CANR
WORK TITLE: THE BLUE MAIDEN
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BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.annanoyes.net/
CITY: Fishers Island
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COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CA 99
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born c. 1988; daughter of Elizabeth Noyes.
EDUCATION:Beloit College, B.A., 2010; University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, M.F.A., 2013.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
AWARDS:Henfield Prize for Fiction, 2013, and Lotos Foundation Prize, 2016, both for Goodnight, Beautiful Women; Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellowship; Lighthouse Works Fellowship; James Merrill House Fellowship; McDowell Fellowship; and Yaddo residency. Selected as writer-in-residence at the Polli Talu Arts Center, Estonia.
WRITINGS
Contributor of short stories to periodicals, including Guernica, Vice, and A Public Space.
SIDELIGHTS
Anna Noyes is a writer who initially frocused primarily on the short story genre, but who has subsequently also published novel-length work. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Beloit College and a master’s degree from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her stories have appeared in publications that include Guernica, Vice, and A Public Space.
In 2016 Noyes released her debut collection of short stories, Goodnight, Beautiful Women. It is the winner of the Henfield Prize for Fiction and the Lotos Foundation Prize. The volume contains eleven short stories, all of which are set in Maine, where Noyes grew up. “Drawing Blood” is set one hundred years in the past and tells of a girl who has an affair with the maid hired to serve her household. The girl marries a man with money, and her family fires the maid. In “Treelaw,” a woman deals with grief following her father’s suicide. Suicide is also a theme in “Hibernation.” “Changeling” tells of a woman riding a bus who sees a fellow passenger that reminds her of her mother. A hungover college student named Claire recalls a lie she told about her cousin, who is mentally disabled, in “Werewolf.”
In an interview with Carmen Maria Machado, a contributor to the Electric Lit Website, Noyes stated: “I am preoccupied with the secrets, and shame, and guilt of all my characters, regardless of their gender. The stories in the collection center on girls and women, but in my larger body of work my protagonists are sometimes male, and still I work to dredge up their shame, to explore and to probe it.” Noyes continued: “This ups the stakes, and the stakes ultimately always fall, for me, somewhere along the lines of whether the world will continue to meet the characters … with love and tenderness at the story’s end, or in the story’s unwritten future. Or will they … become exiled.” In the same interview with Machado, Noyes commented on her decision to write about sex in the stories. She remarked: “I think women’s sexuality and shame come hand-in-hand in this culture. Girlhood sexuality, even more so. And narratives that really lay bare certain emotions in girls and women—lust, anger, jealousy, destruction—seem to me harder to come by. When we come by them, I’ve witnessed their larger capacity to shock the reader, to seem extraordinarily raw or explicit or dark, to be interpreted as extremes as opposed to nuanced examples of the human experience, even though we frequently encounter similar narratives propelled by men.” Regarding her choice of Maine as a setting for the stories, Noyes told Machado that when many people think of the state, they imagine “an idealized version of Maine that is sometimes superimposed over a complex reality. I am interested in who and what this idealized picture necessarily excludes; who feels protected by the safety and ease the summertime lifestyle assumes, and who does not. I am trying to depict what I know of this part of the world, which is so starkly lovely, and also so often beautified.”
“Gritty, beautiful and full of loss, Noyes’ stories make an impressive debut,” asserted Jackie Thomas-Kennedy on the Minneapolis Star Tribune Website. Writing on the Portland Press Herald Website, Michele Filgate commented: “Short story writers have minimal space to make a reader care about the topic and the characters. There’s an economy to it, and Noyes is a master.” Filgate concluded: “ Goodnight, Beautiful Women glimmers with the hopes and failures of the girls and women Noyes’ writes about.” New York Times Online critic Elizabeth Poliner remarked: “The stories may sound grim, but they consistently sparkle with express detail.” Poliner added: “Noyes’s knack for lucid prose includes providing her characters with simple language that nevertheless grasps an understanding of complex human dynamics.” In a lengthy assessment of the volume on the Rumpus Website, Claire Burgess suggested: “Noyes doesn’t offer tidy solutions for her protagonists’ struggles. Some readers will be turned off by this open-endedness and lack of redemption; other readers may find the stories depressing. But for many, these tender and brutal stories will pierce your core like a hook in the gut, shimmering with raw pain and heartache and the desperate desire to survive. Because despite the darkness in these stories, the women and girls within always discover something about themselves and grow a little bit stronger.” Burgess continued: “They’re sometimes thoroughly lost, maybe irrevocably damaged, and uncertain what to do next, but in Noyes’s talented hands, you’re left with the certainty that these tough and wild and messed-up women are going to figure it out. They’re going to be okay.” Maya Gittelman, a contributor to the 20something Reads Website, commented: “ Goodnight, Beautiful Women reads like a brisk Northeast midnight: as forbidding as it is enchanting, fraught with threat and glory, alive with the unexpected. Charged with shattered dreams and uncertain possibilities, it leaves you before the elucidation of the dawn.” “Noyes has a fluid, raw, and strikingly original manner with both language and emotion,” wrote a Publishers Weekly reviewer.
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In 2024, Noyes published her debut novel, The Blue Maiden, a modern gothic tale set on Berggrund, an isolated island in northern Europe. It is 1825, and several generations earlier the women of Berggrund were accused of witchcraft by their local priest. Now Pastor Silas is the local man of God. He is a widower with two young daughters: Ulrika and Beata. These girls are now coming of age and feeling rebellious against the past strictures of the island and are thus outcasts in their community. The girls are also obsessed with their mother, yet their father refuses to speak of her. The two girls themselves are opposites: Ulrike is the practical one who takes on the household duties, while her sister Bea is troubled by visions and longs for friends and attention. When a mysterious stranger comes knocking, the buried family history begins to come to light. Increasingly the neighboring island, Blue Maiden, supposedly Satan’s realm and the place of the Witches’ Sabbath, beckons the girls with the truths they have long sought.
A Kirkus Reviews critic had praise for this Nordic gothic tale, noting that the “consuming bleakness” of its setting is “perfect for a story about the burdens of generational and gendered trauma.” The reviewer furrher felt that this tale would “appeal to fans of classic gothic novels.” Similarly, an online Publishers Weekly reviewer dubbed The Blue Maiden a “bracing debut novel,” and concluded that Noyes “invokes Shirley Jackson in this inspired and memorable gothic tale.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 15, 2016, Leah Strauss, review of Goodnight, Beautiful Women, p. 20.
Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2016, review of Goodnight, Beautiful Women; March 15, 2024, review of The Blue Maiden: A Novel.
Publishers Weekly, April 18, 2016, review of Goodnight, Beautiful Women, p. 90.
ONLINE
Anna Noyes website, http:// www.annanoyes.net (April 10, 2024).
Electric Lit, https:// electricliterature.com/ (December 10, 2016), Carmen Maria Machado, author interview.
Huffington Post, http:// www.huffingtonpost.com/ (May 20, 2016), Maddie Crum, review of Goodnight, Beautiful Women.
New York Times Online, http:// www.nytimes.com/ (June 10, 2016), Elizabeth Poliner, review of Goodnight, Beautiful Women.
Press Herald Online, http:// www.pressherald.com/ (June 12, 2016), Michele Filgate, review of Goodnight, Beautiful Women.
Publishers Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (April 2. 2024), review of The Bue Maiden.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (June 3, 2016), Claire Burgess, review of Goodnight, Beautiful Women.
Star Tribune Online, http:// www.startribune.com/ (July 8, 2016), Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, review of Goodnight, Beautiful Women.
20something Reads, http:// www.20somethingreads.com/ (June 24, 2016), Maya Gittelman, review of Goodnight, Beautiful Women.
Washington Post Online, http:// www.washingtonpost.com/ (May 30, 2016), E.J. Levy, review of Goodnight, Beautiful Women.*
Anna Noyes’ debut novel, The Blue Maiden, is forthcoming from Grove Atlantic on May 14, 2024. Her short story collection Goodnight, Beautiful Women, was a finalist for the Story Prize and the New England Book Award, as well as a New York Times Editors' Choice, Indie Next Pick, Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, and Amazon Best Book of the Month. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her fiction has appeared in Vice, A Public Space, and Guernica, among others. She has received the Lotos Foundation Prize, the Henfield Prize, and residencies from MacDowell, Yaddo, Lighthouse Works, the James Merrill House, and Aspen Words. She lives in New York, on Fishers Island.
QUOTE: “consuming bleakness” “perfect for a story about the burdens of generational and gendered trauma.”
\Noyes, Anna THE BLUE MAIDEN Grove (Fiction None) $26.00 5, 14 ISBN: 9780802162809
Noyes' Nordic gothic follows two young sisters on a small Swedish island shadowed by witchcraft trials four generations earlier.
Berggrund Island in 1825 is a quiet, pious community with a haunting past: In 1675, the village priest coerced two orphans into accusing several women of consorting with the devil in Blockula, the "shadow realm" of an uninhabited nearby island called the Blue Maiden. This kicked off a chain of accusations that culminated in the murders of nearly 30 women. Six-year-old Beata and 10-year-old Ulrika are descendants of the only accused woman spared from death (not by any grace toward her, but because she was pregnant). Their father, Silas, the current priest, is a somber man who dismisses whispers of Blockula as superstition, but Bea and Ulrika become fascinated with witches all the same. This obsession bleeds into the girls' greatest desire: to connect with their dead mother, Angelique. Both pursuits are forbidden in their father's home, but, as they grasp at feminine knowledge--rifling through their mother's things and attempting to cast their own spells--the girls increasingly suspect that Angelique had her share of secrets. It is the arrival of handsome mainlander August that propels the girls into womanhood, a place far less glamorous than they once believed. This debut novel churns with the smell of sea-damp wool, day-old bread, and elderflower-scented smoke. This is a place steeped in tradition, yet, for Bea, who surfaces as the protagonist, "history is too far removed to feel real. What matters is its lore: Be good, or the witch will take you." The girls must accept that the hushed stories--the bits of history blotted from the lore--are even more foreboding in their absence. While the narrative is quite fragmentary, Berggrund and its inhabitants are alluring; Noyes' rich descriptions create a setting that, in all its consuming bleakness, is perfect for a story about the burdens of generational and gendered trauma.
A twisting narrative of the horrors of patriarchal subordination that will appeal to fans of classic gothic novels.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Noyes, Anna: THE BLUE MAIDEN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A786185711/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=29bd56cc. Accessed 7 Apr. 2024.
QUOTE: “bracing debut novel,” “invokes Shirley Jackson in this inspired and memorable gothic tale.”
The Blue Maiden
Anna Noyes. Grove, $26 (240p) ISBN 978-0-8021-6280-9
Noyes’s bracing debut novel (after the collection Goodnight, Beautiful Women) portrays a troubled 19th-century Nordic family descended from a woman who survived a witch hunt. Near the isolated and windswept Berggrund Island lies its smaller sister island, the Blue Maiden, which is uninhabited and rumored to harbor demon spirits. One day in 1675, after months of passionate preaching by the priest of Berggrund, 27 of the island’s 32 women are accused of witchcraft and executed. Of the accused, only pregnant Signe is spared, despite wanting to “stay linked” to the others on their way to have their throats cut. The story then jumps to 1825 and Signe’s descendants Ulrika, 10, and Bea, six. Bea anticipates the return of their dead mother, Angelique, who Bea believes will summon her by tapping on the window with dirty fingers. Meanwhile, Ulrika seeks to distance herself from the memory of their mother and from their preacher father, whose love is often smothering. Noyes shows with incisive and imagistic prose how the specter of the eerie, ever-changing Blue Maiden hangs over the residents of Berggrund like a pall as the sisters come of age to face horrifying tragedies. Noyes evokes Shirley Jackson in this inspired and memorable gothic tale. (May)
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DETAILS
Reviewed on: 04/02/2024
Genre: Fiction
Open Ebook - 1 pages - 978-0-8021-6281-6