Kirjailijakuva

Gwethalyn Graham (1913–1965)

Teoksen Earth and High Heaven tekijä

3 teosta 181 jäsentä 3 arvostelua

Tietoja tekijästä

Tekijän teokset

Earth and High Heaven (1944) 159 kappaletta
Swiss Sonata (1938) 17 kappaletta

Merkitty avainsanalla

Yleistieto

Kanoninen nimi
Graham, Gwethalyn
Muut nimet
Erichsen-Brown, Gwethalyn Graham (birth)
Syntymäaika
1913-01-18
Kuolinaika
1965-11-25
Sukupuoli
female
Kansalaisuus
Canada
Syntymäpaikka
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Kuolinpaikka
Montréal, Québec, Canada
Kuolinsyy
brain cancer
Asuinpaikat
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Westmount, Québec, Canada
Koulutus
Smith College (dropped out)
Ammatit
novelist
script writer
social activist
Suhteet
LeBourdais, Isabel (sister)
Lyhyt elämäkerta
Gwethalyn Graham was born to a wealthy family in Toronto, Canada. Her sister Isabel LeBourdais also became a writer. Gwethalyn attended private school and a finishing school in Lausanne, Switzerland. She spent a year at Smith College in Massachusetts before dropping out in 1932 to marry John McNaught, with whom she had a son; they later divorced. In 1938, she published her first novel, Swiss Sonata, to critical acclaim -- it won the Governor General's Award for Fiction that year. It was followed by Earth and High Heaven (1944), another award-winning success that was the first Canadian book to reach number one on The New York Times bestseller list. In 1947, she remarried to David Yalden-Thomson, a philosophy professor, and moved to Virginia, where she taught at the University of Virginia. In 1958, she and her son returned to Canada, settling in Montréal, where she worked as a script writer for the Canadian Broadcasting Company. Her third novel was Dear Enemies (1963). She was an outspoken opponent of anti-Semitism and of anti-French Canadian discrimination. She died in 1965 at age 52. See also Gwethalyn Graham: A Liberated Woman in a Conventional Age by Barbara Meadowcroft (2008).

Jäseniä

Kirja-arvosteluja

winner gg's literary award anisfield-wolf book award 1945 2 time gg award new canadian library 13

slightly outdated but still relevant.
½
 
Merkitty asiattomaksi
mahallett | 2 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Jul 30, 2018 |
This will almost certainly be on my books of the year list – a book I couldn’t stop reading but didn’t want to finish. It’s hard to convey in a review just how lovely this book is, you may just need to read it. There is something about Gwethalyn Graham’s story-telling, the way in which she creates relationships, the emotional and upsetting nature of the divisions that she portrays which makes this novel so compelling.

I hadn’t heard of Gwethalyn Graham before Persephone re-issued this novel, a Canadian writer who published one other earlier novel before this. Earth and High Heaven was an enormous success remaining on the New York Times bestseller list for thirty-eight weeks. First published in 1944 – those first readers could not have known whether the happy ending that is implicit in the novel’s opening sentence would be replicated for the allies.

Gwethalyn Graham explores the divisions and deeply entrenched prejudices which existed in Canadian society, through the story of Erica Drake and Marc Reiser who meet and fall in love. Set in Montreal during World War Two – Graham shows us how society was divided into three distinct groups.

“Hampered by racial-religious distinctions to start with, relations between the French, English and Jews of Montreal are still further complicated by the fact that all three groups suffer from an inferiority complex – the French because they are a minority in Canada, the English because they are a minority in Quebec, and the Jews because they are a minority everywhere.”

When they meet, Erica is twenty-eight, a journalist on the society pages of the Montreal Post, Marc is a few years older, waiting for his call up overseas, he is a lawyer, originally from a small town in Ontario. Erica’s father is the President of an import company started by his great grandfather, the Drakes holding a prominent position in the English Canadian society which has so little to do with the French Canadian and Jewish communities who live side by side. Marc’s father had emigrated to Canada from Austria with his wife and Marc’s older brother, he owns a planning mill in Manchester Ontario, while Marc’s brother is a doctor to remote mining communities.

At a cocktail party held in the Drake home, Marc Reiser is brought somewhat unwillingly along by René de Sevigny, a French-Canadian friend, and brother to Erica’s brother’s wife. Marc and Erica meet and are instantly drawn to each other – it’s that love at first sight kind of thing that Disney so love to portray. Erica has led a life of unthinking privilege, so when presented with the everyday prejudices that Marc encounters as a Jewish man in Canadian society, the scales fall from her eyes, and she is horrified. When she tries to introduce Marc to her father; Charles (who spends most of the party hiding in his study) she is appalled when Charles walks straight past him without so much as giving Marc eye contact. How could she have got it so wrong?

Erica is an innocent in the ways of the society in which she lives, she herself is incapable of disliking someone simply because they happen to be Jewish – and so discovering this attitude exists within the very walls of her home she is devastated. However, due to her upbringing, Erica soon recognises that she too is guilty of inherent racism, although in loving Marc and recognising how her attitudes have been shaped by her upbringing she is already more enlightened.

Erica is one of three siblings, her father is known to be rather difficult and set in his ways, but Erica and he have always enjoyed a special understanding. Erica is acknowledged by everyone to be Charles’s favourite – she brings the best out in him. So, when she is brought face to face with her father’s prejudice it is a bitter and devastating blow. Charles had raged and stomped when his son married a French-Canadian woman, but now he is very fond of her, and Charles has become his daughter-in-law’s favourite member of the family. Erica tells herself that he will come around, if only he would meet Marc – and see what he is really like. Charles can be cruel – taking every opportunity he can to tell anti-Semitic stories – calling Marc a ‘cheap Jewish lawyer.’

‘I don’t want my daughter to go through life neither flesh, fowl, nor good red herring, living in a kind of no man’s land where half the people you know will never accept him, and half the people he knows will never accept you. I don’t want a son-in-law who’ll be an embarrassment to our friends, a son-in-law who can’t be put up at my club and who can’t go with us to places where we’ve gone all our lives. I don’t want a son-in-law whom I’ll have to apologize for, and explain, and have to hear insulted indirectly unless I can remember to warn people off first.’

Erica’s younger sister Miriam comes home from England, although only twenty-four she has a failed marriage behind her, and two other men vying for her attentions. Miriam takes Erica’s side, she meets Marc and likes him immediately. Miriam understands the problems with their parents in a way that Erica seems unable to. She loves her sister, the one sibling never to cause their parents a moments concern, but now sees there may be no way back for them all. Erica continues to see Marc against her parent’s wishes, Marc tries to make Erica aware of the difficulties they will face, tries to get her to see that marriage between them is impossible. Erica is worn down by the pressure and stress, the barrage of Charles’s vitriol against the man she loves. She loses weight, is visibly changed, but hangs on grimly nevertheless, her belief in Marc, and the possibility of a future together is unwavering.

This is a surprisingly emotional read, and I defy anyone not to rush through it – desperate to see if the happy ending implied in that first sentence comes true. Erica is the driving force of the novel, a wonderfully sympathetic character through whose eyes we see the divisions within a society.
… (lisätietoja)
 
Merkitty asiattomaksi
Heaven-Ali | 2 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Nov 25, 2017 |
'In a country that barely remembers its prime ministers, it's hardly surprising that one of CanLit's brightest early stars is almost forgotten. But Cormorant Books' reprint of the 1944 novel Earth and High Heaven should bring back to prominence the extraordinary Gwethalyn Graham, who published two novels in her short life (1913 to 1965) and won the Governor General's award for both.' - Macleans

'Earth and High Heaven deserves to be read and discussed with other classic Canadian novels.'
The Canadian Jewish News

'Earth and High Heaven is a powerful testament against prejudice that is more telling for the time in which it was written.' — Victoria Times Colonist

'It’s a great read.' — The Globe and Mail

'It's startling and chastening to read of women in the 1940s who seem as liberated as any woman today.'
— The Montreal Gazette

'... Earth And High Heaven, published in 1944, when its author was just 31, ripped the veil off Canada's genteel anti-semitism with its story of a young woman from an upper crust Anglo family in Westmount who falls in love with a Jewish lawyer her father forbids her to marry.'
— The Toronto Star
retrieved from http://www.cormorantbooks.com/titles/earthandhighheaven.shtml
… (lisätietoja)
1 ääni |
Merkitty asiattomaksi
stephippen | 2 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Dec 2, 2009 |

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Tilastot

Teokset
3
Jäseniä
181
Suosituimmuussija
#119,336
Arvio (tähdet)
4.0
Kirja-arvosteluja
3
ISBN:t
13

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