The Furies

“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

“Hobhouse traces the rise and fall of a family’s fortunes by focusing on its women, on the wives and mothers who might be consigned to the margins of the official story.” —A.O. Scott, The New York Times Book Review

Janet Hobhouse (1948-1991) was raised in New York City and educated at Oxford. She lived in London and New York and was the author of two works of non-fiction, The Bride Stripped Bare, a study of the female nude in art, and Everybody Who Was Anybody- A Biography of Gertrude Stein, and four novels, Nellie Without Hugo, Dancing in the Dark, November, and The Furies, which was published after her death from ovarian cancer at the age of forty-two.

Daphne Merkin is the author of Enchantment, a novel and Dreaming of Hitler, a collection of essays. Her cultural criticism has appeared in a range of publications, and has been widely anthologized. She has been a staff writer for The New Yorker, and is currently a contributing writer at Elle and The New York Times Magazine. She lives in New York City, where she teaches writing, and is at work on a memoir, Melancholy Baby.

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