Lily Briscoe: A Self-Portrait

by Mary Meigs

Taking as her alter-ego Lily Briscoe—the painter in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse—Mary Meigs paints a portrait of herself, her family and her friends in Lily Briscoe: A Self-Portrait, a book that is both autobiography and memoir. In it, she describes the three major decisions of her life: “not to marry, to be an artist” and to listen to her “own voices.” She speaks of her parents who belonged to “a generation before their own” and how they instilled in her a sense of guilt, locking her in the prison of her self, a prison constructed “with the material of doubt and failure; of shattered dreams and unhappy loves, jealousy, hate, envy and the deadly sins of lovelessness and indifference,” but she also tells how she escapes from this prison with the knowledge that her inner sun takes its energy “from love, from creativity.”
Lily Briscoe: A Self-Portrait is a book about the exercise of the will, the art of dreaming and the transcendent power of friendship. It is a very wise book written by a woman who waited—and lived—some sixty years before beginning to write.

Genres: Queer

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

Reviews

[Julie]

An interesting memoir by Mary Meigs. I was interested primarily in her relationship with Barbara Deming and then the trouple she and Deming had with a younger woman Marie-Claire. That trouple sounds more steamy than Meigs portrays it in the book. The glimpses into Deming are great, though. Here is how Meigs describes her later in the book: Barbara seems to believe that the elements of ourselves that we share with other should be merged in a kind of loving cup from which all women can drink. Her optimism lies in these expansions from units to the whole. . . .Barbara believes that vast numbers of women must come to see how much they suffer from the oppression of marriage and the patriarch system; she is like a growing plan that cracks open a cement road. . . .she says, "It's how I keep on hoping." Yes.

[leema]

"If we are lucky, as I have been, we have made friends of the witnesses of life, and have been humbled by them."

"I had to learn, even if it was chiefly through these friends, that an artist must above all see, not a sterilized fragment of life, but its ugly paradoxes and “terrible beauty.”

"We are formed, I suppose, by everybody we meet, out of resistance or emulation, but our choice of friends often seems to come from the pressure of whatever in us wants to grow, or refuses to grow."

these quotes are everything to me.