The Tattooed Heart
& My Name is Rose
The Tattooed Heart
& My Name is Rose
Two Novels by
Theodora Keogh
Selected and Introduced by
Lidia Yuknavitch
Published by Pharos Editions, an Imprint of Dark Coast Press
3645 Greenwood Ave N.
Seattle, WA 98103 U.S.A.
The Tattooed Heart
Text Copyright © 1953, Renewed 1981
by Theodora Keogh, all rights reserved
First edition 1954 by Farrar, Straus & Young
My Name Is Rose
Text Copyright © 1956, Renewed 1984
by Theodora Keogh, all rights reserved
First edition 1956 by Farrar, Straus & Cugahy
First Pharos Editions Printing May 2014
Pharos Editions version reprinted by arrangement with Sallie Free
Introduction Copyright © 2014 by Lidia Yuknavitch
ISBN-13: 9781940436128
Library of Congress Control Number:
All Rights Reserved
Digging for Matter
Introduction by Lidia Yuknavitch
Lately, I’ve taken to digging up women.
What I mean is, I’ve become obsessed with going back and down and under to find women writers whose work made it possible for the rest of us, for the present tense of us, to “matter”. I’ve developed this obsession in relation to finding the “market” for women writers in the present to be an abject abyss of dead tropes and formulaic forms, whereas the “matter” in the writing that came before us, even from dead women, remains astonishingly generative.
As my profound case study I give you Theodora Keogh, a novelist who wrote nine novels in the 1950’s and 60’s that, to be modest, blew the doors and windows off of what we mean when we say “women’s writing.” When we say “women’s writing” today, unfortunately, we mean a subset of writing entirely dictated by market-driven gatekeepers of money-making products. Whereas Theodora Keogh’s novels perform the act, the verb, the glorious excess of an actual woman writing. Writing through her body, to be precise. Without flinching or pulling punches.
Imagine that.
Her debut novel, Meg, is about a 12-year old girl who drifts away from her private school friends toward the streets where she is raped. She published Meg in 1950. That was where Theodora Keogh began. Think about that for a minute. From there she went on to publish The Double Door, a novel in which a cloistered teen heiress finds a secret door and ends up making love with her father’s paid male lover, The Fascinator, where a young girl is seduced by a sculptor, Gemini, an incest and murder narrative about twins, Street Music, a story in which a music critic falls desperately in love with a child criminal, and The Other Girl, a fictionalized retelling of the Black Dahlia murder.
And it wasn’t just her themes that ruptured the literary landscape. The formal moves she performed in each novel were every bit as daring as her contemporary male counterparts—which is probably the least interesting thing I could say, so I’ll say this as well: her formal moves interrogated subjectivity from the specific site of a woman’s body.
Like many of her characters, she also lived a full and novel-worthy life in France. She was dancer. She was friends with all things and people Paris Review, including the Plimpton. She was a designer, she worked for Vogue, she divorced and remarried, she bought a tugboat and married its captain, she lived in the Chelsea Hotel, she divorced and remarried again.
She kept a Margay as a pet; it nibbled her ear into a different shape.
And she wrote nine formidable novels.
