![]() ![]() She was alienated from her former self-the prodigy who had delighted her domineering father and stunned teachers at her high school, the Radcliffe undergraduate who had won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets’ Prize, the Guggenheim Fellow who had infiltrated the all-male Merton College at Oxford. ![]() “When I receive a letter soliciting mss., or someone alludes to my ‘career,’ I have a strong sense of wanting to deny all responsibility for and interest in that person who writes-or who wrote,” she recorded in her journal in 1956. She had little time to write and even less motivation. Years later, looking back on this time, Rich would characterize herself as “sleepwalking.” Most days, she was up at dawn with a child before turning to endless domestic tasks: cooking, cleaning, supervising the kids. ![]() And now, despite her contraception, she was pregnant again, to her dismay. She had two young children, and while pregnant with the first she had developed a rash, later diagnosed as an allergic reaction to the pregnancy itself. The first signs of rheumatoid arthritis had appeared seven years earlier, when she was twenty-two. It was the summer of 1958-the end of “the tranquilized Fifties,” in the words of Robert Lowell-and the poet Adrienne Rich was desperate. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |