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Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson.
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Marilynne Robinson earned her reputation as one of the best contemporary writers with Housekeeping (1980), a first novel now considered an American classic. Remarkable not only for the lyricism of its...
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In the following review, Gies lauds Housekeeping as a “sensuous, funny, and mythic” novel.
This extraordinary first novel [Housekeeping] is populated by women and by ghosts. It is narrat...
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In the following essay, Champagne contends that Housekeeping is a feminist postmodern text in which transience and relativity subvert traditional notions of fixity, linearity, and truth.
This essay ex...
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In the following essay, Booth examines the significance of bones, artifacts, and the story of Noah's wife in Housekeeping, arguing that these elements reflect Ruth's attitude toward phys...
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In the following essay, Smyth discusses the sociological discovery of female homelessness during the 1980s and contends that Housekeeping reflects a redefinition of the home, wherein traditional domes...
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In the following essay, Galehouse examines the portrayal of homes and vagrancy in Housekeeping, drawing attention to how Robinson's narrative and language evoke the social, physical, and tempor...
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In the following review, Banks praises Housekeeping for its lyrical prose, strong plot, and interesting point of view.
Paul Valery likened prose to walking, poetry to dancing. Prose, he said, is alway...
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In the following essay, Foster examines Julia Kristeva's feminist critique of women's liberation in her essay “Women's Time” and applies Kristeva's theoretica...
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In the following essay, Mallon explores the significance of the biblical allusions in Housekeeping, asserting that the novel utilizes homelessness as a metaphor for transcendence.
When Marilynne Robin...
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In the following essay, Aldrich examines the mother-daughter relationship in Housekeeping, particularly how Sylvie and Ruth evade patriarchal ideologies through language, female relationships, and unc...
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In the following essay, Ravits demonstrates how Robinson draws on the American literary tradition in Housekeeping and further extends the tradition by writing from a female perspective.
In trying to r...
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In the following essay, Burke contends that Housekeeping may be interpreted as “an unconventional primer on the mystical life,” wherein transience serves as the primary metaphor and Ruth...
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In the following essay, Toles addresses problematic aspects of language and artistic expression while examining Robinson's approach toward questions of being, nature, and transcendence in House...
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In the following essay, Ryan argues that Housekeeping subverts the traditional American myth of wandering—as presented by such canonical male writers as Herman Melville and Mark Twain—of...
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Critical Essay by Paul Gray
Most small American towns have at least one: the "odd" house that everyone knows and gossips about, the old place going to seed on the outside while a hidden,...
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Critical Essay by Le Anne Schreiber
Marilynne Robinson has written a first novel that one reads as slowly as poetry—and for the same reason: The language is so precise, so distilled, so beautif...
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Critical Essay by Anatole Broyard
Here's a first novel that sounds as if the author has been treasuring it up all her life, waiting for it to form itself. It's as if, in writing it, she ...
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Critical Essay by Hermione Lee
[Housekeeping is] written with infinite care. It could easily be made to sound precious, and at times the fine style does become claustrophobic: 'For when does a ...
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Critical Essay by Julie Kavanagh
At the beginning of Marilynne Robinson's outstanding first novel [Housekeeping], set in a far-Western town by a glacial lake, domesticity is endowed with an alm...
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Critical Essay by Alan Brownjohn
Housekeeping is concerned with much more than the gentle account of the failure of [a] family to survive their battle with [an] insidiously hostile environment. Ruth a...
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Critical Essay by Rosemary Booth
Selfhood and shelter have had an intimate association in literature…. [The] notion of shelter is linked with an inner effort to forge a new self. (pp. 306-07)
[...
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Critical Essay by Thomas Leclair
[For] Marilynne Robinson in Housekeeping, style is metaphor: the identification of life with and through unusual language. The elegant, measured prose of Housekeeping ...
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"Home is Where the Heart Is." Whether embroidered with red yarn on a small white pillow or painted in some bubbly scene with roses and hearts, this simple phrase finds its way into almost every hous...
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Teaching Housekeeping
All teaching products sold separately.
Housekeeping Lesson Plans contain 119 pages of teaching material, including:
Marilynne Robinson
Critical Review by Judith Gies
Solace Across the Bridge
