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.
