Status Updates From Chasing Bright Medusas: A L...

Then death came for her. She suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Edith writes in her memoir: ‘She was never more herself that on the last morning of her life—the morning on April 24, 1947. Her spirit was as high, her grasp of reality as firm as always. And she had kept that warmth of heart, that youthful, fiery generosity which life so often burns out.’

To Will Owen Jones, editor of the Nebraska State Journal, she wrote words the wisdom of which any maturing writer will harken to: ‘As one grows older one cares less about clever writing and more about a simple and faithful representation. But to reach this, one must have gone through the period where one would die, so to speak, for the fine phrase; that is essential to learning one’s business.’

...her disobliging account of a production of Lohengrin [in] Pittsburgh...: ‘Frau Gadski who sings Elsa has a very powerful soprano voice and by some strange mischance was not afflicted with a cold. But dramatically she is totally incompetent and unsatisfactory. To begin with she is enormous in size. Her weight is simply preposterous…Why is it that all Elsas must be robust and matronly and weary to the eye?’