Finding Tonks

Why would a successful novelist and poet quit writing to publish at 50 and spend the rest of her life isolated, and immersed in New Age psychobabble and the Bible?

The author suggests the poet was mentally ill and then backs off, describing a normal life spent out of the limelight.

A friend from the time described (Rosemary) Tonks as something like a prophet: “Surrounded by the voices of conventional wisdom, she manifested the loner’s stare into, and the need to speak of, the indescribable future before it was too late.” But she wore this quality uneasily. She told interviewer Peter Orr in 1963: “I think it is diabolical, this getting of a poet out of his or her back room and the making of them into public figures who have to give opinions every twenty seconds.”

The rest of the essay by Ruth Graham.


TS