Catherine Prendergast peers into the sordid past of Carmel-by-the-Sea’s artist enclave and the 1907 death of poet Nora May French.
A mauve glow of artisiness still suffuses Carmel-by-the-Sea. The swoon-worthy vistas, the Middle Earth cottages and the thunderous surf all encourage the thought that here, perhaps, one could paint or write that masterpiece stuck deep inside. In its day, Carmel lured Jack London, Robinson Jeffers and Upton Sinclair, as well as many forgotten literary fritillaries.
Catherine Prendergast is a professor of English at the University of Illinois. Her new nonfiction book The Gilded Edge: Two Audacious Women and the Cyanide Love Triangle That Shook America (Dutton) focuses on a now-forgotten female poet of merit, eclipsed by the more peacocky male bohemians of Carmel in the early 1900s.
According to Lorraine Berry of the Los Angeles Times, Prendergast found a first-person description of a self-induced abortion by the poet Nora May French (1881-1907) in the UC Berkeley library. French had lived in a cottage owned by Carrie Sterling and her philandering spouse, George Sterling. The Sterlings were the real founders of Carmel’s days as an art colony: ”the influencers of their day,” suggests Pendergast, since the Sterlings gave serious artists and dabblers alike “the real estate multilevel marketing hard sell.” When French moved in with the ménage, it led to an early suicide which was imitated by poetasters all over the USA.
The suicide—but was it?—carries its own fascination. What kept Pendergast interested was the feminist side of the story. The professor describes her fascination with French: “I felt like I knew her. You know, like these other women writers I hang out with who are just unspeakably clever, writing about their own lives and traumas and always turning it into something … her voice was extraordinary.”
Read more on LATimes.com: “How a scholar unearthed the cyanide love triangle that toppled a California arts colony.”
For more on the book, visit PenguinRandomHouse.com.
