Eliot Bliss

Eliot Bliss (12 June 1903 – 10 December 1990)[1][2] was a Jamaican-born English novelist and poet of Anglo-Irish descent, whose literary friendships encompassed Anna Wickham, Dorothy Richardson, Jean Rhys, Romer Wilson and Vita Sackville-West.[3]

Eliot Bliss
BornEileen Norah Lees Bliss
12 June 1903
Jamaica
Died10 December 1990(1990-12-10) (aged 87)
Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire
OccupationWriter
LanguageEnglish
NationalityEnglish
GenreBildungsroman
Notable worksSaraband, Luminous Isle

Life

Born Eileen Norah Lees Bliss at a Jamaican army garrison, she was the daughter of Captain John Plomer Bliss and his wife Eva (née Lees).[4] Bliss was educated at a number of British convent schools. Her brother John was sent to school in England at the same time.[4]

She returned in 1923 to Jamaica for two years, a period that would provide inspiration for her second and last novel. She then settled permanently in England and gained a diploma in journalism from University College, London. In 1925 she renamed herself Eliot as a mark of her respect for George Eliot and T. S. Eliot.[4]

Over subsequent years Bliss held various jobs in publishing and made friends with other women writers, notably fellow novelists Romer Wilson, who gave her financial support while she wrote her first novel, and Vita Sackville-West.[3] Her relations with the Australian-born poet Anna Wickham (1883–1947) are said to have been intimate.[5] She lived as a companion for over half a century with Patricia Allan-Burns, an artist, in Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, where she died in 1990. Allan-Burns disposed of her literary estate, the Bliss Collections, in three stages to the McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa.[5]

Bliss left daily diaries in 19 volumes covering January 1959 – December 1960 and January 1963 – August 1980. Prominent authors in her personal library, also held at the McFarlin Library, include Jean Rhys, Radclyffe Hall and Emily Dickinson.[5]

Writings

Each of Bliss's two published novels can be classed as a Bildungsroman. Saraband (1931, reissued 1986) features Louie, a sensitive girl from a genteel family conscious of her inability to do anything of note, unlike her violinist cousin. Her wishes are made clear: "I don't want to go out into the world and earn my living. I don't want to have to say goodbye to a quiet scholar's life, to smooth, civilized hours around a Wedgwood teapot.... I don't want to be terrorised into a set formula of life."[6] However, family financial problems force her to train as a typist, making her "afraid of turning into a machine," but she eventually recognizes the creativity in herself and begins to write. The book was widely praised for its modernist and feminist ideas.

Luminous Isle is a largely autobiographical tale of a girl's return to Jamaica at the age of 19, after attending school in England. Her desire to treat the island as home is thwarted by the narrowness of life there, its "hypocrisy and hidden indecencies" and its racism.[3] As a recent critic has pointed out, "The underlying homosexuality of the characters is never spelled out; it remains unuttered, and the intricate implications of the relationships... are never fully explained." A third book of hers, The Albatross, said to have been published in 1935, cannot be traced.[4]

The poems of Eliot Bliss were not found until 2004, in the home she had shared with Allan-Burns. They were edited and introduced by the University of Trieste academic Michela A. Calderaro and published electronically. Calderaro is also working on a biography.[7]

The papers of Eliot Bliss (diaries 1959–1980) are held at the McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa.[8] They consist of "19 volumes of daily diaries dating from January 1959 to December 1960, and January 1963 to August 1980. Additional notes, correspondence, poems, photographs and sales receipts are laid into many of the diaries, all of which have been noted in the inventory and... in 'Notes on my Diaries', written by Bliss."[9]

References

  1. "Jamaica, Civil Registration, 1880-1999", database with images, FamilySearch; accessed 3 January 2016): Eileen Norah Lees Bliss, 1903.
  2. Date of death found only in Goodreads, needs confirming. Retrieved 17 September 2015.
  3. Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy (eds), The Feminist Companion to Literature in English (London: Batsford, 1990), p. 106.
  4. Michela A. Calderaro: "To be sexless, creedless, classless, free. Eliot Bliss: a Creole writer". In: Annali di ca' Foscari, XLII, No. 4, 2003, pp. 109–120. Retrieved 17 September 2015.
  5. McFarlin Library, Eliot Bliss Collections, note by Alison M. Greenlee Retrieved 17 September 2015 Archived 27 October 2017 at the Wayback Machine.
  6. Quoted in Emma Garman: "Feminize your canon: Eliot Bliss", The Paris Review", 12 March 2019.
  7. Spring Evenings in Sterling Street. Poems. Retrieved 17 September 2015.
  8. Retrieved 15 January 2020.
  9. Calderaro, Michela (2015). "Finding Bliss at McFarlin: The Papers of Eliot Bliss". Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. 34 (2): 411–421 via JSTOR.
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