Ornament and Silence

Essays on Women's Lives from Edith Wharton to Germaine Greer

Author: Kennedy Fraser
ISBN: 9780375701122

In these fourteen essays, Fraser focuses on women in love affairs, friendships, marriages, and families; in relation to one another and to the talented men who so often rendered them invisible. InOrnament and Silencewe see Virginia Woolf, haunted and eventually destroyed by the sexual secrets of her childhood. We meet Flaubert's theatrically importunate mistress, Louise Colet, the one woman who could briefly slip past the master's misogyny. Fraser offers vibrant portraits of the Russian novelist Nina Berberova and the English naturalist Miriam Rothschild. And here is Fraser herself, learning her craft atThe New Yorker, tending her English garden and--on every page--delighting us with the manifold felicities of her prose. "A wonderfully idiosyncratic set of essays on women famous and unknown whose public and private lives Fraser examines with great feeling and exactitude...insight, intelligence, and grace."--Newsday "Subtlety, fluency, candor, an agile sensate intellect--Kennedy Fraser

Publisher: Vintage Books
Publish Date: 1998-04-28

Subjects: Art / General, Biography & Autobiography / Women, Literary Collections / Essays, Literary Criticism / General, Literary Criticism / Women Authors

This book is available in the following Community Centers: Women's Center (Location: Biography/Autobiography)