Ornament and silence
Subtitle: essays on women's lives
By: Kennedy Fraser.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 1996
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 247
Subjects: Women authors; Women artists; Authors' spouses; Artists' spouses
Description: In the fourteen superb essays collected in this volume - most were published in The New Yorker and Vogue; two appear in print for the first time - Kennedy Fraser explores the uniquely female voice, the uniquely female presence, in literature and art.

She reveals how the early sexual experiences of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton colored their emotions and their work. She considers the long life in exile of Nina Berberova, with its complicated, intertwining loves and friendships. She shows us Vermeer, unrivalled "in conveying the active, passive, peculiarly feminine inner life" of another time, and Louise Colet, Flaubert's mistress, trying to find a permanent place in his life as well as in his work.

Fraser writes engagingly of such survivors as the feminist Germaine Greer, the English naturalist Miriam Rothschild, and the New York haute couture designer Valentina. She observes the havoc Paul Scott and Henri Matisse wreaked on the women and families around them during their very different careers in the arts.

Vignettes from her own life - about her garden, about buying meat in New York, about her sister - are interspersed throughout. And the book ends with a remembrance of her days at William Shawn's New Yorker, where she was introduced to the writing life.
Notes: Collection of 14 essays, most of which were originally published in t New Yorker (1987-1995) and Vogue (1992-1995).
Table of contents: title: Ornament and silence : Virginia Woolf; title: Going on : Nina Berberova; title: Warmed through and through : Edith Wharton; title: My sister, myself; title: A normal man : Henri Matisse and his women; title: Love, longing, and letters : Louise Colet; title: Traps and damask roses; title: Fritillaries and hairy violets : Miriam Rothschild; title: Stones of his house : Paul Scott; title: Valentina; title: The poet of everyday life : Johannes Vermeer; title: Meat; title: Demented pilgrimage : Germaine Greer; title: There at the New Yorker : the novel I never wrote for William Shawn.