Francisbooth, Francis Booth

A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell A Lie: The Fiction of Vera Caspary (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Vera Caspary (1899 1987) was ahead of her time but is perfectly aligned with ours. Caspary put strong, independent women at the center of over twenty novels, while tackling sexism, racism, fascism and antisemitism head on in both her life and her work; in the 1940s J. Edgar Hoover personally initiated an FBI investigation of her.

In the 21st century Caspary's novels have been republished by The Murder Room and The Feminist Press, showing the range of her writing and the breadth of her appeal.

Caspary's first published novel, The White Girl, 1929, concerns a young Black woman passes as white, very much akin to Nella Larsen's Passing, which came out later the same year. A 1930s family saga explored the Jewish experience in America. Then in 1942 Caspary turned the hard-boiled murder mystery inside out with Laura, putting a woman at its heart rather than the usual male detective and inventing the genre of the psycho-thriller. Laura was made into a highly successful film, as was its successor Bedelia, 1945, about "the wickedest woman who ever loved." Fritz Lang's great film noir The Blue Gardenia, 1953, was adapted from a Caspary novella. In the 1960s Caspary followed a gentle satire on sex in the suburbs with a searing Holocaust novel and then a "confession disguised as a novel" about communism in Connecticut; the final novels of the 1970s all explore the mystery of individual identity.

She made her living writing frothy, romantic stories and scripts for Hollywood movies and several of her novels were republished as lurid pulp paperbacks but at heart Vera Caspary was a connoisseur of classic British literature. One Caspary woman calls herself Haworth after the Brontë Parsonage and another is named Elaine after Tennyson's Idylls, while Stranger Than Truth pays homage to Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White and Bedelia echoes Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret. In False Face, Nina was "weaned on Browning and Keats, taught to use my eyes in Florence," and in The Dreamers Ernestine is plans a Ph.D. on George Eliot.

A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie is a monumental and ground-breaking study, examining all of Caspary's published fiction, setting her in the context of her contemporaries and celebrating the Caspary woman, a heroine for our time.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Wu Wei Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 29. Juni 2024
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9798227626530
• Artikelnr.: 72378537

Autorenporträt

As well as A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell A Lie Francis Booth is the author of several books on twentieth century culture:

• Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive);
• No Direction Home: The Uncanny In Literature
• Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in Mid-20th Century Women's Fiction
• Text Acts: Twentieth Century Literary Eroticism
• Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant Garde
• Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938

Francis is also the author of two novel series:

• The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers
• Young adult fantasy series The Watchers