“... explorations of the mother-daughter bond in the formation of women’s consciousness (the bond Adrienne Rich said was patriarchal society’s ‘great unwritten story’), O’Brien posits this strong current in Cather’s life, ‘possibly more intense for her as a lesbian than for heterosexual women, since her lovers directly reinvoked the dynamic ...”

“... have tended to prefer certain representations of the experience (or ‘institution’, as Adrienne Rich called it). In recent years, as the feminist theorists Jennifer C. Nash and Samantha Pinto have pointed out, the dominant version has been the ambivalent ‘white, middle-class mother’, with her titillating, unthreatening articulation of ...”

“... the only philosophy he really knew’ and he begins with the grammar closest in (to paraphrase Adrienne Rich on geography), that of the body – because beyond and above all other cages, Aron is trapped in his body, a pre-pubescent one which refuses to grow. Aron’s parents, especially his mother, would tell Aron’s story far more simply. Until the ...”

“... post hoc, by the size of the rent it has left in the ideal lyric. Thus Vendler has censured Adrienne Rich for political lecturing, and Anne Sexton for sentimentality. In Soul Says, she chastises Robinson Jeffers for affectation and bombast. Vendler’s detractors call this a narrow aesthetic. They are right, but for the wrong reasons. It is narrow ...”

“... excerpts from letters written by Hardwick ‘under the stress and pain of desertion’, as Adrienne Rich put it in a damning review. ‘Aren’t you violating a trust?’ Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Lowell, urging him to reconsider his use, and particularly his alteration, of the letters. ‘Art just isn’t worth that much.’ (A year and a half ...”

“... book, though one that often leaves you wondering whether its author, who’s as fond of quoting Adrienne Rich (‘Truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity’) as he is of dropping some Larkin, has read much Dostoevsky. The vexing question for Ben Blum is whether Alex Blum is a good person. But since being a good person ...”

“... in 1898. The misogyny her presence provoked would become legendary (the best account is given by Adrienne Rich). And although she never self-identified as Jewish, being Jewish is something with which she was always identified. As Ettinger puts it, ‘she represented a nation the Germans considered inferior and a race that offended their ...”

“... Norcross was like a fourth member of the family; then at the end of 1909 she fell in love with a rich cousin. Mary was distraught and Marianne was trapped: ‘You can certainly feel assured that you were never more needed in your life and probably never will be more needed than you are just this winter by the Fawn,’ Norcross wrote to her in September ...”

“... Assos on the Turkish coast, and from there across the narrow strait to Lesbos where the nutrient-rich, calm lagoon harboured an abundance of salt and freshwater fish, eels, shellfish and other sea creatures, its marshy shores home to a chorus of birds, frogs and insects. The life flourishing in this sheltered pool was a boon to Aristotle’s decision to ...”

“... place and the poem, and then ‘an act of leave-taking’. Much of this strikes me as indebted to Adrienne Rich. In ‘Blood, Bread and Poetry: The Location of the Poet’ (1984), for instance, Rich writes about the damage done by ‘alienation’ and an inadequate ‘location of the self’ in verse. Like Boland, she ...”

“... could one engage with the poetry of Dryden without assessing his politics, or with the lyrics of Adrienne Rich without considering her feminism? It is hard to be sure how seriously Vendler proposes this impoverished remit for criticism because she slips so blurringly from ‘poetry’ to ‘lyric poetry’. But she then hits another snag, because, even ...”

“... in at around eight hundred pages. I read that first and then her journals; they are especially rich to read in the mornings. Then The Bell Jar, as good as I remember; then a glance at the smoking crater of the Plath-Hughes myth; then The Collected Poems, fresh as fish, and arrayed in shining scales. The rhythm of my notes changed, went in ...”

“... destructive and neurotic. You are leading a parasitic life, just like her other lovers … All the rich squalor, covering up for inability to feel and function … I do not like parasites … She will destroy you … This kind of anarchy and nihilism will certainly ruin you … You are a great American writer … You are a loss to our culture, hanging about ...”

“... I can scarcely bear to read: they are too ugly, for being too cruel, too intimately cruel.’ Adrienne Rich called it ‘one of the most vindictive and mean-spirited acts in the history of poetry’. Bishop felt ‘perfectly awful’ after reading the poems: ‘IF you were given permission – IF you hadn’t changed them … etc. But art just ...”

“... Mailer’, an exchange of gifts (a silk scarf, a Pottery Barn casserole), into an extraordinarily rich friendship. When friends and foes alike turned on Arendt’s Eichmann book, it was McCarthy who leaped in to defend her: ‘I freely confess that … I too heard … a paean of transcendence, heavenly music, like that of the final chorus of Figaro or the ...”