Gail Godwin

Gail Kathleen Godwin (born June 18, 1937 ) is an American novelist and short story writer. She has published one non-fiction work, two collections of short stories, and eleven novels, three of which have been nominated for the National Book Award and five of which have made the New York Times Bestseller List.

Godwin was born in Birmingham, Alabama but raised in Asheville, North Carolina by her divorced mother and grandmother. She attended Peace College in Raleigh, North Carolina (a women's college founded by Presbyterians in 1857) from 1955 to 1957, but graduated with a B.A. in Journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1959. She worked briefly as a reporter for the Miami Herald and married a Herald photographer named Douglas Kennedy. After the job and the marriage finished (by firing and by divorce, respectively), she worked as waitress back home in North Carolina to save money to travel to Europe. In the early 1960s, Godwin worked for the U.S. Travel Service at the U.S. Embassy in London and wrote novels and short stories in her spare time. She returned to the United States and worked briefly as an editorial assistant at the Saturday Evening Post before attending the University of Iowa, earning her M.A. (1968) from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and PhD (1971) in English Literature.

Godwin's body of work has garnered many honors, including three National Book Award nominations, a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grants for both fiction and libretto writing, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Five of her novels have been on the New York Times best seller list.

Godwin lives and writes in Woodstock, New York. Her family includes her half-brother Rebel A. Cole and half-sister Franchelle Millender.

Career

Gail Godwin was born June 18, 1937. She grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, later attending the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. She lives in Woodstock, New York.

Godwin’s first few novels, published in the early 1970s, explored the worlds of women negotiating restrictive roles. The Odd Woman (1974) was a National Book Award finalist, as was her fourth novel, Violet Clay (1978), in which she modernized the Gothic novel and explored such themes as villainy and suicide.

A Mother and Two Daughters (1982) encompassed a community, Mountain City, based on her hometown of Asheville, North Carolina. Voted a National Book Award finalist, it also became Godwin’s first best-seller. Between it and her next four best-sellers, Godwin interposed Mr. Bedford and the Muses (1983), her second short story collection after Dream Children (1976).

Dream Children had been created at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where she studied with Kurt Vonnegut and Robert Coover. It exhibits her early interest in allegory made real on a psychological level. The Iowa years are also described in her edited journals, The Making of a Writer, Journals, 1963-1969 (2010). A previous volume, The Making of a Writer, Journals, 1961-1963 (2006), presents her years in Europe after a decision to become a writer. The novella, “Mr. Bedford,” derives from her time in London.

“Last night I dreamed of Ursula DeVane", begins Godwin’s sixth novel, The Finishing School (1984), which employs a first person reverie, and concerns the effect of a powerful personality on a developing one. Her next novel, A Southern Family, returns to Mountain City, but is darker than A Mother and Two Daughters, as it involves a murder-suicide that sends shock waves and melancholy through a family.

In Father Melancholy’s Daughter (1991), the daughter of the title navigates her relationships with her father, an Episcopal minister, and with a theatrical auteur. Theology is embraced in Evensong, her 1999 sequel to Father Melancholy’s Daughter, and in her 2010 novel, Unfinished Desires. It also informs her non-fiction book, Heart: A Natural History of the Heart-Filled Life (2001), illustrated by stories from her life and her reading.

Godwin's ninth novel, The Good Husband (1994), emulates Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet) by telling a story through four related characters. This book did not reach the best-seller list. Evensong, her tenth novel, did. Then she engaged in another literary experiment, Evenings at Five (2003), a novella that explored, through stream-of-consciousness, the presence that follows the death of a long-term companion. It is based on her relationship with composer Robert Starer, with whom she collaborated on nine libretti. Regarding Evenings at Five, Godwin said she wanted “to write a different kind of ghost story".

For her 12th novel, Queen of the Underworld, Godwin fashioned a Bildungsroman, derived from her years as a Miami Herald reporter, from 1959 to 1960, where she had experience with the Cuban émigré community. Unfinished Desires (2010) was set at a girls’ school run by nuns. Concerned with girls in adolescence and their elders, who bequeath their deep-set issues, the novel attempts to make the connection between religious devotion and artistic seriousness.

Bibliography

• The Perfectionists (1970)
• Glass People (1972)
• The Odd Woman (1974) (National Book Award finalist)
• Dream Children (1976) (collection)
• Violet Clay (1978) (National Book Award finalist)
• A Mother and Two Daughters (1982) (National Book Award finalist)
• Mr. Bedford and the Muses (1983) (collection)
• The Finishing School (1984)
• A Southern Family (1987)
• Father Melancholy’s Daughter (1991)
• The Good Husband
• Evensong (1999)
• Heart (2001) (nonfiction)
• Evenings at Five (2003)
• Queen of the Underworld (2006)
• The Making of a Writer, Vol. 1 (2006) (nonfiction, ed. Rob Neufeld)
• Unfinished Desires (2010)
• The Making of a Writer, Vol, 2 (2011) (nonfiction, ed. Rob Neufeld)

External links

• Author's official website
• Interview with Gail Godwin
• Inventory of the Gail Godwin Papers, 1913-2006, in the Southern Historical Collection, UNC-Chapel Hill.
• Works by or about Gail Godwin in libraries (WorldCat catalog)