An appreciation of Wendell Berry's "Hannah Coulter"
10 August 2013
This book is a testimony of a woman widowed, twice, once by war. There are several ways the book is counter-cultural in classic Berry style. First of all, the book is indeed a romance, but written from the perspective of a seventy year-old woman. This isn’t the kind of book in which the elderly woman sees her life in the past tense, back there in the romance of youth. No, the novel honors her voice as a real human being, deserving of being heard. She isn’t an “old lady,” but a person whose character deepens as the years go by.