25 March 2005

Birthdays: Flannery and Anne

We're about to hit the road, but I can't let this slip by...



Flannery O'Connor was born on this day in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia. If "Southern Gothic" in literary style, O'Connor was orthodox Catholic in her religious views. She was in the middle of her fifteen-year battle with lupus — she died from it in 1964, aged 39 — when Ginsberg and the other Beats were beginning to get the headlines. [...]

In [a] letter to Robert Lowell, she took this attitude towards her affliction: "I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow. I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing. What you have to measure out, you come to observe more closely, or so I tell myself."





Charlotte, Emily, and Anne

Anne Brontë was born on this day in 1820. Tourists started snooping round the Brontë home when Charlotte was alive, and just after her death the locals were complaining of crowds; now the Haworth Parsonage Museum, the house gets about 200,000 visitors a year.

...Restore to me that little spot,
With gray walls compassed round,
Where knotted grass neglected lies,
And weeds usurp the ground.

Though all around this mansion high
Invites the foot to roam,
And though its halls are fair within--
Oh, give me back my HOME!

(from Anne Brontë's "Home")

(Via Today in Literature)

1 comment:

canaanbound said...

Sorry I haven't been around much lately, you might know why from the blog. I'll call or write soon. (is the number I have a cell? Do you even have one of those?) And if I haven't told you yet, I'm really excited about your new direction.