A Little Lower than the Angels
A Little Lower than the Angels
Virginia Sorensen
with a foreword by Mary Lythgoe Bradford
When I think of Virginia Sorensen (1912-1991) and her first novel, A Little Lower than the Angels, I picture a young faculty wife and mother gathering up her typewriter and paper and trekking across campus to a small tower office where she could write eight hours a day. A fulfillment of her writer’s dream, it was at the same time an act of self-defense. Her mother-in-law had lived with her and her husband Frederick (Fred) since their wedding six years before. Emma Baker Sorensen not only took charge of the household, but she also contributed the pioneer history of her grandmother, Mercy French Baker. Mother Sorensen’s degree in domestic science from Columbia made her “right in everything, and I could tell that she would continue to be right into the future,” Virginia said many years later. Fred, with whom Virginia was deeply in love, also showed signs of being right as she began her peripatetic life with this “stormy petrol” of a husband. His problems with his mother, his drinking, his unrealized ambitions would mean a change of job every two or three years for the next twenty years. Virginia, who had considered herself a writer since childhood, decided to turn the situation to her advantage.
ebook: $9.99
Virginia Sorensen was born in 1912 in Provo, Utah. Subsequently christened Utah's First Lady of Letters, Sorensen wrote eight novels including A Little Lower than the Angels, On This Star, The Evening and the Morning, Many Heavens, Kingdom Come, and Where Nothing Is Long Ago: Memories of a Mormon Childhood. She was awarded two Guggenheim fellowships that took her to Mexico and to Denmark. She also won an O. Henry award, the 1956 National Child Study Association Award for Plain Girl, and the Newbery Medal in 1957 for another children's book titled Miracles on Maple Hill. Yet she remained unappreciated at home until long after her fame faded elsewhere. She lived in Morocco with her second husband, British novelist Alec Waugh, from the 1950s until his death in 1981. She settled in Florida for her final decade and died in 1991.
Fiction
ISBN: 978-1-56085-434-0
