Tillie Olsen

14 January 1912 - 01 January 2007

Standard Name: Olsen, Tillie

Birth Name: Tybile Lerner

Self-constructed Name: Tillie

Pseudonym: Tillie the Toiler

Self-constructed Name: Matilda

Self-constructed Name: Theresa Landale

Self-constructed Name: Theta Larimore

Self-constructed Name: Amy

Married Name: Tillie Goldfarb

Married Name: Tillie Olsen

Pseudonym: Emily Hulot Olsen

Nickname: The Squeakeress

TO , one of the leading lights of the twentieth-century feminist movement in the USA, prided herself on being a proletarian writer. She published very few books: a short-story volume, a novel, a book of essays, jottings and quotations about the silencing of writers, and an anthology on mothers and daughters. It is unusual for such a slim output to have such a profound effect on a generation of readers. TO was prolific, though, in poetry and political (pro-Communist) journalism and speeches during the 1930s and much later in essays and lectures, many of them about forgotten women writers.

Full profile

Connections

Connections Sort descending	Author name	Excerpt
Cultural formation	Rebecca Harding Davis	RHD 's family, American with roots mainly in Ireland, was comfortably situated. Her father held positions of local influence, and she and her husband made themselves well off by years of hard work. Her formative...
Friends, Associates	Alice Walker	This job cemented her friendship with Gloria Steinem . Later, after her divorce, AW and June Jordan started The Sisterhood, a group of black women, artists of one kind of another, who met regularly for...
Friends, Associates	Anne Sexton	AS made many friends among her fellow poets: Kumin , Soter , William DeWitt Snodgrass , Sylvia Plath (whose death affected her deeply), George Starbuck and James Wright (who were also her lovers), and Anthony Hecht
Literary responses	Anne Sexton	Elizabeth Bishop wrote to Robert Lowell that these poems were good, in spots only, less fully realised than his on a similar subject-matter. I feel I know too much about her . . ....
Literary responses	Mary Oxlie	MO has had an almost uniformly enthusiastic press. Her poem was praised by David Masson , who published a biography of Drummond in 1873, and by the late twentieth-century scholar Robert H. Macdonald. Tillie Olsen
Literary responses	Willa Cather	This volume was badly received. Cather sent a copy to Henry James , whom at this date she much admired. As Tillie Olsen later pointed out indignantly, he never replied. To an enquiry from a...
Literary responses	Rebecca Harding Davis	Feminist writer and scholar Tillie Olsen revived RHD 's reputation with the publication of Life in the Iron Mills; or, the Korl Woman. This included Life in the Iron-Mills, The Wife's Story and Anne. Reid, Panthea. Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles. Rutgers University Press, 2010. 257 OCLC WorldCat. 1992–1998, http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999. Davis, Rebecca Harding. “Biographical Introduction”. Life in the Iron Mills; or, the Korl Woman, edited by Tillie Olsen, The Feminist Press, 1972. 7
Literary responses	Rebecca Harding Davis	After RHD 's death, her fiction fell out of favour with scholars and was unknown to readers until it was revived in 1972 by feminist literary critic Tillie Olsen . Olsen had read the story...
Literary responses	Rebecca Harding Davis	Including this work in Life in the Iron Mills; or, the Korl Woman, Tillie Olsen remarked that [a]side from any light or dark that it casts on factors in [RHD 's] breakdown, The...
Literary responses	Rebecca Harding Davis	In its several reprints this book was entitled Life in the Iron Mills and Other Stories. Olsen wrote that from RHD 's work her epoch looks through with its thwarted life, its mighty hungers...
politics	Rebecca Harding Davis	Critics are still divided on RHD 's attitude towards suffrage. Jean Pfaelzer explains: Although Davis was concerned about abolition, temperance reform, divorce law, and prostitution, it appears that she never joined groups or walked in...
Publishing	Anne Sexton	Her first story to reach print was Dancing the Jig, about the relationship of daughter to mother (in which she used her experience as a daughter). It appeared in 1960 in New World Writing...
Reception	Sojourner Truth	Tillie Olsen in 1978 named ST as one of the mosts eloquent users of spoken works in her time. Olsen, Tillie. Silences. Virago, 1980. 184 During the 1990s and early twenty-first century a series of important new studies of ST
Reception	Christina Stead	In 1978 Tillie Olsen called this the definitive novel on world banking. Olsen, Tillie. Silences. Virago, 1980. 243
Textual Features	Olive Schreiner	Tillie Olsen in 1978 pointed out a striking anticipation here of Woolf 's A Room of One's Own: what of the possible Shakespeares we might have had who passed their life from youth upward...

Timeline

1934

US feminist and writer Agnes Smedley , a supporter of Communist forces in China, published China's Red Army Marches, an account of the organization and growth of the Red Army 's campaign against the Kuomintang.

Greenspan, Karen. The Timetables of Women’s History. Simon and Shuster, 1994.

335

Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.

Texts

Davis, Rebecca Harding. “Biographical Introduction”. Life in the Iron Mills; or, the Korl Woman, edited by Tillie Olsen, The Feminist Press, 1972.

Davis, Rebecca Harding. Life in the Iron Mills; or, The Korl Woman. Editor Olsen, Tillie, Tillie Olsen, The Feminist Press, 1972.

Olsen, Tillie. Mother to Daughter, Daughter to Mother: A Daybook and Reader. Feminist Press, 1984.

Olsen, Tillie. “Requa”. The Iowa Review, Vol.

, No. 3, University of Iowa, pp. 54-74.

Olsen, Tillie. Silences. Virago, 1980.

Olsen, Tillie. Tell Me a Riddle. J.B. Lippincott Co., 1961.

Olsen, Tillie. Yonnondio. Delacorte Press, 1974.

Tillie Olsen

Connections

Timeline

1934: US feminist and writer Agnes Smedley, a supporter...

1934

Texts