Doris Grumbach - Critical Reception of Grumbach's Work

Critical Reception of Grumbach's Work

Several facets of Grumbach’s work have won her both praise and criticism. Grumbach is often lauded as a feminist writer championing the cause of women in her fiction and revealing the economic, social, and psychological difficulties women face. Other critics find her work not feminist enough and regard her portrayals of women characters as stilted. Grumbach is both highly regarded and often criticized for her focus on gay and lesbian characters. A number of her works, such as The Spoil of the Flowers, Chamber Music, and The Ladies, focus on gay and lesbian themes and characters. She presents lesbian and gay characters in a positive light; social critics have sometimes criticized her writing as unconventional, if not immoral.

Grumbach writes in a wide range of genres—a feature that may raise questions along the lines of "jack of all trades, but master of none." But, a counter argument may be that Grumbach shows interesting talents and a myriad of literary skills to be able to write as a novelist, literary critic, essayist, biographer, memoirist, and cultural critic.

As a writer who explored gay and lesbian themes in the 1950s and 1960s, Grumbach tends to be grouped with other groundbreaking authors who explored these themes and issues at a time in which the popular sentiment was to regard homosexuality as deviant behavior. Such writers as Ann Bannon, Marijane Meaker, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Patricia Highsmith explored gay and lesbian themes in positive ways similar to Grumbach. As Ann Cothran, a literary critic of writers on lesbian themes and author of a study on Simone de Beauvoir states, perhaps Grumbach’s “most important contribution to gay and lesbian literature is the manner in which she consistently represents homosexual relationships matter of factly, as an integral part of the human landscape. Grumbach depicts lesbianism as a positive, life-giving force in women's lives.”

Grumbach’s novels tend to be literary and literate in tone in that she often draws upon well-known writers or writings for her titles and for references within her works. For example, she drew her title for The Spoil of the Flowers from a poetic fragment by Euripides, the title for The Short Throat, The Tender Mouth from "The Pardoner’s Tale" in The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, and The Magician’s Girl from a poem by Sylvia Plath. In addition, Grumbach’s writings often refer to well-known or arcane writings; her dialogs or internal monologues have phrases from Latin, French, and other languages.

Critics have noted that she has drawn from historic persons and events for her fiction. In Chamber Music, for example, she bases the characters and the plot on the American composer Edward MacDowell and his wife, Marian; upon Marilyn Monroe in The Missing Person; upon Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby in The Ladies; and Sylvia Plath and Diane Arbus in The Magician’s Girl.

Grumbach’s achievements as a novelist were recognized, but a significant part of her reputation and current audience is based upon her two memoirs that focus upon aging: Coming into the End Zone and Extra Innings. She has also received praise for her spiritual reflections about her life in The Presence of Absence: On Prayers and an Epiphany. Grumbach has written introductions and critical assessments to the works of such writers as Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and Zora Neale Hurston. Grumbach also wrote an influential review of the novel Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor. Her article on an aborted plan to write a biography of Willa Cather was published in the American Scholar in January 2001.

Grumbach remains an important author for the focus she brought to women’s lives and women’s struggles in the redefinition of women’s roles from the 1950s onward. This dimension is especially true with regard to her positive presentations of lesbians and lesbian lifestyles. Grumbach is admired for her writing style and characterization, which often presents overtones of Henry James and of Gustave Flaubert and Jane Austen in Grumbach’s focus upon social conventions and their influence upon the development of individual lives and psyches. Grumbach is one of several twentieth-century women writers, such as Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland, and Katherine Mansfield who represent a transition from Victorian styles and emphases combined with the social and psychological concerns of modernism. Grumbach’s papers (from 1938 to 2002) are archived in the New York Public Library (Humanities and Social Sciences Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division).