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The Shutter of SnowAuthor: Emily Holmes Coleman American Literature Series August 1997 245 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 paperback, 1-56478-147-X Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $10.36—20% OFF! 
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Book Description
In a prose form as startling as its content, The Shutter of Snow portrays the post-partum psychosis of Marthe Gail, who after giving birth to her son, is committed to an insane asylum. Believing herself to be God, she maneuvers through an institutional world that is both sad and terrifying, echoing the worlds of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Snake Pit.
Based upon the author's own experience after the birth of her son in 1924, The Shutter of Snow retains all the energy it had when first published in 1930.
About the Author
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Emily Holmes Coleman, American poet and novelist, was born in 1899, in Oakland, California. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1920 and soon thereafter left for Paris where she worked as the society editor for the Paris Tribune. As an expatriate writer, Coleman continued to live in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. Although Emily Coleman's papers reveal her to be a prolific writer, her only published works were her contributions to little magazines, such as transition and New Review, and her autobiographical novel, The Shutter of Snow (1930). She kept a close friendship with Djuna Barnes, Edwin Muir, Peggy Guggenheim, Beatrix Wright, and Antonia White. From 1944 until her death the focus of Coleman's attention and activities was her religious life. She became involved with the Catholic left, developed friendships with Dorothy Day and Jacques and Raissa Maritain, and lived in a number of Catholic communities. At the time of her death in 1974, Coleman was being cared for by Catholic nuns at The Farm in Tivoli, New York. |
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Praise
"An extraordinary, visionary book, written out of those edges where madness and poetry meet."—Fay Weldon"The book is no less graphic than it is authentic, an extremely rare achievement in the 'firsthand' document school of letters, for usually we have drama at the expense of truth, or bald facts that unwittingly falsify the picture. The Shutter of Snow is a profoundly moving book, supplying as it does a glimpse of what a temporary derangement and its consequences may mean to the sufferer."—The Nation
"Seldom does one of Mrs. Coleman's background become a victim of psychosis and come back to tell the tale. Certainly there has never been a book containing such a vivid experience in the field of mental shadow as she remembers."—Boston Transcript
"Coleman has succeeded in conveying the pity and terror of the condition in a remarkable manner, without exaggeration and without self-pity or sentimentality. It is a success very rarely achieved in any kind of literature."—The Nation and Athenaeum (London)
"The quick wit which delighted Mrs. Coleman's examiners even when she was psychopathic saves her book from being too utterly depressing. The story of daily life in a ward for the insane is not likely to be merry reading, nor does Mrs. Coleman desire it to be; her intent has an obvious depth beyond that, but there are abysses into which it is hardly fair to lead the reader under the guise of the novel. The Shutter of Snow avoids these without being false to its essential tragedy."—Saturday Review
"A very striking triumph of imagination and technique. . . . The book is not only quite unique; it is also a work of genuine literary inspiration."—Edwin Muir
"A work which has stirred me deeply . . . compelling."—Harold Nicholson
"Coleman seems to have understood instinctively, through her madness, the conflicts experienced by so many women in relation to the process of birth: the powerlessness of the female body in this condition, the mixture of love and hatred felt for husband and child by a woman defenseless in the face of its mysteries and agonies."—Carmen Callie and Mary Siepmann, from their introduction to the 1981 Virago edition of The Shutter of Snow
"Poetic and vivid language."—Feminist Bookstore News