Despite occasional fictional flourishes, these forgotten friendships, from illicit and scandalous to radical and inspiring,...
Rich and revealing portraits of four literary friendships.
Because female authors are so often “mythologized as solitary eccentrics or isolated geniuses,” Midorikawa and Sweeney (Owl Song at Dawn, 2016), both teachers at New York University in London, set out to uncover overlooked friendships. As Margaret Atwood puts it in the foreword, the authors successfully “retrace forgotten footsteps, and tap into emotional undercurrents.” The close relationship between Jane Austen and Anne Sharp would be lost if it wasn’t for Jane’s niece, Fanny, whose writings included much information about her governess, Anne, who liked to pen theatricals. It turns out Jane had “deep affection” for Anne, her “most treasured confidante.” Over the years, on and off, they “would find all sorts of ways to support each other’s endeavors.” Jane “treated Anne as her most trusted literary friend.” Charlotte Brontë and the pioneering feminist writer Mary Taylor were “good friends” despite quite differing personalities. Taylor was energetic and political while Charlotte was quiet and diffident. So when Mary wrote to her that Jane Eyre was “so perfect as a work of art,” she also criticized it “for not having a greater political purpose.” Despite disagreements and debates, they found a “space for themselves in the rapidly changing Victorian world.” When George Eliot heaped great praise upon Harriet Beecher Stowe (whose bestselling fame was greater than Eliot’s) for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Eliot received an unexpected letter from Stowe, which praised Eliot’s works, and a friendship was born. Until, that is, Eliot shockingly learned of Stowe’s published criticism of Byron for his incestuous relationship with his sister. It created a “frostiness” in their relationship, but it endured. Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield played a literary cat-and-mouse game with each other thanks to social differences and creative rivalry, but they remained friends.
Despite occasional fictional flourishes, these forgotten friendships, from illicit and scandalous to radical and inspiring, are revelations.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-544-88373-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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