By Liz Soares
Like so many other schoolgirls, I loved Helen Keller. Assigned by our sixth-grade teachers to choose a biography to read, we were drawn to the story of the deaf-blind girl who defied all odds to become successful, accomplished and world-famous.
Eleanor Roosevelt, Nellie Bly and Babe Didrikson Zaharias were weak competition for our interest. Was it because Helen’s tale was so poignant? Or were we attracted to the idea of the rescuing angel Annie Sullivan, who transforms the wild child and then devotes her life to her? Maybe girls relate to Helen because, at times, we feel mute and imprisoned--not literally, but figuratively.
I probably first read about Helen Keller in the “Childhoods of Famous Americans” series. I was so addicted to these books I even read the ones about George Eastman and Eli Whitney. So while I was intimately familiar with the timeline of Helen’s life--born with sight and hearing, she became blind and deaf after suffering a fever--I didn’t know much about her adult life, save that she was famous and was still living when I was a little girl.
It was delightful to reconnect with Helen Keller and see that she not only thrived as an advocate for the disabled, but was a Socialist, a war protester and a supporter of birth-control rights. She even endorsed the concept of “free love”! And she was willing to defy her family, Annie Sullivan, and, perhaps, public opinion, to marry the man she loved. Helen was, indeed, a woman after my own heart.
Rosie Sultan’s novel, Helen Keller in Love, brings the reader into the mind of this most unique individual. Through Annie’s perseverance, young Helen made the connections between sign and object, sign and idea, sign and process--and kept right on going. She was a star pupil at the Perkins School for the Blind, graduated cum laude from Radcliffe, and wrote 12 books. She developed her individual philosophies of life through what she “heard” from words spelled into her hand, felt on the faces and lips of those she met, and read in Braille books.
Yet, if she was left alone in an unfamiliar room, she was helpless.
Sultan’s Helen Keller is a woman who lives in a remarkably sensory world, where footsteps rattle floorboards, a moist breeze heralds rain, and anger is expressed with a closed fist. When Peter Fagan enters her orbit, as a substitute secretary for Annie, who has a racking cough that is misdiagnosed as tuberculosis, he wafts a scent of “typewriter ink, cigarette smoke, and the strange muskrat smell I always associate with men.”
Helen’s fame excites Peter; she sees a way to fulfill the empty last corner of her life--love, marriage and motherhood. But “Team Helen” (her mother, sister, gun-toting brother-in-law, and Annie) have too much invested in her to let her go. Helen is one of the most famous women in the world. Mark Twain loved her like a daughter, Andrew Carnegie supported her financially, and Alexander Graham Bell was a friend and mentor. Marriage, though, remained out of her impressive reach.
Eleanor Roosevelt, Nellie Bly and Babe Didrikson Zaharias were weak competition for our interest. Was it because Helen’s tale was so poignant? Or were we attracted to the idea of the rescuing angel Annie Sullivan, who transforms the wild child and then devotes her life to her? Maybe girls relate to Helen because, at times, we feel mute and imprisoned--not literally, but figuratively.
I probably first read about Helen Keller in the “Childhoods of Famous Americans” series. I was so addicted to these books I even read the ones about George Eastman and Eli Whitney. So while I was intimately familiar with the timeline of Helen’s life--born with sight and hearing, she became blind and deaf after suffering a fever--I didn’t know much about her adult life, save that she was famous and was still living when I was a little girl.
It was delightful to reconnect with Helen Keller and see that she not only thrived as an advocate for the disabled, but was a Socialist, a war protester and a supporter of birth-control rights. She even endorsed the concept of “free love”! And she was willing to defy her family, Annie Sullivan, and, perhaps, public opinion, to marry the man she loved. Helen was, indeed, a woman after my own heart.
Rosie Sultan’s novel, Helen Keller in Love, brings the reader into the mind of this most unique individual. Through Annie’s perseverance, young Helen made the connections between sign and object, sign and idea, sign and process--and kept right on going. She was a star pupil at the Perkins School for the Blind, graduated cum laude from Radcliffe, and wrote 12 books. She developed her individual philosophies of life through what she “heard” from words spelled into her hand, felt on the faces and lips of those she met, and read in Braille books.
Yet, if she was left alone in an unfamiliar room, she was helpless.
Sultan’s Helen Keller is a woman who lives in a remarkably sensory world, where footsteps rattle floorboards, a moist breeze heralds rain, and anger is expressed with a closed fist. When Peter Fagan enters her orbit, as a substitute secretary for Annie, who has a racking cough that is misdiagnosed as tuberculosis, he wafts a scent of “typewriter ink, cigarette smoke, and the strange muskrat smell I always associate with men.”
Helen’s fame excites Peter; she sees a way to fulfill the empty last corner of her life--love, marriage and motherhood. But “Team Helen” (her mother, sister, gun-toting brother-in-law, and Annie) have too much invested in her to let her go. Helen is one of the most famous women in the world. Mark Twain loved her like a daughter, Andrew Carnegie supported her financially, and Alexander Graham Bell was a friend and mentor. Marriage, though, remained out of her impressive reach.
Helen Keller in Love is an enthralling love story, even though the reader knows it ends badly. The beloved Helen Keller, the myth and the real woman, goes on--all the more remarkably after enduring a broken heart.
