Hortense Calisher Critical Essay | Critical Review by Robert Kiely

Critical Review by Robert Kiely

SOURCE: “On the Subject of Love,” in The Nation, May 25, 1963, pp. 447-8.

In the following excerpt, Kiely commends Calisher's prose in Textures of Life, though finds fault in her generalizations about women.

To read the newly published novels of Hortense Calisher and Iris Murdoch one after the other is a salutary and educational experience for anyone who tends to place contemporary female novelists together in the same hazy category. There are obvious attributes that women writers, these two included, are likely to have in common; they prefer to see a dramatic situation through the eyes of a heroine rather than a hero, and their feminine characters are deftly and unsentimentally—Lord, how unsentimentally—depicted; they have a fondness for precise detail, and their subject, no matter how you view it, is love.

Beyond that, these two authors defy comparison with each other. If Hortense Calisher’s Textures of Life reminds us...
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