Diana Trilling (July 21, 1905 to October 23, 1996) was an American literary critic, reviewing books for The Nation, for many years. She and her husband Lionel Trilling were mainstays of an American intellectual circle which identified itself as modern and New York centered. It was after her husband's death that she published several books herself, as well as preserving his literary oeuvre.
Her memoirs, The beginning of the journey (1993) include this note about her own mother:
There were also aberrancies in my mother's conduct which support the belief that she suffered a breakdown after my birth. When our cat had kittens, my mother drowned the unwanted litters in a kitchen pail.
My guess is that this picture is part of an internal dialogue on Trilling's part, a dialogue sorting out rules in a world in which everything was questioned. Very 20th century.
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