After
she was graduated from the Winsor School in Boston in
1926, Nancy Hale set out to be a painter like her parents.
Through a series of fated career decisions, though, she
settled upon writing, for writing was as much in her blood
as painting. Her grandfather, the writer and Unitarian
clergyman Edward Everett Hale, was as famous for his essays
and stories—especially The Man Without a Country
(1863)—as he was for his sermons. One of her great
aunts, Lucretia Hale, wrote The Peterkin Papers
(1880) and another, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s
Cabin (1852).
When Nancy Hale was not quite eight years old, she asked
to be given a printing press for her birthday, astonishing
her mother, but not her father, who explained that most
Hale children ask for printing presses at some point in
their childhoods. The whole family—male and female
members alike—had been involved in writing for and
publishing newspapers, particularly the Boston Daily
Advertiser, since the beginning of the nineteenth
century. As soon as Nancy Hale got her printing press
she began to put out a family newspaper called the Society
Cat “at wildly irregular intervals.” By
the time she was eleven, she sought a wider audience by
submitting a story to the Boston Herald, with a
letter explaining that “my purpose is remuneration,”
thus expressing her determination even then to be considered
a professional in the field.
Nancy Hale received considerable recognition as a fiction
writer. Almost immediately magazines like American
Mercury, Harper’s, Harper’s Bazaar, McCall’s,
and the New Yorker had begun to publish her sensuous,
yet understated, deftly crafted stories.
Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor at Scribners, was
an early admirer and stalwart supporter of Nancy Hale.
He met her when she first came to New York City in 1928
and ten years later confessed to their mutual friend,
Elizabeth Lemmon, that he had instantly recognized in
her a writer of unusual talent: “I thought she could
write before she had written—like you Virginians
think a colt could run when he could barely stand.”
When The Prodigal Women came out in 1942, Maxwell
Perkins was vindicated with a vengeance. Overnight the
book became a best-seller—possibly because it dramatized,
with unflinching candor, the psychological cost of being
a woman of that time.
The book was an immense success—more than two million
copies of it had been sold by the time it was republished
in paperback by Avon in 1981—and no one took more
pleasure in its success than Maxwell Perkins. In 1942
he wrote the author: “from the very beginning, I
believed in you and said so, and while I don’t believe
that sales are in themselves a proof, they are the only
proof and the irrefutable proof that a lot of people to
whom I have to say things—booksellers and such.”
In an interview conducted at the height of the success
of The Prodigal Women, just before the publication
of Between the Dark and the Daylight, the thirty-four-year-old
Nancy Hale was already musing about the new direction
her talent seemed to be taking: "I feel as though
I had dozens of novels still to write and all kinds of
stories. The only difficulty is that I most want to write,
it seems, about things that happened before I was twenty-five."
Then she goes on to express a fear that she may be "just
drawing on the life—the life that I really and fully
lived—before I wrote much. Well, you can't draw on
that forever. One reason there are so many one-book authors
is that they used up the living years in one book."
As it turned out, her fear was unfounded. Nancy Hale's
imagination was able to keep responding to and fashioning
new (although more carefully restricted) fiction from
the experiences that came to her as an adult, while it
was also making rich use of her childhood.
The year 1942 was an unusually lucky one for Nancy Hale,
not only because of the success of The Prodigal Women,
but more important, personally, because in March of that
year she married Fredson Thayer Bowers, a professor of
English at the University of Virginia. In the months preceding
Pearl Harbor, he had been trained secretly as a cryptographer
and was soon transferred with his new family from Charlottesville
to Washington to oversee a group deciphering codes in
the Navy department. After the war the Bowers moved back
to Charlottesville, where they have remained ever since,
though they go to New England every year to spend the
summer on Cape Ann.
During the next three decades, Nancy Hale adapted to the
relatively quiet life of a small academic community and
continued to write not only novels, short stories, and
what she calls "autobiographical fiction" but
also a biography and a book for children. She also edited
New England Discovery (1963), an anthology representing
300 years of New England writing.
A whole generation of readers of the New Yorker
came to feel that they were intimate friends of Nancy
Hale's, or more accurately of Nancy Hale's imagination,
since almost all of the sketches in A New England Girlhood
and the stories in The Empress's Ring and The
Pattern of Perfection (1960) appeared originally in
that magazine. In fact, during one year in the 1950s,
Nancy Hale had more pieces of fiction in the New Yorker
than any other writer.
After the death of her mother in 1963, she began to clear
out the objects in her mother's studio on Cape Ann and
to write about the feelings this activity engendered.
Before she knew it, Nancy Hale was engaged in a series
of affectionate, but unflinchingly honest, reminiscences
of the artists she grew up among—her mother, her
father, and her aunt. Most of them appeared separately
in the New Yorker before she gathered them into
The Life in the Studio (1969). This masterful collection
of familiar essays opens with a list of objects she found
lying around the studio, a list which extends over three
printed pages and ensnares the reader—sensually and
intellectually—in the artists' world. The reader
then proceeds to stroll through the past with the middle-aged
author, stumbling unexpectedly upon hitherto hidden truths,
"secrets" that the author did not know she knew.
Because of her extraordinary understanding of the inner
world of artists and of women, and so, particularly, of
artists who are also women, Hale was commissioned by Doubleday
to write a full-scale biography of the American painter
Mary Cassatt. The resulting book, Mary Cassatt,
was an immense undertaking in a genre new to her which
consumed four years in research and writing before the
book was published in 1975.
In Charlottesville, Virginia, the local newspaper dedicated
its 1980 arts supplement to Nancy Hale, enumerating the
many contributions she has made to that community: among
them serving as a visiting Phi Beta Kappa scholar and
as a moving force in the creation of the Virginia Center
for the Creative Arts. She was also the first woman ever
invited to give the graduation address at the University
of Virginia.
Abridged from
the Dictionary of Literary Biography, 1980.
