Slowly, by Thy Hand Unfurled

Romulus Linney is the author of three novels, many short stories, and forty plays, staged throughout the United States and abroad. They include The Sorrows of Frederick, Holy Ghosts, Childe Byron, Heathen Valley, 2, and a stage adaptation of Ernest Gaines' novel, A Lesson Before Dying.He won two OBIE awards, one for Sustained Excellence in Playwriting, two National Critics Awards, three DramaLogue Awards, and many fellowships, including grants from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations. He is the Founding Playwright of Signature Theatre Company. Stories appear in many literary journals and in the Anthologies Pushcart Prize, New Stories from the South, Best of the Year, 2001 and 2002. His 1960s novels, Heathen Valley and Slowly, By Thy Hand Unfurled, were recently republished by Shoemaker & Hoard, Washington, D.C. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which has given him its Award in Literature and The Gold Medal For Drama.

In Slowly, By Thy Hand Unfurled, a nineteenth-century nameless and poorly educated housewife records a remarkable diary of her dark, disintegrating journey. Trying to make sense of herself and to form a judgment of her life, she struggles in confusion to pierce the narrow limits of her understanding-of her time and place, of the realities of her nature. Award-winning Romulus Linney has written an exquisite exercise in self-destruction, but its final strength rests in its naked yet compassionate treatment of human guilt and suffering. The diarist's language is blunt and deformed, but it also reaches toward a lyricism as she sees the discrepancies between what she professes and what she practices-as a mother, a wife, and individual.