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kathyxtran's review against another edition
3.0
Would be more for first essays/lectures, but the rest of this collection is mostly whole excerpts and notes that I ended up skimming. Would probably be great to have as a reference copy on the shelf though.
octavia_cade's review against another edition
5.0
A collection of essays and criticism on the theme of authorial exclusion - how being kept from a full immersion in craft has materially disadvantaged certain sets of writers. This is manifested in what Olsen calls silences: those long periods in an author's life where nothing is written or published because other aspects of life take priority. There's a strong focus on how poverty keeps artists from their craft, and how impoverished creators are by necessity forced to concern themselves more with earning a living than with getting on with the business of creation. The biggest example Olsen uses to support this is a novella I'd never heard of before: Life in the Iron Mills by Rebecca Harding Davis, which tells the story of an iron-labourer and sculptor who comes to a terrible end, his potentially genius art nearly all gone and himself driven to suicide by deprivation and injustice. (The excerpts included are excellent, I'm going to have to find a copy.)
Naturally poverty is affected by a number of other factors - intersections with race and gender, for example - and the bulk of the silences that Olsen is concerned with are those of women, who have historically been so burdened by the care of others that they've been unable to be artists in the same uninterrupted manner that their husbands enjoyed. Olsen backs up her argument with a mountain of quotations and excerpts from primary sources, conveying both through these women and her own first-hand experience the despair of women writers who've been forced into the silences that so undermine their work. It's painful and fascinating reading.
Naturally poverty is affected by a number of other factors - intersections with race and gender, for example - and the bulk of the silences that Olsen is concerned with are those of women, who have historically been so burdened by the care of others that they've been unable to be artists in the same uninterrupted manner that their husbands enjoyed. Olsen backs up her argument with a mountain of quotations and excerpts from primary sources, conveying both through these women and her own first-hand experience the despair of women writers who've been forced into the silences that so undermine their work. It's painful and fascinating reading.
raehink's review
5.0
Olsen presents a marvelous series of essays, lectures and anecdotes about writing, creation, and the writing career, with the focus on women. Can a woman be a mother and write?
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