I precocious visited a location connected Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Despite its hospitable interiors, I wasn’t invited inside. I wandered astir successful the dark, peering done the windows similar a voyeur. I couldn’t judge what I saw. I dreamed of napping successful 1 of the plush beds with the gilded headboards and silk sheets. I gawked astatine the elevator, ne'er having been successful a location with its ain backstage lift. The creation collection, hung salon-style successful a ample introduction hallway with striped floors, stunned me: cubist paintings, works by Gaston Lachaise and Marguerite Zorach, Marcel Duchamp’s famed Nude Descending a Staircase!
I made my mode to the different broadside of the house, uncovering a country with metallic walls and reddish lacquer furniture. A mahjong acceptable had been abandoned mid-game connected the table, and a bookshelf overflowed successful the corner. I longed to beryllium allowed in, to settee into 1 of the reddish chairs and work a book. On the shelves, alongside works by Sterne, Swift, and Defoe, I spotted a airy bluish publication called Love Days by Henrie Waste. Oh, however I wished to work it!
If trespassing had been physically possible, possibly I would person slipped inside. But however tin you interruption into a location truthful tiny that its furnishings fits successful your pockets? Built successful 1916, the dollhouse was designed and continuously redecorated until 1935 by Carrie Stettheimer (1869-1944). In 1945, the location entered the postulation of the Museum of the City of New York, wherever I saw it displayed wrong a solid container connected a acold wintertime afternoon. Carrie performed a “Honey, I Shrunk the Salon” miracle: encapsulating her family’s satellite of creation and privilege successful dollhouse miniature. The dollhouse memorializes the salon hosted by Carrie and her younger sisters, creator Florine and writer Ettie, and visited by each the large avant-garde artists and thinkers of the precocious nineteenth and aboriginal twentieth centuries.
Her startling caller guides america done the Stettheimer sisters’ fabulous satellite and the interior spaces of a troubled woman’s mind.
The dollhouse is astir often discussed successful the discourse of Florine’s (1871-1944) paintings: colorful and surreal canvases of gargantuan flowers, New York City landmarks, and her elegant sisters, dressed up successful drop-waist evening dresses oregon romping done the countryside successful pants. The location and its tiny creation postulation materializes Florine’s presumption arsenic an avant-garde doyenne, but it besides contains a uncommon (and precise small) transcript of Love Days, one of 2 books published by Ettie nether the pseudonym “Henrie Waste.” Ettie (1875-1955), the youngest and astir audacious of the Stetties, as the sisters were known, has garnered little attraction for her creator output than her sisters but was nary little productive.
A 100 years aft the work of Love Days, Ettie’s penning vocation has each but disappeared. Instead of speechmaking her words, we spot her publication miniaturized successful Carrie’s dollhouse oregon drawback glimpses of her holding a quill oregon publication successful Florine’s paintings. This caller variation of Love Days, enlarged to quality standard by Mandylion Press, recenters Ettie arsenic an writer of her ain experience. Her startling caller guides america done the Stettheimer sisters’ fabulous satellite and the interior spaces of a troubled woman’s mind.
Ettie’s change ego Henrie Waste was calved successful 1917 with the work of Philosophy: An Autobiographical Fragment, a young woman’s relationship of pursuing a Ph.D. successful Germany astatine the crook of the century. Henrie’s adjacent and last novel, Love Days, was released successful 1923 by Alfred A. Knopf. The usage of pseudonyms by pistillate writers calved successful the nineteenth period is typically understood arsenic a feminist loophole astir the patriarchal suppression of women’s writing.
A 1923 New Republic reappraisal of Love Days in which Henrie Waste is referred to with pistillate pronouns suggests that Ettie’s nom de plume was little an enactment of sex transgression than of emancipation from her individuality arsenic 1 of the Stetties. The sanction “Henrie” was plucked from the fractional of Henrietta’s sanction not already successful usage by her lifelong sobriquet. While her household and friends called her Ettie, she chose the past sanction “Waste.” The surname is astatine likelihood with a caller similar Love Days, wherein thing is wasted—Ettie’s ain beingness providing fodder for crippled and character.
Ettie was calved successful Rochester, New York connected July 31, 1875, the youngest of 5 children calved to Joseph and Rosetta Walter Stettheimer. Joseph worked successful his German Jewish family’s covering and banking businesses, until helium abandoned his household successful the precocious 1870s, ne'er to beryllium seen oregon heard from again. Rosetta moved with her children archetypal to her autochthonal New York City and past to Germany, raising them betwixt Stuttgart and Berlin. Extended stays successful Europe helped shield Rosetta from the ungraded caused by her husband’s disappearance. In the 1890s, the eldest children, Stella and Walter, each joined and moved to California, reducing the household portion to 4 azygous women, who lived unneurotic until Rosetta’s decease successful 1935. Florine studied astatine the Art Students League of New York and Ettie graduated from Barnard College successful 1896. She received a master’s successful science 2 years later, and successful 1908, earned a Ph.D. successful doctrine from the University of Freiburg. When World War I threatened the family’s Continental lifestyle, Rosetta and the Stetties permanently relocated to New York, maintaining residences astatine 102 West 76th Street and successful the Alwyn Court gathering astatine 180 West 58th Street.
Love Days retraces the outlines of Ettie’s beingness done the communicative of Susanna Moore. While a accepted bildungsroman follows its heroine from cradle to grave, Love Days follows Susanna from assemblage to the sanitorium, each section encompassing 1 time of Susanna’s beingness arsenic she transforms from a dreamy teen to a somber woman. Susanna attends a women’s assemblage successful Manhattan, wherever she excels arsenic a student of past Greek but tin hardly archer her schoolmates apart, confusing who commutes from New Rochelle and who from Nyack. While her peers enactment their “Mrs.” degrees to bully use, marrying and settling down, Susanna continues her studies astatine a assemblage successful Germany. Her widowed aunt plays chaperone arsenic Susanna attends heady lectures and repulses her galore suitors.
Tired of German men throwing themselves astatine her feet, she returns to New York, wherever she rents a bohemian workplace and befriends celebrated artists. She bristles astatine the thought of matrimony but falls successful emotion with Pol Grodz, “the caller celebrity” of the scene, whose creation “seems [to her] utterly modern, and yet to partake of the certainty of the Renaissance and its consciousness of harmony.” The world of joined beingness disappoints. Susanna asks herself: “Did the consciousness of helping an creator to nutrient a masterpiece adjacent with ensuing immortality successful a Museum compensate 1 for a protracted honeymoon…?” Henrie Waste answers this question with a resounding “No.”
Susanna’s “love days” are brief. Her passionateness for Pol is simply a flare, burning brightly and extinguishing quickly. If the caller has a moral, it is that matrimony is simply a mistake. She learns the acquisition excessively late; lured by desire, she ends up successful a conjugal prison. The Stetties avoided specified crises, flirting without signing distant their New Woman freedoms. Gossips person linked Ettie, the astir outgoing sister, to overmuch younger men similar Marcel Duchamp and Elie Nadelman. Duchamp (1887-1968) appears successful Love Days “readymade” arsenic Pierre Delaire, an eccentric Frenchman who surprises her astatine the workplace aft returning from Paris. “I didn’t play chess each the time,” helium promises, “I began immoderate canvases.” He explains that his caller paintings person “an ulterior volition which removes them from Cubism.” If Delaire is friend-zoned successful Love Days, who is Pol Grodz? Perhaps helium is simply a pastiche of each the talented and temperamental men who visited the Stettheimer salon. Or possibly helium represents the creator who produced dozens of portraits of Ettie, with whom she shared a fiery decades-long relationship. Who other but Florine?
Ettie whitethorn ne'er person married, but she knew the dynamic betwixt creator and taxable intimately. Her sister painted her countless times successful her lifetime. Susanna and Pol’s matrimony sours erstwhile helium spends their honeymoon obsessively sketching his caller wife. He admonishes Susanna for posing “like a exemplary earlier her painter—not similar a woman earlier her husband, her lover.” Ettie portrays the narration betwixt creator and exemplary arsenic a powerfulness struggle. Susanna lone succeeds arsenic a woman erstwhile she contorts herself into his perfect image, causing him to exclaim, “you are a Grodz!” After her death, Ettie executed Florine’s estate, depositing her paintings successful large collections and organizing exhibitions. In doing so, she sealed her ain destiny arsenic “a Stettheimer!”, little a idiosyncratic truthful overmuch arsenic a recurring motif. The sister with the dense brow and acheronian bangs, often with a publication successful her hands, tin beryllium spotted connected the walls of galore museums, but seldom bash we get to perceive from her directly.
One of Florine’s portraits of Ettie provides penetration into the quality of Susanna Moore. Ettie’s look is transposed onto the caput of Medusa. As successful existent life, her bangs hover adjacent to her eyebrows, but successful this portrait, greenish snakes slither done her hair. Her look is contorted into a look of wide-eyed horror. The representation dates to 1908, the aforesaid twelvemonth that she received her Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg. At the highest of her intelligence powers, she is depicted arsenic a Greek mythological fig who turns men to stone. What strikes maine astir the coating is however Medusa herself appears to beryllium made of stone. A floating caput painted successful shades of greenish grey against a blood-red background, Ettie is some Medusa and her victim. Love Days gets wrong the caput of the disembodied, Medusa-like pistillate who uses her enactment to flight the perils of her ain subjectivity. Susanna’s narration with her assemblage and enactment is tortured: staring astatine her reflection successful the mirror, she wonders what she looks like, and successful intimate moments, she shuts down completely.
Walking done prewar Berlin, taking successful its historical architecture, Susanna daydreams of her autochthonal New York, an ever-changing metropolis wherever buildings are torn down and rebuilt successful the blink of an eye. “When the Plaza Hotel was antiquated it would inevitably springiness commencement to another, newer Plaza Hotel, and dice usefully.” In a stunning admittance of her ain disembodiment, Susanna longs to signifier “this Plaza method of reproduction,” some to “give commencement to a caller Susanna,” but also, presumably, to debar sex.
Later, connected their miserable honeymoon, Susanna pretends to beryllium dormant arsenic Pol manipulates her body, drafting her person to him successful bed, whispering “I dice of thirst and hunger for you.” As helium violates her, Susanna lies motionless and holds herself rigid, a “skill derived from acquisition successful impersonating dolls and dormant bodies.” These moments eerily resonate with the Stettheimer dollhouse. Susanna seeks an architectural solution to the occupation of quality reproduction—instead of a body, she wishes to beryllium a building. When forced to enactment successful quality intersexual contact, she turns herself into a doll.
Love Days gets wrong the caput of the disembodied, Medusa-like pistillate who uses her enactment to flight the perils of her ain subjectivity.
From the archetypal lines of Love Days, we are made alert of Susanna’s penchant for dissociation: she has meal but doesn’t retrieve what she’s eaten; she doesn’t ride the streetcar to college, she finds herself connected it. The caller is elongated by ellipses…as if our heroine momentarily loses not words…but consciousness. She is lone genuinely blessed erstwhile she’s working, but blessed does not mean whole. Work is her flight from existent life. When an anonymous German classmate declares his emotion for her, she hides from him and her ain feelings successful obscure past texts.
After luncheon she got to work, and she soon managed to detach herself from her troubles by plunging heavy into her research, an probe of definite Greek verse forms. Working, she was nary longer either blessed oregon unhappy; she was personally submerged; she existed lone arsenic mind, arsenic instrument. As an idiosyncratic she had go arsenic non-existent—for herself astatine least—as 1 becomes successful dreamless sleep.
Unfortunately, I americium acquainted with Susanna’s impulse to evade analyzable emotions done working. It is easier to beryllium “as mind, arsenic instrument” than to admit to being a living, breathing idiosyncratic with passions and needs. It is important to retrieve that “plunging heavy [into] research” is simply a privilege lone precocious awarded to women. Stettheimer belonged to the archetypal procreation of women granted entree to the academy. Susanna worries that she can’t support up with Pol and his avant-garde friends without acknowledging that having a assemblage grade was extremist for a woman. Stettheimer processes each this newness done Susanna’s interior dissonance and the novel’s elliptical quality.
Ettie surely considered herself a pioneer. In 1951, she published Memorial Volume: Of and By Ettie Stettheimer, a postulation of her 2 novels, immoderate abbreviated stories, her Ph.D. dissertation astir William James, arsenic good arsenic a missive helium wrote praising her work. In a New York Times reappraisal that year, professional Elizabeth Janeway warned that “Miss Stettheimer is not to beryllium laughed off.” According to Janeway, “with the Fitzgerald revival, the Twenties person abruptly go historical,” creating specified an over-emphasis connected the flapper years that the preceding decades threatened to vanish from the corporate memory. Amid this historiographic crisis, Janeway praised Love Days for its insights into the “real years of anguish and growth” that came earlier the roaring Twenties.
Susanna Moore is terribly important to us, much truthful than immoderate of Hemingway’s gallant girls. She is greedier, not lone unsatisfied arsenic are Lady Brett and Gatsby’s Daisy, but insatiable, for she wants truthful overmuch much than beingness tin give….She is the instauration of that antheral property truthful incongruously named for Victoria—she is what emerged astatine the extremity of Victorianism erstwhile the curtain of antheral supremacy was yet lifted.
It is tempting to qualify the high-achieving women of the precocious nineteenth and aboriginal twentieth centuries arsenic victors. But Susanna’s communicative does not extremity erstwhile she graduates from college, nor does Avis Dobell’s aft she trains arsenic a creator successful Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ The Story of Avis (1877), which Mandylion is reissuing alongside Love Days because of their shared involvement successful ambitious women. The novels of Stettheimer and Phelps are notable for however they represent the dilatory gait of change. New opportunities travel with caller challenges—a pistillate tin lone beryllium arsenic caput oregon instrumentality for truthful long. If she desires to brace her occurrence with immoderate modicum of emotional, spiritual, oregon carnal fulfillment, past she volition endure the consequences. While The Story of Avis is decidedly a nineteenth-century novel, Love Days belongs to the clip successful between. Susanna Moore “is the instauration of that antheral property truthful incongruously named for Victoria,” but she has the aforesaid bobbed haircut arsenic Brett Ashley and Daisy Buchanan, pistillate characters liberated (at slightest sexually) by the shifting mores of the twentieth century.
Despite being published astir 50 years later, Love Days tolls the aforesaid alarm bells arsenic The Story of Avis. Susanna whitethorn beryllium our archetypal Mandylion heroine to marque a telephone call, thrust an automobile, oregon thrust an elevator, but similar Avis Dobell earlier her, she loses her independency and originative imaginable erstwhile she opens her bosom to love. The stubborn both/and prime of Love Days—its blend of avant-garde experimentation and Victorian conservatism—challenges our tidy chronologies and puts the “long” successful Mandylion’s preferred “long nineteenth century.” The pleasance and symptom of speechmaking aged books is realizing that the past is relatable. With large alteration comes large stagnancy. I graduated from Barnard College a 100 and 20 years aft Ettie Stettheimer, a subordinate of 1 of the women’s college’s earliest graduating classes. In that intervening century, women gained the ballot and antheral went to the moon, but the entreaty of entering an alternate beingness wherever men airs nary menace to the dreams of ambitious women remained constant.
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From Love Days by Ettie Stettheimer. Introduction by Mabel Capability Taylor. Copyright © Mandylion Press, 2026 and Mabel Capability Taylor.
English (US) ·