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Abstract: During the 1980s and 1990s Westfield State University's Institute for Massachusetts Studies published over a dozen books on local history. In this issue we offer the following "Editor's Choice" as one of our most popular selections.
Despite inspiring the work of one of America's most well-loved poets, Elinor Frost has inspired precious little biographical research. Published in 1988, Sandra L. Katz's Elinor Frost: A Poet's Wife remains one of the touchstone pieces; more than twenty years later, no other full-length biography exists of Elinor Frost.
Katz paints her subject as a talented and budding poet in her own right who may well have ceased writing creatively to protect the fragile ego of her then-high school boyfriend, "Rob " Frost. In these first chapters Katz describes the couple's secret, unofficial marriage and the strenuous circumstances leading up to their real marriage, all the while examining the poems that Robert wrote to mark this period and how they relate to his relationship with Elinor. These formative years, during which Robert's poetry consisted largely of fodder for his high school newspaper and, a few years later, a self-published volume hand-delivered to Elinor at school, form the basis of these excerpts from Katz's work.
PREFACE
Not much is known about Robert Frost's wife, Elinor Miriam White (1873 - 1938). There has never been a comprehensive biography of her, and in the many studies of her husband, she is a shadowy figure at best. Those who know Elinor Frost, from either Lawrance Thompson's "official" 1966 biography, Robert Frost: The Early Years, or from reviews of this encyclopedic work, would think her a strange and unattractive person.1 For example, Martha Duffy, in her review, wrote:
The most enigmatic figure is Frost's wife, Elinor... Elinor Frost's accustomed weapon against her husband was uncanny silence... Elinor Frost's final silence was most appalling. As she lay dying, the poet desperately sought her blessing or some reassurance about his treatment of her. Though she had been at his side for forty-three years, she refused to admit him into her room.2
This description of Elinor is as jaundiced as the monstrous portrait Thompson drew of Robert Frost. The Frosts' daughter-in-law, Lillian LaBatt Frost, told me that when Thompson interviewed her, he did not want...