Word: authorly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...most famous feminists, suffragettes, and publicly visible lesbians-- such as the novelist May Sinclair, the composer Dame Ethel Smythe, and the Paris-based painter Romaine Brooks. Her literary acquaintances were similarly eminent (and, in many cases, similarly "deviant"): Hall's partner Una Troubridge first translated the sexually daring French author Colette's works into English; Hall and the English playwright Noel Coward wrote each other into their works; and no lesser lights than the writers of the Bloomsbury Group--including Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster--entered the story when they came to the defense of The Well of Loneliness...
...already be asking, was such pageantry the necessary complement of a first-class book or, like so much ceremony, a feat of window-dressing staged around a hollowness of ideas? In other words, did author and text deserve the worshipful two hours carved out for them...
...Then there is the grandeur," said Toni Morrison. Sure, the sentence is just one of many from Chapter One of Morrison's new novel Paradise, read by the author to an audience of several hundred in Faneuil Hall last Wednesday night. This particular phrase is unique, though, because through it the novelist perfectly encapsulated the listener's experience of her own reading...
Whatever the disappointments of her material--and granted, these shortcomings would almost certainly go unnoticed coming from any other author--Morrison stood proud atop the evening like the Tall Ships in our harbor, her elocution marvelous and her words like banners unfurled. Her delivery maintained a patrician exactitude--affording the word "vegetable" its deserved four syllables, crisply enunciating the second "t" in "tomatoes"--that rivaled her beautiful prose itself as a tribute to our language...
West and DuBois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis Gates, seated like acolytes beside and behind the author, grinned with the audience at her unexpected but graceful bravado. Perhaps their glee stemmed in part from how effectively her comments deflated the near-pomposity with which they had begun the evening. Gates went so far in introducing, West to christen him "a true citizen of the Republic of Letters," a bold pronouncement for anyone to make when the queen of said Republic sits a few feet away...