The AML Online Book Club will be discussing Virginia Sorensen’s novel A Little Lower than the Angels at 7pm (Mountain), Sunday, May 22. All are invited!
The historical novel, set in Nauvoo, Illinois, is considered a foundational classic of Mormon literature. Sorensen, a recent Brigham Young University graduate, was overwhelmed by the positive national attention her debut novel received upon publication in 1942. Clifton Fadiman, writing for The New Yorker, noted how “convincingly [she] explores . . . the tragic, comic, and grotesque problems of plural marriage.” She tells the story of a Nauvoo residents Mercy Baker and her Mormon husband, loosely based on her in-laws’ family history and augmented by on-site research. The novel preceded the first scholarly treatment of Nauvoo by three years. As an outsider, Mercy is puzzled by the city’s mysteries. Gradually, however, she discovers that a neighbor’s obsession with Joseph Smith is due to her polygamous marriage to him. Even so, Mercy cannot foresee the complications that her own baptism will bring.
Sorensen went on to a remarkable career, including winning the 1957 Newbery Medal for her children’s novel, Miracles on Maple Hill, and writing a series of novels about Danish Mormons, from Denmark to Sanpete County, Utah, including On this Star, The Evening and The Morning, Many Heavens, Kingdom Come, and the autobiographical essays of Where Nothing is Long Ago.
Some excellent Sorensen scholars, including Mary Bradford, Susan Elizabeth Howe, Sarah Reed, and Helynne Hansen plan to attend the discussion on May 22, plus a few surprise guests. We may be at the start of a new blooming of attention to Sorensen’s works, as Signature Books announced that they are publishing an ebook version of A Little Lower than the Angels in June, and I hear that there will be a short biography published in the near future.
Zoom link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87507107246?pwd=V0praVJiWE9jU1dyOWJNcHNZa2xrdz09
Meeting ID: 875 0710 7246 Passcode: 488895
Contemporary Reviews
Orville Prescott, New York Times, May 13, 1942.
“A work of genuine distinction, sure craftsmanship and beautiful prose.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been the object of a good deal of literary attention in recent years. Vardis Fisher’s Children of God, as stirring violent fictional history, and Maurine Whipple’s The Giant Joshua, as a warmly human story of a polygamous marriage in Utah, garnered some well deserved critical plaudits. A Little Lower Than the Angels is written with so much finer feeling and so much greater literary skill than either of them that there should be little doubt as to its rank as the best Mormon novel yet written. Mrs. Sorensen has chosen to write it terms of one woman and her family and friends with the spectacular and theatrical evens of Mormon history providing only the background, the offstage shouts as its were, rather than the center of attention . . .
The unhappiness, the choking bitterness and personal misery that a second wife could bring to the bewildered, resentful children as well as to the first wife are poignantly brought home. . . .
Few first novels and perhaps still fewer historical novels are written with the emotional warmth, the gentle, true adroitness in creating rounded, understandable, timelessly human characters that distinguish A Little Lower Than the Angels. These backwoods farmers and their wives and children are not just harsh outlines of fanatically zealous converts to an outlandish cult; they are extraordinarily real human beings, perplexed, troubled, dogged, courageous. Mrs Sorensen writes of them simply and yet almost lyrically, in firm, artful, beautiful prose. Her book is a fine achievement, a historical novel illuminated by an inner grace and constructed with an artistic skill seldom indeed to be found in fiction dealing with America’s past.
Wallace Stegner, The Saturday Review
(Invoking Bernard DeVoto, who had despaired of writers ever being equal to the Mormon story because God had already written it.) “Up to now, nobody has proved Mr. DeVoto wrong, but Virginia Sorensen, in this admirable first novel, comes very close to doing just that. . . . Instead of trying to cover the whole panorama of Mormon history . . . she confines herself to the story of Nauvoo . . . [but] even that history she subordinates to the story of a family . . . every member of it is real enough to make the average historical novel look like Grandfather’s stuffed Sunday shirt.”
John A. Widtsoe, The Improvement Era
The story, uneven in structure, is well told. There are many fine passages in it. The author is gifted in her style and expression. Nevertheless, the story is not colorful. Only occasionally does it grip the reader. Fire is wanting.
As a Mormon novel it is ineffective. There were strong beliefs, right or wrong, that made possible the building of Nauvoo, that drove the Saints across the plains and enabled them to conquer the Great American Desert. These compelling forces are absent, to the reader’s surprise, from the actions of the Mormons in the tempestuous Nauvoo days. Joseph Smith and his associates become, in the telling, ordinary, rather insipid milk and water figures. That does not comport with the historical achievements of the Mormon pioneers.
In the eager grasping for modern unlovely realism, some trivial and repulsive episodes are allowed place in the book. How Simon’s capable second wife cured one of Mercy’s boys of bed-wetting does not add interest or beauty to the story. Nor does the sense of decency welcome the account of the sex temptation of Mercy’s oldest son. Others might be mentioned.
Readers are beginning to wonder whether the constant stark realism of the present literary day comes from the writers, or from publishers who compel the writers in the interest of greater profits. Virginia Sorenson has done much careful research in the preparation of this book. She has undoubted literary gifts. Much may be expected from her.
Frank Winn, The Deseret News
It is to be regretted that Mrs. Sorensen chose this topic [polygamy] –one too often exploited and with which she appears to have little sympathy or understanding . . . The historic characters are well drawn, but the incidents affecting them alone are not accurate according to the records . . . The writer, in fact, shows real literary ability. Had she chosen a subject she did not so thoroughly despise she could have produced a good novel, but her desire to avenge her own feelings prevented excellence in this instance.
Scholarly reappraisals
Mary Bradford. “Virginia Sorensen: An Introduction” Dialogue, 1980.
Mary Bradford. “’If you are a writer, you write!’ An interview with Virginia Sorensen” Dialogue, 1980.
Edward A. Geary. “A Visitable Past: Virginia Sorensen’s Sanpete” Utah Historical Quarterly, 1990.
Mary Bradford. “In Memoriam: Virginia Sorensen” Sunstone, 1992.
LuDene F. Dallimore, “Mercy, Zina, and Kate: Virginia Sorensen’s Strong Women in a Man’s Society” AML Proceedings, 1994.
Helynne H. Hansen, “In Search of Women’s Language and Feminist Expression Among Nauvoo Wives in A Little Lower Than the Angels” Dialogue, Summer 2004.
Sarah C. Reed “The important fact is that I always felt Danish”: Preserving Ethnic Memory in Virginia Sørensen’s Mormon Novels” The Bridge: Journal of the Danish American heritage Society, Fall 2018.
Theric Jepson. “Who loves A Little Lower than the Angels?” Thubstack, May 2022.
Past AML Online Book Club events:
- Sept. 2021: James Goldberg and Janci Patterson. The Bollywood Lover’s Club
- Nov. 2021: Bela Petsco.Nothing Very Important and Other Stories
- Dec. 2021: Lisa Van Orman Hadley. Irreversible Things
- Jan. 2022: Terryl Givens. Stretching the Heavens: The Life of Eugene England and the Crisis of Modern Mormonism
- Feb. 2022: Steven L. Peck. Wandering Realities: Mormonish Short Fiction
- March 2022: Irreantum: “Wine into Water: Contemporary LDS Poems about Jesus”
- April 2022: Rosalyn Eves. Beyond the Mapped Stars
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I finished this novel yesterday and absolutely loved it. Loved it. Maybe my favorite Mormon novel. I have a lot to say but, alas, I finally looked at the calendar and the meeting’s the same time as seminary graduation. So I’m afraid I will once again not be in attendance.
Say wise things in my absence!