Mitchell, Emily

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Mitchell, Emily

PERSONAL:

Born in London, England; immigrated to the United States. Education: Middlebury College, B.A., 1997; Brooklyn College, M.F.A.

ADDRESSES:

Home—San Francisco, CA. Office—California College of the Arts, 1111 8th St., San Francisco, CA 94107-2247.

CAREER:

Writer. Has taught at Lehman College of the City University of New York, Bronx, NY, and California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA.

WRITINGS:

The Last Summer of the World (novel), W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor to periodicals, including Agni, Indiana Review, Raritan, and New England Review.

SIDELIGHTS:

After losing her job in a dot-com company, Emily Mitchell reexamined her career path and decided to enroll in an M.F.A. program in writing at Brooklyn College. Since then her short stories have appeared in several small magazines, including Agni and Indiana Review. Her first novel, based on the life of photographer Edward Steichen, was published to enthusiastic reviews. Critics admired The Last Summer of the World as a well-researched and insightful exploration of an enigmatic artist's life.

Steichen (1879-1973) was a pioneer of fine art photography who was stationed in France during World War I, where he served as an aerial reconnaissance photographer. After the war he returned to the United States, where he worked in fine art and fashion photography. In her novel, Mitchell focuses on Steichen's war experience and on his troubled marriage to his first wife, Clara. Troubled by her husband's infidelity in France, Clara returns to the United States; Steichen, meanwhile, discovers that his mistress is at the front, working as a nurse. He spends the war flying above enemy territory to photograph sites important to the war effort—an experience that, in those relatively early days of aviation, was fraught with novelty and danger. As Mitchell explained in a Middlebury College Web site interview, the work was "brand new and … scary and quite dangerous." To try to imagine a person who would do such work, Mitchell added, she realized she needed to "try to understand his life before the war." It was a challenge, she explained, to write a novel about a protagonist who had actually lived and whose life was well-documented, but Mitchell emphasized that fiction can reveal things that plain history cannot "because we can't know them for certain, which are peoples' private thoughts, their interchanges, the conversations they have in private, their emotions. Those kinds of subtleties are really what fiction does, I think."

Writing on Salon.com, Sarah Karnasiewicz observed that, for the most part, "Mitchell exhibits admirable restraint as she interweaves contemporary scenes from Steichen's soldier life with his awakening as an artist and his romance and unraveling marriage to Clara." The critic was particularly intrigued by the fact that, throughout the novel, Steichen remains such an "elusive" character. In her skillful use of flashbacks, Karnasiewicz explained, Mitchell suggests that her protagonist's obsession with his art left little room for an actual, concrete life.

New York Sun contributor Mike Peed hailed The Last Summer of the World as a "penetrating" novel that is written "with grace and precision." In a starred review, a writer for Publishers Weekly called Mitchell's narrative approach a "dazzling trick" that reveals Steichen's inner life. The reviewer also praised the novel as a "devastating portrait of the insanity of war."