Volume 23, Number 17 · October 28, 1976
Orphans and Oracles: What Clara Knew
By Karl Miller
The Widow's Children
by Paula Fox
Dutton, 224 pp., $8.95
Lady Oracle
by Margaret Atwood
Simon and Schuster, 345 pp., $8.95
These two novels share a concern with the status and sufferings of the orphan or outcast. Neither of their heroines is technically an orphan, but each of them is thought to resemble one. The adventures of literary orphans, who are liable to be both cast out and imprisoned, locked out and locked in, can resemble a certain experience of family life: the experience of those who feel themselves excluded and who wish to escape. To think about orphans can look like a way of thinking about the family, whose members will sometimes be exposed, and imagine themselves exposed, to the orphan's double trouble of coercion and neglect, and the literature of the orphan includes the adventures of many such imaginary orphans as the heroines of these novels.
Review, 4659 words
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