Bronte Wilde: A novel

by Fanny Howe

An early novel by the distinguished American writer Fanny Howe, recently revised, Bronte Wilde , set against the background of the emerging counter-culture of the early 1960s, is the tragic tale of a dispossessed young woman, in thrall to a childhood friend, who flees from the East to the West coast of the USA in a vain bid to reinvent herself. Fanny Howe, acclaimed as a poet and novelist, was born in Buffalo, NY, and brought up in Boston. For some years she was professor of literature at the University of California, San Diego, and later visiting writer/lecturer at various colleges in the USA and Ireland. She was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001 and 2005, and for the Man Booker International Prize in 2015. She has won the National Poetry Foundation Award (twice) and the American Book Award for Fiction, among others.

Genres: Fiction

153 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Fanny Quincy Howe was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. She was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Howe wrote more than 20 books of poetry and prose. Her major works include poetry such as One Crossed Out, Gone, and Second Childhood; the novels Nod, The Deep North, and Indivisible; and collected essays such as The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life and The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation.
Howe received praise and official recognition: she was awarded the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize by the Poetry Foundation. She also received the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California. In addition, her Selected Poems received the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for the most outstanding book of poetry published in 2000. She was a finalist for the 2015 International Booker Prize. She also received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Arts Council, and the Village Voice. She was professor of writing and literature at the University of California, San Diego and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[rndgmoat · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's books like this that drive compulsive bibliophila (if that's a real word). Because no matter how many books you hoard, no matter how many books you add to your to-read list, and no matter how long your library check-out slip, there's always some unknown treasure awaiting you somewhere you haven't even thought to look. This book was a total surprise, a random library find that came close to being a lost classic.

Let's start with outside appearances--if this vintage and totally great cover (the artwork! the font!) doesn't suck you in, I guess you and I have vastly different tastes in books. Inside, we find a surprisingly eccentric story, probably one of the most interesting coming of age tales I have ever encountered.

Mary Casement is adopted (legally?) under mysterious circumstances by a husband and wife who are members of Boston's intellectual upper-class. Loving but aloof, they allow Mary to be independent, almost to a fault. Her mother, a prominent psychologist (or is it psychiatrist--I can never remember which is which) eventually introduces Mary to one of her patients, the beautiful Honey Figgis. Perhaps hoping the pair will become friends, this somewhat dubious combination of the personal and professional has lifelong ramifications for Mary. Mary becomes obsessed with Honey, who we soon learn is a lot more disturbed than initially expected. Eventually, however, Honey abandons Mary to run off to Europe (at the age of 15) with Mary's piano teacher. Following a series of other dramatic occurrences in Mary's life, including a hurricane, Mary changes her name to Bronte Wilde and flees the east coast for the California of the 1960s. However, one's past is not so easily escaped; after a series of interesting love affairs, Mary eventually finds herself coming full circle.

To say more would spoil the plot, which is unpredictable but enjoyable, filled with scenes from Mary's cross-country journey and entry into a vividly realized and lightly satiric imagining of life on the "left coast" in the late 60s. Overall, I really enjoyed this book. Howe writes with a fair degree of economy that recalls Vonnegut and other writers of the era but also peppers the prose with delightfully obscure poetic imagery. The book is a great variant on the coming of age tale, replete with lots of historically interesting period detail.

If I had to say why this book is not the lost classic I thought it was, it would have to be the extreme shift in style toward the end of the book. Howe deliberately cuts the reader off at the knees, and serves up a series of disturbing vignettes about (perhaps?) Mary's future, or maybe just her imagined vision thereof. While these sections were great pieces of prose, they yanked me right out of the story and uprooted my understanding of what I was reading. To be frank, I'm no longer sure *what* I read. The reader is then returned back to the previous style, without comment or elaboration. A quirk of the freewheeling, anything goes 70s style? IDK. I see that the author did eventually reissue a revised edition; I would be intrigued to know if these passages are more fully integrated into the narrative this time around.

However, on the whole I really enjoyed this and thought it was a pleasant surprise. While I had never heard of Fanny Howe before being tempted to pick this one up, I'm definitely interested to check out some of her other works now. If you like 1970s literary fiction like early Margaret Atwood, this is a strong entry for you to check out.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heaven, I tell you, I began in those twenty-four hours to become all of a piece. The location of history may be in my cells, but the individual soul lives across space, skinless and free. Gaudy wings of the angelic orders must transport us in some way.
First you have to try on the colors and then you have to let them go and be a blend, a conjunction.
You speed across time and years and still remain a fixed entity. Far below are the bodies of your identities, they are not the same. But like a miniscule stack of clothing.
All along I had the question backwards. Did anyone love me? It should have been, Did I love anyone? Yes, I loved five. I loved Henry and Alice and Heaven and Honey and Sal. Not one of us was related by blood to the other. Why did I judge them so harshly? Why couldn't I have cried out to them: Love me, oh Love Whom I love!

That's what you cry when you find there's no fracture in the grammar of heart and mind. That's what the dying cry. I think every person is a perfect creation. Selfish and in agony that person still persists in its integrity.




*

[Delia Rainey · Rating 5 out of 5]

fanny howe’s “indivisible” is one of my favorite books, and “bronte wilde” is an excellent precursor. howe’s writing is always painfully relatable, about being in a caretaking female role like a chosen spiritual task, and bound to love unstable electric people. the question of reciprocal love and care is abound, and the main character mary, or bronte, is constantly wondering if she exists, overshadowed by her narcissistic mentally unwell best friend honey, and chasing her first love, heaven, who cares for her on the train journey to escape the chains of childhood. like all of howe’s work, class awareness and worker’s rights and questions of protest and feminist issues are the threaded between it all. the city of boston is a boomerang of pain.

i truly believe fanny howe holds the secrets to the universe sometimes.

“Mercy is a cruel word; you have to beg for it. Justice is quite different, an achievement to be pursued. When I asked the universe for mercy, then, I knew I was a slave to love.”

“The location of history may be in my cells but the individual soul lives across space, skinless and free.”

[Cassie · Rating 5 out of 5]

“You must always be prepared for changes in your character, Dearly Beloved, just as you must always be prepared for violence. Possibilities come, like the waves on the sea, in regular patterns. You are given a third chance, a fourth chance, and endless more, to change your life; but you must be on guard or you’ll let the chances slip by.”