Ornament and Silence

In the fourteen superb essays collected in this volume - most were published in The New Yorker and Vogue; two appear in print for the first time - Kennedy Fraser explores the uniquely female voice, the uniquely female presence, in literature and art. She reveals how the early sexual experiences of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton colored their emotions and their work. She considers the long life in exile of Nina Berberova, with its complicated, intertwining loves and friendships. She shows us Vermeer, unrivalled "in conveying the active, passive, peculiarly feminine inner life" of another time, and Louise Colet, Flaubert's mistress, trying to find a permanent place in his life as well as in his work. Fraser writes engagingly of such survivors as the feminist Germaine Greer, the English naturalist Miriam Rothschild, and the New York haute couture designer Valentina. She observes the havoc Paul Scott and Henri Matisse wreaked on the women and families around them during their very different careers in the arts. Vignettes from her own life - about her garden, about buying meat in New York, about her sister - are interspersed throughout. And the book ends with a remembrance of her days at William Shawn's New Yorker, where she was introduced to the writing life.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.