Reviews
“Whether this book is read as a tragedy—which in many ways it is—or as a story of triumph over adversity, which it certainly is, it will find many different kinds of readers. For the social historian it effectively evokes an almost vanished way of life; for the historian of women it reveals one of the root causes of the woman’s movement; for the moralist it raises the ethical issue created when one person uses money to control another person’s life. It is a book to be pondered as well as enjoyed.”
–Anne Firor Scott, editor of Unheard Voices: The First Historians of Southern Women
“In Bernice Kelly Harris, Valerie Yow does a fine job of drawing from many unpublished materials and from interviews with friends of her subject. She makes clear that Bernice’s life was enriched greatly by the friendships with other writers. Her life was also threaded with students and younger writers who looked to her for what seemed to be boundless enthusiasm: her belief that everyone had a story to tell marked the way she taught, and the way she listened.
“While the entire biography moves with verve and clarity, I liked best Yow’s chapter on Bernice’s involvement with the Federal Writer’s Project during the 1930s. Playing recorder for the life stories of real people, white as well as black, gave Harris the opportunity to understand lives that differed from her own somewhat confined existence. From 1939 through 1951, she published seven novels, many short stories, and a collection of plays.
“Bernice Kelly Harris said she had lived an ‘ordinary life.’ Valerie Yow’s biography brings the warmth of her impeccably kind existence—and her relentlessly positive outlook—to today’s reader and makes us aware that this was an exceptional ordinary woman.”
–Linda Wagner-Martin, Hanes Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, ‘A Generous Life,” The Herald Sun (Durham, N.C.) 16 July 2000
“Yow’s approach is multi-faceted: she states that she is writing biography and history (‘the way an individual life reveals the intersection of culture, historical moment, and the particular’) and psychology (individual emotional expression as related to ‘culturally approved feelings’)—all of these as related to Harris’s gender in the locus of Harris’s time. Given the sweeping breadth of her intent, for Yow to have succeeded even partially would be an accomplishment. However, Yow succeeds on each of these fronts, leading the reader to infer the general—Every Woman—from a close examination of the particular.
–Lorraine Hale Robinson, “Two Good Lives Were Writing,” Southern Literary Journal, Spring 2003.
For readers’ reviews, go to Amazon.com.
