Search Results

“... Fanny Howe​ is so adept at creating floating worlds, gossamer meditations on being and art, that a reader might mistake autobiographical anecdotes for fables. In the final piece in her 2009 essay collection, The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation, she goes to a café in Paris to meet an unnamed older woman, vaguely a colleague, whose existential pronouncements bear down harshly: ‘You are welcome to commit suicide ...”

“... S ome people​ convert to Catholicism to answer their doubt, others to give their doubt shelter. Fanny Howe belonged to the latter party. ‘Did I have faith or was it hype,’ she asks in one poem. And later: ‘Did I believe or was it hope.’ Even within the idiosyncratic terms of her faith she was a refusenik: ‘I am secular ...”

“... of this avant-garde theatrical troupe, of which the presiding spirits were Lang and Molly Howe (mother of the poets Susan and Fanny Howe), who had trained at the Abbey Theatre in the 1920s and had been directed by Yeats. Other founding members included O’Hara, John Ashbery, Edward Gorey and Donald Hall, all ...”

“... some wandering for days before stumbling back to their settlements. Atherton was among them.Susan Howe took Atherton’s ordeal after the ‘Falls Fight’ as the focal point for her poem sequence ‘Articulation of Sound Forms in Time’, which was published as a chapbook in 1987 and later collected in Singularities (1990). It was his name that first caught ...”

“... half-souled and the half-educated,’ Maimie Pinzer wrote in one of the letters to the Bostonian Fanny Quincy Howe that make up The Maimie Papers. Later on, when she had set up a shelter for young prostitutes in Montreal, she described her favourite among them as being ‘the opposite of “bourgeois” ’. Neither Gladys ...”

“... orchestras of victim-shriek and song’, and I can understand why when some contemporary poets – Fanny Howe, for example – pay him their respects they think of Beckett. An early masterpiece like ‘Neutral Tones’ is illuminated by a light source (‘the sun was white, as though chidden of God’) much like the one that opens Murphy (‘The sun ...”

“... itself in realistically. Richardson uses as a convention the letter-writing of Clarissa and Anna Howe, but their intimacy is itself a fact to be taken for granted. The problem is that once men have invented women in fiction, it is difficult for women not to produce a counter-invention in the same spirit. Guidelines and frontiers are all too easily drawn. I ...”

“... husbands were supported by their communities, and press coverage could be sympathetic. James Howe began to live as a man in 1732, aged sixteen, and had been married for thirty years before his desperation at being blackmailed by a childhood acquaintance led him to reveal his secret. After his friends and neighbours learned that ...”

“... Ellmann herself offers in evidence only the four opening lines from one of Keats’s poems to Fanny Brawne: Physician Nature! let my spirit blood! O ease my heart of verse and let me rest; Throw me upon thy tripod till the flood Of stifling numbers ebbs from my full breast. Though the lines do convey the speaker’s yearning to be eased of the pressure ...”

“... villas, and a blue arm of sea, and the hills upon the further side’. I stopped at the corner of Howe Street and Heriot Row, where you are bound to feel the press of Stevenson’s young mind, for these are his ‘sleepy quarters’, his world of oil-lamps and dark coasts.He lived at 17 Heriot Row, five floors of grey Georgian elegance facing the Queen Street ...”