Word: ellas
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...local education and professional good works; he soon realized she was unfit to be trusted. He continued to worship his father for years: but all his father perceived in his diffidence was aversion and stupidity about which, in his son's hearing, he ruefully made jokes. Pathetic Cousin Ella so blackmailed him for pity that it was impossible to pity her. Full-blooded Uncle Ernest, by horning in on his private enthusiasms, ended forever his interest in science. At the school they sent him to he underwent a "gradual blunting of intellectual curiosity, by unimportant information uninterestingly given...
Soon Artist Chapin got so absorbed in spare, taciturn, unschooled Emmet, George and Ella Marvin that he stopped painting cubist arrangement of rocks, scaffolding and apple trees, became instead a limner of the U. S. scene long before it became the popular thing. The suspicious Marvins would not pose at first, thawed when he worked with them in the fields, helped round up the pigs. For five years he stirred from the farm no more than the Marvins did, sketched them ploughing, foxhunting, planting potatoes, sharpening a scythe, clustered round their old iron kitchen range. The paintings that resulted...
...Wilcox," she said in perfect American. Neither of us replied. I remember thinking to myself: "Well, Mrs. Wilcox you shouldn't be talking to strange men in restaurants." "Ella Wheeler Wilcox" came next, with a very sweet and disarming smile. We were both on our feet, sputtering apologies...
...Ella was not absurd, and it is the special virtue of Jenny Ballou's book that she makes that plain. Some of Ella's first poems were "lovely in their lilt, overbrimming with an authentic freshness of emotion." She had great energy, great sincerity, great generosity, and on occasion great good sense. Even when she became a fixture of yellow journalism, her spontaneity remained untainted by cynicism. What was it that led her on into the self-deception that finally broke down in her last tragic years? ("I shall be forgotten," she said, "while more careful and conscientious...
Small, bright, Russian-born Jenny Iphigenia Ballou got the idea of doing Ella Wheeler Wilcox several years ago when she and her husband were living near the Wilcox place at Short Beach, Conn. Her witty book obviously owes much to Critic Van Wyck Brooks, with whom she corresponded-though Brooks disagreed with her somewhat unguarded conclusions. There is more than morbid fascination in Period Piece, more than a stunt in Biographer Ballou's reason for doing it: "It may be because critics have been squeamish about penetrating the subliterary world that literature is not at a generally higher level...