#ThrowbackThursday: WOMEN AND APPLE TREES
This fall, our archival intern Monika Zaleska will offer a glimpse back into FP’s collection, using correspondence, documents, and clips from our extensive archive. Monika is a PhD student in the CUNY Graduate Center’s Comparative Literature Program, and is working with FP through a grant from Publics Lab.
You can follow her on Twitter at @myszka_mz and check out her weekly posts here and on the FP instagram.
We may know better than judging a book by its cover, but sometimes the cover art is what draws you to a novel in the first place. That’s why it's so crucial that it captures the mood of the book.
This week in the archives, I looked at two 1930s novels by Moa Martinson, a working class Swedish woman writer who FP published in the 1980s. Women and Appletrees and My Mother Gets Married were both translated by Margaret S. Lacey, and each features cover art by a woman artist. Above is a painting by American Impressionist Mary Cassatt. My Mother Gets Married features Portrait of a Young Woman by Paula Modersohn-Becker, a German early Expressionist painter.
Covers also inspire healthy debate between the publisher, writer, and/or translator about how the book is best represented. Above is a letter from Joanne O’Hare of FP to translator Margaret S. Lacey on the cover art for Women and Appletrees. The novel itself follows two working class women as they fight for opportunities denied to them because of their gender and poverty, therefore FP thought it was important to have a woman represented on the cover, along with the apple trees. The final cover, the Cassatt painting, represents a woman and child reaching for an apple, a symbol of reaching for knowledge and opportunity.
Baby reaching for an Apple was used with permission from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, for a minimal charge and the favor of returning the transparency: a thin piece of plastic printed with the painting, used to produce the cover image. Judging from this letter, it seems that FP had an ongoing relationship with their collections, and often corresponded with the museum.
Moa Martinson was one of Sweden’s most well-known writers of proletarian literature, and her novels often focused on the hardships that working class women went through in labor and their private lives. My Mother Gets Married is an autobiographical novel about the protagonist’s mother’s marriage to an abusive alcoholic as a means to improve the condition of her family’s life. Mia, the young protagonist, represents the countless people in Sweden who, despite the cozy stereotype of blond children and happy families, “didn’t have a bed to lie in,” as Martinson writes in Women and Appletrees.
In the 1970s, Martinson became a role model for feminist writers in Sweden, and her notariety increased. She is known and admired for her willingness to cast an unblinking eye at the conditions of the working class in turn of the century Sweden: she wrote about poverty, illness, urbanization, motherhood, and survival. She herself was the illegitimate child of a mother who worked as a maid, in a textile mill (pictured above), and on a farm to keep her family alive. The Cassatt painting Baby reaching for an Apple captures a moment of intimacy and desire in what was, for Martinson and her characters, a difficult, unjust life--the yearning to get more from life. A form of hope, or at least a sign of resilience.
Monika Zaleska is a writer, translator, and PhD student in comparative literature at the CUNY Graduate Center. She has an MFA from Brooklyn College, where she served as fiction editor of The Brooklyn Review, and currently teaches in the English department.