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Show 42 MADELYN CANNON STEWART SILVER the French class, and many entries in her diary are partly or entirely in French. Her French was very good, both in spelling and grammar. Were the French entries merely practice? Or were they designed to mystify members of the family who might be tempted to read what she wrote? Very often her private thoughts are in French. French expressions and sentences occur throughout the first three years of the diary. Partly through her Aunt Annie, who had been editor of the Young Womans [ournal, and partly through her teachers at LDS High, Madelyn was introduced to Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Scott, Wordsworth, and Emerson. She also read Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, with its celebration of intellect, feeling, and moral sense in women; George Eliot's Adam Bede, Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch, and Silas Marner, with their psychological portrayals and depiction of the social and cultur al pressures faced by bright and ambitious women; and Willa Cather's 0 Pioneers, My Antonia, and One of Ours, featuring characters that moved out of their narrow world into an envi ronment that gave women more freedom in thought and action. Her reading however, was not "with a constructive social pur pose," as some moderns would recommend. Appreciating the aesthetic beauty of literature, she enjoyed reading for the sake of reading. Good literature harmonized morals and aesthetics, and did not lead her to embrace an agenda for various social and political crusades. Daring to allow her own imagination to wander, Madelyn began to compose poems, essays, and "thoughts" in a wide range of subjects, from the beauty of quaking aspens and the feel of riding a galloping horse, to the pleasures of hiking, and the sounds of nature. Determined to avoid the common ten dency to shape little lessons into verse, she used similes and images from nature to illustrate uplifting or despairing thoughts that came to her. For her, the Stewart Ranch and the nearby Wasatch mountains represented the good and the beautiful. She must have made careful study of poetic form and technique because she experimented with many types of original poems: Italian and English sonnets, triolets, odes, villanelles, French ballads, and free verse. In each of these, she showed consider- |
