Nancy Hale, Fiction Writer, Is Dead at 80
By JAMES BARRON
Published: September 26, 1988
Nancy Hale, a novelist and short-story writer, died Saturday at the Martha Jefferson Hospital in Charlottesville, Va., after suffering a stroke. She was 80 years old and lived in Charlottesville.
Flickers of prim Boston, social New York and proper Virginia danced through her works, the earlier ones focusing on the follies and foibles of well-bred women.
''I specialize in women,'' Miss Hale said in an interview in 1942, ''because they are so mysterious to me. I feel that I know men quite thoroughly, that I know how, in a given situation, a man is apt to react. But women puzzle me.''
Nancy Hale was born in Boston on May 6, 1908, the daughter of Philip L. Hale and Lilian Westcott, both painters. As a toddler she played in their studios, often setting up a palette and trying to copy whatever they were working on.
She graduated from the Winsor School in Boston in 1926, studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and worked briefly as a painter.
Bored with Boston, she moved to New York in 1928. After working as an assistant editor at Vogue (''I pinch-hit as a model''), she joined The New York Times as a reporter. In 1929 she began to contribute ''casuals'' - humorous sketches - and stories to The New Yorker.
She became one of the New Yorkers best-known writers, and once boasted that she sold the magazine more stories in a single year than any other writer. First Novel About the Young
Miss Hale's first novel, ''The Young Die Good,'' was published in 1932. It was based on her idea that young New Yorkers wanted something more than they were getting in life but had neither ''the courage nor strength to go out and get it.'' Her second novel, ''Never Any More,'' appeared in 1934, followed in 1936 by a collection of short stories, ''The Earliest Dreams.''
Among her other works were ''New England Discovery'' (1963), ''Life in the Studio'' (1969), ''Secrets'' (1971), ''Mary Cassatt'' (1975) and ''The Night of the Hurricane'' (1978).
She is survived by her husband, Fredson T. Bowers, of Charlottesville, a former chairman of the English department of the University of Virginia; two sons by previous marriages, William Wertenbaker, of New Haven, Conn., and Mark Hardin; five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.∼Nancy Hale was born Anna Westcott Hale on May 6, 1908, in Boston, Massachusetts, the only child of painters Philip Leslie Hale and Lilian Clark Westcott. Descended from a distinguished New England family, Nancy Hale's grandfather was the orator, author, and Unitarian clergyman Edward Everett Hale, and two of her great-aunts were the writers Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lucretia Peabody Hale. Philip L. Hale achieved some success as a neo-impressionist painter of the Boston School, but probably had a greater influence as an instructor at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School and as an art critic for Boston newspapers. Lilian W. Hale, the more talented artist of the pair, was well known for her portraits and landscapes in oil, pastel, and charcoal.
Nancy Hale began writing at an early age, producing a family newspaper, the Society Cat, at age eight, and publishing her first story, "The Key Glorious," in the Boston Herald, at age eleven. She also devoted considerable energy to the study of art under her parents' tutelage and, after she was graduated from the Winsor School in 1926, at the Boston Museum School (1926-28).
In 1928, she married aspiring writer Taylor Scott Hardin and moved with him to New York City where she was hired to work in the art department at Vogue. She was, however, almost immediately put to work as an assistant editor and writer instead. Under the pen name Anne Leslie, she wrote "chatty news" items, fashion news, and editorials.
Hale's true ambition was to write fiction. Jobs at Vogue and later Vantiy Fair provided financial support while she built her reputation as a fiction writer. While working full time she was also writing pieces on commission for a variety of magazines as well as free-lance fiction. Her first son, Mark Hardin, was born in 1930.
Hale's first novel, The Young Die Good (1932), was a chronicle of the shallow lives of the post-flapper "smart set" in New York. In 1933, one of her stories,"To the Invader," won the O. Henry Memorial Award Prize. A second novel, Never Any More, was published in 1934.
Hale was hired by the New York Times as its first woman straight news reporter in the spring of 1934, a job which she left after an exhausting six months. By then, she and her husband had been living apart for some time. They were divorced late in 1934.
In October of 1935, Hale entered into a troubled second marriage with author and journalist Charles Christian Wertenbaker. They settled in Charlottesville, VA, in 1936. Her next book, The Earliest Dreams (1936), was a selection made from the already substantial body of short stories published by Hale in such magazines as the New Yorker, Harper's, Redbook, and Ladies Home Journal. Writing was now her primary means of financial support.
Hale's second son, William Wertenbaker, was born in the spring of 1938. After several separations, she was divorced from Charles Wertenbaker in 1941. In 1942, Hale married Fredson Thayer Bowers an English professor on the faculty of the University of Virginia.
Her third and best known novel, The Prodigal Women, was published later that year. It is an immense book (over 700 pages) which, in the words of writer Anne Hobson Freeman, "dramatized, with unflinching candor, the psychological cost of being a woman at that time." It is the story of three women, each in her own way taking advantage of the freedoms offered by the post World War I rejection of Victorian social mores.
Throughout this period Hale was plagued by a series of physical ailments and bouts of anxiety severe enough to result in 1938 and again in 1943 in what was called a "nervous breakdown." Always intensely self-critical, Hale worried that she had squandered a promising career and sold- out artistically by writing to make money. She was fortunate in 1943 to find a psychoanalyst, Beatrice Hinkle, who helped her begin to solve what Hale called "this problem of who to be."
Always extremely hard-working, Hale published a collection of stories, the first of two much-loved volumes of "autobiographical fiction," A New England Girlhood (1958), and three novels in the 1950s. Hale singled out a favorite among these, Heaven and Hardpan Farm (1957). A humorous and humane novel about a group of "neurotic" women and their Jungian doctor at a small country sanitarium, Hale felt it was her most successful effort at writing about the experience of psychoanalysis.
In 1958, the University of Illinois awarded Hale a Benjamin Franklin Magazine citation for excellence in short story writing.
In 1961 Hale sold more stories (12) to the New Yorker than any other writer in the magazine's history. Also, in that year, she put together The Realities of Fiction, a volume of lectures on writing primarily given at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, 1959-60. Another novel, a collection of stories, and an anthology of writings by New England authors followed in the 1960s. In 1968, Hale received the Henry H. Bellamann Foundation Award for her significant contribution to the arts. One of Hale's best-loved books, The Life in the Studio, was published in 1969. "My mother died and I felt more than I could stand without expressing it," Hale told a newspaper reporter in 1969. Advertised as "an affectionate recollection of some singular parents," The Life in the Studio is as much about coming to terms with their memory and their loss. Hale blurred the boundaries of fiction and fact to discover for herself "the meaning of the past," but also "to awaken an echo in other lives; to arouse a consciousness where perhaps formerly there was none."
It is clear that Hale shared her parents' artistic philosophy as described in The Life in the Studio. The artist's role is to create a subtle marriage of objectivity and subjectivity, to use "the interplay of the painter's subjective view with the way the light actually falls upon the object" to "render" its essence and its meaning. In Mary Cassatt (1975), a biography of the American artist commissioned by Doubleday and Co. after the success of The Life in the Studio, Hale was clearly aiming for "the special marriage of subject and object." Written with an authority quite different from that conferred by scholarly credentials, Hale combined personal knowledge of Mary Cassatt's social and artistic milieu with the style developed in her "autobiographical fiction" to produce a biography that seems, in many ways, ahead of its time.
Hale next turned her attention to stories for children, publishing The Night of the Hurricane in 1978 and, in the mid 1980s, writing a collection of stories for young dyslexic readers. She died in Charlottesville, Virginia on September 24, 1988.
By JAMES BARRON
Published: September 26, 1988
Nancy Hale, a novelist and short-story writer, died Saturday at the Martha Jefferson Hospital in Charlottesville, Va., after suffering a stroke. She was 80 years old and lived in Charlottesville.
Flickers of prim Boston, social New York and proper Virginia danced through her works, the earlier ones focusing on the follies and foibles of well-bred women.
''I specialize in women,'' Miss Hale said in an interview in 1942, ''because they are so mysterious to me. I feel that I know men quite thoroughly, that I know how, in a given situation, a man is apt to react. But women puzzle me.''
Nancy Hale was born in Boston on May 6, 1908, the daughter of Philip L. Hale and Lilian Westcott, both painters. As a toddler she played in their studios, often setting up a palette and trying to copy whatever they were working on.
She graduated from the Winsor School in Boston in 1926, studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and worked briefly as a painter.
Bored with Boston, she moved to New York in 1928. After working as an assistant editor at Vogue (''I pinch-hit as a model''), she joined The New York Times as a reporter. In 1929 she began to contribute ''casuals'' - humorous sketches - and stories to The New Yorker.
She became one of the New Yorkers best-known writers, and once boasted that she sold the magazine more stories in a single year than any other writer. First Novel About the Young
Miss Hale's first novel, ''The Young Die Good,'' was published in 1932. It was based on her idea that young New Yorkers wanted something more than they were getting in life but had neither ''the courage nor strength to go out and get it.'' Her second novel, ''Never Any More,'' appeared in 1934, followed in 1936 by a collection of short stories, ''The Earliest Dreams.''
Among her other works were ''New England Discovery'' (1963), ''Life in the Studio'' (1969), ''Secrets'' (1971), ''Mary Cassatt'' (1975) and ''The Night of the Hurricane'' (1978).
She is survived by her husband, Fredson T. Bowers, of Charlottesville, a former chairman of the English department of the University of Virginia; two sons by previous marriages, William Wertenbaker, of New Haven, Conn., and Mark Hardin; five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.∼Nancy Hale was born Anna Westcott Hale on May 6, 1908, in Boston, Massachusetts, the only child of painters Philip Leslie Hale and Lilian Clark Westcott. Descended from a distinguished New England family, Nancy Hale's grandfather was the orator, author, and Unitarian clergyman Edward Everett Hale, and two of her great-aunts were the writers Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lucretia Peabody Hale. Philip L. Hale achieved some success as a neo-impressionist painter of the Boston School, but probably had a greater influence as an instructor at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School and as an art critic for Boston newspapers. Lilian W. Hale, the more talented artist of the pair, was well known for her portraits and landscapes in oil, pastel, and charcoal.
Nancy Hale began writing at an early age, producing a family newspaper, the Society Cat, at age eight, and publishing her first story, "The Key Glorious," in the Boston Herald, at age eleven. She also devoted considerable energy to the study of art under her parents' tutelage and, after she was graduated from the Winsor School in 1926, at the Boston Museum School (1926-28).
In 1928, she married aspiring writer Taylor Scott Hardin and moved with him to New York City where she was hired to work in the art department at Vogue. She was, however, almost immediately put to work as an assistant editor and writer instead. Under the pen name Anne Leslie, she wrote "chatty news" items, fashion news, and editorials.
Hale's true ambition was to write fiction. Jobs at Vogue and later Vantiy Fair provided financial support while she built her reputation as a fiction writer. While working full time she was also writing pieces on commission for a variety of magazines as well as free-lance fiction. Her first son, Mark Hardin, was born in 1930.
Hale's first novel, The Young Die Good (1932), was a chronicle of the shallow lives of the post-flapper "smart set" in New York. In 1933, one of her stories,"To the Invader," won the O. Henry Memorial Award Prize. A second novel, Never Any More, was published in 1934.
Hale was hired by the New York Times as its first woman straight news reporter in the spring of 1934, a job which she left after an exhausting six months. By then, she and her husband had been living apart for some time. They were divorced late in 1934.
In October of 1935, Hale entered into a troubled second marriage with author and journalist Charles Christian Wertenbaker. They settled in Charlottesville, VA, in 1936. Her next book, The Earliest Dreams (1936), was a selection made from the already substantial body of short stories published by Hale in such magazines as the New Yorker, Harper's, Redbook, and Ladies Home Journal. Writing was now her primary means of financial support.
Hale's second son, William Wertenbaker, was born in the spring of 1938. After several separations, she was divorced from Charles Wertenbaker in 1941. In 1942, Hale married Fredson Thayer Bowers an English professor on the faculty of the University of Virginia.
Her third and best known novel, The Prodigal Women, was published later that year. It is an immense book (over 700 pages) which, in the words of writer Anne Hobson Freeman, "dramatized, with unflinching candor, the psychological cost of being a woman at that time." It is the story of three women, each in her own way taking advantage of the freedoms offered by the post World War I rejection of Victorian social mores.
Throughout this period Hale was plagued by a series of physical ailments and bouts of anxiety severe enough to result in 1938 and again in 1943 in what was called a "nervous breakdown." Always intensely self-critical, Hale worried that she had squandered a promising career and sold- out artistically by writing to make money. She was fortunate in 1943 to find a psychoanalyst, Beatrice Hinkle, who helped her begin to solve what Hale called "this problem of who to be."
Always extremely hard-working, Hale published a collection of stories, the first of two much-loved volumes of "autobiographical fiction," A New England Girlhood (1958), and three novels in the 1950s. Hale singled out a favorite among these, Heaven and Hardpan Farm (1957). A humorous and humane novel about a group of "neurotic" women and their Jungian doctor at a small country sanitarium, Hale felt it was her most successful effort at writing about the experience of psychoanalysis.
In 1958, the University of Illinois awarded Hale a Benjamin Franklin Magazine citation for excellence in short story writing.
In 1961 Hale sold more stories (12) to the New Yorker than any other writer in the magazine's history. Also, in that year, she put together The Realities of Fiction, a volume of lectures on writing primarily given at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, 1959-60. Another novel, a collection of stories, and an anthology of writings by New England authors followed in the 1960s. In 1968, Hale received the Henry H. Bellamann Foundation Award for her significant contribution to the arts. One of Hale's best-loved books, The Life in the Studio, was published in 1969. "My mother died and I felt more than I could stand without expressing it," Hale told a newspaper reporter in 1969. Advertised as "an affectionate recollection of some singular parents," The Life in the Studio is as much about coming to terms with their memory and their loss. Hale blurred the boundaries of fiction and fact to discover for herself "the meaning of the past," but also "to awaken an echo in other lives; to arouse a consciousness where perhaps formerly there was none."
It is clear that Hale shared her parents' artistic philosophy as described in The Life in the Studio. The artist's role is to create a subtle marriage of objectivity and subjectivity, to use "the interplay of the painter's subjective view with the way the light actually falls upon the object" to "render" its essence and its meaning. In Mary Cassatt (1975), a biography of the American artist commissioned by Doubleday and Co. after the success of The Life in the Studio, Hale was clearly aiming for "the special marriage of subject and object." Written with an authority quite different from that conferred by scholarly credentials, Hale combined personal knowledge of Mary Cassatt's social and artistic milieu with the style developed in her "autobiographical fiction" to produce a biography that seems, in many ways, ahead of its time.
Hale next turned her attention to stories for children, publishing The Night of the Hurricane in 1978 and, in the mid 1980s, writing a collection of stories for young dyslexic readers. She died in Charlottesville, Virginia on September 24, 1988.
Nancy Hale, Fiction Writer, Is Dead at 80
By JAMES BARRON
Published: September 26, 1988
Nancy Hale, a novelist and short-story writer, died Saturday at the Martha Jefferson Hospital in Charlottesville, Va., after suffering a stroke. She was 80 years old and lived in Charlottesville.
Flickers of prim Boston, social New York and proper Virginia danced through her works, the earlier ones focusing on the follies and foibles of well-bred women.
''I specialize in women,'' Miss Hale said in an interview in 1942, ''because they are so mysterious to me. I feel that I know men quite thoroughly, that I know how, in a given situation, a man is apt to react. But women puzzle me.''
Nancy Hale was born in Boston on May 6, 1908, the daughter of Philip L. Hale and Lilian Westcott, both painters. As a toddler she played in their studios, often setting up a palette and trying to copy whatever they were working on.
She graduated from the Winsor School in Boston in 1926, studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and worked briefly as a painter.
Bored with Boston, she moved to New York in 1928. After working as an assistant editor at Vogue (''I pinch-hit as a model''), she joined The New York Times as a reporter. In 1929 she began to contribute ''casuals'' - humorous sketches - and stories to The New Yorker.
She became one of the New Yorkers best-known writers, and once boasted that she sold the magazine more stories in a single year than any other writer. First Novel About the Young
Miss Hale's first novel, ''The Young Die Good,'' was published in 1932. It was based on her idea that young New Yorkers wanted something more than they were getting in life but had neither ''the courage nor strength to go out and get it.'' Her second novel, ''Never Any More,'' appeared in 1934, followed in 1936 by a collection of short stories, ''The Earliest Dreams.''
Among her other works were ''New England Discovery'' (1963), ''Life in the Studio'' (1969), ''Secrets'' (1971), ''Mary Cassatt'' (1975) and ''The Night of the Hurricane'' (1978).
She is survived by her husband, Fredson T. Bowers, of Charlottesville, a former chairman of the English department of the University of Virginia; two sons by previous marriages, William Wertenbaker, of New Haven, Conn., and Mark Hardin; five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.∼Nancy Hale was born Anna Westcott Hale on May 6, 1908, in Boston, Massachusetts, the only child of painters Philip Leslie Hale and Lilian Clark Westcott. Descended from a distinguished New England family, Nancy Hale's grandfather was the orator, author, and Unitarian clergyman Edward Everett Hale, and two of her great-aunts were the writers Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lucretia Peabody Hale. Philip L. Hale achieved some success as a neo-impressionist painter of the Boston School, but probably had a greater influence as an instructor at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School and as an art critic for Boston newspapers. Lilian W. Hale, the more talented artist of the pair, was well known for her portraits and landscapes in oil, pastel, and charcoal.
Nancy Hale began writing at an early age, producing a family newspaper, the Society Cat, at age eight, and publishing her first story, "The Key Glorious," in the Boston Herald, at age eleven. She also devoted considerable energy to the study of art under her parents' tutelage and, after she was graduated from the Winsor School in 1926, at the Boston Museum School (1926-28).
In 1928, she married aspiring writer Taylor Scott Hardin and moved with him to New York City where she was hired to work in the art department at Vogue. She was, however, almost immediately put to work as an assistant editor and writer instead. Under the pen name Anne Leslie, she wrote "chatty news" items, fashion news, and editorials.
Hale's true ambition was to write fiction. Jobs at Vogue and later Vantiy Fair provided financial support while she built her reputation as a fiction writer. While working full time she was also writing pieces on commission for a variety of magazines as well as free-lance fiction. Her first son, Mark Hardin, was born in 1930.
Hale's first novel, The Young Die Good (1932), was a chronicle of the shallow lives of the post-flapper "smart set" in New York. In 1933, one of her stories,"To the Invader," won the O. Henry Memorial Award Prize. A second novel, Never Any More, was published in 1934.
Hale was hired by the New York Times as its first woman straight news reporter in the spring of 1934, a job which she left after an exhausting six months. By then, she and her husband had been living apart for some time. They were divorced late in 1934.
In October of 1935, Hale entered into a troubled second marriage with author and journalist Charles Christian Wertenbaker. They settled in Charlottesville, VA, in 1936. Her next book, The Earliest Dreams (1936), was a selection made from the already substantial body of short stories published by Hale in such magazines as the New Yorker, Harper's, Redbook, and Ladies Home Journal. Writing was now her primary means of financial support.
Hale's second son, William Wertenbaker, was born in the spring of 1938. After several separations, she was divorced from Charles Wertenbaker in 1941. In 1942, Hale married Fredson Thayer Bowers an English professor on the faculty of the University of Virginia.
Her third and best known novel, The Prodigal Women, was published later that year. It is an immense book (over 700 pages) which, in the words of writer Anne Hobson Freeman, "dramatized, with unflinching candor, the psychological cost of being a woman at that time." It is the story of three women, each in her own way taking advantage of the freedoms offered by the post World War I rejection of Victorian social mores.
Throughout this period Hale was plagued by a series of physical ailments and bouts of anxiety severe enough to result in 1938 and again in 1943 in what was called a "nervous breakdown." Always intensely self-critical, Hale worried that she had squandered a promising career and sold- out artistically by writing to make money. She was fortunate in 1943 to find a psychoanalyst, Beatrice Hinkle, who helped her begin to solve what Hale called "this problem of who to be."
Always extremely hard-working, Hale published a collection of stories, the first of two much-loved volumes of "autobiographical fiction," A New England Girlhood (1958), and three novels in the 1950s. Hale singled out a favorite among these, Heaven and Hardpan Farm (1957). A humorous and humane novel about a group of "neurotic" women and their Jungian doctor at a small country sanitarium, Hale felt it was her most successful effort at writing about the experience of psychoanalysis.
In 1958, the University of Illinois awarded Hale a Benjamin Franklin Magazine citation for excellence in short story writing.
In 1961 Hale sold more stories (12) to the New Yorker than any other writer in the magazine's history. Also, in that year, she put together The Realities of Fiction, a volume of lectures on writing primarily given at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, 1959-60. Another novel, a collection of stories, and an anthology of writings by New England authors followed in the 1960s. In 1968, Hale received the Henry H. Bellamann Foundation Award for her significant contribution to the arts. One of Hale's best-loved books, The Life in the Studio, was published in 1969. "My mother died and I felt more than I could stand without expressing it," Hale told a newspaper reporter in 1969. Advertised as "an affectionate recollection of some singular parents," The Life in the Studio is as much about coming to terms with their memory and their loss. Hale blurred the boundaries of fiction and fact to discover for herself "the meaning of the past," but also "to awaken an echo in other lives; to arouse a consciousness where perhaps formerly there was none."
It is clear that Hale shared her parents' artistic philosophy as described in The Life in the Studio. The artist's role is to create a subtle marriage of objectivity and subjectivity, to use "the interplay of the painter's subjective view with the way the light actually falls upon the object" to "render" its essence and its meaning. In Mary Cassatt (1975), a biography of the American artist commissioned by Doubleday and Co. after the success of The Life in the Studio, Hale was clearly aiming for "the special marriage of subject and object." Written with an authority quite different from that conferred by scholarly credentials, Hale combined personal knowledge of Mary Cassatt's social and artistic milieu with the style developed in her "autobiographical fiction" to produce a biography that seems, in many ways, ahead of its time.
Hale next turned her attention to stories for children, publishing The Night of the Hurricane in 1978 and, in the mid 1980s, writing a collection of stories for young dyslexic readers. She died in Charlottesville, Virginia on September 24, 1988.
By JAMES BARRON
Published: September 26, 1988
Nancy Hale, a novelist and short-story writer, died Saturday at the Martha Jefferson Hospital in Charlottesville, Va., after suffering a stroke. She was 80 years old and lived in Charlottesville.
Flickers of prim Boston, social New York and proper Virginia danced through her works, the earlier ones focusing on the follies and foibles of well-bred women.
''I specialize in women,'' Miss Hale said in an interview in 1942, ''because they are so mysterious to me. I feel that I know men quite thoroughly, that I know how, in a given situation, a man is apt to react. But women puzzle me.''
Nancy Hale was born in Boston on May 6, 1908, the daughter of Philip L. Hale and Lilian Westcott, both painters. As a toddler she played in their studios, often setting up a palette and trying to copy whatever they were working on.
She graduated from the Winsor School in Boston in 1926, studied at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and worked briefly as a painter.
Bored with Boston, she moved to New York in 1928. After working as an assistant editor at Vogue (''I pinch-hit as a model''), she joined The New York Times as a reporter. In 1929 she began to contribute ''casuals'' - humorous sketches - and stories to The New Yorker.
She became one of the New Yorkers best-known writers, and once boasted that she sold the magazine more stories in a single year than any other writer. First Novel About the Young
Miss Hale's first novel, ''The Young Die Good,'' was published in 1932. It was based on her idea that young New Yorkers wanted something more than they were getting in life but had neither ''the courage nor strength to go out and get it.'' Her second novel, ''Never Any More,'' appeared in 1934, followed in 1936 by a collection of short stories, ''The Earliest Dreams.''
Among her other works were ''New England Discovery'' (1963), ''Life in the Studio'' (1969), ''Secrets'' (1971), ''Mary Cassatt'' (1975) and ''The Night of the Hurricane'' (1978).
She is survived by her husband, Fredson T. Bowers, of Charlottesville, a former chairman of the English department of the University of Virginia; two sons by previous marriages, William Wertenbaker, of New Haven, Conn., and Mark Hardin; five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.∼Nancy Hale was born Anna Westcott Hale on May 6, 1908, in Boston, Massachusetts, the only child of painters Philip Leslie Hale and Lilian Clark Westcott. Descended from a distinguished New England family, Nancy Hale's grandfather was the orator, author, and Unitarian clergyman Edward Everett Hale, and two of her great-aunts were the writers Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lucretia Peabody Hale. Philip L. Hale achieved some success as a neo-impressionist painter of the Boston School, but probably had a greater influence as an instructor at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School and as an art critic for Boston newspapers. Lilian W. Hale, the more talented artist of the pair, was well known for her portraits and landscapes in oil, pastel, and charcoal.
Nancy Hale began writing at an early age, producing a family newspaper, the Society Cat, at age eight, and publishing her first story, "The Key Glorious," in the Boston Herald, at age eleven. She also devoted considerable energy to the study of art under her parents' tutelage and, after she was graduated from the Winsor School in 1926, at the Boston Museum School (1926-28).
In 1928, she married aspiring writer Taylor Scott Hardin and moved with him to New York City where she was hired to work in the art department at Vogue. She was, however, almost immediately put to work as an assistant editor and writer instead. Under the pen name Anne Leslie, she wrote "chatty news" items, fashion news, and editorials.
Hale's true ambition was to write fiction. Jobs at Vogue and later Vantiy Fair provided financial support while she built her reputation as a fiction writer. While working full time she was also writing pieces on commission for a variety of magazines as well as free-lance fiction. Her first son, Mark Hardin, was born in 1930.
Hale's first novel, The Young Die Good (1932), was a chronicle of the shallow lives of the post-flapper "smart set" in New York. In 1933, one of her stories,"To the Invader," won the O. Henry Memorial Award Prize. A second novel, Never Any More, was published in 1934.
Hale was hired by the New York Times as its first woman straight news reporter in the spring of 1934, a job which she left after an exhausting six months. By then, she and her husband had been living apart for some time. They were divorced late in 1934.
In October of 1935, Hale entered into a troubled second marriage with author and journalist Charles Christian Wertenbaker. They settled in Charlottesville, VA, in 1936. Her next book, The Earliest Dreams (1936), was a selection made from the already substantial body of short stories published by Hale in such magazines as the New Yorker, Harper's, Redbook, and Ladies Home Journal. Writing was now her primary means of financial support.
Hale's second son, William Wertenbaker, was born in the spring of 1938. After several separations, she was divorced from Charles Wertenbaker in 1941. In 1942, Hale married Fredson Thayer Bowers an English professor on the faculty of the University of Virginia.
Her third and best known novel, The Prodigal Women, was published later that year. It is an immense book (over 700 pages) which, in the words of writer Anne Hobson Freeman, "dramatized, with unflinching candor, the psychological cost of being a woman at that time." It is the story of three women, each in her own way taking advantage of the freedoms offered by the post World War I rejection of Victorian social mores.
Throughout this period Hale was plagued by a series of physical ailments and bouts of anxiety severe enough to result in 1938 and again in 1943 in what was called a "nervous breakdown." Always intensely self-critical, Hale worried that she had squandered a promising career and sold- out artistically by writing to make money. She was fortunate in 1943 to find a psychoanalyst, Beatrice Hinkle, who helped her begin to solve what Hale called "this problem of who to be."
Always extremely hard-working, Hale published a collection of stories, the first of two much-loved volumes of "autobiographical fiction," A New England Girlhood (1958), and three novels in the 1950s. Hale singled out a favorite among these, Heaven and Hardpan Farm (1957). A humorous and humane novel about a group of "neurotic" women and their Jungian doctor at a small country sanitarium, Hale felt it was her most successful effort at writing about the experience of psychoanalysis.
In 1958, the University of Illinois awarded Hale a Benjamin Franklin Magazine citation for excellence in short story writing.
In 1961 Hale sold more stories (12) to the New Yorker than any other writer in the magazine's history. Also, in that year, she put together The Realities of Fiction, a volume of lectures on writing primarily given at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, 1959-60. Another novel, a collection of stories, and an anthology of writings by New England authors followed in the 1960s. In 1968, Hale received the Henry H. Bellamann Foundation Award for her significant contribution to the arts. One of Hale's best-loved books, The Life in the Studio, was published in 1969. "My mother died and I felt more than I could stand without expressing it," Hale told a newspaper reporter in 1969. Advertised as "an affectionate recollection of some singular parents," The Life in the Studio is as much about coming to terms with their memory and their loss. Hale blurred the boundaries of fiction and fact to discover for herself "the meaning of the past," but also "to awaken an echo in other lives; to arouse a consciousness where perhaps formerly there was none."
It is clear that Hale shared her parents' artistic philosophy as described in The Life in the Studio. The artist's role is to create a subtle marriage of objectivity and subjectivity, to use "the interplay of the painter's subjective view with the way the light actually falls upon the object" to "render" its essence and its meaning. In Mary Cassatt (1975), a biography of the American artist commissioned by Doubleday and Co. after the success of The Life in the Studio, Hale was clearly aiming for "the special marriage of subject and object." Written with an authority quite different from that conferred by scholarly credentials, Hale combined personal knowledge of Mary Cassatt's social and artistic milieu with the style developed in her "autobiographical fiction" to produce a biography that seems, in many ways, ahead of its time.
Hale next turned her attention to stories for children, publishing The Night of the Hurricane in 1978 and, in the mid 1980s, writing a collection of stories for young dyslexic readers. She died in Charlottesville, Virginia on September 24, 1988.
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