Our Fascinations with Women of the Past

What do they mean to us? How do we honor them? And what happens when we decide to write their biographies?

Hello from Edinburgh!

I hope you are enjoying a glorious beginning to the summer, wherever you are. Here in Edinburgh, the weather has been beyond gorgeous. After gray and chilly days for the first two weeks I was here, we’ve had sunny days in the 60s ever since. For me, this is the perfect weather!

View of spires in the distance from the Royal Botanical Gardens

These past couple of weeks I’ve begun trying to make sense of my trip and the transition I’m undergoing, looking for the parts of it that might fit into some kind of cohesive story I could write. That work is ongoing. But I’ve been thinking particularly about what spurred me to take this trip. The work I had been doing on the American expatriate writer Kay Boyle was certainly an important factor, but taking this trip has also meant setting that work aside. So I’d like to explore that a bit more here.

I’m interested in not just my relationship with Boyle but the relationships so many of us have to the women of the past we become obsessed with. This obsession often takes the form of wanting to write their biographies. Just the other day I was taking a women’s history walking tour of Edinburgh, and the woman giving the tour told us about her favorite woman of the city’s past and said she was trying to write her biography. I can’t tell who how many times this has happened me! It happened just last month in Berlin as well.

Here, then, this is my attempt to explore how such fascinations develop and what they can mean to us as these women become more than simply subjects we are writing about. And why we might, as I did with Boyle, set them aside, at least for a while.

Discovering Boyle

I’m not sure I’d be on this year-long trip around Europe if it wasn’t for Kay Boyle. I first discovered her in 2017, when I was preparing to teach a course on the European short story in Austria. I wanted a female writer to pair with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and after some research I found Kay Boyle, who was a member of the Lost Generation in Paris in the 1920s, but she wrote about much more than the expatriate community. In fact, she didn’t go home when the Depression started but stayed through some of Europe’s darkest years.

Boyle went on to write about the rise of Nazism in Austria in the mid-1930s and the fall of France in 1940. She even came back to Europe after the war and wrote stories about occupied Germany. Best of all, her stories were just as artistically significant as they were historically relevant. She not only chronicled Europe’s fall into madness and its postwar recovery, but she also helped shape the modern short story as a regular contributor to The New Yorker and the winner of two O. Henry awards for the best short story of the year.

Portrait by Man Ray, 1931

Kay Boyle’s name had sounded only vaguely familiar to me. So I started asking around to see if other English professors knew of her. Occasionally I’d get a response similar to mine: the name rings a bell. But that would be it. Many had no clue who she was, even those specializing in the 20th century. That was all I needed to know. I was smitten.

I have a thing for forgotten women writers. During four years of college, I was hungry for examples of successful female authors. But the general assumption was simply that there weren’t any, until recently at least. That was in the 1980s. Once I got to grad school, I quickly found them, and then I spent the next 23 years teaching them and writing books about some of them. I suppose there is something selfless about spending one’s career trying to ensure the legacies of others, but this work also fed a deep need inside of me, as all our creative and scholarly work does. Or else we wouldn’t do it.

Choosing Kay Boyle as my next biographical subject was hardly an accident. I wanted to come back to Europe somehow, and I knew she would bring me. She was perfect for that, having lived all over France as well as in Austria, England, and Germany. She brought me first to France, where I taught in 2019. It was on that trip that I began to dream of following in her footsteps more long-term and becoming an expat myself.

One of the many cafes in which Kay Boyle and other expats hung out in Paris in the 1920s-30s

Falling in Love

Thinking about writing someone’s biography is a bit like dating someone. You evaluate them to see if you would be happy spending a lot of time in their company. You’re on the lookout for traits that might irritate you or skeletons in their closet. You hope you won’t be disappointed. You think, this could be the one!

If you’re a serial biographer, you start to feel guilty as well about leaving behind your last subject. You did them justice, but you can’t help feeling that you are cheating on them with your new subject. The attachment doesn’t die after you’ve typed the last word, or you’re done with the last book signing.

At least that’s how it’s been for me with my previous subjects, Constance Fenimore Woolson and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. It’s not that way with every biographer. I think the beginning must be like that for most of us, but for some the relationship turns sour. And the biography that results is colored—I would even say twisted—by the writer’s disaffection. Unfortunately, that was the case for Kay Boyle’s biographer, Joan Mellen.

Reading her 1992 tear-down of Boyle felt like sitting down with your new lover’s ex and hearing every horrible thing about them. But you wonder how objective this account is. (In this case, it seems it wasn’t, as I discovered in letters preserved in the archives.) In light of the bias you uncover, you dismiss the ex’s perspective as jaundiced by rejection and put your fears on the back burner. Meanwhile, your subject pulls you in deeper. There are so many things about them that excite you. They have lived in places you dream of. They have had passionate love affairs. Their work entices you over and over again. You find yourself reading it with the eye of a lover, or at least a friend, rather than a critic.

Of course, I’m really talking about myself here, and if any biographers are reading this, they may want to take me aside and give me a little lecture about maintaining my objective distance. Sure, I know. We don’t want to write hagiography. But I think my analogy holds. Because just like any relationship, it’s during the early phase that you have your rose-colored glasses on. You can’t fall in love without them. But inevitably, the closer you get, the more distance you feel. Try as you might to immerse yourself in their world and their consciousness, you will always be on the outside.

The trouble comes not from falling in love with your subject, I believe, but when you develop a dysfunctional relationship with them, jealously guarding the priority of your claim on them (like Leon Edel did with Henry James), or having a score to settle (like Mellen did with Boyle). But for most of us, I think, we come to care for our subjects’ complex humanity and feel the loss very deeply when we reach the end of their lives.

I would say that I did get past the early stages of my romance with Kay Boyle. I’ve seen some skeletons in her closet, but I am able to understand her as a full human being who was very often noble yet sometimes deeply flawed. Just like the rest of us.

Kay Boyle (left) on a press tour of Europe in 1945

Losing Oneself

My desire to write Kay Boyle’s biography, though, was really more about myself, I now see, than it was about her. She would be my excuse for getting back to Europe, but, more importantly, she would be my escape from a life that I was becoming increasingly desperate to flee. The more I learned about her life and the more she occupied my mind with her three husbands, two lovers, six children, and twenty-five books, including fifteen novels, the more I felt myself living through her. Her life loomed large—so large I couldn’t imagine containing it all in one book.

This is what happens to a biographer. You spend your days reading this person’s most intimate letters and diaries. You try to figure out what their relationships with their parents, their children, and their husbands were like. You jot down details that will help you bring them to life—such as what kind of food and drink they liked, what their voices sounded like, or the nicknames their lovers called them, and why. I began to drink Dubonnet in the late afternoons, as Kay did, and listened to songs I knew she had liked. I tried to imagine what it was like to write in bed with a clunky manual typewriter on your lap, as she did for the duration of her life. I spoke to people who had known her, asking for detailed descriptions of her home and her appearance.

As your obsession with your subject grows, you begin to inhabit their world, letting pieces of your own fall away. Slowly, your tastes, your desires, even your intimate relationships can start to take a backseat. There isn’t a lot of room for your own life anymore. (Which is incidentally what being a mother is like as well. But that’s another story, which others have written very well.) This is probably not an accident for many of us. I heard a biographer say recently to a room full of other biographers, “We feel happiest living someone else’s life [and being] absorbed in someone else’s life, unlike autobiographers.”

She had put her thumb on what makes a good biographer—that desire to escape from oneself into someone else’s life. Maybe there are things in our own lives we’d rather avoid. Or maybe it’s simply that our lives aren’t quite as interesting as we’d like them to be. And there is no question that immersing oneself in a biography-worthy subject can be exciting. Sometimes, you’re virtually on the edge of your seat as you read an exchange of letters or uncover clues to a long-hidden secret. 

But something about Kay, or me, or the combination of Kay and me, has made me dissatisfied with the self-avoidance and self-neglect—maybe even self-erasure—that writing a biography requires.

Over the course of those of years that Kay Boyle was taking hold in my mind, I also found new parts of myself that had been silent for a long time starting to speak up. I became dissatisfied with how I was living. I wanted more from life. I looked at how deeply Kay had lived, how full her life had been, and I started to hear a voice in my ear, “When you are on your deathbed, how will you know that you have really lived?”

A Beacon in the Dark

They say that learning to say no is one of the first things you need to do in order to start living your own authentic life. In order to start living mine, I had to say three big no’s—to being a professor, a wife, and a biographer—and one big yes to those parts of myself that wanted to find a new way to live. All of those no’s have left a lot of free space to fill. And I’m still working on how I would like to fill it.

But Kay is still here. I haven’t said no to her. She’s with me more than ever, in fact. I still feel this desire to know her, to understand her life and her work, to somehow find a way to honor it. More than that, though, I think I want to see her life braiding into my own. Perhaps rather than crowding me out, she has been shining her light on a new path for me, helping me discover—after more than two decades as a wife, mother, biographer, and professor—who I am in the world without all of that. If I could write a letter to Kay, I think I would say what James Baldwin told her when he wrote to her in 1966, “I love you very much, Kay, for me, you are one of the beacons in this dark world.”

Kay Boyle at the MacDowell colony, where she became friends with James Baldwin, in the 1950s

What is it that we look for in the women of the past we feel drawn to? Are we looking for spirit guides, as the woman I met in Paris at the start of my trip was? Are we working through some part of our own suppressed needs, as I now see I was in my earlier books? Are we hoping that something of the glamour of their lives will rub off on our own, or that by resurrecting them we will somehow feel more seen as well? Or perhaps simply that their company offers us something we can’t seem to find in the present? Are we looking for alternative sisters, companions on the road of the life, or perhaps even mothers who have something to teach us that our own mothers didn’t?

I’d love to know if you have any particular fascinations/obsessions with a woman of the past. Have you felt like you wanted to write their biography or pay some kind of tribute to them? And do you have any thoughts on why you are so drawn to them?

I hope to hear from you soon!

All the best,
Anne