Ruth Suckow

Regional women writers get short shrift.

I’m thinking particularly of Midwestern writers.  Perhaps you’ve read Pulitzer Prize winner Willa Cather’s My Antonia (I recommend her stunning novels, The Professor’s House and A Lost Lady), or Pulitzer and Orange Prize winner Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead or Home.

You are less likely to know Margaret Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Able McLaughlins (1924), a chilling, compelling novel, set during the Civil War, about a woman who is raped  and how she and her fiance courageously deal with her pregnancy.  There is also playwright and novelist Susan Glaspell, who won the Pulitzer for her play Alison’s House, and whose collection of stories, Her America:  A Jury of Her Peers and Other Stories, was published by University of Iowa Press.

And then there are the Midwestern women writers who didn’t win the Pulitzer Prize.

Ruth Suckow (1892-1960), an Iowa-born novelist of the 20th century who wrote very quiet, simple novels about small-town life in the Midwest, has many devoted supporters.  The Ruth Suckow Memorial Society has worked hard to promote her books, and will hold its annual meeting on Saturday, June 8, at the Hawarden Public Library in Hawarden, Iowa, Suckow’s birthplace.  The business meeting starts at 10, and  the discussion of her novel, The John Wood Case, begins at 11.  Afterwards you can tour the six-room house where the Suckow family  lived.

Her novels are not classics.  I won’t lie to you.  She is, however, historically important if you’re interested in Midwestern women’s lives at the turn of the (last) century. The daughter of a Congregationalist minister, she followed her father to many towns in Iowa and even studied bee-keeping in Colorado.  In her novels, she describes the daily  lives of women whose  social lives revolve around the church, as her own life did growing up.  She details their preparations for Thanksgiving festivals, Christmas services, choir practice, kaffeeklatsches, fudge-making, church suppers, flirtations at choir practice, and marriage.

I enjoyed The Folks and New Hope, two of Suckow’s novels reissued by the University of Iowa Press.  Some of her books are available as e-books.

LINKS TO AMERICAN BLOGS!

Yes, I’m an Anglophile. Yes, I read mostly English books.  Yes, I read many English blogs. But  last week some of my favorite English bloggers BEGAN  TO SOUND EXACTLY LIKE MISS READ.  I was reading Dovegreyreader and Mary Beard, and they sounded like the same person.

It’s disconcerting, so I am taking a short break from their blogs.

Anyway, I have gone all-American this week: here are a few links to American blogs.

I recommend:

1.  Ellen Moody’s beautifully written and intense blog about her husband’s cancer, “A Visit to the Surgeon” (Under the Sign of Syliva Two).

2.  D. G. Myers on Claire Messud, a novelist who replied angrily to a Publishers Weekly writer who asked if she’d want to be friends with the heroine of her novel, The Woman Upstairs (A Commonplace Reader).

3.  Borderline Ph.D. on “The Unthinkable Thought of Borderline Pride. ”  After a decade of publication of frank mental illness memoirs in the ’90s, the depressed, bipolar, and others have gone underground, leaving autism the most-written-about brain disease.  I don’t quite know how borderline personality disorder fits in, because I haven’t heard much about it, but Borderline Ph.D.states her case and good luck to her.

4.  The novelist Jay McInerney’s blog on the PEN Freedom to Write award and the award to Roth for service, “The Weight of the Word.”