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  • A Potpourri of Praise
  • Earl Rovit (bio)
Elizabeth Madox Roberts: Essays of Reassessment and Reclamation edited by H. R. Stoneback and Steven Florczyk (Wind Publications, 2008. 348 pages. $20 pb)
Elizabeth Madox Roberts: Essays of Discovery and Recovery edited by H. R. Stoneback, Nicole Camastra, and Steven Florczyk (Quincy & Harrod Press & The Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society, 2008. 184 pages. $20 pb)

These two collections consist of a scattering of letters, notes, and unpublished fiction culled from the Elizabeth Roberts papers; articles of biographical and historical information; essays of exegesis; and other miscellaneous items honoring Eliza-beth Madox Roberts (1881–1941). Both books are largely the product of the Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society—a group which under the enthusiasm of Harry Stoneback and William Slavick has been nurturing the ember of Roberts’s reputation and striving mightily to fan it into a larger flame. Categorized by conventional literary history as a minor Kentucky regionalist, Roberts is remembered, if at all, for two of her seven novels—The Time of Man (1926) and The Great Meadow (1929), a handful of poems which are often categorized as “children’s poetry,” and several short stories.

A literary late bloomer, Roberts entered the University of Chicago in 1917 at the age of thirty-six, joining a kind of aesthetic Bruderschaft that hovered on the fringes of Harriet [End Page lxii] Monroe’s Poetry and that included Glenway Wescott, Yvor Winters, Janet Lewis, and Monroe Wheeler. The Time of Man, published in the same year as The Sun Also Rises, was a Literary Guild selection, and The Great Meadow was made into a reasonably successful movie. In the thirties Roberts’s health—seemingly always fragile—deteriorated, as did her reputation.

Several of the essays argue that Roberts was an exemplary modernist (à la Pound); some try to include her as a member of the southern Agrarians; some argue for her influence on Robert Penn Warren and Wendell Berry; one writer finds her work paralleling Milton’s Paradise Lost; and several provide close readings of some of her short stories. Curiously enough there is almost no attention focused on what was her most ambitious, albeit seriously flawed, novel, He Sent Forth a Raven (1935). Essentially the two collections present a potpourri of praise with a tincture of resentment at the failure to recognize the value of Roberts’s contribution to American letters.

Literary reputation—the formation and ongoing rearrangement of the canon—is ultimately something of a mystery. While we are likely to assert and perhaps believe that aesthetic excellence—like truth—will eventually “out” and prevail, the grounds for such belief are shaky. Survivability and prominence in the literary marketplace are determined by so many variable factors—institutional reading lists, vacillating ideological concerns, topical relevance, what we might call the “authority of influence,” seismic shifts in taste, cultural whimsy—that it is inevitable for some worthy writers to be overlooked. I have wondered, for example, why a feminist movement that has embraced Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton should have bypassed Roberts and Ellen Glasgow. In the end readers harbor their own subjective preferences and passions, but persuading others to join them tends to be a futile pursuit. Or, to put it another way, it’s impossible to legislate or coerce genuine love.

Earl Rovit

Earl Rovit, a novelist, critic, and scholar, has published essays (especially reminiscences) and reviews in the SR for many years. He lives in Manhattan.

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