saturday Review of Literature, helped her burgeoning career as a poet. When they married in 1923, she dismissed their friends’ misgivings by saying, ‘Yes, it would be a pity that a first-rate poet [Wylie] should be turned into a second-rate poet by marrying a third-rate poet.’

The women became good friends that same year, and Parker was soon going to the Wylies’ impressive apartment to write. By this time, Parker was free-lancing, and it was Wylie who had now talked herself into a job (as poetry editor) at Vanity Fair.

In May 1925, Wylie and Parker were invited to Connecticut for the wedding of Parker’s mentor and fellow Round Table member, FPA, along with other writers working on the newly established New Yorker magazine. Wylie insisted that all continue the party at her nearby country home. Passed out on the couch, Parker was devastated to wake up to the voices of Wylie and another guest whispering about the scars on Parker’s wrists left by her recent suicide attempt.

At the end of the following year, Wylie had an opportunity to come through for her friend. Parker showed up early one Sunday morning at Wylie’s Greenwich Village townhouse, talking about trying to kill herself again. Wylie calmed her down. This was one of the only times Parker talked to someone about suicide before she tried it.

Wylie’s brother and sister, in addition to her first husband, had also killed themselves. She wrote to her mother, ‘I suppose Dottie thinks we are experts on the subject!’

Fittingly, Parker’s first collection of poetry, Enough Rope, was published the next month, dedicated to Wylie and containing Parker’s most well-known poem, ‘Resumé’.

Wylie’s poetry was totally unlike Parker’s short, witty quips. Wylie favoured more traditional wording and structure, and, obsessed with romantic Percy Bysshe Shelley, she wrote two novels fantasising that he had been reincarnated.

Having suffered from high blood pressure and migraines most of her life, Wylie was staying with her by-then estranged third husband during Christmas 1928. When he brought her some water, she wryly remarked ‘Is that all it is?’ and dropped dead from a stroke at age 43.

On hearing of Wylie’s death, Parker was so distraught that she found herself rendered temporarily mute. But her late friend continued to speak to her through the words of ‘Anti-Feminist Song, For My Sister’ – her poem addressed to Parker, which was published in the New Yorker shortly after Wylie’s death. ‘I am I,’ Wylie had written, ‘and you, my darling;/Someone very like myself.’

A few years later, during Parker’s visit to Venice with friends, Wylie apparently spoke up again from beyond the grave. When the holidaymakers started playing with the latest craze, a Ouija board, a spirit identifying herself as Wylie began talking about such gruesome crimes and poisonings that the group became quite scared – an apt end to a friendship founded on death, despair, and the darkest of wits.

 

Written by Kathleen Dixon Donnelly, who runs the blog Such Friends, and is working on a book ‘Such Friends’: A Scrapbook Almanac of Writers’ Salons, 1897-1930. You can follow her on Twitter @SuchFriends

Edited by Clêr Lewis. Clêr has an MA in creative writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is  working on her first novel.

Vicky Grut and Kathy Page: Writer friends with the long view

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Last month, we were delighted to feature Vicky Grut’s post on the literary friendship between Beryl Bainbridge and Bernice Rubens. Today, to mark the occasion of Vicky’s debut short story collection, Live Show, Drink Included, we bring you a guest post by Vicky and her own friend Kathy Page, author of the recently published novel Dear Evelyn.

Vicky Grut (©Bill Williams)

Vicky: We met in 1984. You came to see my degree show at Goldsmiths. I remember the person who introduced us telling my then boyfriend that you were ‘a proper writer’, which suggests I was tinkering with the idea of writing even then, though I was making video documentaries at the time. You published your first book. You learned to drive and moved away to Norwich and the UEA course with Malcolm Bradbury and Rose Tremain. We lost touch. About ten years later I found a copy of Frankie Styne and the Silver Man in a bookshop. I still have it. I wrote to you care of Methuen and discovered that you were living just minutes away from me in south London. By then I had started writing seriously. You invited me to join your writers’ group and soon afterwards I began to get my stories published. But I was quite awe-struck by you and all your achievements – I still am. Eleven books!

Kathy-Page-main-picutre-HR
Kathy Page (©Billie Woods)

Kathy: We write quite differently and I like that. I’m always interested to read what you are working on and delighted that the book is finally coming out. As I soon discovered once you joined the group, you’re a very sensitive reader, and articulate too. Also, you talk with your hands…  I’ve always appreciated your very nuanced response to my work in progress, and the way you’ll read something at short notice. Over the years I think we have become more and more attuned to each other’s concerns, aims and voices, which is mainly a very good thing, though I do think that in a way it does perhaps sometimes make it harder to see each other’s work as a stranger will.

Vicky: It was 1993 when we reconnected. Bill and I were living in a one-bedroom flat with our first child. We were desperate to move to a bigger place but everything in our price range was so cramped and ugly. One day Bill came back saying he’d seen a beautiful Edwardian flat in X road. ‘But that’s where Kathy lives!’ I said. There are more than a hundred flats in this road, but the one he’d found turned out to be right next door to yours. We moved in 1994 and we’re still living here. When Becki was born, you and Richard moved to a bigger place. In 2001 you emigrated to Canada.

Kathy: I really enjoyed us being neighbours in the nineties. The living room and kitchen areas of our maisonettes looked in on each other, and early on in that period when I was pretty unhappy I used to glimpse and overhear you and your family and feel inspired by you all getting along so well. I really think it helped me to have the vision and courage to finally ditch my unhappy relationship and find a better one. And then as a result you later got to overhear my moaning and groaning when I was in labour with my daughter.

Vicky: I was so impressed by the way you took charge of your life. You decided to choose happiness. I remember your first-date nerves when you started going out with Richard. Now you have two grown-up children.

Kathy: I was a bit worried when I handed my writing classes over to you. I was exhausted and had been doing too much teaching and I felt that perhaps it was a bit of a poisoned chalice. But I think you are a natural teacher, and it worked out well, and paved the way for us to have the opportunity to teach together later on. And here we are, seventeen years after I left the country, with our books coming out within weeks of each other! I’m very glad that we kept in touch (thank goodness for email) and that we’ve been able to see each other fairly regularly too.

Vicky: I’ve learned so much from our friendship. In the early days it was about the craft of writing itself, but also about publishing. I’ve watched your work go through a creative renaissance since you started working with indie publishers like Biblioasis and And Other Stories. Without them you wouldn’t have published those two wonderful collections of stories, both nominated for the Giller Prize. Your example encouraged me to gather my own short fiction together and to approach Holland Park Press.

Kathy: I like that ours is not just a writing friendship. We help each other through the ups and downs of the writing life and we share our stories and worries about our kids, husbands and work.

Vicky: And we have the long view. We know the road that each of us has travelled and we can check in with one another about what’s important.

 

Kathy Page’s eighth novel, Dear Evelyn, was published on 6 September 2018 by And Other Stories in the UK and  Biblioasis in Canada, and is forthcoming in Germany. You can find out more about her work at  http://www.kathypage.info/

 

Vicky Grut’s first book Live Show, Drink Included: Collected Stories is published by Holland Park Press on 5 October 2018. You can follow her on Twitter @VickyGrut. Her website is: www.vickygrut.com

 

 

Edited by Clêr Lewis. Clêr has an MA in creative writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is  working on her first novel.

 

 

 

 

Kathleen Lyttelton and Virginia Woolf

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We have long been fans of Ann Kennedy Smith’s excellent blog, which focuses on the friendship networks of Cambridge University women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and so it’s a real pleasure to welcome her to Something Rhymed today. Ann’s piece below profiles one of Virginia Woolf’s important literary bonds – not her tempestuous friendship with Katherine Mansfield, which we have discussed on this site before, but Woolf’s relationship with another writer Kathleen Lyttelton.

Ann’s work has been edited by Clêr Lewis. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

In November 1904 Virginia Stephen (who would become Virginia Woolf when she married) was twenty-two and excited about beginning her new life. She had just moved into 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury with her sister and two brothers and wanted to put her sadness at the recent death of her father, and her subsequent major breakdown, behind her. She needed to earn her own living, but how? Her older friend Violet Dickinson suggested that she should send a sample of her writing to a friend of hers who worked for a weekly journal aimed at clergymen called The Guardian (not to be confused with The Manchester Guardian).

Kathleen Lyttelton, the forty-eight-year-old editor of The Guardian’s women’s supplement, lived with her daughter Margaret just a few minutes’ walk away, at 56 Gower Street.

Mary Kathleen Lyttelton.
Mary Kathleen Lyttelton (With thanks to Andrew Wallis for permission to use this photograph.)

They too were new to Bloomsbury, having moved there after the death of Lyttelton’s husband, the Bishop of Southampton. Lyttelton was an active suffrage campaigner and author of Women and their Work (1901). But she was also a short-story writer; the passionate ‘Francesca’s Revenge’ was published by Blackwoods Magazine in 1891. Although she now worked as a journalist, her job as editor allowed her to combine her twin interests in women’s issues and literature.

‘I don’t in the least want Mrs L.’s candid criticism; I want her cheque!’, Woolf told Dickinson impatiently. She had just sent off a sample of her writing and was anxiously waiting for a response. It was a positive one. Lyttelton generously invited her to contribute 1,500 words on any subject she liked. A few weeks later, in December 1904, The Guardian published Woolf’s essay ‘Haworth, November 1904’, in which she wrote: ‘Haworth expresses the Brontës; the Brontës express Haworth… They fit like a snail to its shell.’

When she met the woman she called ‘My Editress’ soon afterwards,Woolf liked her immediately.

Virginia Woolf in 1927
Virginia Woolf in 1927 (This image is in the public domain.)

‘Mrs Lyttelton has just been – she is a delightful big sensible woman,’ she told Dickinson. ‘I wish she would pet me! I think she has possibilities that way!’ Warm and easy-going as she was, Lyttelton was not interested in being a substitute mother. Instead, she treated the younger woman as a professional writer, which caused occasional upsets. Woolf never got over having to shorten her review of The Golden Bowl by Henry James, but it was only what any male editor would have done (and did).

Lyttelton’s weekly Guardian columns show her to be an investigative and outspoken journalist who campaigned for equal access to higher education and improved legal rights for women. But she was also a lover of good novels, although she did not envy the limited life choices of Jane Austen’s women characters, of whom she wondered ‘how these unemployed young women managed to while away the long weary hours of the day’. Lyttelton was in no doubt that modern women (like herself and Woolf) who could make a career for themselves as writers were more fortunate.

Over the next two years, Woolf and Lyttelton developed a friendship based on warmth and mutual respect. Mrs L’s ‘melancholy roar of laughter’ amused Woolf. ‘I went to tea with her, and she roared at me, like a shaggy old Lioness with wide jaws, and gave me 4 books to review.’

During this time The Guardian published over 30 book reviews and essays by Woolf, including a funny and touching obituary of her family dog, Shag. She sometimes complained about the newspaper’s preachy tone (‘how they ever got such a black little goat into their fold, I can’t conceive’) but being published regularly gave Woolf new confidence in being able to earn a living by her pen.

There were more difficult times to come. Woolf’s beloved brother Thoby died of typhoid fever in November of that year, and less than two months later, Lyttelton herself died suddenly of influenza and ‘a weak heart’ aged fifty-one. Painful as such losses were, Woolf was already on her way as a writer by then.

In 1933, when she herself was fifty-one, Woolf wrote her essay ‘Professions for Women’. She recalled (a little inaccurately) how her career as a published writer began – by simply, she said, sending a few pages of her writing to a newspaper, ‘and my effort was rewarded on the first day of the following month – a glorious day it was for me – by a letter from an editor containing a cheque for one pound ten shillings and six pence’.

The thrill of being paid for her writing was a memory that Woolf cherished all her life.

 

Ann Kennedy Smith is a published writer and contributor to Slightly Foxed, TLS and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Her ‘Ladies Dining Society’ blog celebrates the friendship networks of Cambridge University women 1870-1946. You can follow Ann on Twitter @akennedysmith

 

Edited by Clêr Lewis. Clêr has an MA in creative writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is  working on her first novel.

 

If this post has inspired an idea for a future Something Rhymed post, please do get in touch. You can find out more about what we are looking for here. Former contributor and post editor Kathleen Dixon Donnelly has written a review of A Secret Sisterhood on her own blog Such Friends. You can read it here.

 

Mabel Dodge and Gertrude Stein (and Alice B. Toklas)

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Regular readers of this blog will perhaps remember Alice Fitzgerald’s post on the friendship between Pratibha Parmar and Alice Walker, edited by Kathleen Dixon Donnelly. Today, Kathleen writes a post of her own for us, edited this time by Clêr Lewis. We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we did.

If this inspires you to get more involved with Something Rhymed, please find further details here.

Gertrude Stein by Carl Van Vechten, 1934. (This image is in the public domain.)

Think of ground-breaking writer Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) — a native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, like me — and you automatically think of her life partner, Alice B. Toklas (1877-1967).

From the moment Stein and Toklas met, in Paris in 1906, their joint biographer, Diana Souhami, writes that they ‘never travelled without each other or entertained separately, or worked on independent projects’.

Very romantic—but, didn’t they have any woman friends?

Both were great friends with many writers—mostly male—who admired Stein’s work, including Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Female acquaintances would come to their salons on the Left Bank in the 1920s, but most were the wives of the writers.

Another American who became well known for her 1920s Greenwich Village salons was Mabel Ganson Evans Dodge Sterne Luhan (1879-1962), daughter of a wealthy Buffalo businessman, widowed and married again before she was 26. Dodge’s first husband was killed in a hunting accident, leaving her with a young son. To pry her away from an affair with a Buffalo gynaecologist, her family sent her to Paris. On board ship she met a rich Boston architect, Edwin Dodge, and they married two years later, establishing a fabulous home, Villa Curonia, in Florence.

MAbel Dodge
Mabel Dodge Luhan by Carl Van Vechten, 1934. (This image is in the public domain.)

In 1911, Dodge visited rue de Fleurus, in Paris, to meet Stein and Toklas. The Dodges in turn invited their new friends to their ornate Italian home, and there Stein began writing A Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia. She developed an essay technique by adapting what Cezanne and other painters had done in the portraits that she had bought to adorn the walls of her salon. Stein wrote, ‘Pablo (Picasso) is doing abstract portraits in painting. I am trying to do abstract portraits in my medium, words.’

Stein wrote late at night, in her room next to Dodge’s. As Mr Dodge was away, his wife invited her children’s 22-year-old tutor into her bedroom. Stein incorporated overheard sounds into her portrait: ‘So much breathing has not the same place where there is that much beginning. So much breathing has not the same place when the ending is lessening. So much breathing …’ Dodge was thrilled.

Toklas was not.

Dodge had felt Stein warm to her and became a bit flirtatious. As she described in her memoir: ‘Gertrude sitting opposite me in Edwin’s chair, sent me such a strong look over the table that it seemed to cut across the air to me in a band of electrified steel—a smile traveling across on it—powerful—Heaven! I remember it now so keenly! (Alice walked out.) Gertrude gave a surprised, noticing glance … and followed.’ Stein came back to say that Toklas wouldn’t come to lunch as, ‘She feels the heat today.’

Alice B. Toklas by Carl Van Vechten, 1949. (This image is in the public domain.)

From that moment, Dodge felt that Toklas kept them apart. But for the next twenty years Dodge and Stein wrote to each other.

Back in New York, divorced from her husband, holding political salons and having an affair with radical, communist journalist John Reed, Dodge became involved with the organizers of the 1913 Armory Show, the first major exhibition of European and American modern art in the States. Dodge had had a few essays in Alfred Stieglitz’s intellectual photographic journal Camera Work, so the Armory Show’s publicist asked her to write a piece about Gertrude Stein’s avant-garde style for a special issue of Arts and Decoration magazine.

Dodge obliged with ‘Speculations, or Post-Impressionists in Prose’, comparing Matisse and Picasso’s work in paint with Stein’s in print. Stein reacted with delight: ‘Hurrah for gloire! Do send me half a dozen copies … I want to show it to everybody.’

From then on, Stein’s name was associated, both seriously and satirically, with the cubists.

When Reed went off on his communist adventures, Dodge married a painter, Maurice Sterne, following him to Taos, New Mexico, where they established an artists’ colony. By the mid-1920s, Dodge had dumped him and married a Native American, Tony Luhan. They hosted many of the decade’s leading artists and writers, including D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda.

Meanwhile, in Paris, Stein and Toklas were welcoming a new generation of Americans who were taking advantage of a cheap franc, cheap food and cheap wine.

Dodge helped Stein get her work published in the States, but Stein didn’t hit it big until, in six weeks in 1932, she wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas because Toklas wouldn’t. American friends encouraged them to come on a US lecture tour, starting at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan. When they arrived, newspaper headlines proclaimed: ‘Gerty Gerty Stein Stein Is Back Home Home Back.’

Dodge urged the pair to come to her in Taos. Or they could visit her home in Carmel on the California leg of their trip.

Toklas said no.

When the first volume of Dodge’s memoirs, Intimate Memories, was published in 1927, reviewing it in The New Yorker, Dorothy Parker was underwhelmed: ‘It may be in her forthcoming volume, when she gets into her stride of marrying people, things will liven up a bit.’

In later volumes, Dodge treated her friend Stein well, but described Toklas as sinister, and concluded ‘I missed my jolly fat friend very much.’

 

Written by Kathleen Dixon Donnelly, who runs the blog Such Friends, and is working on a book ‘Such Friends’: A Scrapbook Almanac of Writers’ Salons, 1897-1930. You can follow her on Twitter @SuchFriends.

 

Edited by Clêr Lewis. Clêr has an MA in creative writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is  working on her first novel.