After Housekeeping debuted in 1980, Robinson would not publish another novel for twenty years. What happened in those years? one might be tempted to ask. Life. The dailiness of work and raising children and watching them grow up and come of age. A move abroad to London, where she would complete research that would become her first book of non-fiction, Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution(1989), an investigation into the environmental impact of the Sellafield processing plant on the coast of the Irish Sea, and then a collection of writings, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998). Marilynne Summers Robinson (born November 26, 1943) is an American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people. [2] Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991 [3] and retired in the spring of 2016. [4] The novel treats the subject of housekeeping, not only in the domestic sense of cleaning, but in the larger sense of keeping a spiritual home for one's self and family in the face of loss, for the girls experience a series of abandonments as they come of age. All of the events take place in the house that was built by their grandfather, Edmund Foster. The man worked for the railroad and lived happily, but his life ended in a train derailment that took place on the bridge over the large glacial lake near Fingerbone. The orphans’ mother and aunts took different paths after they were raised in this house.

Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (1980) tells the story of Ruthie, a quiet, friendless girl living in a remote Idaho town called Fingerbone. The train that travels into the cold mountains of Fingerbone crosses a lake that has claimed the lives of Ruthie's grandfather by accident and her mother by suicide, leaving Ruthie and her younger sister Lucille with their grandmother, Sylvia Foster. If you were the child-welfare officer or sheriff, what would you have done with Ruthie and Lucille? How would you defend your decision?What Does It Mean to Love a Country? (online: Don't Give Up on America)". The New York Times. October 9, 2020. Something always comes between fathers and sons, but what divides these two has divided all of Christendom: whether to turn our swords into plowshares or take them up in a just war. Asked one Fourth of July to speak during the town celebration, the elder Ames makes the case for the latter path: “When I was a young man the Lord came to me and put His hand just here on my right shoulder. I can feel it still. And He spoke to me, very clearly. The words went right through me. He says, Free the captive.” Others heard the same call, he continues, and they answered it courageously, often at their own peril. “General Grant once called Iowa the shining star of radicalism,” he says. “But what is left here in Iowa? What is left here in Gilead? Dust. Dust and ashes.”

Although both girls find their aunt’s housekeeping eccentric, they view it in different ways. Eccentric housekeeping is manifested in Sylvie’s insisting that the family should eat in the dark. Ruth is the one to accept these odd habits of her aunt, but Lucille does not want to tolerate such behavior and, thus, begins to rebel. The girls avoid school for some time as the weather becomes warmer but eventually return to their studies. Lucille decides that the two of them should not be cloistered up and reaches out to other girls in the school. However, Ruth is left to herself – feeling alone and abandoned. Prolonged moments of Lucille’s absence are taking their toll on Sylvie that becomes more and more silent. In the 1950's Pacific Northwest, a series of bizarre events unfold leading to the abandonment of two adolescent girls. In a dramatic early scene, the girls' misfit mother amiably asks some young boys for help in getting her car out of a muddy rut. When they do, she casually commits suicide in front of them by driving over a cliff. Her daughters, long abandoned by their father, become the wards of their grandmother and aunt, who see them into their early teens. When the deceased mother's sister shows up, the grandmother and great aunt disappear into the night, leaving them in the care of the newly arrived "Aunt Sylvie" (Lahtie).At the moment, she is planning another volume in her Ames/Gilead sequence. Three more from Marilynne Robinson After Nona and Lily leave, Ruthie has frequent nightmares that she and Lucille are taken away from Sylvie. How do these—and her other dreams of trains and bridges—foreshadow the future? Robinson has served as visiting professor and writer-in-residence at several colleges and universities in the U.S. and abroad. In 1991, she joined the faculty of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. She currently resides in Iowa, where she teaches and writes. An Interview with Marilynne Robinson Overall, Housekeeping is filled with existential themes that are mainly tragic in tone and explore feelings of isolation, grief, loneliness, and inability to accept loss or even oneself. The author uses a number of plot devices and characters to explore these themes creating an image of emotional numbness and conflicts. Ruth and Lucille are essentially contrasted to each other to convey the idea of conflicting means of coping with both existence and the tragedy of losing a parent, family member, and friend.