Virginia Sorensen: Pioneering Mormon Author

Virginia Sorensen is best known to the world as an author of children's books, especially the 1956 Newbery Award novel Miracle on Maple Hill. She remains the only Latter-day Saint woman to win this prestigious award. However, Sorensen also wrote some of the best-regarded adult fiction about Mormons to appear in the twentieth century and is a crucial figure in the development of Mormon literature. In Virginia Sorensen: Pioneering Mormon Author, Stephen Carter makes a substantial contribution to Mormon letters (and the history of Mormon letters) by examining Sorensen's life and her novels for both children and adults.Virginia Eggertsen grew up in an inactive, part-member family in Provo, Utah. She got her publishing start in The Juvenile Instructor and reported for BYU's newspaper Y News before moving to Chicago shortly after marrying her husband, Fred Sorensen. Virginia became part of literary circles outside of Utah, gaining accolades from the larger literary community for her debut novel, A Little Lower Than the Angels, which included a historical Mormon polygamist character based on the life of her husband's ancestor, Mercy Baker. She received a grant to attend the Bread Loaf conference in Middlebury after nominations from Wallace Stegner and Alfred Knopf. She also traveled to Denmark on a Guggenheim grant for research. Fred's feelings of jealousy for Virginia's success eroded their relationship, and Virginia found literary companionship elsewhere. She met the writer Alec Waugh, older brother to the famous Evelyn, at an artist residency at the MacDowell Colony in 1954. The two became very close friends. Several years after Virginia divorced Fred, she married Alec in 1969 and wrote to a friend that she was too happy to write much.Carter draws from Sorensen's fifty-year correspondence with her friend Anna Marie Smith to give us glimpses of her biography and of Sorensen's writing process: a cycle of excitement about an idea, attempts to execute it, getting stymied in its revisions, and then awaiting critical response—a torturous cycle familiar to any author. Sorensen was unusual in that she was an author at a time when many women were expected to fulfill family obligations first. Her family's support was critical in both senses of the word. While initially enabling Virginia's writing through childcare, her mother-in-law, Emma Sorensen, constantly reminded her that her successes were injurious to Fred's masculinity. Carter mentions in a footnote that Virginia's experience with domestic clashes between two women in the same house (the inspiration for her polygamy plots) came partially from her experience with living with Emma.Carter presents his extensive archival research in a journalistic and accessible manner. Except for a few times when he summarizes her weight gain and loss (which Sorensen writes about to her friend), his treatment avoids sexist pitfalls that would be very easy to fall into when writing about a woman writing in the 1940s and 1950s. He presents Virginia's budding relationship with Alec neutrally, not blaming anyone for the portentous pairing. The gems he pulls from Virginia's correspondence are fragrant with literary incense. Virginia describes her daughter's first cry as “wavering down from a sky vague and spinning and full of flying stars” (8). In old age, she laments her failing memory, writing that “dates run together like mixed fruit in juices—a splendid, confused concoction of jumbled colors, tastes, and fragrances” (65).While Carter's curation of the glistening bits of Sorensen's letters is exceptional, his analysis of the larger picture of Mormon literature in chapter 8 is underdeveloped. Carter writes that Utah Mormons didn't embrace Virginia's novels because they were used to didactic “home” literature. It's true that before the “lost” or “golden” generation of the nationally acclaimed jack-Mormon writers of the 1930s and 1940s, writers of Mormon literature often wrote in the “Sunday school story” genre of didactic stories. But Carter's wide-reaching assertions about the development of Mormon literature—like “the idea that a narrative can provide an unerring pattern for the reader's life, was central to Mormonism's origins” (69)—require more evidence than Carter provides before shifting to an argument that Mormon aesthetic sensibilities were arrested in a primitive state. The many factors that contributed to how the Saints understood literary aesthetics in the early twentieth century require more than eight pages to explain. While Carter accurately reports that Mormon fiction had to fight against the anti-novel moment in the 1880s, he does not account for the extensive literary instruction present in the official curricula of the Mutual Improvement Association and Relief Society organizations in the first half of the twentieth century. These lessons, published in official church periodicals, introduced Saints to literary culture, including literary works that didn't have a clear didactic purpose.However, where Carter's biography succeeds, it succeeds magnificently. He clearly demonstrates that Sorensen wrote novels that circled around stories of outsiders trying to return to and reintegrate into the communities they leave. Often, but not always, these communities were Mormon. In the last chapter, Carter does an excellent job summarizing Sorensen's novels and making them sound extremely interesting. Carter continues the critical work of publishing this research on an under-appreciated author of Mormon literature with a Sorensen primer worthy of study by any Mormon studies scholar.