If DeWees’ goal is to encourage “a bookshelf full of new titles,” she succeeds in planting the seed that there are many...
Debut author DeWees brings back to life seven Victorian women writers with the hope of proving them worthy of shelf space alongside Austen and the Brontës.
The British women of this book lived from the mid-1700s to the late 1800s, a time when society expected them to find husbands and not do much else. But these were no ordinary women; all had "broad disregard for convention…an unabashed sense of self-worth.” Some wrote because their situations forced them to, after bad marriages left them unsupported (Charlotte Turner Smith). Others did it because they were compelled by their beliefs, whether political or personal, in protest against the negative connotations of "spinsterhood.” Mary Elizabeth Braddon wrote in search of a successful career and, despite the rage of critics, made a fortune. Catherine Crowe penned one of the first detective novels complete with a “resourceful, industrious, lionhearted” female lead. Sara Coleridge wrote Phantasmion, considered by some as the first fairy-tale novel in English. What DeWees does best is reveal the interesting lives and strong characters of these oft-forgotten writers, proving to readers that there were many more successful Victorian women writers than the handful that populate syllabi. The most memorable chapters belong to Mary Robinson, who left a loveless marriage to become a commanding actress and mistress to the Prince of Wales, using her fame to become a definitive cultural voice of her time, and to Coleridge, whose gripping story reveals a constant struggle against the binding duties of motherhood and marriage. Virginia Woolf summed up Coleridge’s tragedy well: “She meant to write her life. But she was interrupted.” While some chapters blend together and the accomplishments become indistinguishable, this book succeeds at making readers aware of the gaps in our knowledge of British literature. Read this not as serious literary criticism but as an appreciation of writers who deserve to be remembered.
If DeWees’ goal is to encourage “a bookshelf full of new titles,” she succeeds in planting the seed that there are many treasures out there waiting for a second chance.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-239462-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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
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