Background
Lisle, Laurie was born on September 11, 1942 in Providence. Daughter of Laurence Lisle and Adeline Cole Simonds.
(“The rituals of gardening give a rhythm, even rapture, to...)
“The rituals of gardening give a rhythm, even rapture, to everyday life that is apart from the routines of writing and the flows of relationships. Tending my garden became the same as taking care of myself.” When Laurie Lisle fled the city, she was in such a fever to buy a particular old clapboard house on the green of a historic New England village that she didn’t notice the awkward shape of the backyard. “When I had seen the surveyor’s map of my less than half acre,” she writes, “I was shocked at how very long and narrow a rectangle it actually was; on paper, as if seen from above, it looked to me like a fairway on a golf course, and I wondered how I could turn such an awful shape into a graceful garden.” Thus begins this modern pastoral, in which Lisle tells us how she heaved compost, dug post holes, planted, and replanted–and how she also found herself digging into her feelings about love and loss, work and play, roots and rootlessness, solitude and sociability. Twenty years later, in these intimate essays that have sprung up around themes such as “Weather,” “Color,” “Woods,” and “Shadows,” Lisle explores the fascinating connections among one’s interior landscape, village life, and the natural world. In “Roots,” Lisle writes about the generations of female gardeners in her family and the question of whether she has exiled herself into “a floral cage.” In “Sharon,” she traces the grand gardening history of her pre-Revolution town and notes the tensions between natives and newcomers. “Words” contrasts “the easy pleasure of gardening” with “the more elusive satisfaction of writing,” and goes on to examine the role of the garden in the lives of writers such as Emily Dickinson and Edith Wharton. “Woods” tells of the “dramatic demarcation point between nature acted upon and nature left alone.” In “Outside,” Lisle battles back the deer and contemplates the mature garden that has grown up around her. Ultimately, Four Tenths of an Acre is a testament to one woman’s glorious engagement with place.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400061679/?tag=2022091-20
(Westover, a girls' school in Middlebury, Connecticut, was...)
Westover, a girls' school in Middlebury, Connecticut, was founded in 1909 by emancipated "New Women," educator Mary Hillard and architect Theodate Pope Riddle. Landscape designer Beatrix Farrand did the plantings. It has evolved from a finishing school for the Protestant elite, including F. Scott Fitzgerald's first love, to a meritocracy for pupils of many religions and races from all over the world. The fascinating account of the ups and downs of this female community is the subject of Laurie Lisle's lively and well-researched book. The author describes the innovations of the idealistic minister's daughter who founded the school in 1909, her intellectual successor who turned it into a college preparatory school in the 1930s, the quiet headmaster who managed to keep it open during the turbulent 1970s, and the prize-winning mathematics teacher, wife, and mother who later lead the high school. This beautifully illustrated book tells an important story about female education during decades of dramatic change in America.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0819568864/?tag=2022091-20
(This is a biography of Louise Nevelson, who was the bolde...)
This is a biography of Louise Nevelson, who was the boldest, most original American sculptor of the twentieth century. Her monumental works of wood, found objects and metal can be seen in parks and museums throughout the world.A flamboyant iconoclast born Leah Berliawsky in Czarish Russia in 1899, she grew up in Main, ostracized as a Jew and a foreigner. At twenty she escaped to New York as Mrs. Charles Nevelson. She lived and loved with lusty abandon, often in grinding poverty, undil she achieved fame and fortune at sixty after struggling as a woman and an artist in a world dominated by men. She was a self-made phenomenon who spanned the century and left it at eighty-eight, proud, angry, imperious--a woman whose powerful art and remarkable life made her a legend in her own time.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0671675168/?tag=2022091-20
(Without Child brings scope and depth to a subject that ha...)
Without Child brings scope and depth to a subject that has long been misunderstood. Weaving rich materials from history, literature, religion, and sociology with Laurie Lisle's own and other personal stories, this groundbreaking book does what no other has done before--presents childlessness in a multifaceted and positive light. Most women grow up thinking they will become mothers. And many do follow that path. But for those women who are willingly or unwillingly without children, childlessness is a way of life that many of them must constantly defend. Without Child explores the facts and fallacies behind childlessness, what it means for women and society, and reminds us of how women can and do embrace this choice. Lisle contends that childless women are part of an ancient and respectable cultural tradition that includes Biblical matriarchs, celibate saints, and nineteenth century social reformers. However, like other aspects of women's history, this tradition has been forgotten and, in the process, maligned. Without Child brings childless women out of the shadows and places them back in women's history. Without Child also challenges the stigma of childlessness by offering childless women the life-affirming story of themselves. Beginning with the difficult inner journey a woman faces before finally deciding or realizing she will not bear children, Without Child explores the myth of the childless woman's rejection of the maternal instinct. It also explores the childless woman's relationship to mothers and mothering, to her femininity, to men, to achievement, to her body, and to old age. In the shadow of a culture that claims to adore the child, Without Child brings a long forbidden topic into the light. Wide-ranging, yet intimate, philosophical, yet clear-sighted, this important book will reassure millions of women that they are not alone, not unusual, and, in fact, are part of a long and honorable tradition.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345373278/?tag=2022091-20
Lisle, Laurie was born on September 11, 1942 in Providence. Daughter of Laurence Lisle and Adeline Cole Simonds.
Bachelor in English, Ohio Wesleyan University, 1965.
Researcher Newsweek magazine, New York City, 1970-1978. Associate professor Southampton College of Long Island University, 1981-1982. Independent scholar Southern Connecticut Library.
Council, Hamden, 1989—2002. Speaker New York Council for the Humanities, New York City, 2000—2002.
(Westover, a girls' school in Middlebury, Connecticut, was...)
(“The rituals of gardening give a rhythm, even rapture, to...)
(This is a biography of Louise Nevelson, who was the bolde...)
(Without Child brings scope and depth to a subject that ha...)
Member of The Authors Guild, The Century Association, American Pen Center.
Married Robert I. Kipniss, December 17, 1994.