Cactus Thorn by Mary Austin

1989 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-176
Author(s):  
Rae G. Ballard
Keyword(s):  
Mary Austin

Yours for the (Marriage) Revolution

2018 ◽  
pp. 248-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donna M. Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Progressive Era ◽  
Gender Inequality ◽  
Sexual Desire ◽  
Jack London ◽  
Mary Austin ◽  
Rational System ◽  
Greenwich Village ◽  
Companionate Marriage ◽  
Scientific Systems ◽  
The Ideal

In 1915, Mary Austin (1868-1934) wrote to her old friend and fellow writer Jack London (1876-1916) to upbraid him for failing to write a novel that truthfully depicted the life of a modern woman, and by extension, companionate marriage. Companionate marriage was a rational system based in idealism, tailor-made for the Progressive Era and for revolutionists such as Austin and London in Greenwich Village, who shared their era’s enthusiasm for scientific systems. Austin and London protested conventional forms of marriage both from the sociological standpoint of its unnecessary conventions and from its failure to account for the irrationality of sexual desire and its dampening effect on genius. Yet their accounts of unconventional unions reveal another set of problems. Pitting conventional marriage against its more revolutionary counterparts, Austin, in A Woman of Genius and Number 26 Jayne Street, and London, in “Planchette” (1908) and Little Lady of the Big House (1916), critique conventional marriage but also cast a cold eye on its Bohemian alternatives, revealing the gap between the ideal and the real in progressive marriage by highlighting the stubborn realities of gender inequality and of the irrational desire, cast in London’s “Planchette” as the supernatural world, that plagued their idealistic efforts.

Mary Austin: The Land of Little Rain

Green Writing ◽  
2000 ◽  
pp. 195-223
Author(s):  
James C. McKusick
Keyword(s):  
Mary Austin

Mary Austin, Stafford Austin, and the Owens Valley

2011 ◽  
Vol 53 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 305-322
Author(s):  
Abraham Hoffman
Keyword(s):  
Owens Valley ◽  
Mary Austin

Stories from the Country of Lost Borders by Mary Austin

1988 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-74
Author(s):  
Thomas W. Ford
Keyword(s):  
Mary Austin
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document