Maiden Hour

By: Kennelly, Kate

In her feminist essay A Room of One's Own (1929), Virginia Woolf reminds us that if women have appeared pervasively as objects of fascination in the annals of literature, it was almost always as an extension of men's imaginations rather than their own. With a female dreamer at its center, the poetry in Maiden Hour echoes Woolf's desire to subvert this trend-painting its queens, muses, girls, and goddesses through a distinctly delicate and intimate sensibility. Its odyssey begins within the confines of a young woman's sheltered existence-one she now realizes left her unprepared for the world's crueler webs of human desire and manipulation. As her darker memories threaten to resurface, she seeks refuge in the worlds of art and myth, assembling a private pantheon of feminine inspiration and power: the luminous huntress and moon goddess Diana, the ravishing witch-sorceress Circe, the princess from an ancient Japanese legend whose refusal to be courted gave birth to the first bleeding heart flower. Reclaiming these figures in her own voice, she celebrates their artful and passionate defiance-their determination to preserve their agency and define their own "Edens," where they are no longer the banished temptresses but the emboldened rulers.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0D4QP8JZN
• ISBN13: 9798325586477
• Release Date: May 2024
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 76 Pages
• Weight: 0.18 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.0" x 8.0"