Carol DeBoer-Langworthy

Kate Bolick's Boston Globereview
The Boston Globe
November 30, 2003
She Was a Free Spirit In a Dependent Age
By Kate Bolick

I like to think of Neith Boyce as America’s first bachelor girl — a more serious, though equally independent, 19th-century Carrie Bradshaw. It’s not an entirely unfair notion. In 1898 Boyce wrote a column for Vogue about her life as a single woman in New York with the sort of wit and breezy social acumen taken up by sex columnists a century later (just without the sex). But to reduce her legacy to the nine or so months of her 26th year is to overlook a long and varied career.

Born in 1872, Boyce enjoyed a national reputation as a prolific novelist, journalist, and playwright from 1900 to 1920, gadding about with Mabel Dodge, Mina Loy, and Gertrude Stein, helping to found the Provincetown Players, and generally contributing to the modernist movement. But as early as 1951 her old friend Carl Van Vechten thought to mention her only on the very last page of his memoir as a “literary lady” he’d once known. Her six novels, it goes without saying, fell out of print years ago. It wasn’t until 2000 that she garnered serious space in a general-interest history book — Christine Stansell’s fantastic study of post-Victorian bohemian New York, “American Moderns.” Now, more than 50 years after her death, Boyce’s autobiography is being published for the first time.

Scrupulously — even lovingly — annotated, edited, and introduced by Carol DeBoer-Langworthy of Brown University, “The Modern World of Neith Boyce” assembles 36 years’ worth of Boyce’s autobiographical writings. Boyce wrote the bulk of this material in her late 60s, looking back on her early life — from a tragic childhood (all four of her siblings died in the diphtheria epidemic of 1880), to her late adolescence in Boston and her life as a journalist in Greenwich Village, straight on up to her marriage in 1899 to the radical writer Hutchins Hapgood. The narrative ends on their wedding night. (Unfortunately for the prurient among us; the two forged a famous open marriage.)

Throughout, Boyce refers to herself in the third person as “Iras” (like the name Neith, it is culled from ancient Egypt), a decision that both delights and saddens DeBoer-Langworthy. Boyce’s experimental approach “transformed the diary and autobiography into something truly New,” DeBoer-Langworthy writes. But her omniscient remove also “blotted out . . . the power of romance and sexuality in a life that had been, in many ways, propelled by it” — a disavowal that DeBoer-Langworthy interprets as an expression of Boyce’s disillusionment with her marriage and literary career. Boyce’s open marriage, DeBoer-Langworthy believes, enervated more than it energized her — Hapgood exercised its freedoms more assiduously, leaving Boyce to raise their four children — and by the time she died, a widow, in 1951, she was, as Van Vechten reminds us, essentially forgotten as a writer.

Omissions aside, there is a great deal to be found in this engaging account of one writer’s beginnings. Forced early on to confront her mortality (and survivor’s guilt), Boyce grew up feeling “apart from herself [and] was given to observing herself as she observed other people.” It shows. Recalling her young womanhood in New York, she wryly notes that dinner party talk “like wine was served in little shallow glasses and you had to be careful of them; you mustn’t be excited by an idea or an emotion, or you might spill your wine.”

Among the more interesting results of Boyce’s decision to retreat behind an omniscient voice is how the resulting scrim is dismantled by scholarly intervention. With access to rough drafts, DeBoer-Langworthy was able to ferret out and reveal each concealed name and glossed-over fact. For the reader, it’s a bit like sneaking a peek behind the veil.

More than half a century later, British novelist Hilary Mantel’s memoir, “Giving Up the Ghost,” written in her early middle age, seems to take an opposite and more contemporary tack; indeed, it begins with a transparency we’ve come to associate with postmodernism. “I hardly know how to write about myself,” she confesses a few pages in. “Any style you pick seems to unpick itself before a paragraph is done. I will just go for it, I think to myself, I’ll hold out my hands and say, c’est moi, get used to it.”

But Mantel’s self-questioning ends as soon as it starts. In its place is an assuredly wise, lovely, and often amusing story of growing up Catholic in postwar England, and of an adulthood spent not only figuring out how to write, but also enduring a painful and long-misdiagnosed illness. As was the case with Boyce, sickness helped to shape Mantel’s outsider’s sensibility, though she has been the victim, not the saved. (And refreshingly, this is no saccharine “survivor’s” tale — Mantel is not afraid to be acerbic about the cards she was dealt.)

Unlike Boyce, however, Mantel wrote a book that is every inch a “memoir,” insofar as that means taking full advantage of her literary powers; her descriptions are beautiful and surprising to read, and her insights consistently judicious and deep. It is written in the first person, yes, but with the knowing restraint and a novelistic eye. Perhaps this is because she tackled it the same way she did her eight critically acclaimed novels: “I began this writing in an attempt to seize the copyright in myself.”

Kate Bolick is the deputy cultural editor of The New York Sun. Her column will appear every other month.

Kate Bolick on Neith: "She Was All That: This Single Chick Broke the Mold"
Less brief description goes here

Kate Bolick on Neith: "She Was All That: This Single Chick Broke the Mold"
Less brief description goes here

Catherine Kunce's review
An expert's opinion

Dennis Bryson's review
scholarly assessment by expert in the field

The Modern World of Neith Boyce
cover of this book

The Modern World of Neith Boyce: Autobiography and Diaries
"Neith Boyce's autobiography is a lost treasure of Americana, rescued from the archives and scrupulously edited by Carol DeBoer-Langworthy. Boyce's pictures of Los Angeles as a small town and New York as a small city at the turn of the century are vivid and priceless. And the account of her struggle to live as an independent professional woman is engrossing. She was a fine professional writer--one of a number of women writing in the early twentieth century whose work deserves recognition and reexamination. This collection of her autobiographical writings is an excellent first step." -- Robert Scholes, author of The Crafty Reader and director, Modernist Journals Project, Brown University

Bibliography of Neith's Works
Books
The Bond. New York: Duffield and Company, 1908.
The Eternal Spring. New York: Fox, Duffield and Company, 1906.
The Folly of Others. New York: Fox, Duffield and Company, 1904. Reprint, Plainview, New York: Books for Libraries, Inc., 1974.
The Forerunner. New York: Fox, Duffield and Company, 1903.
Harry: A Portrait. New York: Thomas Selzer, 1923.
Proud Lady. New York: Thomas Selzer, 1923.
Songs. Boston: Arena Publishing Company, 1892.
Stories from the Chap-Book. Chicago: Herbert S. Stone and Company, 1896.
The Town in the Forest: Life Story of Richmond, New Hampshire. Richmond: Richmond, New Hampshire Archives, 1992.
Story of an American Family: Letters and Commentary on the Hapgood Family, 1648-1917. Chicopee, Mass.: Brown-Murphy, 1953.

Plays
"The Two Sons." In The Provincetown Plays, 4 Series, edited by Frank Shay, 147-169. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1916.
"Winter’s Night." In Fifty More Contemporary One-Act Plays, edited by Frank Shay, 39–46. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1928 and in A Century of Plays by American Women, edited by Rachel France, 79–85. New York: Richard Rosen Press,1979.
——— and Hutchins Hapgood. "Enemies." In The Provincetown Plays, edited by George Cram Cook and Frank Shay. Cincinnati: Stewart Kidd Company, 1921.

Poems
"After the Storm." LOTOS 9:3 (September 1895), 177.
"After Sunset." LOTOS 8:10 (April 1895), 709.
"Flower of Rajisthan." The New Cycle 8:8 (February 1895).
"Last Week in Autumn." Overland 52:201 (December, 1892), 609.
"Noel." LOTOS 9: 6-7 (December-January 1895/1896), front cover.
"Triolet." LOTOS 9:5 (November 1895), 338.
"Winter’s Night." Overland 52:17 (September 1891), 610.

Short Stories
"Awakening." Harper’s Weekly 57 (27 September, 1913): 21–2.
"Blue Hood." Harper’s Weekly 58 (2 May, 1914): 9–11.
"Blue Pearl." McClure’s 35 (May 1910): 26–35.
"Books and Men." Harper’s Weekly 60 (6 February, 1915): 131, 187–8.
"A British Matron." Harper’s Weekly 61 (15 January, 1916): 591–2.
"Brothers." McClure’s 38 (December 1911): 138–145.
"Burton’s Burglar." Harper’s Weekly 58 (24 January, 1914): 12–14.
"The Elder Generation." American Magazine 71 (April 1911) 748–757.
"Faithful Wife." Harper’s Weekly 60 (2 January, 1915): 14–15.
"The Golden Wedding." Harper’s Weekly 59 (26 December, 1914): 615–616.
"In a Garden." Stories from the Chap-Book, 29–43. Chicago: Herbert S. Stone & Company, 1896.
"Inlaid Chest." Harper’s Weekly 60 (16 January, 1915): 65–67.
"Labouchere." Harper’s Weekly 58 (28 March, 1914): 14–15.
"The Legacy." American Magazine 64 (October 1907): 615–23.
"A Livelier Plumage." American Magazine, 70 (August 1910): 506–515.
"Luxury." American Magazine 71 (November 1910): 112–119.
"Love!" Harper’s Weekly 60 (9 January, 1915): 42–44.
"Maddalena Speaks." Forum 51 (January 1914): 103–107.
"The Most Beautiful Girl in the World." LOTOS 9:8 (February 1896): 584–86.
"Mrs. Peyton Interferes." McClure’s 37 (August 1911): 4–8.
"My Dear Niece." Good Housekeeping 53(July 1911): 33-41.
"Progressive at Large." Harper’s Weekly 58 (7 February, 1914): 10–11.
"A Provident Woman." Lippincott’s Magazine 73 (March 1904): 259–317.
"Retreat." Harper’s Monthly Magazine 146 (December 1922): 46–66.
"The Return." Harper’s Weekly 60 (20 February, 1915): 187–188.
"Silence Is Gold." American Magazine 70 (July 1910): 304–311.
"Thirty Years." Harper’s Weekly 60 (22 May, 1915): 485.
"Tschekhov’s Plays." Harper’s Weekly 57 (27 December, 1913): 22–23.
"The Undertow." Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine 560 (August 1914): 129–176.
"The Vestals." New York Commercial Advertiser, n.d.
"When Chesterton Is Angry." Harper’s Weekly 59 (11 July, 1914): 31.
"The Wife of a Genius." Harper’s Weekly 59 (12 December, 1914): 556–568.

Creative Nonfiction, Articles and Essays
"The Bachelor Girl" "papers" in Vogue for 5 May 1898: 294; 19 May 1898: 320, 322; 16 June 1898: viii; 7 July 1898: 6,10; 4 August 1898: 75-6, 78; 1 September 1898: 138-39; 8 September 1898: 156; 22 September 1898: 190; 3 November 1898:284.
"The Baths of Lucca," Scribner’s Magazine 39 (May 1906): 614–620.
"Books and Men," Harper’s Weekly, 60 (February 20, 1915): 187–188.
"Book Notes and News" monthly columns in New Cycle 8:12 (June 1895) and subsequent issues of LOTOS through September 1896.
"Coming Comedy of American Manners." Bookman 15 (March 1902): 57–58.
"‘Prigs’ and ‘Cads’ in Fiction," Bookman 23 (July 1906): 490–491.

"Writing Minnesota"
Along with three Brown University students, CDBL is writing her memoirs of growing up in Minnesota. This volume is a patchwork of memories of Minnesota locations experienced by different people at different times. The project is supported by the Dean of the College of Brown University.