Word: cline
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Cline is also serious about analyzing all of Hall's literary output, and she offers interesting discussions of Hall's poetry and short stories, the later and less successful novels, and the great early books. The latter are often overshadowed by the subsequent notoriety of The Well. For example, Adam's Breed, Hall's remarkable fourth novel, first rocketed her to the top of the bestseller lists and swept the English literary awards...
...Cline also makes an effort to tie together the various threads running through Hall's life and work. While her insights are often interesting, her relentless attempts to psychoanalyze Hall can become grating--after a certain point, one no longer wants to hear that the nuances of the writer's friendships with women can all be traced back to her dysfunctional relationship with her mother. But most of Cline's arguments, including her suggestion that Hall's work can be read as exploring the various facets of the "alienated individual confronted with the mystery of the universe," are straightforward...
...richness of information and exhaustive detail is one of Cline's book's most praiseworthy achievements. Unfortunately, it's also the factor that consistently weighs it down. Cline seems to have aimed to write both a scholarly work and one with popular appeal. But her careful, exhaustive and often pedestrian style makes it a slow read and a frequently heavy one; there's no inspired prose to be found here. The text's punctiliousness about names and dates is a mixed blessing, of course: for the reader with a consuming interest in Hall, or a general fascination with early lesbian...
...Cline's credit, the book isn't a hagiography. Her obsessive attention to detail and her effort to represent more than one side of a given story leaves us with a picture of Hall as a person who, in the final analysis, falls considerably short of sainthood. Hall's behavior toward each of her long-term partners when she fell in love with someone else was unpleasant, to say the least: it's tacky by any standards to start dating your lover's nurse while she's laid up in the hospital. Hall was also a possessive and controlling lover...
...Troubridge was ominously prophetic: Hall was, publicly and privately, martyred for her cause. But she was prepared to put her private self on view, and, once it was all out in the open, refused ever to back down from her stance or to try to hide what she was. Cline, in placing Hall in her larger cultural and literary context, has also succeeded in showing us what an extraordinary act of courage it was for this women, at this time, to make the choice she did. The book is a difficult one, and it does not succeed on all levels...