What do you think?
Rate this book
Escapade
In 1913, at the age of nineteen, Elsie Dunn- later to be known as Evelyn Scott- turned her back on the genteel Southern world she was born into and ran off to Brazil with a married Tulane University dean more than twice her age. Living in tropical exile under assumed names, the couple produced a son and endured a grueling series of hardships and failures that would provide Evelyn Scott with the raw material for a singular work of fictionalized autobiography. That work, published in 1923 amid expressions of mingled outrage and admiration from the critical establishment, was Escapade.This new edition is enhanced by a thoughtful and appreciative critical afterword by Dorothy M. Scura that illuminates both the structure of the book and the beauty of its language while placing Scott within the continuum of feminist writers.
- GenresMemoirBiography Memoir
321 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1923
3 people are currently reading
210 people want to read
About the author
Evelyn Scott
43 books17 followersEvelyn Scott was an American novelist, playwright and poet. A modernist and experimental writer, Scott "was a significant literary figure in the 1920s and 1930s, but she eventually sank into critical oblivion.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
May 5, 2015
She died penniless in a New York Slum in 1963 and was buried in an unmarked grave. That is just fucking ridiculous.
Fans of Kavan, Lispector etc should track down a copy of this one in particular.
A couple of quotes from Escapade:
"Crowds, crowds, and the babel of voices. Let men, rushing after themselves, trample between my breasts. I will slip away into passive stillness. Because I am utterly abandoned to life I believe I cannot be taken. When there is a kiss upon my mouth there is a colder kiss upon my heart. I feel wide like a field, sown with the seeds of pain. I bloom unseen to myself. And I wonder if all these emotions are utterly absurd."
"To have one’s individuality completely ignored is like being pushed quite out of life. Like being blown out as one blows out a light."
Excellent stuff, once again. Suffers occasionally from the usual issues with first person narratives of this type, but certainly pulls it off (and the ending is nuts)...
A bio and some more info about Evelyn Scott - a forgotten modernist genius you really need to be reading:
http://www.mtsu.edu/tnlitproj/TLP_Web...
Some lovely contemporary reviews from male critics:
"Her outlook is certainly abnormal and her mind […] has the appearance of a sick mind, we feel certain that no scientist nor physician would be much at a loss where to place such tendencies”
"It is gruesome and unrelieved, and much of it is undeniably distasteful. Its significance for any large number of people we doubt”
"the reader is simply subjected to obstetrical woes"
"Mrs. S’s view of the world will isolate itself from general experience and become a ‘case’—a pathological case at that."
"In short, the book is diseased”
"It should never have been published in its present unhealthy form. The author’s mind is morbid […]. The world she sees is unnatural, […] a mirror distorted by her own pathology."
"“We are instructed in the pangs of childbirth, endure an ensuing obstetrical operation from which no details are spared. We weary of Evelyn Scott’s reiterated allusions to the contours and habits of her body."
That's right. Lock that damn woman up in a mental institution. How dare she write about her body or her emotions? How dare she write about childbirth in anything other than sanctified terms? For god's sake, we need at least some references to the Virgin Mary when talking about having a baby (if only all women could be both virgins and mothers!) - I don't want to hear that it hurts. Now shut up, put down that damn pen and make me a cup of tea.
Fans of Kavan, Lispector etc should track down a copy of this one in particular.
A couple of quotes from Escapade:
"Crowds, crowds, and the babel of voices. Let men, rushing after themselves, trample between my breasts. I will slip away into passive stillness. Because I am utterly abandoned to life I believe I cannot be taken. When there is a kiss upon my mouth there is a colder kiss upon my heart. I feel wide like a field, sown with the seeds of pain. I bloom unseen to myself. And I wonder if all these emotions are utterly absurd."
"To have one’s individuality completely ignored is like being pushed quite out of life. Like being blown out as one blows out a light."
Excellent stuff, once again. Suffers occasionally from the usual issues with first person narratives of this type, but certainly pulls it off (and the ending is nuts)...
A bio and some more info about Evelyn Scott - a forgotten modernist genius you really need to be reading:
http://www.mtsu.edu/tnlitproj/TLP_Web...
Some lovely contemporary reviews from male critics:
"Her outlook is certainly abnormal and her mind […] has the appearance of a sick mind, we feel certain that no scientist nor physician would be much at a loss where to place such tendencies”
"It is gruesome and unrelieved, and much of it is undeniably distasteful. Its significance for any large number of people we doubt”
"the reader is simply subjected to obstetrical woes"
"Mrs. S’s view of the world will isolate itself from general experience and become a ‘case’—a pathological case at that."
"In short, the book is diseased”
"It should never have been published in its present unhealthy form. The author’s mind is morbid […]. The world she sees is unnatural, […] a mirror distorted by her own pathology."
"“We are instructed in the pangs of childbirth, endure an ensuing obstetrical operation from which no details are spared. We weary of Evelyn Scott’s reiterated allusions to the contours and habits of her body."
That's right. Lock that damn woman up in a mental institution. How dare she write about her body or her emotions? How dare she write about childbirth in anything other than sanctified terms? For god's sake, we need at least some references to the Virgin Mary when talking about having a baby (if only all women could be both virgins and mothers!) - I don't want to hear that it hurts. Now shut up, put down that damn pen and make me a cup of tea.
September 26, 2025
I wanted to be a writer but I had nothing to write about. The world was a field of light and I was a ghost.Whenever I feel my faith in truly transcendent literature faltering, I often turn to modernist woman writers, in this case Evelyn Scott—a bright star since largely faded from literary history through a combination of bad luck, poor health, and likely some crucial bridge burning. Despite her early days of hobnobbing and corresponding with literary and cultural elites of early 20th century America and beyond, Scott would eventually sink into obscurity by the end of her life. While some of her work has been reissued, much of it still remains out of print (including some of those reissues). This book (available through the Internet Archive)* is her fictionalized memoir of life with her (technically) bigamist husband and young son as exiles in Brazil. Having run afoul of the U.S. Mann Act, which the husband’s wife threatened to use against them after she found out he was cheating on her with Evelyn, they took on assumed names and fled to South America in the wake of growing publicity over the scandal. Though the Mann Act was chiefly intended to crack down on prostitution and sexual trafficking, the ambiguous language around ‘immorality’ also led to its use in prosecuting adulterers. What follows the couple's elopement is an increasingly desperate tale of illness, poverty, and interpersonal discord. After giving birth, Evelyn develops complications that, due in part to the couple’s inability to return home, are never fully resolved, leaving her in a chronically ill state. Then John, Evelyn’s husband, loses his job, which, although it required significant travel around the country, had provided them with enough funds to eke out an existence. Soon, Evelyn’s aunt Nannette arrives, recently divorced, adding additional financial burden to the household. The family ends up moving further into the remote countryside onto land that John manages to acquire and hopes to farm. Their situation slides from bad to worse as they attempt to raise sheep while living in a squalid, rat-infested dirt-floor hut.
Scott’s writing veers between diaristic accounts of daily life and interactions with native people, some of whom are in the couple’s employ, and deeply poetic passages describing her inner life, dreams, and wonders of the natural world around her. Evelyn’s narration is frank throughout: she does not try to hide her disdain for how some of the locals live or her conflicted feelings toward Nannette as the woman’s mental health declines in the face of an existence she never could have imagined for herself. Major themes include living with chronic illness, life and identity as an exile, women’s agency and gender roles, machismo culture, classism and imperialist thinking, and intercultural barriers. It is a consistently engrossing read; however, the last section of the book (Part VII) is a rather bizarre appendage to a book that quite satisfactorily could have ended with the close of Part V. Scott referred to it as a ‘shadow play’, and it reads like a satirical comedy of manners surrounding a dinner party. In her dissertation for a philosophy doctorate at University of Memphis, April Lenoir discusses how the shadow play reflects Scott’s negative feelings toward the Southern upper class and their piousness, specifically with regard to how those people had condemned her for her affair, leading to her exile in Brazil. Though this conclusion was clearly important to Scott, I did find it disturbed the continuity of the book, while not effacing its strength.
*The EPUB file is auto-generated and so contains formatting and spelling issues, though nothing too egregious.
December 29, 2024
No puedo explicar por qué me gustó esta novela que ficcionaliza la verdadera vida de la autora, quien tras liarse con un hombre casado huyó con él a Brasil y se trasladaron de pueblo en pueblo hasta terminar casi en la selva, apenas con lo suficiente para sobrevivir.
La novela es una "corriente de conciencia", una serie de imágenes, ideas y escenas apenas unidas cronológicamente. Al final es la narración de una mujer que cada vez se siente más sola y abandonada (además de que enferma al dar a luz), rodeada de gente extraña, una madre que va perdiendo la cabeza y un "marido" que no le ofrece todo el cariño que ella espera.
Eso sí, la última parte no tiene sentido. No sé a qué viene. Académicos han intentado explicar por qué la escribió y yo no soy lo suficientemente lista para intentar dar una explicación.
La novela es una "corriente de conciencia", una serie de imágenes, ideas y escenas apenas unidas cronológicamente. Al final es la narración de una mujer que cada vez se siente más sola y abandonada (además de que enferma al dar a luz), rodeada de gente extraña, una madre que va perdiendo la cabeza y un "marido" que no le ofrece todo el cariño que ella espera.
Eso sí, la última parte no tiene sentido. No sé a qué viene. Académicos han intentado explicar por qué la escribió y yo no soy lo suficientemente lista para intentar dar una explicación.
March 22, 2024
Evelyn Scott, seudónimo de la novelista, dramaturga y poeta estadounidense Elsie Dunn, tuvo una vida turbulenta digna de la mejor de las novelas. En 1913, con veinte años, huyó con su amante que le doblaba la edad, casado y con hijos. Dejando su acomodada vida, se aventuraron en una odisea geográfica por el Brasil de la época, una persecución judicial y escándalo social, que los llevó a un viaje sin retorno de años.
Escapada, es la recreación literaria de esta huída. Una novela autobiográfica a modo de diario, donde la autora refleja en primera persona, sus más íntimas reflexiones y sentimientos sobre los acontecimientos del día a día. La culpabilidad, las dudas, el arrepentimiento, conviven con el dolor físico por los problemas de salud, las penurias económicas y la soledad, recreando un texto sumamente intimista y lírico. La capacidad de Evelyn para dar belleza a las escenas más duras y grotescas es maravillosa, una narradora exquisita.
Bajo su atenta mirada, la obra se convierte también en un durísimo viaje por el Brasil más tradicional de los años 20. Un país empobrecido, humilde y anclado en las viejas creencias y costumbres, que chocará frontalmente con una Evelyn moderna y abierta. Y es que, publicada en 1923, la novela fue brutalmente atacada, tanto por la relación adúltera que refleja, como por su lenguaje transgresor, llegando a ser censurada por su abierta mención a la sexualidad y al cuerpo femenino. En plena efervescencia del nuevo siglo, un texto de estas características escrito por una mujer era inaceptable.
Una novela reposada, muy descriptiva, cargada de emociones, con poca acción y apenas diálogo, donde prima más la forma que el contenido. Es por ello que me ha resultado tediosa por partes y me ha costado entrar de lleno en su estilo. Aunque he disfrutado de su riqueza narrativa en diversos momentos, en conjunto esta novela no ha sido para mí. Ya nada que decir del capítulo final, cúlmen del modernismo que destilaba la autora. Un capítulo muy experimental que me ha dejado ojiplática, totalmente ajeno a la obra y con una carga simbólica que siento no haber podido captar. Una novela exigente y muy particular, que no deja indiferente.
Escapada, es la recreación literaria de esta huída. Una novela autobiográfica a modo de diario, donde la autora refleja en primera persona, sus más íntimas reflexiones y sentimientos sobre los acontecimientos del día a día. La culpabilidad, las dudas, el arrepentimiento, conviven con el dolor físico por los problemas de salud, las penurias económicas y la soledad, recreando un texto sumamente intimista y lírico. La capacidad de Evelyn para dar belleza a las escenas más duras y grotescas es maravillosa, una narradora exquisita.
Bajo su atenta mirada, la obra se convierte también en un durísimo viaje por el Brasil más tradicional de los años 20. Un país empobrecido, humilde y anclado en las viejas creencias y costumbres, que chocará frontalmente con una Evelyn moderna y abierta. Y es que, publicada en 1923, la novela fue brutalmente atacada, tanto por la relación adúltera que refleja, como por su lenguaje transgresor, llegando a ser censurada por su abierta mención a la sexualidad y al cuerpo femenino. En plena efervescencia del nuevo siglo, un texto de estas características escrito por una mujer era inaceptable.
Una novela reposada, muy descriptiva, cargada de emociones, con poca acción y apenas diálogo, donde prima más la forma que el contenido. Es por ello que me ha resultado tediosa por partes y me ha costado entrar de lleno en su estilo. Aunque he disfrutado de su riqueza narrativa en diversos momentos, en conjunto esta novela no ha sido para mí. Ya nada que decir del capítulo final, cúlmen del modernismo que destilaba la autora. Un capítulo muy experimental que me ha dejado ojiplática, totalmente ajeno a la obra y con una carga simbólica que siento no haber podido captar. Una novela exigente y muy particular, que no deja indiferente.
February 12, 2022
Working through reading all her stuff, I liked this. Almost a study on how to describe a landscape. The last chapter is a mystery, she thought very highly of it though, somewhat of a failure in this regard. Well worth the time.
Read
December 8, 2023Evelyn Scott is a little lost to the ages, but might be making a comeback in awareness/popularity. She a very well known novel called The Wave, which takes place during the Civil War (I haven't read it, but I am hoping it's much better than that other very well known Civil War novel at the same time), and a few memoir books.
This book was written when she was about 30, and several years after the events in it happened. When she was 19, she ran off to Brazil with a married college professor and lived a much less privileged (but still pretty life) in Brazil. She's becomes pregnant and the whole thing is really fascinating and harrowing. It's not a misery-laden book, but there's a lot of struggle and pain in the book. It's also interesting because it's both mired in self-criticism and doubt, but also defiant of those censures as well. Like a few other very popular memoirs of that moment (I am most thinking about Robert Graves's Good Bye to All That) it goes there in a way that I otherwise wouldn't guess a book would.
This book was written when she was about 30, and several years after the events in it happened. When she was 19, she ran off to Brazil with a married college professor and lived a much less privileged (but still pretty life) in Brazil. She's becomes pregnant and the whole thing is really fascinating and harrowing. It's not a misery-laden book, but there's a lot of struggle and pain in the book. It's also interesting because it's both mired in self-criticism and doubt, but also defiant of those censures as well. Like a few other very popular memoirs of that moment (I am most thinking about Robert Graves's Good Bye to All That) it goes there in a way that I otherwise wouldn't guess a book would.
April 5, 2025
Es su historia.
Lo inmoral y escandoloso en su época, los años 20, del siglo pasado.
Contra lo convencional, esta joven mujer, de veinte años, abandonó su cómodo hogar de Nueva Orleans con su amante, mayor, casado y con hijos.
La esposa del amante le persigue judicialmente, la prensa da voz al escándalo, su madre es víctima del dolor del escarnio.
Viajamos con ellos ya en Brasil, con dineros escasos, en su vertiente más mísera y pobre, de pueblo en pueblo, en barco, en tren, hoteles con cucarachas, casas con agujeros y ratas.
La autora nos llena los sentidos con sus palabras, en las que la ambientación es también una gran protagonista. Es una buena narradora, muy detallista, muy observadora.
El intenso cielo azul, la llegada de una lluvia, el movimiento de las palmeras con el viento.
Ella es compleja, yo muchas veces no consigo entender sus reflexiones, a ratos me parecen hasta ilógicas. Llama la atención lo opuesta que es a todo lo que le rodea.
Me da la sensación de que es un pez fuera del agua, vanidosa, enferma, dolorida, con problemas económicos, con una mente muy perceptiva.
Novel intimista, introspectiva, individualista, pero a la vez muy sensorial, descriptiva, olemos los colores amazónicos y vemos los olores de la selva.
Lectura exigente, de una autora avanzada a su época.
Lo inmoral y escandoloso en su época, los años 20, del siglo pasado.
Contra lo convencional, esta joven mujer, de veinte años, abandonó su cómodo hogar de Nueva Orleans con su amante, mayor, casado y con hijos.
La esposa del amante le persigue judicialmente, la prensa da voz al escándalo, su madre es víctima del dolor del escarnio.
Viajamos con ellos ya en Brasil, con dineros escasos, en su vertiente más mísera y pobre, de pueblo en pueblo, en barco, en tren, hoteles con cucarachas, casas con agujeros y ratas.
La autora nos llena los sentidos con sus palabras, en las que la ambientación es también una gran protagonista. Es una buena narradora, muy detallista, muy observadora.
El intenso cielo azul, la llegada de una lluvia, el movimiento de las palmeras con el viento.
Ella es compleja, yo muchas veces no consigo entender sus reflexiones, a ratos me parecen hasta ilógicas. Llama la atención lo opuesta que es a todo lo que le rodea.
Me da la sensación de que es un pez fuera del agua, vanidosa, enferma, dolorida, con problemas económicos, con una mente muy perceptiva.
Novel intimista, introspectiva, individualista, pero a la vez muy sensorial, descriptiva, olemos los colores amazónicos y vemos los olores de la selva.
Lectura exigente, de una autora avanzada a su época.
August 10, 2022
This is one crazy book! The prose is unbelievably flamboyant but it draws you in and holds you breathless with the sheer poetry of it.
Evelyn Scott was from my state. I'd read about her in a newspaper article while in my 20s and bought a used copy of this book several years ago. She was quite a character herself so of course the people who dwell in her story are larger than life. It is autobiographical but some events seem very hard to think of as real.
If you're looking for something over the top and brilliantly colorful this book will fill the bill!
Evelyn Scott was from my state. I'd read about her in a newspaper article while in my 20s and bought a used copy of this book several years ago. She was quite a character herself so of course the people who dwell in her story are larger than life. It is autobiographical but some events seem very hard to think of as real.
If you're looking for something over the top and brilliantly colorful this book will fill the bill!
August 21, 2023
4.5/5 - exquisite prose
September 4, 2024
It definitely has its lulls, but Escapade is a harrowing, feminist-fueled adventure that is at its best when it reads like Scott's diary, chronicling her gritty experiences living in exile.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews