Teresa Urrea

Teresa Urrea was born in 1873 in the lush state of Sinaloa, Mexico, the daughter of Tomas Urrea, the patron of a large ranch and the prettiest of the Yaqui Indian ranch workers. Her mother leaves, and Teresa is brought up by an unpleasant aunt. When she is ten, all the people on the ranch pick up and move in a vast wagon train up to Sonora, since Tomas has angered the regime of Porfirio Diaz. Teresa attaches herself to Huila, the household manager and a curandera (healer and herbalist) for the family.

In Cabora, Sonora, Teresa is the life of the ranch. She is tall and has blonde in her hair, looking much like Tomas. Huila educates her and Teresa begins to help bring babies into the world, stilling the pains of the mother. Tomas finally notices her and admits that she is his daughter. He brings her into the house, educates her and dresses her. She insists on learning to read, though Huila thinks it is silly.

After being attacked by a ranch hand, Teresa is in a coma for 12 days. Her coffin is prepared, but Teresita revives. She begins healing people. Her fame spreads. Thousands visit the ranch, wanting her healing touch. The Diaz regime begins to fear that she is fomenting revolution. Indeed her father’s best friend Aguirre prints revolutionary tracts, putting her name, ‘the Saint of Cabora,’ and her photo in them. When Indians come from up in the hills, Teresa befriends them. The Catholic priest is scandalized by their reverence for her.

When the Rurales come to Don Tomas’ ranch, Tomas stands them down, but he and Teresa flee. Soldiers catch up to them and put them in prison. Teresa is covered with bites and has fever. She expects to be shot, but instead, she and her father are put on a train to Arizona. The Diaz regime calls her ‘the most dangerous girl in Mexico,’ though Teresa, in impromptu talks to her pilgrims preaches only peace.

Tomas and Teresa settle in Arizona, but many assassins come to kill them. They keep moving, enjoying American pleasures like baseball, pretty dresses for Teresa and ice cream. Aguirre draws them east to El Paso, Texas. It is a real town with paved streets. The crowd of seekers finds Teresa here, too. She cannot escape the thousands of people who come to her and does not want to. She feels it is her destiny to heal. Aguirre, however, in his newspaper uses her fame to incite revolution.

In 1896, several villages fight with photos of ‘the saint of Cabora’ covering their hearts. They are killed. Newspapermen and more assassins arrive. Tomas and Teresa go back to Arizona where Tomas buys land and begins to build another ranchita. It is high up in mining country, and Tomas tells Teresa he does not want pilgrims or sainthood in his new home. Tomas loves the country and farming. But Teresa is swept off her feet by Lupe Rodriguez. He demands to marry her, though Tomas refuses. In fact they do marry, but after only a day, Lupe publicly attacks Teresa. The townspeople put him in their jail. He is taken to an asylum, mad.

The rift between Teresa and her father does not heal. She goes to San Francisco to heal the son of a wealthy family. A group contracts her to go to St. Louis and then New York. She insists she doesn’t want money for healing, but the consortium pays for her upkeep. She spends lonely weeks with this tour, unable to speak much English, though her fame is great and pilgrims come to her. Finally she asks an old friend to come from Arizona as a protector and translator. She enjoys John Van Order’s company and they become lovers. In New York, the cream of society welcomes Teresa, making her into a fine lady.

When her contract is up, Teresa goes back to California. She and John have two daughters, Laura and Magdalena. Teresa lives with her sister in Los Angeles and then in Ventura County. At last she goes back to Arizona, where her father has died. She sets up a small clinic, but she is succumbing to tuberculosis herself. According to Luis Alberto Urrea, whose two fictionalized books about her [The Hummingbird’s Daughter, 2005; and Queen of America, 2011] detail her life, Teresa feels she has failed. “All the illusions of that life are gone. I despise the ‘saint of Cabora,’” she says. She dies in 1906 at the age of 33.

Urrea portrays Teresa as a lively character, always in control of her life, though she is humble about her abilities to heal. She smokes, drinks, dances and always insists she is not a saint. She is curious about everything and equal to it, no matter how new. By the end of her short life she has lived everywhere from a peasant hovel to fine hotels, knows the desert as well as cities. She is a mother and makes peace with her father’s people, though she does not see her father again after she leaves home in 1900. It is an extraordinary story, brought to vivid life by Luis Urrea, Teresa’s grand-nephew.

Odile Blanc

Nella Bielski, to whom Berger dedicated "Once in Europa"

Though born in 1936, we hear nothing of World War II in the story of Odile Blanc, told by John Berger in the titular story of his book Once in Europa [1987]. Instead, we learn of the small farm, garden and orchard her parents tend in the shadow of a giant factory which produces ferromanganese in the Haute-Savoie, a region of France in the Alps, very close to Switzerland.

Achille Blanc hates the factory, the furnaces of which are always kept burning, and which spews fumes and leaves ever-growing mountains of red dust slag. Though the company keeps increasing the price it will pay for his farm, Odile’s father will not sell. He does not want his son working there, but eventually Odile’s older brother does.

Despite the factory, Odile grows up feeding rabbits, helping shovel out the stable and going to school. She is very close to her father. At 14, the schoolmistress comes to tell Odile’s parents that she is doing so well she should be sent to further schooling. She boards in the nearby town of Cluses, lonely, but obedient. Odile’s father dies and the village brass band he had been a member of comes to play “Amazing Grace” at the farm.

One day Odile’s mother asks her to take a loaf to her brother at the factory. Michel, one of her brother’s friends, offers to take her for a ride on his motor-bike. At first she refuses, but then accepts. They pack a picnic and ride over the mountains down into Italy. Odile is thrilled, but only a few weeks later she hears Michel has been badly burned at the factory when a furnace wall broke. He spends a long time in hospital, losing both his legs.

On New Year’s Eve, when Odile is 17, she hears music coming from the barracks where the foreign workers for the factory live. She puts on an old coat and goes to look in the window, watching Russians dancing and many other people she doesn’t know. A man comes up behind her and asks her in. He is Stepan, an orphan Ukranian who grew up in Sweden. He asks Odile to dance: “What’s so surprising about music is that it comes from the outside. It feels as if it comes from the inside. The man who had clicked his heels and announced his name as Stepan Pirogov was dancing with Odile Blanc. Yet inside the music, which was inside me, Odile and Stepan were the same thing.”

Odile’s family is horrified. Her mother won’t speak to her. Odile often walks into the mountains with Stepan and, when they have slept together, quits school and takes a job in town at a components factory. Stepan is patient, thinking they will win over Odile’s family. He builds an amazing bed and a separate room in the barracks which goes by the name ‘In Europa,’ and Odile often stays there. One day, however, as she is preparing for work, her brother calls to say Stepan has been killed at the factory. Asphyxiated, he fell into the furnace and was incinerated.

Devastated, Odile does not know what to do. She is only 18 and pregnant. She stays at the barracks until she can bear to leave and then moves to Cluses where she works in the components factory and raises her son Christian, who looks much like Stepan. As a kid, Christian is deeply interested in flight and, in a framing story, takes his mother hang gliding over the mountains of the Haute-Savoie.

When Christian goes to camp one summer, Odile meets Michel again. He runs a tobacco and newspaper shop in a nearby town and has prosthetic legs. He offers to take Odile to Paris, but as they stop to have a sandwich, someone runs into their car. They put up at a hotel and never get to Paris. Michel, Odile finds, has been to hell and back: “Who says hell has to stay the same? Hell begins with hope. If we didn’t have any hopes we wouldn’t suffer. We’d be like those rocks against the sky.” But he offers himself to Odile. She and her son go to live with him over the shop. Michel and Odile have a daughter together.

Thinking over her life, Odile wants to say to her daughter: “I will tell you which men deserve our respect. Men who give themselves to hard labour so that those close to them can eat. Men who are generous with everything they own. And men who spend their lives looking for God.” She thinks of the men in her rich life with much tenderness.

The stories Berger tells of the people he lived among in Quincy, France, are developed from the talk of his fellow villagers, including perhaps a woman such as Odile. Berger’s biographer Joshua Sperling quotes Berger saying of these neighbors: “’his ideals are located in the past; his obligations are to the future, which he himself will not live to see.’ They were the opposite of opportunists; in many ways they were saints.”

Emma Woodhouse

Romola Garai, Emma, BBC, 2009

Though it may seem that Emma Woodhouse has no mountains to get over, this is not entirely true. Emma is most hampered by her own willfulness which, as we learn, blinds her to the results of her actions. The story of her 21st year, as told by Jane Austen in the novel which bears her name published in 1815, brings Emma from her youthful sense of power to shame and humiliation, while opening her closed world to love and a stronger sense of other people’s realities.

Emma lives alone with her father in one of the better houses in Highbury, a village in Surrey. She has seen little of the world due to her father’s fearful temperament and his reluctance to leave home. Emma has just lost her best companion, her governess, who is really more of a friend. Neither her father nor her governess have tried to curb Emma’s spirit, though she is very well educated to filial duty and gentle-womanly manners.

Believing that her own efforts have helped her governess find a husband, Emma decides that the village curate must be in need of a wife. She befriends Harriet, only 17, hoping to educate the beautiful girl into the gentry. Harriet has become the beloved of a yoeman farmer, but under Emma’s influence, Harriet rejects him. Emma is certain that Harriet would make Mr. Eliot, the curate, a good wife. Emma’s good friend Mr. Knightley tries to warn her not to interfere in Harriet’s life, but Emma brushes off his advice.

The biddable Harriet falls in love with Mr. Eliot. Emma emphasizes to her all the ways he seems to care for Harriet, but is then horrified to find that Mr. Eliot’s attentions are actually directed towards herself. When she finds herself alone in a carriage with him after Christmas dinner, Emma rejects his advances. Mr. Eliot leaves town in a huff.

The gentry in Highbury seem to have little to do but visit and talk about each other, sharing letters and news. Jane Fairfax visits her old aunt, and Frank Churchill, who was adopted out of the village and into a wealthy family, also returns. Frank is lively and many think he might become attached to Emma. They plan dances together. Emma thinks Jane more accomplished than herself and does not befriend her.

With Frank away, Emma examines her feelings and finds she is not in love with him. She has quarreled with Mr. Knightley about him also. Mr. Knightley does not think Frank a good man. Emma is surprised to find that Harriet has fallen in love with Mr. Knightley for his kindness to her. Emma has compounded the unhappiness, encouraging her because she believed Harriet referred to Frank. The tangle of feelings in Highbury is finally unraveled to reveal that Frank and Jane Fairfax have been secretly engaged. Frank has been covering this up by toying with Emma. This duplicity is felt to be an outrage in the village.

Emma is fearful that Mr. Knightley might prefer Harriet to herself, realizing that she has been foolish. “The only source whence anything like consolation or composure could be drawn, was in the resolution of her own better conduct, and the hope that, however inferior in spirit and gaiety might be the following and every future winter of her life to the past, it would yet find her more rational, more acquainted with herself, and leave her less to regret when it were gone.”

When Mr. Knightley learns that Emma never loved Frank despite their flirtations in company, he reveals that Emma, with all her faults, is his dearest; that he has loved her since she was 13. Emma is transported, her happiness only marred by knowing Harriet’s feelings. She sends Harriet to her sister in London. There Harriet meets with her farmer, who proposes again. Harriet accepts and is married in September.

Emma’s father hates change and always rails against marriage. Emma thinks she cannot leave home while he is still alive. Considering this, Mr. Knightley suggests that he move in with Emma and her father, which is finally agreed to. Emma marries Mr. Knightley in October.

Jane Austen is careful to elaborate the feelings of her characters in delightfully specific language. She wraps up the stories of each of the important characters. Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax are suitably remorseful and their apologies are accepted.

Austen’s clear delineation of values makes her stories useful to us more than two hundred years after she wrote. A progressive, she mocks Emma’s pretensions and, through Mr. Knightley, shows that a person’s character is more important than his class. Lack of real feeling, money-seeking and egotism show up as false in characters that have as much life as those we admire. In fact it is quite astonishing how much Austen endears Emma to us, even though we know she is usually wrong! Emma’s sincere shame and growing self-knowledge contribute and we do not begrudge a happy resolution to her story. If you fall in love with Emma, I do not think there has been a better representation of her than Romola Garai’s in the 2009 BBC production of the novel, clips of which can be found on Youtube.

Leila Hosnani

Egyptian Coptic Woman

Leila Hosnani’s story is told in Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandrian Quartet (published 1957-1960). We meet her through the eyes of the young diplomat Mountolive, who is visiting the beautiful farm Karm Abu Girg outside of Alexandria where Leila lives with her ailing husband and two grown sons. They are Christian Copts, very proud, who have been the “brains” of Egypt, doing much of the administrative work of the country.

Leila had been a brilliant student, had hoped to become a doctor. But for an Egyptian woman born between the two world wars, this not possible. Leila is obedient, pliant, and loyal. She marries into a family which her parents arrange for her. Her life must belong to Egypt. “Whether she was happy or unhappy she herself had never thought to consider. She was hungry, that was all, hungry for the world of books and meetings which lay forever outside this old house and the heavy charges of the land.”

Thus Leila becomes that age-old archetype of woman, a woman of experience who accepts that her work and natural gifts might not be appreciated in the great world of politics, culture, academia or even art; but knows that this world cannot get on without her; knows what a woman is to men and that her life lies in the areas of graciousness, civility, intimacy and beauty. Such a woman crafts a place for herself at the heart of her household that only she can fill: rooted in family, with children, representing that family to the world with grace, ensuring civility, showing to younger people that it is okay; that life, that being a woman is worth the pain. 

Leila settles into the “rambling old-fashioned house built upon a network of lakes and embankments near Alexandria.” She subscribes to books and periodicals in the four languages she knows besides her native Arabic, and goes into the city of Alexandria for the occasional holiday. But she does not appreciate shallow society and becomes introspective.

Leila begins to live through her smooth and attractive son Nessim, who runs the family banking and shipping businesses. Her other son Narouz runs the farm as her much-older husband suffers from increasing muscular atrophy. Mountolive, a young British foreign service officer, is invited to stay on the farm for a summer to improve his Arabic. He and Leila ride out into the desert together at her husband’s suggestion. They have an affair. “Only I must not fall in love,” Leila tells Mountolive.

When Mountolive is posted to other countries, Leila begins a correspondence with him. With their difference in ages, she had not expected their affair to last, but distance frees them. “She kept pace with his growth in those long, well-written, ardent letters which betrayed only the hunger which is as poignant as anything the flesh is called upon to cure: the hunger for friendship, the fear of being forgotten.”

When Leila’s husband dies, she considers meeting Mountolive in Europe, but that summer she contracts smallpox, which “melted down the remains of her once celebrated beauty.” Leila buys heavy black veils and retires to a life in the summerhouse on the farm where she reads and writes with a tame snake for company. She tells Mountolive not to pity her and begs him to write as gaily as before.

In the third book of his quartet, entitled Mountolive, Durrell reveals the plot at the bottom of all of them, which Nessim has conceived for the sake of the Copts, together with the Armenians, Jews and Greeks in Egypt, as a defense against being engulfed by the Arab tide. He believes that the British have turned the Moslems against them and he has been aiding the Jews in their fight against the British in Palestine, providing arms. This is the basis for his marriage to Justine. He has many covers for this plot. Leila is finally told of it.

In the resolution of this complex tale, Mountolive comes back to Egypt as British ambassador. Leila, who has resisted seeing him, finally meets Mountolive to beg for Nessim’s life, as she is convinced that he has been found out and will suffer. This is humiliating for both of them. The British do prevail upon the Egyptian police, but Nessim has successfully bribed them. Nessim sends Leila to a family farm in Kenya, but Narouz will not leave. The Egyptian police come for him and assassinate him instead of Nessim.

We do not learn more of Leila, though the fortunes of the Hosnani family suffer and we must assume she shares in this. I have always been fascinated by the resignation and the dignity with which Leila conducts herself after her disfiguring illness. And in re-reading this book I finally came to see Durrell’s value. It is not just the lush language for which he is justly celebrated. Or the varieties of love which he describes, including all the cynicism which resulted from the wars when European nations were thrown into chaos with ramifications all over the world. It is also that he can flesh out the meaning and motives of characters with whom he is not naturally in sympathy. The Hosnani family is richly drawn.

Tove Jansson

Tove Jansson overcame the darkness of an early life to become a bright and shining light. She was born in 1914 to a family of artists in Helsinki, Finland. Her father was a sculptor in the classical tradition. Her mother illustrated magazines and accepted commissions for graphic designs, prompting Tove’s own early drawings. In the summers, the family left their crowded city apartment and went out to an island in the Finnish archipelago. It was difficult to get to, but they all loved the sea.

War darkened the close family life, however. Finland fought a civil war in 1918, affecting their father’s personality. The country was squeezed between Soviet Russia on one side and the growing Nazi presence on the other. Initially the Finns cooperated with the Nazis against a Soviet invasion, but then the bombing began. Tove’s younger brother served in the army during World War II. Tove’s letters reflect how dispiriting this time period was.

Tove went to art school, but abandoned it for work with tutor Sam Vanni. She regarded her painting as most important, but she also created a family she called the Moomintrolls, writing their stories and drawing them to sublimate her own feelings. The Moomintroll family had the personalities of Tove’s own family with added characters reflecting events in Tove’s life. Catastrophes happen in the books, but the family comes through, with tolerance for each other’s quirks.

In 1944 the Nazis were driven out, leaving a trail of destruction. Finland retained its independence, but lost some of its territory to the Soviets. After the war came a time of self-discovery for Tove. At 30, she was clear that she did not want a conventional family life, with children who might have to go to war. Art was the most important thing. Due to conflicts with her father, she found her own studio in the middle of Helsinki. She and her friends danced, talked and stayed up all night. Tove fell in love with Viveke Bandler, but the affair was secret and brief. Viveke was married and same-sex relationships were illegal in Finland at the time.

Tove published several children’s books about the Moomintroll family, leading to a request from a British publisher for a cartoon strip series about them. Beginning in 1954, a huge advertising campaign launched the strip which brought Tove money and fame. For seven years she produced six strips a week before becoming exhausted and handing the strip off to her younger brother Lars.

About this time, when Tove feared she was too busy to do fine art, she met and fell in love with the artist Tuulikki Pietila. Tuulikki had a studio near Tove’s. They could work separately and cross to each other’s place through a passage in the attic of the buildings. Longing for a simpler life, Tove and Tuulikki built a house on an island far out in the Finnish archipelago, Klovharu. Without plumbing or electricity, the house had windows on all four sides so they could watch storms roll in from any direction and boats approaching.

Tove began to write adult fiction, including The Summer Book, written in 1971, just after her mother’s death. The book shares the perceptions of a six-year-old and her grandmother who are spending a summer on an island. They are shaken by very specific natural events, and so is the reader.

Tove and Tuulikki took a trip around the world in 1971, collecting jazz records and spending time in New Orleans. Every summer they lived on their remote island until 1992 when their boat broke up in a storm. Tove had cancer in her last years and died in 2001.

I first met Tove Jansson through the wonderful Summer Book. I also read a profusely illustrated biography of her, Tove Jansson: Work and Love, by Tuula Karjalainen [2014]. Truly a creative sprite who always took time for delight and love, you can watch an hour-long BBC documentary on Tove here.