RARA-AVIS: Varieties of condescension: from NPR and from, back when, THE LAD DER

From: Todd Mason ( Todd.Mason@tvguide.com)
Date: 03 Nov 2003


NPR's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED yesterday ran a puff-piece on the Feminist Press's self-congratulatory "rescue from oblivion" of such "obscure" work as Dorothy Hughes's IN A LONELY PLACE, which had barely gotten three? four? reprints since the film version...at least you can see the new/retro covers: http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1490040 Meanwhile, from the pioneering US lesbian magazine THE LADDER, Barbara Grier began reviewing relevant paperbacks apparently around the turn of the '60s, including:
"In a featured review of We Two Won't Last, by "Ann Aldrich," Grier wrote:
"This tone of personal self-hatred is probably the most serious fault of this and all her books. It is apparent to the Lesbian reader that Miss Aldrich is simply not very happy and for the moment one is tempted to feel pity. There are few things worse to have to live with than self-hatred and Ann Aldrich is steeped in it. Unfortunately for the rest of us, she is highly intelligent and articulate and thus able to disseminate much misleading data which is damaging to all homosexual women." (15) Aldrich also wrote lesbian pulps under the name "Vin Packer," among others. Ironically, this Aldrich book mentioned in The Ladder (unfavorably), first brought the magazine to the attention of Alma Routsong (pseudonym Isabel Miller), who wrote one of the first lesbian novels with a happy ending, Patience and Sarah. (16)" From a site turned up by Juri Nummelin:
< http://people.ucsc.edu/~rosewood/writing/essays/the%20laddercomplete.htm>

--
# Plain ASCII text only, please.  Anything else won't show up.
# To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to
# majordomo@icomm.ca.  This will not work for the digest version.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 03 Nov 2003 EST