Bertha Harris (December 17, 1937 – May 22, 2005) was an American novelist. She is highly regarded by critics and admirers, but her novels are less familiar to the broader public.
In 1959, Harris graduated from the Women's College of University of North Carolina. Upon graduation, she moved to New York City at age twenty-two, spending her summers in Westport, Massachusetts.[4] She stated that she wanted to live in New York "to find lesbians",[5] but, ended up in a brief heterosexual marriage and had a daughter, Jennifer Harris Wyland. To support herself and her daughter, she worked as an editor and proofreader for a time, before returning to North Carolina to receive her M.F.A.[5]
She died at age 67, on May 22, 2005, in New York City.[4]
Career
Harris began her career as she was completing her M.F.A. in North Carolina. As part of her degree requirements, she wrote what would end up being her first novel, Catching Saradove, published in 1969. The novel was semi-autobiographical and is probably her novel that comes closest to conventional fiction.[5]
Harris has said that she is obsessed by two things: music (particularly opera) and the South. These two obsessions define her second novel, Confessions of Cherubino, published in 1972. However, she is most well known for her stylistically bold third novel, Lover, published in 1976. Lover was brought out by the Vermont-based independent publisher Daughters, Inc., a small publisher of women's fiction. She says she wrote it "straight from the libido, while I was madly in love, and liberated by the lesbian cultural movement of the mid-1970s."[5]
In all three of Harris' novels, she engages the aesthetics of late twentieth-century literature; they may be considered examples of literary postmodernism. Her novels are stylistically akin to the work of modernist authors as Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Djuna Barnes (whom Harris greatly admired). She once proclaimed that Djuna Barnes's work was "practically the only available expression of lesbian culture we have in the modern western world" since Sappho. Much of Harris's work, most notably Lover, is written with the women's movement of the 1970s as its primary inspiration and its audience. Indeed, Lover might be viewed as a literary mother of queer theory; her novel resonates almost as strongly with third-wave feminism as it does with the second-wave feminism of its origins.
Harris co-authored The Joy of Lesbian Sex in 1977 with Emily L. Sisley. Lover was reissued in 1993 by the New York University Press with a preface by Karla Jay and a new introduction by the author, mainly recounting her involvement with Daughters Press and its owners, June Arnold and Parke Bowman.
At the time of her death she was completing her fourth novel, a comedy, Mi Contra Fa.
The Bertha Harris Women's Center at the College of Staten Island is named after Harris.[9]
