Items related to The Tattooed Heart and My Name is Rose
The Tattooed Heart (1953): June Grey spends a green and dreaming summer alone with her grandmother in a large isolated house at Grey's Neck on the Long Island shore. Around the house are wooded hills that give down to beach and sea, and in these woods June meets the boy Ronny, younger than herself and still firmly anchored in the fantasies of childhood which June is on the point of leaving. Eventually the youngsters become cruelly caught up in the complicated motives and desires of their elders.
My Name Is Rose (1956): Written partly in the form of a journal and partly in conventional narrative, Theodora Keogh's novel is a kind of 'examination of conscience,' by a young wife whose marriage is breaking up after seven years. Original in its perceptions, strong in story, and clearly written in a highly personal idiom which gives all Theodora Keogh’s work a mysterious and pulsating quality which is the sign of life.
The Tattooed Heart and My Name is Rose were selected for Pharos Editions and introduced by Lidia Yuknavitch (Dora: A Headcase, The Chronology of Water)
My Name Is Rose (1956): Written partly in the form of a journal and partly in conventional narrative, Theodora Keogh's novel is a kind of 'examination of conscience,' by a young wife whose marriage is breaking up after seven years. Original in its perceptions, strong in story, and clearly written in a highly personal idiom which gives all Theodora Keogh’s work a mysterious and pulsating quality which is the sign of life.
The Tattooed Heart and My Name is Rose were selected for Pharos Editions and introduced by Lidia Yuknavitch (Dora: A Headcase, The Chronology of Water)
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
THEODORA KEOGH, the granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt, wrote nine novels between 1950 and 1962. A complicated and captivating prose stylist, her work has been compared with that of Patricia Highsmith for its psychological depth and complex often morally conflicted characters. Appearing as they did mid-way in her brief career, these two novels provide a wonderful introduction to this overlooked author.
LIDIA YUKNAVITCH is the author of Dora: A Headcase and The Chronology of Water as well as three works of short fiction. Her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Exquisite Corpse, Fiction International, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere. She received the 2011 Pacific Northwest Bookseller’s Award. She lives in Portland.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
LIDIA YUKNAVITCH is the author of Dora: A Headcase and The Chronology of Water as well as three works of short fiction. Her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Exquisite Corpse, Fiction International, Zyzzyva, and elsewhere. She received the 2011 Pacific Northwest Bookseller’s Award. She lives in Portland.
My Name is Rose and The Tattooed Heart by Theodora Keogh
Digging for Matter: Theodora Keogh: An Introduction” by Lidia Yuknavitch
Lately, I’ve taken to digging up women.
What I mean is, I’ve become obsessed with going back and down and under to find women writers whose work made it possible for the rest of us, for the present tense of us, to matter”. I’ve developed this obsession in relation to finding the market” for women writers in the present to be an abject abyss of dead tropes and formulaic forms, whereas the matter” in the writing that came before us, even from dead women, remains astonishingly generative.
As my profound case study I give you Theodora Keogh, a novelist who wrote nine novels in the 1950’s and 60’s that, to be modest, blew the doors and windows off of what we mean when we say women’s writing.” When we say women’s writing” today, unfortunately, we mean a subset of writing entirely dictated by market-driven gatekeepers of money-making products. Whereas Theodora Keogh’s novels perform the act, the verb, the glorious excess of an actual woman writing. Writing through her body, to be precise. Without flinching or pulling punches.
Imagine that.
Her debut novel, Meg, is about a 12-year old girl who drifts away from her private school friends toward the streets where she is raped. She published Meg in 1950. That was where Theodora Keogh began. Think about that for a minute. From there she went on to publish The Double Door, a novel in which a cloistered teen heiress finds a secret door and ends up making love with her father’s paid male lover, The Fascinator, where a young girl is seduced by a sculptor, Gemini, an incest and murder narrative about twins, Street Music, a story in which a music critic falls desperately in love with a child criminal, and The Other Girl, a fictionalized retelling of the Black Dahlia murder.
And it wasn’t just her themes that ruptured the literary landscape. The formal moves she performed in each novel were every bit as daring as her contemporary male counterparts which is probably the least interesting thing I could say, so I’ll say this as well: her formal moves interrogated subjectivity from the specific site of a woman’s body.
Like many of her characters, she also lived a full and novel-worthy life in France. She was dancer. She was friends with all things and people Paris Review, including the Plimptons. She was a designer, she worked for Vogue, she divorced and remarried, she bought a tugboat and married its captain, she lived in the Chelsea Hotel, she divorced and remarried again.
She kept a Margay as a pet; it nibbled her ear into a different shape.
And she wrote nine formidable novels.
So why haven’t you heard of her?
It’s a good question, isn’t it?
With Pharos’ re-release of My Name is Rose and The Tattooed Heart, we can turn away from the glitz and gleam of the market, away from women’s writing,” and look back at what a woman writing looked like on the page. In My Name is Rose, by alternating between first person and third person, Theodora gives us an unhappily married woman who writes her second self alive through a passionate affair only available in the pages of her journal. A passionate affair with an underage boy. What emerges is the crisis between two women the women we are from the inside-out and the women we are told to be by cultural scripts of wife” and mother.” Written in 1956.
Similarly, in The Tattooed Heart, a girl nearing adolescence spends a summer with her grandmother and discovers a younger boy in the wooded hills of the Long Island shore. The two revel in the younger boy’s childhood fantasies, almost as if it is possible to hover at the cusp of things, until the adult world around them shatters the possibility space of sexuality and creativity.
It’s as if all of her novels meant to explore the form and content of passion what territories of the body, life and language are available?
As Joan Schenkar wrote in her wonderful essay The Late, Great, Theodora Keogh” which appeared in The Paris Review Daily, But if passion is Keogh’s real subject, it’s also the wrecking ball in her democracy of desire. In each of her books, passion equalizes class, age, race, and identity.”
Thrillingly, then, we get a chance to go back, down, under. Like Anais Nin. Like Virginia Woolf. Like Gertrude Stein. Like Marguerite Duras. Like Djuna Barnes. Other women writing who I keep digging up to reassure myself that we always already knew exactly what we were, and are, doing.
Lidia Yuknavitch
Digging for Matter: Theodora Keogh: An Introduction” by Lidia Yuknavitch
Lately, I’ve taken to digging up women.
What I mean is, I’ve become obsessed with going back and down and under to find women writers whose work made it possible for the rest of us, for the present tense of us, to matter”. I’ve developed this obsession in relation to finding the market” for women writers in the present to be an abject abyss of dead tropes and formulaic forms, whereas the matter” in the writing that came before us, even from dead women, remains astonishingly generative.
As my profound case study I give you Theodora Keogh, a novelist who wrote nine novels in the 1950’s and 60’s that, to be modest, blew the doors and windows off of what we mean when we say women’s writing.” When we say women’s writing” today, unfortunately, we mean a subset of writing entirely dictated by market-driven gatekeepers of money-making products. Whereas Theodora Keogh’s novels perform the act, the verb, the glorious excess of an actual woman writing. Writing through her body, to be precise. Without flinching or pulling punches.
Imagine that.
Her debut novel, Meg, is about a 12-year old girl who drifts away from her private school friends toward the streets where she is raped. She published Meg in 1950. That was where Theodora Keogh began. Think about that for a minute. From there she went on to publish The Double Door, a novel in which a cloistered teen heiress finds a secret door and ends up making love with her father’s paid male lover, The Fascinator, where a young girl is seduced by a sculptor, Gemini, an incest and murder narrative about twins, Street Music, a story in which a music critic falls desperately in love with a child criminal, and The Other Girl, a fictionalized retelling of the Black Dahlia murder.
And it wasn’t just her themes that ruptured the literary landscape. The formal moves she performed in each novel were every bit as daring as her contemporary male counterparts which is probably the least interesting thing I could say, so I’ll say this as well: her formal moves interrogated subjectivity from the specific site of a woman’s body.
Like many of her characters, she also lived a full and novel-worthy life in France. She was dancer. She was friends with all things and people Paris Review, including the Plimptons. She was a designer, she worked for Vogue, she divorced and remarried, she bought a tugboat and married its captain, she lived in the Chelsea Hotel, she divorced and remarried again.
She kept a Margay as a pet; it nibbled her ear into a different shape.
And she wrote nine formidable novels.
So why haven’t you heard of her?
It’s a good question, isn’t it?
With Pharos’ re-release of My Name is Rose and The Tattooed Heart, we can turn away from the glitz and gleam of the market, away from women’s writing,” and look back at what a woman writing looked like on the page. In My Name is Rose, by alternating between first person and third person, Theodora gives us an unhappily married woman who writes her second self alive through a passionate affair only available in the pages of her journal. A passionate affair with an underage boy. What emerges is the crisis between two women the women we are from the inside-out and the women we are told to be by cultural scripts of wife” and mother.” Written in 1956.
Similarly, in The Tattooed Heart, a girl nearing adolescence spends a summer with her grandmother and discovers a younger boy in the wooded hills of the Long Island shore. The two revel in the younger boy’s childhood fantasies, almost as if it is possible to hover at the cusp of things, until the adult world around them shatters the possibility space of sexuality and creativity.
It’s as if all of her novels meant to explore the form and content of passion what territories of the body, life and language are available?
As Joan Schenkar wrote in her wonderful essay The Late, Great, Theodora Keogh” which appeared in The Paris Review Daily, But if passion is Keogh’s real subject, it’s also the wrecking ball in her democracy of desire. In each of her books, passion equalizes class, age, race, and identity.”
Thrillingly, then, we get a chance to go back, down, under. Like Anais Nin. Like Virginia Woolf. Like Gertrude Stein. Like Marguerite Duras. Like Djuna Barnes. Other women writing who I keep digging up to reassure myself that we always already knew exactly what we were, and are, doing.
Lidia Yuknavitch
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherPharos Editions
- Publication date2014
- ISBN 10 194043601X
- ISBN 13 9781940436012
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages336
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