Volume 56, Number 15 · October 8, 2009
Mary McCarthy's Room
By Christopher Benfey
A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx
by Elaine Showalter
Knopf, 586 pp., $30.00
''House' is being 'cleaned,'' Emily Dickinson wrote in 1866. 'I prefer pestilence.' Her father, a wealthy lawyer, employed servants to bear much of the workload in the kitchen and the barn; she could afford to joke about what she called the 'prickly art' of housekeeping. Dickinson cooked the bread for her father because he liked only hers. 'And people must have puddings,' she told the Boston-based writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson, when he visited the Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1870. According to Higginson, Dickinson spoke of puddings 'very dreamily, as if they were comets—so she makes them.'
Review, 2973 words
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