MAY IVERSON'S CAREER by Elizabeth Jordan
Jan. 17th, 2014 11:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blueinkedfrostThis early twentieth-century Project Gutenberg book is the sequel to a school novel, MAY IVERSON - HER BOOK. The first book is a competent school novel with an interesting, vivacious, amusing, and slightly toplofty and overly literary narrator; this second book, about the narrator's career as a journalist in New York, is more than competent - it's adult and interesting.
May Iverson, fresh from a convent school, wants to be a nun, but her father arranges a bargain that she'll try being a newspaperwoman for three years before taking the veil. Needless to say, May falls into finding this job tremendously interesting and her true calling. May's adventures and misadventures are compelling: she is brave, kind, a talented writer, and more insightful than she herself realises; but she's also naive, a little self-centred, and has a lot to learn.
May's journey between idealism and cynicism is especially convincing because of the directions she takes. May is completely idealistic at first, and then learns more about the plight of others in New York: she's one of few women in a men's office; she buys a prostitute dinner and writes up her story and the story of other women; and she's assaulted by a crooked financier and has to defend herself. And then May's pendulum swings in utterly the opposite direction: she goes out to a fancy restaurant with a colleague, and mistakes the dancers for a den of vice and a respectably engaged couple for a desperate prostitute and an abusive man. To have the protagonist proven wrong by the narrative has the paradoxical effect of increasing the reader's trust and sympathy. May Iverson's insights then only increase from there.
There is a very fascinating description of absinthe!
Mollie Merk seemed to understand our emotions, for she began to tell us about her first experience with absinthe, years ago, in Paris, when she drank a large gobletful as if it had been a glass of lemonade. She said it was the amount a Frenchman would spend an entire afternoon over, sipping it a few drops at a time at a little sidewalk table in front of some cafe; but that she gulped it down in a few swallows, and then had just enough intelligence left to get into a cab and tell the cocher to drive her around for three hours. She said she had ordered the man to keep to the Boulevards, but that he had taken her through the Milky Way and to the places where the morning stars sang together, and that she had distinctly heard them sing. Afterward, she added, she had traveled for centuries through space, visiting the most important objects in the universe and admiring color effects, for everything was pulsing with purple and gold and amethyst lights.
Additionally, a section of the novel covers activities of the suffragists. This contemporary account is a fascinating read of their contemporary activities; women who travel around the country giving speeches and standing up for women, and the story of Tildy Mears, who seems like 'only' a farm woman and is wonderfully eloquent and amazingly hardworking. Mears joins up with professional suffragist Doctor Anna Harland and finds herself an incredible orator: simple, homely, powerful, and able to use her real experiences to reach out to other women. Mears makes a choice to return to her farm rather than stay a professional suffragist, but it's great to read her story through May Iverson's eyes.
There is also a story of a feud in the Virginia mountains between the Morans and the Tyrrells, and its effect on the Moran matriarch - an old woman with only one grandson left, Shep, both embroiled in a blood feud that can't stop until the last of the Tyrrells is killed for revenge. Shep's grandmother wants her vengeance, jubilant even though her grandson must put his life at grave risk. This is a melodramatic story, but it comes across as plausible in the novel for this feud to develop in a remote area of America.
May Iverson has a male love interest, but he's really rather a nonenity, though a reasonably nice nonentity who respects her abilities. Most of this story is about May's interactions with other women - fellow journalists, old schoolfriends, small girls, prostitutes, socialites, suffragists, farmer's wives who are also suffragists and expert orators, and female carriers of family feuds in the distant outback. Jordan seems much better at writing women than she is at writing men, and this is a novel that delightfully smashes the Bechdel standard into pieces with how many times it passes. Even working in a male-dominated profession, May has so many meaningful interactions with women.
This is a novel about a professional woman making it in the world in inimitable fashion; May Iverson's strong, delightful personality carries the book. There are serious social commentary aspects to the novel, which add depth to it besides its good and compelling style. It's a novel written by a published writer about a struggling writer trying to become an published writer, but it still breathes some fresh life into that particular old story. I strongly suspect that some parts of May Iverson's eventual success are idealised compared to Elizabeth Jordan's autobiographical experiences, but Jordan herself had an extremely impressive career as editor, journalist, author, and suffragist.
May Iverson, fresh from a convent school, wants to be a nun, but her father arranges a bargain that she'll try being a newspaperwoman for three years before taking the veil. Needless to say, May falls into finding this job tremendously interesting and her true calling. May's adventures and misadventures are compelling: she is brave, kind, a talented writer, and more insightful than she herself realises; but she's also naive, a little self-centred, and has a lot to learn.
May's journey between idealism and cynicism is especially convincing because of the directions she takes. May is completely idealistic at first, and then learns more about the plight of others in New York: she's one of few women in a men's office; she buys a prostitute dinner and writes up her story and the story of other women; and she's assaulted by a crooked financier and has to defend herself. And then May's pendulum swings in utterly the opposite direction: she goes out to a fancy restaurant with a colleague, and mistakes the dancers for a den of vice and a respectably engaged couple for a desperate prostitute and an abusive man. To have the protagonist proven wrong by the narrative has the paradoxical effect of increasing the reader's trust and sympathy. May Iverson's insights then only increase from there.
There is a very fascinating description of absinthe!
Mollie Merk seemed to understand our emotions, for she began to tell us about her first experience with absinthe, years ago, in Paris, when she drank a large gobletful as if it had been a glass of lemonade. She said it was the amount a Frenchman would spend an entire afternoon over, sipping it a few drops at a time at a little sidewalk table in front of some cafe; but that she gulped it down in a few swallows, and then had just enough intelligence left to get into a cab and tell the cocher to drive her around for three hours. She said she had ordered the man to keep to the Boulevards, but that he had taken her through the Milky Way and to the places where the morning stars sang together, and that she had distinctly heard them sing. Afterward, she added, she had traveled for centuries through space, visiting the most important objects in the universe and admiring color effects, for everything was pulsing with purple and gold and amethyst lights.
Additionally, a section of the novel covers activities of the suffragists. This contemporary account is a fascinating read of their contemporary activities; women who travel around the country giving speeches and standing up for women, and the story of Tildy Mears, who seems like 'only' a farm woman and is wonderfully eloquent and amazingly hardworking. Mears joins up with professional suffragist Doctor Anna Harland and finds herself an incredible orator: simple, homely, powerful, and able to use her real experiences to reach out to other women. Mears makes a choice to return to her farm rather than stay a professional suffragist, but it's great to read her story through May Iverson's eyes.
There is also a story of a feud in the Virginia mountains between the Morans and the Tyrrells, and its effect on the Moran matriarch - an old woman with only one grandson left, Shep, both embroiled in a blood feud that can't stop until the last of the Tyrrells is killed for revenge. Shep's grandmother wants her vengeance, jubilant even though her grandson must put his life at grave risk. This is a melodramatic story, but it comes across as plausible in the novel for this feud to develop in a remote area of America.
May Iverson has a male love interest, but he's really rather a nonenity, though a reasonably nice nonentity who respects her abilities. Most of this story is about May's interactions with other women - fellow journalists, old schoolfriends, small girls, prostitutes, socialites, suffragists, farmer's wives who are also suffragists and expert orators, and female carriers of family feuds in the distant outback. Jordan seems much better at writing women than she is at writing men, and this is a novel that delightfully smashes the Bechdel standard into pieces with how many times it passes. Even working in a male-dominated profession, May has so many meaningful interactions with women.
This is a novel about a professional woman making it in the world in inimitable fashion; May Iverson's strong, delightful personality carries the book. There are serious social commentary aspects to the novel, which add depth to it besides its good and compelling style. It's a novel written by a published writer about a struggling writer trying to become an published writer, but it still breathes some fresh life into that particular old story. I strongly suspect that some parts of May Iverson's eventual success are idealised compared to Elizabeth Jordan's autobiographical experiences, but Jordan herself had an extremely impressive career as editor, journalist, author, and suffragist.
