Slowly, By Thy Hand Unfurled

In Slowly, By Thy Hand Unfurled (1965) a nineteenth-century nameless and poorly educated housewife records a remarkable diary of her dark, disintegrating journey.  The book is based on an old ledger book, used as a diary by an unknown woman, given to Linney by the wife of his friend and fellow Oberlin alum Richard Cuyler.  Linney wrote the book while at Yaddo.  In reference to this novel, Linney said:

"I breathed a sigh of relief, because then I knew it wasn’t just a fluke, that I hadn’t just sort of been an actor pretending to be a novelist and wrote one novel, that I had done something that was really quite extraordinary, and that I could do it again."