Nora May French — Collected Poems

April 26, 1881, Aurora, New York–November 13, 1907, Carmel, California

Nora May French wrote with the urgency of a life already in motion. Before she was twenty-seven, she crossed the country for art school, supported herself as a designer and telephone operator, and published in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and national magazines. Her poems turn California’s fog, trails, poppies, gardens, ruined chimneys, and ocean cliffs into charged landscapes of desire and freedom. After the 1906 earthquake she entered the Bay Area bohemian circle of George Sterling, Jack London, Ina Coolbrith, Gelett Burgess, and Porter Garnett, yet her work is more compelling than the legend surrounding that group. Her death by cyanide in Carmel in 1907 made national news and encouraged readers to treat the poems as suicide prophecies. This edition instead presents a restless, clear-eyed writer whose music, visual precision, and skeptical treatment of romance still feel immediate.

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Catalogue

Land of Sunshine & Out West

Associations

Charles Fletcher Lummis Circle George Sterling Circle Modernism Out West The Land of Sunshine

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Bibliography

French, Nora May. Poems. The Strange Company, 1910.

———. Nora May French: Her Poems. Introduction by Mary Rudge. Star Rover House, 1986.

———. The Outer Gate: The Collected Poems. Edited by Donald Sidney-Fryer and Alan Gullette. Hippocampus Press, 2009.

Works About the Author

Allen, Judith. “The Life and Writing of Nora May French.” M.A. thesis, Mills College, 1963.

“Henry Anderson Lafler Papers, approximately 1905–1907.” Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; includes letters and a poem by French.

Berry, Lorraine. “How a Scholar Unearthed the Cyanide Love Triangle That Toppled a California Arts Colony.” Los Angeles Times, 19 Oct. 2021.

Herr, Pamela. “Nora May French: Biographical Sketch.” California Legacy Project, 2007.

Prendergast, Catherine. The Gilded Edge: Two Audacious Women and the Cyanide Love Triangle That Shook America. Dutton, 2021.

———. “Recovering Women’s Reproductive Lives, One Mutilated Record at a Time.” History News Network, 10 Oct. 2021.

Sidney-Fryer, Donald. “Nora May French: A Biographical and Critical Introduction.” The Outer Gate: The Collected Poems of Nora May French, edited by Donald Sidney-Fryer and Alan Gullette. Hippocampus Press, 2009.

Williams, Michael. “A Book of Beauty.” The New Age, vol. 7, no. 11, 14 July 1910, pp. 254–55.

Stefans, Brian. “Los Angeles Poetry from the McCarthy to the Punk Eras.” A History of California Literature, edited by Blake Allmendinger, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 260–80.