Literary Seductions: Compulsive Writers and Diverted Readers [Hardcover]

Frances Wilson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 2000

We have all surrendered ourselves to the world that writing creates. Eudora Welty once observed that her mother read the works of Charles Dickens in the same spirit with which she would have eloped with him. Some of us remember our first novel with more pleasurable vividness than our first kiss. Many of us go to on-line chat rooms, looking for love with our keyboard. And most of us have tried to seduce with words-reciting that Shakespeare sonnet or composing that Valentine's Day poem with tremulous hope. All writing seeks to ensnare the reader in its embrace. As Frances Wilson also proves in this engaging, enlightening, and provocative new book, writing can also ensnare the writers themselves. Highlighting the lives and loves of celebrated literary couples, Wilson reveals the depth of their passion for language-their own as well as their partner's. Taking as a point of departure the legendary courtship of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, a courtship conceived on the printed page, Wilson explores how easily, how seductively, literary desire becomes sexual desire and vice versa. "Literary seductions," she writes, are "violent, extreme, and irreversible." Not all reading seduces, not all writing inflames. But when they do, what is written ceases to be merely an arrangement of symbols on a page. The word has been made flesh.Lady Caroline Lamb and Lord Byron, Anas Nin and Henry Miller, Laura Riding and Robert Graves, Osip and Nadzheda Mandelstam, W. B. and Georgie Yeats were all in the grip of a compulsion for writing and reading, enmeshed in words.Miller called his relationship with Nin, a "literary fuck-fest"; for Riding and Graves, it took on the self-destructive (and self-conscious) melodrama of a Russian novel; for the Mandelstams, it was a life-giving (if self-sacrificing) bond in a precarious world; for George and W. B Yeats, it offered sexual stimulus. The couplings of verbs and nouns do more than precede coupling; they comprise it. Literary Seductions is itself a seductive book. The elegant power of Wilson's arguments, the rigor of her research, and the delights of her prose enthrall the reader. Here is intellectual engagement and readerly pleasure rolled into one.AUTHORBIO: Frances Wilson teaches at Reading University in England and writes for The London Review of Books.She is currently working on a biography of the regency courtesan, writer, and blackmailer, Harriette Wilson.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

British lecturer Wilson (Reading University) analyzes the creative and erotic extremes of three 20th-century writing couples for whom love for each other and love for each other's writing were one and the same; they were in a state of "literary seduction"Apossessed, consumed or contained by each other's writing. For Henry Miller and Ana?s Nin, this meant literary possessionAa literary outpouring (explosive in his case, slow and steady in hers) in which "there was never a point at which they realized they had said it all." Robert Graves and Laura Riding experienced literary consumption, wherein Graves deified Riding as "a literal incorporation" of the Muse and his "ruling passion," to the exclusion of his own children and other relationships. For Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam, it was literary containment, seen in her decades-long crusade to preserve his writing, in hidden manuscripts and in her memory, after his death in Stalin's camps. Beginning with Wilson's ability to unite these seemingly unconnected writers, there's much to admire here. She arranges the essays intelligently, building in intensity for a payoff in the afterword on the Yeatses. Characterizations are apt: Laura Riding is an underappreciated "intellectual terrorist" who likened herself to Middlemarch's Casaubon. Despite these qualities, the book is unsatisfying. The seduction construct seems limiting and ephemeral, nor does the book invite continued study of the authors. Wilson's work is original, yet its theory of the confusion "of sexual with textual desire" remains unconvincing. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Wilson (English literature, Reading Univ., UK; editor of Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture) examines momentsDwhich she refers to as "literary seductions"Din which readers have lost themselves in the text and writers have lost themselves in the compulsive zeal of writing. She notes that the classic example of literary seduction, the relationship between Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, is atypical for its lasting mutual passion, which extended beyond the writing. She also addresses the extreme case of Caroline Lamb, so seduced by the writing of Lord Byron (her lover) that she became obsessed with wanting to be Byron, preferring simulations of him to the real person. Wilson's primary focus is on three couplesDAna s Nin and Henry Miller, Laura Riding and Robert Graves, and Osip and Nadezhda MandelstamDwhose lives were changed forever by powerful literary seductions that turned to extreme forms of possession, consumption, and containment, respectively. Wilson has created her own literary seduction and a cadre of diverted readers with this fascinating, enthusiastic study. Highly recommended for academic and research libraries.DJeris Cassel, Rutgers Univ. Libs., New Brunswick, NJ
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 258 pages
• Publisher: St Martins Pr (July 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312261934
• ISBN-13: 978-0312261931
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,261,304 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Groundbreaking study, March 21, 2002

By 

Pam Hanna "wind star" (Thoreau, New Mexico United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Literary Seductions: Compulsive Writers and Diverted Readers (Hardcover)

Even though not all readers are seduced and not all writers are compulsive, when a peculiar chemistry occurs between reader and writer, the written word is made flesh and creates strange bedfellows. Frances Wilson has connected the dots and produced a unique and astonishing study of this perhaps unholy alliance.

Beginning with the famous courtship of Elizabeth Barrett by Robert Browning as a kind of contrast/control because of its relative wholesomeness, Wilson goes on to explore the more pathological literary seductions of Anais Nin and Henry Miller, Laura Riding and Robert Graves, Osip and Nadzheda Mandelstam, and W.B. and Georgie Yeats. The Brownings were more normal and sane, according to this author, because they achieved the "...transition from a love of one another's words to a broader love beyond the literary."

But the dynamic of the more pathological literary seductions are different for all. Anais Nin and Henry Miller were possessed by words. "Henry saw the English language as a part of his body" while Anais "...believed words were speaking HER rather than the other way around." They both wrote constantly and compulsively and their sexual involvement with each other was defined by their writing.

Laura Riding, on the other hand, was "la belle dam sans merci." She and Robert Graves together created this mythic persona of Laura and they both fed upon and nurtured it in their writing. They did not "...live to tell the tale so much as tell the tale in order to find a way of living." In other words, they wrote themselves into existence.

For the Russian husband and wife team, Osip and Nadzheda Mandelstam, life was a Gulag Archipelago. Osip was tormented by the poems that he heard as a buzzing in his brain until he wrote them down. But he had to memorize them rather than write them because he was so constantly subject to arrest and imprisonment. So his wife, Nadzheda, contained them within herself, committing them to memory much as Brandbury's characters in *Fahrenheit 451* memorized whole books because the written word had become illegal. Osip and Nadzheda completed one another to such an extent that their separations were torture to both.

W.B. Yeats and his wife, Georgie, also wrote together on an intimate level, but in this case, Georgie received her husband's creative thoughts by automatic writing. She was his conduit; his writing hand was her hand. She wrote constantly and feverishly to such an extent that their authorship was blurred and defined by one another.

In all these latter cases, there was at least one third party in the equation. For Miller and Nin, there was June (Miller's wife). Geoffrey Phibbs and Nancy Graves were present in the Graves-Riding duo. Laura Riding was "...endlessly getting rid of the third party in the way of her relationship, whilst she needed this third party in order to have the relationship in the first place." For the Mandelstams, there was the poetess, Anna Akhnatova, and for W.B. and Georgie Yeats, there was Anne Hyde (who had died in the 17th Century but who appeared in Georgie's automatic writing).

If you're not a reader of literature, you probably won't be reading this review anyway, but if you're an inveterate reader and all of your heroes are writers (not cowboys), this book will absorb and fascinate you with its engaging style, scholarly research and in-depth psychological profiles.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Two Words, December 20, 2004

By 

Elizabeth A Triano "lizziewriter" (In Transition, NY (watch this space)) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Literary Seductions: Compulsive Writers and Diverted Readers (Paperback)

If you are a writer, a muse or something in between, this book may fascinate you for more than purely scholarly reasons. It is an unusual approach, and in some ways it could be an especially helpful one. The two words I have are: cautionary tales. The things that we dream of, sometimes they are not such good ideas.
If you like this book, or this topic, there are of course many other books about writers and the weaknesses of flesh and spirit, however you may especially like _What Lips My Lips Have Kissed_ about Edna St. Vincent Millay.