Gertrude Beasley’s Followers (26)

Gertrude Beasley

Born

The United States

Genre

Memoir

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“Gertrude Beasley belongs in the first rank of Texas writers,” Don Graham, a professor at the University of Texas who is the state’s leading literary historian, said in an interview. “She’s the forgotten woman of Texas literature.”

Edna Gertrude Beasley was born on June 20, 1892, near Cross Plains, Tex., but her father, a subsistence farmer, was restless and moved frequently, always hoping for better luck. Gertrude’s mother grew so wary of her alcoholic, abusive husband and the prospect of yet another baby that she pretended to take the children out to pick cotton one day and instead ran away with them to nearby Abilene, where she got a divorce — something unknown and therefore shameful in rural Texas.

Gertrude was the only Beasley to take an “Gertrude Beasley belongs in the first rank of Texas writers,” Don Graham, a professor at the University of Texas who is the state’s leading literary historian, said in an interview. “She’s the forgotten woman of Texas literature.”

Edna Gertrude Beasley was born on June 20, 1892, near Cross Plains, Tex., but her father, a subsistence farmer, was restless and moved frequently, always hoping for better luck. Gertrude’s mother grew so wary of her alcoholic, abusive husband and the prospect of yet another baby that she pretended to take the children out to pick cotton one day and instead ran away with them to nearby Abilene, where she got a divorce — something unknown and therefore shameful in rural Texas.

Gertrude was the only Beasley to take an interest in school. She received a teaching degree from an Abilene college and a masters in education from the University of Chicago, where she embraced stridently leftist views on women’s rights. She was commissioned by National Geographic to write about Japan and then traveled to Soviet Russia, where she wrote for Birth Control Review, a journal that was edited by Margaret Sanger. While abroad, in 1925, she published her only surviving book, an angry, unapologetically explicit memoir entitled My First Thirty Years.

In August 1927, while she was living in London, a policeman turned her out of her lodgings for reasons that remain unclear. In protest, she broke her window with an umbrella and was promptly arrested, placed in the mental ward of a local hospital, and ultimately deported. From the ship en route to the United States, she wrote a rambling letter to the Secretary of State claiming that she was in danger and that the British authorities were plotting “to destroy me as a writer and a personality and have me put to death.” She said she was finishing a manuscript. It has never been found.

Within 10 days of the ship’s docking in New York, she was committed to Central Islip Psychiatric Center on Long Island. She never left, dying on July 25, 1955, of pancreatic cancer. She was 63.

“She was without funds, a woman with no husband, and abrasive,” Alice Specht, librarian at Hardin-Simmons College in Abilene, said. “It was easier just to put her away.” ...more

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Gertrude Beasley’s books

Average rating: 3.68 · 397 ratings · 87 reviews · 1 distinct work • Similar authors

My First Thirty Years
by

Gertrude Beasley,

Nina M. M. Bennett (Contributor),

Marie Bennett (Editor)

3.68 avg rating — 397 ratings — published 1925 — 7 editions

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Quotes by Gertrude Beasley (?)

“I know what's the matter with us; I know why we hate one another so much; it's because there never was a speck of love in our family!”
― Gertrude Beasley, My First Thirty Years

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“I was angry and would have liked to quarrel with her; that was a good thing to separate on; she believed one thing and I believed another; I had a right to stick to my opinion. Besides then I would be free and I would have all of my own money. But I thought again; she had about the hardest life I had ever heard of.”
― Gertrude Beasley, My First Thirty Years

tags: mother-daughter-relationship

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“I said quietly without knowing I was going to say it, "But, Mother, you have made many mistakes too,”
― Gertrude Beasley, My First Thirty Years

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Topics Mentioning This Author

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Read Women: 2025 Literary Centenaries	13	28	May 14, 2025 07:00PM

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