RIP Dorothy Bryant

I am sorry for two RIP posts in a row. But today I saw the obituary of writer Dorothy Bryant in the San Francisco Chronicle. I hadn’t thought about this author for a long time, but memories came rushing back as soon as I saw her name. I most associate Bryant’s work with my longtime Reading Group (see my posts of 1/26/10, 1/8/12, and 2/4/16 for more on this group), as we read several of her novels in the mid- to late-70s, when our group was young (as were we!) and when Bryant published her first few books. Bryant was born in San Francisco and lived in the Bay Area most of her life; she died in Oakland on Dec. 21, 2017, at the age of 87. She was the daughter of Italian immigrants, the first in her family to graduate from college, and some of her fiction reflects that background. It has aspects of the local (San Francisco and Oakland), of immigrant culture, and of working class life, as well as of the teaching life. Bryant taught in schools and community colleges in the Bay Area, and was known at least a bit to some of my friends in the Reading Group (all of us educators) through those teaching circles. We read her books because she was local and because she was a feminist, and we thoroughly enjoyed and celebrated those books. She also wrote plays and a book about writing. I am not sure how well known she was outside of the Bay Area, but here she was known with respect and affection, especially among women, and most especially among feminists. I am happy to remember those days of reading her fiction with my Reading Group friends, and connecting it to our lives in those early days of our group and of second wave feminism. Thank you, Dorothy Bryant, for your sustaining work.