Tillie Olsen Books

First published over twenty-five years ago and recently reissued by The Feminist Press of the City Univesity of New York, Edith Konecky's "Allegra Maud Goldman" soars with life, tingles with humanity and snaps with feminist tang. Its theme of self-discovery, a staple of coming-of-age novels, however has a distinct slant; "Allegra" insists that its protagonist, a precocious girl growing up in late Depression Brooklyn, hurl herself against familial and societal restraints imposed on her due to the simple reason of her sex. Konecky has created a masterwork; her novel is neither strident or didactic. Instead, her protagonist, Allegra Maud Goldman tells her own story -- directly, ironically and courageously. It is this unadorned, unaffected point of view and voice which enriches the novel and elevates it to mythical proportions.

Cursed with a memory which forbids her forgetting any sexist reduction of her self, Allegra's childhood unfolds as an unending conspiracy to eviscerate her unbridled enthusiasm for life and undermine her incredible intellectual talents. Unsaddled from the urban poverty afflicting most Americans during the 1930s, Allegra lacks little material comfort but suffers, at an early age, from existential oblivion. Her distant and chronically-absent mother, a social butterfly who has made peace with her marriage to a quietly tyrannical dress manufacturer, provides little to copy as a role model. Allegra must set out to develop, define and fortify her own sense of self in a world seemingly set to reduce her to docile femininity.

In a revealing conversation with her mother, Allegra expresses discontent that her family focuses attention on her older brother David, who suffers from his own lack of confidence. When she asks, "How come nobody around here is at all interested in whether I am finding myself?", her mother dismisses her by telling her that she will "grow up and marry some nice man and have children." Against this biology is destiny environment, Allegra launches her battle. As her childhood evolves, Allegra challenges the different ways boys and girls are indoctrinated to handle their emotions, does battle with a public school system that diligently attempts to socialize girls into subordinate domestic. Her sardonic friend Melanie has one of the best lines of the novel: "If they're prepring us to be housewives...why don't they teach us something useful like sexual intercourse?"

By the time Allegra has come to grips with her evolving body, she has developed a passion for writing and a talent for poetry. Her epiphany is hard-earned and promises a life of rebellion. After having one of her poems purchased for publication in a daily newspaper, her father chooses to take her letter of acceptance instead of her creation to work as a means of validation. Stunned and bewildered by how her family "managed, with nothing but good intentions, to make me feel so dismal," Allegra repeats her own mantra of self-validation, her own declaration of independence: "You're a person. You're a person."

We tend to forget how hard girls have had to work to obtain what boys perceive is their birthright: the need for self-definition, praise for ambition and affirmation for struggle. Strong women come from strong girls. Strong girls come from the crucible of their own experiences and the will to face the hurricane. Edith Konecky's "Allegra Maud Goldman" will be a treasured companion for girls and women who savor the creation of an independent, autonomus self and will be valued by the boys and men who cherish girls and women who are strong, vibrant and proud.

This is a wonderful coming-of-age novel. Allegra Maud Goldman sees past the limitations of her conventional family, her teachers and peers. Her father is only interested in his fashion business, her mother mostly too busy meeting friends. She notices, and usually points out, what they can't see, especially when they treat her differently from her brother because she's a girl. For the most part she remains bright and clever, and her frustration rarely turns inwards or outwards - she rises above everyone and everything with the help of a friend.

It's very funny, very easy to read and stands up to being re-read.

I read this book when I was 10 and had just had dental work done. My treat following enduring that was to pick out a book. It was my good fortune to pick this one. Allegra spoke so strongly to me as a 10-year-old Jewish and precocious girl that I still think about it 20 years later. The family dynamics, the self-esteem campaign launched for her brother and the conflicts bewteen the old and new social mores were way ahead of its time. I can't wait until my children are old enough to read it, too.

I loved this book with all my heart- it told the story of how Allegra travels from childhood to young adulthood, dealing with ideas we all must cope ith- death, sex, love, and friendship. And, as a plus, her name is Allegra, a rarely seen name in the modern world, considering most people think its a drug. This book is one I recomend to all, even the most cynical of people.

This book taught me the meaning of empowerment before the term was coined. I read the book as a child and never forgot Allegra. I recently purchased the book again and wish I hadn't waited so long! The story weakens toward the end but that is meaningless when taken as a whole. The character is a gem - a strong female and Jewish protaganist who never avoids being honest. Quite the role model!

Olsen writes stories that are so powerful, and so well-written, you'll want to read them again and again. Although she uses Jewish culture as a backdrop, her talents bring a universaility to her stories which reminds me of Steinbeck in its power, and Morrison in its complexity.

Tillie Olson is a brilliant woman. She was way ahead of her time, breaking through the constraints binding talented women back then by her sheer persistence and follow-through, becoming recognized as a notable author. Her insights regarding women authors of the 19th century are brilliant. And her story "Tell Me A Riddle" is a classic.

However, her words sometime seem to start from the middle of a conversation, back up against one another, fall over themselves and then make a circuitous route to sometimes puzzling conclusions. "Tell Me A Riddle" occasionally found me shaking my head as if to dislodge some buzzwords that were way too loud and confusing. Although I understood the gist of this powerful story, I found its delivery to be irritating.

Perhaps that is the way Tillie Olsen writes. However, despite the brilliance of her observations, I find her writing style too discordant.

Tillie Olsen packs a lifetime of enforced silences into this slender work of art. These are dense and poetic evocations of Joyce and Woolf, but with an added proletarian knife-thrust to the heart.

"Hey Sailor, What Ship" is the most powerful, concentrated portrayal of alcoholism that I have ever read. Olsen gets inside the mind of a late-stage alcoholic. Her prose seems to stretch and distort as her main character goes on an unplanned bender while on shore leave.

She shows beautiful restraint, too: there is nothing sensational or mawkish here. I am in awe of this story.

Amazed by her words and writing - the first story, I STAND HERE IRONING - where a mother is mulling over the changes in her and her daughter's lives and relationship. The stories were published in the 50s originally, but were written in a time-free fashion. Get you a copy, you hear?

This is an extremely important and readable book about two very important working-class writers. It is one of the finest efforts of its kind to begin to help us rediscover and recover working-class literature as well as to renew the importance of class in our national discussion.

I read Life in the Iron Mills for a graduate English course on social-class-imagery in 18th & 19th cen Transatlantic (British and American) literature with Elisabeth Ceppi at Portland State. Ceppi asked us to read closely for the rhetoric of class attributes. There was much class-identifying-imagery to observe in Harding-Davis' 1860's rendering of the lives of impoverished Welsh miners transported into late-slave-era iron foundries of the American North. Mid-19th-cen feminist literature of this social-reform type is deeply informed by Protestant missionary enthusiasm to transform everyone into clean-living bourgeois church-goers. Thus Harding-Davis uses powerful polarities of dirt for workers, clean for bouregoisie, etc. It's so blunt and obvious that she could be accused of writing soap-opera ... as many of her mid-1800's female-writer colleagues were accused, sometimes justly. However her scenes of poverty, disease, and death in the mills are so heart-wrenching that her motives are clearly pure. Now that Tillie Olsen has rescued Harding-Davis' wonderful writing from obscurity, she is good to read for knowledge of American feminist writing history, for understanding of American class polarities in the ante-bellum era, and also for a true, scary story of life with the great unwashed.

... and less clinical than expected. Read it second to the actual work.

In spite of the fact that Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio has been accused at several occasions of silencing or not fully developing the women's issues sketched on it, this work is (in my opinion) a great innovation on the part of Olsen. Yonnondio is not only the typical product of the Socialist literary tradition, wherein the expected Proletarian Realism is displayed and developed: Olsen's Feminist concerns were not completely silenced and no "lament for the lost" feminist issues can be raised and wielded against her. By includying her Feminist interests, Olsen was as strong as to differ from the Party's established rules improving in this way Proletarian Realism.

Even though Feminist issues and worries such as the double opression of working-class women, sex-roles or the mother-daughter relationship are not finely-developed or solutions granted, this work provides the reader with clues and hints which will make him/her question many of his/her pre-established preconceptions.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
Why aren't you writing?, September 18, 2003
By Charity Kendall (Ann Arbor, Michigan USA) - See all my reviews
Silences by Tillie Olsen

Annotated Bibliography

This book is addressed to the silences in literature and the ways in which writing ceases to be, to the dying and death of capacity. It is about the censorship and self-censorship of woman primarily. The book is written to encourage everyone who is marginalized to find a place for their voice amidst the constrictions of wage-labor and child rearing because their experiences are invaluable. Olsen estimates that only one out of twelve writers in our century are women.Olsen goes into great depth telling the story of Rebecca Harding Davis a nineteenth century woman who spoke out through her literature from isolation both as a woman without encouragement and as a citizen of a backward city, without even a library, in what became West Virginia. She wrote and eventually was introduced to society and made great friends with many prominent writers, however, at age thirty-one she married, and once she had children she let her writing go. Her sympathetic perspective about iron-workers in her town is almost inexplicable in terms of her class. Olsen asks how she got the information she used in her story and remarks on her personal qualities that made her into a popular conversationalist before she retreated/succumbed to motherhood and fulfilled the role of what was properly expected of her. Primarily this book is about the silences of women throughout time. It asks why women have not been enabled to publish, why their lives have usually been overwhelmed by child rearing (their work not allowing time for writing), what is wrong with the world that it doesn't ask-and make it possible-for people to raise and contribute the best that is in them. Olsen explores the idea that women must choose between their art and their fulfillment as a woman and asks what difference it makes to literature if a woman remains childless especially since so many marvels have been created by childless woman. There is a wonderful excerpt from Henry James on the value he placed on his mother's sacrifices to her family.The book is filled with quotes from writers, Katherine Anne Porter writes that writers must not let editors or publishers tamper with their lives because writers are practicing an art while publishers are running a business. Olsen notes that at one time woman were asked to divest themselves of characteristics that might identify them as women if they were to try to write in this man's world. Cynthia Ozick is quoted as saying "...The term "woman writer"...has no meaning, not intellectually, not morally, not historically. A woman is a writer."Common people are asked why they do not write and writers are examined to understand why they have pauses in their otherwise fertile production. This is not about those times a writer takes to regenerate and think creatively, but rather, about those times when it is impossible to write because of the pressures the artist puts on him/herself or allows the world to impose.

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Silences by Tillie Olsen

Annotated Bibliography

This book is addressed to the silences in literature and the ways in which writing ceases to be, to the dying and death of capacity. It is about the censorship and self-censorship of woman primarily. The book is written to encourage everyone who is marginalized to find a place for their voice amidst the constrictions of wage-labor and child rearing because their experiences are invaluable. Olsen estimates that only one out of twelve writers in our century are women.Olsen goes into great depth telling the story of Rebecca Harding Davis a nineteenth century woman who spoke out through her literature from isolation both as a woman without encouragement and as a citizen of a backward city, without even a library, in what became West Virginia. She wrote and eventually was introduced to society and made great friends with many prominent writers, however, at age thirty-one she married, and once she had children she let her writing go. Her sympathetic perspective about iron-workers in her town is almost inexplicable in terms of her class. Olsen asks how she got the information she used in her story and remarks on her personal qualities that made her into a popular conversationalist before she retreated/succumbed to motherhood and fulfilled the role of what was properly expected of her. Primarily this book is about the silences of women throughout time. It asks why women have not been enabled to publish, why their lives have usually been overwhelmed by child rearing (their work not allowing time for writing), what is wrong with the world that it doesn't ask-and make it possible-for people to raise and contribute the best that is in them. Olsen explores the idea that women must choose between their art and their fulfillment as a woman and asks what difference it makes to literature if a woman remains childless especially since so many marvels have been created by childless woman. There is a wonderful excerpt from Henry James on the value he placed on his mother's sacrifices to her family.The book is filled with quotes from writers, Katherine Anne Porter writes that writers must not let editors or publishers tamper with their lives because writers are practicing an art while publishers are running a business. Olsen notes that at one time woman were asked to divest themselves of characteristics that might identify them as women if they were to try to write in this man's world. Cynthia Ozick is quoted as saying "...The term "woman writer"...has no meaning, not intellectually, not morally, not historically. A woman is a writer."Common people are asked why they do not write and writers are examined to understand why they have pauses in their otherwise fertile production. This is not about those times a writer takes to regenerate and think creatively, but rather, about those times when it is impossible to write because of the pressures the artist puts on him/herself or allows the world to impose.

I am not shocked that this wonderful work is out of print -- it's simply history repeating itself. But I do think we should work very hard to get it back into print, probably by one of the small feminist publishers, such as The Feminist Press or Aunt Lute or Spinster -- because they are faithful to their books. However, until that happens, those looking for the essays will find many of them reprinted in various anthologies, including the title essay, "Silences: When Writers Don't Write" in IMAGES OF WOMEN IN FICTION: FEMINIST PERSPECTIVES ed. Susan Koppelman, Popular Press, 1972, and still in print and available from the publisher.

This scholarly exploration of how silence is imposed on the literary writing of those people hampered by gender, class, religion, or ethnicity was first published in 1978 and has recently been reissues with a new preface. Olsen speaks of the obstacles and frustrations faced when women and other disenfranchised people are driven to put words to paper. The fact that Olsen took 15 years to write this book, squeezing bits of time between working and mothering, goes a long way toward demonstrating exactly what she's talking about.

It is an embarassment that this title is out of print. As a woman, mother, writer, I am reading it now + find it to be an important tool. SO here is my suggestion for obtaining a copy, which may be awful but nonetheless it is how I got my copy: I borrowed it from the library and then told them I lost it + then I paid for it.

A young girl survives a very hardscrabble existance, dragged from coal mine to sunflower farm to the bloody slaughterhouses of Omaha as her father struggles to find work that will support himself and his growing family. The little girl tries to find joy in a life that is almost totally devoid of it; to escape despair, her father drinks; her mother, constantly pregnant, is worn out trying to keep them all fed and housed; and the one place where they are all happy, the sunflower farm in North Dakota, ruins them with capricious weather. Their final move, to Omaha, is where the book ends.

I gave the book 5 stars on the strength of the writing and story; a book that was begun decades earlier, the author resurrected what was already written and published it without adding much. It's a pity there is no followup; it is a story begging for resolution. You wonder how the family did; if the children grew to escape the fates of their parents (one child is lost to sickness), or if they were lost in the cracks of humanity that swarmed amongst the poor of the 30s. I heard stories like this while growing up, from survivors of the Depression; we will probably not return to such abject misery as is portrayed here, but this thin little book is a cautionary tale, and very moving.

The majority of Yonnondio was written when Olsen was 19 years old. Her husband discovered its remains among Olsen's papers in 1972 and she herself pieced the current book together and published the still unfinished results in 1974. This newest version of the book includes new material discovered by Olsen that was not included in the 1974 version.

Yonnondio (the title taken from a Walt Whitman poem) is a moving lament for the impoverishment and despair of young families and young women during the depression. Despite the uneveness and jumpiness of the narrative (an artifact of its unfinished status), the small and detailed moments leap out through the pages to capture the reader. It is occasionally a very sad book, and always very beautiful.

It's unusual to be so impressed by an unfinished novel published when the author was still living. Unfortunately, Olsen has published so few works that even something rough and unfinished is a welcome treat. While I understand her insistence that she would not write any new material for the book, it is hard not to read it and wish it were possible to read the finished book. If the fragments are so magnificent, what would the final work have been?

First, the woman who claims the father in this book has sexual relations with his child is mistaken. Actually, what takes place is a marital rape that the child hears through the wall. Not pretty, but any feminist activist has to know this kind of tragedy didn't end in the 30s...

That aside, this book is one of the most poignant portrayals of poverty and working class struggle I've ever read. I've taught it to literature students who agreed that the picture Yonnondio paints is not pretty, but the book is mesmerizing just the same. It's absolutely shameful that an amazing book by one of the foremost advocates for women's and working class people's rights is being "silenced" by going out of print.

Tillie Olsen write much like Steinbeck in her prose as she illustrates the struggles of a poor family.

As an activist for 30 years, I initially was drawn to the description of the book, primarily that which dealt with working class and women's struggles. However, as I read the first quarter of the book, it became difficult to read the pages of abuse (hitting, beating) to the children and wife in this story. I was determined to read the rest, based on the seemingly progressive content/review of the book. I stopped in the middle of the book when the father/husband had sexual relations with his (female) child. I have never thrown out a book before, but with this one, I did so with pleasure.

Tillie Olsen's YONNONDIO is such an essential story of poverty and personal struggle. When we look around for stories that help us, this should be high on any list. It's as relevant today as it was in 1936; the poor continue to be used and forgotten, and yet their spirit rises as it does in this clear and compassionate portrait.