There is a good reason for [Tillie Olsen's] low production. For more than forty years she has been a wife and mother, a family wage-earner at dull and time-sapping menial jobs. She has been, like multitudes of other talents, frustratingly "silent"—silent because, most of all, of the necessities of earning a living and keeping a family together.

Silences, her third book, tells us all this—tells us why, and how arduous and obstructed her life, a woman's life, has been. She has not been alone. Her abundant quotations from others who have endured silently, both men and women, may seem abundant only to those unacquainted with or indifferent to society's waste of individual talents.

If categories are wanted, call this a highly personal commonplace book. Call it a case-book, a text. Above all, it bears the stamp of a passionate and reasonably angry voice. What is said...