Shutter of Snow, The.
Coleman, Emily Holmes. The Shutter of Snow. New York: The Viking Press, 1930.
8vo.; grey paper-covered boards, stamped in red; cloth spine; printed title label to spine; edges rubbed; dust-jacket, price-clipped; internal tape repair; spine darkened.
First edition of Coleman’s only published book, an autobiographical novel of a young mother’s struggle with postpartum depression and subsequent two-month confinement in a mental hospital in Rochester, New York. A significant work, recently reprised in England by Penguin (as part of its Virago series) and in the United States by the Dalkey Archive Press. Coleman penned another novel, The Tygon, which was never published, as well as numerous autobiographical plays, stories and poems.
Emily Holmes Coleman (1899-1974) graduated from Wellesley College in 1920 and married Loyd Ring Coleman, a psychologist, in 1921. After the birth of their son, John, in 1924, Coleman spent two months at the Rochester State Hospital where she was treated for “a toxic exhaustive psychosis”—the post-partum depression she describes in The Shutters of Snow. After her recovery, she moved with her family to Paris in 1926, where she worked as the society editor for the Paris Tribune – the European edition of the Chicago Tribune – and contributed articles, stories and poems to transition and the New Review.
In Paris, mostly through her association with the New Review and transition, Coleman became friends with a circle of artists and writers. In 1931, she worked as Emma Goldman’s secretary in St. Tropez during the period in which she wrote her autobiography, In My Life. Later, she helped Djuna Barnes edit and prepare Nightwood (1936) for publication. Barnes wrote the bulk of Nightwood on the English country estate of Peggy Guggenheim, also Coleman’s friend. Coleman was essential in getting the book published; when it was not accepted anywhere in New York, it is she who persuaded T.S Eliot to accept it at Faber & Faber in London.
The marketing department at Viking spared no enthusiasm in their preparation of the dust-jacket text. They are correct, however, in noting the importance of this early first-hand account in giving a voice to a neglected issue. “Leading psychiatrists,” they note, “have already vouched for it as a document. Readers will be no less interested in it as a successful literary experiment.” Critics concurred. A reviewer in Nation and Atheneum remarked, “Mrs. Coleman has succeeded in conveying the pity and terror of [her] condition in a remarkable manner, without exaggeration and without self-pity or sentimentality. It is a success very rarely achieved in any kind of literature.” It is no exaggeration to state that Coleman did for post-partum depression what Plath did for suicide with The Bell Jar, thirty years later.
Coleman remarried—Jake Scarborough, a rancher in Arizona—in 1940, but that union lasted just four years. Her devotion to the study and practice of Catholicism took over, and from 1944 until her death in 1974 she lived—ironically, a woman twice divorced—in various Catholic communities.
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