Mistress Manifesto
What do we call a man who is Kept?
Sunday, October 19, 2025
Friday, October 17, 2025
ABORTION IN THE TIME OF NORA MAY FRENCH : AMERICA AT THE EARLY 20th CENTURY
CRIME READS - NORA MAY FRENCH - GILDED EDGE
This essay, entitled 'Reclaiming the Legacy of Nora May French, the Pioneering Poet Made Into A Femme Fatale By Mediocre Men and California Mythology, is by Catherine Prendergast, author of 'The Gilded Edge."
Nora's second abortion was by pill bought over the counter. Her boyfriend was the married Harry Lafler (Henry Anderson Lafler). She wrote him a letter as the abortion pill began to take effect.Excerpt : Her parcel of pills still unopened, Nora sat in the kitchen and read the letter from Harry. It was everything she had hoped it would be, sweet and passionate. She felt her will, so resolute earlier that evening, begin to falter. She tried to imagine a life with Harry and a child: Harry, walking their unfinished floor at 3:00 a.m., rocking their baby to sleep in his arms as she dozed. A beautiful baby perhaps with Harry’s dark wavy hair but her own spooky eyes. She and Harry could be like Dante and Elizabeth Rossetti, living for beauty and art, while their child rambled happily around the house.
It didn’t take long for this fantasy to collapse. Harry Lafler was still a married man, and despite his promises, Nora did not believe his separation from his wife would ever progress to divorce. In truth, she wasn’t even sure if she wanted it to. She and Harry were bound by passion and recklessness, not responsibility and reality. She was his carefree muse, something ethereal and magical, not an ordinary woman who could get in ordinary trouble. He would recoil from the sight of a swollen belly and bolt from the rigors of fatherhood. She would be left raising a baby on her own—a complete disaster. Even if in 1907 women worked outside the home, rode bicycles, and published poetry, nobody looked favorably on an unwed mother and her bastard. Her child would be seen not as the product of love but rather as the punishment for sin.
Wednesday, October 15, 2025
ABORTION and the BOHEMIANS
Did turn of the century men expect women to "get rid of it quietly?"
Sunday, October 12, 2025
READING THE POETRY OF NORA MAY FRENCH on PROJECT GUTENBERG
Here's the link! PROJECT GUTENBERG : POETRY OF NORA MAY FRENCH
Friday, October 10, 2025
Monday, October 6, 2025
NORA MAY FRENCH : THE SPINSTER POET IN CALIFORNIA : RETIRED BRITISH ARMY CAPTAIN HILEY AND NORA HAVE AN AFFAIR AND SHE BECOMES PREGNANT
Excerpt page 57: (After Nora called off her engagement in 1904)
At the age of twenty-three, Nora embraced spinsterhood with enthusiasm. Freedom from marriage was freedom to live one's own life. She would devote herself to her writing. No more light ditties like the "Ode on Aunt E.'s Bloomer Bathing Costume," which had made Helen (her sister) laugh for hours. No more stories to distract the readers of the Sunday Los Angeles Times. She would focus only on poetry and set goals to challenge herself. That year she published four poems in Lummis's journal but decided to shoot for journals with more national reach. In March, her poem "In Empty Courts" appeared in The Smart Set: A Magazine of Cleverness. A new publication out of New York, The Smart Set's circulation had shot up to well over one hundred thousand in four short years buy printing national names like Jack London.
About a man's inconsistent attention, in "Empty Courts" has been inspired buy a muse of sorts who had recently entered her life. Captain Alan Hiley had two main qualities that recommended him. He was already married, and he lived far away, in Santa Cruz. A tall, handsome timber magnate and retired British Army captain, Hiley considered himself an established author who had published his memoir of distinguished service in the War. They had met at a poetry ready (Hileys wife was also a poet( and started an on-and-off affair.
On the weekends, Hiley sailed down the coast on a yacht to take Nora to dinner in fine restaurants. He asked her about poetry though she noticed he rarely listened to her answers....
Nora decided that she could not give in to Hiley's charms and fought her attraction to him.
Excerpt page 59: (As Nora became pregnant)
They debated too long what to do. He would leave his wife. Of course he would. Then, no, a divorce would take too long and be too public. In her distress, she made the dreadful mistake of telling Helen everything. Helen, scandalized, was even more distraught than Nora. She must get Hiley to marry her, Helen counseled, or the whole family would be ruined.
But marriage was not in the cards. Instead, the eminently respectable Captain Alan Richard Hiley secured a doctor and money enough to pay him. What at first had seemed to Nora like a vexing process - coming to the decision, finding the willing physician - turned out to be the easy part compared to what came next. She experienced the procedure itself as a surreal horror, the doctor's cold, pointed, metal tolls contrasting with the soft warm of her flesh mingled with that of the fetus. Only partially sedated during it all, she glanced down and saw the aftermath.
This was Nora's first known abortion and, because she did not take the pills or potions advertised, I have this feeling she might have been further along in the pregnancy than a woman could consider to be "delayed menses." Additionally, it seems to me that, after such a horror, a woman would seek to use contraception. Maybe she did. And it failed.
Excerpt page 80 : (The aftermath of the abortion)
She couldn't exactly say when Harry Lafler became so much a part of her emotional life. Right after her mother died in July, she had sent a poem to The Argonaut, where Harry was serving as editor. He accepted her poem, and their correspondence quickly became romantic. They fell in love through words.
How perfect, she thought, that the body was not there to intervene. Since the abortion she had a nickname for herself : the "Hands Off" girl. Except for a date here and there, she kept men at arm's length - especially Alan Hiley, who in an irritating reversal now wanted to marry her...
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Saturday, October 4, 2025
Thursday, October 2, 2025
BOHEMIAN POET NORA MAY FRENCH : AN EARLY 20th CENTURY LOVE GONE WRONG STORY OF MONTEREY CALIFORNIA : THE CYANIDE LOVE TRIANGLE
These three people were not in a triad and they did not commit suicide together, but I bet because of the title of the book you thought so. Although it's complicated, I wasn't convinced that the suicide of Nora or that of George's wife, Carrie, or the eventual suicide of George was entirely motivated by relationship frustration or loss of love. Rather it was also about money - the natural need for it in this material world - and especially so for women at a time when few could support themselves; imagine any poet at any time thinking their poetry would bring in money enough. George Sterling was a founder of the Bohemian Club which endures to this day as the Bohemian Grove, but he eventually went broke.
As I read this book from cover to cover, I couldn't help but think about the way marriage was about the only way a woman could survive back in the day. Nora May French was not the first or last woman to ever have sex before marriage or an affair with a married man/men, but she needed marriage. Society was not set up for most women to be independent of men or to earn their own money and support themselves and Nora's experience with paid employment was unfulfilling and exhausting. What any woman with creative talent, such as a writer who needed to write, was a patron or a husband rich enough to support her so she would not have to work for income herself and could keep writing. He had to be the type who didn't want a conventional wife and be someone who loved the arts and might find some prestige in having a poet as a wife..
Then Lee proposed. At first, she hesitated She told him everything about herself, how she was happiest wandering in the woods, how she lived to write poems, and how she would never be just an ordinary girl, if that was what he wanted..."
C 2025 Mistress Manifesto