Works by
Gail Godwin
(Writer)
[June 18, 1937 - ]

As Editor

• The Best American Short Stories 1985: Selected from U.S. and Canadian Magazines (1985)

Audio

• Queen of the Underworld (2006) by Gail Godwin with Stephanie Zimbalist, performer
  CD

Biography and Memoirs

• The Making of a Writer: Journals, 1961-1963 (2007) with Rob Neufeld, ed.
  After the breakup of her first marriage and being fired from her job as a reporter for the Miami Herald, Godwin decides to devote herself to becoming a writer and moves to Europe -- first to Denmark then to London, with a glorious interlude in the Canary Islands. Godwin lived in London for two years working at the U.S. Travel Service by day and, during her free time, doggedly pursuing her writing often amid anxious self-doubt. Godwin kept a daily chronicle of this heady time in her life recording her impressions of new places, new people (new men – lots of them), her reactions to the books she was reading, and her struggles to create prose and find her voice as a writer.

Novels

• Queen of the Underworld (2007)
  Emma Gant is a young heroine who may become as familiar to readers as Isabel Archer or Becky Sharp. Just out of college, she takes the train to Miami to begin a job as a reporter at the Miami Star. Fiercely ambitious and confident, she imagines her first front page story about Castro’s Cuba, while quickly writing obituaries and dutifully tackling the small assignments sent her way. Her most fortuitous assignment occurs when she goes to a local hospital following a tornado to report on the injured and meets Ginevra Brown, aka the Queen of the Underworld, a notorious Miami madam once betrothed to a mobster whose story has fascinated Emma since the day she arrived. Through Emma’s keen and curious eyes, the world of a daily paper -- during the time of typewriters, cigarettes, copy paper and women in heels clustered over fashion layout pages -- comes vividly, and unforgettably, to life.

• Evenings at Five: A Novel and Five New Stories (2004)
  Every evening at five o' clock, Christina and Rudy began the ritual commonly known as Happy Hour, sharing drinks along with a love of language and music (she is an author, he a composer, after all) a delight in intense conversation, a fascination with popes, and nearly thirty years of life together. Now, seven months after Rudy's unexpected death, Christina reflects on their vibrant bond -- with all its quirks, habits, and unguarded moments -- as well as her passionate sorrow and her attempts to reposition herself and her new place in the very real world they shared. "A tender story of a relationship that defies the grave," said The New York Times Book Review. Wrote Shirley Hazzard: "With deep truth and immediacy, Gail Godwin illuminates an indivisible marriage -- its experience, passion, thought, and wit; and its sundering into loss, longing, and remembrance. For such closeness, there should be a word beyond love."

• Evensong (2000)
  Margaret Gower Bonner, the narrator of Father Melancholy's Daughter, is now an Episcopal priest and rector of a small parish in High Balsam, North Carolina. She is married to Adrian Bonner, also a priest, whom some say is a replica of her melancholy father. During the first three weeks of Advent, 1999, Margaret's marriage, her parish, and her faith are tested by the arrival of two strangers, an old man claiming to be a monk, and a fervent woman evangelist with a God-dictated agenda to save the troubled community of High Balsam -- and to save Pastor Margaret Bonner particularly. Wrote Ron Charles in The Christian Science Monitor, "For readers waiting for a literary novel that treats traditional religious issues with wisdom, wit, and compassion, Evensong is an answer to prayer . . . Smashing one of the strangest taboos in American literature, Godwin may have finally brought religion back from the wilderness and made it a safe subject for literary fiction."

• The Finishing School (1999)
  An actress looks back on her fourteenth summer, when she befriended a passionate, tragic woman who introduced her to heightened reality. Wrote Frances Taliaferro in The New York Times Book Review, "Miss Godwin has written a finely nuanced, compassionate psychological novel . . . The Finishing School is a wise contribution to the literature of growing up."

• A Southern Family (1997)
  A North Carolina family is baffled and heartbroken by the unresolved violent death of a son and brother. The story is told in multiple voices. Wrote Jonathan Yardley in The Washington Post, "A Southern Family is, if possible, an even richer and more rewarding book than A Mother and Two Daughters  . . . it is old-fashioned fiction of the most serious and exemplary kind -- a book that creates a dense, populous world and draws the reader into it as surely as if it were his own . . . A Southern Family is an ambitious book that entirely fulfils its ambitions; not merely is it psychologically acute, it is dense with closely observed social and physical detail that in every instance is exactly right." [won the Janet Heidinger Kafka prize and the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Prize]

• Father Melancholy's Daughter (1997)
  The young narrator, Margaret Gower, daughter of an Episcopal priest, grapples with the legacy of her runaway mother, her father's cyclic depressions, and her own evolving spiritual life. Wrote Robert Wilson in USA Today, "I don't know more than a few contemporary novels as full of grace as Gail Godwin's new book, Father Melancholy's Daughter . . . Godwin has an almost Trollopian eye for the community that revolves around St. Cuthbert's, the parishioners with their quirks and foibles, the vestry with their expectations and demands . . . it is also in some sense about grace, divine grace, about the ways in which the presence or absence of the divine works in different lives." [won the Alabama Librarians Award for 1991.]

• Glass People (1996)
  This is a cautionary tale, a suspense story about a woman's spirit and the hazard-ridden leap she must make from being the object of someone else's shapely plot to becoming the subject of her own.

• The Perfectionists (1996)
  An eccentric English psychotherapist, his new young American wife, his three-year-old illegitimate son, who never speaks, and a young female patient take themselves off to Majorca for what they hope will be a healing vacation. But as it progresses, they find the sun, the sea, the idle hours relaxing their control over their interior derangements.

• The Good Husband (1995)
  A portrait of a dying woman, a charismatic professor of visionary literature, and the people who gather at her bedside as well as an intimate study of two marriages. Wrote Penelope Mesic in The Chicago Tribune, ". . . the novel's greatest accomplishment lies in capturing the sheer work of dying." "This is Godwin's best book to date, a landmark achievement." Publisher's Weekly: starred and boxed review.

• The Odd Woman (1995)
  At 32, Jane Clifford has achieved the professional and economic independence that the Liberated Woman takes for granted. Yet as the novel begins, an increasing and ominous sense of her own "oddness" is starting to impinge upon her.

• Violet Clay (1995)
  The eponymous heroine, a painter, reaches that "soon or never" time in her struggle to make her life and her art amount to something. Jonathan Yardley wrote in The Miami Herald, "Violet Clay is filled with wonderful language, wonderful people and wonderful insights. It is a portrait of a woman seeking to fulfill her art, and herself, before it is too late, and as such cuts to the quick of one of the most elemental yearnings . . . It is the work of one of the very best writers we have." [Nominated for the 1980 American Book Award].

• A Mother and Two Daughters (1994)
  The story is told from the three points of view of the two daughters (one an agitator and the other a conservative) and their newly widowed mother at a time filled with turbulence for each protagonist. Edmund Fuller in The Wall Street Journal wrote: "Confirms Miss Godwin as the maturely gifted artist she is. The wisest, most sensitively balanced novel that I have read about women in the enormous social transitions of our time." [Nominated for the 1982 National Book Award].

Non-fiction

• Heart (2001)
  "The Italians have a musical notation not found in any other language: tempo giusto 'the right tempo.' It means a steady, normal heat, between 66 and 76 on the metronome. Tempo giusto is the appropriate heat of the human heart."
  
  One of the preeminent literary artists of our time turns her attention, her profound insight, and her passion to humankind's most enduring, important, evocative, and provocative symbol:
  
  What is heart? It is the muscle of life, sending our most vital fluid coursing through our veins to every striving hungry part of our being. It is what keeps us striving against impossible odds; that fortifying something that is the cornerstone of every triumph. It elates us when we discover love and pains us greatly when that love is lost or proves unrequited. It is a gentleness that colors what we give to others. It is a symbol that we see on greeting cards: a small, red shape that was drawn on the wall of a cave in Spain more than 12,000 years ago.
  
  In this truly remarkable work, acclaimed, bestselling author Gall Godwin takes us on a breathtaking journey of the heart that spans the entire history of human civilization, combining literature, myth, religion, philosophy, medicine, the fine arts, and intensely personal stories from the writer's own past to explore the full and complex character of that unique symbol. Brimming with intelligence and wit, Godwin's explorations and meditations brilliantly track themes of the heart in life, legend, and art -- from the first valentine to the first stethoscope, from Gilgamesh to Confucius, from the heart of darkness to wearing one is heart on one's sleeve.
  
  Here is a gift of the heart from an eminent American writer at the pinnacle of her creative talents. It is a work of extraordinary power, creativity, scholarship, and passion. Lively and moving, Heart offers us a profound new look at where we come from and what has sustained us across millennia-in short, what it is that makes us human.

Short Stories

• Dream Children (1996)
  Fifteen stories. Jane Hill, in Dictionary of Literary Biography 234 wrote about Dream Children, "Its controlling theme is the exploration and testing of limits. The characters are people who have all gone beyond limits of some kind; the resolutions are often beyond the boundaries of physical reality."

• Mr. Bedford and the Muses (1996)
  A novella ("Mr. Bedford") and five stories about artists. Jane Hill, in her article about Gail Godwin's short fiction in Dictionary of Literary Biography 234, wrote, "All but one of the stories deal specifically with the profession and development of the protagonist, a writer." Wrote Gene Lyons in Newsweek, "the novella that gives the book its title is a subtle work of almost crystalline clarity that can only be compared to Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier."

Other

• For the Love of Books: 115 Celebrated Writers on the Books They Love Most (1999), Ronald B. Shwartz, ed.
  Gail Godsin writes about C.G. Jung.

• Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian (1998), Joyce Dyer, ed.
  See "Uncle Orphy"

• The Writing LifeThe Writing Life: a Collection of Essays and Interviews by National Book Award Authors (1995), Diane Osen, ed.
  See "Rituals and Readiness: Getting Ready to Write

• Who's Writing This? Notations on the Authorial I, with Self Portraits With (1995), Daniel Halpern, ed.
  See "The Girl in the Basement,"

• First Words: Earliest Writing from Favorite Contemporary Authors (1993), Paul Mandelbaum, ed.
  Includes "Juvenilia" (1949-1955): "The Autobiography of a Tin Cup,"(1949); "The Accomplice," (1951); "The Choice," (1951); "So Nice of You to Come," (1955)