The furies

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In a novel of sweeping grandeur and lush, brilliant prose, Janet Hobhouse delves deep into the heart of a quarrelsome, self-dramatizing, and passionate family of women, three generations of mothers and daughters - daughters who leave mothers and mothers who leave daughters. It is a family of no fathers to speak of and no brothers, and for two generations there is born a pair of sisters who will define themselves to the outside world either as victims or as women. Warriors, the good sister or the bad. The clan begins with Mirabel, matriarch and great-grandmother; a grande dame of Old New York society and a widow of forty years; famously ugly, famously loved, she was the founder of this line of lovely, financially incompetent, largely bohemian females. From her own daughters, to her granddaughters - "poor, beautiful Bett" and her "selfish" sister, Constance - and finally to Mirabel's great-granddaughter, Helen, The Furies is a tale. Of a family of powerful personalities in conflict, each struggling with her own aspirations, the expectations of the previous generation, and the jealousies of siblings. Helen herself grew up loving ferociously - whether it was love for her beautiful mother, Bett, whose unworldliness kept the two of them in financial peril, or for the Oxford student who kindled passion so extravagant it was deemed "beyond ridicule." Propelled by the drive to forge a life and an identity. Of her own making, a life not molded by the sins of the mother, Helen seeks out those places in the heart where obsessions and terrors dwell. Hers is a story of frank curiosity so filled with captivating and at times painful detail that it is impossible to look away. The Furies was the last novel Janet Hobhouse wrote before her death, in 1991, yet its rich and expressive literary style shows Hobhouse in her fiercest and finest form.