Silences [SPECIAL EDITION] (Paperback)

by Tillie Olsen (Author)
Key Phrases: essential angel, Iron Mills, Virginia Woolf, Rebecca Harding Davis (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
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. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Jesse Larsen --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Description

First published in 1978, Silences single-handedly revolutionized the literary canon. In this classic work, now back in print, Olsen broke open the study of literature and discovered a lost continent -- the writing of women and working-class people. From the excavated testimony of authors' letters and diaries we learn the many ways the creative spirit, especially in those disadvantaged by gender, class and race, can be silenced. Olsen recounts the torments of Melville, the crushing weight of criticism on Thomas Hardy, the shame that brought Willa Cather to a dead halt, and struggles of Virginia Woolf, Olsen's heroine and greatest exemplar of a writer who confronted the forces that would silence her. This 25th-anniversary edition includes Olsen's now infamous reading lists of forgotten authors and a new introduction and author preface.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY; 25 Anv edition (April 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1558614400
• ISBN-13: 978-1558614406
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #299,964 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Why aren't you writing?, September 18, 2003

By	Charity Kendall (Fenton, Michigan USA) - See all my reviews

Silences by Tillie Olsen

Annotated Bibliography

This book is addressed to the silences in literature and the ways in which writing ceases to be, to the dying and death of capacity. It is about the censorship and self-censorship of woman primarily. The book is written to encourage everyone who is marginalized to find a place for their voice amidst the constrictions of wage-labor and child rearing because their experiences are invaluable. Olsen estimates that only one out of twelve writers in our century are women.Olsen goes into great depth telling the story of Rebecca Harding Davis a nineteenth century woman who spoke out through her literature from isolation both as a woman without encouragement and as a citizen of a backward city, without even a library, in what became West Virginia. She wrote and eventually was introduced to society and made great friends with many prominent writers, however, at age thirty-one she married, and once she had children she let her writing go. Her sympathetic perspective about iron-workers in her town is almost inexplicable in terms of her class. Olsen asks how she got the information she used in her story and remarks on her personal qualities that made her into a popular conversationalist before she retreated/succumbed to motherhood and fulfilled the role of what was properly expected of her. Primarily this book is about the silences of women throughout time. It asks why women have not been enabled to publish, why their lives have usually been overwhelmed by child rearing (their work not allowing time for writing), what is wrong with the world that it doesn't ask-and make it possible-for people to raise and contribute the best that is in them. Olsen explores the idea that women must choose between their art and their fulfillment as a woman and asks what difference it makes to literature if a woman remains childless especially since so many marvels have been created by childless woman. There is a wonderful excerpt from Henry James on the value he placed on his mother's sacrifices to her family.The book is filled with quotes from writers, Katherine Anne Porter writes that writers must not let editors or publishers tamper with their lives because writers are practicing an art while publishers are running a business. Olsen notes that at one time woman were asked to divest themselves of characteristics that might identify them as women if they were to try to write in this man's world. Cynthia Ozick is quoted as saying "...The term "woman writer"...has no meaning, not intellectually, not morally, not historically. A woman is a writer."Common people are asked why they do not write and writers are examined to understand why they have pauses in their otherwise fertile production. This is not about those times a writer takes to regenerate and think creatively, but rather, about those times when it is impossible to write because of the pressures the artist puts on him/herself or allows the world to impose.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Base for International Women Writers Resolution to the UN Wo, June 24, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Silences: Classic Essays on the Art of Creating (Paperback)

It is difficult to understand why this book is out of stock. Olsen's ideas encouraged International PEN Women Writers' Committee(of which I was then Chair) to hold two regional conferences on censorship and self-censorship of women. It was also part of the inspiration for the resolution forwarded by our delegation to the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. Women writers have been aware for centuries about women's silences, but it was generally acknowledged that there was little support for the perspective of it being institutionalised ,deliberate ,and encouraged by societies. Those who wish to find evidence for the phenomenon and examples of women who broke the silence would find much to interest them in'The Book of the City of Ladies' by Christina de Pizan, a Fourteenth Century Italian writer(and widow) at the court of the King of France.Christina broke many of the taboos of her day. It is remarkable that women's censorship and self-censorship(silences) are not the subject of doctoral theses in women's studies' departments. Olsen provided women everywhere with a great service in writing this book. Read it,I urge you to do so.It will make you reflect ,if you are a woman, on your own silences. If you are a man with an open mind, it will probably make you wonder how such a continual human rights' abuse has continued for so long.Perhaps the answer is because it is a silent one.The scars are and have been felt on the souls of our mothers,sisters, and daughters of blood and spirit throughout the millenia of recorded human history.Simply because they do not inflict physical hurt, does not mean that such silent scars do not constitute abuse.Olsen's book,'Silences',did much to set the record straight. I , as a woman writer, am grieved, at both the intellectual and emotional levels, that such a valuable record should go out of print.It is ironical that in the 'great age of gender issues' such a book is no longer available.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars These essays have had a profound impact on my own work., August 5, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Silences: Classic Essays on the Art of Creating (Paperback)

I am not shocked that this wonderful work is out of print -- it's simply history repeating itself. But I do think we should work very hard to get it back into print, probably by one of the small feminist publishers, such as The Feminist Press or Aunt Lute or Spinster -- because they are faithful to their books. However, until that happens, those looking for the essays will find many of them reprinted in various anthologies, including the title essay, "Silences: When Writers Don't Write" in IMAGES OF WOMEN IN FICTION: FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ed. Susan Koppelman, Popular Press, 1972, and still in print and available from the publisher.