| Title | : | Brook Evans |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1903155169 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781903155165 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 320 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1928 |
Like DH Lawrence, whose Lady Chatterley's Lover was also published in 1928, Susan Glaspell believed that society should respect the effects of passion instead of valuing it far less than the forces of respectability and economic security.
A film of Brook Evans, The Right to Love, was made in 1931, the year Susan Glaspell won the Pulitzer Prize for her play Alison's House.
Brook Evans Reviews
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Love, love, love this book!
A very moving account of how ones actions effect the generations.
Poetic and beautifully written.
Will stay with me for a long time! -
I was very taken with Susan Glaspell’s novel ‘Fidelity’ when I read it, a year or so ago, and because I knew that only that novel and one other were in print, I thought that I should save that other for a little while, and enjoy the prospect of reading another work by a very fine author.
When the Persephone Readathon came around I decided that it was time to pick up my book, but until now life hasn’t allowed me time to write about books.
‘Brook Evans’ was published thirteen years after ‘Fidelity’, and it was interesting to see that some things had changed but some things had remained the same. The style felt familiar but the author’s voice had matured. She still had many of the same concerns, and she addressed them in a story that covers a much broader period of time; telling the story of Naomi Kellogg and her daughter Brook Evans from 1880s to the 1920s.
The first act of the story, set in farming country in northern Illinois, tells of the love affair of two young people: Naomi and Joe. They are deeply in love, they plan to marry, they believe that they will always be together, and so it seems quite natural to them to begin a sexual relationship.
The future that they both hoped for is not to be, and Naomi is devastated when Joe is killed in an accident She only finds comfort in the realisation that she is pregnant, that she will always be connected with Joe through their child, and that she will have a purpose in life raising that child.
She forgets that she is flying in the face of convention until Joe’s mother, instead of expressing joy at the prospect of a grandchild that she thought had been lost with her only child, calls Naomi a whore and angrily accuses her of trying to sully the memory of her son.
Naomi’s parents are overwhelmed by the coming disgrace and insist that Naomi accept the open proposal of Caleb Evans, an farmer and lay preacher who has courted her for a long time. He had plans to move to Colorado, he wanted to take her as his bride, he was even prepared to raise her child, and all those miles away nobody would know how long had passed between marriage and the birth of a first child ….
Naomi didn’t care for Caleb, she didn’t care for that plan at all, but she had nowhere else to go ….
I was captivated as this story played out. It was so very well written, each and every character lived and breathed, and I understood every emotion and every action. I saw that there could be no happy ending, not in those days and not in the days when Susan Glaspell wrote this book; and I saw that there were no heroes and villains, just real, fallible people.
The second act is set in Colorado some years later. Caleb was a good man, he worked hard to provide for his wife and her child, but he was a religious fundamentalist and his family’s life revolved around his church and its strictures. Naomi did her best to a proper wife to Caleb, but she could never feels any love for him, and all of her hopes for the future were vested in the daughter she had named Brook, for the little stream where she and Joe made love.
Naomi wants Brook to experience the love and passion that she knew that she herself knew for such a short time, and to have the kind of life that she had only been able to live in her dreams. Sadly, her desperation to give Brook that future blinds her to the reality of her daughter’s feelings and situations, and she pushes too hard. Brook is torn between her first love and her fundamentalist belief and she is devastated when Naomi, believing she will make her daughter understand the importance of following her heart, shows her an old photograph of Joe, explains that he is her ‘real father’ and tells her the true circumstances of her birth.
Brook doesn’t see the romance of it all, but it gives her a new appreciation of the man who loved and raised her. In the heat of the moment she rejects her mother and the young man she supported, and she leaves home with the intention of going to the church and becoming a missionary ….
This really was a tragedy, and the story spoke profoundly about the conflict between love and duty.
I wished that Naomi would act a little more prudently but I understood why she spoke and acted as she did and I felt such compassion for her. I felt for Brook too, I wished that she could understand both of her parents, but of course she couldn’t, she was far too young to have such maturity and wisdom.
The third act opens in Europe, many years later. Brook is a wealthy widow who hasn’t seen either of her parents since she left home, who has a son who is coming of age, and who has two suitors. The solid and very wealthy aristocrat friend of her late husband would be the sensible choice but she is more drawn to an ardent adventurer who wants to join him on his travels through the Himalayas.
Brook begins to think of her mother, who had died some years early; and she comes to understand what Naomi had been trying to give her, and to realise that she had judged her so very harshly. Then she receives news that Caleb was gravely ill and near the end of his life. She knew that she ought to go to see him for one last time, but that left her under pressure to make a difficult decision.
She knew that she had the choice that had been taken away from Naomi ….
The exploration of family relationships is beautifully done, and I loved the way that themes echoed through the story and across generations, but I found that I was not as engaged with the latter part of the story as I had been with what went before. Because I couldn’t reconcile the woman Brook was with the girl she had been; too many years had passed and too little was shown or explained.
That was a flaw, but not a fatal flaw.
The story continued to speak to my head and to my heart; and it felt so real that I can believe that it played out, all those years ago. -
Way back in the mists of time, soon after I first discovered the wonders of Persephone books I read Fidelity by Susan Glaspell. So now sixty odd Persephone books later and I find I don’t remember Fidelity as clearly as some others I have read, although I know I enjoyed it. In February, I was bowled over by a Susan Glaspell short story From A-Z, in The Persephone book of short stories, it made me immediately want to read Brook Evans.
“She lay flat, eyes closed, Joe sitting beside her, but not touching her now, as if each would feel alone what it was they had together. She smelled her father’s hay from the field across the brook; her hand was on moss deeper and smoother than velvet; the trees were a large fresh sound, like something going over the world; the brook was tender and clear. She opened her eyes and looked up at the stars.”
Brook Evans tells a searing story of love in its many incarnations. In Illinois in 1888 Naomi Kellogg a nineteen year old farmer’s daughter is captivated by the country surrounding her home, especially the brook that divides her father’s land from that of their neighbours the Coplands. Naomi is in love with Joe Copland, and forced to meet in secret they meet on the banks of the brook, their relationship quickly becomes sexual but the two have plans to marry after the harvest. However Joe is killed in an accident and Naomi discovers she is pregnant with his child. Naomi is pleased her love will live on in Joe’s child, but Joe’s mother is not at all pleased, and neither is Naomi’s horrified family. Naomi had been previously proposed to by Caleb Evans, an older highly respected man with deeply held religious convictions. Aware of Naomi’s condition Caleb offers to marry her anyway and to take her to Colorado with him to start a new life. So broken hearted, and rejected by her family, Naomi marries a man she knows she cannot love and leaves a place she loves for one she never will. Her heart remains true to Joe, although all she has to remember him by is her lovely daughter named for the Brook by which she was conceived, and one small fading photograph.
The narrative then moves forward in time, 1907 and Brook Evans nearing eighteen is naturally unaware of how she came into the world. Her mother is faded and bent by the years with a man she cannot love, and the tragic loss of a younger child, her father a strict religious fundamentalist who views sex and dancing as a sin. Naomi is devoted to Brook, and lives only for her, saving the best bits of food for her, wanting her daughter to experience the passion and exhilaration that she herself knew for such a short time. Her desperation to give to Brook the kind of life she didn’t have leads to her making some odd decisions and puts a severe strain upon her relationship with her beloved daughter. Brook is repelled by her mother’s hatred of Caleb, and Naomi is unprepared for her daughter’s defiance. Brook turns more toward her father, and the women missionaries of their church who are always looking for someone willing to take up the missionary mantle. When Brook finally turns away from her mother, the reader knows it will break Naomi’s heart.
In the final section of the novel, time has moved on again and so has Brook. It is the late 1920’s and Brook is no longer an angry young missionary, she is a thirty-eight year old widow living in Paris with her seventeen year old son. As a mother, it is only now she can begin to understand some of what her mother meant. Her mother is now dead, it is too late to repair the ruptures and misunderstanding of the past and Brook is beset with memories and regrets. As Brook contemplates a second marriage with a friend of her husband’s, and plans a trip back to Illinois to see a dying Caleb (living with Naomi’s family in her old family home) for one last time, she meets a man who turns everything on its head for her. Brook now must make a choice, love or duty, a good honourable man or an unconventional adventurer who makes her want to act against own good sense. Brook only now understands what is was that her mother understood about love, and how a life lived without it, for them at least, was only half a life.
“Just what did her mother mean – those things she said about love? Was there something she – Brook – did not know? Was she incapable of knowing? There had been nothing in her own life that would have gone on living through twenty barren years. Mother had known only a few months of love – then loss, shame, and - oh, loneliness – long, relentless. But there was a light that never went out. It burned in tragic beauty until – until I put out all of her spirit, thought Brook. But she – Brook – was the child of that love”
In this beautifully written, almost unbearably poignant novel, Susan Glaspell explores the different kinds of love that exist in a family. There is a rawness of emotion throughout this novel, as these characters love and lose over and over again, the decisions of one generation felt by the next. Themes of parenthood and sacrifice sit alongside the painful stories of love in Brook Evans and make for a compelling and beautiful novel. I am slightly confused by the number of lukewarm reviews for this novel on Goodreads and Librarything because I loved this book – I can only assume the sadness was too much for some – it is sad but maybe I like sadness more than I realise. -
A few qualms w this book:
1) the characters were all so subtly despicable — far from evil, but all unbearably selfish in a way that was almost worse because if you blink you don’t realize you shouldn’t like them… having nobody to root for is not as fun
2) there was way too much of a gap between brook and evans in a way that just felt lazy on the author’s part
3) the characters were so! overly! dramatic! (*edit: realizing the author wrote this because she believed passion should be something society values definitely changes my perspective; I guess the hysterics are justified)
And yet — this gets four stars because I simply can’t resist a work from Persephone Books. The writing is beautiful and the first 2/3s of the book I literally could not put down. -
Although this novel is named after one of its central characters, this is effectively a family saga covering 3 generations, and its main theme is the cruelty of children towards parents. Brook is the daughter of Naomi by her lover Joe, who dies in a tragic accident before he can marry her. Since this is 1888 rural Illinois, Naomi's parents breathe a huge sigh of relief when their neighbor Caleb agrees to marry Naomi and take her to Colorado to start a new life. The problem is that Naomi can never let go of Joe and is a bad wife to poor Caleb, who is neither very attractive nor very successful. On the other hand, he is patient and kind. Eventually Naomi gives him a son, but the little boy is killed in a cow stampede. What holds Naomi together is the hope that her daughter will find Prince Charming and marry for love. Therefore she goes into overdrive when Brook falls in love with Tony, and does everything in her power for the romance to blossom, although Caleb disapproves of Tony's mixed ancestry and Catholic background. In the hope of making it easier for Brook to disobey Caleb's orders, Naomi dumps on Brook the bombshell that he is not her biological father. However, this backfires because Brook is overwhelmed with gratitude for Caleb instead, and shrinks more and more from her mother's stifling maternal affection. Without fully realizing it, Brook rebels against the idea of fulfilling her mother's romantic yearnings vicariously. With enormous misgivings, Naomi hatches a plot for Brook to elope with Tony to California, even if the last thing she wants is to be separated from the child she idolizes in memory of Joe. Her sacrifice is voided when clumsy Tony blurts out the truth of Naomi's involvement to Brook, and partly to spite her mother, Brook follows missionary friends to Asia. Brook quickly grows disillusioned with missionary life, marries a nice Englishman, Bert, and has a son, but these news arrive too late for Naomi who can't get over Brook's rejection and sinks into terminal depression. Towards the end of WWI, Bert is seriously injured and becomes an invalid. After nearly a decade of nursing him, Brook starts going spare, and out of love for her, Bert commits suicide, trusting his colonel will marry his widow and support his son. Brook genuinely believes that Bert died of his long illness, but their son Evans (so named of course in honor of Caleb, to whom Brook has remained loyal from afar) is fully aware of his father's sacrifice. Brook and Evans move to France, because Brook isn't in love with Colonel Fowler and wants to defer her decision. In the meantime she meets and falls head over heels in love with a mad Icelandic mathematician, Erik. When she hears that Caleb is on the brink if not of death, at least of dotage, Brook feels under tremendous pressure to choose between sailing to the US to say farewell to her father or staying in France to embark on her first true romance with Erik. In the end she chooses to jump into the unknown and marry the impecunious and high-strung Erik, but sends Evans to Caleb instead. In Illinois, Evans meets not only his senile grandfather but all sorts of distant relatives with whom he has little in common. When he hears that Brook has ditched the upstanding Colonel for a man she hardly knows, Evans gets very angry, but decides to forgive her. Thus is the cycle of rejection of the parent by the child broken. From this summary you might get the impression that "Brook Evans" is high melodrama, but Glaspell has real empathy with all her characters and parses their motivations with infinite subtlety. One leitmotiv is that human beings always want to "rescue" the person they love most, often with devastating consequences. Caleb does rescue Naomi's reputation but condemns them both to marital hell as a result. Hoping to rescue Brook from Caleb's bigoted disapproval of Tony, Naomi sends her unwittingly into a solid but unexciting marriage. Bert marries Brook to rescue her from the missionaries. Many books peddle family secrets as an ever-appealing plot point, but this one truly shows how secrets kept or divulged at the wrong time warp lives. It is a genuinely illuminating exploration of the many faces of love.
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This was incredible, I love the style and it really moved me and I was so invested, when I picked it at Persephone Books I did not expect to enjoy it so much but what a great choice past me made; excited to gift/recommend it to all my friends.
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It’s the old, old story – boy meets girl, they fall in love, but boy’s mother considers the girl not good enough for her son and the lovers are forbidden to meet. They continue to meet in secret, until – almost inevitably – the girl falls pregnant.
Naomi Kellogg is the girl in this story, passionately in love with Joe Copeland. Her parents practice a stern, joyless kind of Protestantism, and the news of Naomi’s pregnancy is a huge disgrace, particularly as the year is 1888.
When Joe Copeland is tragically killed in a farming accident, Naomi’s parents all but force her to marry Caleb Evans, a man even more cheerless than they, who loves Naomi and is willing to give her child a name. They move out west, and Naomi’s child is born – a girl she names Brook after the brook beside which she and Joe used to meet.
When Brook falls in love with Tony – of Italian extraction, and a Catholic – Caleb disapproves, but Naomi tries to persuade Brook to carry on meeting Tony in private. Her own disappointment still fresh even after eighteen years, her one wish is for Brook to avoid the same loveless life that she has endured. But Brook has a fierce loyalty towards the man she considers her father, and it is not until many years later that Brook begins to understand her mother and wish that she had behaved differently towards her.
Naomi’s inability to communicate with her teenage daughter is contrasted with Brook’s relationship with her own son. Brook has been offered a chance of love and happiness, but she feels – not without reason – that her son won’t understand.
Glaspell does an excellent job of showing the conflict between Naomi and Brook. There are faults with the book – there is something a little too melodramatic about the first section of the book, and it is hard to understand in the final section of the book why Brook falls in love with Erik. Although this isn’t, to my mind, as good a novel as 'Fidelity' (also published by Persephone), it is nevertheless very readable, and Glaspell handles her themes with a good deal of compassion and understanding. -
I have read the Book it is very sad and emotional.
the purpose of my reading his Book was to prepare myself to play the charector of Caleb Evans in a Play performed at Nortland Pioneer College called Intimations of the Brook.
it was a very hard experiance for me because it took all of the physical and mental streangth I had to do so. -
Rather beautifully written but a tad melodramatic at times.I did rather like the way my reactions towards the various characters changed over time as did those of the characters. The analysis of the effect of an unhappy life and the consequent embittering was excellent.
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See my review here:
https://whatmeread.wordpress.com/2017... -
Brook Evans is a story of three generations. The title character is the middle generation and the result of a passionate love affair that at shapes the life of a all three generations. It is quite a sad story in some ways, Brook’s mother Naomi has such fleeting happiness with her lover, Joe, before he is killed and then her relationship with Brook is damaged by misunderstanding and circumstance. That continues to some extent, the generations never fully understand each other, but there is love and hope again at the end, and perhaps it doesn’t matter that none of the generations understand everything as they must make their own way.
Brook’s son Evan returns to the family, and to the brook where his mother was conceived and for which she was named, and feels a connection with the place without understanding the family history:
“The brook curved like an embracing arm, and then above, it again twisted so that here was a place all by itself, as a little meadow before the sheltering curve of the low hills. An oak reached far over the brook. This place pleased Evans.”
There’s a sense of resolution in this, despite the fact that much of the story remains open ended. -
In the Mid West in the 1880s, Naomi Kellogg is swept off her feet by young love. In Colorado 20 years later, the same thing almost happens to her daughter. And then there is a third section, set another 20 years on.
This is the second book I’ve enjoyed by Susan Glaspell, who was best known as a playwright. It’s a very readable story, although I thought the characters did some frustrating things. They seemed divided into two types, the passionate and the dull, and never the twain should marry - although they do, with unfortunate consequences. But the character development was interesting, with sympathetic characters becoming unsympathetic as they grew older, and vice versa. -
I first read about Susan Glaspell in an article, maybe in the NYT, and wanted to check her out. Long out of print, luckily, Persephone Books has published several of her titles. Brook Evans was, according to Wikipedia, one of her best-sellers when it came out in 1928. Imagine your great- or great-great-grandmother, a young woman in 1888, falling in love with a local boy and having his baby. Out of wedlock. And never falling out of love with him, despite marrying an older man who is lucky to find the young woman of his dreams in a tight place that favors his suit.
Because of the times these characters live in, secrets are kept for a long time, and life-long love for a man not your husband is too bizarre a thing for others to believe in. Glaspell's style takes a little getting used to, but is worth your patience--she'll soon sound like that favorite great-aunt telling you a family story that needs remembering.
