leaves behind her a bewildering and beautiful body of work; at 84, she was the author of dozens of books of experimental, polymorphic prose-poetry-philosophy, many of them out of print at the time of her death. Howe was the humblest of geniuses; a small-press star, always unreachable by the mainstream and in a perpetual state of rediscovery.
I've included it because although the magazine is not an academic one, the article focuses on West Coast Nurse (1963) and Vietnam Nurse,two romances which Howe wrote at the very beginning of her career. I have not quoted all the analysis here.
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In the beginning, before the books she wrote under her own name, there were two romance novels about nurses. In discussions of Howe’s work, they are treated as a footnote, another charming detail in a life rich with incident. But read looking backward, having seen all that came later, the nurse novels come to look like more than a curiosity. Instead, they are the place where Howe first experienced the plotting of a novel as a kind of existential struggle; where she began working through, in writing, the questions that would sustain and bewilder her. They deserve the kind of careful attention Howe’s later work often likened to a spiritual imperative.
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What is striking about these books [...] is how much Fanny Howe can be glimpsed in Della Field’s novels. In West Coast Nurse, as in Howe’s later fiction, there are Irish daughters, neglectful actress mothers, meditations on loneliness and silence, the irreconcilable lure of the light out West and the seasons back East; ruminations on the parts we play and the parts of ourselves we struggle to understand. There is a politically astute indictment of what would come to be called the war on drugs. There are repeated references to Jane Eyre, and it is even possible to view the novel as a slight, slant retelling: an orphaned girl, a taciturn hero, pervading questions of relational equality.
Most remarkably, though, is the novel’s anticipation of Howe’s later spiritual seeking.
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In Vietnam Nurse, too, there are hints of Howe’s religious searching, and of the syncretic Catholicism she would eventually adopt, as the novel detours into a comparative analysis of Buddhism and Catholicism.
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Perhaps the genre, so seemingly unlikely a starting place for Howe, is rather fitting. She preferred plots with “strange returns and recognitions and never a conclusion.” When the inevitable happy ending is reached, in both the Della Field novels, they bend back on themselves, as if they are circling back and beginning again. Vietnam Nurse began with Lee’s first fiancé dead in the midst of the Vietnam war and ends with Johnny and Lee newly engaged. But Johnny is also wounded and on a plane to the United States, while Lee is staying on in a war zone for another year; there is a lingering fear of death, an unshakeable sense that the story may be starting over again.
This is an obituary for Fanny Howe, who
I've included it because although the magazine is not an academic one, the article focuses on West Coast Nurse (1963) and Vietnam Nurse, two romances which Howe wrote at the very beginning of her career. I have not quoted all the analysis here.
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