
Ornament and Silence
Essays on Women's Lives From Edith Wharton to Germaine Greer
Kennedy Fraser(Author)
Vintage Books (Publisher)
Published on 28. April 1998
Book
Paperback/Softback
268 pages
978-0-375-70112-2 (ISBN)
Description
"A brilliant collection.... Ms. Fraser does the greatest honor a writer can do people: she brings them alive". -- The New York Times Book Review
Kennedy Fraser brings to the fourteen essays in this indispensable volume the sensitivity, freshness of observation, and offhand elegance that made her fashion reportage for The New Yorker so legendary.
In Ornament and Silence, Fraser writes about women as independent luminaries and supporting players in the lives of famous men, as solitary figures or as wives, lovers, daughters and sisters. We see how Virginia Woolf was haunted and eventually destroyed by the sexual secrets of her childhood. We meet Flaubert's mistress, Louise Colet, the one woman who could briefly slip past the master's misogyny. Fraser offers vibrant portraits of the Russian novelist Nina Berberova and the English naturalist Miriam Rothschild. And here is Fraser herself, learning her craft at The New Yorker, tending her English garden and -- on every page -- delighting us with the manifold felicities of her prose.
"A wonderfully idiosyncratic set of essays on women famous and unknown whose public and private lives Fraser examines with great feeling and exactitude...insight, intelligence, and grace". -- Newsday
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Publishing group
Random House USA Inc
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 216 mm
Width: 140 mm
Thickness: 17 mm
Weight
382 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-375-70112-2 (9780375701122)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

E-Book
01/2014
Vintage
€5.49
Available for download
Person
Kennedy Fraser