The Furies

Janet Hobhouse was still writing The Furies when she died of ovarian cancer in 1991, at the age of 42. The book is simultaneously a memoir and a novel, with the protagonist Helen drawn very directly from Hobhouse’s life. She and her mother (Bett in the novel) were products of a strong matrilineal line, devoid of supportive men, and their relationship was unusual and intense. Bett and Helen lived in reduced financial circumstances, causing Helen no end of social difficulties during her school years. And yet she made her way from New York to Oxford, and then into a successful writing career.

But that success was tempered by dysfunctional relationships. Helen is continually restless, moving from one place to another in the blink of an show more eye. She has a tendency towards on again, off again relationships with men. She never quite achieves independence from Bett; they were very close, and Bett was also very needy. And yet the evolution of their relationship drew me in, especially in the latter part of the novel. I also found the last chapter -- in which Hobhouse/Helen announces her cancer diagnosis and contemplates her inevitable death -- very moving.

While The Furies is not an easy read, it’s one of those books that stays with you long after you’ve turned the last page. show less

A beautifully well-written story of growing up as a brilliant and dysfunctional woman, in a family that mirrored and reinforced those qualities, during the mid-20th century. Also tragic because Hobhouse died of cancer in her early 40s before it was completely finished, so the pacing is a little uneven—but the first part, where she's growing up with her charismatic mess of a mother, is just gorgeous.

The biggest attraction of Janet Hobhouse's account of growing up poor in New York City, and how, from those humble beginnings, she got herself to Oxford, and made herself a writer is the prose. It's nice to read such frankly exuberant writing from a time and place when a more austere mode was preferred. Oddly, her mother's suicide, which, one assumes, was intended to be one of the book's central events, makes for the most skim-worth reading: other people's grief, it may be, is just not that interesting. I'll place it on the shelf next to Alix Roubaud's journals.