Roselily Essay | Critical Essay #4

Roselily Critical Essay #4

In the following review, Fowler presents an overview of the story "Roselily."

Alice Walker is an exceptionally good writer. More than that, she has the artist's insight into the quiet dramas enacted in the inner lives of those who are anonymous and ineffable: most of us. All of which adds up to a young writer of great promise and great potential.

The promise—and the potential—are manifest in Ms. Walker's first volume of short stories, In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women.The stories take in a wide spectrum of the black woman's experience in America. We are afforded glimpses of the young rural Southern woman without a husband ( "Roselily,", "Strong Horse Tea" ), the bored, upper class educated housewife who wanders into a love affair with a stranger ("Really, Doesn't Crime Pay?"), the deeply religious old woman who "stood with eyes uplifted in her Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes" (...
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