Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World [Hardcover]

Claudia Roth Pierpont (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 7, 2000

A series of extraordinary explorations of the biographies and literary achievements of twelve modern women writers, Passionate Minds tells the stories of women who "rewrote" the world that they inherited, shaping beliefs about vital issues ranging from religion to sex to race to politics.

Claudia Roth Pierpont organizes these probing portraits into three sections. Broadly speaking, the first deals with issues of sexual freedom, in essays on Olive Schreiner, Gertrude Stein, Anaïs Nin, and -- surprisingly, for those who do not know her as a writer -- Mae West. The second section, which examines Margaret Mitchell, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty, deals with issues of race and the American South during a period of wrenching change and retrenchment. The third focuses on politics, particularly on the experience and historical interpretation of Soviet Communism and Nazi Germany: the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, Ayn Rand, Doris Lessing, and, in a dual essay that is also a moving account of an enduring friendship, Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy. Throughout, Pierpont anatomizes both the lives and the art of her subjects and suggests their roles in the progress -- if it has been progress -- that has taken place in the attitudes of women over the course of the century.


Individually published in The New Yorker during the past eight years, these essays -- brought together in revised and expanded form, and containing ample new material -- reveal unsuspected parallels, contrasts, and influences among the twelve women discussed, illuminating each of them in new and startling ways.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In Passionate Minds, Claudia Roth Pierpont lifts several artists out of their hagiographical limbo and eases others (even Mae West and Margaret Mitchell) away from cliché and the condescending chortle. Her 11 essays offer a fascinating mix of biography, analysis, and elegant aphorism. Yet Pierpont also lets her women speak for themselves, and they often do so eloquently and unexpectedly. Zora Neale Hurston, for example, writes: "Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry.... It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company?"

Pierpont is interested in both reality and reception: how these writers altered the world, but also how they have been viewed--their lives and visions disseminated and vitiated, ritually patronized, misinterpreted, and reinvented. As she declares, with typical wit, "There is hardly a woman here who would not be scandalized to find herself in company with most of the others. Hannah Arendt and Ayn Rand, Gertrude Stein and Mae West, Doris Lessing and Anaïs Nin, Zora Neale Hurston and Eudora Welty, Marina Tsvetaeva and Mary McCarthy: what could they possibly have in common?" Yet even while she proves that achievement and reputation don't necessarily go hand in hand, Pierpont makes it clear that all her subjects refused to make the easy concessions. (At the same time, these hyperaware individuals often lacked--and sometimes deliberately skirted--self-knowledge.)

It's difficult to elevate a few pieces above the rest, since the standard is so high (all appeared in The New Yorker). But those on Stein, Lessing, Hurston, and, yes, Rand and Mitchell offer continual enlightenment and surprise. Pierpont is unafraid of generalization. In her piece on Anaïs Nin, for instance, she declares: "The real and bottomless subject of Nin's diary is not sex, or the flowering of womanhood, but deceit." Elsewhere, she rescues Lessing from her harsher critics:

Despite her theories and her ethics and the range of her literary personae--the African realist, the London scene painter, the anguished psychologist, the social prophet--Lessing is in essence a storyteller, with a rare gift for getting characters on their feet and for setting the wind stirring the curtains with language so apparently simple it betrays no method at all. The classical concision of the story form seems to induce in her an unusually clear-eyed mental energy, an urge to pick the locks of the elaborate cages she constructs in her novels.

Pierpont is also fond of the startling detail, the quote that reverses expectation, and even the pun. (After a delightful summary of The Fountainhead, she writes, "It is surely gratuitous to point out that the author suffered from an edifice complex.") In Passionate Minds this author repeatedly shows us the rewards of close reading and historical context. Even her asides are inspiring. At one point, she avers, "The greatest Russian translator of Shakespeare's tragedies, Pasternak played the Hamlet of the Revolution, much as Mayakovsky had been its Mercutio." Wonder how these tragic male figures made it into a book on "women rewriting the world"? Open this collection and read on. --Kerry Fried

From Publishers Weekly

Considering "how ambitious women worked out their destinies in an age of momentous transition," Pierpont scrutinizes 12 well-known 20th-century women in these essays (revised and expanded from their original publication in the New Yorker). In her highly capable hands, these diverse women--writers, philosophers and a movie star--come alive through probing questions about their work and vivid details about their lives. In the first grouping, Pierpont explores "issues of sexual freedom" through the widely varying perspectives of Olive Schreimer, Gertrude Stein, Anais Nin and Mae West. The second part, concerned with race, and the third, with politics, cover figures from Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Mitchell and Eudora Welty to Ayn Rand, Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy. Of course, connections and overlapping concerns emerge through the course of these excellent, astute pieces. The most interesting parallels are those that are least expected and those that occur across the borders of nationality, class and medium--such as coincident views of women's power between Arendt and Mitchell, or similar sexual stances on the part of Nin and Rand. In her arrangement of writings, Pierpont raises questions about women's progress through the century: What do these "women of a transitional age" tell us about our own "internal change"? She also defends her subjects from harsh contemporary judgment, "for they had hardly any models to follow, apart from a handful of suicidal literary heroines." Indeed, perhaps this collection's most noteworthy contribution is its levelheaded, sympathetic and unsentimental nature, especially given that the name alone of many of these figures (such as Rand and Nin) can provoke powerful reactions from both admirers and detractors. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (March 7, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679431063
• ISBN-13: 978-0679431060
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #512,775 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully-crafted literary portraits, April 12, 2000

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This review is from: Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World (Hardcover)

What a pleasure to read essays of such distinction! C. R. Pierpont deftly weaves history and biography into her literary judgments and the results are always fascinating and fresh. I couldn't put this book down; more importantly, it sent me running to the authors she studies. (Well, most of the authors; nothing could ever make me slog through Ayn Rand.) Each essay is a jewel of taste, style, and balance. I can't recommend this book highly enough and am sending copies to all my friends!

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars even better than in the new yorker, May 14, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World (Hardcover)

I read all these pieces when they first appeared, and couldn't wait to read them all again. All are revised, and several are expanded significantly. Pierpont has a way of combining "life," "works" and "social context" so that they all speak effortlessly of one another. If all critics had her perceptiveness, sympathy and wit, arguments would never have sprung up about what is and isn't relevant to the appreciation of a writer; she makes it all completely natural, while at the same time telling you things you never thought of for yourself.

20 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Passionate Minds, Passionate Writing, March 4, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World (Hardcover)

Rivals Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae in breadth and ambition, and surpasses it in elegance. A book that will be read and re-read.

Six stars out of five.