Writing for Her Life: The Novelist Mildred Walker by Ripley Hugo (review)

b o o k R e v i e w s 3 1 7 Westerns. What disappoints me most, however, is that Mesce uses context to justify Peckinpah whereas he would do better to use the “masculine imperi­ alisms” in Peckinpah’s films to explain Peckinpah’s turbulent times. Writing for Her Life: The Novelist Mildred Walker. By Ripley Hugo. L incoln: U n iversity o f N ebraska Press, 2003. 286 pages, $29.95. Reviewed by Carmen Pearson U niversity of H ouston The late novelist Mildred Walker lamented never having written a real love story. There was love in all her stories, but she felt she’d never written the love story. Sometimes, ambitions are several generations in coming to fruition. And so it may be said that her grown daughter has finally written the love story her mother never wrote. Poet and scholar and English faculty mem­ ber at the University of Montana, Ripley Hugo has paid the greatest tribute of love to her mother in writing the recently published biography, Writingfor Her Life: The Novelist Mildred Walker. Literary genres are slippery things. A biography is someone else’s story— so we’re told. Indeed, this biography shows great scholarly effort: of endless hours spent going through Walker’s journals, letters, and manuscripts. Hugo carefully places her mother’s writing career in the context of her mother’s per­ sonal life. But, as a subtext to the story of Mildred Walker’s life, this book also contains the story of the daughter, Ripley, discovering her mother: the mother who was not hers, the private woman who seemed, many times, impatient to be away from her own family and domestic milieu, to get back to her writing. Hugo starts this biography by presenting her own intial discovery of her mother’s work as an author. As a child, she jumped through a window one day in play, only to land with dirty feet upon neatly stacked piles of her mother’s manuscripts. Nonetheless, she and her siblings knew little of her mother as an author, who kept her books hidden in a closet. It was only many years later, as an adult, that Ripley ever read and shared her thoughts on Walker’s books with her mother. This biography is interesting not only in its subject matter, one of Ameri­ ca’s less celebrated female literary figures, it is also interesting to study as its own form of writing. Hugo is at times ambivalent as to whether she is writing as a daughter or as a scholar— and so, she vacillates in the text, but there are echoes of Walker’s stylistic brevity and realistic portrayals in Hugo’s own writ­ ing: giving a bit of herself but leaving a reader wishing for more of the intelli­ gent and honest companionship. A t times the distance between Hugo and her subject is as far as Walker’s childhood home in Vermont must have seemed from the family cabin in Montana. At other times, Hugo becomes deeply personal and introspective, interrupting the text and apologizing with her own daughterly questions. 3 1 8 WAL 3 8 . 3 FA LL 2 0 0 3 Being Mildred Walker’s daughter was not easy. In the 1930s and 40s, it was not commonplace to sympathize with the compromises career women made with their work and domestic lives. This must have been further complicated by the fact that Walker practically hid her work from her children, who must have wondered why she was often so impatient and abrupt. Similar to her mother, Hugo is most interested in unembellished accuracy. The pain such a chore must have caused the biographer/daughter is readily apparent. Her mother was judgmental, impatient, and at times condescending, but Hugo lets her readers know that Walker was also keenly observant and sympathetic in her writing of the people and places around her, so much so that with many of her novels, readers were quite sure she’d lived the lives she’d written. For example, when Walker published Dr. Norton’s Wife, nursing stu­ dents were instructed to read the book to develop a greater understanding of the effects...