The Wonderful World of Maria Ro
Novelist, feminist, conservative, revolutionary, capitalist, tree-hugger, Catholic, dyke.
Perhaps the most interesting woman writer of the turn of the last century.
Maria Rodziewiczówna (“Maria Ro”) (1864-1944) had an extraordinary life. Her family – Polish gentry in today’s Belarus – was dispossessed and exiled by the Russian regime to Siberia in 1864. They returned to Poland only in 1875, penniless and in utter poverty. Maria was soon orphaned. And then, in 1882, she inherited a vast but poorly managed estate back in Belarus. Maria cut her hair, donned man’s clothing and set about reforming the estate. She proved a tough but fair, popular and successful farm manager: she introduced new farming techniques and new crops, built roads, bridges, hospitals and schools, and all the while she wrote beautiful novels in which she distilled her life experience.
Her books remain immensely popular today, but she has had bad luck with critics, who hate her politics. The right hates her open lesbianism (she lived in a menage a trois with two beta females) and her friendly attitude to ethnic minorities; the left hate her firm opposition to Russian imperialism and communism.
Her novels spin a good yarn: they are often about noble characters heroically striving to achieve worthy goals – something the readers can identify with. Her position in Polish literature is comparable to Jane Austen and William Thackeray in English, and many have found her similar in mood and style to her near contemporary, the great Russian classic Igor Turgenev.
“I have read Maria obsessively, breathlessly, with fascination and with pain,” — Czesław Miłosz
We have illustrated The Summer of the Forest Folk to match the beauty of the prose.
Here are the first two novels by Maria. There will be nine more.
eBook: $9.99
paperback: $16.99
hardcover: $24.99
audiobook: $17.99
The most beautiful book you will read this year.
Irresistibly charming.
I will never stop reading this.
I’m stunned and enraptured; you will be too.
A book about love, in its purest form, for anything and everything.
Gorgeous writing. What a joy.
This book has the status of a cult classic in Poland. Everyone knows it, everyone has had it read to him or her as a child. More: it is a book with an avid, almost religious following, “forest souls” as they say of themselves: people who read this book endlessly over and over, quote whole passages from memory, relive and replay its story, its attitudes and situations in their own lives. The story is the simplest thing on earth: tree women spend their summers in a remote cottage deep in the last virgin forest in Europe. This summer, their teenage big-city nephew joins them. But the goodness of the book does not lie in the story. It lies in how it tells it–and what deeper sense the reader can derive from it. At bottom, it is a heart-warming, feel-good tale of love and friendship, of coming of age, and of the healing power of nature. But it contains hidden meanings: one can read it between the lines, also. This is a book like nothing you have ever read, a phenomenon, a genre of its own. The most beautiful book I have ever done, bar none, wrote the audiobook narrator about her experience with it. A cult classic since its publication in 1920, it has had 52 editions in 102 years. Now finally in English in a highly readable, beautifully illustrated translation.
eBook: $6.99
paperback: $15.99
hardcover: $24.99
audiobook: $23.99
Love in the cold climate.
In 1891, 27-year-old Maria Rodziewiczówna put pen to paper to record her experiences as a political exile in Siberia: the severity and beauty of nature, the extraordinary life of the steppe, the daily struggle to survive, and the lives of the exiles: some withering and dying, some barely eking out a living, and some adapting, thriving and even–finding love.
The book’s message of hope in the face of great adversity, the mysterious figure of The Shaman, and the special sense of “being there,” evoked with extraordinary beauty and economy of words have kept the book permanently in print for 130 years.
The book, who for plot and style can easily compete with the best of Turgenev or Tolstoy, was unlucky with its choice to translator. The first English translation of the book, published in 1900, never made a splash and has since faded away. This new translation updates the style and corrects many mistakes and omissions, giving us the first accurate and highly readable English version of this great, timeless classic.
If you love great literature and beautiful prose, you will love this. Pick up your copy today.