MARY OLIVER, A LIFE....is an intimate, lacerating account of the ties between daughter and mother! 345 Pages In Print! A satisfying read!!
As a child, Mary Olivier's dreamy disposition and fierce intelligence set her apart from her Victorian family, especially her mother, "Little Mamma," whose dazzling looks cannot hide her meager love for her only daughter. Mary grows up in a world of her own, a solitude that leaves her free to explore her deepest passions, for literature and philosophy, for the austere beauties of England's north country, even as she continues to attend to her family. But in time the independence Mary values—at almost any cost—threatens to become a form of captivity itself.
This novel is a subtle and quite devastating disection of a females life in the Victorian era. Stifled by a rigid sense of what it is important for a girl to aspire to, the sensitve and independent character of Mary Olivier strives to find her own answers to lifes mysteries. She cannot ask anyone... When she does she is early on taken to task by the very men she assumed would assist her.
This is the key to the subtlety of the dialogue between Mary and her male friends.Considerable time is also taken up with Mary's relationship with her family members. This a satisfying book and the reader will be richly rewarded in following the life of Mary Olivier.
Mary and her brothers must revolt against their father's jealous possessiveness of his wife and their mother's sweet manipulations and doctrinaire piety, but they can never bring themselves to fully hate them.
This novel is a real triumph, especially in its presentation of the way children think about their parents, the world around them, and even philosophical matters.
This may be May Sinclair's finest novel and it stands in comparison with the work of
Willa Cather, Katherine Mansfield, and the young Virginia Woolf.
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