:Clara Lanza
{{short description|American novelist}}{{Infobox person
| name = Clara Lanza
| image = Clara Lanza (1889).png
| caption = Clara Lanza, c. 1889 (The Amusement Bulletin)
| birth_name = Clara Hammond
| birth_date = {{Birth date|1858|02|12}}
| birth_place = Fort Riley, Kansas
| death_date = {{Death date and age|1939|07|15|1858|02|12}}
| known_for = Novelist
| title = Marquise
| spouse = Marquis Manfridi Lanza di Mercato Bianco
| children = 3
| father = William A. Hammond
}}
Marquise Clara Hammond Lanza (February 12, 1858 – {{circa}} July 15, 1939) was an American novelist whose realist fiction often centered on troubled marriages. Several were praised for exhibiting realism and originality. She published her first work in 1884.
Family and education
Lanza was born Clara Hammond in Fort Riley, Kansas, the daughter of William A. Hammond, a physician who served as the Surgeon General of the United States Army during the second half of the American Civil War, and his first wife, Helen Nisbet. When she was seven, her family moved to New York City. After attending a French school in New York, she received further education in Paris, France, and Dresden, Germany. In 1877, she married the Marquis Manfridi Lanza di Mercato Bianco of Palermo, Sicily, with whom she had three sons.
Career
File:MARQUISE CLARA LANZA A woman of the century (page 458 crop).jpg")]]
Lanza's literary career began in 1884 with the publication of her first novel, Mr. Perkins' Daughter. She published half a dozen further novels as well as Tales of Eccentric Life, a collection of short stories (many with medical themes) coauthored with her father.
Lanza's novels tended to focus on troubled relationships, especially marriages. Several were praised by critics for their realism and their originality. Of Basil Morton's Transgression (1890), one critic wrote that "no better piece of realism has been written for many a day." Her 1909 novel of an unhappy marriage, The Dweller on the Borderland, was called "an exceptionally original book — original in treatment, original in motif." Some critics even found her work too harsh. Her 1891 novel A Modern Marriage, for example, was called "intellectual, analytical, purposeful, but ... unsympathetic in its tireless alertness and unslumbering observation."
An anomaly among her novels is Scarabaeus: The Story of an African Beetle (1892), coauthored with James Clarence Harvey. With such elements as a camera that can photograph the past and a plot centering on a talismanic gem and an ancient kingdom in Africa, it is closer to speculative fiction than to her usual realism.File:Marquise Clara Lanza.pngLanza also wrote articles for periodicals like Cosmopolitan and Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly. An example of these is a tribute to her long friendship with the Irish novelist George Moore. Lanza found an American publisher for his book Mike Fletcher when his British publisher went suddenly out of business. Moore expressed interest in collaborating with her on dramatizing one of her novels that he had liked, but the project was abandoned after two acts had been completed.
Among her articles are several about the lives of contemporary women, such as a chapter on the women clerks of New York for Lydia Hoyt Farmer's book What America Owes to Women, which was published as a souvenir of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.
Books
- Mr. Perkins' Daughter (1884)
- Tales of Eccentric Life (1886; with William A. Hammond){{cite web |url=http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Lanza%2C%20Clara%2C%201859-1939 |title=Online books by Clara Lanza |website=University of Pennsylvania |access-date=November 11, 2018}}
- Basil Morton's Transgression (1890){{cite book |date=1889 |title=The American Bookseller |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=P9JOAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA2-PA92 |publisher=American News Company |page=467}}
- A Modern Marriage (1891){{cite book |date=1890 |title=The American Bookseller |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=P9JOAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA2-PA92 |publisher=American News Company |page=92}}
- A Golden Pilgrimage (1892)
- Scarabaeus: The Story of an African Beetle (1893, with James Clarence Harvey)
- Horace Everett (1893){{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=hY5UAAAAYAAJ |title=Horace Everett: A Novel |publisher=G.W. Dillingham|year=1897}}
- The Dweller on the Borderland (1909){{cite book |last=D. Smith |first=Geoffrey |date=August 13, 1997 |title=American Fiction, 1901-1925: A Bibliography |url=https://archive.org/details/americanfiction10000smit |url-access=registration |publisher=Cambridge University Press |page=[https://archive.org/details/americanfiction10000smit/page/389 389] |isbn=9780521434690}}
References
{{Reflist | refs=
{{cite encyclopedia |url=http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/lanza_clara|title=Lanza, Clara|date=12 August 2018|encyclopedia=The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction}}
The New York Times, July 15, 1939, p. 15, col. 6. (Obituary of Clara Hammond Lanza).
"Current Literature." Current Opinion, vol. 4, January 1890, p. 12.
"New Novels and New Editions." The Literary World, vol. 43, p. 341.
"Literature". America, vol. 2, 1910, p. 593.
}}
External links
- {{Commons category-inline}}
- {{Wikisource-inline|Woman of the Century/Marquise Clara Lanza}}
- {{Internet Archive author|sname=Clara Lanza}}
{{authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lanza, Marquise Clara}}
Category:20th-century American novelists
Category:19th-century American novelists
Category:19th-century American women writers
Category:20th-century American women writers
Category:Novelists from Kansas
Category:People from Fort Riley, Kansas
Category:American women novelists
Category:Wikipedia articles incorporating text from A Woman of the Century