In 1928, the same year she graduated from college, Edith Everett Taylor, later Edith Pope published Not Magnolia, a jazz-age college novel. The protagonist of the book, Leigh Monroe, is an undergraduate at Florida College for Women, facing a life-crisis. Her foster brother, childhood friend and anticipated husband, Simon, has suffered a nervous breakdown. Courted by a young New York novelist, Oliver Varn, and surrounded by fellow co-eds and sorority sisters trying to make a “good catch,” Just as Leigh decides she is in love with Oliver, Simon reappears, and Leigh is torn between her love for Oliver and what she feels is her duty to Simon. She is also torn between her two aunts, nicknamed “Ante-Bellum” and “Anti-Boredom” by Oliver. Belle, the elegant wife of a Southern aristocrat, is horrified at the possibility of her niece marrying an upstart Yankee novelist and plays on Leigh’s sense of guilt and duty. Beulah, a robust spinster, counters:
“Love is not lace paper Valentine,” she said fiercely. “Nor life a flower to be prettily worn. Will you choose to stagnate here, Leigh? No love, and no duty excuses a woman marrying a man who is not her peer in strength, and in vitality. Will you live like Belle, like Sarah, like the other women of Goodwind, pretty and passionless, flowering like a magnolia, against a dying background? Choose to be anything, but not magnolia.” (212-13)

Kathryn Seidel has pointed out that “Pope deftly used the magnolia, the standard emblem
of the purity and beauty of the southern belle in nineteenth-century fiction, as a symbol of decay and sterility” (36). But it is the novelist’s emphasis on the need for a woman to exercise her strength and vitality to live a full life that runs as an underlying theme throughout her novels.

This is an appealing first novel. ( )