Fifty Days of Solitude

When her companion Sylvia left for an extended book-buying trip, Doris Grumbach was given 50 days alone in their home on the coast of Maine. It was the winter of 1993 and the 75-year-old Grumbach surrounded herself with silence and music, with books and an empty journal, with paintings and the view out her window of a bare winter landscape. Fifty Days of Solitude is a memoir of what Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called the "inscape": the deep, meandering landscape of an interior life. Grumbach's observations about the paintings of Edward Hopper, the death of a friend from AIDS, and the life-long grief of Dr. Anna Perkins for her companion Miss Hannay are full of dignity and pathos. Fifty Days of Solitude is a rendering of the mind and heart alone, of how distance and silence inform our compassion and intellect.