Volume 40, Number 9 · May 13, 1993
Grim Fairy Tale
By Ann Hulbert
The Furies
by Janet Hobhouse
Doubleday, 293 pp., $22.50
To be a writer who is told, again and again, that your life is made for fiction is rarely the pure good fortune it seems. Larger-than-life lives, after all, are not so easy to live. And truths that are stranger than fiction, the sort of truths that such lives are made of, can be next to impossible to turn into fiction. The novelist Janet Hobhouse heard the 'great copy' line a lot, and her short life—she died two years ago at forty-one of cancer—was not only dramatic but hard. It was also very productive: along with a biography of Gertrude Stein and a study of twentieth-century artists and nudes, she wrote four novels, including the posthumously published The Furies. In her fiction she never strayed very far from her actual experience, but she had to struggle to put its most outlandish, powerful parts on the page.
Review, 3372 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |