Tempus fugit! Except when you’re reading Young, or Proust, or Sterne, the grand dilators. Most readers who have grown to see their pocket-sized corporate ad-lattice as an appendage of their autonomy, or, say, a novel as a “story,” will find themselves not only disinterested in this book, they will scorn it, for it is an affront to their sense of time. It is an exceptionally long book in which exceptionally little happens by conventional narrative standards. Out of print for just shy of two decades now (but not for long? 2), I find something quite ironic: this book is very rare, and yet even today there are undoubtedly more people who own a copy of one of its five editions than there are starry-eyed wax house figurines who have the patience to not only keep the boundless illusion of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling 3 illuminated detail by redundant detail, reading uninterrupted for a few hours each day up to several weeks, but beyond this, to sit with it and love it as it should be loved.

“I always thought of Miss MacIntosh as the center of the wheel, the hub, then the spokes as the subsidiary, secondary characters, and the wheel as endlessly expanding like a universe.” - Marguerite Young 1 The Collidescope is an affiliate of and will earn a small commission if you click through those specific links and make a purchase. Young’s epic novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling was informed by her concept of history and pluralistic psychology, as well as her poetic prose style with its many layers of images and languages.Įditor’s note: This is a guest post by Zachary Tanner. She was also renowned as a teacher of writing at a number of venues, including the New School for Social Research and Fordham University. Over the next fifty years, while maintaining an address in New York’s Greenwich Village, she traveled extensively and wrote articles, poetry, and, book reviews for numerous magazines and newspapers. She relocated to New Harmony and spent seven years there, beginning work on Angel in the Forest, a study of utopian concepts and communities, which was published in 1945 to universal acclaim, winning the Guggenheim and Newberry Library awards. In that same year, she visited New Harmony, Indiana, the site of two former utopian communities, where her mother and stepfather resided.

Her first book of poetry was published in 1937, while she was teaching high-school English in Indianapolis.

Her work evinced an interest in American identity, social issues, and environmentalism. About Marguerite Young: Young was an American author of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and criticism.

Miss macintosh my darling