Book review - Maud Martha
It’s remarkable that Gwendolyn Brooks’s only novel, Maud Martha (1953), has not been published in Britain until now. Brooks was an acclaimed poet and the first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1950 for Annie Allen . In her introduction to this welcome, if overdue, Faber edition, Margo Jefferson suggests Brooks’s debut “sank beneath the weighty canonical force of first novels by two of Brooks’s male Black peers”. She’s referring to Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. Maud Martha is a quieter, more reflective work than Invisible Man and Go Tell it to the Mountain , but nevertheless, it’s a perceptive, eloquent study of life for an ordinary, working-class black woman living in Chicago during the 1930s and 40s. Maud Martha is presented as a series of vignettes written in third-person omniscient narration. Brooks’s poetic sensibility is evident from the outset and her narrator’s warm, idiosyncratic voice is one of the book’s many charms. She opens with Maud Martha’s childhoo