Becoming Elizabeth Lawrence is not the first Lawrence collection Emily Herring-Wilson has edited. In 2002 she published Two Gardeners: A Friendship in Letters, a collection of the correspondence between Lawrence and Katherine White, best known to most as the wife of E.B. White and fiction editor of The New Yorker. But that collection was, as the title states, all about gardening. And while it must have taken some nerve to write letters to a woman who was the pre-eminent doyenne of literary style in the nation, Lawrence herself was on sure ground when it came to horticulture. The two women were well-matched.

Becoming Elizabeth Lawrence is another kind of book entirely. Oh, there is quite a lot of gardening in it. And I can’t tell you how comforting it was to read and discover that many of the mistakes I have made in my garden, many of the failings I have castigated myself for, she was guilty of as well. I was comforted to know that even after years of experience, Lawrence still was in the habit of over-ordering from catalogs, still unpacking shipments of plants, uncertain of what they were, still unable to resist impulsively buying unusual plants, even if she had no plan for where to put them in her garden, still losing track of where things had been planted and accidentally digging up bulbs because she had forgotten they were there. Her garden, it seems, was well-planned in conception, but sometimes serendipitous in execution. She did not impose her will upon it, the garden imposed its will upon her.

But Becoming Elizabeth Lawrence is a collection of letters Lawrence wrote, not to another gardener, but to another writer. To a writer who was, in fact, her main literary influence. At the time the letters begin in 1936, Ann Preston Bridgers is already famous, a literary light and nationally known. Elizabeth Lawrence is just beginning to write for magazines and papers. Ann is her critic and confidant. And interestingly, Elizabeth becomes Ann’s as well.

It is a much more personal story than any other book of Lawrence’s I have read; filled with the small details of her daily life, her thoughts about what she is doing, what she is reading, what she is thinking and feeling. It is, also, a one-sided story because while the letters Elizabeth Lawrence wrote to Ann Bridgers were found among Bridger’s papers, the letters Ann wrote to Elizabeth have never been discovered. So reading the correspondence is sometimes like listening to one side of a telephone conversation—one must intuit, from the things you hear, what the other person is saying. Particularly frustrating to me were the long and fascinating critiques Elizabeth would write, discussing manuscripts of plays that Ann apparently sent to her for input. Since the manuscripts themselves are not included in the book, one can only wonder wistfully what they were like. Read full review