Gail Godwin

Author

• Born: June 18, 1937
• Place of Birth: Birmingham, Alabama

• AMERICAN NOVELIST AND SHORT-STORY WRITER

Biography

Gail Godwin is one of the foremost novelists of her generation. Her career has done much to advance the acceptance women as writers of serious literature. She was raised in Asheville, North Carolina, by her mother, Kathleen Krahenbuhl, a divorced journalist, teacher, and writer of romances, and her maternal grandmother. These women proved to be strong influences on Godwin’s fiction, and each has served as a model for one or more of her fictional women. Her fiction also shows the influence of her father, Mose Godwin, a model for Uncle Ambrose in Violet Clay (1978), and her stepfather, Frank Cole, whom Godwin’s mother married in the late 1940s. Ray in The Odd Woman (1974) and Ralph in A Southern Family (1987) owe something to Cole.

Godwin was educated at Peace Junior College and the University of North Carolina, where she earned a degree in journalism. She was a reporter for the Miami Herald for a year, worked for the US Travel Service at the American embassy in London, and eventually returned to the United States, earning a Ph.D. in English at the University of Iowa. Like another premier novelist from Asheville, Thomas Wolfe, Godwin is considered an autobiographical novelist. Her novels bear a striking resemblance to events or locales from her personal experience. A typical Godwin theme is the modern woman and her dilemma in defining self and others in an era when the old frameworks and definitions have broken down. The conflicts she portrays most often arise between a character’s work, usually of an artistic nature, and her desire for security, love, and connection, most often through a relationship with a male. Thus, the theme of the woman struggling for identity is divided into two thematic strands: identity as an artist and identity as a lover.

Godwin’s characters also long, in many cases, to penetrate the identities of others. Yet, these characters are conscious of the questionable morality of such an invasion. Finally, her most important theme is the artist's role concerning self, others, and art itself. Her main characters tend to be self-conscious “artists” even when they are lawyers, psychiatrists, or unemployed. They make life itself into an art.

The Perfectionists (1970) and Glass People (1972) feature women who are trapped in bad marriages, do not have meaningful work, and are too insecure to make the inevitable and necessary break from their spouses to pursue an independent life. In The Odd Woman (1974), Godwin creates Jane Clifford, her first unmarried hero, and allows her to grow toward a valid understanding of herself, her strengths, and her limitations. This novel also introduces the important theme of family life, of learning how to relate to one’s birth family in adulthood, which has continued to be central to most of Godwin’s subsequent work. Violet Clay (1978) was Godwin’s first novel written from a first-person point of view and her first overt exploration of an artist protagonist. Violet is a painter, and like Jane Clifford, she must come to terms with herself and her family. Another of Godwin’s first-person narrators is Justin Stokes of The Finishing School (1985). An actor looking back on her childhood, she seeks to recover the magic of her yearning during her fourteenth summer.

A Mother and Two Daughters (1982), one of Godwin’s biggest commercial successes, uses multiple perspectives. Although the narrator is omniscient, the shifting of attention among the three title characters ensures a broader scope than in the previous novels. The cast of characters in A Mother and Two Daughters is larger than Godwin usually handles; the resolution of the conflicts, which are not so different from the conflicts facing her earlier protagonists, is more blatantly optimistic.

A Southern Family (1987), an ambitious work for Godwin, is based in part on the unsolved death of her half-brother. The novel has many of the same autobiographical fragments as her earlier work, including an artist figure (this time a writer), a strong mother-daughter relationship, an ambivalent relationship between the relocated artist and her native South, and the struggle to define the relationship between self, others, and art. The real breakthrough in this novel is in narrative technique. Godwin employs multiple narrators for the first time, using first-person in some cases and a tightly limited third-person perspective in others, allowing all the characters to take on a significance and integrity previously reserved only for the typical Godwin hero.

Father Melancholy’s Daughter (1991) and The Good Husband (1994) continue Godwin’s themes of female self-development through meaningful work and relationships. Both also concern themselves with spiritual issues for characters confronting mortality in the chaotic, modern world. While Father Melancholy’s Daughter focuses on Margaret Gower’s struggle to find her identity and regenerate herself from the ashes of a troubled family past, The Good Husband (similar in its themes) is more complex. It is told from four narrative perspectives—two husbands’ and two wives’—whose marriages are ending in crises (death and divorce). In both novels, protagonists undergo painful spiritual journeys to fulfill their lives' promise. Evensong (1999), a sequel to Father Melancholy’s Daughter, is a contemplative novel that depicts a pivotal period in the life of Margaret Gower Bonner, now an Episcopal pastor whose marriage, family, community, and church undergo a trial by fire.

Most critics prefer Godwin’s novels to her short fiction. Like her novels in technique and subject matter, her stories tend to go against the grain of most contemporary short fiction, often shifting perspectives or using an omniscient narrator and covering more extended periods and more complicated action than is customary for the contemporary story. Godwin is sometimes pigeonholed as a “woman’s writer,” but her accomplishment is more significant than that limited title would suggest. Hers is an intelligent approach to fiction, and she is very aware of the traditions of the novel. Her richly detailed portraits of sensitive, striving women seeking fuller lives will remain critical to the literature. As her work turns increasingly toward examining faith and spiritual matters, it is hopeful that the limiting classification of “woman’s writer” will fall away.

Godwin has published several works in the twenty-first century, including the novels Queen of the Underworld (2006), Unfinished Desires (2009), The Red Nun (2009), Flora (2013), and Grief Cottage (2017); the memoirs Heart: A Personal Journey through Its Myths and Meanings (2001), The Making of a Writer: Journals, 1961–1963 (2006), The Making of a Writer: Journals, 1963–1969 (2011), and Publishing: A Writer’s Memoir (2015); and the story collection Evenings at Five (2003). Throughout her career, Godwin has also served as a lecturer at several prestigious universities and started her own, small publishing house, St. Hilda's Press. In 2021, Godwin suffered a near-fatal accident when she broke her neck. The experience inspired her 2024, nonfiction work, Getting to Know Death: A Meditation, which is Godwin’s thoughts on life, death, and mortality.

Bibliography

Cheney, Anne. “Gail Godwin and Her Novels.” Southern Women Writers: The New Generation. Edited by Tonette Bond Inge. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1990.

Crain, Jane Larkin. “Dream Children.” New York Times Book Review, 22 Feb. 1976.

Frye, Joanna S. “Narrating the Self: The Autonomous Heroine in Gail Godwin’s Violet Clay.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 24, 1983, pp. 66–85.

Gies, Judith. “Obligation, Fascination, and Intrigue.” Rev. of Mr. Bedford and the Muses, by Gail Godwin. New York Times Book Review, 8 Sept. 1983, pp. 14, 37.

Halisky, Linda H. “Redeeming the Irrational: The Inexplicable Heroines of ‘A Sorrowful Woman’ and ‘To Room Nineteen.’” Studies in Short Fiction, winter 1990, pp. 45–54.

Hill, Jane. Gail Godwin. New York: Twayne, 1992.

Mickelson, Anne A. “Gail Godwin: Order and Accommodation.” Reaching Out: Sensitivity and Order in Recent Fiction by Women. Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1979.

Shands, Kerstin W. “Four-telling, Foretold: Storytelling in Gail Godwin’s The Good Husband.” Southern Quarterly, vol. 35, 1997, pp. 77–86.

Schaub, Michael. “At 85, Gail Godwin Survived a Broken Neck. She Reveals her 'Extra Life' in New Book.” Orange County Register, 11 July 2024, www.ocregister.com/2024/07/11/at-85-gail-godwin-survived-a-broken-neck-she-reveals-her-extra-life-in-new-book. Accessed 23 July 2024.

Shands, Kerstin. “Read of the Month: “Getting to Know Death: A Meditation” by Gail Godwin." Southern Literary Review, 2 July 2024, southernlitreview.com/reviews/read-of-the-month-getting-to-know-death-a-meditation-by-gail-godwin.htm. Accessed 23 July 2024.

Smith, Marilyn J. “The Role of the South in the Novels of Gail Godwin.” Critique, vol. 26, 1980, pp. 103–10.

Westerlund, Kerstin. Escaping the Castle of Patriarchy: Patterns of Development in the Novels of Gail Godwin. Stockholm: U of Uppsala, 1990.

Wimsatt, Mary Ann. “Gail Godwin, the South, and the Canons.” Southern Literary Journal, vol. 27, 1995, pp. 86–95.

Xie, Lihong. The Evolving Self in the Novels of Gail Godwin. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1995.