Although she led a quiet, reserved life with her family, Elizabeth Lawrence was a strong, successful woman who lived on her own terms. Her letters to her friend Ann Preston Bridgers show us the unexpected richness of Lawrence’s life.
In a day of tweets and texts, a collection of letters seems quaint, which is part of this book’s charm. In an editor’s note, Emily Herring Wilson aptly calls the collection a “last hurrah of an age of letters we are not likely to see again.”
Although she led a quiet, reserved life with her family, Elizabeth Lawrence was a strong, successful woman who lived on her own terms. Her letters to her friend Ann Preston Bridgers show us the unexpected richness of Lawrence’s life, as well as how a shy, uncertain girl became a heralded writer of gardening books and newspaper columns. Bridgers taught her protégé how to write and how to avoid society’s smothering expectations for Southern ladies.
As Wilson notes, this book is for readers who enjoy letters, not for scholars. Lawrence penned many letters as she wrote, revised, and published her classic book, A Southern Garden. North Carolina readers will enjoy the day-to-day picture of life in Raleigh in the 1930s and ’40s and, to some extent, in Charlotte, although the letters slowed after Lawrence moved in 1948. And anyone who loves gardening will share in Lawrence’s delight as she discovers new plants and ways to enjoy their beauty.
Making of a Memoir
After discovering the letters of Elizabeth Lawrence, Emily Herring Wilson pieced together her story.
First came the discovery. Then the detective work started in earnest. In the 1990s, Emily Herring Wilson of Winston-Salem, collaborating on a book about North Carolina women, became convinced that noted garden writer Elizabeth Lawrence deserved a biography.
First, Wilson edited a collection of correspondence between Lawrence and Katharine S. White, well-known editor and columnist for The New Yorker and wife of E.B. White. The success of that book, Two Gardeners, in 2002, paved the way for the biography, No One Gardens Alone, in 2004.
In one letter to White, Lawrence mentioned that her friend Ann Preston Bridgers was dying. Wilson wondered, “Who was Ann Preston Bridgers?” Wilson’s husband, Edwin, provost emeritus of Wake Forest University and a movie buff, told her: Bridgers, of Raleigh, was coauthor of Coquette, a Broadway hit that became a movie.
“I thought, ‘If she is that well known, there must be papers,’ ” Wilson says. A call to a bibliographer friend at Duke University hit pay dirt: Bridgers’ papers were there, including a wealth of letters Lawrence wrote to her. Those letters, more intimate than those to White, enabled Wilson to write the biography. Charmed by the letters and the personal growth they revealed, Wilson wanted Lawrence to “have her say” in her own words.
The letters’ discovery set in motion a treasure hunt. The undated letters were full of incomplete references to people, places, and events. Wilson pored through newspaper archives and histories, and checked old weather reports to establish dates and fill in the blanks. She decided what information to add in brackets or footnotes.
“[I was] committed to letting her speak for herself,” Wilson says. If Lawrence wrote something that sounded racist or nonfeminist by today’s standards, Wilson left it in. “You can’t make anything up, and you can’t interrupt the narrative. You are sort of reading over somebody’s shoulder.”
John F. Blair, Publisher. 2010, 315 pages, hardback, $19.95.
