The Furies (New York Review Books Classics) - Softcover

Hobhouse, Janet

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590170857 ISBN 13: 9781590170854

Publisher: NYRB Classics, 2004

Synopsis

An exhilarating, fiercely honest, ultimately devastating book, The Furies confronts the claims of family and the lure of desire, the difficulties of independence, and the approach of death.
Janet Hobhouse's final testament is beautifully written, deeply felt, and above all utterly alive.

About this title

Review:

"This is a grim, tough, powerful, and beautiful book, the memoir of a genuine heroine, whose struggle against the calamities that beset her -- beginning with the wounds inflicted by a remote coldhearted father and a pathetically helpless mother and ending with the anguish of a wrecked marriage, the mother's suicide, and the author's own fatal illness -- was waged with enormous intelligence and fortitude, and even with flair. At the heart of the book -- and depicted with pitiless candor -- is the tortuous bond of love between mother and daughter. That at the end of her brief life, Janet Hobhouse could transform her suffering into a confession so precise and evocative and singularly unselfpitying, so strangely full of verve, strikes me as a considerable moral as well as literary achivement." -- Philip Roth

"A stunning heartbreaker of a book, shot through with pellucid sadness...[an] extraordinary last book in which [Hobouse's] pain is as insistent--and lustrous--as her craft." -- Daphne Merkin, Los Angeles Times

"[A] sad, beautiful--and profoundly affecting--meditation on love and death and family." -- Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"A sort of Jamesian journey through the labyrinth of the narrator's consciousness, a finely tuned, highly intelligent, witty, self--examining and haunted instrument...This is an intense tale, told at fever pitch. Grab your hat and hang on for the ride." -- The Boston Globe

Synopsis:

The four generations of women described in Janet Hobhouse's autobiographical novel rival the Furies of Greek myth in their capacity to love and hate with vengeance. At the heart of the story is a mother/daughter conflict that is at moments an innocent love affair between romantic co-conspirators and at others a bitter and deforming contest of wills. Hobhouse takes on the irresolvability of this struggle between safety and liberty, loyalty and deflance, and in what amounts to her last words, told in a voice of unforgettable immediacy, finds that the quest for understanding can itself be a form of letting go. The books was published just a year after her death from cancer at forty-two. Although the book is complete, she was still editing and revising the text when she died, hastily completing the tragic and final section of the book.

About this edition

• Publisher: NYRB Classics
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1590170857
• ISBN 13: 9781590170854
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 312