Nina Auerbach

Judith Richardson begins Possessions by quoting a 1933 guidebook to the Hudson Valley: ‘How comes the Hudson to this unique heritage of myth, ghosts, goblins and other lore?’ By the end of her exhaustive chronicle of local history and legend the answer is self-evident: ‘Why is the Hudson Valley haunted? Perhaps a better question after all is: how on earth could it not...

“Save Me the Waltz is in fact vividly different from Scott’s work. For Zelda, marriage is a shadowy affair: the novel springs to life in ballet school, a female world of muscles, sweat, competition and community. Unlike Scott, intoxicated by hazy images, Zelda lives in bodies and smells. ‘Do you still smell of pencils and sometimes of tweed?’ she wrote longingly to Scott from hospital.”

Susan Gubar has kept the faith. Most of the ‘feminist critics’ of the late 1970s, myself included, have drifted away, though not away from feminism: feminist criticism, an exclusive academic sorority, was always distinct from commitment to a political movement. But despite her dismay and even despair at what’s become of academic feminism, Gubar does her best to tend the flame.‘