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Out of the closet

Tom Paulin, 29 October 1987

Emily Dickinson 
by Helen McNeil.
Virago, 208 pp., £3.50, April 1986, 0 86068 619 1
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Emily Dickinson: Looking to Canaan 
by John Robinson.
Faber, 191 pp., £3.95, August 1986, 0 571 13943 4
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Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar 
by Christanne Miller.
Harvard, 212 pp., £15.95, July 1987, 0 674 25035 4
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Emily Dickinson: The Poet on the Second Story 
by Jerome Loving.
Cambridge, 128 pp., £20, April 1987, 0 521 32781 4
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... were used freely as value-judgments in critical discourse. As Helen McNeil points out in her centenary study, Emily Dickinson entered the 20th century seeming to have written a series of ‘over-sensitive, coy, rather ill-disciplined poems’. Feminist critics have challenged this sexist view of her writing, and argued that ...

Burke and Smith

Karl Miller, 16 October 1980

Sydney Smith 
by Alan Bell.
Oxford, 250 pp., £9.95, October 1980, 0 19 812050 8
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Burke and Hare 
by Owen Dudley Edwards.
Polygon, 300 pp., £7.95, August 1980, 0 904919 27 7
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... feeble contrivance; – could make a better with great ease.’ Cockburn and Jeffrey were on the small side, and were elevated to the Bench. Smith on the latter: ‘His robes, God knows, will cost him little; one buck rabbit will clothe him to the heels.’ Smith was swept to fame by his contributions to the Review, ‘Lightness and flimsiness are my line of ...

The Numinous Moose

Helen Vendler, 11 March 1993

Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It 
by Brett Millier.
California, 602 pp., £18.50, April 1993, 0 520 07978 7
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... a souvenir: In the blue pharmacy the pharmacist had hung an empty wasps’ nest from a shelf: small, exquisite, clean matte white, and hard as stucco. I admired it so much he gave it to me. The wasps’ nest, rather than the map or the Atlantic Ocean, is now Bishop’s symbolic equivalent for art: an organic form (unlike her former inorganic monument in ...

At Tate Modern

Brian Dillon: Joan Jonas, 2 August 2018

... enigmatic action is periodically accompanied by loud electronic buzzing. There are more mirrors: small and round, large and triangular, close-up and getting smashed with a hammer. Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (1972) is a study of pictorial space, the performing body and Jonas’s relationship with certain eloquent objects, whose outlines she draws ...

Saved for Jazz

David Trotter, 5 October 1995

Modernist Quartet 
by Frank Lentricchia.
Cambridge, 305 pp., £35, November 1994, 0 521 47004 8
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... to spurn new emphases. In a previous book about Stevens, Lentricchia upbraided Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler for ‘proceeding as if they had never read the poet’s letters and journals, or as if, having read them, they had come to the conclusion that the worldly life they found portrayed therein pertained to somebody else.’ But he sometimes proceeds as ...

Post-Feminism

Dinah Birch, 19 January 1989

Cat’s Eye 
by Margaret Atwood.
Bloomsbury, 421 pp., £12.95, January 1989, 0 7475 0304 4
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Interlunar 
by Margaret Atwood.
Cape, 103 pp., £5.95, October 1988, 0 224 02303 9
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John Dollar 
by Marianne Wiggins.
Secker, 234 pp., £10.95, February 1989, 0 436 57080 7
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Broken Words 
by Helen Hodgman.
Virago, 121 pp., £11.95, February 1989, 9781853810107
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... hard lesson to learn. The reader’s troubled stomach will not be soothed by the opening words of Helen Hodgman’s evocation of contemporary life in South London, Broken Words. The pond on the Common froze in the night. Thirteen ducks were caught by the feet. The big dog came along and bit each bird off at the knee. Later, the sight of a stubble of duck ...

Move Your Head and the Picture Changes

Jenny Turner: Helen DeWitt, 11 September 2008

Your Name Here 
by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff.
helendewitt.com, 580 pp., £8, May 2008
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... lines and jumble them up and that’s nicely fractured, but nobody’s gonna read it. Last year, Helen DeWitt posted this passage on paperpools, her blog: it ‘says everything I might have wanted to say about life, the universe, postmodernism and Your Name Here.’ Your Name Here is a 120,000-word novel; DeWitt is one of its authors, the category of ...

Waiting for the Poetry

Ange Mlinko: Was Adrienne Rich a poet?, 15 July 2021

The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography 
by Hilary Holladay.
Doubleday, 416 pp., £25, November 2020, 978 0 385 54150 3
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Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution 
by Adrienne Rich.
Norton, 345 pp., £13.99, May 2021, 978 0 393 54142 7
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... with the initial A: Alfred Conrad (formerly Cohen) in 1953. In 1925, Arnold married the Episcopal Helen Jones from Atlanta and designed a long-sleeved black crêpe dress for her to wear as a uniform. Helen gave up her concert career, although she continued to play the piano every day. Holladay sees an unspoken contest that ...

Wild Enthusiasts

Bernard Porter: Science in Africa, 10 May 2012

Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950 
by Helen Tilley.
Chicago, 496 pp., £18.50, April 2011, 978 0 226 80347 0
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... happens, we have got,/The Maxim gun and they have not’), but they were very small, and often outspeared if not outgunned. You would need a very compliant native population to Westernise to a significant extent with means as slender as these. Most Africans weren’t compliant. Simply controlling them was hard enough, and could generally ...

Cad

Frank Kermode, 4 April 1996

Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude 
by Ray Monk.
Cape, 720 pp., £25, April 1996, 0 224 03026 4
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... sigh, how much he regretted having to break Mrs Eliot’s heart. A young American woman, Helen Dudley, whom he met and seduced at Bryn Mawr, travelled to England at his invitation – not without difficulty, for the 1914 war was about to begin – only to find that he had no use for her, being otherwise engaged. He blamed her for the ensuing ...

Oh you darling robot!

Thomas Jones: ‘Klara and the Sun’, 18 March 2021

Klara and the Sun 
by Kazuo Ishiguro.
Faber, 307 pp., £20, March, 978 0 571 36487 9
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... house nearby, less ‘high-rank’ than Josie’s, where a boy called Rick lives with his mother, Helen. (‘Are you a guest?’ she asks Klara. ‘Or do I treat you like a vacuum cleaner?’) Josie and Rick have been friends since early childhood, and have long-held plans to spend their lives together, but these are now in jeopardy: Josie has been ...

Errata

Christopher Ricks, 2 December 1982

T.S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage 
edited by Michael Grant.
Routledge, 408 pp., £25, July 1982, 0 7100 9226 1
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... from Four Quartets have been checked against the first English edition (1944) as given by Helen Gardner; all other citations have been checked against CPP [The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot, 1969].’ This is pointlessly inconsistent, since it means that some of the texts have been corrected to the text they first had in volume form (not ...
Djuna Barnes 
by Philip Herring.
Viking, 416 pp., £20, May 1996, 0 670 84969 3
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... to a sanatorium by her family when she returned to the States two years later. She moved into a small apartment in Patchin Place in Greenwich Village, where she wrote The Antiphon (an unreadable play championed by some) and became such a recluse that her neighbour E.E. Cummings would shout every so often: ‘Are ya still alive, Djuna?’ She stayed there ...

No Dose for It at the Chemist

Helen Thaventhiran: William James’s Prescriptions, 24 October 2024

Be Not Afraid of Life: In the Words of William James 
by William James, edited by John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle.
Princeton, 387 pp., £25, January 2023, 978 0 691 24015 2
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William James, MD: Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician 
by Emma K. Sutton.
Chicago, 251 pp., £24, December 2023, 978 0 226 82898 5
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... its connections with the late 19th century’s ‘hygienic programme’, which aimed to regulate small-scale daily actions of mind and body. His concept of the ‘stream of consciousness’, the flow of impressions through the mind, gains from being considered alongside his earlier popular science writing about temperance, which was sharpened by his role ...

A Show of Heads

Carlos Fuentes, 19 March 1987

I the Supreme 
by Augusto Roa Bastos, translated by Helen Lane.
Faber, 433 pp., £9.95, March 1987, 0 571 14626 0
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... 1974 and finally reaches the English reading public today, in a suitably masterful translation by Helen Lane, is the kind of summa that absorbs everything that the writer has done before. This is Roa Bastos’s dialogue with himself through history and through a monstrous historical figure whom he has to imagine and understand if he is to imagine and ...

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