Nancy Hale came into my life as a bit of an accident. I had published a tiny review in a literary magazine, of which I was stupidly and inordinately proud, and received, along with the magazine, a copy of a new collection of some of Nancy Hale’s short stories accompanied by new criticism. The subtitle of the collection described the book as “Of the Life & Work of a Lost American Master.” The sketch of the woman on the cover could have been any white lady in an indeterminate period of the 20th century; I learned from the back that Hale’s writing had “helped to shape the early identity of The New Yorker magazine” in the 1930s and 1940s. I regarded the collection with stupid and inordinate skepticism. I considered myself a well-read person, and was an English major in school, which gave me a particular kind of hubris. I had never heard of Nancy Hale, and wasn’t sure I needed to. Then I blazed through all seven stories in the collection during one breathless subway ride, and went from a curious reader to a dyed-in-the-wool Nancy Hale evangelist.
Hale was born in Boston in 1908, the only child of a painter and a prominent art teacher. The Hale family was well established in the New England cultural scene; Nancy Hale was related by marriage or blood to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catherine Beecher, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, among others. Hale studied art but also wrote continuously, and following her first marriage she moved to New York where she set out to be a writer. She published her first novel, The Good Die Young, at the age of twenty-six. This book shares subject matter with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and the Damned—loose morals, excessive drinking, and general depravity in post-WWI New York. Hale and Fitzgerald also happened to share the Scribner editor Max Perkins, whose other authors included Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe. During this time Hale also worked for Vogue and as the New York Times’ first female straight news reporter, which is somehow one of the lesser entries on her résumé. In 1942, Hale’s third novel, The Prodigal Women, became a bestseller, and made her career.
The Prodigal Women, now sadly out of print, is a strange, giant, wonderful book, full of desperate, sad, sometimes wicked, sometimes pitiable, women. Gillian Flynn wrote of her novel Sharp Objects, “Isn’t it time to acknowledge the ugly side? I’ve grown quite weary of the spunky heroines, brave rape victims, soul-searching fashionistas that stock so many books.” Gillian, let me present to you Nancy Hale’s Leda March. Leda is deliciously unlikeable. She is described as “frantic with self-consciousness and envy and desire”; she exclusively “hated people, or envied them, or scorned them.” She schemes for social power, she carries on affairs with the husbands of her friends, and above all she feels no shame. Leda is cold, cold, cold.
Read more In Praise of Difficult Women: The Forgotten Work of Nancy Hale at The Toast.
