Novelist

Herman Melville, born August 1, 1819, in New York City, was educated at the New York Male High School (1825-29), Grammar School of Columbia College (1829-30), and Albany Academy (1830-31). He entered service in merchant shipping in 1839 and travelled the seas until 1844. This life led him to pen novels of the sea, notably Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (1846), Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas (1847), Mardi: And a Voyage Thither (1849), Redburn: His Voyage (1849), White-Jacket; Or, The World in a Man-of-War (1850), and Moby-Dick: or, The Whale (1851). The public lost interest in his later fiction, although his short-fiction collection The Piazza Tales (1856) held masterpieces like Bartleby the Scrivener. Melville then turned to poetry, his Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, some of the greatest poems about the Civil War, appearing in 1866. During his life as a customs inspector, and up to his death on September 28, 1891, he produced three more volumes of verse. He was survived by Elizabeth née Shaw, his spouse from 1847, two sons and two daughters.

• Collected Poems of Herman Melville. Ed. Howard P. Vincent. Chicago: Packard, 1947. PS 2382 V5 Robarts Library
• The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819-1891. Ed. Jay Leyda. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951. Supplement, New York: Gordian Press, 1969. PS 2386 .L4 Robarts Library
• Melville, Herman. Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. New York: Harper, 1866. B-12/0855 Fisher
• --. Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. 2 vols. New York: Putnam's, 1876.
• --. John Marr and Other Sailors, With Some Sea-Pieces New York: De Vinne, 1888.
• --. Timoleon Etc. New York: Caxton, 1891. PS 2384 .T5 1891A Robarts Library

Charles Dickens was born on Feb. 7, 1812, in Portsea and grew up in Chatham. At twelve years old, his father was jailed for debt, and the entire family suffered poverty and humiliation. Young Dickens began working as a clerk in legal offices and soon, by studying shorthand, became a court reporter, eventually in the House of Commons, for various newspapers including The Morning Chronicle. Then he moved into writing. His first success, Sketches by Boz, followed his marriage on April 2, 1836, to Catherine Hogarth. Dickens wrote some twenty novels between Pickwick Papers in 1836-37 and Our Mutual Friend in 1864-65, many published chapter-by-chapter in monthly journals. These great novels include Oliver Twist (1837-39), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), Christmas Carol (1843), David Copperfield (1849-50), Bleak House (1852-53), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1856-57), Great Expectations (1861), and Tale of Two Cities (1859). Dickens visited Italy in 1844 and the United States and Canada in 1842, and America again in 1867-68. He was a hugely successful dramatic reader of his own works. His poems were entirely incidental to his story-telling. Dickens and his wife separated in 1858 after having ten children. Self-driven and -made, having been weakened by decades of hard work, and rich, Dickens died June 9, 1870, at Gadshill.

• Dickens, Charles. Poems. Ed. Adelaide Anne Proctor. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1858. PR 5191.A1 Robarts Library
• --. The Poems and Verses of Charles Dickens. Ed. F. G. Kitton. London: Chapman and Hall, 1903. Ver 8.90.148 Cambridge University Library. LE D548poK Robarts Library
• Forster, John. The Life of Dickens. Ed. A. J. Hoppé. 2 vols. 1872-74: London: Dent, 1969. PR 4581 .F7 Victoria College Library
• S., L. "Dickens, Charles." The Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. Sir Leslie Stephen and Sir Sidney Lee. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921-22. V: 925-37.

Charles William Shirley Brooks was born on 29 April, 1816 at 52 Doughty Street, London. The son of Elizabeth and William Brooks (an architect), he was articled to his uncle Charles Sabine of Oswestry after receiving his early education. In 1938, he passed the Incorporated Law Society's examination, but there is no record of Brooks becoming a solicitor. Brooks began his writing career in 1842 as a journalist for Ainsworth's Magazine. From 1848 to 1952 he worked as a parliamentary correspondent for the Morning Chronicle. Apart from his journalistic endeavors, Brooks also wrote drama, often quite successfully. His first play, The Creole, or, Love's Fetters, was very well received when it premiered at the Lyceum in 1847. In total, Brooks wrote nine plays, which varied in genre from farce and comedy to drama. During the 1850s and 1860s, while continuing his work for the leading periodicals, Brooks also turned to writing novels. These included Aspen Court: a Story of our Own Time (1855), Gordian Knot (1860) and Sooner or Later (3 vols., 1966-8). Nevertheless, Shirley Brooks is most remembered as a regular contributor to Punch, from 1851 on. His writing was well received, particularly his witty parliamentary commentary. His dedication to the publication allowed Brooks to become editor of the journal in 1870. He continued his work for Punch until his death on 14 march, 1872.

• Boase, G. C. “Brooks, Charles William Shirley (1816-1874).” Rev. H. C. G. Matthew. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004.

Mary Ann Evans was born on Nov. 22, 1819, near Nuneaton, Warwickshire, to Robert Evans and Christiana Pearson. She was educated at Nuneaton and Coventry (1841-). Her first publication was a poem in the Christian Observer (Jan. 1840). After leaving the Church, she moved to London in 1849 and edited The Westminster from 1851 to 1853. From 1854 to his death in 1878, she lived with George Henry Lewes, editor of the Leader, a married man. Under her pen name, George Eliot, beginning in 1857, she published the novels for which she is famous: Scenes from Clerical Life (1857), Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1863), Felix Holt (1866), Middlemarch (1871-72), and Daniel Deronda (1876). Her two books of verse are The Spanish Gipsy (1868) and The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems (1874). After Lewes' death, she married Johnnie Cross on May 6, 1880. Her death followed quickly, on Dec. 22.

• Eliot, George. Collected Poems. Ed. Lucien Jenkins. London: Skoob Books, 1989. PR 4650 A17 1989 Robarts Library
• --. The George Eliot Letters. Ed. Gordon S. Haight. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954-78. 7 vols. PR 4681 .A3H3 Trinity College Library
• --. The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems. Toronto: Adam, Stevenson, 1874. B-12/1065 Fisher Rare Book Library
• --. The Spanish Gypsy; the Legend of Jubal and Other Poems, Old and New. New York Worthington, 1890. PR 4666 S6 1890 Robarts Library
• Haight, Gordon Sherman. George Eliot: a Biography. London, Clarendon P., 1968. PR 4681 .H27 Trinity College Library
• Pangallo, Karen L. George Eliot : a Reference Guide, 1972-1987. Boston, MA: G.K. Hall, 1990. Z 8259 P36 1990 Robarts Library

Born at Poole, Dorset, on January 30, 1837, as Julia Augusta Davies, Augusta Webster spent her young years on the ship Griper, stationed at such places as Banff Castle and Penzance, and then in 1851, at Cambridge. Her education was informal but she studied at the Cambridge School of Art. Thomas Webster and Augusta, who had published a volume of poems in 1860 under a nom-de-plume, Cecil Home, wed in December 1863. A fellow at Trinity College Cambridge who eventually lectured at law there, Thomas moved with Augusta to London in 1870, where he practiced law. Under her married name, she published five volumes of verse in their first seven years of marriage that singled her out as an extraordinary voice in Victorian poetry: Dramatic Studies (1866), A Woman Sold (1867), Portraits(1870), and translations of Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound and Euripides' Medea. Her novels and plays, although successful in her time, are less read to-day. Child-rearing done, Augusta successfully ran in Chelsea for election in the London School Board in 1879 and again, after a term out-of-office when she had gone to Italy for her health, in 1885. She died on September 5, 1894, at 57, survived by her husband and a daughter.

• Bianchi, Petra. "Webster, (Julia) Augusta (1837–1894)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004. Online ed. Ed. Lawrence Goldman. May 2009.
• Brown, Susan. "Economical Representations: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's 'Jenny,' Augusta Webster's 'A Castaway,' and the Campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts." Victorian Review 17 (Summer 1991): 78-95.
• "Home, Cecil." Blanche Lisle, and Other Poems. London: Macmillan, 1860.
• --. Lilian Gray, A Poem. London: Smith, 1864.
• --. Lesley's Guardians. London: Macmillan, 1864. [A novel.]
• Webster, Augusta.
• Augusta Webster: portraits and other poems. Ed. Christine Sutphin. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2000. PR 5766 .W2A6 2000 Robarts Library
• --. The Auspicious Day. London: Macmillan, 1872. [A play.]
• --. A Book of Rhyme. London: Macmillan, 1881.
• --. Daffodil and the Croäxaxicans: A Romance of History. London: Macmillan, 1884. [Children's literature.]
• --. Disguises; A Drama. London: Kegan Paul, 1879. [A play.]
• --. Dramatic Studies. London: Macmillan, 1866.
• --. A Housewife's Opinions. London: Macmillan, 1879. [Essays from The Examiner.]
• --. In a Day: A Drama. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 1882. [A play.]
• --. Mother and Daughter. An Uncompleted Sonnet-Sequence. Ed. William Michael Rossetti. London: Macmillan, 1895.
• --. Parliamentary Franchise for Women Ratepayers. London: John Bale for the Central Committee of the National Society for Women's Suffrage, 1878.
• --. Portraits. London: Macmillan, 1870. Enlarged edn. London: Macmillan, 1893.
• --. Selections from the Verse of Augusta Webster. London: Macmillan, 1893.
• --. The Sentence; A Drama. London: Unwin, 1887. [A play.]
• --. A Woman Sold and Other Poems. London: Macmillan, 1867. British Library 1647.dd.35
• --. Yu-Pe-Ya's Lute. A Chinese Tale in English Verse. London: Macmillan, 1874.
• --, trans. The Medea of Euripides. London, 1868.
• --. The Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus. Ed. Thomas Webster. London: Macmillan, 1866.

William Carlos Williams served as a physician in his home town of Rutherford, New Jersey, from 1910 to 1951, and in hours after work wrote fiction, poetry, plays, and criticism. He was born on September 17, 1883, in Rutherford, educated at Horace Mann School in New York, and from 1902 until 1906 studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, where he met Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle. He interned at the French Hospital and Nursery and Child's Hospital until 1909, and the next year, after studying briefly in Leipzig, touring Europe, and visiting his old friend Pound in London, set up his private medical practice in Rutherford. In 1912 Williams married Florence (Flossie) Herman, who gave birth to their two sons, William Eric in 1914, and Paul in 1916. Over the next seven years, despite the demands of his medical practice and a young family, Williams published four books of verse, Al Que Quiere! (1917), Kora in Hell (1920), Sour Grapes (1921), and Spring and All (1921), that clearly established him as America's foremost modernist poet. Because his poetry was not received warmly at first, he shifted into fiction and plays, but the major work of his life proved to be Paterson, an epic poem published in five volumes from 1946 to 1958. In 1926 he had won an award from The Dial for a poem titled "Paterson," and the theme stuck. Recognition came slowly. The University of Washington at Seattle invited him to be visiting professor of English in 1948, but his 1949 appointment as consultant of poetry at Library of Congress was withdrawn after an investigation into his associations with Ezra Pound, although the appointment was renewed in 1952. In 1950 Williams was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1953 shared the Bollingen Award with Archibald MacLeish. All his life, from his early editing of Contact in 1923, Williams befriended younger poets. The letters to many, such as Denise Levertov, have survived. On March 4, 1963, Williams died in his sleep after years of illness, especially strokes in 1951-52, 1958, and 1961. He was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the Gold Medal for Poetry of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. His volumes of poetry are as follows:

• Williams, William C. Poems (privately printed, 1909)
• Williams, William Carlos. The Tempers (London: Elkin Mathews, 1913).
• --. A Book of Poems: Al Que Quiere! (Boston: The Four Seas Company, 1917). York University Library Special Collections 5773
• --. Sour Grapes: A Book of Poems (Boston: The Four Seas Company, 1921). York University Library Special Collections 4748
• --. Spring and All (1923: New York: Frontier Press, 1970). PS 3545 .I544S7 1970 Victoria College Library
• --. The Cod Head ( Harvest Press, 1932).
• --. An Early Martyr and Other Poems (New York: Alcestis Press, 1935).
• Adam & Eve & the City (Peru, Vermont: Alcestis Press, 1936).
• Complete Collected Poems (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1938) PS 3545 I544 A17 1938 York University Library
• The Broken Span (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941). York University Library Special Collections 4737
• The Wedge (Cummington, Mass.: Cummington Press, 1944).
• Paterson (New York: J. Laughlin, 1963). 5 vols., published separately 1946-58. 811.5 W728pa Trinity College Library
• --. The Clouds (Wells College Press and Cummington Press, 1948)
• --. The Pink Church (Golden Goose Press, 1949). York University Library Special Collections 5832
• The Desert Music, and Other Poems (New York: Random House, 1954). PS 3545 I544D4 Robarts Library
• Journey to Love (New York: Random House, 1955). PS 3545 I544J6 Robarts Library
• --. "The Lost Poems of William Carlos Williams," ed. John C. Thirlwall, in New Directions 16 (1957).
• Pictures from Bruegel, and Other Poems (New York: for J. Laughlin by New Directions, 1962). PS 3545 .I544P45 Trinity College Library

See also

• The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1967). PS 3545 I544Z52 1967B Robarts Library
• The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume I, 1909-1939, ed. A. Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986). PS 3545 I544A17 Robarts Library
• I Wanted to Write a Poem: the Autobiography of the Works of a Poet, ed. Edith Heal (London: Cape, 1967). PS 3545 I544Z52 1967 Robarts Library
• The Letters of Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams, ed. Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1998). PS 3562 .E8876Z49 Robarts Library
• Mariani, Paul. William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981). PS 3545 I544 Z6534 Erindale College Library
• Something to Say: William Carlos Williams on Younger Poets, ed. James E.B. Breslin (New York: New Directions, 1985.). PS 324 W47 1985 Robarts Library
• Wagner, Linda Welshimer. William Carlos Williams: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1978). Z 8976 .44 W27 Robarts Library
• --. "Williams, William Carlos." American National Biography Online. American Council of Learned Societies: Oxford University Press, 2000.
• Wallace, Emily Mitchell. A Bibliography of William Carlos Williams (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968). Z 8976 .44 W3 Robarts Library
• William Carlos Williams reads his poetry (Caedmon TC 1047, 1958). PS 3014 Erindale College Library AUDIOCASS

British-born novelist, children's playwright, and poet, educated in Point Levy, Quebec, and Sarnia, Ontario, where she and her sisters operated a school for ladies, Walker published poetry widely in newspapers on both sides of the border before collecting them in Leaves from the Backwoods in 1861-62. She returned to England to work for her cousin, Margaret Oliphant, a well-known novelist, and edited her Autobiography and Letters in 1899 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1974; PR 5114 A3 Robarts Library), this time under her married name, Mrs. Harry Coghill. She collected her poetic output in Oak and Maple: English and Canadian Verses (London: Kegan Paul, 1890; CIHM microfiche 696 Robarts Library).

• McMullen, Lorraine. "WALKER, ANNA LOUISA (Coghill)." Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online University of Toronto / Université Laval, 2000.

Marge Piercy was born March 31, 1936, in Detroit, of mother Bert Bunnin Piercy and father Robert Douglas Piercy. She was brought up Jewish by her mother and grandmother. In Early Grrrl, Marge Piercy says, "I started writing poetry regularly and seriously when I was fifteen and my family moved into a house larger by far than we had ever lived in. For the first time, I had a room of my own with a door that closed and some measure of privacy. I was upstairs, with the roomers, while my parents were downstairs" (98). A few years later she entered the University of Michigan and earned a B.A. in 1957. An M.A. followed at Northwestern University in 1958. From 1960 to 1962 she taught at Indiana University at Gary, but in 1963 she left teaching for a career as a professional writer of poetry, fiction, drama, and essays. Piercy describes herself as a "foot soldier" in the civil rights movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and from 1965 to 1969 she belonged to Students for a Democratic Society. In SDS, she explains, she "did power structure research and off campus organizing." She suffered a breakdown in her health in 1969 that took her away from the big cities. Out of the stormy sixties emerged a great feminist author who has led by example ever since. From 1968 to the present she has published thirty-six books and has been included in more than two hundred anthologies. Her works have been translated into sixteen languages, including Danish, Dutch, Estonian, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Spanish, and Swedish. She has published dozens of essays and short stories. Piercy has lectured, led workshops, and given readings at about 350 institutions since the late sixties, including the University of Kansas at Lawrence (1971), SUNY Buffalo (1977), the University of Cincinnati (1986), Ohio State University at Columbus (1985), and the University of Michigan (1992). She has been warmly honoured many times: the National Endowment for the Arts (1978), the Carolyn Kizer Poetry Prize (1986, 1990), the Golden Rose Poetry Prize (1990), the May Sarton Award (1991), the Arthur C. Clarke award (1992), the Brit ha-Darot Award, Shalom Center (1992), the Patterson Poetry Prize (1999), and many others. She has served on the board of the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Massachusetts Foundation for Humanities and Public Policy (1986-). She was poetry editor of Tikkun for two years and now edits Lilith. She actively supports women's groups, ecological issues, and no-kill animal shelters. Marge Piercy's novels have elevated the mass fiction market for twenty-five years. Her most important mainstream works include Braided Lives (growing up in the 1950s), Vida (the decline of the anti-war movement), Three Women (about a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter living together), and The Longings of Women (the entwined stories of three women), and historical novels Gone to Soldiers (about World War II) and City of Darkness, City of Life (on the French Revolution). As well, Piercy has three very successful sf novels: Dance the Eagle to Sleep, Woman on the Edge of Time, and He, She, and It. (Connie in Woman is the greatest character in modern sf.) Those who read Piercy are likely to have the fiction of Joanna Russ and Margaret Atwood at hand too. To read Marge Piercy's poems is to hear her speaking voice. She turns "the language of the everyday" into the "organic verse which is the predominant poetic form of our time." She describes herself modestly as addressing people who do not go into bookstores, and also people who do, and as making "poems for specific occasions ... as a useful artisan." She raises no literary walls between herself and her readers, but for all the level talk she seems bigger, mythic in dignity, more than the Marge Piercy who moved to Wellfleet, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod permanently in 1971 and who married her third husband, novelist and dramatist Ira Wood, on June 2, 1982. Today, besides writing, she loves gardening, cooking, reading, talking, and cats. But once we read her poems -- and they have to be read in books, not in isolation -- she becomes a woman with many incarnations in time's landscape: sister, lover, mother, wife, friend, and daughter. Piercy's readers appropriate her. As she says,

... readers will find poems that speak to and for them, will take those poems into their lives and say them to each other and put them up on the bathroom wall and remember bits and pieces of them in stressful or quiet moments. That the poems may give voice to something in the experience of a life has been my intention. To find ourselves spoken for in art gives dignity to our pain, our anger, our lust, our losses. We can hear what we hope for and what we most fear, in the small release of cadenced utterance. We have few rituals that function for us in the ordinary chaos of our lives. (Parti-colored Blocks, 19)

Piercy herself, with the Editor's suggestions, has selected these poems to represent her work from 1968 to 2000. She has also given very helpful bio-bibliographical information and contributed wisely to the commentary. I would like to thank Marge Piercy and her publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, for permission to publish these wonderful poems. I am also grateful to Piercy's assistant, Terry McManus, for help.

Major Writings by Marge Piercy

POEMS

• Piercy, Marge. Breaking Camp. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968. PS 3566 I4B7 Robarts Library
• --. Hard Loving. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1969. PS 3566 I4H3 Robarts Library
• --. 4-Telling [poems with Emmett Jarrett, Dick Lourie, Robert Hershon]. Trumansburg, N.Y.: The Crossing Press, 1971. PS 615 F6 Robarts Library
• --. To Be Of Use. New York: Doubleday, 1973. PS 3566 I4T6 Robarts Library
• --. Living in the Open. New York: Knopf, 1976. PS 3566 I4L5 Robarts Library
• --. The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing. New York: Knopf, 1978. PS 3566 I4T9 Robarts Library
• --. The Moon Is Always Female. New York: Knopf, 1980. PS 3566 I4M6 Robarts Library. See Piercy's Web site also for one poem from this collection: "For the young who want to."
• --. Circles on the Water: Selected Poems of Marge Piercy. New York: Knopf, 1982. PS 3566 I4A6 Robarts Library
• --. Stone, Paper, Knife. New York: Knopf, 1983. PS 3566 I4S76 Robarts Library
• --. My Mother's Body. New York: Knopf, April, 1985. PS 3566 I4M9 Robarts Library
• --. Early Ripening: American Women's Poetry Now [anthology edited with an introduction]. New York: Pandora, 1987. PS 589 E23 1987 Robarts Library
• --. Available Light. New York: Knopf, February, 1988. PS 3566 I4A94 Robarts Library
• --. Mars and her Children. New York: Knopf, April 1992. PS 3566 I4M37 Robarts Library
• --. What are Big Girls Made Of? New York: Knopf, 1997. PS 3566 I4W48 Robarts Library
• --. The Eight Chambers of the Heart. London: Penguin, 1995. PS 3566 I4E53 Robarts Library
• --. Written in Bone: The Early Poems of Marge Piercy. Five Leaves Publications, 1998.
• --. Early Grrrl. Wellfleet, Mass.: Leapfrog Press, 1999. PS 3566 I4E18 Robarts Library. See Piercy's Web site for two poems from this collection: "The name of that country is lonesome" and "The well preserved man."
• --. The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme. Knopf, 1999. PS 3566 I4A94 Robarts Library. See Piercy's Web site for two poems from this collection: "Apple Sauce for Eve" and "Snowflakes, my Mother Called them."

NOVELS

• --. Going Down Fast. New York: Trident, 1969; Fawcett, 1981. PS 3566 I4G8 Robarts Library
• --. Dance the Eagle to Sleep. Garden City: Doubleday, 1970; Fawcett, 1971. PS 3566 I4D3 Robarts Library
• --. Small Changes. New York: Doubleday, 1973; Fawcett, 1974. PS 3566 I4S5 Robarts Library
• --. Woman on the Edge of Time. New York: Knopf, 1976; Fawcett, 1977. PS 3566 I4W6 Robarts Library
• --. The High Cost of Living. New York: Harper and Row, 1978; Fawcett, 1980. PS 3566 I4H4 Robarts Library
• --. Vida. New York: Summit, 1980; Fawcett, 1981. PS 3566 I4V5 Robarts Library
• --. Braided Lives. New York: Summit, 1982; Fawcett/Ballantine, 1983. PS 3566 I4B68 Robarts Library
• --. Fly Away Home. New York: Summit, 1984; Fawcett/Ballantine, 1985. PS 3566 I4F55 Robarts Library
• --. Gone to Soldiers. New York: Summit, 1987, Fawcett/Ballantine, 1988. PS 3566 I4G8 Robarts Library
• --. Summer People. New York: Summit, 1989, Fawcett/Ballantine, 1990. PS 3566 I4S86 Robarts Library
• --. He, She and It. New York: Knopf, 1991, Fawcett/Ballantine, 1993. PS 3566 I4H37 Robarts Library
• --. The Longings of Women. New York: Fawcett, March 1994. PS 3566 I4L66 Robarts Library
• --. City of Darkness, City of Light. New York: Fawcett/Ballantine, 1996. PS 3566 I4C58 Robarts Library
• -- and Ira Wood. Storm Tide. New York: Fawcett/Ballantine, 1998. PS 3566 I4S77 Robarts Library
• --. Three Women. New York: William Morrow, 1999; Harper Mass Market Paperbacks. PS 3566 I4O94 Robarts Library

OTHER GENRES

• Piercy, Marge, and Ira Wood. The Last White Class. Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1979. [play] PS 3566 I4L3 Robarts Library
• --. Parti-colored Blocks for a Quilt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan: Arbor Press, 1982. [essays] PS 3566 I4P3 Robarts Library
• --. The Earth Shines Secretly: A Book of Days. Zoland Books, 1990. [daybook calendar]

MANUSCRIPTS

• The Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library at the University of Michigan holds many of Marge Piercy's manuscripts and memorabilia.

A few Writings about Marge Piercy

For a full listing, see Marge Piercy's Web Site.

• Augustine, Jane. "Piercy, Marge." Contemporary Poets. Ed. James Vinson and D.L. Kirkpatrick. 4th ed. New York: St. Martins Press, 1985.
• Bender, Eleanor. "Marge Piercy's Laying Down the Tower: A Feminist Tarot Reading." In Ways of Knowing. 1984: 101-110.
• ---. "Visions of a Better World: The Poetry of Marge Piercy." In Ways of Knowing. 1984: 1-14.
• Contoski, Victor. "Marge Piercy: A Vision of the Peaceable Kingdom." Modern Poetry Studies 8 (Winter 1977): 205-216.
• Doherty, Patricia. Marge Piercy: An Annotated Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997. Z 8690.2 .D64 1997 Robarts Library
• Jackson, Richard. "Shaping Our Choices," in his Acts of Mind: Conversations with Contemporary Poets (University: University of Alabama Press, 1983).
• Mitchell, Felicia. "Marge Piercy's The Moon Is Always Female: Feminist Text, Great Books Context." Virginia English Bulletin 40.2 (Fall 1990): 34-45.
• Rosenbaum, Jean. "You Are Your Own Magician: A Vision of Integrity in the Poetry of Marge Piercy." Modern Poetry Studies 8 (1977): 193-205.
• Ways of Knowing: Critical Essays on Marge Piercy. Ed. Sue Walker and Eugenie Hamner. Negative Capability Press, 1984.
• Wynn, Edith. "Imagery of Association in the Poetry of Marge Piercy." Publications of the Missouri Philological Association 10 (1985): 57-73.

Rosanna Eleanor Mullins was born in Montreal and educated at the Convent of the Congregation of Notre Dame. She contributed poems, serialized novels, and short stories to the Literary Garland (1847-51) and other journals. She married in 1851 Dr. Jean-Lukin Leprohon and, of their 13 children, eight survived. The two poems in this selection reveal what this marriage meant to her. Later she published the novels for which she is most remembered, The Manor House of de Villerai (1860), Antoinette de Mirecourt (1864), and Armand Durand; or, a Promise Fulfilled (1868). She died September 20, 1879.

David Herbert Lawrence was born on September 11, 1885, in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, to a coal-mining father he could sometimes despise and a mother whom he revered. Later Lawrence wrote about his life with them in Sons and Lovers. After his education, he taught at Eastwood School, and then in Ilkeston, Derbyshire, before obtaining a teaching certificate from Nottingham University College in 1908. He then became junior assistant master at Davidson Road School in Croydon until 1911, when he renounced teaching and determined to live as a writer. Capable of great and stormy loves, especially for his mother and his wife, his works focused candidly on sexual relationships. After breaking up with a succession of women, Jessie Chambers (Miriam in Sons and Lovers), Helen Corke, and his fiancee Louie Burrows, he eloped with a married woman, Frieda von Richthofen Weekley in 1912. They lived an itinerant life for the next eighteen years, visiting for a time Australia, Ceylon, Italy, Mexico, New Mexico (where he was eventually cremated and buried), and Sicily. They married July 13, 1914, and at his death she nursed him. Lawrence is best known as a novelist for works such as The White Peacock (1911), Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), The Lost Girl (1920), Aaron's Rod (1922), Kangaroo (1923), The Plumed Serpent (1926), Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), and The Virgin and the Gypsy (1930). He also published volumes of short stories, plays, travel stretches, and critical books such as Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious (1921), Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), and Pornography and Obscenity (1929). His paintings were exhibited in London in 1929. After many years fighting tuberculosis, Lawrence died on March 2, 1930, in Vence, France. Lawrence's novels, or his short stories, or even his 5,000 letters would have been enough, individually, to establish him as a great twentieth-century writer, but he also wrote astonishing poetry. It was a passion that charted his life. His complete verse, superbly edited by Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren Roberts, offers nearly 1,100 poems. Works like "Piano," the Tortoise poems, "Snake," "The Ship of Death," and "Wages" deserve the widest possible readership. Lawrence's published books of poetry are

• Love Poems and Others. London: Duckworth, 1913. LE L4195kq Fisher Library
• Amores. London: Duckworth, 1916. PR 6023 A93A7 Robarts Library
• Look! We Have Come Through! London: Chatto & Windus, 1917. PR 6023 A93L6 Robarts Library
• New Poems. London: Martin Secker, 1918. Pr 6023 A93N4 Robarts Library
• Bay. Westminster: Cyril W. Beaumont, 1919. dun L397 B39 1919 Fisher Library
• Tortoises. New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1921. PR 6023 A93 T6 1921 Robarts Library
• Birds, Beasts, and Flowers. New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923. PR 6023 A93B5 1923 Robarts Library
• The Augustan Books of English Poetry. Second Series, Number Twenty-two. D. H. Lawrence. London: Ernest Benn, 1928. dun pam L397 A155 1934a Fisher Library
• The Collected Poems of D. H. Lawrence, 2 vols. London: Martin Secker, 1928. PR 6023 A93A17 1929 Robarts Library.
• Pansies: Poems. London: Martin Secker, 1929. PR 6023 A93P3 Robarts Library
• Nettles. London: Faber & Faber, 1930. dun L397 N48 1930a Fisher Library
• Last Poems. Ed. Richard Aldington and Giuseppe Orioli. Florence: G. Orioli, 1932. PR 6023 A93A17 Robarts Library
• Fire and Other Poems. Foreword by Robinson Jeffers, note by Frieda Lawrence. [San Francisco:] Grabhorn Press for the Book Club of California, 1940. dun L397 F572 1940 Fisher Library.
• The Complete Poems. Ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts. 1964: Penguin, 1993. PR 6023 A93A17 1964 Robarts Library

Essential books on Lawrence and his poetry include

• Ellis, David. D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922-1930. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. PR 6023 A93 Z62617 Robarts Library
• Gilbert, Sandra M. Arts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence. 2nd edn. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990. PR 6023 A93 Z62944 1990 Robarts Library.
• Kinkead-Weekes, Mark. D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile 1912-1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. PR 6023 A93Z6379 Robarts Library.
• The Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Ed. James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979-. 7 vols. dun l397 a17 1979s Fisher Library
• Moore, Harry Thornton. The Priest of Love: A Life of D. H. Lawrence. Rev. edn. New York: Ferrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1974. PR 6023 A93Z688 Robarts Library
• Roberts, Warren. A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.Z 8490.5 R63 1982 Robarts Library