The Furies

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781590170854
Pages: 312
Publication Date: September 30, 2004

This is a grim, tough, powerful, and beautiful book, the memoir of a genuine heroine, whose struggle against the calamities that beset her — beginning with the wounds inflicted by a remote coldhearted father and a pathetically helpless mother and ending with the anguish of a wrecked marriage, the mother's suicide, and the author's own fatal illness — was waged with enormous intelligence and fortitude, and even with flair. At the heart of the book — and depicted with pitiless candor — is the tortuous bond of love between mother and daughter. That at the end of her brief life, Janet Hobhouse could transform her suffering into a confession so precise and evocative and singularly unselfpitying, so strangely full of verve, strikes me as a considerable moral as well as literary achivement.
— Philip Roth

A stunning heartbreaker of a book, shot through with pellucid sadness...an extraordinary last book in which Hobouse's pain is as insistent—and lustrous—as her craft.
— Daphne Merkin, Los Angeles Times

A sad, beautiful—and profoundly affecting—meditation on love and death and family.
— Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

A sort of Jamesian journey through the labyrinth of the narrator's consciousness, a finely tuned, highly intelligent, witty, self—examining and haunted instrument...This is an intense tale, told at fever pitch. Grab your hat and hang on for the ride.
— The Boston Globe

Hobhouse traces the rise and fall of a family’s fortunes by focusing on its women, on the wives and mothers who might be consigned to the margins of the official story.
—A.O. Scott, The New York Times Book Review