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Grumbach Doris

The Ladies

W. W. Norton and Company, Inc.

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  • ISBN13: 9780393310924
  • Health circumstances: New
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Description

"A tale told in delicate brushstrokes of a relationship in which two hearts came almost literally to beat as one."

Newsday

In the late 18th century, Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby defied all conventions of their Irish homeland and eloped to Wales as a married couple.

There, over many years, they forged a romantic paradise from a simple country cottage and a few acres of land. They called it "Plas Newydd" the New Place. Their home was filled with light and love, with the pursuit of enlightenment, with exquisite expressions of their devotion. Their land contained gardens and quiet paths for walking, fruit trees and flowers and bees, sheep and chickens and cows.

Eleanor and Sarah lived in almost utter solitude. When the outside world eventually discovered them, many people journeyed to Wales out of curiosity to meet the renowned "Ladies of Llangollen." All of them came away with profound respect for their way of life, their love for each other, and their courage to be themselves.

"Understated and elegant, this slim book is a true classic on that rarest of relationships, companions of the heart."

San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle
Fifty Days of Solitude

Beacon Press

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Description

A New York Times Notable Book

Faced with a rare opportunity to experiment with solitude, Doris Grumbach decided to live in her coastal Maine home without speaking to anyone for fifty days. The result is a beautiful meditation about what it means to write, to be alone, and to come to terms with mortality.
When her companion Sylvia left for an extended book-buying trip, Doris Grumbach was given 50 days alone in their home on the coast of Maine. It was the winter of 1993 and the 75-year-old Grumbach surrounded herself with silence and music, with books and an empty journal, with paintings and the view out her window of a bare winter landscape. Fifty Days of Solitude is a memoir of what Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called the "inscape": the deep, meandering landscape of an interior life. Grumbach's observations about the paintings of Edward Hopper, the death of a friend from AIDS, and the life-long grief of Dr. Anna Perkins for her companion Miss Hannay are full of dignity and pathos. Fifty Days of Solitude is a rendering of the mind and heart alone, of how distance and silence inform our compassion and intellect.
Life In A Day

Beacon Press

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Description

In this elegant meditation on age and memory, Grumbach's grace, humor, and insight alert us to the transience of each day and the constant play between past and present.

"[A] book that astonishes in its honesty. . . . What greater gift can a memoir bring than a self revealed in all its grubby particulars, with wit and, when day is done, acceptance?" -Rebecca Pepper Sinkler, The Washington Post Book Review
With the recent plethora of memoirs delving into traumatic lives and despairing experiences, this quiet memoir from the author of The Book of Knowledge and Fifty Days of Solitude is charmingly refreshing. We follow the 77-year-old novelist through a day, eavesdropping on her daily fussings and the interior conversations she conducts with the muses that enable her to write, including Dylan Thomas, Somerset Maugham, and her friend, the late May Sarton. With digressive sidetrips inspired by whatever distracts Grumbach from her quiet daily processes, we enter a rich world of memory and thought informed by a lifetime of books and letters. Sorry, no teenage traumas or bouts with alchoholism or bulimia here--just a fine artist at the top of her craft.
Coming into the End Zone: A Memoir

W W Norton & Co Inc

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Description

Started on the eve of the author's seventieth birthday, this year-long journal records the process of slowly slipping into old age, including coming to terms with losses and with powerful memories. Reprint. PW.
Chamber Music: A Novel

Pushcart Press

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Description

"As if Willa Cather had decided to tell the whole truth....We are captured by her craft."—John Leonard, New York Times

Long out of print, Chamber Music is Doris Grumbach's masterpiece. The Pushcart Press is honored to bring her novel back on the occasion of her ninetieth birthday. In her extraordinary tale, Grumbach re-creates the aura of turn-of-the-century Frankfurt, Boston, and Saratoga Springs—an age when private passions were hidden below the surfaces of public selves.
The Presence of Absence: On Prayers and an Epiphany

Beacon Press

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Description

Named a "Reader's Choice" for 1998 by The Boston Globe

When she was twenty-seven, Doris Grumbach was visited by what she recognized as the presence of God. For a woman with no religious education or faith, the event was as unexpected as it was joyful. It was also never repeated. In The Presence of Absence, Grumbach recollects her quest to recover the sense of God's presence through formal worship, private devotion, and the study of literary accounts of epiphany. Her account is a moving and inspiring journey through "spiritual radiance," faith, and love.
As a 27-year-old, the poet Doris Grumbach had a fleeting yet undeniable experience of God's presence. In order to recapture that experience, she began a frustrating few decades of churchgoing, and eventually she abandoned formal prayer--only to begin an equally frustrating search for God in private. The Presence of Absence: On Prayers and an Epiphany is a slim memoir of her ongoing search. Grumbach is most interesting when she reflects on the writers and thinkers--from Meister Eckhart to Kathleen Norris--who have shaped her understanding of the risks and rewards of solitary prayer. And although her unyielding integrity has trapped her in a loneliness that sometimes sounds terrifying, Grumbach's stringent refusal to be glib about God will serve as an inspiring corrective example for many. --Michael Joseph Gross