osprey_archer: (Default)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
Oh hey! I wrote another guest blog post about female literary friendship, this one about the Authors' Club of Louisville, a small writers' group in Louisville in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that boasted three best-selling authors. The members pooled not only their writing skills but also their knowledge of the markets, which I think is why they found such success: they married their devotion to their craft with business acumen.

While I was researching this post, I found an incident that I didn't have room to fit into the blog post: sometime in the 1910s one of Rice's friends couldn't find a publisher for a story with woman suffrage themes, and Rice wrote a note consoling her: "You can’t tell, of course, what reader may be prejudiced against suffrage, - it breaks out in such funny places - but I am sure that story has its public."

And it struck me (this sounds less exciting now that I'm typing it out) that literary history at the end of the day is the story of what publishers were willing to print - that if we find it hard to find stories with suffrage themes (for example) we ought to keep in mind that it may be because publishers didn't want to publish it, not because no one was writing it.

Date: 2019-04-09 02:24 am (UTC)
ladyherenya: (Default)
From: [personal profile] ladyherenya
we ought to keep in mind that it may be because publishers didn't want to publish it, not because no one was writing it.

That's such a good point. Stories from the past, and about the past, play such a huge role in shaping people's perception of history, and so many stories had to be approved by gatekeepers to find an audience.

Lately I've been pondering a comment I saw about how people's misconceptions about history and race is because Hollywood cast white actresses as Cleopatra and didn't include communities of colour that historically lived in London and so on. I don't think Hollywood is responsible for the misconceptions I had, because I didn't really discover historical films and BBC drama until I was 17 (It's just ocurred to me why I have such fondness for certain films; they were the first of their genre that I encountered). But my view of history was definitely shaped by the fiction I read.

Date: 2019-04-09 02:36 am (UTC)
kore: (Default)
From: [personal profile] kore
Oh, very cool! //goes to read

Date: 2019-04-10 12:24 pm (UTC)
littlerhymes: (Default)
From: [personal profile] littlerhymes
I love the story of them all doing a promptfest in a cabin in the woods. That's such a delighful image!

Date: 2019-04-15 03:23 am (UTC)
asakiyume: created by the ninja girl (Default)
From: [personal profile] asakiyume
Your last paragraph absolutely! My dad's a writer, and there was a period in my childhood when he wasn't getting published at all--but he was definitely writing. So now, when there's a book by someone, and then nothing for a long time, I don't assume it's because they gave up writing. It **could** be that--or it could be that no one is publishing them. (Nowadays, of course, there's also self-publishing, but when we're talking about traditional publishing.)

Going to read your post now...

Date: 2019-04-15 03:28 am (UTC)
asakiyume: created by the ninja girl (Default)
From: [personal profile] asakiyume
Wow, they sound absolutely like a writer's group today, down to getting together and writing on a prompt. Amazing to think they were doing all this in the first decades of the twentieth century! (And wow--teaching kindergarten in Japan in that era--what an experience!)

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