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The very thing that makes the romance novel feel like so unlikely a genre for a writer like Howe, and that makes these works so easy to overlook in her oeuvre, is what makes them so compelling a place for her to start. The conventionality the genre requires comes to seem like an impossible demand, the novelist seeking the unreachable; the end unraveling itself. This kind of continual seeking, this spiraling search, came to define Howe’s writing. In West Coast Nurse, the ending comes hurriedly; with neither Ellen nor David having found anything like a solution to the problem of silence and speech, there is nothing to mark their coming together now as more secure than their previous attempts. Howe’s first novel ends, appropriately, in a confusion of beginnings and endings—the last word spoken between her lovers is, “Hello.”
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Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Empress Elisabeth of Austria in Courtly Gala Dress with Diamond Stars, 1865
“Towards the end of Elisabeth’s life, a doctor who examined her found that she was suffering from edema caused by starvation, a condition more commonly associated with soldiers in wartime than empresses at resorts by the sea, but she had been starving for so long. Hers was the diet of someone who had to die to be beautiful, and just might. In the end, though, it wasn’t the starving that killed her; it was an anarchist, concerned not with her body but with her crown (he intended to kill a different royal, but didn’t time it right). While Elisabeth was out walking in Geneva, a man named Luigi Lucheni peered under her parasol, then stabbed her in the ribs with a needle. One version of the story has it that she didn’t die on the spot because of how closely her famous corset held the knife in place, though it seems too neat a metaphor for the paradox of beauty’s privation and protection to be true.When he was asked about his motives, Lucheni kept repeating, “Only those who work are entitled to eat.” He can’t have known that his phrasing would scan almost as a joke. She died starving and worked hard at it.”
“Brennan’s feel for revolutionary politics also manifests subtly in the domestic short stories in the book, though they don’t address Irish politics directly. Both revolution and marriage are, after all, exercises of hope; you might even call them both attempts at homemaking—efforts to construct something new, stable, and supportive. Her stories of people who cannot be happy together are about the uncomfortable friction between grand plans for the future and the relentless dailiness of living—a lesson learned by thwarted revolutionaries and unhappy spouses alike.”
Maeve Brennan photographed by Karl Bissinger
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