Rites Of Compassion by Gustave Flaubert

Rites Of Compassion by Gustave Flaubert

Cather and Flaubert's ultimate "servants" provide piercing commentary on aging and individuals taken for granted.

Personally selected by award-winning writer Mary Gordon, these two stories by Willa Cather and Gustave Flaubert render a flawless portrait of characters who unquestioningly offer their compassionate service to those that take them for granted.

Old Mrs. Harris is the staunch matriarch of a busy house (the look of which Cather based on her own childhood home), brimming with her spendthrift son-in-law, her displaced Southern debutante daughter, and a bevy of children whose dreams seem out of reach. In "A Simple Heart," written at the request of George Sand, Félicité is the faithful servant first to a family fallen on hard times and then to a stuffed parrot she confuses with the Holy Spirit.

Cruel and honest, these two stories explore the ways in which families treat their aging members, the harsh impatience of the young, and the patient compassion of women who make their family's everyday lives possible.

Wila Cather was probably born in Virginia in 1873, although her parents did not register the date, and it is probably incorrectly given on her tombstone. Because she is so famous for her Nebraska novels, many people assume she was born there, but Wila Cather was about nine years old when her family moved to a small Nebraska frontier town called Red Cloud that was populated by immigrant Swedes, Bohemians, Germans, Poles, Czechs, and Russians. The oldest of seven children, she was educated at home, studied with a Latin neighbor, and read the English classics in the evening. By the time she went to the University of Nebraska in 1891-where she began by wearing boy's clothes and cut her hair close to her head-she had decided to be a writer.

After graduation she worked for a Lincoln, Nebraska, newspaper, then moved to Pittsburgh and finally to New York City. There she joined McClure's magazine, a popular muckraking periodical that encouraged the writing of new young authors. After meeting the author Sarah Orne Jewett, she decided to quit journalism and devote herself full time to fiction. Her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, appeared in serial form in McClure's in 1912. But her place in American literature was established with her first Nebraska novel, O Pioneers!, published in 1913, which was followed by her most famous pioneer novel, My Antonia, in 1918. In 1922 she won the Pulitzer Prize for one of her lesser-known books. One of Ours. Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), her masterpiece, and Shadows on the Rock (1931) also celebrated the pioneer spirit, but in the Southwest and French Canada. Her other novels include The Song of the Lark (1915), The Professor's House (1925), My Mortal Enemy (1926), and Lucy Gayheart (1935). Wila Cather died in 1947.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781558615625
ISBN 10	1558615628
Title	Rites Of Compassion
Author	Gustave Flaubert
Series	Two By Two Ser
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Feminist Press at The City University of New York
Year published	2007-10-01
Number of pages	151
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.