(This novel, set in the third decade of the nineteenth cen...)
This novel, set in the third decade of the nineteenth century, concerns an incident in the life of a poet who for twenty years fought passionately for the betterment of mankind.
(A compilation of 4 previously published collections and 4...)
A compilation of 4 previously published collections and 47 additional poems arranged in chronological order to show the development of the poet's style.
Elinor Morton Wylie was a famous American poet and novelist of 1920s and 1930s. Her work, written from an aristocratic and traditionalist point of view, reflected changing American attitudes in the aftermath of World War I.
Background
Elinor Morton Wylie was born Elinor Morton Hoyt on September 7, 1885, in Somerville, New Jersey, United States. She grew up in a socially prominent family, as the daughter of a lawyer who later became solicitor general of the United States. Her childhood was unhappy, according to Edward Kelly in the Dictionary of Literary Biography; her father had a mistress, her mother was a chronic hypochondriac, and at least one of her siblings, a brother, committed suicide. Another brother was rescued after jumping off a ship, and a sister died under equivocal circumstances.
Education
Wylie attended Miss Baldwin’s School from 1893 to 1897. She was then educated at Mrs. Flint's School, for four years from 1897, she finally attended Holton-Arms School from 1901 till 1904.
Encouraged by her friends, Wylie submitted poems to Poetry magazine despite her own self-doubts; four were published by Harriet Monroe in the May, 1920, edition, including her most widely anthologized poem, “Velvet Shoes.”
Working hard, Wylie published four volumes of poetry and four novels between 1921 and her death in 1928, in addition to writing some essays and reviews and working as a literary editor of prominent magazines such as Vanity Fair.
In 1921, Wylie’s volume Nets to Catch the Wind, which many critics still consider to contain her best poems, was issued. In addition to “Velvet Shoes”, it contains the notable poems “August”, “Wild Peaches”, “A Proud Lady”, “The Eagle and the Mole”, “Sanctuary”, “Winter Sleep”, “Madman’s Song”, “The Church-Bell” and “A Crowded Trolley Car”. Her poems were miniature in scope, displaying what Wylie in an essay called her “small clean technique.” Stanzas and lines were quite short, and the effect of her images was of a highly detailed, polished surface. Often, her poems expressed a dissatisfaction with the realities of life on the part of a speaker who aspired to a more gratifying world of art and beauty. Nets to Catch the Wind “conveys a deep knowledge of life and evidences a mature talent,” in the view of a Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism contributor; in its own time, it attracted the praise of poets such as Edna St. Vincent Millay and Louis Untermeyer.
Nets to Catch the Wind was followed in 1923 by another successful volume of verse Black Armour. Wylie’s second novel The Venetian Glass Nephew came in 1925; however, and her best fourth novel Mr. Hodge and Mr. Hazard was published in 1928. Wylie’s third volume of verse Trivial Breath came in 1928, as well. Wylie included her series of nineteen sonnets One Person as the first section of Angels and Earthly Creatures in 1928.
Wylie trained for the life of a debutante and a society wife, but she rebelled against that destiny and became notorious, in her time, for her multiple marriages and affairs. Extravagantly praised in her lifetime, Wylie suffered a posthumous reversal in her reputation but has experienced something of a revival of interest among feminist critics since the 1980s.
Physical Characteristics:
Wylie herself, although known for her beauty, suffered from dangerously high blood pressure all her adult life; it caused unbearable migraines, and would kill her by means of a stroke at the age of forty-three.
Quotes from others about the person
"[Wylie] forever draws attention away from what she is saying by the way in which she insists on saying it. This characteristic explains the thinness of her themes and the fragility of her style: in place of fresh perceptions, she very often gives an artificially posed personality and, in place of style, stylishness."
Connections
Wylie’s first marriage, to Philip Hichborn in 1905, occurred “on the rebound” from another romance, according to Karen F. Stein in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Hichborn, a would-be poet, was emotionally unstable, and it was during this period that Wylie’s headaches began. In 1910, she left her husband and their son to escape to England with a married lawyer, Horace Wylie, under the assumed name of Waring; this event caused a scandal in the Washington social circles Elinor Wylie had frequented. The couple returned to the United States at the outbreak of World War I, and lived in Boston, Augusta, Georgia, and Washington, under the stress of social ostracism and Elinor’s illness. Wishing for a second child, she suffered several miscarriages between 1914 and 1916, as well as a stillbirth and the live birth of a premature child who died after one week.
The Wylies did not officially marry until 1916, after Elinor’s first husband had committed suicide and Horace’s first wife had divorced him. By that time, however, the couple were drawing apart. She separated from Horace Wylie in 1921.
Wylie married William Rose Benet in 1923, but the marriage became strained, and the two agreed to live apart, and Wylie moved to London. By 1927, she had already written to her second husband, Horace Wylie, of her enduring love for him. In 1928, she met a married man, Henry de Clifford Woodhouse, with whom she fell in love.
Wylie had a son from the first marriage - Philip Hichborn III.