![]() ![]() I ended up loving it and having lots of laughs. Mrs Daffodil is always under deadline and stressed out by that, but the two bumble along continuously dieting, hosting weekend visitors, trying to find domestic help and overall being very caring, loving women to each other and their friends. They live in a house in the country (probably outside of NYC) with a Siamese, a red setter and several other dogs. I imagined these two women as a sort of harmless American version of Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas. Mrs Daffodil is a magazine and short story writer who lives with a friend named Kay. A reviewer I read on Amazon speculated that she got to say things she could not write about in her articles. Gladys Taber was a real life author of magazine articles in the 1950s and she turned this experience into a novel. Eventually, because it was recorded in my reading log from 2001, it ended up on the 1957 list of books read for the Big Fat Reading Project.īecause of the cover, I thought it was going to be a dumb little book, but it was actually charming and humorous. That is how I ended up reading Mrs Daffodil. I read the first book I found at the beginning of each letter. But I am easily bored and I had gotten into some author I did not really like, so I moved on. I started out working through all the books authored by anyone whose last name started with A, like Francie in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, from whom I got the idea. She died on Main Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, Massachusetts at the age of 80.īack before I invented My Big Fat Reading Project, I was on a quest to read all the fiction in my local library. Gladys Taber had divorced her husband in 1946 and he later passed away in October 1964. Her final book, published posthumously, was Still Cove Journal (Lippincott, 1981). While a resident of Orleans, Taber contributed “Still Cove Sketches” to the Cape Cod Oracle. Having spent some summers on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, she decided to relocate to the town of Orleans where she would live out the remainder of her days. In 1960, her companion, Eleanor, died and Taber decided to abandon life at Stillmeadow. In 1959, she moved from Ladies’ Home Journal to Family Circle, contributing the “Butternut Wisdom” column until her retirement in 1967. She published more than 20 books related to Stillmeadow, including several cookbooks. Beginning with Harvest at Stillmeadow (Little, Brown, 1940), Taber wrote a series of books about her simple life in New England that possessed homespun wisdom dolled out with earthy humor and an appreciation for the small things. In the late 1930s, Taber joined the staff of the Ladies’ Home Journal and began to contribute the column “Diary of Domesticity.”īy this time, she had separated from her husband and was living at Stillmeadow, a farmhouse built in 1690 in Southbury, Connecticut, sharing the house with Eleanor Sanford Mayer, a childhood friend who was often mistakenly identified as her sister. She went on to write several other novels and short story collections, including Tomorrow May Be Fair ( Coward, 1935), A Star to Steer By (Macrae, 1938) and This Is for Always (Macrae, 1938). Taber won attention for her first humorous novel, Late Climbs the Sun (Coward, 1934). She began her literary career with a play, Lady of the Moon (Penn), in 1928, and followed with a book of verse, Lyonesse (Bozart) in 1929. Taber taught English at Lawrence College, Randolph Macon Women’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, and at Columbia University, where she did postgraduate studies. The following year, she married Frank Albion Taber, Jr., giving birth to their daughter on July 7, 1923. She returned to her hometown and earned a master’s in 1921 from Lawrence College, where her father was on faculty. Gladys graduated from Appleton High School and enrolled at Wellesley College, receiving her bachelor’s degree in 1920. During her childhood, she moved frequently as her father accepted various teaching posts until they finally settled in Appleton, Wisconsin. An older sister, Majel, had died at the age of six months while a younger brother Walter died at 15 months. Her parents were Rufus Mather Bagg, who could trace his ancestry back to Cotton Mather, and the former Grace Sibyl Raybold. A prolific author whose output includes plays, essays, memoirs and fiction, Gladys Taber (1899 – 1980) is perhaps best recalled for a series of books and columns about her life at Stillmeadow, a 17th-century farmhouse in Southbury, Connecticut.īorn Gladys Bagg on Apin Colorado Springs, Colorado, she was the middle child and only one to survive to adulthood. ![]()
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