What I am Reading and Writing This Month

By Dorothy Wickenden

Executive Editor of the New Yorker magazine 

Here’s a non-fiction book that tells the story of two society girls from Auburn, New York, who spent a year teaching school in the mountains of Colorado in 1916-1917.

At the time, living in that region was still frontier adventuring in an environment as beautiful as it was harsh. Amid the growing pains of a national unconsciousness that displaced many First Nation people from their way of life, these young women of privilege put the expectation of marriage and motherhood on hold for a season of discovery.

Nothing Daunted initially allows readers to accompany Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood through highlights of their lives before Colorado. These include their time in college, their subsequent year abroad, and their social obligations on the streets and in the front parlors of their vibrant community of wealth, power, and influence nestled within the Finger Lakes region of New York State.

Written by Dorothy’s namesake granddaughter, the book creates a hybrid experience of an epistolary sort of oral tradition about this era in the Colorado Rockies, as the two friends experienced the land and its people. 

Nothing Daunted is multiply-sourced by the letters the teachers wrote home and to friends and family over that learning year. As was the social custom of the time, these pieces of correspondence were saved and treasured over the years. Their rediscovery in the subsequent century by Ms. Woodruff’s journalistic granddaughter was the genesis moment for this book. 

In the book, firsthand recollections augment the letters and all blend into a creative narrative. The author’s visits with her grandmother and her benefactor/friend/and second husband enflesh their tales of life beyond the Continental Divide, enriched by subsequent modern-day interviews and memoirs from descendant generations. 

The granddaughter’s investigative western forays, among overgrown mountain trails, high pastures, and weathered structures fading into oblivion, resonate the final echoing strains of Dorothy’s and Rosamond’s story. 

Nothing Daunted saves their tale from vanishing into the aeries and tall swaying grasses where those who went before them in that space, near the attic of the west, silently reside.

© 2011 Scribner, New York 

One evening this November

 I was reading Nothing Daunted. 

I was more than halfway along the international and 

transcontinental path Ms. Wickenden had engaged me 

to travel on foot, steamship, carriage, rail, and horseback. 

Something came over me. 

I wrote on my ever-present notepad: 

“ the art of letter-writing and the anticipation of

receiving notes and missives by mail—that started

out in an envelope across the ocean, a country, 

over the mountains and plains—suddenly just 

bushwhacked the front of my mind, with just 

ninety pages to go. 

This awareness had been 

seeping into my consciousness so stealthily 

I can only attribute it to Ms. Wickenden." 

Nothing Daunted was subtle. It didn’t reprint letters wholesale,

scarred with indents and italics page after page, in place of neat 

fold lines and oft-repeated creases. It only hinted at the fiber woven 

into the stationery employed. 

Instead, I was being entwined in the 

fiber of the hopes, dreams, disappointments, excitements and 

wonderments these friends-since-kindergarten shared and then

re-told to those to whom they wrote.  

I fashioned a New Year’s resolution two years ago to foreswear 

e-mail to certain friends in favor of enveloped letters regularly sent 

and received through the US postal service. 

Alas, it wasn’t Postmaster

General DeJoy who shredded that intention. It was me.

I shall have to undertake

it again, as soon as I finish sending out this year’s holiday greeting cards. 

Alongside the monthly installments of Custody since October there have been, and will continue to be, books written by other authors. 

Those books investigate in their own way some of the underlying themes in Custody. These books and the story of the Lowry family in Custody will hopefully form the infrastructure of a dialectic for individuals, 

literature classes, and book clubs. 

In October, Edna Pontellier fought to discover herself apart from marriage and motherhood in The Awakening. 

Last month, the marriage and divorce of Joanna and Ted Kramer sets up a custody battle for their son, Billy, in Kramer vs Kramer. 

And this month, Nothing Daunted chronicles lifelong friends Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood as they delay marriage and motherhood until first venturing out west to challenge themselves for a year of living and teaching school in the wilderness mountains of Colorado. 

by Kate Chopin

Ms. Chopin hailed from St. Louis and knew first-hand the socio-economic influences of the Louisiana Creole culture prevalent near New Orleans at Grande Isle. That lifestyle and its manners had been exported up the Mississippi by commerce and adventure into the nineteenth century western US. She was nurtured in her formative years by both European and American mercantilism, the arts, society, religion, culture, and her family’s storytelling about earlier generations of Missouri’s social order, by-way-of-Louisiana. 

Her novel, written in the last decade of that century, achieved eventual publication in 1899.

The book’s heroine, Edna Pontellier, shocked most readers and was celebrated by few. The pillars of that paternally structured society and its literary critics found Edna’s personal and public struggle to discover her feminine identity too much to accept, unfettered as it was by contemporary conventions of womanhood, motherhood, sexuality, and family. 

Ms. Chopin and Edna, somewhat her alter-ego, posed an unwelcome threat to the status quo by striving for personal fulfillment, prioritizing self-awareness over societal norms, neglecting her husband and two children, fostering romantic relationships with single men, and disregarding accepted standards of class distinction. Guardians of the “natural order” appear to have feared Chopin’s Edna would create a role model, and were successful in stifling the book’s circulation and sales.

It took fifty years and the evolution of significantly different attitudes in society for The Awakening to achieve renewed publication, critical acclaim, and widespread readership. 

© 1899. Herbert S Stone, Chicago / New York 

{ For this month, I read the novel within the Third Norton Critical Edition,

The Awakening, An Authoritative Text, Biographical and Historical Contexts, Criticism. 

© 2018 W. W. Norton & Company, New York / London, edited by Margo Culley }

As I have commented before on this web site about a film derived from a recommended book, the grammar of the visual art is different from that of the printed page. In this case, the literalism of the graphic medium seems to ground our consumption of the tale’s reality. Whereas Ms. Chopin’s writing lets our imagination fly, and even at times, provokes it to soar. Perhaps the most crucial example of this artistic variance involves the culmination of the relationship between Edna and her most insistent suitor, Mr. Alcée Arobin.

Buyer, Beware: Viewing this film on-line is risky business as the streaming service Starller!, from World Beyond, Inc., offers a free five day trial followed by a $ 49.95 monthly continuing subscription fee. It is virtually impossible to discover the on-line portal to terminate the subscription within the five days, after you have used it to see the film. 

A final note on serialization. 

This September I was looking for something of a change for drive-time listening. 

On Sirius/XM I wandered up the offerings in search of spoken word stories, harkening to my many years of listening to audio books while driving for work at Mystic Air Quality Consultants in Groton, CT. 

I came upon Radio Classics at Channel 148. What a treat!

You’ll hear radio serializations of stories from detective mysteries to favorite shows from the Golden Age of Radio—way back to the 1940s through the 1960s. 

What a kick it is to have a marathon for an hour-and-a-quarter, composed of five, 15-minute episodes of a classic show that aired three-quarters of a century ago on weekday nights, Monday through Friday. Some those became TV shows in the 50s (Father Knows Best), (Hopalong Cassidy).

There are detectives like Johnny Dollar, an insurance company fraud investigator based out of Hartford, CT.

 And what a blast to hear audio commercials for consumer products from that time: AutoliteTM car batteries, toothpastes and powders, milk and boxed cereal, personal hygiene items, and OTC medicines.

Radio Classics won’t totally replace your current listening routine, but it’s a refreshing break from repetitive music selections, ads for sports gambling 

(I cautioned about its onslaught last January), political wrangling, and just plain bad news from around the globe. 

Move over, Dick Clark and Casey Kassem. 

Enjoy!