Ornament and Silence
Essays on Women's Lives From Edith Wharton to Germaine Greer
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
From one of The New Yorker’s most revered writers comes “a brilliant collection” (The New York Times Book Review) about women in love affairs, friendships, marriages, and families—from Virginia Woolf and Flaubert’s mistress to Russian novelist Nina Berberova and English naturalist Miriam Rothschild.
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. In Ornament and Silence we 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 at The New Yorker, tending her English garden and—on every page—delighting us with the manifold felicities of her prose.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
These thoughtful, well-crafted essays by Fraser (Scenes from the Fashionable World), previously published in Vogue and the New Yorker, deal largely with the relationship between creative women and the men in their lives. In an extended piece, the author explores the life and work of Russian emigre writer Nina Berberova, whose literary achievements (The Italics are Mine) were accomplished after she left her lover, Russian poet Vladislav Khodasevich. Other articles deal with the impact of childhood sexual abuse on the life of Virginia Woolf and with Edith Wharton's successful struggle to find sexual freedom. Fraser includes several perceptive essays on writers and artists, such as novelist Paul Scott and painter Henri Matisse, that examine the women who influenced them both positively and negatively. Of particular interest are Fraser's reflections on the time she spent working as a young writer at the New Yorker with famed editor William Shawn.
