Published in 1995 (first published 1979)
310 pages
Adrienne Rich was an American poet, essayist and feminist. Born to a middle-class family, Rich was educated by her parents until she entered public school in the fourth grade. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe College in 1951, the same year her first book of poems, A Change of World, appeared. That volume, chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and her next, The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (1955), earned her a reputation as an elegant, controlled stylist.
In the 1960s, however, Rich began a dramatic shift away from her earlier mode as she took up political and feminist themes and stylistic experimentation in such works as Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), The Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), and The Will to Change (1971). In Diving into the Wreck (1973) and The Dream of a Common Language (1978), she continued to experiment with form and to deal with the experiences and aspirations of women from a feminist perspective.
In addition to her poetry, Rich has published many essays on poetry, feminism, motherhood, and lesbianism. Her recent collections include An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991) and Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991–1995 (1995).
What is this book about?
On Lies, Secrets, and Silence is a sort of travel diary, documenting Adrienne Rich’s journeys to the frontier and into the interior. It traces the development of one individual consciousness, “playing over such issues as motherhood, racism, history, poetry, the uses of scholarship, the politics of language”. She has written a headnote for each essay, briefly discussing the circumstances of its writing. “I find in myself both severe and tender thoughts toward the women I have been, whose thoughts I find here”.
