Silences by Olsen, Tillie - 1979

New York: Seymour Lawrence Delta Ed. , Dell Publishing Group. Very Good+ 1979. Softcover. Marfree, '79 prtg; tanned, not marked-in, clearance or discard. Usually mails within 12 hours. ; 300 pages; From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Jesse Larsen This book is about silences. It is concerned with the relationship of circumstances - including class, color, sex; the times, climate into which one is born - to the creation of literature. " In the United States, why are there so many more male authors than female authors listed in literary course offerings, reviews, and anthologies? Why, especially, when as far back as 1971, one out of every four or five books published were written by women? Is this more proof, "in this so much more favorable century, " that women are innately incapable of artistic literary achievement? With poetic language and painstaking thoroughness, Tillie Olsen articulates the obstacles, difficulties, frustrations, and imperatives faced when non-privileged people - women especially - are driven to write: How do working people get sustained periods of time not devoted to wage labor or corrupted by economic pressures? Where do women writers find sufficient space and encouragement to keep writing? Written over a period of fifteen years in time squeezed between wage work and mothering, Silences continues to serve as a model of inviting and accessible scholarship: "A passion and purpose inform its pages: love for my incomparable medium, literature; hatred for all that, societally rooted, unnecessarily lessens and denies it; slows, impairs, silences writers. It is written to re-dedicate and encourage. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. How circumstances affect the creation of literature, Oct 16, 2003 Reviewer: Peggy Vincent "author and reader" (Oakland, CA) -#This scholarly exploration of how silence is imposed on the literary writing of those people hampered by gender, class, religion, or ethnicity was first published in 1978 and has recently been reissues with a new preface. Olsen speaks of the obstacles and frustrations faced when women and other disenfranchised people are driven to put words to paper. The fact that Olsen took 15 years to write this book, squeezing bits of time between working and mothering, goes a long way toward demonstrating exactly what she's talking about. .