Book Review: The Virgin of Bennington

Title: The Virgin of Bennington

Author: Kathleen Norris

Publisher: Penguin

Date: 2001

ISBN: 1-57322-179-1

Length: 256 pages

Quote: “Before I arrived at Bennington, I had no notion of its reputation on thed East Coast.But I soon learned that to many people the term ‘Bennington girl’ connoted someone who was flamboyantly (if not oppressively) artsy, bohemian, and also notoriously easy with sexual favors…I was by no means the only student who took her studies seriously. But I did feel isolated.”

This book is actually a pleasant adult read—very adult, all about work and philosophy, never a steamy moment—but it deserves some sort of award for having the Worst Title. It’s not about virgins, or Catholics, or religious art. I think the publisher was hoping to sell this book to people looking for sensational stories about any or all of those things—something like The Da Vinci Code—and those readers are guaranteed to be disappointed.

At Bennington, the author of Dakota and Little Girls in Church wasn’t exactly religious. She was just an introvert who didn’t want to go quite as far into sex, drugs, and every other mindless rebellion a kid could think of, quite as fast, as her dorm mates did. So although she didn’t actually stay a virgin for most of her college years she was nicknamed “the Virgin of Bennington.”

But that’s only a preface to explain the attention-grabbing title, not what the book is about. The sins of good writers’ youth are seldom memorable; Norris doesn’t claim to be an exception. (One married man—not named—and a few underwhelming drug trips.) So what she actually delivers to readers is a memoir of the last years of her first employer, a friend to poets, and what her employer did for writers and writing in the late twentieth century. This turns out to be an inspirational story—about poets, working to spread interest in poetry out from New York City. Elizabeth Kray, “Betty,” had been married long before Norris met her, and Norris was at least considering marriage to David Dwyer at the end of this memoir.

Since none of Norris’s books is exactly sensational, and this one’s not even religious, The Virgin of Bennington is a book for a small niche market. It’s more biography than autobiography, but a personal reminiscence rather than a formal, researched, full-length biography. It’s written in short bloggy sections arranged mostly in chronological order, with a little noticeable repetition, not much. The question it answers, in the context of Norris’s better known books, is “How did Norris prepare for the extraordinary half-monastic, half-artistic life for which she’s known? Did she ever have to work for someone else, and if so who, when, where, and why?” We learn how Kray helped prepare both Norris and the United States for Norris’s adult career.

Those seriously interested in women’s history, literary history, poems, and poets will love this story. I do. But although you can recognize the voice of the bestselling essayist in this memoir, it's also easy to see why the memoir was not a bestseller.