We are sad to note the passing of the author and educator Louise Plummer, on March 20, 2025, at the age of 82. To honor Louise, we are republishing to essays evaluating Plummer’s published works, John Bennion’s, “Austen’s Granddaughter: Louise Plummer Re(de)fines Romance” and Anne Billings’ “Louise Plummer: Local Grasshopper Makes Good”.
Louise taught in the Brigham Young University Department of English from 1985 until her retirement, where she was a beloved teacher. Her five young adult novels, all published by Delacorte, are gems:
The Romantic Obsessions and Humiliations of Annie Sehlmeier (1987)
My Name is Sus5an Smith, the 5 is Silent (1991, ALA Best Book, AML YA Fiction award)
The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman (1995, ALA Best Book, AML YA Fiction award)
A Dance for Three (2000, ALA Best Book, AML YA Fiction award, one of the AML 100 Works of Significant Mormon Literature)
Finding Daddy (2007, AML YA Fiction award finalist)
She also wrote the humorous personal essay collection Thoughts of a Grasshopper (Deseret Book, 1992), and co-wrote You Are Boring, But You Are Uniquely Boring: 25 Models for Writing Your Memoir (2017, with Ann Cannon).
Austen’s Granddaughter: Louise Plummer Re(de)fines Romance
by John Bennion (published in the AML Annual, 2001)
As my two daughters became teenagers and their relationships with boys became more complicated, they struggled to read the confusing cultural signs of romance. They had to make decisions: Would they foster several relaxed relationships or focus on one boy? How physical would their relationships be? How emotionally consuming? As we struggled through those years together (my wife says that parents experience puberty again with their children), I have been grateful for the novels of Louise Plummer. Her voice is like that of a friendly aunt who knows plenty of stories about love. She is neither as dogmatic as parents nor as mercurial as peers. Reading her modern-day novels of manners helped my daughters walk through the forest of adolescence.
Plummer’s intelligent, ironic voice reminds me of Jane Austen. Both write about young women whose happiness is at first threatened by faulty judgment and then secured by solid decisions. Both authors examine the differences between love, which is enduring, and infatuation, which is transient. In addition to modeling the growth of female characters who gradually discover a reliable manner of loving, both writers contrast the qualities of young men who are worthy or unworthy of love. Both authors also compare the ways stories of love are told, whether in the manner of romances (where excitement depends on insecurity and self-deceit) or of novels (where fidelity to realistic human behavior is the standard).
Recently, after years of reading Plummer’s novels, my younger daughter discovered Jane Austen. When I asked her what she likes about Austen she said, “Because she’s very witty. Sarcastic. What she says is clear. And because you know there’s going to be a happy ending.” At sixteen she’s learning to read Austen’s irony. I believe she was prepared for that leap by reading contemporary authors like Plummer, whose cultural signs are more accessible than Austen’s. Young people need contemporary authors who are careful to build bridges of understanding back to the language, techniques, and deepest cultural values of the classics.
What specifically are those values? Austen allows for Persuasion based on rational social judgment rather than on bias. She favors choices about love and marriage which involve objective social standards rather than either overweening Pride or distorting Prejudice. Her ideal basis of judgment is a balance of Sense and Sensibility. Her work is in reaction to the excesses found in the Gothic romance; but instead of merely being anti-romantic, she endeavors to find a way to incorporate sentiment into her formula for successful love and marriage.
An example of the rational ideal is found in Pride and Prejudice, where Elizabeth Bennet tries to change her sister’s sympathetic impression of an engagement. “You shall not, for the sake of one individual, change the meaning of principle and integrity, nor endeavour to persuade yourself or me, that selfishness is prudence, and insensibility of danger, security for happiness” (94). In that book and in Austen’s other novels, this strictly rational ideal is softened by a kinder heart, in this case, that of Jane Bennet, who sees good in everyone.
In like manner, Louise Plummer shows young women the difference between romantic obsessions, infatuations, and a more self-actualized kind of love. She unmasks the manipulation and deceit found in modern romance novels, movies, and TV shows. She, like Austen, believes that unbridled romantic emotion sets up young men and women for trouble. Her books, like Austen’s, are novels of manners, because readers judge good behavior through seeing the mistakes of the characters, who generally come to a stable vision by the end of the story. This description might imply that I think that the main virtue in Plummer’s work is the didactic content, but like Austen, her narratives are never pushy, using irony and a balanced narrative to give readers a broader range of options than they had before sitting down with the book.
Because love has to do with verbal as well as physical commerce, both authors explore the ways we talk and write about love. Some brief examples will show how Austen and Plummer criticize the excessive language and exaggerated manners of romance novels. In Northanger Abbey Austen makes clear that hyperbole or deceit in matters of love can produce terrible social damage. A naive but pure-hearted heroine, Catherine Moreland, goes to Bath as traveling companion to a Mrs. Allen. In Bath she meets Isabella and John Thorpe, who are expert dissemblers, making play with manipulating the truth. She falls in love with Henry Tilney, who is much more forthright. Through the progress of the novel, Austen’s ironic voice gives readers the insight to judge between the two approaches to love and life.
Austen embeds in her novel references to Gothic romances which are (to use Henry James’s metaphor) like a free-floating balloon, untethered from reality. The following conversation occurs early in the book between the heroine and her friend, Isabella:
“Have you gone on with Udolpho?” [Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, 1794]
“Yes, I have been reading it ever since I woke; and I am got to the black veil.”
“Are you, indeed? How delightful! Oh! I would not tell you what is behind the black veil for the world! are not you wild to know?”
“Oh! yes, quite; what can it be?—But do not tell me—I would not be told upon any account. I know it must be a skeleton, I am sure it is Laurentina’s skeleton. Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it. I assure you if it had not been to meet you, I would not have come away from it for all the world.”
“Dear creature! how much I am obliged to you; and when you have finished Udolpho, we will read the Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you. . . . Castle of Wolfenback, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time.”
“Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?” (60-61)
Soon readers see that, in Isabella’s case, life imitates fiction. She speaks after the manner of what she reads—full of passion, improbability, and exaggeration. Through the course of the novel, Catherine discovers that Isabella is unreliable and that her liberties with truth harm herself and others.
In Plummer’s The Romantic Obsessions and Humiliations of Annie Sehlmeier, the protagonist and her new friend Maggie use the same kind of language to discuss a contemporary romance:
“Have you read this?” She pulled a tattered paperback book from one of the lower shelves: The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough.
I shook my head.
“Oh, you must read it. It’s so wonderful. It’s also a television movie with Richard Chamberlain—the heroine’s name is Meggie and it’s all about forbidden love.” Her eyes widened. Forbidden love was better than ordinary love. “I’ve got it on video and have seen it a million times. The book’s better though.” She forced it into my hands. (34-35)
Readers of both Plummer and Austen begin to question whether forbidden love, with its unstable emotional truth, isbetter than ordinary love. They are given the mental tools with which to criticize novels and movies about love.
Plummer mocks the conventions and language of romance novels by having her protagonist Kate write one. The story begins when Richard, whom Kate has long admired, comes home from college for Christmas vacation. Kate and her best friend Ashley become rivals for his love. Kate thinks of love as something that grows out of an enduring friendship; for Ashley, who has steeped herself in romance novels, love is immediate—sexual attraction and little else. It becomes clear that Kate is writing the novel to work out her ideas about love. In the prologue she self-consciously imitates a romance:
This is one of those romance novels. You know, that disgusting kind with kisses that last three paragraphs and make you want to put your finger down your throat to induce projectile vomiting. It is one of those books where the hero has a masculine-sounding name that ends in an unvoiced velar plosive, like CHUCK (although that is not my hero’s name), and he has sinewy muscles and makes guttural groanings whenever his beloved is near. In romance novels, the heroine has a feminine-sounding name made up of liquid consonants, like FLEUR, and has full, sensuous lips—yearning lips. I think the word “yearning” will appear at least a thousand times in this book. The heroine also has long silky legs and is a virgin. (1)
Kate knows about romances because Ashley has always shared them with her. Like Isabella, Ashley not only reads but lives romances, believing that love involves manipulation and deceit more than it does honesty.
The manners and language of the foils in both Austen’s novel and Plummer’s are remarkably similar; Isabella and Ashley could be sisters. Isabella says to Catherine,
“Oh! they [men] give themselves such airs. They are the most conceited creatures in the world and think themselves of so much importance!—By the bye, though I have thought of it a hundred times, I have always forgot to ask you what is your favourite complexion in a man. Do you like them best dark or fair? (63)
Move her forward two centuries and she could be Ashley:
“None of that counts,” Ashley said, finally turning away from the mirror to look at me.
“What counts?”
Her tongue flickered between her teeth. “Thighs,” she said slowly. “Boys’ thighs.”
That was it? Thighs? Thighs? What about warmth and kindness and humor? What about intelligence and stability? (47)
Unlike these two characters, the authors admire language which is “plain, unaffected, gentleman-like English” (Emma 432). In Emma Austen has Knightley say, “If you were as much guided by nature in your estimate of men and women, and as little under the power of fancy and whim in your dealings with them, as you are where these children are concerned, we might always think alike” (121). In like manner, Plummer has her protagonist admire frank language and realistic portrayal of human relations:
Reality is not appropriate to the [romance] genre. I just read a couple or Harlequins, and I’ve got to edit out some of the reality in this novel as it is. I’ll have to cut Midgely and the cancer (he died three weeks ago). I won’t say anything about Richard receiving an early acceptance into the University of Minnesota’s American Studies Program with a full fellowship, while I have applied to Columbia and do not expect to be turned down. Even if Richard and I marry down the line and have 2.5 children—a real possibility—I need to find out first who Kate Bjorkman is. (181)
The ironic reference to the act of writing helps Plummer teach readers about the differences between romances and novels. Her novel is presented as a workshop on how to write about love. Plummer even includes “Revision Notes,” italicized sections in which she meditates on the difficulty of saying the truth, especially when her tools are the language and conventions of the romance novel.
The similarities I’ve outlined between Northanger Abbey and The Romantic Obsessions and Humiliations of Annie Sehlmeier hold true for the rest of the books by both authors. A close comparison of Emma and The Romantic Obsessions and Humiliations of Annie Sehlmeier can show that both authors follow a fairly consistent pattern of moving from false judgment to true judgment as the protagonists come of emotional age.
In Austen’s novel Emma sets herself up as a judge in matters of love. As a matchmaker, she will manage the exciting economics of the heart. Through the bulk of the novel, Emma is ignorant of her true love for John Knightley, based on a long friendship. For part of the book she believes she loves Frank Churchill, a gentleman who has been adopted by a family of high social status. Plummer’s protagonist is newly immigrated from Holland. She has feelings for two boys, Jack Wakefield, who is a reliable friend and who loves her, and Tom Woolley, who plays at emotion, feigning passion for every girl he knows. Both authors have their characters flirt with what appears to be love, but which is really surface infatuation. Austen’s protagonist meditates on her own lack of reaction when she is separated from the supposed object of her affection, Frank Churchill:
Emma continued to entertain no doubt of her being in love. Her ideas only varied as to the how much. At first, she thought it was a good deal; and afterwards, but little. She had great pleasure in hearing Frank Churchill talked of . . . ; she was very often thinking of him, and quite impatient for a letter, that she might know how he was, how were his spirits, how was his aunt, and what was the chance of his coming to Randalls again this spring. But, on the other hand, she could not admit herself to be unhappy, nor, after the first morning, to be less disposed for employment than usual; she was still busy and cheerful, and pleasing as he was, she could yet imagine him to have faults; and farther, though thinking of him so much, and, as she sat drawing or working, forming a thousand amusing schemes for the progress and close of their attachment, fancying interesting dialogues and inventing elegant letters; the conclusion of every imaginary declaration on his side was that she refused him. Their affection was always to subside into friendship. Every thing tender and charming was to mark their parting; but still they were to part. When she became sensible of this, it struck her that she could not be very much in love; for in spite of her previous and fixed determination never to quit her father, never to marry, a strong attachment certainly must produce more of a struggle than she could foresee in her own feelings. (268)
Emma believes she is in love, but she is wise enough to doubt how deep and enduring is her affection. Plummer’s Annie Sehlmeier is more self-deluding about her own motives. Her younger sister Henny has hired her to drive her to the home of a handsome boy, where they spy on him and repeatedly toilet paper his car. Annie muses:
If I did it, if I went with her [Henny], I would be like her. I would be like a person who kissed her high school president in back of the piano at assembly.
No, I wasn’t anything like that. I really loved Woolley. It made me sick, I loved him so much. Real love. It was different with Henny. She had the hots. That was different from love. I was in love. (111)
While the cultures on which the two novels are based are quite different, both authors use these scenes to enable a reader to question the depth of the attraction. In a later scene Annie continues her self-delusion:
I looked up. Woolley was removing his shirt. I let out an involuntary gasp. I had seen the black hair on his chest and, oh awesome, I had seen his navel. My insides shuffled about. I felt dizzy. He was so beautiful.
Henny fanned herself with an empty envelope. “He’s so beautiful,” she swooned.
“Don’t be an idiot,” I snapped. “Haven’t you ever seen a boy’s chest before?”
“Wake up, Annie, that is not a boy’s chest.”
“This is so stupid,” I said, starting up the car. I didn’t turn the lights on. “I don’t know why I do this.”
“For the money, sister dear. For the money.” She placed the five dollars on the dashboard.
I will go to Hell, I thought. I felt weak all over. (118)
Although Annie continues to think that her attraction to Woolley is deeper than Henny’s, she does feel guilty for enabling Henny’s delusion. She mocks Henny’s infatuation, at the same time keeping her own passion secret. While the focus on flesh is very different from anything in Austen’s works, the use of irony is similar.
The young women in both novels have friends with cooler heads—the men who love them enough to be honest. This contrast enables Plummer and Austen not only to model stable male characters, but also to explore how a change in vision is required to admire realistic qualities more than romantic heroism. The primary characteristic of the ideal male in both novels is their frank honesty. Austen writes:
Mr Knightley, in fact, was one of the few people who could see faults in Emma Woodhouse, and the only one who ever told her of them: and though this was not particularly agreeable to Emma herself, she knew it would be so much less so to her father, that she would not have him really suspect such a circumstance as her not being thought perfect by every body.
“Emma knows I never flatter her,” said Mr Knightley. . . . (42)
In similar manner, Plummer gives Annie’s friend Jack, the quality of saying what he thinks without contrivance:
After the dance Jack and I stood under the yellow light of the porch and held each other, our faces touching.
“I feel like I’m hugging a bear.” Jack laughed. His mouth was close to my ear, his face was warm and smelled of spice.
“You smell wonderful,” I couldn’t help saying.
“You are wonderful. I like you better than . . .”
“Life itself,” I finished for him.
“No that’s no good.” He laughed. “Sounds like Woolley, the golden throat of insincerity.”
I drew my head back so I could see his face. “You think that?” I asked. “But he’s your friend.”
“But he wouldn’t be if he talked to me the way he talks to girls. I’d want to throw up. Like the way he’s always telling you that you look like Meryl Streep. It’s so insulting.”
“But Meryl Streep is lovely,” I argued. “It’s flattering to be compared with her.”
“Yes, but you’re you. You’re not one of those made-up movie star fantasies. You’re real. You’re better. I think you’re prettier, for that matter.” (124)
Through these scenes, both authors show how indulging in fantasy causes problems in relationships. One is that each protagonist misinterprets the actions and motivations of others. Emma believes that Frank Churchill is pining for her:
He was silent. She believed he was looking at her; probably reflecting on what she had said, and trying to understand the manner. She heard him sigh. It was natural for him to feel that he had cause to sigh. He could not believe her to be encouraging him. A few awkward moments passed, and he sat down again. . . . He stopt again, rose again, and seemed quite embarrassed.—He was more in love with her than Emma had supposed; and who can say how it might have ended, if his father had not made his appearance? (265)
He is actually in love with Jane Fairfax, a woman Emma dislikes. She mistakes his actions because she has constructed a false story to explain his behavior. Elsewhere Austen suggests that Emma is an “imaginist,” leaping quickly to exotic interpretations of simple matters.
Although Plummer’s Annie knows that Woolley is just flirting with her, she believes that her own emotions are deeper than his. She allows herself to be affected by his advances because she has misinterpreted her own emotions, writing a false script for herself similar to the one Emma crafted. Plummer writes:
He sat down next to me, his coat thrown over the back of the chair. He wore a new sweater, of dark green, with two red reindeer facing each other on the front. His face was tanned from skiiing over the holidays. He looked absolutely stunning, and I felt my Christmas-day resolve fading. The pure physical beauty of him made me weak and dizzy.
“How are you doing?” He leaned into me and smiled.
I didn’t move away. I smiled back without answering.
He opened a book and pretended to read the same way I pretended to read. His body seemed to give off electrical charges. My insides trembled like Oma’s chocolate pudding. I tried following the text with my pencil, marking lightly each sentence as I read it. For a half hour, I worked in that tremulous state.
Then Woolley reached over and wrote lightly in my notebook, “I love Annie Sehlmeier.” He watched my face while I read it. I swallowed. I did not believe it, but I liked seeing it written in his hand. My face burned. (130)
Through indulging in fantasy about love, both women find that they make embarrassing and potentially damaging mistakes of judgment.
In the segment of the novel which begins before the following exchange, Emma and Harriet have discussed the latter’s attachment to a man above her station. The women have discovered that they misunderstood each other. When Harriet talked about feeling warmth toward a man who had rescued her, she meant— not Frank Churchill, who came to her aid when she was threatened by gypsies—but Emma’s own good friend, George Knightley, who had danced with Harriet when no one else would. Emma’s reaction is stark:
“Good God!” cried Emma, “this has been a most unfortunate—most deplorable mistake!—What is to be done?” . . .
“I do not wonder, Miss Woodhouse,” [Harriet] resumed, “that you should feel a great difference between the two, as to me or as to anybody. You must think one five hundred million times more above me than the other. But I hope, Miss Woodhouse, that supposing—that if—strange as it may appear—. But you know they were your own words, that more wonderful things had happened, matches of greater disparity had taken place than between Mr Frank Churchill and me; and, therefore, it seems as if such a thing even as this, may have occurred before—and if I should be so fortunate, beyond expression, as to—if Mr Knightley should really—if he does not mind the disparity, I hope, dear Miss Woodhouse you will not set yourself against it, and try to put difficulties in the way. But you are too good for that, I am sure.” . . .
“Have you any idea of Mr. Knightley’s returning your affection?” (397)
Emma’s question shows that she sees the damage her romantic speculations have done to Harriet, who loves a man so far above her that he will certainly reject her.
In like manner, Annie’s excesses harm herself and the friend who really loves her, Jack Wakefield. In the middle of the night she sneaks to Woolley’s house and toilet-papers his car. She doesn’t know that all her friends are hiding on the roof, watching her dance:
“Is that you, Apollo?” [her nickname for Woolley] I whispered rashly and grinned at the car. “Come to your maiden queen,” I said to the car, extended my arm to it. “Come closer.”
I held both arms above my head, swaying them as gracefully as I could in my down jacket, tr[ying] to make them look like Ms. Needham’s modern dance class. I swayed, bent my body forward, and planted a kiss smack on the hood of the car. Even in the moonlight, I could see the pink imprint clearly. “My love,” I said and pressed my lips again on the cool metal. . . . “My love,” I said again and planted one kiss, two, three more kisses on the hood of Woolley’s car. More lipstick and more kisses—I wanted to cover Woolley’s face, those lips, those dimples, those eyes with kisses. I continued kissing and calling the car “Woolley dear” and “Woolley darling.” I let my lips linger on the white painted surface.
That’s when I heard a clear voice in the night: “Stop it. Please stop it!”
That was when a blinding light beamed directly into my eyes from the roof of the garage. (139-40)
Her friend Jack has been watching her silly dance, and it nearly costs her his friendship. Like Emma, Annie is a good person who has been misled by her own emotions.
Toward the ends of their novels, both authors allow their heroines to have epiphanies during which they meditate on their folly. Emma sees the damage she has done to Harriet:
Her own conduct, as well as her own heart, was before her in the same few minutes. She saw it all with a clearness which had never blessed her before. How improperly had she been acting by Harriet! How inconsiderate, how indelicate, how irrational, how unfeeling had been her conduct! What blindness, what madness, had led her on! It struck her with dreadful force, and she was ready to give it every bad name in the world. (398)
In parallel fashion, Annie’s imagination plays over and over her foolish performance with Woolley’s car:
I closed my eyes and saw the heads of my friends staring down at me from Woolley’s garage. Maggie’s face, crying. Jack’s face. Jack. Had I put that pain there? Was I capable of that? I didn’t mean to. It was just my secret. It was just silly fun. I saw Woolley’s face. He hardly seemed worth the humiliation now. My face was wet again. Really very wet. I rubbed it. I couldn’t stop this silent crying. I must be getting sick I thought. I must be ill. (142)
Instead of allowing their characters to be destroyed by these minor crimes of romance, each author allows her protagonist to recover. After self-delusion turns into self-realization, the characters evaluate what happened. In the following passage, Knightley talks about Frank Churchill, but Emma applies the advice to her own manipulative matchmaking:
“Very bad—though it might have been worse.—Playing a most dangerous game. Too much indebted to the event for his acquittal. . . . —Always deceived in fact by his own wishes, and regardless of little besides his own convenience.—Fancying you to have fathomed his secret. Natural enough!—his own mind full of intrigue, that he should suspect it in others.—Mystery; Finesse—how they pervert the understanding! My Emma, does not every thing serve to prove more and more the beauty of truth and sincerity in all our dealings with each other?”
Emma agreed to it, . . . with a blush of sensibility on Harriet’s account. . . (430)
She realizes that luck and Mr. Knightly’s good sense saved her from doing serious damage to her unformed friend, Harriet.
At the end of Plummer’s book Annie and her sister talk about love:
“Do you love Jack?” It was an earnest question. She leaned against the porch post and waited for my answer.
“I honestly don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t the vaguest notion of what love is. Do you love Roger?” I asked. They had been dating steadily since the Christmas Dance.
“I like to kiss him.” She laughed. “A lot.” She bit her lip. “I don’t think that’s necessarily love, though.”
“Well,” I said. “The imitation is pretty heady stuff, if you ask me.” I sighed. I felt as old as Oma. “And it doesn’t feel that bad either.” (170-71)
Plummer, like Austen, allows her protagonist to be burned a little, just enough that she respects passion, but not so much that she is repulsed by love. The characters of both authors learn to balance emotion and reason and to distinguish between the cultural signs of deep and shallow love.
Plummer’s two other novels, My Name is Sus5an Smith. The 5 Is Silent and A Dance for Three, also follow the career of young women who learn how to judge character through making mistakes. The protagonists of these two novels at first chose to love foolishly, relying on the loose fidelity to truth commonly found in romance novels.
In the former novel a budding artist, Susan Smith, believes that her family is parochial and doesn’t comprehend her artistic vision. Without real evidence, she believes that her Uncle Willy, whom she hasn’t seen since he abandoned her mother’s sister, understands her vision. She has admired him in imagination so much that her vision of him is distorted. “Willy grew in my mind, godlike, with magical powers to make me fly through the air, soar like a bird right over the peaks of the Rocky Mountains. I never stopped loving Willy” (10).
After graduating from high school she lives with her aunt in Boston. The story, like all of Plummer’s and Austen’s novels, shows her facing life decisions: Which values of the artistic community will she adopt, which traditional values of her family in Utah? Like Austen’s heroines she has an epiphany. After discovering that Willy lives in Boston, she seeks him out, and they begin dating, even though he is much older. He is as charming as ever, and now she is eighteen, apparently ready to feel grown-up passion for him. When he violates her trust, using a key she has loaned him to rob her and her aunt of their possessions, she feels wretched and thinks:
Willy, how you burn behind my eyes. How you smart. Your kisses have turned to cold sores and boils. Your smile scrapes my insides. I am only eighteen. You should have known better. I am only eighteen. I was a humiliated eighteen. I was no match for you. I am so young. Only eighteen. (188).
Her vision of character, before her epiphany and after, is reflected by her artistic vision. In Boston she met a young male artist; she corresponds with him in Italy. After receiving some sketches, including some of Uncle Willy, her friend writes:
But . . . I feel less sure of your sketches of your Uncle Willy. Does he really look like that? Is he that square-jawed, and do his eyes gleam in quite the way your highlights suggest? Is his hair that thick, that curly? Do his muscles shine like the photographs in those muscle-mania magazines? I feel reluctant to ask these questions, because I saw your portraits, Susan, saw your clear vision of other people, and have faith in that vision, but I have to say, quite honestly, that the sketches of your uncle Willy seem distorted to me and therefore false. You make him look like He-Man. (189-90)
His letter sinks into her heart. She realizes that she allowed a soft romantic idea of Uncle Willy to distort what she trusts most—her sense of what is true artistically. In the end she adopts a more realistic view of the world, one connected to both the traditional values of her parents and the aesthetic principles of art.
A Dance for Three involves material Austen wouldn’t include in a novel: Hannah finds herself pregnant, and when she tells Milo, the father of her unborn child, he hits her and then lies about having sex with her so that his senior year of high school won’t be ruined. Despite these cultural differences, the book is similar to Austen’s work because Plummer focuses on the ways illusion causes personal damage. Early in Hannah’s relationship with him, Milo hid his violent and selfish nature behind a cultivated appearance and manners, the kind of surface sheen that from long before Austen’s day could be misread as good character. The section is in Hannah’s voice:
Milo looks preppy in a fresh blue oxford-cloth shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “Hey Ziebarth.” He smiles.
“Come in,” I say, and introduce him to Mama.
I can see by her face that she is impressed by Milo’s good looks, his height, his neat appearance, his polite manner. (31)
Hannah is impressed also and fooled by his feigned kindness and his interest in her mother’s bonsai trees. He plays her father’s guitar for her and her mother, and Hannah thinks,
It is the first time Mama and I have seen or heard this guitar since Daddy died. Milo plays notes, not just chords. When he lowers his head, I see Daddy—the same dark hair, the same pose—Daddy sitting on the edge of the sofa playing the guitar. Daddy. I feel my chin tremble and bite hard on my bottom lip. (33)
Like Austen’s heroines, she is unable to see him clearly at first. Eventually they have sex, but Hannah persists in her belief that he will be like her father—stable in his love for her, responsible in caring for her. However, when she tells Milo she is pregnant, he hits her and later that day turns to another girl, saying the same words to her that he said to Hannah, months before, when he was persuading her to yield to him.
With most of the other books I’ve discussed in this article, the protagonist has an epiphany concerning her mistake of judgment—a life-changing revelation of truth. However, Hannah is not strong enough emotionally to stand a revolutionary transformation of her world. She is so fragile emotionally that she has a psychotic break, during which she smashes many of her mother’s pots of bonsai and dances as if she were a tree. “I see and hear everything as I sway my branches and kick up my roots,” describes Hannah. “Perhaps I even see the policemen grab me from behind. . . . There is blood on my shirt. I want to wipe it off, but I can’t move either arm. I’m handcuffed.” (70)
Rather than blame Milo, she blames herself, repressing key facts about his behavior. During therapy she is forced again and again to visit in memory two crucial scenes: when Milo first had sex with her and when he hit her. Like Austen, Plummer uses fictional experience to enable readers to read character as they would read a text—the word-by-word revelation of interpreted truth. Plummer italicizes the remembered scene, showing how the meaning changes as Hannah remembers more about Milo and judges him more accurately. The book begins:
Milo wasn’t the first boy to kiss me but he was the first one to bite me. I said “Ouch,” and he said, “Let me lick it better.” It was when his mouth was on my shoulder and his hands tugged my camisole down that I knew I would go all the way with him. I would lose my virginity with Milo in the back of his Toyota 4Runner parked above the cemetery with the lights of Salt Lake City below. Not that we were looking. I kissed him fiercely. Too fiercely. He said, “Slow down; it’s better slow.” (1)
Much later, in a conversation with her therapist, Caitlin, Hannah remembers the scene fully, finally recognizing what Milo did to her and seeing him for what he is. Because trusting her illusion about Milo is part of her illness, remembering is part of her healing. The reader, watching the slow expansion of remembered detail, discovers the truth with Hannah. The last description of her seduction, given verbally to Caitlin, goes beyond that on the first page:
I pulled him down on me. “Now,” I said. “Now.”
It was when Milo was in me that the announcer on the television said, “The Mailman delivers,” and Milo arched his torso back and yelled. “The Mailman delivers. The Mailman delivers!” (150)
Caitlin asks careful questions to help Hannah see clearly what she had forgotten: that while they were having sex, Milo was watching a basketball game on a portable TV. Caitlin asks,
“—when he ‘yelled’ he was happy because?”
“Because Karl Malone scored!” Could she be more dense?
“And?”
I look away then and think of Milo’s urgent rocking, his chest arched away, his attention focused on the television, his one hand turning up the sound so that the roar of the crowd filled the car and above that his yelling, “The Mailman delivers.” When I look back at Caitlin Saunders her face is as sad as I feel. “I think Milo was happy because he and Karl Malone scored at the same time,” I say.
She nods again. “I think so too,” she says.
We sit and look at each other. For the first time, I see that her eyes brim with tears. (151)
Later in group therapy, Hannah is pushed even further to see how radically foolish her judgment of Milo was. Forced to publicly admit that he hit her more than once, she crumbles:
“Oh,” I say, my mouth twisted in a little oval. “Oh, oh, oh.” . . . He hit me once— here. Milo hit me here. I fell against the Dumpster and knocked my head. He said I was a whore. . . . I went to his house—oh, oh, oh. He was with Mimi—oh—I hid in the back of the 4Runner. They made out. Oh, oh, oh. I remember being a tree and swaying my branches. I remember being a wild thing and painting my face with blood. I made more blood with Daddy’s old razor blade. I’m bad. Oh, oh, oh.” (157)
At this point she has no illusions left—no hidden memory. She is unable to maintain the romantic fantasy that the person she loved is not magical or heroic, but a shallow, lustful, selfish nothing. Naive readers who ignored the implied cruelty in the first description of Milo’s bite, perhaps thinking his aggressive show of affection interesting or romantic, must now judge his acts differently. Hannah’s repression of memory is pathological, but it is similar to the treatment of truth found in many romantic fantasies, whether written, imagined, or acted out.
Hannah’s recognition of her mistake in judgment is not the hopeful epiphany of Austen’s novels or of Plummer’s earlier ones. But while there are no more illusions, Plummer does give hope that Hannah might love a better person in the future. That hope is given through Milo’s brother, Roman, who although he is blind in one eye, sees more clearly than anyone in his family Hannah’s worth as a human being. After Hannah accuses Milo, he and his parents focus on their main worry, that the smooth career of Milo’s life might be upset. Roman, however worries about her, what her life will be like. He also goes to the hospital to visit the baby. Much later, after Hannah has given the baby up for adoption and returned to high school, she and Roman talk. This section is written from his point of view:
Her face is in the window [of the car] now, her hands grasping the door. “You came to the hospital, didn’t you?” Her eyes, unflinching, look directly into mine. She won’t accept anything but the truth. . . .
I nod.
“Did you like him?” She has to press her lips together after she asks this question.
“I liked him a lot.” My voice is gravelly and I turn and see that my knuckles are white from clutching the steering wheel too tightly. “He smiled at me,” I say.
Little shudders of air escape her lips and she tries to smile. “He was beautiful, wasn’t he?”
“Yes,” I say. He was very beautiful.”
Her smile wobbles. “Thanks, Roman,” she whispers.
I nod.
She backs away from the window, but our eyes stay focused on each other for a few more seconds.
Then we look away. (217-18)
Roman’s act is a quiet one, simply giving her empathy. He shows with his white knuckles, the tone of his voice, and his willingness to look her in the eye that he knows she has passed through a difficult experience. Nothing more than that happens between them, no hint that they will ever grow closer.
Through this and a few other scenes given from Roman’s perspective, the reader learns to value him—the klutzy, skinny, one-eyed younger brother of a boy with the body (and the character) of a Greek god. If Hannah had loved Roman first, the reader is able to see, he would have treated her with kindness and respect. If he had fathered her child, he would have stayed with her. His empathy and Hannah’s emotional recovery constitute the hope of the novel.
Sophisticated, funny, and hip, Plummer’s novels are a bridge back to the values and techniques in Austen’s work. While the social codes, especially those pertaining to sexual passion, have changed dramatically in the two centuries between these writers, what is similar is their certainty that honest expression is better in matters of love than exaggeration and deceit. Behind their ironies of people who make mistakes are two certain and steady voices, telling young women that they can trust themselves, trust their heads.
WORKS CITED
Austen, Jane. Emma. 1816. London, Penguin Books, 1985.
—. Northanger Abbey. 1818. London, Penguin Books, 1972.
Plummer, Louise. A Dance for Three. New York: Delacorte Press, 2000.
—. My Name Is Sus5an Smith. The 5 Is Silent. New York: Delacorte Press, 1991.
—. The Romantic Obsessions and Humiliations of Annie Sehlmeier. New York: Dell Publishing, 1989.
—. The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman. New York: Delacorte Press, 1995.
A native of the Utah desert, John Bennion has published a collection of short fiction, Breeding Leah and other Stories (Signature Books, 1991), and the novels Falling Toward Heaven (Signature Books, 2000), An Unarmed Woman (Signature Books, 2019), Ezekiel’s Third Wife (Roundfire Books, 2019), and Spin (BCC Press, 2022). He has retired from teaching creative writing in the English Department at Brigham Young University. He is the recipient of the 2021 Association for Mormon Letters Lifetime Achievement Award.
He delivered this paper at the AML conjoint meeting of the Rocky Mountain Language Association, October 1999, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Louise Plummer: Local Grasshopper Makes Good
by Anne Billings (published in the AML Annual, 2002)
I really am going to talk about Louise Plummer today, but I’d like to begin by describing an experience of my own. When I entered BYU’s masters’ program in the English Department, I was interested in young adult literature. Those were the classes I wanted to take and the ones I most enjoyed. I knew I had the option of writing a young adult novel. This is what I really wanted to do. But even so, when it came time to actually declare an emphasis and decide what type of thesis to write, I hesitated. I worried that a young adult novel would not be important and literary enough. I worried that if I wrote a young adult novel, academic peers would not take me seriously.
I share this experience because I think my hesitation to get fully involved in young adult literature is probably not altogether unique. I believe that there may be many writers and scholars who could benefit from and contribute to young adult literature but are hampered by false and lingering stereotypes that literature for young adults is not “real” literature—that it is nothing but cotton-candy pulp novels and does not merit our time or serious attention. These misconceptions are unfortunate because the genre of young adult literature in fact offers a great variety of rich and rewarding reading and presents opportunity for aspiring writers.
Luckily, things are changing. The fact that a session of this conference is dedicated to the discussion of literature for young adults shows that among Mormon academics and scholars, literature for adolescents and children is receiving more attention. In part, young adult literature has steadily been gaining recognition and attention over the last several years. More recently, young adult literature has received increasingly more attention from the LDS literary community in particular, due to some fine writers and scholars in our midst. Some of them are the other speakers at this session, and they have made reference to some of the others. And among these scholars and writers of literature for young people, Louise Plummer is one of the finest.
Born in the Netherlands, Louise Plummer immigrated to the United States with her parents when she was five. She grew up in Salt Lake City and married Tom Plummer, a neighborhood boy who later became a professor of German. They lived in Massachusetts briefly, then Minnesota, and had four sons. Louise earned a master’s degree at the University of Minnesota. The book she wrote for her M.A. thesis—The Romantic Obsessions and Humiliations of Annie Sehlmeier (1986)—was the first book she published. After almost twenty years in Minnesota, Louise and her husband moved back to Utah, where they have lived for almost another twenty years. They now both teach at BYU. She teaches literature and writing classes and continues to write novels. From Louise Plummer, I have learned many important things about why and how to write young adult literature. These are a few of the things I have learned.
According to Plummer, young adult literature isn’t that different from adult literature. It can be serious, yet there are also many very funny young adult books. You can write about anything. One reason Plummer says she writes for teenagers is that she is still working out her own adolescence. When we are honest, most of us still have issues, emotions, and relationships from our adolescence that in some way, we are still working out. This is clear in her writing, for example, in her short essay, “Wallflower,” where we hear the poignant, humorous, yet real thoughts of a young girl standing against the wall waiting to be asked to dance during a stake dance.
Reading good writing like this, we not only remember how it is to be a teenager, we feel emotions that are relevant to us at any stage of life. A review of A Dance for Three, a novel about 15-year-old Hannah who becomes pregnant, said:
Hannah is a rich and rewarding presence; her aching losses nearly throb on the page. Plummer is not afraid to say that it is possible to overcome life’s demons, but it’s hard; that people can change, but not all do; that giving up a baby hurts. Sobering and definitely a page-turner. (“Plum mer” Kirkus)
Louise’s plot is far from the negative image of cotton-candy fluff we sometimes associate with the label “young adult literature.” Plummer demonstrates in her writing that books for and about teenagers can and should deal with the stuff of real life.
Detail is another of Plummer’s strengths. The details in her books often come from her own life—places: a neighborhood in Salt Lake or a park in Boston; people, such as a slightly unstable Dutch grandmother; and situations, such as a husband climbing in a bathtub fully clothed to settle an argument with his wife. As she describes in “First Things First,” an essay in Thoughts of a Grasshopper,
My job is to tell a compelling story and the only way to do it is through “the divine details,” as Nabokov puts it, so that in my fiction, the divine details are often autobiographical, and in my nonfiction the divine details are imagined. And it is all true. (5)
These details make her stories real.
They also make her characters real. I have learned from Plummer’s writing that interesting characters with strong voices make you want to turn pages. Characters with strong teenage voices are one of Plummer’s strengths. She says that a big influence on her came when she read J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye in high school. “Holden Caulfield’s voice was a voice with attitude,” Plummer said. “I read that book and thought, ‘Can you write in this voice?’ If you can, I can do that!’” (Plummer, Interview).
Characters with strong personalities that come out in their voices are a key to Plummer’s approach to writing. She says she usually starts with a character that will matter to the audience. She lets the character talk, hears the character’s voice, and then gets that character in lots of trouble. In her four young adult novels, the main characters—Annie, Susan, Kate, and Hannah—are very distinct, but have a similar defiant voice that rings true with teenagers.
A book review in Publisher’s Weekly pointed out Plummer’s talent for creating great characters: “Plummer’s uncanny ability to project details and human idiosyncrasies onto her characters makes her enterprise a believable one. [They] seem to have lives beyond the page; they, even more than their struggles, are memorable” (201).
Another thing I have learned from Plummer’s writing is that, in books for teenagers, there is rich potential in experimenting with form. In A Dance for Three, not only does Hannah speak in the first person, but we also hear from Hannah’s best friend Trilby, and also from Roman, the brother of the boyfriend who got Hannah pregnant. In The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman, Kate is writing a “romance novel” as she tells her story. Thus, she incorporates phrases from The Romance Writers’ Phrase Book: “‘See you later,’ Kirk said, looking back. He didn’t gaze longingly into my amethyst eyes, so he obviously is not the hero in this novel” (8). Plummer also includes revision notes at the end of each chapter as if Kate had written them. The revision notes are printed in a different font and include all of the things Kate thinks she should change in the chapter of the book she is writing. (Plummer said this device also made it very simple to incorporate the revision suggestions of her editor—she simply listed them at the end of each chapter as Kate’s revision notes.)
Besides specific writing skills, from Louise I have learned that you can be a Mormon and be a successfully published writer in the national market. Plummer started out trying to write for the national press because she wanted to see if she could make it as a writer in that market. She said she has not written specifically Mormon stories because that is not what editors have wanted. However, she does present religious figures in a positive light. She often writes about Mormon characters in a way that does not make an issue of their Mormonness but shows them as real people. For instance, in The Romantic Obsessions and Humiliations of Annie Sehlmeier, the main character and her family are not Mormon, but one of their neighbors is a Mormon bishop. When their grandmother dies, Annie’s father invites the neighbor-bishop, who has become a family friend, to say a prayer with the family before the casket is closed (144).
In a similar way, being Mormon is not the direct subject of any of her books, yet she incorporates elements of being Mormon in a natural and positive manner. Plummer has also shown that young adult literature can be an attractive field for Mormon writers because, in her words, “they want clean romance. I’m happy with that” (Interview). Finally, Plummer is one of the best examples I know of doing what you love and doing it well.
Several years ago, having no idea who Louise Plummer was, I registered for a literary criticism class she taught. I vividly remember one day when, laughing, she boldly proclaimed that besides teaching English, she wrote novels for teenagers. I was amazed that a “real” English teacher did such a thing—and not only did such a thing, but was proud of it!
I later found out she, like I, had once worried that writing for teenagers wasn’t a “practical” enough thing to spend one’s life on. From an early age, Plummer was interested in writing for young people. There was a section in her elementary school called “girl books” that she loved. (The librarian once tried to get her to read Little Men after Louise had liked reading Little Women, but Louise didn’t want to read it because it was in the “boy books” section.) She always wanted to write “girl books.” But for many years she didn’t think she could really write fiction for a career. Instead, she concentrated on looking for more “practical” jobs. Finally, in her thirties, she realized she really did want to write novels and went back to school to finish a degree in English and get a M.A. in creative writing. Now, she says, “I love what I do.” Anyone who knows her can see that is true. And because she loves what she does, she does honor to herself and her craft.
When she writes a book, she wants it to be well written. She wants to write a good book that she would be interested in reading. Some of what she tries to do in her own writing comes out through the voice of Kate Bjorkman, in the book, The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman: “Romance novels are sappy in the extreme. They read like junior-high-school daydreams. I’ve never read one that I could really believe. None of them sounds like real life. And I want real life. Even in novels, I want real life” (2).
Since Plummer began writing novels for adolescents, she has published all four of the young adult novels she has written—a phenomenal success rate for any writer! Not only have her books been published, but she has also won several awards. Her first book, The Romantic Obsessions and Humiliations of Annie Sehlmeier, which describes the life of a girl who moves to the United States from Holland in her senior year of high school, won Honorable Mention in the Third Annual Delacorte Press Prize for an Outstanding First Young Adult Novel, a national contest. The award included the publication of the novel in 1986.
Plummer’s second book, My Name is Sus5an Smith. The 5 is Silent, is about a girl who goes to Boston the summer after her senior year to live with her “hip” aunt and pursue her talent for painting. Published by Delacorte Press in 1991, this book was selected as an ALA Best Book for Young Adults and also won first prize for a young adult novel in the 1989 Utah Arts Council Creative Writing Competition.
In Plummer’s third young adult novel, The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman, the unexpected arrival of an old family friend at Kate’s house for Christmas vacation brings a romantic element into Kate’s holidays. This book was published by Laurel-Leaf Books in 1995 and was a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year.
Plummer’s fourth book, A Dance for Three, showed critics that she not only had a talent for humor and romance but was also able to treat more somber subjects. In this story, 15-year-old Hannah has had to take care of herself and her mother since her father died a few years ago. Then she finds out she’s pregnant. It was published by Delacorte Press in 2000. Like her other books, it received favorable reviews in important national book review publications such as Horn Book, which called it “smart, witty, and affecting” (320), School Library Journal, Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Amazon. com. The scope and prestige of the recognition Louise Plummer’s writing has received in the field of juvenile literature have been equaled by very few Mormon writers and artists in their respective fields.
Thanks to the influence of Louise and others, I did decide to concentrate on young adult literature during my master’s program. I’ve been nothing but happy with this decision, and I’ve never enjoyed writing a research paper as much as I have enjoyed writing my novel. Before I made this decision, I asked Louise how her academic colleagues react when she tells them she writes novels for teenagers. “Do they respect you?” I asked. She laughed and said, “Well, now they do.” She has shown me that if you love what you do and do it well, even if it’s writing novels for teenagers, it can matter.
ANNE BILLINGS delivered this paper as a second-year English master’s candidate at Brigham Young University. Her thesis project was a young adult novel. After graduation (April 2001), she moved to Houston, Texas, with her husband and baby daughter.
WORKS CITED
“A Dance for Three.” Publisher’s Weekly, 14 Feb. 2000, 201.
“Plummer, Louise: A Dance for Three.” The Horn Book Guide, 11.2 (Fall 2000): 320.
“Plummer, Louise: A Dance for Three.” Kirkus Reviews, 15 Dec. 1999: 1961.
Plummer, Louise. “First Things First.” Thoughts of a Grasshopper. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1992. 1-5.
—. Interviewed by Anne Billings, 18 Jan. 2000.
—. The Romantic Obsessions and Humiliations of Annie Sehlmeier. Dell: New York, 1986.
—. The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1995.
Other links about Louise Plummer:
Louise’s blog, “The Chattering Crow” (active 2010-2023).
“The Tom and Louise Show”. Y Magazine, Fall 2004.
Louise’s husband, Tom Plummer, was BYU German professor and personal essayist, who passed away in 2023. Here is his AML memoriam article.