December Tea with TLW
Wednesday 6th December, 5pm UK time
Anne Boyd Rioux on ‘Looking for Kay Boyle, a Lost Member of the “Lost Generation,” in Paris’
For December’s installation of Tea with TLW, we are excited to welcome Anne Boyd Rioux to give a talk on the American writer, Kay Boyle.
Anne is interested in the relationships many of us have to the women of the past we become obsessed with. In her talk, she will explore what these women can mean to us as they become more than simply subjects we are writing about—and why they might, as Kay Boyle did for her, impact the directions that our lives take.
Anne began researching Kay Boyle (1902-1992) in 2017 and planned to write a biography of her. Boyle was part of the so-called “Lost Generation” in Paris the late 1920s, but she wrote about much more than the expatriate community. In fact, she didn’t go home when the Great Depression started but stayed through some of Europe’s darkest years. Boyle went on to write about the rise of Nazism in Austria in the mid-1930s and the fall of France in 1940. She even came back to Europe after the war and wrote short stories and a novel about occupied Germany. Best of all, she not only chronicled the personal toll of Europe’s fall into madness and its postwar recovery, but she also helped shape the modern short story as a regular contributor to The New Yorker and a winner of two O’Henry awards for the best short story of the year. However, few people today know her work.
Anne will talk about her research on Kay Boyle as well as the profound ramifications it has had on her life, including leaving her twenty-three-year academic career to travel to Paris on a one-way ticket in September 2022. Initially following in Kay Boyle’s footsteps, she has been on the road and writing about it ever since.
We can’t wait for this discussion of a little-known American author, and we hope you will join us on the day!
As always, all are welcome.
If you’d like to join us, please email: transatlantic.women@gmail.com and we’ll send you a secure Zoom link.
We hope to see you there!
Team TLW: Laura, Chiara, Lindsay, Shelby
#TeawithTLW
Anne Boyd Rioux is the author or editor of seven books, including Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters (Norton 2018) and Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist (Norton 2016), one of the Chicago Tribune’s ten best books of the year. She is the recipient of four National Endowment for the Humanities awards, two for public scholarship and is Professor Emerita of English at the University of New Orleans. She has written for LitHub, the Washington Post, Lapham’s Quarterly, and elsewhere. Currently, she is writing a memoir about her year of travel in Europe in search of a new home and a new life as a writer. She writes about her sojourns, with a focus on the lives and works of women writers and artists, her own included, in her newsletter: https://lettersfromanne.substack.com/about.
Transatlantic Literary Women 