Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s Chinese Pyjamas

I’d never come across the American author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896-1953) before. Not surprising as her books were mostly to do with rural American themes and largely set in Florida. However, she was very popular in the 1930s and won a Pulitzer. She’s what would now be termed a YA author, I think. She never wrote anything about China as far as I know but did publish a novel entitled The Sojourners, which caught my attention as it’s a term often applied to foreigners in China in the interwar years. But it’s nothing to do with China. Still, Rawlings did like Chinese jim-jams…as the photo below shows (from 1953).

What’s the story behind those PJ’s? Well, a little research yields that, according to her correspondence, the Chinese pyjamas were a gift from her old college friend Bee McNeill in 1939 – and she obviously really liked them…