Biographies: Writing Women’s Lives

Women’s history, written and performed by women, provides new and challenging perspectives on the past. So it is with three new biographies of women in colonial and contemporary America.In “The Passion of Anne Hutchinson: An Extraordinary Woman, the Puritan Patriarchs, and the World They Made and Lost” (Oxford University Press, 312 pages), Marilyn J. Westerkamp pits her subject against Governor John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in a struggle over fundamental theological and political issues.Hutchinson challenged Winthrop at a time when New England Puritanism was unsettled. She rejected the ministry’s “covenant of works” doctrine in favor of a “covenant of grace,” and she attracted a strong following among men as well as women. Ms. Westerkamp’s biography unfolds as a history in the making even as Hutchinson is banished from the colony for trying to remake it in opposition to patriarchal power.Political triumphs do not necessarily mean ultimate victory, which is why Hutchinson’s own reading of the Bible — taking it out of the hands of its ministers — has proven, in Ms. Westerkamp’s view, such an enduring legacy. What it means for a woman to win, in the light of history, may be quite a different story from the one her male opponents believed they have won. “Rebel Artist of the American Theater,” the subtitle of Alexis Greene’s “Emily Mann” (Applause Books, 391 pages), begins with a childhood scene that is also a parable of women’s history. Seven-year-old Emily, living at Northampton, Massachusetts, transforms her bedroom into “Emilyville,” creating an “entire world” for “hours and days and days, just as happy as can be, away from everyone else.”The mention of creating an “entire world” sent my mind racing to the Brontës and their childhood creation, Glass Town, and then returning to Sylvia Plath, already writing poetry at the age of 8 and later departing for Smith College in Northampton after dreaming about a life away from her Wellesley home and her overprotective mother. A playwright, director, and artistic director of the McCarter Theater in Princeton, Ms. Mann was the first woman to direct on legendary Tyrone Guthrie’s main stage in Minneapolis and is author of several plays, including “Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 years.” She overcomes sexism, violence, and multiple sclerosis to stage history, assigning to herself the role of interpreter of political and cultural issues. Some women’s lives have to be recovered from occluded evidence and speculation, and even then remain “Half in Shadow,” to use the title of Shanna Greene Benjamin’s “The Life and Legacy of Nellie Y. McKay” (The University of North Carolina Press, 259 pages). McKay is best known for co-editing with Henry Louis Gates the canonical “Norton Anthology of African American Literature.”A feminist and literary scholar, McKay achieved distinction while hiding her own history. Her biographer naturally wants to know why. Ms. Benjamin sets the scene of a mystery: On April 1, 2006, in a lecture hall at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, friends and colleagues gather to memorialize a “preeminent scholar in the fields of Black literary and feminist studies.” The biographer portrays this group as McKay’s family, the sole repository of her love and work. Sitting apart in this congregation of the faithful are a man and woman who turn out to be the children of a woman who was 10 years older than was commonly assumed. Why did she keep her kin a secret, and what did her dissembling say about her and the career she had created?The shock of this secret life hit McKay’s colleagues in different ways, which is to say (without revealing the mystery’s solution) it was precisely this divergence of reactions that had determined her to remove essential parts of her biography. A life under cover, sharing herself on a need-to-know basis, is a familiar story in women’s history.I encountered this sequestration of crucial facts so as to thwart inspection while researching “To Be A Woman: The Life of Jill Craigie.” She made herself three years younger and told the press her father had died in World War I. In fact, he lived decades longer but had no place in the mythology she built up of herself as a young woman director in World War II London. I mentioned to Craigie (not then knowing her secrets) my discovery that Lillian Hellman lied about her age. A vehement Craigie defended her, telling me I had to learn what it was like to live in a man’s world. I am still learning.Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Female Icons: Marilyn Monroe to Susan Sontag;’ and co-author with Lisa Paddock of The Brontës A to Z.

Biographies: Writing Women’s Lives

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