Office Bohemia

Edith Lewis moved to Greenwich Village in 1903 to pursue literary work and Bohemian life. Willa Cather visited her there twice before moving to the Village herself in 1906 to become an editor at McClure’s Magazine, the staff of which Lewis also joined. This chapter argues that Lewis’s editorial collaboration with Cather emerged out of their work at McClure’s. It also argues that when they moved in together in 1908, they followed the example of Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Fields, whom Cather had met while working for McClure’s in Boston. Cather left magazine work to take up full-time authorship, but Lewis continued working at McClure’s and then Every Week. Lewis gave up writing bylined fiction and poetry, but together she and Cather merged pragmatism and idealism, the market and aesthetics.

Kafka’s Strindberg

This chapter, the first of three case studies designed to carry the story of representations of connectivity forward from the moment in the history of literature in English at which Chapter 5 left off, develops its own version of island theory in order to revalue the two novels Strindberg wrote about islands in the Stockholm archipelago, The People of Hemsö (1887) and By the Open Sea (1890). Islands insulate and isolate. They insulate the connectivity which sustains both empire and international trade from social and political circumstance; and, in doing so, isolate their inhabitants. The popularity of local colour writing offers a context for stories of isolation by Strindberg, Lawrence, and Sarah Orne Jewett, as well as for Kafka’s rewriting of aspects of By the Open Sea, a novel he knew well, in The Castle. The chapter concludes by analysing the distribution of the term Verbindung (connection) in The Castle.

Sarah Orne Jewett’s depictions of women in a changing medical profession: Nan Prince and Almira Todd

Sarah Orne Jewett, who lived from 1849 to 1909, witnessed a revolution in medicine that led to the formation of the medical profession as it is recognised today. By comparing two of the author’s works, one written at the outset of her career and the other written much later, this paper discusses how Jewett’s views about women’s role in medicine changed and developed. In the first novel, A Country Doctor, a young Jewett celebrates the new-found power of scientific medicine in the period directly after germ theory was widely adopted. The author depicts a female physician as a pioneer bravely breaking into a male-dominated field. Later, in The Country of the Pointed Firs, Jewett’s depiction of a female medical practitioner is much more nuanced— the matured writer’s views are accompanied by discrete but deep-seated criticisms of medical ideology as she saw it developing. The comparison of these novels gives us insight into Jewett’s world, and leaves questions for readers today. Most importantly, how should women today approach traditional medicine given the discipline’s deeply misogynist roots? Jewett’s unique perspectives serve as a catalyst for this discussion.