A Likkle Miss Lou: How Jamaican Poet Louise Bennett Coverley Found Her Voice

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Rambling, sparsely punctuated sentences often repeat themselves and its conversational style – “that’s right”, the narrator likes to reassure herself – contrasts with a satisfyingly recondite vocabulary, running to words such as ouroboros and autotelic. As well as Quin, there’s praise for another autofiction-inclined English late-modernist, Anna Kavan. Louise was subsequently accepted at RADA on the condition that she passed the entrance test, which she did. There is no way to cut to the real, no way to show us a beloved teacher or a long-ago friend without choosing what aspects made them who they were, summed them up, and—in the emotional sense—named them.

Claire-Louise Bennett: ‘If there was a revolution, I’d be Claire-Louise Bennett: ‘If there was a revolution, I’d be

A description of Charlotte Bartlett, the older cousin in A Room With a View – this is a book full of other books – contains a strong hint of self-comparison: “She has spent a lot of time on her own and certainly that makes a person susceptible to overthinking simple transactions and occasionally losing perspective. Ireland, where the stories are set, is never even mentioned: “I live on the most westerly point of Europe, right next to the Atlantic ocean” is as close as we get and as much as we need. From the home we slide suddenly into the mind—another place where we are sometimes at peace and sometimes at odds, a place we inhabit but don’t control. Additionally, the ongoing expansion and restructuring of the Force to cauterize the ballooning threats to national security has caused an increased demand for newly commissioned Second Lieutenants. The red book, which doesn't get much attention when people speak about Forster's novel, nevertheless seemed significant enough for me to use it as a frame for my review, and to recollect it now and reuse as a frame for this review of a book that is itself framed by A Room with a View.A ‘leading lady on stage and radio’, Louise’s multifaceted career in the arts had a significant impact on Jamaican culture.

Louise Bennett-Coverley

When everything is illuminated and the shadows have been sanitised, where goes the creature inside and what happens to her need for reverie? Unsurprisingly, our narrator, who stays in bed for days on end, believes the cleaner the home the more dubious the sanity of the person inside it. As drama officer for the Jamaica social welfare commission in the 1950s, she travelled all over the island, and continued the study of Jamaica's folklore and oral history that she had begun in the early 1940s. Initially, the British government was conservative in approving a hill station for the troops in Jamaica. Bennett’s unnamed, 40-ish narrator, raised in south-west England but resident in Ireland, holds forth in fevered, looping, breathless prose, and displays a tendency to travel long and far down the blindest of alleys.The first two can again be seen as variations on the essays in the novel (or rather, vice versa, given they came first).

Louise Bennett’s Women Without a Story - The New Yorker Claire-Louise Bennett’s Women Without a Story - The New Yorker

Like our doodling protagonist, we are stuck with the problem that representation remains representation, no matter how much closer we think we’ve got to the heart of a thing.The one of the striking juxtapositions at the core of the book is the act of physical violation versus the destruction of a manuscript. Oh, and banana bread, on which I intuit that Bennett had no fixed opinions until everyone started talking about it: “I’m not making any fucking banana bread ever now,” she says. The way I understood it, it's really about the danger of the destruction of books — Bennett mentions this poweful sentence of Heinrich Heine's in relation to the subject: Where they burn books, they will in the end burn people. Her father, Augustus Cornelius Bennett, owned a bakery, and her mother, Kerene Robinson, worked as a dressmaker.