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Angle of Repose

Wallace Stegner

Why we're reading this: An amazing tale of American society in the 19th and 20th centuries. My review is here: http://bethslistlo …more
[close] An amazing tale of American society in the 19th and 20th centuries. My review is here: http://bethslistlove.wordpress.com/20...

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Feb 27, 2016 Suzanne rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction, classics

Stegner is one of those authors that needs to be savored, so take some time to read this work slowly and thoughtfully. The novel presents a retired historian, Lyman Ward, in his attempt to compile the biography of his grandparents who raised him. What follows is a rich telling of an engineer and his author/artist wife who become part of the story of the American West during the late 1800's.

The character of Lyman's grandmother, Susan Burling Ward, was based on a real-life woman of similar backgro ...more

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Oct 12, 2015 Renae rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: genre-historical, genre-literary, read-in-2015

To consider this book out of context is only to get fractions of the whole picture. Without context, Angle of Repose, which won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is an interesting, well-written, and thought-provoking—if rather problematic—novel. But this is only if you read the book as an isolated object and know nothing about the author and his source material.

Because to put it quite bluntly, Wallace Stegner lifted the majority of his story wholesale from (and without giving credit to) the t To consider this book out of context is only to get fractions of the whole picture. Without context, Angle of Repose, which won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is an interesting, well-written, and thought-provoking—if rather problematic—novel. But this is only if you read the book as an isolated object and know nothing about the author and his source material.

Because to put it quite bluntly, Wallace Stegner lifted the majority of his story wholesale from (and without giving credit to) the then-unpublished memoirs of Mary Hallock Foote. Angle of Repose is, in a word, plagiarized. Some would argue that this falls into an ethical gray area, and perhaps the case could be argued from that position (and has been). However, it is my belief that when you create a “fictional” character whose life is rooted so deeply in the life of a real person that it’s hard to distinguish between the two, when you quote, word for word, from that person’s memoirs without proper citation…I believe that is ethically wrong.

Wallace Stegner claimed that Mary Hallock Foote wasn’t “interesting enough” to write a biography about, that by creating her fictional counterpart, Susan Ward, he made her “immortal”. He, a White man, improved upon the life one of the most recognized and celebrated American woman writers/artists of the latter 19th century. It’s strange, then, isn’t it, that the only “improvements” Stegner made upon Mary Hallock Foote’s life chronology were to A) provide a middle-aged White grandson character to “interpret” his grandmother’s life, and B) to invent a scenario in which Susan Ward has an affair and is directly responsible for the death of her youngest daughter. So, according to Stegner, what Mary Hallock Foote really needed was an anti-feminist, disdainful man to tell her what her problem was, and she needed to have the most melodramatic, ridiculous tragedy happen to her. (The quality in prose and storytelling between what Stegner plagiarized and what was entirely invented is quite marked—the former is infinitely better.)

Yet other than this, Stegner made no changes from Mary Hallock Foote’s memoirs, often not changing the names, often putting Foote’s own letters into the novel and passing them off as ones written by the “fictional” Susan Ward.

But in the end, though 80% of the book is about Susan Ward and her life in the 19th century, what Angle of Repose is really about it Lyman, the pretentious, curmudgeonly grandson. Stegner has stolen a real woman’s life and words in order to support the character arc of a man (who claims to be so much wiser and better than her). Mary Hallock Foote has not only been plagiarized, she’s been turned into a narrative tool to serve a probably misogynistic author and his definitely anti-feminist narrator.

From where I sit, this issue does not fall into a gray area; it’s wrong, and no matter how well-written or greatly-awarded Angle of Repose is, it’s despicable. ...more

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