Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Mary Page Stegner

Mary and Walace Stegner on their wedding day in 1934.
Widow of writer Wallace Stegner -- via the Salt Lake Tribune. The obituary acknowledges that the concept of a woman helping her spouse achieve his artistic goals seems contra-feminist; however, it also includes this quote from Stegner, who obviously treasured her:

"She has had no role in my life except to keep me sane, fed, housed, amused, and protected from unwanted telephone calls, also to restrain me fairly frequently from making a horse's ass of myself in public, to force me to attend to books and ideas from which she knows I will learn something; also to mend my wounds when I am misused by the world, to implant ideas in my head and stir the soil around them, to keep me from falling into a comfortable torpor, to agitate my sleeping hours with problems that I would not otherwise attend to; also to remind me constantly (not by precept but by example) how fortunate I have been to live for fifty-three years with a woman that bright, alert, charming, and supportive."

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