Emotional Crisis Often Beginning Of Literary Urge

Southland Times, Issue 23989, 2 December 1939, Page 12

Emotional Crisis Often Beginning Of Literary Urge

Many and various are the reasons authors give when asked why they first began to write. Novelist G. B. Stem says a brokenup love affair started her. Jane Austen was similarly urged. Marjorie Bowen was.lonely as a girl and left much to herself. At sixteen she wrote her first novel. Fannie Hurst was also a lonely only child, and everyone knows the famous Bronte sisters wrote because they were lonely. George Eliot, on the other hand, boasted that, she could write better than the “silly women novelists” of her day. Challenged to do so by George Henry Lewis, she did. One day her editor said to journalist Louisa Alcott, “We ought to have a children’s story. Could you write one?” “I’ll try, sir,” she said. And she wrote "Little Women.” ENCOURAGED BY HUSBANDS Mrs Beecher Stowe’s husband suggested to her that she could write an anti-slavery story. . She sat up all one night and in the morning gave him a chapter of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”—one of the last—“ The Death of Uncle Tom.” Mary Somerville, the first girl graduate, was also encouraged to write by her second husband. Left destitute by her husband with five little boys, Mrs Hernans wrote poems for their living.

Illness set off some women writers —Mrs Henry Woods, for instance, and Harriet Martineau, who was deaf. Australian Dorothy Cottrell and New Zealander Gloria Rawlinson found their pens after illness. Many began as children. A school paper set off Ethel Turner, Lilian Turner, Louise Mack and Amy Mack, while literary competitions started Dulcie Deamer, M. Barnard Eldershaw, and Kylie Tennant.