 Wolfgang Hampel - and Betty MacDonald fan club fans,perhaps you are one of our winners of Betty MacDonald fan contest.You'll be able to find the names of our winners inBetty MacDonald fan club newsletter November.Betty MacDonald fan club contest question was:What happened to Betty MacDonald on October 30, 1938?( see answer below )What's about a new breakfast at the bookstore with Brad and Nick?Enjoy a great Sunday,Max
Vita Magica
|
 |
ABOUT US | SUBSCRIBE
| E-MAIL
EDITOR | HOME
|
Issue 5 2002 Anne Finger:
Betty MacDonald is best known for her book
The Egg and I (a bestseller when it was published in 1945, it was made into a movie starring Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurry) and her children's books, the Mrs. Piggle Wiggle series. The Egg and I is the story of a city girl who, at the age of 18, marries a chicken farmer -- from "that delightful old school of husbands who lift up the mattresses to see if the little woman has dusted the springs" -- and settles down with him to raise children and poultry -- and conceives an almost pathological hatred of chickens.
Published in 1945, The Egg and I is a classic
of the wisecracking, disgruntled dame variety -- but it isn't hard to see that beneath that veneer, the book voiced real complaints about women's lot in marriage and a tough streak of anti-romantic realism. (It also contributed to the image of Seattle and its environs as a realm of backwoods eccentrics -- a far cry from the current stereotype of grunge rockers and latte-drinking drones for Microsoft.)
The Plague and I (1948), MacDonald's subsequent
-- and largely ignored -- autobiographical follow-up, concerns the year she spent in a tuberculosis sanitarium. In it, she brings the same grim humor to the story of her institutionalization and the dehumanizing treatment she experiences there. |
