The Interior Castle
The Art and Life of Jean Stafford
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- اطلاعات
- نقد و بررسی
- دیدگاه کاربران
نقد و بررسی
May 4, 1992
This searching, comprehensive portrait of the witty, troubled novelist and short story writer whose work and life captured the dark spirit of a particular place and time--New York literary circles of mid-century--is disappointingly flat. Hulbert, a senior editor at the New Republic , traces her subject's childhood in Colorado and California, probing Stafford's uneasy family relationships, particularly with her father, a failed writer, and follows the writer East and into her marriages to Robert Lowell, Oliver Jensen and A. J. Liebling. Throughout, events in Stafford's life, including long stays in psychiatric institutions and her struggles with alcohol, are related to her writing, with clarification drawn from her correspondence with such friends as Peter Taylor. While Hulbert illuminates the painful conflicts of Stafford's efforts to remain true to her literary calling and find peace in her everyday life, that dilemma is still most clearly expressed in the problems Stafford poses, and does not solve, for the characters in her stories. Stafford was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her collected short stories in 1970; she died in 1979 at the age of 64. Readers Subscription Book Club main selection.
May 15, 1992
Hulbert, senior editor at The New Republic, paints a vivid portrait of the conflicted, troubled life of Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer and journalist Jean Stafford. She dramatizes the central struggles of Stafford's life: her attempt as a writer to contain and interpret her past--particularly her relationship with her father--so that she could use it productively in her fiction, her continual battle to achieve a balance between her needs as woman and as writer, and her inability to resolve the tension between drives toward isolation and belonging. We see Stafford fight for a precarious hold on life, perpetually ready to break apart under the pressures of poor health, failing marriages (the first of which was to Robert Lowell), alcoholism, and unachieved literary goals, but Hulbert never resorts to the sensationalism of David Roberts's Jean Stafford: A Biography ( LJ 6/15/88). She avoids jargon and reductive readings while providing a thorough analysis of Stafford's work and its literary context, complementing Charlotte Goodman's feminist approach in Jean Stafford: The Savage Heart ( LJ 6/1/90). Highly recommended. --Ellen Finnie Duranceau, MIT Lib.
Copyright 1992 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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