Violet Weingarten: Half a Loaf, Half a Voice

FAIN: FT-13855-78

Nancy Y. Hoffman
St. John Fisher College (Rochester, NY 14618-3537)

To write a study of the literary development of Violet Weingarten (1916-1976), who wrote her first novel in 1968. Her fiction dealt with the dilemmas facing modern, middle-aged women: loneliness, generational conflict, the empty "successes" of women in the professions, the infidelities of a financially successful, middle- aged husband. Weingarten kept a diary of her two final years, when she learned she had cancer. She also wrote and published her last novel, Half a Marriage, about her husband's affair, and the first five chapters of a book about a woman with cancer. This study will examine Weingarten's movement for detachment to involvement to abandonment in her four published novels; it will then compare her response to her death sentence in her fiction and non-fiction.