Circle of Stones: Woman’s Journey to Herself, by Judith Duerk (Circle of Stones Series, Volume 1) Innisfree Press, Inc. 1993, 1999.

I picked this book up used because books about women’s issues and spirituality tend to interest me. After I started looking through it, I found that it was part poetry, part meditation, and part workbook. At only 123 pages- and some of the pages are blank or have few words on them- I thought it might be a rip-off. I was wrong; some parts are surprisingly deep for how slight they are.

Even though it says nothing about it on the cover, a surprising amount of writing is devoted to dealing with depression. She looks at depression almost as a normal state- a gift, even, that causes us to look within. Having dealt with depression my entire life, I hate the idea that depression is a normal state. I agree with her that having a circle of women, ones who surround us all our lives, would make it easier to deal with depression, or any mental state, for that matter. (it also bothers me that we are ignoring men with depression)

I do feel it would be good to have these circles of women, good to know we were not alone walking through life. It would be good to have guidance, and to know someone had our backs. Some people are not lucky enough to have that. It’s not an ingrained piece of our society.

Every chapter ends with a line about “How would your life have been if…” you had a circle of women surrounding and backing out. I did appreciate those; I may take the time to at least think about those and maybe even write it down. They are good meditations even if I don’t have a drum circle. This would be a good workbook for a women’s group. And, perhaps most important, I feel these ideas would be equally good for all sexes and genders. We all need someone to have our back. We all need people to explain how life works, and what is happening to us as we grow up, and as we age.

 

The Mutual Admiration Society: How Dorothy L. Sayers and her Oxford Circle Remade the World for Women, by Mo Moulton. Hachette Book Group, 2019

Dorothy Sayers and her college circle of women friends were a high achieving group. Sayers is the best known of them as the author of the Lord Peter Whimsy mysteries, but she was not the only one to achieve a great deal- and the Whimsy stories were by no means her only writing. One of the group, a historian, discovered a cache of Tudor era letters, which she translated into modern English and published over the course of 40 years. One was in a long term lesbian love triangle. One became a birth control advocate, a parenting expert (she wrote much on those subjects), and midwife.

They met at Oxford, where they were a group of some of the few women to be admitted in that time. At the time, a few women were allowed to attend, but they could not receive degrees. This came later (in 1920); some of the group were given retroactive degrees. Sayers wrote an essay titled “Are Women Human?”, which, it seems, women really weren’t in those days. The MAS was a female equivalent of The Inklings; a university group of writers and scholars with common interests.

This group biography covers the women’s lives from Oxford to their deaths. It’s extremely well researched (the notes and bibliography take up almost 60 pages) and detailed. It’s not fast reading, but I found it fascinating.

Outsiders: Five Women Writers Who Changed the World, by Lyndall Gordon. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019

The ‘outsiders’ that the author has selected are Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Olive Shreiner, and Virginia Woolf. They were outsiders in the way they lived their lives, and in the things they wrote. All were motherless and learned the ways of being a woman through books. Three of them published under an assumed man’s name, in order to get their work taken seriously. All were feminists. All but Woolf lived in social isolation. And even though they never knew each other, there are connections between them that Gordon makes, looping back to reference something in a different chapter.



Each woman’s life and work is explored in detail, one per section. In some ways, the book reads as if it were five separate thesis or lecture; things we’ve already been told in one section get restated in another. But there is not enough of that to get tiresome.



All these women stepped beyond the common boundaries of the time that were prescribed for women. Some lived ‘in sin’. Some lobbied for women’s and human rights. Gordon describes their lives in detail, and also tells about how the world reacted to their writing, and how the writers who lived after them were affected by their work. She also shines a light on who influenced them, be they absent mother, father, husband, or sister.



I enjoyed the book (although it wasn’t a fast or easy read), but I think I would have enjoyed it more if I had known more about the women beforehand. I was lost a few times because I had not read this or that of their works. While I’ve read Shelley and Woolf, I have barely read Bronte and Eliot; Shreiner I had never even heard of. Gordon’s writing expects the reader to be widely-read. Four stars.

Call Your Daughter Home, by Deb Spera. Park Row Books, 2019

Set in South Carolina in 1924, this novel weaves together narrations from three disparate women. Annie Coles is the rich, white, woman. She’s not as rich as she used to be, though; the Cole family money was in cotton and the boll weevil has left that business in tatters. But they are getting into tobacco, and Annie has a business of her own: The Sewing Circle, where the cotton sacks for packing crops are sewn, which is cheaper than buying premade sacks. And now Annie and her younger son, Lonnie, are branching out: they are starting to manufacture clothing to be sold in stores around the area.

Gertrude is poor white trash, married to an abusive drunk who is starving his family when he’s not beating on them. One day she can’t take it anymore, and flees the shack in the swamp with her children. She’s lucky: in this economically depressed area, she manages to get a job. But it’ll take more than that to give her security.

Oretta is the Magical Negro. She’s worked for the Coles family all her life; she is the first generation of freed people of color. The Coles had owned her family before the Civil War. She keeps the Coles’s house and family in good shape. She can see and talk with the dead.

The three women, who normally wouldn’t have associated with each other, find their lives bound together in strange ways. There is a big secret in the Coles family, one which keeps Annie’s two daughters, Sarah and Mollie, from speaking to her. One of the Coles sons committed suicide at a young age. Gertrude’s secret would be totally damning if found out.

It’s a wretched time and place to be living in. Disease, alligators, poverty, misogyny, racism, and classism, all are present. All three women are well acquainted with grief. The author did well creating her main characters; you can’t not feel their pain. The story bogs down in places- the middle section seems to take forever- but it’s still a can’t-put-it-down story. While it’s pretty easy to figure out the biggest secret early, how it’s dealt with in the end caught me by surprise. Survival and motherhood are the backbone of the novel. Four and a half stars.

Not Our Kind, by Kitty Zeldis. HarperCollins, 2018

In the time after WW 2, Eleanor Moskowitz, young Vassar grad, is on her way to interview for a teaching position, when her cab collides with another one, this one bearing Patricia Bellamy. The jolt leaves Eleanor with blood on her face, and Patricia feels compelled to invite Eleanor to her home to freshen up. Having by now missed her appointment, Eleanor goes with Patricia. Patricia lives in an expensive, upper class apartment building. Patricia happens to need a tutor for her 13 year old daughter Margaux, recently recovering from polio, which has left Margaux with a limp and a large attitude. Match made in heaven? Well, it might be- except the Bellamys are WASP and Eleanor is Jewish. But Eleanor and Margaux have made an instant connection, so Patricia decides it’s worth the risk- if Eleanor shortens her name to ‘Moss’. It would never do for anyone in the building- especially Wynn Bellamy, Patricia’s husband- to know they had allowed a Jew in, even as an employee. 

Eleanor finds herself walking a tight rope as tensions rise in the Bellamy summer house, with Eleanor as a live-in, Wynn there most of the time, and then Tom, Patricia’s brother, moves in. While Margaux is doing much better, both physically and emotionally, Eleanor isn’t sure she can stay any longer. And Eleanor’s mother, a successful milliner, doesn’t understand why Eleanor doesn’t want to join her in business. And Eleanor might soon find herself having to do that, when suspicions about her arise.

I enjoyed the book- it’s a bit of a tense read- but I wish the characters had been fleshed out more. The *do* thinks, but we don’t get a feeling of why they do them. Scenes change quickly without seeming to evolve or slide into each other. It does a great job of pointing out class differences and women’s roles. I’d give it four stars- good, but not great. And while it doesn’t affect the story- I really wished more time had been spent on Eleanor’s mother and her millinery. Total vintage clothing junkie here!

I received this book free from the Amazon Vine Program in return for an unbiased review. This did not affect my opinion. 

Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, by Kathleen Rooney. St. Martin’s Press, 2016

It’s New Year’s Eve of 1984, and 85 year old Lillian Boxfish is taking one of her long walks through New York City. She hit New York young; she wanted out from under the thumb of her family in D.C., and she wanted the exciting life of the big city. She soon was hired by Macy’s, writing distinctive ad copy, as well as publishing books of poems. She made quite a lot of money, despite not being paid nearly as much as the male ad writers.

As Lillian walks, the cityscape brings back memories of her long life. Here was the tiny apartment she and her best friend shared, where they partied constantly. Here’s the ladies only hotel she lived in while saving up for said apartment. Here’s Macy’s, where she worked up until she became pregnant and became persona non grata. Here’s the park, the Hudson, the restaurants. The hospital where she was taken when she had a breakdown.

The story is not just an autobiography of Lillian, but a paean to the city and its evolution. I came to love “listening” to Lillian tell her story, like sitting down to tea or cocktails with a really tough but nice woman, who spans the time from Prohibition and speakeasies to the 80s AIDS epidemic. Lillian is witty and arch, as if sitting at the Algonquin Round Table. The only thing I found odd was that everyone was so friendly and accommodating; after hearing for decades how rough and gruff New Yorkers are, it was odd to find even the muggers being nice.

The above is an affiliate link. If you click through and buy something- anything- from Amazon, they will give me a few cents. 

I received this book free from the Amazon Vine program in return for a fair review. 

Neither of these things influenced my review.  

The Velocipede Races, by Emily June Street. Elly Blue Publishing, 2016

Emmy lives in a world similar to late Victorian England, but in her world, bicycle races are the big thing that men bet on. Women don’t bet, or ride. Or do much of anything. The upper class women are corseted and cossetted, pressed into marriage early and trained only in things like embroidery. Emmy hates this way of life; she wants to ride, like her twin brother Gabriel. Her brother is reluctantly following a career in professional riding; the family is in poverty because of their father’s gambling and few avenues are considered honorable for the upper class. The pittance he earns allows them to eat and purchase the things he needs for his racing; the rest is gambled by his father. Emmy trains in secret, doing the same body building exercises as Gabriel and sneaking out in his old riding clothing to ride. If she was ever caught, she’d be ruined for life.

Emmy’s mother is extremely happy when she catches Emmy and a stranger in a ‘compromising’ position- Emmy almost faints from her tightly laced corset. She’s forced to marry the stranger- who is quite wealthy- with the expectation that she will get him to give her family money and/or sponsor her brother as a racer. But all she cares about is being able to continue to ride, which will be tricky living in her husband’s house. Can she follow her dreams? Can Gabriel manage to support the family?

The book is partly coming of age and partly a feminist tale, with romance and sport thrown in. The subservient position of women is given a thorough going over, with lower class women taking to wearing split skirts to ride to work (something no upper class woman could do) and skipping corsets for “Mod dress” which I assume is like the Rational Dress of our own past. The prejudice against women who ride is intense, just as the prejudice against the women of our world was when they started demanding equal rights.

Emmy is a good character but I wish more time had been spent on the other characters. Gabriel has some depth to him, and there are hints about Emmy’s husband’s past, but that’s about it. I would have liked to have seen more of the women’s rights activists, as well as knowing why the husband did some of the things he did. They are used simply as props in Emmy’s story. While Emmy is a good heroine for the young adult readers, it’s a little hollow. 

The above is an affiliate link. If you click through and buy something- anything- Amazon will give me a few cents. 

This in no way influenced my review.