Coker wrote nine books, some of which were considered groundbreaking at the time
Elizabeth Boatwright Coker wrote nine books, some considered groundbreaking at the time, and was known as “South Carolina’s First Lady of Letters.”
Judging a book by its cover isn’t always a bad thing, and in the case of A Curious Heart (Evening Post Books, 2024), it’s nearly unavoidable. Against a regal garnet backdrop, the gaze of Elizabeth Boatwright Coker, her short flapper do backlit like a halo, is magnetic. She locks eyes with you, peering out from the 1920s—a woman wholly self-possessed, graceful, gorgeous, slightly mischievous, and alluring. The photograph is a siren—you are lured in; you want to know who this woman was, what that piercingly soft gaze sees, what that sly, almost-smile is holding back, and what it’s hinting at.
The pages that follow answer these questions and more. Authors and mother-daughter duo Penelope Coker Hall and Eliza Wilson Ingle tell the story of their mother and grandmother, respectively, largely through celebrated author Elizabeth Boatwright Coker’s extensive letters and diary entries. Coker, born in Darlington in 1909, lived in Hartsville most of her adult life, where she was the wife of Jim Coker, president of packing materials giant Sonoco and one of the state’s preeminent business leaders. The Cokers enjoyed the privileges of wealth and status—trips to Europe and New York, galas and balls, hosting tea for 80 on a weekday, bespoke wardrobes, and a staff to help manage it all. Yet, they also lived in a tiny southern town, haunted by the residual sepia tones of the Civil War and all the changes that industrialization was bringing to formerly agrarian communities. College-educated and ignited by her drive to become a published author, Coker thrived amid the friction of the world shifting around her. Indeed, she threw off plenty of sparks herself.
A Curious Heart is a curious book in many ways: part family memoir, part biography, part love letter to a literary doyenne and 20th-century trailblazer, and part nostalgic ode to the bygone days of small-town southern charm that hasn’t yet been Bravo-tised. It’s hard not to be charmed by Coker—the woman who Salvador Dali would sketch in a New York restaurant, the woman forever dashing around South Carolina in her yellow Corvette.
Coker’s first novel, Daughter of Strangers, published in 1950 when she was 41, became a New York Times best seller. The historical novel portrayed “the gay, relaxed society of the plantation owners,” as the jacket copy described, but also dealt with miscegenation and racial issues, leading one literary scholar to place Coker “at the vanguard, a decade before the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement, of other writers and artists willing to put themselves and their art on the line to address racial discrimination, champion tolerance and justice….”
Hall and Ingle give their matriarch a balanced treatment. Would her nine novels hold up today? Not likely, Ingle admits. But for her time, Coker’s work was groundbreaking. She was dubbed “South Carolina’s First Lady of Letters” and earned a place in the SC Hall of Fame.
Like its subject, the book is a charmer, for its insights into small-town life and its gems of wisdom, thanks to the nuggets Coker shares about balancing the demands of being a wife, mother, and hostess with her compulsion to be an artist. “Art is a jealous mistress, and if you don’t give her everything, she kicks your teeth in,” Max Aley, Coker’s literary agent, once wrote to his client. Hall and Ingle have given everything here, including what Coker deserves: a place on our bookshelves.
