Robinson and Dillard: Wrapping Up

The previous thirty-one posts in this series have covered Marilynne Robinson’s and Annie Dillard’s youth (I, II), some of their first influences (I, II, III, IV), their earliest available work (I, II, III, IV, V, VI), their grad-school theses and dissertations, their first published books for general audiences, and a random uncollected but representative Dillard essay. We’re up to the late 1990s, when Dillard has a novel behind her and yet another prose assemblage, and Robinson has fallen a little too under the spell of America and also under the spell of John Calvin. It doesn’t seem like it, but … this is the end.

Late in life, Marilynne Robinson turns again to Shakespeare, the subject of her dissertation. He’s all over The Givenness of Things in particular. She doesn’t try to claim him for one side or the other in the controversies of the Reformation, but she reads him as a person fascinated by the ideas surround him, and excited by the challenges they pose to the dramatist. She writes, for example: “Shakespeare tests various and opposed ideas, giving each one extraordinarily rich expression. He savors a good idea.” Later in the same essay: “Grace is grace. How would this be staged?”