Feminize Your Canon: Mary Heaton Vorse
Our column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. Originally begun by Emma Garman, it will now be written by Joanna Scutts.
Mary Heaton Vorse.
Mary Heaton Vorse, prolific novelist, journalist, and labor activist, spent most of her long life trying to escape her upper-middle-class origins. The heroine of her 1918 novel ’ calls the inescapability of a bourgeois upbringing life’s “blue serge lining”—a reference to the practical fabric that protected the inside of coats and suits, forming a barrier between the self and the world. The lining stands for the inevitable conformity of class, getting, if not quite under the wearer’s skin, then next to it, holding her upright, constraining her imagination and her freedom. Camilla is constantly on the run from it. She embraces the pretensions of bohemian Greenwich Village—anarchist friends, artistic aspirations, a Polish violinist lover, and nights spent in smoky bars. She repeatedly rejects her neighbor and suitor, the equally middle-class Ambrose Ingraham, out of fear that he will wrap her up in blue serge once again, and strangle her with it. Subtitled , the novel is more of an archaeological find than a timeless classic. Yet its ironic depiction of young people caught between ambition and gender-based expectation dramatizes the central conflict of its author’s life, and that of her generation of American “New
