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Dear May, Life and Death of Harriett Frean (1922) traces the eponymous character’s downfall from a promising child to a nonentity. Our protagonist, Harriett, the only child…… Read more “Being good felt delicious”
Tag: Family
Only the skin chairs are true
Dear Barbara, As The Skins Chairs (1962) starts, ten-year-old Frances has been sent to stay with the Lawrences, her mother’s rich relatives. In one of her strolls…… Read more “Only the skin chairs are true”
Childhood is dark and it’s always moaning
Dear Tove, In Childhood (2019, tr. Tiina Nunnally. Original: Barndom, 1967), your portrait of the artist as a working-class girl is no rosy picture. Born in an…… Read more “Childhood is dark and it’s always moaning”
What fun she would have as a ghost
Dear Elspeth, Who can resist an awkward, introverted misfit with a wild imagination and a tragic fate? Janet, your protagonist in O Caledonia (1991), is a girl…… Read more “What fun she would have as a ghost”
The unlived life is light, so light
Dear Marie Luise, Circe’s Mountain: Stories (1990, tr. Lisel Mueller. Stories originally written in the 1950’s and 1960’s) is a collection of 12 of some of your…… Read more “The unlived life is light, so light”
And the money ate the blood
Dear Maria, Die Vergiftung (“The Poisoning”, 1920) reads like a box full of family pictures. We are taking them out randomly, one by one, and some disembodied…… Read more “And the money ate the blood”
So much humanity quelled down and buried beneath a concrete of inflexible obedience
Dear Geraldine, The Half Sisters (1848) is this puzzling thing: it peels off the layers of Victorian convention and throws a sharp light over their underlying lack…… Read more “So much humanity quelled down and buried beneath a concrete of inflexible obedience”
The fathomless ocean on which they had set out with such unknowing fearlessness
Dear Amy, The Romance of a Shop (1888) is all about framing: depending on the way we turn our lens and the point where we choose to…… Read more “The fathomless ocean on which they had set out with such unknowing fearlessness”
Their movement through life is invisible
Dear Jokha, Celestial Bodies (2018, tr. Marilyn Booth. Original: Sayyidat al-Qamar, 2010) revolves around a family and their household members, in an Omani village, in the late 20th…… Read more “Their movement through life is invisible”
It isn’t a circle–it is simply a long line
Dear Lorraine, I love how inconclusive your portrait of a 1950’s working-class African American family is in A Raisin in the Sun (1959) – the way it…… Read more “It isn’t a circle–it is simply a long line”
The most wonderful thing in the world must be to be a childless widow
Dear Elizabeth, Irony is your plaything in Diary of a Provincial Lady (1930), to the point where it starts to be slightly subversive. Written as a series…… Read more “The most wonderful thing in the world must be to be a childless widow”
Impossible to get out of it
Dear Carmen, In Nada, tr. Edith Grossman (2007. Original: Nada, 1944), we have a labyrinth of haunted characters confined in a haunting house in a city haunted…… Read more “Impossible to get out of it”
I do not know how women do it,
Dear Júlia, In A falência (1901, “The bankruptcy”, not translated yet), I could not help but feel you were constantly hiding something in plain sight, in-between the…… Read more “I do not know how women do it,”
Hers was a nature with a wide range
Dear Sarah, In The Beth Book (1897), we feel that we are reading two very different, at times irreconcilable, books: a powerful coming of age novel and a…… Read more “Hers was a nature with a wide range”
Otherwise let this mad world crush us now
Dear Elizabeth, The Morgesons (1862) is that rare thing: a 19th-century novel with a sceptical, areligious, and probably amoral heroine. It reads like a modernist fiction avant…… Read more “Otherwise let this mad world crush us now”
This lonely spot was not without its pilgrims
Dear Sarah, Much like its characters, who seem to inhabit the limbo between past and present, life and death, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) lies…… Read more “This lonely spot was not without its pilgrims”
Take her away and I’m half of whatever we are
Dear Dorothy, Cassandra at the Wedding (1962) is a nuanced, finely observed character study and comedy of manners, full of a dark, twisted sense of humour, which can…… Read more “Take her away and I’m half of whatever we are”
The view and the woods opening to a light that’s itself untrodden
Dear Ali, Winter (2017) is a novel full of the ambivalence embodied in this season: the dying of light that is also a promise of new light.…… Read more “The view and the woods opening to a light that’s itself untrodden”
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