Nancy shares an update from former guest Ken Kiewra. He joined us on the Front Porch in January, for Episode 70, to comment on The Real Work by Adam Gopnik. We invited Dr. Kiewra because he is a leading scholar in talent development. He emailed to let me know his new book, Be a More Productive Scholar, is now available from Cambridge University Press. It reveals how leading scholars are so productive and offers more than 100 recommendations for budding and seasoned scholars alike. I worked in academia for 30 years, and I know that there are some scholars that are amazingly productive at publishing in peer reviewed journals and they seem to always be breaking new ground. Well, Ken interviewed dozens of productive scholars over the past 25 years to uncover the hidden curriculum of scholarly success. If you are, or know any researchers who are trying to make their name in academia, this book has career-guiding advice they can benefit from. We’ll put an easy link in the show notes.
Our guest this episode is Anne Boyd Rioux, the author or editor of seven books, including the Indie bestseller Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters. This book was chosen as one of the best books of the year by Library Journal, The Daily Mail, and A Mighty Girl. It was also one of the best reviewed books (Lit Hub), one of the best books of August (Christian Science Monitor), a book not to miss (USA Today), and one of the best books of summer (Newsday). Anne Boyd Rioux is a writer and expert on American women writers, uncovering the stories of their lives and fostering renewed appreciation for them. She is the recipient of four National Endowment for the Humanities awards, two for public scholarship. Anne has a Ph.D. in American Studies and was an English professor for 23 years, before selling her house to write fulltime and travel around Europe. She serves on the board of directors for Biographers International Organization. She has been interviewed on the BBC, NPR, and radio programs in Ireland, Sweden, and Australia, and she speaks regularly at bookstores, museums, and universities.
We start off by asking Anne about her decision to sell your house to write and travel full-time. She decided to make that leap after 23 years as an English professor due to a mix of events, not the least of which was her daughter heading off to college. When Anne was in college, she became passionate about the recovery of American women writers who wrote fascinating, sometimes provocative, and often daring works that have been unavailable or unread.
Anne has written a number of books including;
"Writing for Immortality: Women and the Emergence of High Literary Culture in America."
Before the Civil War, American writers such as Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Harriet Beecher Stowe had established authorship as a respectable profession for women, but mostly regarded themselves as educators and businesswomen. During and after the Civil War, some women writers began to challenge this view, seeing themselves as artists writing for themselves and for posterity. Writing for Immortality studies the lives and works of four prominent members of the first generation of American women who strived for recognition as serious literary artists: Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Elizabeth Stoddard, and Constance Fenimore Woolson. Combining literary criticism and cultural history, Anne E. Boyd examines how these authors negotiated the masculine connotation of "artist," imagining a space for themselves in the literary pantheon. Redrawing the boundaries between male and female literary spheres, and between American and British literary traditions, Boyd shows how these writers rejected the didacticism of the previous generation of women writers and instead drew their inspiration from the most prominent "literary" writers of their day: Emerson, James, Barrett Browning, and Eliot. Placing the works and experiences of Alcott, Phelps, Stoddard, and Woolson within contemporary discussions about "genius" and the "American artist," Boyd reaches a sobering conclusion. Although these women were encouraged by the democratic ideals implicit in such concepts, they were equally discouraged by lingering prejudices about their applicability to women.
"Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist" Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840–1894), who contributed to Henry James’s conception of his heroine Isabelle Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, was one of the most accomplished American writers of the nineteenth century. Yet today the best-known (and most-misunderstood) facts of her life are her relationship with James and her probable suicide in Venice. This first full-length biography of Woolson provides a fuller picture that reaffirms her literary stature. Uncovering new sources, Anne Boyd Rioux evokes Woolson’s dramatic life. She was a grand-niece of James Fenimore Cooper and was born in New Hampshire, but her family’s ill fortunes drove them west to Cleveland. Raised to be a conventional woman, Woolson was nonetheless thrust by her father’s death into the role of breadwinner, and yet, as a writer, she reached for critical as much as monetary reward. Known for her powerfully realistic and empathetic portraits of post Civil–War American life, Woolson created compelling and subtle portrayals of the rural Midwest, Reconstruction-era South, and the formerly Spanish Florida, to which she traveled with her invalid mother. After her mother’s death, Woolson, with help from her sister, moved to Europe where expenses were lower, living mostly in England and Italy and spending several months in Egypt. While abroad, she wrote finely crafted foreign-set stories that presage Edith Wharton’s work of the next generation. In this rich biography, Rioux reveals an exceptionally gifted and committed artist who pursued and received serious recognition despite the difficulties faced by female authors of her day. Throughout, Rioux goes deep into Woolson’s character, her fight against depression, her sources for writing, and her intimate friendships, including with Henry James, painting an engrossing portrait of a woman and writer who deserves to be more widely known today.
"Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters." Soon after publication on September 30, 1868, Little Women became an enormous bestseller and one of America’s favorite novels. Its popularity quickly spread throughout the world, and the book has become an international classic. When Anne Boyd Rioux read the novel in her twenties, she had a powerful reaction to the story. Through teaching the book, she has seen the same effect on many others. In Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, Rioux recounts how Louisa May Alcott came to write Little Women, drawing inspiration for it from her own life. Rioux also examines why this tale of family and community ties, set while the Civil War tore America apart, has resonated through later wars, the Depression, and times of changing opportunities for women. Alcott’s novel has moved generations of women, many of them writers: Simone de Beauvoir, J. K. Rowling, bell hooks, Cynthia Ozick, Jane Smiley, Margo Jefferson, and Ursula K. Le Guin were inspired by Little Women, particularly its portrait of the iconoclastic young writer, Jo. Many have felt, as Anna Quindlen has declared, “Little Women changed my life.” Today, Rioux sees the novel’s beating heart in Alcott’s portrayal of family resilience and her honest look at the struggles of girls growing into women. In gauging its current status, Rioux shows why Little Women remains a book with such power that people carry its characters and spirit throughout their lives.
Anne tells us Alcott’s novel influenced its readers and American culture at the time of its publication because it showed girls many paths to womanhood. Since its publication, it continues to influence contemporary readers and has spawned many plays, film, musicals, and novels. Anne's favorite adaptation is the recent film by Greta Gerwig.
Throughout the interview, we discuss the choices and challenges Alcott's "little women" faced and how women are still struggling to understand how to balance dreams, life, and expectations. Alcott's novel offers a glimpse of living for people at every age and stage.
