Feminize Your Canon: Eliot Bliss
Our monthly column Feminize Your Canon explores the lives of underrated and underread female authors. Here, the life of Eliot Bliss, a prolific lesbian writer from the British Caribbean who may have had a strong influence on the work of Jean Rhys.
Eliot Bliss
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 want to be able to watch the evening in the sky, to dream on some far hill, to make things slowly out of patterns that I have been finding for years. I don’t want to feel cramped, jostled, frightened, herded among thousands of people; to work among the noise of machines, the incessant clamor of traffic vibrating on the nerves. I don’t want to be terrorised into a set formula of life.
These are the thoughts of Louie Burnett, the heroine of Eliot Bliss’s enchanting and lyrical first novel, (1931). After an English convent school education, Louie has her independence thrust upon her: her army officer father is dead and her mother’s upper-class Anglo-Irish family, thanks to the Great War, is no longer rich. “Perhaps you’ll pick up some nice young man, my dear,” says an uncle. But
