SOURCE: Wolk, Merla. “Offerings: The Price of Speaking Out in the Fiction of Rosellen Brown.” Critique 38, no. 2 (winter 1997): 123-34.

In the following essay, Wolk analyzes the effects that “speaking out” have on the female protagonists in Brown's novels.

For all the wise humor, the rich ironies, and the confirmation of life's ambiguities that mark the fiction of Rosellen Brown as measured and reasoned in its judgments, disaster—terrifying, irreversible, irrational—stands at the center of each of her novels. A child dies, the consequence of mutual rage between mother and daughter, in Autobiography of My Mother (1975); a boat accident in Tender Mercies (1979) reduces a wife and mother to an infant-like state, a quadriplegic, with only voice and mind able to function; an auto accident orphans two children in Civil Wars (1985). placing them in the home of the “enemy,” people who abhor what the children have been raised to...