Elizabeth Spencer's Long Literary Career Subject of Upcoming Documentary Film

Generations of Americans who may have forgotten, or may have never heard the name Elizabeth Spencer will have an upcoming opportunity to learn about a lady who casts a long shadow across the field of American literature.

A documentary film, “Elizabeth Spencer: Landscapes of the Heart,” with funding from the Southern Documentary Fund, is being made by Kevin McCarthy, a London native who now teaches screen writing at Dartmouth College. So who is this lady?

Eudora Welty had this to say. “It has never been doubted that Elizabeth Spencer knows the small, Southern, backwoods hill town down to the bone. This she transforms by the accuracy of her eye and ear, talent and a certain prankish gaiety of spirit into a vital and absorbing novel.”

Elizabeth Spencer’s personal life, from her birthplace, Carrollton, Mississippi, in 1921, to her present home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, is as compelling as her literary career.

According to Sharon Swanson, the film’s project director, Elizabeth’s mother was a McCain and great aunt to presidential candidate Sen. John McCain. The senator’s brother, Joseph Pinckney "Joe" McCain II, appears in the film.

After graduating as her high school’s valedictorian, Elizabeth attended Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi, before earning her Master’s Degree in Literature at Vanderbilt University in 1943.

Ten years later, with two published novels to her credit, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She left her teaching post at the University of Mississippi in Oxford and moved to Italy to pursue a full time writing career.

In September 1956, she traveled to Cornwall, England, where she married John Rusher, an Englishman. Their honeymoon was a train trip through London, Paris and eventually to Rome where the couple had first met. They would later call Montreal, Canada, their home for nearly thirty years before relocating to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1986.

Her list of awards received is extensive, but the one she did not win may be the most intriguing episode in the six decades of her writing career. In 1956, the year of her marriage, her novel, THE VOICE AT THE BACK DOOR, was published.

The popular opinion among those who deemed themselves to be in the know considered the book a shoo-in for the next Pulitzer Prize for literature. The jury for the 1957 selection recommended that she receive the award. But the Pulitzer board made no award that year.

In a void of explanation, speculation ran the gauntlet … the author was a woman with only two novels to her credit … she was not living in the United States … she was married to a foreigner … the novel dealt with racial issues at a time when some felt they were best left unaddressed.

The novel received the first Rosenthal Award of the American Academy. It was published in England and translated into several foreign languages. Reviews were universally raves. A movie contract was signed, a cast selected and a script written before a Hollywood strike doomed the project.

There were those who speculated that the worldwide acclaim the novel received and the Pulitzer board’s failure to make an award in 1957 were factors in what happened four years later. Harper Lee’s TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD received the Pulitzer Prize for 1961.

There are striking similarities between the two novels. Southern women who had little or no established literary history were the authors. Both books were set in the south, both dealing with small-town strife and racial issues. However, there were differences between the two women.

Harper Lee knew Truman Capote from their childhood days in Monroeville, Alabama. When she moved to New York City in 1950, Capote was already there, somewhat established, and gave his young friend helpful advice that led to the writing of her novel.

During an interview in 2008, Elizabeth Spencer described her situation in 1957. “There were Pulitzer rumors when that book came out, but I was young, and relatively unknown by the committee at the time.”

While TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD was the extent of Harper Lee’s published writing career, Elizabeth Spencer’s has continued for more than a half century since her snub by the Pulitzer board. And her list of awards has continued to grow, a list far to vast to include here.

She is retired from her teaching post at UNC-Chapel Hill and has been a widow since her husband of 42 years died in 1998. But she still looks at the world with the heart of a writer. She had this to say in a recently published interview.

“The world of today, so vital and various, sends out a challenge for any writer to get down something valuable, no matter how daunting even to think of such a task may be. I keep running to keep up, not so fast as before, but still trying. This means a short story every so often, a novel when I can.”

The title of the film comes from her book published in 1998, LANDSCAPES OF THE HEART A MEMOIR. In the opening chapter Elizabeth describes the horseback ride she took at age twelve from Carrollton to Teoc, her mother’s family plantation.

Rebekah L. Cowell, in an article in The Chapel Hill News, wrote after viewing preliminaries of the work in progress. “It’s an emotional moment in the film when Spencer returns to the family home place, once a bustling plantation and now a derelict shell.”

Filming on the documentary is scheduled for completion this summer as McCarthy follows the story to Italy. A release date for the film has not been announced.

When the film is released, it will provide an opportunity for the world to see and hear a fascinating lady who can claim personal friendships with a league of authors from William Faulkner to Lee Smith.

[Photo credit: Raleigh Metro Magazine]