Alone! Alone!

Lives of Some Outsider Women

By Rosemary Dinnage

In the course of over thirty years of writing about psychology, child development, biography, and fiction, Rosemary Dinnage has encountered a variety of outstanding women, all of whom, in one way or another, felt powerfully alone.

Here she brings together her reflections on some of the most memorable of them, including solitairies like the painter Gwen John and the philosopher Simone Weil; muses to partners of genius like Clementine Churchill and Giuseppina Verdi; unstoppable characters like the birth-control advocate Marie Stopes and the children's novelist Enid Blyton; literary survivors like Isak Dinesen and Rebecca West; and, along the way, an assortment of aristocrats, lawbreakers, manic-depressives, transvestites, and storytellers.

Some of these women knew isolation through their dedication to duty, and others through their immersion in writing, painting, or politics. Some juggled with fantasy worlds in which they could end up stranded. Others learned the fine art of survival, fighting illness, hard childhoods, or a hostile public. All of them, whether trying to construct a life or a work of art—or both—suggest ways in which women can choose, learn, laugh, invent, dare, and of course wholeheartedly love or hate.

These women make up a remarkable gallery of the famous, the infamous, the once famous, and the never famous. In telling their stories, Rosemary Dinnage considers what aloneness may really be, how it begins, how it feels, and, above all, how this crucial experience can teach and illuminate as well as hurt.

Reviews

In these nuanced biographical pieces, Dinnage adeptly characterizes the solitary essence of a wide-ranging group of women...
— The New York Times Book Review

Rosemary Dinnage captures the spirits of such unforgettable figures as Isak Dinesen and Simone Weil.
— Vogue

Alone! Alone! is a luminous collection of meditations on women who bore, or refused to bear, with the cards life dealt them. Rosemary Dinnage's great strengths include her keen psychological insight and her refusal to think inside the feminist box, and she has a unique ability to analyze and speculate about the conflicts of a personality without stooping to easy conclusions. Her essays on the strength that informed the wifely pliancy of Clementine Churchill and the vulnerability that lay behind the adamantine will of Simone Weil are alone worth the price of admission.
— Daphne Merkin

The introduction to Alone! Alone! is very good. It's modest and candid, and everything Rosemary Dinnage says about book-reviewing is spot on
— Carole Angier, The Spectator (London)

Also see:

Seduction and Betrayal By Elizabeth Hardwick Introduction by Joan Didion Seduction and Betrayal is a virtuoso performance, a major writer's reckoning with the relations between men and women, women and writing, writing and life.

The Furies By Janet Hobhouse Introduction by Daphne Merkin The four generations of women described in Janet Hobhouse's autobiographical novel rival the Furies of Greek myth in their capacity to love and hate with vengeance.

Cassandra at the Wedding By Dorothy Baker Afterword by Deborah Eisenberg Dorothy Baker's fascinating tragicomic novel follows an unpredictable course of events in which Cassandra appears variously as conniving, self-aware, pitiful, frenzied, absurd, and heartbroken—at once utterly impossible and surprisingly sympathetic.

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