Review
"A southern female contemporary version of The Education of Henry Adams. . . . The author lets us inside the narrator: we see a complex and sympathetic woman. . . . I especially admired every passage dealing with food and intellectual issues."
—Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab's Wife
"Caws traces a continuum of relish and regret encompassing emotional states such as joy, fear, angst, and anger, but at the same time acknowledges the power of imagination in shaping her personal and professional life. [She] traces the process whereby she acquired her personal and academic voice despite an emotionally absent father, a husband who considered his career more important than hers, and a stiflingly sexist southern society"
--ANQ
From the Inside Flap
The southern landscape forms a backdrop in this memoir by Mary Ann Caws in which she recounts a life of passionate engagement. She sketches her early years in North Carolina, where she makes her debut and begins to struggle with accepted social values of the time and region. She recounts the tangled relationships of her family, and her ties to her sister, parents, and grandmother--a painter--who served as her role model. Caws describes her education at Bryn Mawr, in Paris, and at Yale--where she weds a professor of philosophy. She details the joys, small and large, of a complicated marriage that ends in divorce, after which she strives toward self-sufficiency and self-understanding. Finally, Caws relates her deep passion for writing, teaching, art, and poetry; her friendships with the writers, artists, and intellectuals who provided sanctuary for her mind and heart; and the many light-filled summers spent with her children at their field house in Provence.
The author returns to visit the tangled vines of the southern landscape and her hometown and dwells on the steadying influence in her life of a singular place: the boathouse in New York's Central Park where for peace and solace, and where, finally, she and her children row out on the water to toast their lives, their city, and their sense of home.
Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature in the Graduate School of City University of New York. She has held Guggenheim, Rockefeller, N.E.H., and Getty Foundation fellowships and is the author of many works of scholarship, including Picasso's Weeping Woman: The Life and Work of Dora Maar, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
