It knocked me out. I came to Dickens and Trollope later in life."
By the time Voigt began high school, she had set her sights on a career as a writer. She began writing short stories and poetry, and upon entering Smith College, a women's college in Massachusetts, she enrolled in creative writing courses. Her work, however, received little encouragement from her teachers. "Clearly what I was submitting didn't catch anyone's eye," she once remarked. "I never had a bad teacher like my character, Mr. Chappelle in A Solitary Blue." On the other hand, she did find that some of her teachers at Smith "resented teaching women, feeling themselves too good for the position. We had very little patience with that attitude."
Following graduation from Smith College, Voigt moved to New York City where she worked for the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency. "I married in 1964 and moved with my first husband to Santa Fe, New Mexico," she recalled. "I was to work as a secretary to help support us while he was in school. But even with my New York experience it was difficult to find a job. I drifted into the Department of Education one day and asked what I would have to do to qualify myself to teach school.
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