Dr. Cathy Prendergast will discuss her newest book project, The Gilded Edge. Here is a description from Dr. Prendergast of this project:
"In 2017, I almost gave up on a book about a woman instrumental to Carmel-by-the-Sea’s famed literary colony which had been founded in the early 1900s. I had stumbled upon a searing letter by poet Nora May French to her boyfriend about her abortion, written while she was having it, but there were too few other documents to do her life justice. Unlike the well-known (and even not so well-known) men of this early twentieth literary super-group which included Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and the colony’s founder, George Sterling, Nora May French had few records under her name, despite being nationally known in her day. Searching collections of her male associates, I found letters that were about her or by her, but these documents had sections torn away, words crossed out, or whole pages missing.When I saw how hard men had worked to erase Nora from history, I recommitted myself to find out why. This talk is about putting in that extra mile to recover women’s lives, from looking in unusual places, to making sense out of mutilated records, to connecting the dots from disparate sources."
Contact blafond2@illinois.edu for more information and the meeting link.
