The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States. Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin, editors. NY: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Rich was born 16 May 1929 in Baltimore, Maryland, the elder of two daughters of Arnold Rich, a doctor and pathology professor at Johns Hopkins University, and Helen Jones Rich, a gifted pianist and composer who had given up a possible professional musical career to raise a family. In her long autobiographical poem "Sources" (1983) and the essay "Split at the Root" (Blood, Bread and Poetry), Rich recalls her growing-up years as overtly dominated by the intellectual presence and demands of her father, while covertly marked by the submerged tensions and silences arising from the conflicts between the religious and cultural heritage of her father's Jewish background and her mother's southern Protestantism. Her relationship with her father was one of strong identification and desire for approval, yet it was adversarial in many ways. Under his tutelage Rich first began to write poetry, conforming to his standards well past her early successes and publications .

In 1951, Rich graduated from Radcliffe, and also won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Prize for her first book, A Change of World. W. H. Auden, the judge of the award, wrote a preface for the book that acquired eventual notoriety for its classic tones of male condescension and paternalism to female artists. Yet, the preface accurately describes Rich's elegant technique, chiseled formalism, and restrained emotional content. Rich's early poems clearly announced in theme and style their debt to Frost, Yeats, Stevens, and Auden himself, and received their high acclaim on the basis of that fidelity.

In 1953, Rich married Alfred Conrad, a Harvard economist, and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she bore three sons in the next five years. As her journal entries from these years reveal, this was an emotionally and artistically difficult period; she was struggling with conflicts over the prescribed roles of womanhood versus those of artistry, over tensions between sexual and creative roles, love, and anger. Yet, in the late fifties and early sixties, these were issues she could not easily name to herself; indeed, they were feelings for which she felt guilty, even "monstrous," and for which there was as yet no wider cultural recognition, much less insight or analysis.

Rich's third book, Snapshots of a Daughter- in-law (1963), which was eight years in the writing, stands as a watershed in her poetic development. For the first time, in language freer and more intimate and contextual, she situates her materials and emotions against themes of language, boundaries, resistance, escape, and moments of life-altering choice. As the poem "The Roofwalker" states, "A life I didn't choose/chose me," while "Prospective Immigrants Please Note" rhetorically asserts that the safety of enclosures and illusions must be abandoned for the claims of a risky but liberating reality.

The critical reaction to Snapshots was negative, with objections to its bitter tone and the shift away from her hallmarks of formalism and emotional control. Tellingly, feeling she had "flunked," Rich wrote Necessities of Life (1966) with a focus on death as the sign of how occluded and erased she felt when her own sense of coming into her rightful subject matter and voice was denied. Necessities, personally and poetically, was less a retreat than a pause. Coinciding with her personal and poetic evolution was the tremendous force of the historical moment. Rich's earlier, inchoate feelings of personal conflict, sexual alienation, and cultural oppression were finding increasing articulation in the larger social/political currents gathering force throughout the sixties, from the civil rights movements to the antiwar movement, to the emergent women's movement.

Rich moved to New York in 1966, when her husband took a teaching position at City College. She taught in the SEEK program, a remedial English program for poor, black, and third world students entering college, which was raising highly political questions about the collision of cultural codes of expression and the relation of language to power, issues that have consistently been addressed in Rich's work. She was also strongly impressed during this time by the work of James Baldwin and Simone de Beauvoir. Though Rich and her husband were both involved in movements for social justice, it was to the women's movement that Rich gave her strongest allegiance. In its investigation of sexual politics, its linkage, as Rich phrased it, of "Vietnam and the lovers' bed," she located her grounding for issues of language, sexuality, oppression, and power that infused all the movements for liberation from a male- dominated world.

Rich's poetry has clearly recorded, imagined, and forecast her personal and political journeys with searing power. In 1956, she began dating her poems to underscore their existence within a context, and to argue against the idea that poetry existed separately from the poet's life. Stylistically, she began to draw on contemporary rhythms and images, especially those derived from the cinematic techniques of jump cuts and collage. Leaflets (1969), The Will to Change (1971), and Diving into the Wreck (1973) demonstrate a progressive coming to power as Rich contends against the desolation patriarchy enacts on literal and psychic landscape. Intimately connected with this struggle for empowerment and action is the deepening of her determination "to write directly and overtly as a woman, out of a woman's body and experience." In the poem "Tear Gas," she asserts "The will to change begins in the body not in the mind/My politics is in my body." Yet this tactic has not led Rich to a poetry that is in a way confessional. Rich's voice is most characteristically the voice of witness, oracle, or mythologizer, the seer with the burden of "verbal privilege" and the weight of moral imagination, who speaks for the speechless, records for the forgot- ten, invents anew at the site of erasure of women's lives.

With each subsequent volume--Twenty-One Love Poems (1976), A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981), The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New (1984), Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Time's Power (1989), and most recently An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991)--Rich has confirmed and radicalized her fusion of political commitment and poetic vision. In her urging women to "revision" and to be "disloyal," she has engaged ever-wider experiences of women across cultures, history, and ethnicity, addressing themes of verbal privilege, male violence, and lesbian identity.

Over the years, Rich has taught at Swarthmore, Columbia, Brandeis, Rutgers, Cornell, San Jose State and Stanford University. Since 1976, she has lived with the writer and editor Michelle Cliff. She is active in movements for gay and lesbian rights, reproductive freedom, and for the progressive Jewish movement New Jewish Agenda. In 1981, she received the Fund for Human Dignity Award of the National Gay Task Force. Her poetry has been honored with the National Book Award in 1974 for Diving into the Wreck (which she accepted jointly with Alice Walker and Audre  Lorde in the name of all women who are silenced), two Guggenheim Fellowships, the first Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Brandeis Creative Arts Medal, the Common Wealth Award, the William  Whitehead  Award  for  Lifetime Achievement, and the National Poetry Association Award for Distinguished Service to the Art of Poetry. 
Deborah Pope

After leaving school, Olsen, a member of the Young Communist League and the Communist party, was twice briefly jailed for participating in strikes, including the famous Bloody Thursday maritime strike in San Francisco, where she had moved in 1933. Olsen married Jack Olsen, a warehouseman and printer, in 1943, and is the mother of four daughters; she still lives in San Francisco, the setting of much of her fiction. 

Her work falls roughly into three periods: the activist political publications of the 1930s; the polished, highly praised short fiction of the 1950s and 1960s; and the feminist-humanist nonfiction writing, teaching and public speaking from the 1970s to the present. In the 1930s, Olsen published several polemical essays, including "The Strike," "Thousand Dollar Vagrant," and "Literary Life in California" (1934); she also wrote two poems, "There Is a Reason" and "I Want You Women Up North to Know" (1934), a powerful evocation of poverty-stricken Mexican women. Her unfinished novel Yonnondio: From the Thirties, begun in 1932, remained unpublished until 1974. 

In the 1950s and 1960s, Olsen entered the greatest period of her fiction writing. After enrolling in a creative writing course at Stanford University, she published "I Stand Here Ironing" (1956) to critical acclaim, quickly following it with "Hey Sailor, What Ship?" (1957), "O Yes," and the enormously successful "Tell Me a Riddle" (1961). Ail four stories, written in Olsen's densely rich, imagistic, innovative style, and republished as Tell Me A Riddle (1962), delineate the difficulties of poverty, illness, loneliness, bigotry, and exclusion, and center on the relationships of mothers and daughters, ultimately celebrating their accomplishments. 

Since 1970, aided by time at such retreats as the MacDowell Writers Colony, Olsen has published the first of a two-part story, "Requa I" (1970); the rediscovered fragment of her Great Depression novel, Yonnondio (1974); and the now-classic Silences (1978), her explanation of the relatively small number of women writers and suggestions for correcting the imbalance. Silences also reprints Olsen's afterword to the 1972 republication of Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills, and Olsen's 1972 essay "Women Who Are Writers in Our Century: One out of Twelve." In the eighties, she edited two collections: Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother (1984), which includes "Dream Vision," the briefly eloquent tribute to her mother; and Mothers and Daughters: That Special QuaIity (1987). 

Perhaps even more significant than her writing in these last two decades is Olsen's personally powerful impact on current views of women writers and women's studies: a recipient of prestigious fellowships and grants, Olsen has held numerous visiting professorships at universities both in the United States and abroad, and continues to be in great demand as a reader and speaker who possesses a gift for galvanizing her audiences. Although she correctly perceives herself as a humanist, encouraging more diversity in curricula and more attention to the voices of "silenced" people, her influence on women has been truly profound.  
Abby H. P. Werlock 

SEXTON, Anne (1928-1974), poet.

Anne Harvey was born in Newton, Massachusetts, where she spent a tumultuous childhood in which her alcoholic father undermined Anne's self-esteem at every opportunity. In 1948, she eloped with Alfred (Kayo) Sexton, with whom she shared an often stormy relationship. Sexton bore two daughters--Linda in 1953, and Joyce in 1955-- whose birth seemed the catalyst for Sexton's persistent depression, which led her to seek therapy. It was her therapist who encouraged her to begin writing as part of her treatment. Very soon poetry became a mainstay in Sexton's life.

Sexton's poetry explores the struggle between a woman's creativity and the conventions of her era. The disparity between the two pushed Sexton to the brink of suicide many times. She is often labeled a confessional poet and criticized for treating the subjects of the female body and her own madness too frankly. Sexton's work is meeting with renewed critical interest as feminist critics explore Sexton's themes, which include incest, motherhood, mental instability, and low self-esteem.

In 1957, Sexton formed what was to become the most important friendship of her life as well as the strongest influence on her poetry when she met Marine Kumin at a poetry workshop. Kumin and Sexton shared an intense correspondence, critiquing and encouraging each other's work.

To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), Sexton's first book, was written under the encouragement of Robert Lowell, who conducted a poetry workshop Sexton attended. As the title suggests, a good many of the poems focus on madness and recovery. Sexton won the Pulitzer Prize for Live or Die (1966), her third book, in which she examines her suicidal tendencies but also affirms life. The strong correlation between sexual desire and suicide in this book suggests that Sexton may have been an incest victim. In most of her later work, including Mercy Street (1969), Sexton's only published play, and Transformations (1972), Sexton's revisionist fairy tales, incest plays a central role. In numerous therapy sessions, Sexton accused both her father and live-in aunt of sexually abusing her as a child. Since her accounts are contradictory, there is some debate over whether such incidents occurred. Constant references to incest in her poetry, though, lend credence to her accusations .

Sexton committed suicide in 1974, finally succumbing to her mental illness and profound lack of self-esteem. Sexton's work chronicles an intense struggle against the debilitating effects of convention.

Deborah Viles

BRADSTREET, Anne (c. 1612-1672) was the first published poet in America. Born Anne Dudley in Northampton, England, in 1612 or 1613, she was the second oldest in a family of five children. She began her education early, being taught, no doubt, by her mother, Dorothy Yorke Dudley. By age six or seven, Anne was reading Scripture. For her education in Latin, poetry, religion, and natural science, she was especially indebted to her father, Thomas Dudley. During Anne's preteen years, she had use of the castle library at Sempringham, Lincolnshire, where Thomas as steward to the earl of Lincoln. Because girls did not attend school, Bradstreet probably was tutored by the tutors to the earl's children. In her work, she pays allegiance to Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Sir Walter Raleigh, and the anatomist, Helkiah Crooke. Sidney's sister, the countess of Pembroke, and his eldest daughter, Lady Mary Wroth, both poets, may have served as role models. Bradstreet's poetic discipleship of the French Protestant poet Du Bartas may be attributed to medical practitioner and erstwhile poet and playwright Thomas lodge, who tutored at Sempringham and translated a commentary on Du Bartas's Semaines in 1620. Two of the Dudleys' four daughters, Anne and Mercy, were poets, and one, Sarah was a preacher in England. Clearly, the Puritan Dudleys believed in educating daughters. In 1630, two years after Bradstreet's marriage to her childhood friend, Simon Bradstreet, the couple and the Dudley family emigrated to New England to help found the Massachusetts Bay colony. After a year in Charlestown, Massachusetts, the Bradstreets and Dudleys moved to Cambridge, and from there, in 1635 or 1636, to distant Ipswich. Ipswich was settled by John Winthrop, Jr., the physician son of the famous governor--a very different man from his father. An adept at hermetic lore, practiced, of course, for Christian purposes, the younger Winthrop had the largest alchemical library in colonial New England.

Some scholars emphasize that outlying Ipswich was limiting in its isolation; it was also the location of Bradstreet's primary interpretive community and an environment protected by its isolation. Ipswich was home to an unusually learned group of Puritans, including Nathaniel Ward, John Norton, and Nathaniel and John Rogers, all of whom had high praise for Bradstreet's poetry. This group, including Simon Bradstreet, would soon be at odds politically with powerful Boston over various issues, such as allowing non-church members the vote. In addition, their interests in applied science, alchemy, medicine, and the arts set them apart. Anne Bradstreet shared these interests. Natural science was one of her chief poetic and prose subjects, and from alchemy she borrowed key metaphors for growth processes of all kinds. Just as alchemists believed "affliction," or the grinding of the soul, precedes its transformation, so too, in Bradstreet's finest poem, "Contemplations," is Christ the Philosopher's Stone with which God grinds the creation to perfect it. The poet's task in "Contemplations" is to bear witness to and assist in this process--both in the microcosm of the individual and family life and in the macrocosm of universal nature and history.

This ambitious view of the poet's role seems to have been shaped in Anne's childhood by John Dod, the minister who converted her father, married her parents, and perhaps baptized Anne. Although Dod remained in England, his work and his later tolerationism were demonstrable influences on Bradstreet. Her Lincolnshire education in science, colored, no doubt, by the ideas of the Czech John Amos Comenius, whose radical pedagogy favored the education of girls, and by Dod's interpretations of the feminine presence in biblical wisdom, supported a belief in women's powers of mind and expression.

A supportive audience for poetry was but one factor contributing over the next three decades of her life, beginning with the elegy to Sir Philip Sidney dated 1638. Separation from parents may have been another. Soon after Anne Hutchinson's trials for heresy in 1637- 1638, Dorothy and Thomas Dudley left Ipswich for Roxbury, near Boston, so that Thomas could take a more active role in government. At about this time, Bradstreet must have begun work on the major poems of The Tenth Muse, including the so-called quaternions-descriptions of human and natural history and physiology, presented to her father in 1642.

Additionally, during these years Bradstreet bore eight children--the first, Samuel, was born in Cambridge in 1633, and the last, John, was born in Andover in 1652. For Bradstreet, these procreative years were a time of remarkable poetic energy. In "The Author to her Book" and "In Reference to her Children," childbearing is associated with poetry. As the mother had given birth, so the poet expected her words to engender rebirth. In "A Dialogue between Old England and New," dated 1642, Bradstreet portrayed Old England's suffering during its civil war as a mother-daughter dialogue. Sarah Dudley, then in England preaching, was apparently caught up in the country's religious enthusiasm. Against this background of physical separation, theological difference, and even dissension among the Dudley family members, Bradstreet's poems stand as reenactments of the parental legacy, forging connections between science and Puritan piety, between Old England and New, parents and daughters, past and future. Internal struggle is evident. In "Of the vanity of all worldly creatures," the poet's aspirations to religious devotion are confronted by her uncompromising intellect. Bradstreet was frank about her religious doubts. Her autobiographical letter to her children, "To my dear children," the chief source of information about Bradstreet's life, and an example of "mother's legacy," describes her religious rebelliousness in adolescence and her "blocks" to belief in her mature years. Dorothy Dudley's death in 1643 would provide yet another reason for Bradstreet to address themes of continuity in the midst of change.

By 1647, the Bradstreets had moved to the yet more distant town of Andover, Massachusetts, where their minister was John Woodbridge, Mercy Dudley's husband. The Woodbridges took a sheaf of Bradstreet's poems with them to England, and, with Nathaniel Ward's help, arranged for publication of The Tenth Muse. John Woodbridge's dedication suggests that all this activity took place without Bradstreet's knowledge. Whether or not this is actually so, it is known that Bradstreet did not guide either of her volumes through to publication. She died in Andover in 1672. Six years later, her Several Poems, which republished the Tenth Muse poetry as well as presenting eighteen new poems, was compiled, probably by John Rogers. In 1867, a complete works, The Works of Anne Bradstreet in Prose and Verse, edited by John Harvard Ellis, contained, for the first time, Bradstreet's and her son Simon's manuscript writings, among these her prose, "Meditations divine and moral," her poem, "Contemplations," and her letter, "To my dear children."

Bradstreet's contemporaries valued The Tenth Muse poems, but her nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics preferred the later and more generally accessible work: the personal, rather than the formal elegies, and the poems to and about family members, particularly the five devoted to her relationship with her husband. "Contemplations," probably written in the mid-1660s, return in a much-transformed way to the subjects of history and nature with which her career began.

Bradstreet's poetic universe is filled with female presence (Elements; Humours; Old and New England; Flesh and Spirit; Queen Elizabeth; and the daughter, wife, and mother personae of the later poetry), and this universe is marred by dissension, disappointment, and loss. Yet Bradstreet's feminism is directly related to her expectation of a worldwide transformation, a "Day" when, as she tells us in her elegy to Queen Elizabeth (1643), women will be restored to equal power. In the marriage poems, her identity as wife coexists in a complex amalgam with her identity as her husband's equal. This strategy has led critics, depending on their views of Bradstreet, to ascribe ambivalence, duplicity, or an intended doubleness to her self-portrayals.

Bradstreet's talent has been perceived as held in check by her Puritan piety and/or familial obligations. Poststructuralist feminists problematize Bradstreet's situation, as woman and as artist, in terms of a conflict with Puritan patriarchy. Others have seen in her work an intentional artist, effectively deploying such resources as her time and place provided.

Rosamond Rosenmeier

DICKINSON, Emily (1830-1886), poet.

Emily Dickinson's poetic accomplishment was recognized from the moment her first volume appeared in 1890, but never has she enjoyed more acclaim than she does today. Once Thomas H. Johnson made her complete body of 1,775 poems available in his 1955 variorum edition, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, interest from all quarters soared. Readers immediately discovered a poet of immense depth and stylistic complexity whose work eludes categorization. For example, though she frequently employs the common ballad meter associated with hymnody, her poetry is in no way constrained by that form; rather she performs like a jazz artist who uses rhythm and meter to revolutionize readers' perceptions of those structures. Her fierce defiance of literary and social authority has long appealed to feminist critics, who consistently place Dickinson in the company of such major writers as Anne Bradstreet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sylvia Plath, and Adrienne Rich.

Dickinson was born 10 December 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she lived until her death from Bright's disease on 15 May 1886. There she spent most of her life in the family home that was built in 1813 by her grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson. His role in founding the Amherst Academy in 1814 and Amherst College in 1821 began a tradition of public service continued by her father, Edward, and her brother, Austin. All the Dickinson men were attorneys with political ambitions; the Dickinson home was a center of Amherst society and the site of annual Amherst College commencement receptions. The effect of growing up in a household of politically active, dominant males can be heard in Dickinson's 1852 letter to her close friend and future sister-in-law Susan Gilbert during a Whig convention in Baltimore: "Why can't I be a Delegate to the great Whig Convention?-dont I know all about Daniel Webster, and the Tariff and the Law?" As the confidence and frustration of this letter attests, the Dickinson family tradition had prepared the poet for a life of political activity and public service, only to deny her that life because of her sex.

By the time she wrote this letter, Dickinson had graduated from Amherst Academy and completed a year of study at Mount Holyoke. Though she was referred to by her close friend Samuel Bowles as "the Queen Recluse" in an 1863 note to Austin, her life was not nearly so sheltered as these terms imply; the "Queen" portion of Bowles's appellation should perhaps receive the greater emphasis. Accounts of her earliest years with Austin and her younger sister Lavinia depict a healthy, happy girl whose precocious intelligence did not prevent her from enjoying a normal childhood. From the time she started school, Dickinson distinguished herself as an original thinker who, in her brother's words, dazzled her teachers: "Her compositions were unlike anything ever heard--and always produced a sensation--both with the scholars and Teachers--her imagination sparkled--and she gave it free rein."

During the 1847-1848 year she spent studying under Mary Lyons at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, Dickinson acquired limited notoriety as the one student unwilling to publicly confess faith in Christ. Designated a person with "no hope" of salvation, she keenly felt her isolation, writing her friend Abiah Root in 1848, "I am not happy, and I regret that last term, when that golden opportunity was mine, that I did not give up and become a Christian." In 1850, she would share similar sentiments with her friend Jane Humphrey: "Christ is calling everyone here, all my companions have answered, even my darling Vinnie believes she loves, and trusts him, and I am standing alone in rebellion."

Such resistance to conversion at a time when friends and family were making public confessions reflects a lifelong willingness to oppose popular sentiment. The experience at Mount Holyoke may well have brought to the surface an independence that fueled Dickinson's writing and led her to cease attending church by the time she was thirty. Following her return to Amherst in 1848 and after the religious awakening that peaked there around 1850, she began to write seriously. The magnitude of her output was not clear until after her death, when her sister Lavinia discovered a cherry-wood cabinet containing some 1,147 poems in fair copy. In the meantime, Dickinson increasingly withdrew from public view, participating in commencement receptions but little else after the early sixties. Despite her withdrawal, however, she maintained correspondence with a wide community of friends and associates, including such well-known literary figures as Helen Hunt "Jackson. The 1,150 letters in The Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson and Theodora Ward in 1958, represent a fraction of what she actually wrote.

Much critical attention has been devoted to the years of Dickinson's greatest poetic production, when her output is estimated to have accelerated from 52 poems in 1858 to 366 poems in 1862, and then declined to 53 poems in 1864. What provoked such a sudden and rich abundance of creativity? And why did Dickinson take the time to carefully gather fair copies of 1,147 poems and bind 833 of them in the individual packets known as the fascicles? Early scholarship sought evidence of a failed love interest in the late fifties to account for this sudden burst of energy. Speculation about her possible lovers has at one time or another touched on almost every person for whom she felt deeply, from her brother, her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert, and her friend Rate Scott Anthony, to Charles Wadsworth, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Samuel Bowles, and Judge Otis Lord. These various studies reveal that Dickinson felt great passion for her family and friends and that at times her feelings were distinctly sexual. There is no solid evidence linking her romantically to anyone.

Most recent scholarship has abandoned the search for Dickinson's romantic inspiration. Finding in the poetry the reflection of a complex, multifaceted mind, critics have hesitated to simplify her achievement by inscribing it within a single master narrative. Though the suddenness and the intensity of Dickinson's most productive years still excites scholarly interest, the focus has shifted from questions related to motive and origin to those concerned with style and practice. The fascicles, especially, together with Dickinson s refusal to publish when she had ample opportunity in later life, have provoked close examinations of both her manuscripts and her communication with other literary figures.

The likelihood that updated variorum and readers' editions of the poems will shortly appear has intensified debate over the way Dickinson's writing should appear in print. As scholars explore methods for translating her chirography onto the printed page, more is learned about the range of possible readings suggested by her fair copies. Respecting Dickinson's punctuation, use of variants, and lineation will have a major influence on the way her poems are read and understood. Feminist scholarship has convincingly demonstrated her resistance to patriarchal authority and stimulated interest in the revolutionary nature of the self presented in her work. ...

Paul Crumbley

ANGELOU, Maya (b. 1928), autobiographer, poet, educator, actress, dancer.

Responding to her granddaughter Maya Angelou's decision to stop talking after being raped by her mother s boyfriend when she was seven and a half, Annie Henderson told Angelou that she did not care one bit about what neighbors were saying about her--that she was either crazy or a moron or an idiot. Speaking in the repetitive cadences of the old black oral tradition, she repeated that she did not care. She kne-she was absolutely certain--that Angelou would eventually belong to that most articulate group of human beings: she would be a preacher. And Annie Henderson was right. While Angelou did not become a preacher in the traditional sense of the term, she did become a messenger of truth. And her sermons, in lieu of the preacher's chants and cries, have come to us in the form of poems and narratives that speak with the emotional power of the preacher.

Angelou was born Margurite Johnson on 4 April 1928, in St. Louis, Missouri. Her mother, Vivian (Baxter) Johnson and her father, Bailey, divorced shortly afterwards. Consequently, the three-year-old Angelou and her four-year-old brother, Bailey, were sent to Stamps, Arkansas, to live with "Momma" Henderson.

After her graduation from the eighth grade, Angelou and her brother went to live with her mother in San Francisco. Once, while visiting her father, she fought with his girlfriend, and ran away. She lived in a junkyard with other homeless children for a month. When she later returned to San Francisco, she became the city's first black streetcar conductor, and at age sixteen gave birth to her son, Guy, shortly after graduating from high school.

Before gaining notoriety as a writer, Angelou worked as a creole cook, a madam, a prostitute, a dancer, an actress, a singer, a songwriter, and a social activist. At the request of Martin Luther King, Jr., she served as northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Council in 1960 and 1961, thus establishing her commitment to the struggle for black freedom .

Meanwhile, she was launching her career as a writer. She joined the Harlem Writers Guild, which included such writers as James Baldwin and Paule Marshall, and learned the importance of discipline and technique. After her return from Ghana in 1966, Angelou joined James Baldwin for an evening with Jules and Judy Feiffer. Relaxed by the atmosphere created by casual drinking and talking, Angelou felt comfortable enough to tell her life story. Judy Feiffer was so intrigued that she contacted a friend who worked at Random House. He, in turn, contacted Angelou and encouraged her to write her autobiography. Initially, Angelou refused. But after her future editor noted the difficulty of the autobiographical form, Angelou responded to the challenge and consented. Her first volume of autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), was an instant success. It became a best-seller and was nominated for the National Book Award. Since then, she has published five more volumes of autobiography, including Gather Together in My Name (1974), Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas (1976), The Heart of a Woman (1981) and All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986). In addition, she has published five collections of poetry: Just Give Me A Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie (1971), Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well (1975), And Still I Rise (1978), Shaker, Why Don't You Sing? (1983), and I Shall Not Be Moved (1990). In 1993, her memoir Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now was a Book-of-the-Month Club featured selection .

In a crowning achievement, Angelou was selected to read the inaugural poem on President Bill Clinton's Inauguration Day. The poem, "On the Pulse of the Morning," is both a celebration of life and an appeal to listeners and readers to help America live up to its promise of genuine democracy .

And so it was that on 20 January 1993 Maya Angelou fullfilled her grandmother's prophecy. Standing before the entire country, she paid homage to the word and spoke the truth. Granted, Maya Angelou has had a multifaceted career. In 1954 and 1955, she toured Europe and Africa as a cast member in a production of Porgy and Bess. She was nominated for an Emmy in 1977 for her role in the television pro- duction of Alex Haley's Roots. And in 1981, she received a lifetime appointment as Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University. But despite her many achievements in other artistic and intellectual spheres, she will always be best remembered as a writer.

Tony Bolden

KINGSTON, Maxine Hong (b. 1940), memoirist, novelist.

Maxine Ting Ting Hong Kingston was born on 27 October 1940 in Stockton, California, the eldest of six children. Her mother, Ying Lan Chew, who had been a doctor/midwife in China, was a laundress and field hand in the United States. Her father, Tom Hong, was a scholar/teacher in China, and a laundryman and gambling house manager in the United States. Kingston studied English literature, graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1962, earned a secondary teaching credential in 1965, and marched against the Vietnam War. She married classmate Earl Kingston, an actor, in 1962; the couple have one son, Joseph. After seventeen years in Hawaii, the Kingstons returned to the mainland. In the fall of 1991, Kingston's house and almost two hundred pages of manuscript were burned in an Oakland fire. She is now professor of creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley.

After The Woman Warrior won the 1976 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, Kingston garnered numerous additional awards, including the rare title of Living Treasure of Hawaii, bestowed by a Buddhist group in 1980. China Men (1980) won the American Book Award for 1981; her novel Tripmaster Monkey (1990) received the PEN West Award for fiction. Kingston holds four honorary doctorates. Her first two books have been the most frequently taught texts on college campuses by any living American writer. In 1991, the Modern Language Association published Approaches to Teaching Marine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, placing her in a series that includes such authors as Homer, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dante, Goethe, Milton, Cather, Chopin, and Camus.

On publication, The Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood among Ghosts created a sensation in literary and scholarly circles. Prepared by the civil rights and the women's liberation movements, readers could appreciate Kingston's voice. Though it spoke of being physically weak because of continued devaluation, both by a patriarchal Chinese culture and by white-dominated society, her voice was strong and angry as it protested sexism and racism. The Woman Warrior was an experiment in genre, an autobiography that crossed into fiction without recognizing boundaries. It told seemingly outlandish Chinese stories and superstitions; it also made easy reference to Anglo-American authors and traditions. It mixed American slang and striking poetic metaphor. It was a personal sorting out of the author's particular Chinese- American female identity, as well as the story of every second-generation American. It was a voice that was simultaneously exasperated by and proud of its Chinese-American heritage, the voice of a daughter both angry and loving towards her mother. "I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes" wrote Kingston, and her text itself is composed of such paradoxes.

Readers' responses to Kingston's work have varied. While some Euro-American reviewers have found her work "exotic" and "Chinese," most readers from China find it very "American." Some Chinese Americans have denounced it as unfaithful to Chinese legends, and assimilationist in tone, while others rejoice that at last someone speaks for them. This spectrum reveals the difficulties Chinese-American authors face in negotiating others' expectations when so few writers are perceived to be representing so many.

Kingston herself, in The Woman Warrior, sought to come to an understanding of her own youth and upbringing, which was beset by conflicting standards of behavior: the self-sacrificial filial obligations demanded of Chinese girls versus the independence and self-fulfillment promised to American children. How was she to fit the Chinese ghost stories and legends her mother funneled into her imagination to the American world of neon and plastic in which she was growing up? How was she to find her own voice and realize her worth with a mother who claimed to have cut her daughter's frenum, and in a society that devalued daughters? How was she to develop her own story-telling powers when faced with a mother whose own story- telling powers and domineering spirit were so formidable as to be threatening?

In China Men, Kingston presents an alternate version of the founding fathers of America. Not only does she shift the geographical locale from New England to Hawaii and California, but she boldly shifts the ethnicity from Englishmen to China Men. She makes founding fathers of the Chinese men whose backbreaking labor cleared jungles to create sugar plantations and broke through mountains to lay tracks for the transcontinental railroad; who, though scholars, took in laundry to support their families; who, though pacifists, served as soldiers in Vietnam. Again, her text is a collage, mixing myth and history, fictional elaboration and biographical fact. Hers are composite, communal stories, as well as stories of her own family. To set the context and provide a contrast for her tales of heroism, she gives a central place in her book to "The Laws," a chronological, factual list of America's legislation that predominantly discriminated against the Chinese.

Kingston's most recent work, Tripmaster Monkey (1990), is an ambitious and brilliant novel about a 1960s Berkeley graduate, a loud-mouthed, raging Chinese-American playwright, Wittman Ah Sing. An Asian-American Ulysses, the novel is richly textured, interweaving literary allusions from Euro-American traditions with those from the Chinese classic Journey to the West or Monkey, by Wu Ch'en-en. Tripmaster Monkey is a comic/tragic/surrealistic portrait of a complex young spokesman for a developing Asian-American consciousness. Fully aware of racism and its humiliations Wittman Ah Sing screamingly asserts himself, uninhibitedly expresses his contempt for conventions, seeks validation in personal relationships, and finally expresses himself by directing an extravaganza that incorporates all the people of his acquaintance and all the passion and fury of his person....

Amy Ling

CHOPIN, Kate (1850-1904), novelist and short fiction writer.

Kate O'Flaherty, born 8 February 1850 into a bourgeois family in St. Louis, Missouri, had many of the prerequisites fof literary achievement. She grew up in a community of women who stressed learning, curiosity, and financial independence; she shared girlhood reading and writing with a lively and intelligent best friend, Kitty Garesche; she received a rigorous education at the St. Louis Academy of the Sacred Heart, where literature and science were emphasized; and she was nurtured by a gifted high school teacher who recognized her writing talent.

Kate's parents, Eliza Faris and Thomas O'Flaherty, had married when Eliza was sixteen and Thomas thirty-nine, and after Thomas's death in a railroad accident when Kate was five, Eliza became a wealthy widow who never remarried. (In her 1894 work "The Story of an Hour," Chopin describes the sadness and exhilaration of a woman who hears that her husband has died in a railroad crash: she will miss him, but loves her freedom more.)

Young Kate's household was run by vigorous widows: her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, Victoire Charleville, who schooled Kate to love music, French, and gossip. There were also four slaves, and when the Civil War broke out at the time of Kate's First Communion (May 1861), the O'Flaherty household supported the Confederacy. During the war years, Kate was almost arrested for tearing down a Yankee flag on the porch; her great-grandmother and her half-brother, a Rebel soldier, both died; and her friend Kitty's family was banished for their Confederate sympathies. After the war, Madam Mary O'Meara, of the Sacred Heart nuns, assigned Kate to keep a commonplace book, in which the thoughtful adolescent recorded themes that appear in her later fiction, among them women's roles (home- makers vs. "blue stockings") and the conflict between desire (her "dear reading and writing") and duty (the "general spreeing" expected of a belle). kate O'Flaherty graduated from the Sacred Heart Academy in 1868, and on 9 June 1870 married Oscar Chopin, the son of a Louisiana planter. Her diary of their three-month European honeymoon records her detailed, clever observations of women, houses, and food, as as her own delight in walking, cigarette smoking, and solitude.

Kate Chopin had the gift, the discipline, and early encouragement to be a writer, but marriage and motherhood filled her twenties and thirties. During the New Orleans years (1870-1879), she gave birth to five sons. Although she kept diaries and wrote long, entertaining letters, none of them survives. When Oscar's business failed, the Chopins moved to Cloutierville ("Cloochyville"), a tiny French village in Natchitoches ("Nak-i-tush") Parish in north Louisiana; there, Kate Chopin found the literary material she needed. She gave birth to her last child and only daughter, Lelia, in 1879in Cloutierville, where she also amazed villagers with her flamboyant clothes and citified ways. Oscar owned a general store, and Kate listened avidly to their customers' dramatic stories. (The Chopins' Cloutierville house is now the Kate Chopin Home/Bayou Folk Museum.)

When Oscar died of malaria on 10 December 1882, he left Kate $12,000 in debt; but she came from a family of resourceful women. She sold properties, successfully ran Oscar's remaining plantations, and had a scandalous romance with a married local planter, the charming but brutal Albert Sampite ("Sam-pi-tay"): he became the model for the character Alcee in several of her stories. Chopin left him and Cloutierville in 1884 to return to her mother's home in St. Louis; after Eliza O'Flaherty died a later, Kate bought a new home, left the Catholic church, and began writing about Louisiana people, especially women in unhappy marriages.

Starting late--her first story, "A Point at Issue!,"- was published when she was thirty-nine--Kate Chopin was an instant success. Her first novel, At Fault (1890), about a Louisiana widow who loves a man married to another woman, drew national attention; her first short story collection, Bayou Folk (1894), was praised everywhere for its charm, local color, and deft characterization. Although her second collection, A Night in Acadie (1897), puzzled some readers with its decadent atmosphere and inconclusive stories, it was lauded by the critics Chopin admired most. Her prose style was always lucid and unadorned; her stories were ironic, lush, and sensual in a manner more French than American.

Meanwhile, she had become the center of St. Louis's literary colony, and each Thursday she held a salon at her home, where artists, editors, and literati would visit. Her friends included avant-garde, European-oriented women of the day, among them the journalist Florence Hayward, the translator Thekla Bernays, and the editor Rosa Sonneschein, founder of the American Jewess, to the first issue of which Chopin was the only gentile contributor.

When she published her second novel, The Awakening (1899), in which a Louisiana wife and mother has two lovers, Chopin was unprepared for its nationwide condemnation by male critics who found it "unwholesome." Although women, recognizing Chopin's celebration of women's individuality, wrote letters of praise and invited her to give readings, the men who controlled publishing made it clear that Kate Chopin should not publish what she knew of life and love and sinful desire.

Chopin never attempted to publish her most graphic short story, "The Storm" (eventually published in 1969); her publisher cancelled her last short story collection, A Vocation and a Voice (eventually published in 1991). In just thirteen years, Chopin had written nearly a hundred small pieces (short stories, essays, translations, poems, one play, and one polka), but after The Awakening's hostile reception, she wrote only eleven more stories before her death on 22 August 1904, of a cerebral hemorrhage. She was buried in St. Louis's Calvary Cemetery and mostly forgotten--until the 1960s, when a Norwegian scholar, Per Seyersted, rediscovered her.

Besides The Awakening, Chopin is now best known for stories about women who learn startling secrets about themselves and their men, especially "The Story of an Hour," "Desiree's Baby," "At the 'Cadian Ball," and "The Storm." Some of her best stories are about women's friendships, among them "Odalie Misses Mass" (about a very old black woman and an adolescent white girl); "Lilacs" (depicting a Sacred Heart nun and a Parisian actress); and "Fedora" (a sly exploration of homophobia). She wrote gently and subtly about many social problems, including venereal disease ("Mrs. Mobry's Reason"); prostitution ("Dr. Chevalier's Lie"); and wife beating ("In Sabine"). Chopin is one of the few white writers of her day to write sympathetically about the anguish of black single mothers ("La Belie Zoraide") as well as white ones ("Miss McEnders"). In many ways a writer ahead of her times, Kate Chopin is now a woman for all seasons....

Emily Toth

RUKEYSER, Muriel(1913-1980), poet, biographer, translator, essayist, critic, playwright, and novelist.

Born in New York City to second- generation Jewish parents, Rukeyser attended Manhattan's School of Ethical Culture, the Fieldston School, Vassar College, and Columbia University. The daughter of a concrete salesman and a bookkeeper, she grew up emulating Joan of Arc, and by the age of thirteen, had decided to be a writer. Politically active throughout her life, Rukeyser allied herself with the Communist Party during the Depression; she attended the 1933 trial of the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama, traveled to Hanoi in 1972 with Denise Levertov in protest of the Vietnam War, and in 1975, as the president of PEN American Center, she demonstrated against the imprisonment of the poet Kim Chi-Ha in Seoul, South Korea.

In 1935, her first collection of poems, Theory of Flight, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize. From 1935 to 1948 she published numerous essays and reviews as well as the biography of the physicist, Willard Gibbs, a three-act play, and four books of poems: U.S. 1 (1938), A Turning Wind: Poems (1939), Beast in View (1944), and The Green Wave (1948). In 1945, Rukeyser moved to California, where she taught a poetry workshop at the California Labor School, and for two months was married to the painter Glynn Collins. In 1947, unmarried, she gave birth to her only child, (William) Laurie Rukeyser, whom she raised as a single parent. Though her political activity and productivity slowed somewhat after her son's birth, she continued to write and translate. In 1949, she published Elegies, Orpheus, and The Life of Poetry, her essential meditation on the place of poetry in society. In 1954, she moved back to New York and started teaching at Sarah Lawrence College. During the 1960s, she published her selected poems Waterlily Fire (1962), wrote the novel The Orgy (1966), continued teaching at Sarah Lawrence, translated and published the poems of Octavio Pat and Gunnar Ekelof, and completed the collection Speed of Darkness (1968). In the midst of this productive period, at the age of fifty-one, Rukeyser suffered her first paralyzing stroke.

Characterized by poems of great expansion, Rukeyser has often been compared to the poet Walt Whitman. Through the themes of silence and speech, Rukeyser's poems use the rhythms and music of language to create transformations in the physical, emotional, mythic, and political worlds. Rejecting and even mocking the despair of poets such as Sylvia Plath, her poetry is generous and optimistic in spirit and vision, reflecting her political times as well as her personal experience as daughter, sister, mother, lover and friend, and as lesbian engaged in the changing world. During the last decade of her life, she published the biography The Traces of Thomas Harlot (1971), Breaking Open (1973), the translations of Octavio Pat's Early Poems (1973) and Brecht's Uncle Eddie's Moustache (1974),.The Gates (i976), and The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser (1979). With all of her books out of print for well over a decade, Rukeyser has long been known as one of the neglected, yet great and essential female voices of the twentieth century....

Jan Freeman

FULLER, Margaret (1810-1850), writer.

Although Margaret Fuller came to rebel against the Boston Brahmin class into which she was born in 1810, the values of her elite heritage gave her the intellectual foundation and self-discipline that later enabled her to question the politics of power.

Tutored by her father, Timothy, a Harvard-educated lawyer who served in the Massachusetts State Legislature and the United States Congress, Fuller, by the age of six, recited her Latin translations to him nights, after he returned home from his office. Her mother bore eight more children, but found time to support her precocious daughter's aspirations, including her earliest literary efforts, the letters she composed as a child. When her intellectual precocity became too marked even for Cambridge, her parents sent her to a girls' school in Groton, to be socialized into the proper conduct for a "young lady." Her father's death in 1835 was a major life crisis, forcing her to confront women's financial powerlessness and to struggle with an unsympathetic uncle for control of her father's limited estate.

Fuller taught school, but found it more satisfying and more lucrative to conduct seminar-style "Conversations" for establishment-class women. Many of the aspirations and dissatisfactions expressed by Boston's "non-traditional students" were later developed by her in her writing.

Throughout her life, Margaret Fuller had a furious hunger for ideas and answers. She taught herself German in order to read Goethe, and then translated German poetry and prose. She first sought Ralph Waldo Emerson as her mentor, but as their relationship progressed, it developed into one of mutuality. She was chosen by members of the Transcendental Club to edit their journal, the Dial. Her Summer on the Lakes, published in 1844, attracted the attention of Horace Greeley, who offered her a position as literary critic and feature writer on the New York Tribune. Her work for the paper was so successful that when she left for Europe, she was able to continue serving as the Tribune's foreign correspondent· After traveling in England and France, Fuller settled in Italy, where she became involved in the Italian revolutionary cause and took as her lover an Italian nobleman, Marehese Giovannl Angelo Ossoli. After their baby was born, Ossoli joined Mazzini's forces, who fought to free Rome from the secular power of the papal state. When the short-lived Roman Republic was defeated, the couple fled to Florence with their son. Soon, they em- barked for the United States. During a storm, the family was lost at sea.

After Fuller's untimely death in 1850, so much emphasis was given to her dramatic life as a revolutionary radical that her literary genius was often overlooked and even denigrated. Her writing about highly controversial subjects so threatened traditionalists that, instead of dealing directly with her ideas, patriarchal apologists discredited them by disparaging Fuller's ability as a writer, additionally attacking her personality, her sexuality, and her physical appearance.

Extraordinarily imaginative and versatile, Margaret Fuller wrote critical essays about social problems and the promise of American democracy, in addition to her letters, poetry, experimental fiction, and German translations· She covered the cultural scene of a parochial United States with articles on art and music, but her literary criticism is the most significant. Her travel narrative, Summer on the Lakes, raised disturbing questions about exploitation of Native Americans, the uses of the environment, and the treatment of pioneer women. She continued her acute assessment of social turmoil and of the politics of power in the dispatches she sent to the New York Tribune from Europe. However, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) is her literary masterpiece· She suggests the androgynous nature of sexuality and demands that all barriers to women be removed, that vocations traditionally male, such as sea captain, be opened to them. Her treatise adheres to the chief tenets of transcendentalist philosophy, which acknowledged the power of intuition as a guide and the godlike ability of the human spirit to transform the self. In 1883, Julia Ward Howe stated that nothing subsequently written had made Fuller's teaching superfluous.

Woman in the Nineteenth Century served as the feminist manifesto that gave courage to those writing the "Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls in 1848. In History of Woman Suffrage, edited by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others, it is said that Fuller had 'vindicated a woman's right to think." Others inspired by Fuller, such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Mary A. Livermore, Ednah Dow Cheney, and Caroline Healey Dall, continued to carry forward Fuller's message throughout the nineteenth century, as did new generations in the twentieth....

Marie Mitchell Olesen Urbansk

H. D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886-1961), poet, novelist, autobiographer, critic, filmmaker, and hermetist.

Having rejected Victorian norms for modern experiments, H. D. repeatedly launched out from instructors found among the early canonized male modernists. She developed new lyric, mythic, and mystical forms in poetry and prose, and an alternative bisexual lifestyle that were little appreciated until the 1980s. Her literary contacts included Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Ford Madox Ford, May Sinclair, Dorothy Richardson, Richard Aldington, Bryher, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Amy Lowell, Norman Douglas, Edith Sitwell, and Elizabeth Bowen. She was the literary editor of the Egoist (1916-1917), and admired the work of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Younger poets like Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, May Sarton, and Denise Levertov took her as a mentor. H. D.'s literary papers are at Beinecke Library, Yale University.

Autobiographies. H. D. was born into the Moravian community of her artistic, musical mother, Helen (Wolle), in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and reared in Upper Darby, a Philadelphia suburb convenient to the University of Pennsylvania. Her astronomer father, Charles, was director of the Flower Observatory there. The Gift (written 1941-1944; published 1982) is cast in the inquiring voice of a child, who is cognizant of several generations of her family, and of her own dreams and fantasies. Her grandmother ultimately bestows a sense of her self-enabling heritage or "gift," and its mystical connection to the Moravians. Mystical access to the past through visions and the reading of "signets"--signs or heiroglyphs requiring patient deciphering--is essential to all of H. D.'s autobiographical writing.

H. D.'s autobiographical writings from the middle years of her life are invaluable to the study of the gendered politics of experimental modernism, and the place of the female anaiysand in psychoanalysis. Ezra Pound entered her life while she was still a schoolgirl in Pennsylvania. In verses written for her, Pound gave her the persona of the "dryad," which persisted among her many self-concepts. They were twice engaged. Barbara Guest has suggested that his tutelage interfered with her studies at Bryn Mawr, which she quit in her second year. She did meet another as yet undeclared poet, Marianne Moore, while there (l904-1906). H. D. joined the same literary circles Pound traveled in when she moved to London in 1911. In a famous incident of 1913, he sent some of her verse to Harriet Monroe's Poetry Magazine, appending the signature "H. D., Imagiste." They served as models of the new poetry he was promoting. End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound by H. D. (written 1958; published 1979) explores this relationship.

With Bid Me to Live (written 1933-1950, published 1960), H. D. writes herself out of what Rachel Blau DuPlessis has called "romantic thralldom" with two other literary men. She married the British poet, Richard Aidington, in 1913. Having enlisted in World War I, his fictional counterpart called for her sustaining letters to the front, yet resented her sharing verses with "Rico," the D. H. Lawrence counterpart, and flaunted his infidelities. Lawrence had a charismatic effect upon H. D. during the war years in London, but discouraged her creation of male subjects in her poetry, and objected to her relationship with Cecil Grey, the painter whom she joined in Cornwall. Grey became the father of her only surviving child, Frances Perdita Aldington (born 1919). H. D. had been anguished over the still-birth of a daughter fathered by Aldington in 1915, and the death of her brother Gilbert at the front. Bid Me to Live was part of a "madrigal cycle," including also Paint it To-Day and Asphodel (neither yet fully published). All of these works intertwined the painful demands of war and love relationships, as does the brilliant long poem, Trilogy (written 1944-i946), with its images of rebirth taken from classical, Egyptian and Christian sources.

Tribute to Freud (written 1944; published gradually from 1945-1985) offers a third creative re-vision of male-inspired paradigms. H. D. was analyzed by Freud in 1933 and 1934, in an attempt to overcome writer's block. She also underwent analysis with Hans Sachs in the 1930s, with Erich Heydt in the 1950s, and was treated with intervenous shock therapy, following a major breakdown in 1946. Freud encouraged her to write straight history to break out of the personal crisis she experienced during World War I. With Bid Me to Live she felt she was escaping also from the influence of psychoanalysis; she did revise Freud's role as analyst to something more like a medium. Spiritualism became an overriding interest in the 1940s. Communication with the dead and projections from another realm were regular tropes in her writing, including her last writing, Hermetic Definition.

Bisexuality. H. D.'s troubled alliance with Pound was mingled with her love of Frances Josepha Gregg, a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the recipient of some of her earliest poems. Gregg and her mother were H. D.'s companions on the 1911 trip to London. Prefiguring other bisexual triangles she would involve herself in, H. D. planned to accompany Gregg on her honeymoon, but was prevented from doing so by Pound. The strains between lesbian and heterosexual attractions, experienced over the Gregg relationship, entered into H. D.'s novel HERmione (written 1927, the year before Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness, was the subject of an obscenity trial; published 1981).

The novelist and editor Bryher (Winnifred Ellerman, an heiress to a shipping fortune), was the most significant companion of her mature life. Their relationship survived until H. D.'s death in 1961, spanning Bryher's two marriages of convenience to Robert McAlmon and Kenneth Macpherson, in circumstances that included significant travel and residences mainly in London and Switzerland. H. D. has credited Bryher with saving her life during the final months of her pregnancy in 1919, when she was struck with influenza. Bryher and H. D. traveled to the Scilly Islands together in June 1919, for a month of idyllic companionship; they went to Greece (sailing by Lesbos) with H. D.'s mother in 1922, and traveled to Egypt the next year. The women made a creative trio with the artist and filmmaker Kenneth Macpherson from 1927 to 1932; Macpherson became H. D.'s lover, and Bryher's husband, and the married couple adopted H. D.'s daughter Perdita. Their collaborations included photomontages, the film journal Close Up, to which H. D. supplied poetry and reviews, and Borderline, a film in which H. D. starred with Paul Robeson. The project is one indication of H. D.'s literary connections to the Harlem Renaissance, and her attraction to the margins of modernism. Much of H. D.'s poetry published in the 1930s and 1940s appeared in Life and Letters Today, edited by Bryher.

H. D. was well informed about contemporary theories of homosexuality, due both to her analysis by Freud, who pronounced her bisexual, and her friendship with sexologist Havelock Ellis, whom she met in 1919. But she was not limited to their views, particularly in HER. Her shift in interest to mother-daughter dynamics in Notes on Thought and Vision may have been a transference out of Freud's influence. However, Ellis failed to appreciate her revolutionary "bell jar" experiences of pregnancy and the unconscious, recorded in Notes on Thought and Vision, and his lack of enthusiasm may have discouraged her publishing it.

Crltical Repositioning and Feminist Criticism. For many years H. D. was known chiefly for the stark, chiseled images and experimental rhythms of her earliest work, collected as Sea Garden (1916). This fit the imagist program of Ezra Pound. She also had a limited reputation as a classicist and translator of Greek. Feminist critics, led by Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, have studied H. D.'s works for feminine, lesbian, and bisexual discourses. Since the early 1980s H. D.'s epic and prose writing have received more attention, and work self-suppressed in her own lifetime has been recovered and studied. H. D.'s frequent recourse to the palimpsest can be seen as an escape from binary and hierarchical thinking associated with patriarchy. The term denotes a parchment that retains partially erased parts of earlier writings, which strain productively with new text. She titled a three-part story sequence Palimpsest (written 1923-1924), but the term also applies to her rewritings of her own selfhood in autobiographies, and to her rewritten myths. H. D. can be credited with anticipating the maternal semiotic of Julia Kristeva, and with giving a female voice to classical myths. Sandra Gilbert ("H. D.? Who Was She?," Contemporary Literature 24 [1983]: 496- 511) suggests that she developed a "woman's mythology" in Trilogy, Helen in Egypt, and Hermetic Definition. Alicia Ostriker ("Thieves of Language," Signs 8, no. 1 [1982]: 68-90) includes H. D. among women poets who construct new myths to include their selves. H. D.'s Greek texts, culminating in Helen in Egypt, explore the divinity of the goddess, the sexually ecstatic Eleusinian mysteries, and the female version of patriarchal epics. A criticism from Lawrence S. Rainey ("Canon, Gender and Text," Representing Modem Texts, ed. George Bornstein, [19911) is that in recent years H. D.'s work has been studied for the sake of content conducive to feminist solidarity, rather than aesthetic value. Yet this criticism neglects feminist critics' remarks on the formal devices of mythic mask, palimpsest, and return of the repressed, characteristic of life-writing cure, that moved H. D. beyond confinement to the divisive gender stereotypes of her day....

Bonnie Kime Scott

Louise Bogan (1879-1970), poet, reviewer, and short fiction writer.

Born in Livermore Falls, Maine, to middle-class Irish Catholic parents, Bogan attended the Girls' Latin School in Boston, where she began writing poetry at the age of fourteen. She studied at Boston University for one year, then turned down a Radcliffe scholarship to marry Curt Alexander in 1916. At the start of World War I, Alexander was sent to Panama, and Bogan joined him there. Her daughter was born in Panama in 1917, and marital difficulties followed; shortly after their return to the United States in 1918, the couple separated. When Alexander died of pneumonia in 1920, Bogan settled in New York City and entered literary circles. Her first book of poems, Body of This Death, was published in 1923, followed, in 1929, by Dark Summer.

In 1931, Bogan became poetry critic for the New Yorker magazine, a position she held for thirty-eight years. She published two more volumes of poetry, The Sleeping Fury (1937) and Poems and New Poems (1941), in addition to several collections of critical essays, including Achievement in American Poetry, 1900-1950 (1951) and Selected Criticism: Poetry and Prose (1955). Bogan underwent periods of psychiatric tretment and recovery throughout her life, and in her later years produced new poems infrequently; her collection The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968, published two years before her death in 1970, contained just over one hundred poems.

Formally rigorous, compact, and controlled, Bogan's poetry tends to be epigrammatic rather than descriptive; her poems often inhabit stark, dreamlike landscapes, and, reflecting her interest in psychology, attempt to explore the workings of the unconscious. With regard to poetic form, Bogan occupies an ambiguous position: she situates herself between the female lyric tradition and male modernism, rejecting the sentimentalism of the former, but finding grounds for difference from the latter. Although she resisted definition as a woman poet--and, indeed, her work was praised by Thoeodore Roethke, among others, for its lack of "feminine" qualities--Louise Bogan's poetry frequently addresses cultural constructions of gender. In poems such as "A Tale" (1921), "Medusa" (1922), "The Sleeping Fury" (1937) and the ambivalent "Women" (1923), Bogan revises masculine mythology, anatomize heterosexual love, and explores the relation of femininity to speech and silence, masks and masquerade, in ways that would powerfully influence later poets, including May Sarton and Sylvia Plath.

Valerie Rohy

May Sarton (1912-1995), poet, novelist, diarist, essayist.

May Sarton was born in Belgium to artist Mabel Elwes Sarton and science historian George Sarton. The family eventually settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Sarton was educated, first at the Shady Hill School in Cambridge, and later at the High and Latin School. Against her family's wishes, Sarton refused to attend Vassar College, appreticing instead at the civic Repertory Theoter in New York, under the direction of Eva Le Gallienne. In 1933, Sarton founded and directed her own company, the Apprentice Theater, until its failure during the Great Depression in 1936.

Sarton counts among her strongest influences her parents, who encouraged her creativity, the Shady Hill School, where she first began writing poetry, and her theater experience. Of the influences on her poetry, SArton considers Yeats and Valery her classical training, and Amy Lowell, H.D., and Louise Bogan among her more contemporary influences.

Though a prolific writers with nearly fifty books to her credit, Sarton has not garnered much critical acclaim until very recently. Writing in a variety of mediums, SArton considers herself primarily a poet. Her poems are lyrical and often formal and/or rhymed, reflecting her belief that structure is critical both in life and art. Her poems express an essence, a moment, and explore such subjects as aging, the life of the creative woman, and Sarton's own creativity. For Sarton, poems are a way of communicating with the self.

Sarton's novels tackle more encompassing themes, delving into the way relationships grow and change. Her major themes are still apparent in this medium; she examines female friendships, creativity, agin, and the nature of solitude. Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965), perhaps her most controversial novel, deals with a contemporary woman's struggle to define herself both as an artist and as a lesbian at a time when neither theme was honored.

Sarton's critical acclaim began with her journals, her most popular writings, though she considers them minor work. Their popularity probably stems from her careful attention to the details of ordinary life. The journals, Plant Dreaming Deep (1968), Journal of Solitude (1977), and At Seventy (1984) among them, are candid accounts of a woman who relishes her solitude, a woman committed to her writing, a woman growing older....

Deborah Viles