In Alice Walker's novelThe Color Purple, on
approximately page 299, we learn that Doris Baines is an
English woman who was born wealthy, her father being, as the narrator phrases
it, "Lord Somebody or Other."
Doris grew up to be a bit more rebellious than the family
expected. She disliked the family's social gatherings and knew her calling was
to be a writer. She also rebelled against the idea of getting married, saying,
as that narrator phrases it, "Me marry! she hooted." According to the
narrator, Doris further explained that Doris's family did all they could think
of to persuade her to marry and that Doris "never saw so many milkfed young men
in all [her] life as when [she] was nineteen and twenty" (p. 299).
One evening, while preparing for a date, she recalled to herself something a sea captain had said while at dinner...
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and began dreaming up the notion of how nice it would be tobe a missionary. She felt that it would be
better to live in a convent than her current home because "she could think, she
could write" (p. 229). She felt it would be blissful to be off alone in untamed
India that she began fooling her parents and the Missionary Society into
believing she was truly a pious person, and quickly the society sent her off to
Africa.
Oncein Africa, she began writing novels under the pseudonym
Jared Hunt. Even though not a missionary in the true sense, she did a great
deal for the "heathen," as she called them, including writing loads "about
their culture, their behavior, their needs" (p. 230). She even took money from
her family, friends, and the society to build a hospital, an elementary school,
a college, and a swimming pool.