The Furies

(Paperback, Main)

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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.

Reviews

"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 mothers suicide, and the authors 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 [Hobouses] pain is as insistentand lustrousas her craft." Daphne Merkin,Los Angeles Times

"[A] sad, beautifuland profoundly affectingmeditation on love and death and family." Michiko Kakutani,New York Times

"A sort of Jamesian journey through the labyrinth of the narrators consciousness, a finely tuned, highly intelligent, witty, selfexamining and haunted instrumentThis is an intense tale, told at fever pitch. Grab your hat and hang on for the ride."The Boston Globe

Author Bio

Janet Hobhouse (1948-1991) was the author of four novels and two works of non-fiction. Daphne Merkin is the author of Dreaming of Hitler, a collection of essays, and Enchantment, which won the Edward Lewis Wallant award for best new work of American-Jewish fiction. She is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker.