Everyone loves a great love story. While we wish for happily ever after in fiction and life and rom-coms, convoluted love makes for more interesting reading. When it came to literary couples, few have lived up to the romantic true story of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. Even that one wasn’t smooth sailing — after they eloped, Elizabeth’s disapproving father disowned her.
Let’s look at two real-life and two fictional love stories that illustrate just how complicated humans can be when it comes to matters of the heart. Following are the first few paragraphs of these long posts, from which you can easily hop to the rest on the Literary Ladies site.
The Tumultuous Marriage of Martha Gellhorn & Ernest Hemingway
Photo source: Corbis
The esteemed war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway’s third wife, famously said, “Why should I be a footnote to somebody else’s life?”
She dreaded being remembered mainly for her doomed marriage to the iconic American author. Hemingway and Gellhorn encouraged each other, supported each other, and once they separated, refused to speak of each other.
It all began when one evening, close to Christmas 1936, the young journalist and writer Martha Gellhorn went to a Key West for a drink. She was with her mother, Edna, and younger brother Alfred, taking a break in the winter sun.
The bar was Sloppy Joe’s, and there Martha noticed “a large, dirty man in untidy somewhat soiled white shorts and shirt,” sitting in a corner, drinking and reading his mail.
The man was Ernest Hemingway, and this inauspicious meeting was the start of a relationship that lasted almost ten years. Culminating in a disastrous four-year marriage, their partnership is (in)famous for its volatility, hard drinking, and occasional violence.
But there were also times of love, happiness, and hard work in writing. The tempestuous dynamic between these two enormous literary talents continues to fascinate to this day.
Read the rest of this post, contributed by Elodie Barnes.
Catherine and Heathcliff: Extreme Love in Wuthering Heights
This post is by my son, Evan Atlas, a philosophical writer — join him here on Substack, and see some of his articles.
Catherine and Heathcliff in the story of Wuthering Heights (1847), the only novel by Emily Brontë, are unhesitatingly certain of their soul connection.
I’d venture to guess that some people who say they have identified their twin flame are experiencing some kind of unhealthy, obsessive, and delusional form of love.
However, some of them may be experiencing something closer to amigeist — an intense, perhaps spiritual, bond which tends towards the exaltation of all. There is an undecidability here which gives love both its healing touch and jagged edge.
Catherine: “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
What do we say about it from the outside? Such cases inspire or forewarn us, depending who you ask. Other characters in the novel express their own concerns.
Nelly: “The two, to a cool spectator, made a strange and fearful picture.”
Emily Brontë’s depiction of Catherine and Heathcliff has much in common with the themes of limerence, amigeist, twin flames, and extreme love in general.
It might be up to the reader to decide for themselves which of these phenomena best describes these lovers. And, as we’ve done so far, we should look at this story and the twin flame idea as opportunities for reflections on the metaphysics of love.
Read the rest of this post, contributed by Evan Atlas.
The Tragic Relationship of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
This is the most widely viewed post on the Literary Ladies Guide site. By far. It was written by my first official undergrad intern in 2018, neither of us imagining its staying power hundreds of thousands of views later. Sylvia Plath (1932 – 1963) is frozen in time as a brilliant thirty-year-old poet. Had she lived to a ripe old age, she would have been 92 this year!
Many of the truths behind her final years were exposed after her death, discovered in letters revealing the dark secrets of her tragic relationship with Ted Hughes.
Attractive, smart, and ambitious, Sylvia Plath seemed to have what it took to succeed. Journal entries in her diary, written while she seemed to be thriving at Smith College, revealed how much she was struggling.
When Sylvia Plath met Ted Hughes
Plath first met fellow poet Ted Hughes on February 25, 1956, at a party in Cambridge, England. Talk about a whirlwind — they married on June 16, 1956, and honeymooned in Benidorm, Spain. The following year, Plath and Hughes moved to Massachusetts, where she taught at her alma mater, Smith College.
In May of 1962 Assia Wevill and her third husband, Canadian poet David Wevill, were invited to spend a weekend with Plath and Hughes, who were then living in the village of North Tawton in Devon, England.
It was then, as Hughes later wrote in a poem, that "The dreamer in me fell in love with her," and a few short weeks later he embarked on his affair with Assia Wevill. This is when things started to go very, very wrong …
Read the rest of this post here. (Contributed by Aiyana Edmund)
“The Gilded Six-Bits” by Zora Neale Hurston
[Chad Coleman and Tkeyah Crystal Keymah in the 2001 short film, approx. 30 minutes, of “The Gilded Six-Bits.” You can watch this film on Vimeo.]
“The Gilded Six-Bits,” a 1933 short story by Zora Neale Hurston, is arguably the one that launched her as a fiction writer. It wasn’t by any means her first story. But it was the one that caught the attention of the publisher, Bertram Lippincott, who read it in an issue of Story magazine. Impressed, he wrote Zora to ask whether she might be working on a full-length novel. She wasn’t, but told him she was. She got serious about starting her first novel, Jonah's Gourd Vine, and it was ready in three months.
In Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography, Robert E. Hemenway encapsulates this short story :
“The Gilded Six-Bits” is one of Hurston's best short stories, an ironic account of infidelity and its human effects. A young Eatonville wife, Missie May, is seduced by a traveling Lothario whose main appeal is a gold watch charm. He promises her this gold coin, but at the moment of submission they are discovered by her husband, Joe.
The cheapness of the affair and the tarnish of the marriage is represented by the coin Left behind — instead of a ten-dollar gold piece it turns out to be only a gilded half-dollar. Joe cannot verbalize his grief and Missie May cannot articulate her sorrow, but they work together during the next year to recapture their love, growing together again after the birth of their first child — who strongly resembles Joe.
The story ends as Joe goes to the white man's store to buy his wife some candy kisses a symbol of his forgiveness, paying for the purchase with the gilded six bits as a reminder of her infidelity."
Read the full short story “The Gilded Six-Bits” here.
More full short stories by Zora:
“John Redding Goes to Sea” (1921)
“Spunk” (1925)
“Sweat” (1926)
Can someone please give me an honorary doctorate, like Edith Wharton? Please?
A few literary birthdays and anniversaries until we meet again …
June 14, 1811: Harriet Beecher Stowe is born (Litchfield, Conn)
June 16, 1956: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes marry after a brief courtship
June 20, 1923: Edith Wharton is the first woman to receive an honorary
Doctor of Letters degree from Yale UniversityJune 20, 1905: Lillian Hellman is born (New Orleans)
June 21, 1912: Mary McCarthy is born (Seattle, Wash)
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