Line Mikkelson Cohen

Solveig Kronlokken Taylor

Line (pronounced Lee-na) Mikkelson is born into a Scandinavian American family and grows up in the upper Midwest. She is the oldest, and the leader, of the three sibling protagonists in my series So Are You to My Thoughts [published 2015-2020]. Their Dad calls them “Sparky and the gang.”

Line is on the lookout for injustice, owns up to her mistakes and does not believe in a religion which denies that animals have souls. She and her siblings  enjoy sociable school years, blizzards in the winter and long, halcyon summers spent partly at a lake in northern Minnesota. When her brother Paul has painful surgeries to repair his polio-affected legs, Line is his best companion.

Line attends a Lutheran college and spends a semester at Spelman, a historically black women’s college in Atlanta, during the civil rights era. Not content with her protests there, she goes down to Selma, Alabama in 1965 to swell the ranks of marchers to Montgomery. Here she meets Stephen Cohen, an activist leader. Stephen is in school in Chicago and Line establishes herself there. She trains as a nurse practitioner. When she becomes pregnant, she and Stephen marry.

By 1968, Stephen’s frustration pushes him toward the violent ends of the protest spectrum. This is too much for Line. She packs up her six-month-old baby Christopher and takes a train to San Francisco where her sister Marty is working. Marty and Line partner to bring up Christopher. 

Marty is, however, involved with a character whom Line thinks shady. When Line finds drugs in the apartment, she again packs up Christopher and leaves, this time going to Alaska, where Paul is teaching school. It is here that Stephen comes to find her. They have been apart for two years. He has settled down and taken a job teaching at the University of California in Santa Cruz. Line and Stephen resume their married life.

In a short while, three more kids, Heather, Fern and Ivy, are born. Line settles in to being the earth mama that she is. Midwives are under threat and Line joins the fight. When the kids are all in school, Line becomes a hospice nurse and also studies alternative healing methods, such as Reiki, which uses touch to direct healing energy.

As the kids grow up, Stephen’s widowed father comes to live with the Cohens. Line continues to cook and garden in Santa Cruz. When Stephen spends sabbatical years in Edinburgh, doing research for history books he plans to write, Line makes a home for him and her younger girls. While there, Fern falls in love with archeology and attaches herself to European digs. 

Following her kids becomes Line’s chief preoccupation. Christopher, who never got along with his father, moves to Minnesota and becomes a political operator for the Democratic Farm Labor party. Heather, who attends college in Davis, California, develops a career as a viticulturalist. She meets a Chilean winemaker and moves to Chile with him. Line hates to see her family spread far and wide. She clings to Ivy, her youngest. But Ivy too has ideas. She moves to Los Angeles to work in a drama school in costuming.

As Line grows older, she finds that something is wrong with her body. She has taken it for granted, worked it hard and now she can’t rely on it. One of her hips collapses as she walks and she finds herself unaccountably tired now and then. She is eventually diagnosed with progressive multiple sclerosis, one more instance of unfairness in the world.

Acceptance is slow for Line, but she finds it is a more positive and helpful response than her initial panic. Stephen is very supportive. They are both thrilled when Barack Obama becomes president. Line has lost both parents, but she and all of her siblings gather at the lake in Minnesota at the cabin which was a legacy from Mother and Dad. At this point, Line is still getting around on her own two legs.

Solveig and Connie Kronlokken, SF, 1970

Though the circumstances of Line’s life do not match those of my sister Solveig, my sister’s unique spirit infuses Line. In fact, my sister probably instigated the writing of this series of novels, which reflects many aspects of our own large family. 

Solveig was a gifted gardner, a nurse practitioner for many years and a wonderful mother. She was unequivocal in her certainty of what was right, but mild and relaxed in presence. She didn’t trust what people said as much as what she saw below the surface. This grounding made her an inspiration to the many people she met and my own boon companion throughout our long lives.

Though Line lives forever in the fictional present, I am now using the past tense for my brave and beautiful sister. Solveig was diagnosed with MS in 2000 and died on October 20, 2026.

Marie Arnoux

Louise Colet by Adele Grasset, 1842

We meet Madame Arnoux through the eyes of Frederic Moreau, the protagonist of The Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert, first published in 1869. She appears to him as a vision, with her brown skin, pale dress and pink ribbons on her hat. She is doing embroidery with dainty fingers. Moreau wants to know everything about her, but she is soon claimed by her husband and daughter.

In Paris, Moreau finds the shop where Arnoux sells art prints and paintings. He manages to be invited to dinner at their home, which is exotic, bohemian, while at the same time being peaceful and homely. Madame Arnoux is wearing a black velvet dress and a red Algerian head-dress. After the meal she sings an Italian song. Moreau, a law student, becomes a friend of the family.

Recalled home, Moreau’s mother says there is no money, and he stays in the country for several years. When he returns to Paris with an inheritance, he finds the Arnoux family has a three-year-old son. Madame Arnoux occupies herself with teaching her little boy, presiding over her daughter’s piano lessons, and sewing. She asks Moreau what he plans to do. “You must have ambition.”

Moreau only wants to go into society. He finds that Arnoux has a mistress, which distresses Madam Arnoux, but her husband is also a family man, and loves his children. Among his many business interests he has begun a china factory. Moreau gets tangled in their finances, wants to help.

Moreau visits the china factory, finding Madame Arnoux there. When he tries to speak to her of love, she gives him no encouragement and gathers her children around her. But she knows her husband cannot be trusted. She takes a small house in the country and Moreau visits every day. “You are my ideal,” he says. They talk of their childhoods, tastes and opinions. “If only we had met earlier.” They imagine their life together. Moreau begs Madame Arnoux to meet him in Paris and prepares a place for them.

On the appointed day, Madame Arnoux’ son has a grave sickness. She does not send word to Moreau and he angrily forsakes her. She, however, is glad this crisis has stopped her from joining Moreau and offers her soul up to God.

With revolution stirring in the streets, Moreau prepares to stand for election. But no one listens to him. Moreau even participates in a duel, when he thinks Madame Arnoux’s name is being impugned, though the story, when told by others, bears little relation to what actually happened.

As the wife of an unreliable and philandering husband, Madame Arnoux does not have an easy time of it, and we sometimes see her own faltering feelings. But she remains dedicated and dutiful. When Moreau sees her finally, and she tells him why she didn’t meet him as arranged, they renew their love talk. But all of a sudden, there is Rosanette, the woman Moreau has been living with. She is pregnant.

When Moreau hears that the Arnoux’ finances are in such disarray that they must leave Paris, he collects money to try to help them stay. But the Arnoux family has already left. Moreau attends an auction of their things, numb as he watches the beloved objects sold.

Much later Madame Arnoux comes to Paris, to Moreau’s house to pay a debt. She and her family have been living in Brittany. They reminisce. “We have loved each other,” she says. When she takes off her hat, he can see that her hair is white. She looks at him, “loving, responsible, dazzlingly beautiful, and so kind.” Much later, after her husband’s death, Moreau hears that she has moved to Rome to live with her son.

The Sentimental Education recounts Moreau’s adventures in great detail. We are sure that many of them were Flaubert’s own. Madame Arnoux was inspired by Elisa Schlesinger, the wife of a music publisher, who remained an ideal love throughout Flaubert’s life. 

Flaubert thought badly of the rootless people he met in his quest to be a part of society in the 1840’s. In his telling, he was quite as venal as the next person! But he redeems himself in describing what he sees with great exactness. And he sets up Madame Arnoux as the moral compass in the life of his character Moreau. She remains virtuous, honorable and devoted to her children.

Reading The Sentimental Education, I am pleased to find myself in the grounded realism of one of the first writers to think that it was worth noting things as they actually are. The book is chock full of characters and stories of the revolution and of the society in which Flaubert moved, but the unwavering vision Moreau had of Madame Arnoux as the book opens remains its guiding light.

 

Emily “Mickey” Hahn

Mickey and her pet gibbon

Emily Hahn was born in 1905 in St. Louis. Known to everyone as Mickey, her family soon moved to Chicago. Out of “sheer contrariness,” since no woman had done so, she got a degree in Mining Engineering from the University of Wisconsin. She hated working in an office, however, and wanted to travel.

Taking one of the lively letters Mickey wrote to her family from a trip to New Mexico, her brother-in-law sent the text to the newly-begun New Yorker, which published it. Mickey moved to New York and began writing all the time. She took a research position in England and from there moved to the Congo, where she thought she could spend most of her time reading and writing. After a couple of years in the Congo, she wrote “one of the most interesting” travel and adventure books of 1930.

Back in New York, Mickey found a sort of “coyote mentality,” as the depression deepened. People lived on subsistence diets, especially the flocks of young women who had come to the city. With her sister Helen, Mickey traveled to Japan, and then to Shanghai, where she didn’t intend to stay long. Helen went back to New York, however, and Mickey stayed. Sending dispatches back to the magazine, Mickey got deeper into the expatriate culture and especially got to know the Chinese artistic community.

Mickey became involved with Shao Yunmei, a Shanghaiese poet and publisher who had spent his young years in Europe enamored of French poets. When Shao bought a printing press with his inheritance, he and Mickey started a magazine. Only three issues were published. When Mickey wrote about him for the New Yorker, however, people couldn’t get enough of her stories. Shao was married, but he also married Mickey. The document which showed they had been married later allowed Mickey to be an “honorary Asian” and kept her out of internment camps for the British when the Japanese took over Hong Kong later.

It was suggested to Mickey that she write a biography of the Soong sisters, three Chinese women whose husbands were powerful politicians, including Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek. They were skittish, worried about defamation, but Mickey, through her contacts, met them and spent time in Chongqing and Hong Kong with them. The book was published in 1941 and was pronounced excellent.

In Hong Kong Mickey met Charles Boxer, a British intelligence officer who was also a brilliant colonial historian. Like Mickey, Charles was not racist and believed the British empire to be over. They had a baby together, Carola, born in 1941. The Japanese invaded Hong Kong and Charles was wounded, then sent to prison camps. He was respected, however, because he had lived in Japan and could speak Japanese.

Asked by a Japanese official why she had married an Asian and then had a baby with Major Boxer, Mickey said, “because I’m a bad girl.” “No,” said the official, “You are good girl.” Mickey spent her time trying to collect enough food to keep her daughter alive and also find food for Charles. As difficulty mounted, Charles insisted Mickey leave, taking the Swedish prisoner exchange ship MS Gripsholm run by the Red Cross. She arrived in New York with Carola in 1943.

In New York, Mickey wrote feverishly, completing China to Me. Americans lapped up the book. Charles was reported killed, but Mickey did not lose hope. He arrived in Los Angeles and flew straight to New York. It was “the best publicized romance of the war.” They were married six days later.

Mickey and Charles moved to England, to Conygar, a dilapidated house belonging to Charles’ family in Dorset. Another daughter, Amanda, was born in 1948. Both Mickey and Charles spent their time studying and writing, though they were also sociable and gave parties. Mickey was not a good housewife, but she was interested in the mechanics of living and how they reflected the culture. After the war, women were once again in an ambivalent position between domestic life and work.

In the 1950’s, Mickey became a staff writer at the New Yorker, continuing to travel and living in both England and New York. In her later years, she was interested in wildlife preservation, especially in primate communication. Charles took academic positions in Britain and the United States, writing on European colonialism. Mickey died in New York in 1997, from complications of a surgery; Charles in 2000 in England.

I had never heard of Mickey Hahn when I ran across her in Starry and Restless [published 2026] by Julia Cooke. I was immediately taken with her insouciant presence. Her witty, observant prose is full of casual details which show what life was really like at a particular time and place. She was curious and did not hang back from the truth. She was “a woman deeply, almost domestically, at home in the world,” wrote a colleague, comfortable with well-known people, but also with the ordinary. Her beloved sisters, her daughters, nieces and nephews found her as unexpected and informal, as elusive as the rest of us do.

Sybil Stone Van Antwerp

Virginia Evans

Sybil is a small woman with black hair and dark skin, a watchful child in photographs. When we meet her (in The Correspondent by Virginia Evans [published 2025]), she is already 72 years old. She is told she is losing her sight. But in letters she writes and receives over the course of this novel, we learn the story of her life.

Sybil and her brother were adopted by a well-off family. Sybil became an attorney and was for 30 years the working partner of an influential judge. She was married to a man from Belgium whom she loved and with whom she had three children. Their middle child died in a swimming accident at the age of eight, however, and their marriage did not survive this terrible event. Sybil turns in on herself and her husband, Dan, must care for the remaining kids, Bruce and Fiona, who was only four at the time.

At 72, Sybil is reluctant to leave her house and garden at the edge of a river in Maryland, where she sits with her paper and pens. A rich life flows from her forthright writing. In a letter to a friend, Sybil writes: “Relationships are the meat of our lives. They are links in a long chain … a story is thus preserved in some way. They are the original civility.” 

Sybil writes to her brother, a journalist and writer, who lives with his partner in France. She writes to authors she admires and to a friend, Rosalie, with whom she has corresponded for years. She writes to the child of a colleague, Harry, who is probably autistic, brilliant at math. When this kid runs away from home, he comes to live with Sybil for a while.

After their divorce, Dan returned to  Brussels, taking Fiona, who, as an adult, lives in London. Sybil has trouble speaking to her daughter, who professes not to understand her mother. When Dan is dying, he writes an anguished letter to Sybil, forgiving her of any guilt over Gilbert’s death. Sybil tries to answer the letter, but is unable to before Dan dies. When she doesn’t come to the funeral, Fiona is outraged.

Bruce, Sybil’s son, lives near her. At Christmas, he gives her the gift of a DNA matching service, which Sybil at first resists. She has a cordial relationship with a neighbor, Theodore Lubeck, a German who escaped before the war. She is also introduced to a colleague, Mick, whose company she enjoys. She even visits him in Texas and he proposes marriage.

In other correspondence, Sybil tries to get a Syrian refugee engineer a better job, fights to be able to audit classes at a nearby college and hears from a young man who wishes her ill, since a case she worked on went badly for him. She quarrels with her good friend Rosalie, who tries to get her to reconcile with Fiona. And finds that she has a 49% DNA match with a woman named Henrietta Gleason who lives in Scotland.

When Sybil procrastinates and the trail on Ms. Gleason goes cold, Harry, with his superior Internet skills, steps in and finds her address. Sybil writes to her and finds that Hattie is indeed her sister! Hattie can also tell Sybil more about her birth mother and father, though she does not know why Sybil was given up for adoption. 

As Sybil grows closer to Theodore Lubeck, he confesses his feelings of guilt, as he escaped while his father and brother died at Dachau. Sybil confesses to him the circumstances of her son’s death, which include her inattention. Confession lifts the inner scream which has lived in Sybil all these years and she feels more peaceful.

Sybil finally does reconcile with Fiona and goes to London to see her. Fiona drives them to Scotland, where they visit Hattie and her brothers. Sybil’s experience in Scotland is “magical and painful.” She invites Theodore to come. By the time they return to the United States, Sybil and Theodore move in together. Sybil, at 80, is indeed losing her sight and Theodore must read and write her correspondence. They take a last trip to Paris, but then Sybil dies suddenly of a pulmonary embolism.

I found Sybil’s story movingly told. After a long life of work, a certain amount of strain, but also quiet dignity, Sybil slowly opens herself to a time of happiness with her daughter and her newly-found sister. She also finds a companion in Theodore Lubeck. I highly recommend the audiobook of this title, as those who perform it have just the right emotional tone for the characters.