After a brief stint of trying to show the town that she is in fact, suitable to take care of Ruthie, Sylvie does what everyone else in the family does: decides to run away. I was a baby, lying on my back, yelling, and then someone came and started wrapping me up in blankets. In the decades that followed, Marilynne Robinson would become one of the most significant contributors to contemporary American letters, receiving a National Humanities Medal awarded by President Obama in 2012 for “her grace and intelligence in writing. After some time, Lucille tells Ruth that she does not need to stay with Sylvie, but Ruth would hear none of it. Ruth has chosen the stranger and more difficult path in life, the path Sylvie laid out for her—a path which continually demands she commune with the natural world and give herself over to its powers.

However, it may also be assumed that each of these paths is flawed in some manner though still being a way to resolve the problem. They arrive at a small island in the center of the lake, where Sylvie leads Ruth to a hidden, frost-covered valley, at the center of which sits a fallen-down house. While she and Sylvie are only dead in a metaphorical sense, they are still “dead to the ‘other world’ that Lucille and all the townspeople presumably still inhabit” (Toles 127). Robinson was born Marilynne Summers on November 26, 1943, in Sandpoint, Idaho, the daughter of Eileen (Harris) and John J.After Sylvia’s death, they enter the care of their great-aunts, Lily and Nona Foster, and are eventually surrendered to their mother’s eccentric sister, Sylvie Fisher. It becomes progressively hard to cope with a lonely existence that the girls are succumbed to, and both girls find their own ways to deal with this problem. It is a story filled with colorful and alluring metaphors, which make the entire book compelling to read.

Because of her husband’s diagnosis, she has been confined to a room that she considers to have a dreadful appearance because of the yellow wallpaper. The book Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson shows that if your problems seem too big too handle it’s okay to run away from them. It is about a woman who is so far from everyone else that it would be presumptuous to put a name to her frame of mind”. First published in 1980, Housekeeping is the story of two sisters, Ruth and Lucille, who are raised by a rotating cast of eccentric female family members after their mother drives a borrowed Ford off a cliff and into the lake that dominates the fictional town of Fingerbone. S. Naipaul (1988) • Octavio Paz (1989) • Christa Wolf (1990) • Kurt Vonnegut (1991) • Bohumil Hrabal (1992) • Seamus Heaney (1993) • J.Indeed, in the novel’s startling final pages, Sylvie and Ruth work together to set fire to their family’s ancestral home in preparation for setting out together as a pair of transients. My mother never drove one of her beat-up cars into the lake waters of her childhood, and nobody I loved ever slid off a railway bridge in a train car in the middle of the night. Perhaps it would be more enjoyable thinking about housework as an opportunity to lose us in another new world. The meanings of these stories are complex and must be thoroughly analyzed before making rash judgments. In May 2011, Robinson delivered the University of Oxford's annual Esmond Harmsworth Lecture in American Arts and Letters at the university's Rothermere American Institute.

Although he has dealt with many murders and other violent crimes, he is uncertain how to deal with Sylvie's apparent neglect of Ruth and Lucille.Abandoned by their suicidal mother at a young age, Ruth and Lucille are raised for several years by their grandmother Sylvia.