Jean Stafford
Born - July 1, 1915 - Covina, California
Married 1940 to 1948 to Robert Lowell . One of three marriages.
She published three novels but most now regarded for her wonderful short stories, most of which were published in The New Yorker or The Psrtisian Review as her Glory.
1970 - Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Died - March 26, 1979 - White Plains, New York
Today's story, "The Echo and the Nemesis" is a delightful story. I am quickly becoming enraptured by Stafford's exquisite prose, the brilliant way she incorporates her characters reading life into the stories.
I do not want to give away much of the extraordinary plot of this story. It is set in the late 1930s in Heidelberg, Germany:
"Sue Ledbetter and Ramona Dunn became friends through the commonplace accident of their sitting side by side in a philosophy lecture three afternoons a week. There were many other American students at Heidelberg University that winter— the last before the war— but neither Sue nor Ramona had taken up with them."
The relationship of Sue and Ramona is complex, sometimes seeming like just a convenience, sometimes the core of their lives.
"Soon after the semester opened in October, the two girls fell into the habit of drinking their afternoon coffee together on the days they met in class. Neither of them especially enjoyed the other’s company, but in their different ways they were lonely, and as Ramona once remarked, in her highfalutin way, “From time to time, I need a rest from the exercitation of my intellect.” She was very vain of her intellect, which she had directed to the study of philology, to the exclusion of almost everything else in the world. Sue, while she had always taken her work seriously, longed also for beaux and parties, and conversation about them, and she was often bored by Ramona’s talk, obscurely gossipy, of the vagaries of certain Old High Franconian verbs when they encountered the High German consonant shift, or of the variant readings of passages in Layamon’s Brut, or the linguistic influence Eleanor of Aquitaine had exerted on the English court. But because she was wellmannered she listened politely and even appeared to follow Ramona’s exuberant elucidation on Sanskrit."
Ramona comes from a very wealthy family. She is obsessed by food and extremely heavy. We gradually learn about her parents, brothers and twin sisters.
1 comment:
Phew, what a ride: this story!
But this sentence reminded me of Mavis Gallant and her girl in The Other Paris, similarly disappointed and disillusioned:
"Sometimes Sue, befuddled by the uproar, wanted by turns to laugh and to cry with disappointment, for this was not at all the way she had imagined that she would live in Europe."
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