As a writer, Toni Morrison made an immediate mark upon America’s literary landscape with The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, and Sula, published three years later. Her next book, Song of Solomon, won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award in 1978. In 1983, she left Random House to devote herself full-time to writing and spent the next five years writing Beloved, the fantastical and tragic story of ex-slave Sethe and her children.
Her writing focuses on Black women who had previously been ignored. Her lyrical language combines with both realistic and mythic plot elements to create a distinctive style all her own. In 1993, Morrison won the Nobel Prize in Literature; she was the first Black American to do so. She said, “I am outrageously happy. But what is most wonderful for me personally is to know that the prize has been awarded to an African American. Winning as an American is very special—but winning as a Black American is a knockout.”
Had I loved the life that the state planned for me from the beginning, I would have lived and died in somebody else’s kitchen.
Toni Morrison, in a speech to the International Literary Congress in New York
Ink in Their Veins
Theories of Relativity
Some women seem to have writing talent encoded in their DNA. This is especially true of several “literary dynasties” wherein several family members are extraordinarily gifted, each with a voice uniquely his or her own. How does this happen? Do the gods (and goddesses) look down from above and occasionally say, “Hmmm, let’s endow this family with writing genius through the end of time”? Or can a special relationship with the Muses can be arranged and passed down from generation to generation?
Certainly, these creative kin have some strange magic in remarkable quantity. To wit, just two examples: the legacy of the Brontë lineage hasn’t faded with time; new editions of books and films of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are released every few years like clockwork. Stateside, their doppelgängers, the Grimké sisters, were stirring up hot controversy with virulent abolitionist texts that helped ignite the Civil War.
Bonded by blood and shelved side by side, the women profiled here are invariably very different from each other. But they all have one thing in common: a love of the written word.
It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up by themselves like grass.
Eudora Welty
THE BRONTËS scribbling sisters
The Brontë sisters were originally a troupe of five girls born in the early 1800s in a rural parsonage in Yorkshire, England. Mary Ann and Elizabeth died before they reached the age of ten, Emily and Anne lived to adulthood, and Charlotte outlived them all. Emily Brontë tends to be the most beloved in the family, but Anne and Emily had much in common. They also had many differences; their personalities could not have been more dissimilar. And all three aspired to be writers.
To make family dynamics even more complex, their father, Reverend Patrick Brontë, a failed writer himself, saw Emily as a genius, Charlotte as very talented, and Anne as not worthy of attention. The truth is, however, that the self-absorbed and somewhat silly patriarch had a staggering amount of talent under his roof. To have one daughter become a famous writer is amazing enough, but to have three is almost unimaginable.
The reverend proved more successful in theatrics, at least at home. In constant possession of a pistol, he shot through the open door if irritated and took a knife to one of his wife’s silk dresses. When his wife died in 1821, he sent for his sister-in-law to care for the six children (there was one brother, Branwell). A few years later, all the girls except Anne were sent to boarding school, which turned out to be a horrible experience of physical deprivation; this is where the two oldest girls died. After their sisters’ deaths, Charlotte and Emily were sent home.
Typically for the period, Reverend Brontë pinned his hope on his son, Branwell, an aspiring artist. Branwell was sent to university in London to pursue his dreams and failed miserably. Instead, he squandered his tuition and allowance on gin. When he had run through all of the money, he returned home, telling lies about having been robbed. The sisters ended up as teachers and governesses, but their passion was always writing.
In 1845, Charlotte discovered that Anne and Emily had been writing verse, as had she. She collected their poetry into one volume and published it herself, using the male pseudonyms—Currer (Charlotte), Ellis (Emily), and Acton (Anne) Bell—that they would retain throughout their careers. The book sold one copy. Not to be deterred, they all continued writing. Soon they were publishing to great acclaim.
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre achieved spectacular success during her lifetime, and it has survived the test of time and been retold again and again in films. She also penned the well-received novels Shirley and Villette. Anne’s Agnes Gray and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall are less known now but were critical and popular successes in their day.
But it is Emily who is considered by critics to be the literary genius of the family, based on her poems and her opus Wuthering Heights, which shone with a brilliance and sense of drama and mystery nearly unmatched in all of British literature. Family and friends marveled that sweet-natured Emily, always cleaning and ironing, was capable of the volcanic passions and drama she unleashed in her tale of love on the moors. Her Heathcliff is a brute, a primal presence as wild as the wind, a perfect foil for the spoiled, difficult Catherine. When it came out that the author was a woman, some critics of the day declared that Wuthering Heights must actually be the work of Branwell, on the grounds that no woman, particularly one who led such a sheltered existence, could have written such a passionate book.
Emily and Anne died young (at her brother’s funeral, Emily caught the cold that would eventually kill her). Charlotte went on to be lionized as a literary giant and hobnobbed with the likes of William Makepeace Thackeray, Mrs. Gaskell, and Matthew Arnold. She married her father’s curate in 1854 and died the following year.
I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading;
It vexes me to choose another guide.
Emily Brontë
ALICE JAMES sibling rivalry
Baby sister to brainy overachievers William and Henry James, Alice James, born in 1848, was also a writer of intensity and introspection. But she suffered greatly as a product of the Victorian Age: her brothers were the recipients of all the glory, and Alice was relegated to the house. Given the times, despite her great familial connections, Alice had little chance of publication and gradually receded into the shadows of the brothers’ gargantuan reputations as geniuses in philosophy and fiction.
Alice was sick her whole adult life. Sadly, it seems that her frustrations about career and gender contributed to her illness and neurasthenia. She had her first spells at sixteen and was prescribed a regimen of treatments involving “blistering baths,” electricity treatments, and sulfuric, ether, and motor therapy sessions. These medical advancements didn’t seem to help so much as harm her, and she was depressed and suicidal by the age of thirty. Her father, a Christian mystic preacher and ambitious intellectual, magnanimously gave her “permission” to die, which lessened her interest in that option. The more sensitive sibling, novelist Henry James, noted that “in our family group, girls seem scarcely to have had a chance” and that his sister’s “tragic health was, in a manner, the only solution for her of the practical problems of life.” Alice and her longtime companion Katherine Peabody were the models for Henry James’s novel about a pair of suffragist lovers in The Bostonians.
Despite her ill health, she did manage