7 best short stories by Neith Boyce E-Book

Neith Boyce

• Herausgeber: Tacet Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: 7 best short stories
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 102

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Neith Boyce was a Progressive-Era writer who worked in poetry, theater, short stories, novels, and various forms of creative nonfiction. She helped Gertrude Stein to publish Three Lives, cofounded the Provincetown Players theater company, and wrote "The Girl Bachelor," a popular and pioneering column in Vogue about life as a single woman in New York City. Her best-known novel, The Bond (1908), is based on her famously open marriage to the radical journalist Hutchins Hapgood. This book contains: - Two Women. - Sophia. - Molly. - The Blue Hood. - Love in a Dutch Garden. - Navidad. - The Mother.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

The Author

Two Women

Sophia.

Molly.

The Blue Hood

Love in a Dutch Garden

Navidad

The Mother

About the Publisher

The Author

Neith Boyce (March 21, 1872, Franklin, Indiana – December 2, 1951, Richmond, New Hampshire) was a United States novelist, journalist, and theatre artist. Much of Boyce’s earlier work was published with help from her parents, Mary and Henry Harrison Boyce. Neith Boyce later co-founded the Provincetown Players alongside Susan Glaspell, George Cram Cook, her husband Hutchins Hapgood, and others. Boyce worked with the Provincetown Players in several capacities that included directing, performing, hosting productions in her home, and having all four of her plays produced. Boyce’s plays featured plots that focused on women’s sexuality, personal relationships, and agency.

Neith Boyce was born the second of five children in her family. She was born to Henry Harrison Boyce and Mary Boyce. Henry Harrison Boyce had a wife and child before his relationship with Mary Boyce. This first marriage ended in a complicated divorce. In 1880, the diphtheria epidemic resulted in the death of all the Boyce children, except for Neith. The now family of three traveled from Milwaukee to Indiana and finally settled in Los Angeles.

Neith Boyce was self-educated in her family home in Franklin, Indiana. She did this by reading the books in her parents’ library. She later attended an alternative college that was overseen by an “old melancholy clerical gentleman.” Like most women at the time, Boyce also received music lessons.

Neith Boyce met her husband, Hutchins Hapgood, while working for The Commercial Advertiser. Hapgood himself had a long career as a novelist and journalist. They married on June 22, 1899.

The two would function as friends and advisors to such cultural celebrities as Mabel Dodge, Djuna Barnes, Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Gertrude Stein. Hapgood and Boyce had what was outwardly claimed to be a “modern marriage” in which both partners were equal, and neither was bound by sexual fidelity. However, behind closed doors, Boyce was solely responsible for the children, while Hapgood enjoyed numerous affairs. Hapgood’s jealousy prevented Boyce from enjoying the sexual freedom that he enjoyed for himself. Her one exception to this restrictive marriage was Hapgood’s support of her writing, and Boyce’s ability to use her writing as a means to voice her own discontent and frustration.

Neith began publishing pieces as a teenager in the 1880s in the Los Angeles Times, which her father co-founded. By the mid-1880s the Boyces were leading citizens in Los Angeles. The family later moved to Boston in 1891, where Mary Boyce became an associate editor for The Cycle, which was a publication oriented towards women’s rights issues. Mary Boyce helped publish a great deal of Neith Boyce’s editorial work and poetry. The first of Neith Boyce's works to be published with the help of her mother was a segment titled “women’s nature poetry.” After her family moved to New York in 1896, Boyce began publishing articles and short stories successfully in Vogue magazine.

By the late 1890s, Neith Boyce was living in Greenwich Village with two other young women, who, like herself, were salaried newspaperwomen. The three made their way by writing for various New York City newspapers. Neith Boyce worked for Lincoln Steffens, then editor of The Commercial Advertiser. Boyce published her first book in 1896, The Chap-Book.

Boyce’s husband, Hapgood, took to spending summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Boyce became involved with the local community of female playwrights in Provincetown and was one of the founding members of the Provincetown Players. All four of Boyce’s works for the stage were first presented by the Provincetown Players. Boyce also wrote, directed, and performed for the company.

Boyce’s Constancy (1914) inaugurated the first season of the theatre that would become the Provincetown Players. The play deals with the tempestuous relationship between two of her summer neighbors who were also members of the Provincetown Players, Mabel Dodge and John Reed. Boyce addresses sexual double standards through satirizing the love affair between Dodge and Jack Reed, both of whom were married at the time to other people. In the play, the male lead, Rex, cannot remain faithful to his lover, Moira, yet expects her to await his return from his latest love affair. This topic points to Boyce’s frustration with the sexual double standard in her own marriage, as well as the hypocrisies practiced by the male members of the Provincetown Players.

The second production was of Enemies (1916) which was a collaboration between Neith Boyce and her husband. Enemies was written as a dialogue between a man and a woman that reflected the then contemporary war between the sexes. Neith Boyce wrote the woman’s lines, and Hutchins Hapgood wrote the man’s. The couple appeared in the play when it premiered in Provincetown. Enemies was one the first plays to be produced for radio.

Both Two Sons and Winter’s Night were produced in 1916, however, a printed version of Winter’s Night was not available until 1928. This published copy of Winter’s Night featured several revisions from the script originally presented in Provincetown. Winter’s Night features a female protagonist who rejects a proposal from her late husband's brother to start a dress-making business. This results in the suitor’s suicide.

Two Women

“WELL, Max, you are as extraordinary as ever, I see," said Mrs. Saville. "May I come in, really? It's all very well to say you're glad to see me, but you don't look it."

Maxine drew back, with a glance at her clay-daubed apron and fingers.

"I'm not fit to see anyone. But if you aren't afraid for your gown——"

"Oh, I'll risk it, if you have a single corner that isn't full of mud-pies and parrots. You may believe I'm going to stay and see you after taking all this trouble to hunt you up. Why haven't you been to see me? Did you get my note?"

"Yes, I got it," said Maxine, closing the door.

Mrs. Saville gathered up her elaborate mauve skirts and crossed the bare floor to the divan, before which lay a Bokhara rug. A tea table and two or three chairs gave a habitable look to this one corner. The rest of the place was a confused litter of plaster casts, clay models, drawings in charcoal and chalk, and queer wooden shapes. An Angora cat sprawled on the rug, between a green-and-gold parrot chained to a perch and a dejected crow in a cage. A beautiful window, in tones of gold and reddish violet, cast a warm light above the woman in mauve and the deep red of the prayer-carpet.

"Go on with your work, Maxine. Pray don't let me interrupt you," said Mrs. Saville ironically. "You must be very busy, indeed, since you couldn't find time to stop at my hotel for ten minutes. I didn't expect any of you to come down and receive me with open arms at the pier; but I must say I didn't look for this sort of a welcome, either!"

"I know; I meant to come; I was going to-morrow."

"Were you, really? And my aunt, am I to have the pleasure of seeing her also?"

"Mother's in the country. She went two weeks ago, to get the house in order. We have asked a lot of people for this next month."

"Well, I suppose I shall have to forgive you—put up with your oddities, just as I used. I don't believe you've worn off any of the angles, Max, in these two years. You've changed, though. Sit down, where I can look at you without breaking my neck. I believe actually you've grown."

"No,", said Maxine. She looked absently about. "Have you had luncheon?" she asked abruptly.

"Luncheon? Why, it's after five o'clock. Haven't you lunched, pray?"

"No, I believe not. I've been hard at work." Maxine opened the door into the corridor and brought in a paper box, which proved to contain two sandwiches, a pickle, and a piece of apple pie. "My usual mid-day meal," she said, lighting the alcohol lamp under the tea kettle.

"It can't be called luxurious," observed Mrs. Saville. "But It's just like you. And this place—what a barn!"

"It's a workshop."

Maxine disappeared behind a screen, and came back without her apron and with clean hands. She brought a damp cloth and threw it over a clay bust, which stood on a pedestal in the middle of the room.

"Oh, is that what you were working on? I want to see it—everything you've done! I hear you are getting on beautifully—having no end of a success!"

"I've done a good many portrait busts," said Maxine indifferently. "It's rather a fad—all the women I know come and order them. Next year I suppose it will be miniatures, and then I shall retire again into my native obscurity. Won't you have a sandwich?"

"No, thank you. Nor tea either—I hate the washy stuff. But why talk in that way? I know you're awfully ambitious—or you used to be. Surely you haven't given up all our grand ideas? And all these things aren't portrait busts?"

"No. But it takes forever to do anything worth while. I'm just pegging away as I have been for four years. It's inglorious and not very interesting. Tell me about yourself."

Maxine rummaged under a heap of illustrated papers at the foot of the divan and extracted a gilt wicker-work box tied up with violet ribbons.

"It's some candy—I never eat it. But you do, if I remember."

"I dearly love it, and this looks good. One of your admirers, I suppose—have you as many as ever? You're even better looking than you used to be. I like your hair brushed straight back that way. I always did admire big women and black hair."

Mrs. Saville herself was small and intentionally blond. Her brown hair, several shades lighter than her eyes, had been artistically touched up. Her delicate color was a little faded. Holding the small gilt tongs daintily in her gloved fingers, she picked out all the sugared cherries from the top of the box and ate them first.

"About myself?" she said, carelessly. "Oh, I've been living in Paris, you know, this last year. And I got homesick. I've come back for a good long rest. Aren't you charmed? I'm going to Boston, to stay with mother. She isn't well."

"You must make us a visit this summer," said Maxine, "when there are some people there to amuse you. Are you as fond as ever of being amused?"

"More so. But somehow I find fewer things amuse me. I suppose it's a sign of advancing age. I can't take as much trouble about people as I used to."

"As you used to?" said her cousin, with a half visible smile. "Was that so much?"

"Well, yes—more than they were worth sometimes. But then I played for the game more than the candle."

A slight awkward pause succeeded Mrs. Saville's words. Maxine's question seemed to give it an intentional emphasis.

"Did George come with you?" she asked. There was something hard in the steady scrutiny of her blue eyes and in her faint smile.

"No, indeed. Didn't I write you that I was alone? George has gone to Greece to write some articles for a London syndicate. He's done nothing but scribble and burrow in blue books for the last year. As though he really cared a cent about English politics!"

"Well, I suppose that's his way of amusing himself," said Maxine, dropping three lumps of sugar in to her cup. "Just as mine is mussing with wet clay and yours——"

"Getting my own way, I suppose. Mine doesn't agree with his, at any rate. Maxine, you and the rest of the family might as well understand it at once—we've agreed to disagree. Think what you please, but don't any of you argue with me—it's all quite settled. I shall have to break it to mother—that will be quite enough without having to convince anyone else."

"So soon?" said Maxine, almost inaudibly, stirring the slice of lemon in her tea round and round.

"Soon? I knew it months ago. You've no idea how quickly one makes up one's mind—to disagree. George and I never could get on—we haven't an idea in common. And the worst of it is, I knew that before I married him."

Mrs. Saville shook the chocolates about in the box and pounced on one here and there.

"You aren't surprised," she said, angrily. "I believe you've been waiting all this time for me to come and tell you!"