It's not often that I come across a Virago Modern Classic on my library's shelves, but that distinct green spine always pops out at me when I'm scanning rows of books for something that looks interesting. Is Kay Boyle much read these days? I don't know if I've ever come across her work as I make the the book blog rounds (which of course is not to say she isn't out there somewhere, as maybe I'm just not seeing her). I've long had a couple of her books on my shelves but unsurprisingly I've not read them yet. From what little I've read about Boyle she appears to be one of those authors who was successful and well known in her day but has since fallen into disfavor. I always feel a little bad for those authors and a little curious about them as well. If Virago saw fit to publish her books, I think she must be worth a look and read.
I believe she is known for her short stories more than her novels (I own her Fifty Short Stories), but I brought home her second book, Plagued by the Nightingale (her first was a collection of stories). Boyle was born in St. Paul, Minnesota but her first marriage was to a Frenchman so she lived in France for quite a few years. She remained in France much longer than her marriage lasted and was part of that expatriate group that included Sylvia Beach, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. When she returned to the States in 1941 she began a distinguished academic career and still managed to write something like thirty books in a variety of forms--from short stories to novels to essays to poetry.
This story has an unusual plot--a young American girl marries a Frenchman and lives with his tight knit family in a Breton village. She discovers that the an inherited bone disease taints the family. The disease infects not just the body but the soul as well. Then she meets another man, healthy, young and handsome and is faced with a choice, and I'm sure you already suspect what that choice is. I think I'm making this sound awfully melodramatic (and maybe it is?). Boyle, however, has written the introduction to this edition, and it seems that looking back over a lifetime at this early work (the introduction was written in 1980), perhaps she had second thoughts over this creation.
"Once any work of mine is in print, I find re-reading it a painful operation--an operation performed without anaesthetic, and very difficult to bear. As long as a poem, a story, a novel, has not been committed to publication, revisions and revivifications can be made. But to examine a piece of my writing with the knowledge that is is too late to save it from its failings, its inaccuracies, is close to tragedy. Perhaps the one way to deal with this unhappy situation is to look upon one's published work as though it were the writings of another author: and indeed it was another, much younger writer who wrote Plagued by the Nightingale over fifty years ago."
But she doesn't entirely dismiss it either. "But in fairness, I can say of the book that it is one of the many records of a young woman's troubled search for old landmarks by which we choose the way we must go." To me this sounds very appealing and makes me think she is an author worth exploring even if she is no longer in vogue.