Eliot Bliss (12 June 1903 – 10 December 1990) was a

Jamaica Jamaica (; ) is an island country situated in the Caribbean Sea. Spanning in area, it is the third-largest island of the Greater Antilles and the Caribbean (after Cuba and Hispaniola). Jamaica lies about south of Cuba, and west of His ...

n-born English novelist and poet of

Anglo-Irish Anglo-Irish people () denotes an ethnic, social and religious grouping who are mostly the descendants and successors of the English Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. They mostly belong to the Anglican Church of Ireland, which was the establis ...

descent, whose literary friendships encompassed

Anna Wickham Anna Wickham was the pseudonym of Edith Alice Mary Harper (1883 – 1947), an English/Australian poet who was a pioneer of modernist poetry, and one of the most important female poets writing during the first half of the twentieth century. She wa ...

Dorothy Richardson Dorothy Miller Richardson (17 May 1873 – 17 June 1957) was a British author and journalist. Author of ''Pilgrimage'', a sequence of 13 semi-autobiographical novels published between 1915 and 1967—though Richardson saw them as chapters of o ...

Jean Rhys Jean Rhys, ( ; born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams; 24 August 1890 – 14 May 1979) was a British novelist who was born and grew up in the Caribbean island of Dominica. From the age of 16, she mainly resided in England, where she was sent for her ...

Romer Wilson Romer Wilson (born Florence Roma Muir Wilson (''married name'' O'Brien); 26 December 1891 in Sheffield – 11 January 1930 in Lausanne) was a British writer who wrote about 13 novels during the inter-war period. In 1921, she won the Hawthornd ...

and

Vita Sackville-West Victoria Mary, Lady Nicolson, CH (née Sackville-West; 9 March 1892 – 2 June 1962), usually known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author and garden designer. Sackville-West was a successful novelist, poet and journalist, as wel ...

.Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy (eds), ''The Feminist Companion to Literature in English'' (London: Batsford, 1990), p. 106.

Life

Born Eileen Norah Lees Bliss at a Jamaican army garrison, she was the daughter of Captain John Plomer Bliss and his wife Eva (née Lees).Michela A. Calderaro: "To be sexless, creedless, classless, free. Eliot Bliss: a Creole writer". In: ''Annali di ca' Foscari'', XLII, No. 4, 2003, pp. 109–120
Retrieved 17 September 2015.
/ref> Bliss was educated at a number of British convent schools. Her brother John was sent to school in England at the same time. She returned in 1923 to Jamaica for two years, a period that would provide inspiration for her second and last novel. She then settled permanently in England and gained a diploma in journalism from

University College, London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = � ...

. In 1925 she renamed herself Eliot as a mark of her respect for

George Eliot Mary Ann Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880; alternatively Mary Anne or Marian), known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wro ...

and T. S. Eliot. Over subsequent years Bliss held various jobs in publishing and made friends with other women writers, notably fellow novelists

, who gave her financial support while she wrote her first novel, and

. Her relations with the Australian-born poet

(1883–1947) are said to have been intimate.McFarlin Library, Eliot Bliss Collections, note by Alison M. Greenle
Retrieved 17 September 2015
. She lived as a companion for over half a century with Patricia Allan-Burns, an artist, in

Bishop's Stortford Bishop's Stortford is a historic market town in Hertfordshire, England, just west of the M11 motorway on the county boundary with Essex, north-east of central London, and by rail from Liverpool Street station. Stortford had an estimated po ...

Hertfordshire Hertfordshire ( or ; often abbreviated Herts) is one of the home counties in southern England. It borders Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire to the north, Essex to the east, Greater London to the south, and Buckinghamshire to the west. For govern ...

, where she died in 1990. Allan-Burns disposed of her literary estate, the Bliss Collections, in three stages to the McFarlin Library at the

University of Tulsa The University of Tulsa (TU) is a private research university in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It has a historic affiliation with the Presbyterian Church and the campus architectural style is predominantly Collegiate Gothic. The school traces its origin to ...

. Bliss left daily diaries in 19 volumes covering January 1959 – December 1960 and January 1963 – August 1980. Prominent authors in her personal library, also held at the McFarlin Library, include Jean Rhys,

Radclyffe Hall Marguerite Antonia Radclyffe Hall (12 August 1880 – 7 October 1943) was an English poet and author, best known for the novel ''The Well of Loneliness'', a groundbreaking work in lesbian literature. In adulthood, Hall often went by the name Jo ...

and

Emily Dickinson Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Little-known during her life, she has since been regarded as one of the most important figures in American poetry. Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massach ...

Writings

Each of Bliss's two published novels can be classed as a ''

Bildungsroman In literary criticism, a ''Bildungsroman'' (, plural ''Bildungsromane'', ) is a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood ( coming of age), in which character change is impo ...

''. ''Saraband'' (1931, reissued 1986) features Louie, a sensitive girl from a genteel family conscious of her inability to do anything of note, unlike her violinist cousin. Her wishes are made clear: "I don't want to go out into the world and earn my living. I don't want to have to say goodbye to a quiet scholar's life, to smooth, civilized hours around a Wedgwood teapot.... I don't want to be terrorised into a set formula of life." However, family financial problems force her to train as a typist, making her "afraid of turning into a machine," but she eventually recognizes the creativity in herself and begins to write. The book was widely praised for its modernist and feminist ideas. ''Luminous Isle'' is a largely autobiographical tale of a girl's return to Jamaica at the age of 19, after attending school in England. Her desire to treat the island as home is thwarted by the narrowness of life there, its "hypocrisy and hidden indecencies" and its racism. As a recent critic has pointed out, "The underlying homosexuality of the characters is never spelled out; it remains unuttered, and the intricate implications of the relationships... are never fully explained." A third book of hers, ''The Albatross'', said to have been published in 1935, cannot be traced. The poems of Eliot Bliss were not found until 2004, in the home she had shared with Allan-Burns. They were edited and introduced by the

University of Trieste The University of Trieste ( it, Università degli Studi di Trieste, or UniTS) is a public research university in Trieste in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region in northeast Italy. The university consists of 10 departments, boasts a wide and almos ...

academic Michela A. Calderaro and published electronically. Calderaro is also working on a biography. The papers of Eliot Bliss (diaries 1959–1980) are held at the McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa. They consist of "19 volumes of daily diaries dating from January 1959 to December 1960, and January 1963 to August 1980. Additional notes, correspondence, poems, photographs and sales receipts are laid into many of the diaries, all of which have been noted in the inventory and... in 'Notes on my Diaries', written by Bliss."

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bliss, Eliot 1903 births 1990 deaths 20th-century Jamaican women writers 20th-century Jamaican novelists British feminist writers Jamaican people of English descent Jamaican women novelists Jamaican emigrants to the United Kingdom