Dear Tiny Heart : The Letters of Jane Heap and Florence Reynolds

Rating:
Summary: Lovely Book for a Specific Audience
Review: This book is a collection of letters centering about an amazing, actual woman who moved to Chicago one hundred years ago to attend the School of The Art Institute and to become a painter. Much to her chagrin, artist/writer, Jane Heap, is made to return to her small town in Kansas to support her family only AFTER she has fallen in love with another writer/artist, of greater wealth and urbanity, whom she has met in Chicago. The earlier part of the book is comprised of unabashed, remarkable, sensitive lesbian love letters, full of magic and art and passion. Later, Heap lives back in Chicago and also in New York and in Paris, and publishes the famous "Little Review" (first to publish Joyce's Ulysses) with some of the more interesting political activists, feminists and lesbians of the century, to wit, Emma Goldman, Jack Reed, Djuna Barnes, Gertrude Stein, Janet Flanner, Hemingway, Tristan Tzara, and countless other artists. It's a great read not only because Jane Heap writes well, but because she is recording a history of the last century's greats from the view of an artist and lesbian. Specific audience, extremely inspiring.