Sisters republishing canned
A couple of days ago, I ran across mention of Lynne Cheney’s novel Sisters going back into print. The cover is horrible — as were the reviews on Amazon — but in the end, I decided we didn’t need to make fun of it or her. (Tempting thought it might be.)
Now, however, I regret it: it’s been cancelled. It seems the decision to republish this 25-year-old title was made without Cheney’s consultation, and she “doesn’t feel it’s her best work.” We’d have to disagree, though — it sounds grand:
Sophie Dymond had overcome nineteenth-century prejudices to succeed as publisher of a hugely popular women’s magazine. But when she left New York to revisit her native Wyoming, where her sister had died mysteriously, she left her prestige and power far behind. Waiting for Sophie was a world where women were treated either as decorative figurines or as abject sexual vassals…where wives were led to despise the marriage act and prostitutes pandered to husbands’ hungers…where the relationship between women and men became a kind of guerilla warfare in which women were forced to band together for the strength they needed and at times for the love they wanted. In her effort to grasp the meaning of her sister’s life and death, Sophie discovers the secret that tainted her life and begins to understand the experience of the vast majority of silent, trapped women.
Perhaps that’s because it would be embarrassing? Cheney’s novel includes brothels, attempted rapes and a lesbian love affair — not exactly what’s needed while her husband’s administration is trying to pass a Constitutional amendment condemming homosexuals as second-class citizens.
While Amazon has pulled their page with the republished novel and its horrible cover, copies from the 1981 printing are still available. In fact, says Cheney’s lawyer, “If there is a serious demand for this 25-year-old book, I am confident that America’s used bookstores will be able to satisfy it.”
Ernest has more to say, including a link to a 2000 article from Princeton: Lynne Cheney: Feminist Intellectual?
Comments:
Out of print, you say?
Oh no, I don’t think so.
Not while I have my crappy Snapscan e50 with its highly negligible text-reading ability. Project Gutenberg will be hearing from me shortly. And after I’m done doing that, it’s time to re-typeset this baby, with the gaudiest 80’s fake-deco chapter headers, a cheap version of Baskerville, and one of those covers that involves insane amounts of drapery and women’s heads in profile. A big, color author photo on the back? Certainly. And maybe the endpapers shouldhave a map of iraq.
I’m on top of this like Haliburton. And I will be working on it in “an undisclosed location.”
God save the Cheneys.