Books Briefly
Books Briefly Lives in Letters TOUCHSTONES by Patricia Frazer Lamb and Kathryn Joyce Hohlwein Harper & Row. 330 pp. $14.95. The two women met at the University of Utah in the early 1950s,...
...The theories of Barbara Deming, the feminist-pacifist, are the inspiration for many of the philosophical pieces, but the anthology also covers political organizing, nonviolent defense, lifestyles, and women's history...
...Both were poor...
...Women and Nonviolence REWEAVING THE WEB OF LIFE: FEMINISM AND NONVIOLENCE edited by Pam McAllister New Society Publishers (4722 Baltimore Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19143...
...There is a transition in their correspondence from initial marital euphoria to candid exchanges over the years on raising children, changing marital relations, and altering sensibilities and perceptions...
...Joyce from an upright Unitarian background in Salt Lake...
...Telephone calls at times of crisis slowly replaced their letters...
...Unfortunately, the special problems of minority women, the relationship of women to the economic system, and the violence of poverty are given only cursory treatment, and the esoteric bias of many articles prevents them from speaking to the women whose need for social change is greatest...
...They did, in letters spanning 1953- 1964, and this engaging collection is a social history of our recent times...
...her comments on the fatiguing and frenetic social life of British colonials are devastating...
...This collection of fifty-six essays, stories, and poems demonstrates the integral relationship between feminism and nonviolence...
...After five years of marriage she sadly comments, "Our silences are deafening and souldestroying...
...Returning home, she laments the "fast chaos" of American life, with its noise, television, and sloppiness...
...Joyce married a German painter, taught in Beirut, lived briefly in an isolated part of Scotland, and then returned to rather dreary teaching jobs in Iowa, Wisconsin, and Ohio...
...They wrote out of loneliness and the need to speak openly to a trusted friend...
...She acknowledges the dislocations produced by believing in heroines and in believing in oneself as a heroine, yet she discards an easy condemnation of the delusions novel-reading can foster...
...Rachel Brownstein, an English teacher at Brooklyn College, takes up this question in her study of several English novels and of how she herself and other late Twentieth- Century American women have taken these fictions and their heroines to heart...
...Both marriages disintegrated, and the two women moved on to solid careers of their own...
...while her orientation is militantly feminist, her perspective and arguments are never dogmatic or narrow...
...The contributors—Alice Walker, Grace Paley, Ann Morrissett Davidon, Joan Baez, and many others—advocate creation of a society devoid of patriarchal militarism and injustice...
...As the years pass, the reader witnesses their growing pains and evolving maturity...
...8.95 paperback...
...Real Women BECOMING A HEROINE: READING ABOUT WOMEN IN NOVELS by Rachel M . Brownstein The Viking Press...
...Brownstein's method of switching between the worlds of the novels and that of the reader, though at times rough and disconcerting, eschews over-simplification...
...Pat, the editor of the collected letters, came from a ragtag family in Los Angeles...
...17.95...
...In 1958, Joyce wrote that "the American scene is something of an ugly and tragic spectacle," and a year later she reported that "marriages are failing all around me...
...They had married foreigners, but despite their criticisms of American life, they remained deeply American...
...440 pp...
...Pat married a British physician and spent nine years in Tanganyika, with intervals in Sussex...
...332 pp...
...Joyce had three children, Pat two...
...How we apply the lessons of fiction, for better or for worse, to our own lives is a longstanding literary problem which has provoked no small amount of theorizing, from those who have condemned the novel as "immoral" to those who have argued that reading fiction encourages an unhealthy preoccupation with a fictionalized self...
...10.95 hardcover...
...The two women met at the University of Utah in the early 1950s, shared interests in music and literature, and vowed to "keep in touch...
...An honest and entertaining book...
...Books Briefly Lives in Letters TOUCHSTONES by Patricia Frazer Lamb and Kathryn Joyce Hohlwein Harper & Row...
Vol. 47 • May 1983 • No. 5
