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“... It was February in Provence and the local market sold goat’s cheese wrapped in chestnut leaves and thick, painted pottery. The stalls of dark check shirts were the kind you used to wear, and we began to see you: burly, bearded, handsome as Holbein’s Wyatt, looking into the eyes of a girl or jumping up from the brasserie table to buy truffles from a street vendor ...”

“... The modish title of Elaine Feinstein’s excellent book need not make readers fear that they are being lured to yet another study of the great man himself. Lawrence’s Women really is about the women in his life. They are not just lining the route. Neither should readers suspect that the word ‘intimate’ in the subtitle means that they are going to be told more about Lawrence’s sex life than they wish to know ...”

“... The Woman, her World and her Poetry, was published by Cambridge in 1985, and now we have Elaine Feinstein’s A Captive Lion (the title comes from the poet’s description of herself in her poem ‘Homesickness’). This is the first biography written by someone who cannot read Tsvetaeva’s poetry in the original and had to have the sources on ...”

“... the literary text itself. Where David Malouf shows us an Australian artist starting from scratch, Elaine Feinstein chooses Sydney as the faraway vantage-point from which the elderly European exile can reflect upon the tangled skein of loyalties which was cut when she left the Old World. Malouf takes pains to introduce a minor but undeniably powerful ...”

“... University of Warwick (‘no doubt of the power ... at the acute cutting edge of feeling’); not Elaine Feinstein, from Cambridge (‘the talent is unmistakable’). The truth is that Swansongs should never have been published. As much can be said of many first collections of what offer themselves as poems, and in such cases the merciful way is to ...”

“... Who do you think will close the door after you? Pushkin?’ The question, which Elaine Feinstein quotes in her introduction to this excellent biography, is one which apparently might still be asked by a Russian mother of a careless child. No British mother would say anything like it, if only because she could not think of a figure with comparable evocative power: writers here are hardly household names ...”

“... Kornei Chukovsky did, triumphantly.Poetry by Ruth Fainlight, Ted Hughes, Blok; more fiction, by Elaine Feinstein, John Sladek, Tim Owens; some cheerfully itchy artwork by Pamela Zoline, Rolf Brandt, and others; so much accomplishment, so much mere febrility. It’s unamiable, not to be ignored, and profoundly unsettling, like the ambiguous menu in John ...”

“... of Aphrodite’. Her prose is collected under the rubric A Captive Spirit; her best translator, Elaine Feinstein, took a line of hers, ‘A captive lion’, as the title of a fine biography. Tsvetaeva wrote like a man. Now that I’ve written it twice, it seems less scary. She wrote like a violent man, enraged by captivity, as her best chroniclers ...”

“... In spring last year no less than five of W.H. Smith’s ‘top ten’ titles were in the genre. Feinstein has clearly drawn from its current vitality, although she might prefer comparison with Mann and Lawrence rather than Howard Fast and Alex Haley. But whatever their literary elevation, these sagas tend to conform to the same narrative movement. At the ...”

“... so vividly by these writers. Much of the material will be familiar to readers of Ellen Moers and Elaine Showalter (and the writing is sometimes repetitious), yet it will be useful in showing inexperienced or blinkered readers the existence and nature of a female literary tradition. Sylvia Plath’s best late poetry often has the voice of the rebellious ...”

“... of course. The point of view of the woman speaking very much as she finds is what we are given in Elaine Feinstein’s All you need and A.L. Barker’s The woman who talked to herself, two lovely, sly, sad, comic accounts of depressed housewifery. Feinstein’s story is the triumphant tale of Nell Bolton – ‘Little ...”

“... physical and an emotional sense an abuse of Lisa. Some reviewers kept cool enough to notice this, Elaine Feinstein remarking that this gratuitous association of sexual and literal impaling served ‘to trivialise horror to the point of barminess’; and Ms Antoinette Burton, in a letter to Time Out, exposed the inevitable implication of Thomas’s ...”

“... of the way female sexuality has been constructed in literary history’. It is true that Elaine Feinstein, a victim of fashion, dares to describe Frieda as overweight, that Leavis’s account of her might be a touch xenophobic, that Keith Sagar calls her ‘amoral, disorderly, wasteful, utterly helpless in the house, lying in bed late, lounging ...”

“... Abse, Denise Levertov, Peter Red-grove, U.A. Fanthorpe, Gillian Clarke, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Elaine Feinstein are all variously represented, opening out the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties as a time of diversity and imaginative enterprise. One poet who appears in neither book, and who surely exemplifies not only the ‘democracy’ but the ...”

“... of which had already been revealed by Emma Tennant in her memoir, Burnt Diaries (1999), and by Elaine Feinstein in her biography of Hughes from 2001. Like his hero Robert Graves, Hughes tirelessly pursued the White Goddess, or the Goddess of Complete Being as he called her in his study of Shakespeare, both in his imagination and in the forms that she ...”