Of Beatles and Georgians
Aug. 24th, 2025 03:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakI used my time in GB to acquire a lot of books as well, of course. Some of which were:
Ian Leslie: John & Paul. A Love Story in Songs. No prices for guessing whom this is about. The songs of the title are 43, all in all (the majority of which but not all hail from the Beatles era), used and explored as sign posts to where John Lennon and Paul McCartney were in their respective lives and emotional development. The first song being Come Go with Me (and it's a sign of having read too much about these people that I did know this not exactly world famous song by the Del-Vikings was the one teen John was playing ata the Woolton Village fete when teen Paul, in the audience, was impressed by the fact John who didn't know the lyrics made up lyrics of his own) , the last Here Today (1981 song by Paul McCartney about John Lennon). It's a very fannish book, by which I mean it takes for granted that you might not know the lives in detail but that you do know the songs (not a bad assumption, if you're buying the book), and so an analysis of the songs doesn't have to start from scratch. After the gazillion books written about the Beatles as a group and each member invidiually, and the memoirs of various employees, friends and hangers-on, a lot of which I did read, see above, the appeal of the book for me wasn't new information, but information delivered in a passionately engaged way (about both the music and the men) which, lo and behold, managed to avoid vilifying anyone. (Well. Except Allen Klein, maybe. Boo, hiss. And even there, the book does make it clear Lee Eastman's spectacular loss of temper during a fateful meeting really helped Klein making his case to three of the Beatles.) (Oh, and Arthur "Primal Scream" Janov comes across as the kind of therapist I'd like to avoid, but not as ill intentioned.) Especially the ladies. Leslie proves you can write about Yoko Ono as a complicated human being with her own agenda without making her either the bad guy of the saga or a misunderstood saint, provides us with not just Cynthia and May Pang quotes on the Lennon but also Maggie McGiven and Francie Schwartz quotes on the McCartney side in addition to what few Jane Asher quotes from the time of her relationship with Paul exist, and Linda, all of which helps rounding off the picture of the central relationship under discussion.
Which comes across as intense and complicated and messy and above all as a partnership (cue John quote from 1980, which is to telling it keeps being worth repeating: "I was saying to someone the other day, there's only two arists I've ever worked with for more than a one-night-stand, as it were. That's Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono. And I think that's a pretty damned good choice.") In terms of song analysis, sometimes Leslie surprised me with pointing out something that is true bot I hadn't contemplated before, as when he points out that for all its beauty Eleanor Rigby is just about the darkest thing ever released by the Beatles. No one was saved. All the lonely people remain lonely, do not reach each other. Eleanor Rigby is often described as melancholy, but there is a cold fury to it, too. (...) When McCartney asked Martin to give the song a 'biting' string arrangement, the model they turned to was the violins in Psycho. "Tomorror never knows", from the same album (Revolver), the John song Leslie sees Eleanor Rigby in dialogue with, is downright mellow by comparison. Quoth Leslie, which gives you a good idea of what his book is like, after stating that both songs are essentially about death, "written from a detached, omniscient perspective": In Tomorrow Never Knows John dispenses instruction from the mountain top. In two minutes, Eleanor Rigby captures the entire lives of two individuals in a series of stark images. Musically, both songs are stripped down to a few parts in order to distil and intensify some essence. (...) As a teenager, Paul used to run errands for an elderly woman in his neighbourhood. He wondered what it was like to be her. In Hamburg, he befriended the old woman who ran the bathroom at the Kaiserkeller and sold pills to the customers. He was curious about those left on their own, unmmoored from family. Still, it's hard to explain Eleanor Rigby. Nobody had created a pop song like this before. Its cultural ubiquity has stopped us from noticing how strange it is - at least as radical, in its way, as Tomorrow never knows, which John came up with after hearing Paul play Eleanor Rigby. Both John and Paul were living up to Arthiur Schopenhauer's definition of genius: unlike Talent, which hits a target nobody else can reach, genius hits a target nobody else can see.
Basically: the book pushes my fannish buttons, and is fab. :) Whether it would be to a non-fan, I have no idea, but I'm glad I bought it.
Sean Lusk: A Woman of Opinion. Which is a novel about the fascinating Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Georgian wit, poet and travelogue, whose most famous work I reviewed here. It's a first person narrative, which I thought was risky, because due to her letters, we do have something of an idea of what Lady Mary sounded like when speaking in first person. Lusk mostly pulls it off, despite Lady Mary not being his only narrator; in the first third or so of the book, her chapters alternate with those narrated by her sister Frances, and that's a another choice that made me raise my eyebrows in advance, because I knew what was coming for poor Frances, and I'm still not sure whether it was the right narrative choice, because it means one of the narrators disappears about one third to half of the book in. Now at first, I thought the Frances chapters were there because she can describe Mary from the outside and also sees things differently than Mary, but the problem with that is that the area where Frances and Mary most disagree at (Frances' no-good husband), Mary is later proven right in, and I would have thought the best reason for an alternate narrator in a novel would be to provide a counter perspective which might be just as true or false as the first one. (This how Susan Howatch does it in her novels, for example.) Also it should preferably be a character who gets to be around for at least most of the narrative, if not all. (I'd have picked Lord Hervey, more about this later.) The one thing that Frances does underline, I guess, is the road Mary didn't take; Frances was an obedient daughter marrying her father's choice, Mary was not, Frances was an obedient wife, Mary was not, Frances when following her husband into exile ends up lonely, driven into a nervous breakdown and then never recovering her mental facilities again, Mary works out a steady sensible arrangement with her husband (who was her choice, not her father's) and when leaving GB does so out of her own initiative and sans husband, enjoying the continental life on her own terms until she returns shortly before her death to GB, which is also on her own terms. And of course Frances' tragedy is stronger felt because we've gotten to know her. But I'm still not sure about this narrative choice.
Otherwise this is a straightforward biographical novel, following Mary from little child prodigy presented by her father to his pals at the Kit Kat Club to old lady with scandals, successes and failures behind her dying just when a new age starts. In terms of form, I was also a bit reminded of James Boswell's diaries in that Lusk has Mary render some scenes in direct drama style dialogue (which is something Boswell does in his journals but not, I think, Lady Mary in her letters), and Mary-as-written-by-Lusk captures a lot of the wit and determination of historical Mary. He even breaks with an unspoken convention many a novel, tv show and film clings to, which is that a sympathetic female character with children needs to be a "good" mother, no matter the historical circumstances, shown to be devoted to her offspring above all else. Only female characters meant to be unsympathetic can neglect their kids or do the historical thing of letting them be raised by the servants, if they're rich enough to have those. Winston Churchill's mother in the tv miniseries about her, Jennie, is a rare exception ("Why, Winnie, you have become interesting after all", says she to near adult Winston), and Lusk's Mary is another, which btw follows the impression I had from Isobel Grundy's biography, i.e. Mary is invested in her children's health and safety, of course, but doesn't get interested in her daughter as a person until said daughter is adult and married and able to talk back, and some point early in her son's adolescence when he keeps fucking up at other people's espenses and shows every sign of being a no good sponge washes her hands of him.
The most famous events of Lady Mary's life were: a) her campaign for inocculation as a measure against small pox following her husband's stint as ambassador in Turkey, b) the journeys to and from T'urkey and her time in Turkey, which became famous due to her published Embassy Letters<, c) the fallout from her break-up with Alexander Pope and the resulting two decades long feud, and d) her falling madly in love with a young Italian, Francesco Algarotti, who was simutanously the lover of her bi bff Lord Hervey. This last part only came to light decades after her death when her letters to Algarotti were discovered. (By another poet in self decided exile in Venice, btw, Lord Byron, who was a big Lady Mary fan as a reader and saluted her in his epic Don Juan.) Less famous but also important: Mary's original elopement with Edward Wortley Montagu (as her biographer Grundy but it, the original thing about this was that Mary wasn't madly in love with Edward; mainly she didn't want to marry the guy her father had picked for her, and she did like Edward as a friend), and her custody battle with her no-good brother-in-law and then his no-good family for her sister Frances, and her life in Italy including one truly weird era when she was basically held hostage and financially fleeced by a conman until she could liberate herself. A Woman of Opinion covers all of these, but there is somewhat more of the younger Mary than of the older one. There is the slight problem that the entire section about her Europe and Turkey travels feels like a slight paraphrase and cut edition if yoiu've read the Embassy Letters, but if you haven't, it's fine. Lusk's take on why Alexander Pope went from dedicated Mary admirer to dedicated Mary hater (whose bile about her largely contributed to her having a bad image for decades) felt plausible enough for me. (Like biographer Isobel Grundy, he doesn't believe the anecdote of Pope making a direct pass at Mary and being rejected with a laugh, but unlike Grundy#s biography, a novel does have to provide a reason, so in A Woman of Opinion, it's Mary's satiric parody of Pope's poem about two lovers struck by lightning which causes his feeling offended, the breakup of their friendship and the ensuing feud. Which couldn't have come at a worse time, since this was also when Mary was also attacked for championing Turkish style inocculation against small pox.
Another way in which Lusk's novel follow's Grundy's biography is in his take on Mary's love life. Grundy wonders whether she might have been bisexual in feelings - it was Edward Wortley Montagu's sister Anne young Mary had a passionate friendship with, and only after Anne's death did Edward get into the picture -, and points out because her family got to censor her letters (except for the Algarotti letters, which her family did not possess), we simply can't know about other romantic relationships she may or may not have had during her marriage, but based on what we do have written proof of, the Algarotti relationship was her sole amour fou, and he showed up when she was at her most emotonally vulnerable. The feud with Pope and the public vilification that came with this and the inocculation campaign had gone on for almost twenty years. Her son was revealing himself to be a louse. She just had been through a nasty custody battle during which her in-laws had publically accused her of wanting custody of her sister to have control of her sister's money. And middle age was approaching. She's weary, exhausted, depressed. And then, presto, this sexy Italian with scientific interests shows up, on the lookout for rich patrons, and able to charm just about anyone he sets his sights on; previous European VIPs he hung out with were Voltaire and Émilie du Chatelet, later ones would include Frederick the Great. Most importantly for how the saga proceeds, he's also having an affair with Lord Hervey, who is Mary's friend (and like her in a feud with Alexander Pope, but that's immaterial for the novel). Now where I felt a bit let down by the novel is the relative lack of Hervey, who was one of the most entertaining and bitchy Georgian memoirists, but that's because to me the most interesting thing about the Algarotti affair was that while it put a strain on the Lady Mary/Lord Hervey friendship, said friendship actually recovered and survived. Now, in the novel, Hervey gets mentioned a few times before Algarotti so the readers know who he is and that he's friends with Mary, but it only happens via him saying a sentence or two in scenes about something else, not in scenes that are about them being friends. And once Mary falls for Algarotti, he's only there to signal to the reader that the problem is Algarotti is gay and Mary despite given heavy hints doesn't want to see the obvious until she catches them in flagranti. (This is, shall we say, both a simplification and slight distortion. Algarotti may have preferred men, but he also had relationships with women, and not just those like Lady Mary who had money and status and where you thus could question his motivation. Also, Lady Mary most certanly wasn't clueless about Hervey/Algarotti, nor did she need to catch them to get enlightened. What's more, while Algarotti did have sex with Hervey and didn't with Lady Mary, he must have come across as interested enough in her for Hervey to write very jealous letters to him, especially when Algarotti spent his last evening in London having dinner with Mary and not Hervey. What neither Lord Hervey nor Lady Mary seem to have been aware of is that Algarotti found the time to have yet another affair with someone else while in London, a young Scot named Andrew Mitcihell, future Ambassador but at that point just a young guy without any influence so presumably Algarotti's choice of the heart and loin.) This is where I wanted scenes between Mary and Hervey to show how they get over this and instead got scenes just between Mary and Algarotti. (Who is basically doing the Rokoko version of "don't be so bourgois, free love is all!")
If you read real life Mary's letters to Algarotti, you feel somewhat like reading Charlotte Bronte's letters to Monsieur Heger, in that in both cases you have women, great female writers, desperately in love and laying themselves bare before non-genius men who simply are not in love with them, down to begging. (A Bronte biographer has compared this to seeing an eagle bowing to a chicken). Lusk plays down just how desperate Mary was and importantly gives her a reason to assume that Algarotti would want her to live in Italy with him (he has Algarotti point blank say "come to Italy, Maria" ), instead of letting her take off on an unfounded assumption. But the results are the same (no Algarotti until a belated reunion in Turin, by which time she has realised he's not that into her). The novel balances this by Mary finding out, once she has left England, that while she doesn't find Algarotti in Italy, she finds her old self again, the independent woman full of joy in discovering the world who had been in the process of getting grinded down with the two decades of attacks in England), and that, again feels right in terms of what I had read before of the woman. Our heroine still has the bizarro adventure with the hostage holding gangster to go through, but otherwise Lusk fills Mary's Italian years with a bit of espionage so more than living the ex pat life happens, until he concludes with her return to England and death, and then the epilogue in which her daughter burns her mother's diaries and some of her letters just before her own death. It leaves you with a vivid picture of the woman and the desire to read her own writings (again), which is probably the best thing a novel about a writer can do.
and lastly, a pictorial postcript to my Born with Teeth review:
Ian Leslie: John & Paul. A Love Story in Songs. No prices for guessing whom this is about. The songs of the title are 43, all in all (the majority of which but not all hail from the Beatles era), used and explored as sign posts to where John Lennon and Paul McCartney were in their respective lives and emotional development. The first song being Come Go with Me (and it's a sign of having read too much about these people that I did know this not exactly world famous song by the Del-Vikings was the one teen John was playing ata the Woolton Village fete when teen Paul, in the audience, was impressed by the fact John who didn't know the lyrics made up lyrics of his own) , the last Here Today (1981 song by Paul McCartney about John Lennon). It's a very fannish book, by which I mean it takes for granted that you might not know the lives in detail but that you do know the songs (not a bad assumption, if you're buying the book), and so an analysis of the songs doesn't have to start from scratch. After the gazillion books written about the Beatles as a group and each member invidiually, and the memoirs of various employees, friends and hangers-on, a lot of which I did read, see above, the appeal of the book for me wasn't new information, but information delivered in a passionately engaged way (about both the music and the men) which, lo and behold, managed to avoid vilifying anyone. (Well. Except Allen Klein, maybe. Boo, hiss. And even there, the book does make it clear Lee Eastman's spectacular loss of temper during a fateful meeting really helped Klein making his case to three of the Beatles.) (Oh, and Arthur "Primal Scream" Janov comes across as the kind of therapist I'd like to avoid, but not as ill intentioned.) Especially the ladies. Leslie proves you can write about Yoko Ono as a complicated human being with her own agenda without making her either the bad guy of the saga or a misunderstood saint, provides us with not just Cynthia and May Pang quotes on the Lennon but also Maggie McGiven and Francie Schwartz quotes on the McCartney side in addition to what few Jane Asher quotes from the time of her relationship with Paul exist, and Linda, all of which helps rounding off the picture of the central relationship under discussion.
Which comes across as intense and complicated and messy and above all as a partnership (cue John quote from 1980, which is to telling it keeps being worth repeating: "I was saying to someone the other day, there's only two arists I've ever worked with for more than a one-night-stand, as it were. That's Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono. And I think that's a pretty damned good choice.") In terms of song analysis, sometimes Leslie surprised me with pointing out something that is true bot I hadn't contemplated before, as when he points out that for all its beauty Eleanor Rigby is just about the darkest thing ever released by the Beatles. No one was saved. All the lonely people remain lonely, do not reach each other. Eleanor Rigby is often described as melancholy, but there is a cold fury to it, too. (...) When McCartney asked Martin to give the song a 'biting' string arrangement, the model they turned to was the violins in Psycho. "Tomorror never knows", from the same album (Revolver), the John song Leslie sees Eleanor Rigby in dialogue with, is downright mellow by comparison. Quoth Leslie, which gives you a good idea of what his book is like, after stating that both songs are essentially about death, "written from a detached, omniscient perspective": In Tomorrow Never Knows John dispenses instruction from the mountain top. In two minutes, Eleanor Rigby captures the entire lives of two individuals in a series of stark images. Musically, both songs are stripped down to a few parts in order to distil and intensify some essence. (...) As a teenager, Paul used to run errands for an elderly woman in his neighbourhood. He wondered what it was like to be her. In Hamburg, he befriended the old woman who ran the bathroom at the Kaiserkeller and sold pills to the customers. He was curious about those left on their own, unmmoored from family. Still, it's hard to explain Eleanor Rigby. Nobody had created a pop song like this before. Its cultural ubiquity has stopped us from noticing how strange it is - at least as radical, in its way, as Tomorrow never knows, which John came up with after hearing Paul play Eleanor Rigby. Both John and Paul were living up to Arthiur Schopenhauer's definition of genius: unlike Talent, which hits a target nobody else can reach, genius hits a target nobody else can see.
Basically: the book pushes my fannish buttons, and is fab. :) Whether it would be to a non-fan, I have no idea, but I'm glad I bought it.
Sean Lusk: A Woman of Opinion. Which is a novel about the fascinating Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Georgian wit, poet and travelogue, whose most famous work I reviewed here. It's a first person narrative, which I thought was risky, because due to her letters, we do have something of an idea of what Lady Mary sounded like when speaking in first person. Lusk mostly pulls it off, despite Lady Mary not being his only narrator; in the first third or so of the book, her chapters alternate with those narrated by her sister Frances, and that's a another choice that made me raise my eyebrows in advance, because I knew what was coming for poor Frances, and I'm still not sure whether it was the right narrative choice, because it means one of the narrators disappears about one third to half of the book in. Now at first, I thought the Frances chapters were there because she can describe Mary from the outside and also sees things differently than Mary, but the problem with that is that the area where Frances and Mary most disagree at (Frances' no-good husband), Mary is later proven right in, and I would have thought the best reason for an alternate narrator in a novel would be to provide a counter perspective which might be just as true or false as the first one. (This how Susan Howatch does it in her novels, for example.) Also it should preferably be a character who gets to be around for at least most of the narrative, if not all. (I'd have picked Lord Hervey, more about this later.) The one thing that Frances does underline, I guess, is the road Mary didn't take; Frances was an obedient daughter marrying her father's choice, Mary was not, Frances was an obedient wife, Mary was not, Frances when following her husband into exile ends up lonely, driven into a nervous breakdown and then never recovering her mental facilities again, Mary works out a steady sensible arrangement with her husband (who was her choice, not her father's) and when leaving GB does so out of her own initiative and sans husband, enjoying the continental life on her own terms until she returns shortly before her death to GB, which is also on her own terms. And of course Frances' tragedy is stronger felt because we've gotten to know her. But I'm still not sure about this narrative choice.
Otherwise this is a straightforward biographical novel, following Mary from little child prodigy presented by her father to his pals at the Kit Kat Club to old lady with scandals, successes and failures behind her dying just when a new age starts. In terms of form, I was also a bit reminded of James Boswell's diaries in that Lusk has Mary render some scenes in direct drama style dialogue (which is something Boswell does in his journals but not, I think, Lady Mary in her letters), and Mary-as-written-by-Lusk captures a lot of the wit and determination of historical Mary. He even breaks with an unspoken convention many a novel, tv show and film clings to, which is that a sympathetic female character with children needs to be a "good" mother, no matter the historical circumstances, shown to be devoted to her offspring above all else. Only female characters meant to be unsympathetic can neglect their kids or do the historical thing of letting them be raised by the servants, if they're rich enough to have those. Winston Churchill's mother in the tv miniseries about her, Jennie, is a rare exception ("Why, Winnie, you have become interesting after all", says she to near adult Winston), and Lusk's Mary is another, which btw follows the impression I had from Isobel Grundy's biography, i.e. Mary is invested in her children's health and safety, of course, but doesn't get interested in her daughter as a person until said daughter is adult and married and able to talk back, and some point early in her son's adolescence when he keeps fucking up at other people's espenses and shows every sign of being a no good sponge washes her hands of him.
The most famous events of Lady Mary's life were: a) her campaign for inocculation as a measure against small pox following her husband's stint as ambassador in Turkey, b) the journeys to and from T'urkey and her time in Turkey, which became famous due to her published Embassy Letters<, c) the fallout from her break-up with Alexander Pope and the resulting two decades long feud, and d) her falling madly in love with a young Italian, Francesco Algarotti, who was simutanously the lover of her bi bff Lord Hervey. This last part only came to light decades after her death when her letters to Algarotti were discovered. (By another poet in self decided exile in Venice, btw, Lord Byron, who was a big Lady Mary fan as a reader and saluted her in his epic Don Juan.) Less famous but also important: Mary's original elopement with Edward Wortley Montagu (as her biographer Grundy but it, the original thing about this was that Mary wasn't madly in love with Edward; mainly she didn't want to marry the guy her father had picked for her, and she did like Edward as a friend), and her custody battle with her no-good brother-in-law and then his no-good family for her sister Frances, and her life in Italy including one truly weird era when she was basically held hostage and financially fleeced by a conman until she could liberate herself. A Woman of Opinion covers all of these, but there is somewhat more of the younger Mary than of the older one. There is the slight problem that the entire section about her Europe and Turkey travels feels like a slight paraphrase and cut edition if yoiu've read the Embassy Letters, but if you haven't, it's fine. Lusk's take on why Alexander Pope went from dedicated Mary admirer to dedicated Mary hater (whose bile about her largely contributed to her having a bad image for decades) felt plausible enough for me. (Like biographer Isobel Grundy, he doesn't believe the anecdote of Pope making a direct pass at Mary and being rejected with a laugh, but unlike Grundy#s biography, a novel does have to provide a reason, so in A Woman of Opinion, it's Mary's satiric parody of Pope's poem about two lovers struck by lightning which causes his feeling offended, the breakup of their friendship and the ensuing feud. Which couldn't have come at a worse time, since this was also when Mary was also attacked for championing Turkish style inocculation against small pox.
Another way in which Lusk's novel follow's Grundy's biography is in his take on Mary's love life. Grundy wonders whether she might have been bisexual in feelings - it was Edward Wortley Montagu's sister Anne young Mary had a passionate friendship with, and only after Anne's death did Edward get into the picture -, and points out because her family got to censor her letters (except for the Algarotti letters, which her family did not possess), we simply can't know about other romantic relationships she may or may not have had during her marriage, but based on what we do have written proof of, the Algarotti relationship was her sole amour fou, and he showed up when she was at her most emotonally vulnerable. The feud with Pope and the public vilification that came with this and the inocculation campaign had gone on for almost twenty years. Her son was revealing himself to be a louse. She just had been through a nasty custody battle during which her in-laws had publically accused her of wanting custody of her sister to have control of her sister's money. And middle age was approaching. She's weary, exhausted, depressed. And then, presto, this sexy Italian with scientific interests shows up, on the lookout for rich patrons, and able to charm just about anyone he sets his sights on; previous European VIPs he hung out with were Voltaire and Émilie du Chatelet, later ones would include Frederick the Great. Most importantly for how the saga proceeds, he's also having an affair with Lord Hervey, who is Mary's friend (and like her in a feud with Alexander Pope, but that's immaterial for the novel). Now where I felt a bit let down by the novel is the relative lack of Hervey, who was one of the most entertaining and bitchy Georgian memoirists, but that's because to me the most interesting thing about the Algarotti affair was that while it put a strain on the Lady Mary/Lord Hervey friendship, said friendship actually recovered and survived. Now, in the novel, Hervey gets mentioned a few times before Algarotti so the readers know who he is and that he's friends with Mary, but it only happens via him saying a sentence or two in scenes about something else, not in scenes that are about them being friends. And once Mary falls for Algarotti, he's only there to signal to the reader that the problem is Algarotti is gay and Mary despite given heavy hints doesn't want to see the obvious until she catches them in flagranti. (This is, shall we say, both a simplification and slight distortion. Algarotti may have preferred men, but he also had relationships with women, and not just those like Lady Mary who had money and status and where you thus could question his motivation. Also, Lady Mary most certanly wasn't clueless about Hervey/Algarotti, nor did she need to catch them to get enlightened. What's more, while Algarotti did have sex with Hervey and didn't with Lady Mary, he must have come across as interested enough in her for Hervey to write very jealous letters to him, especially when Algarotti spent his last evening in London having dinner with Mary and not Hervey. What neither Lord Hervey nor Lady Mary seem to have been aware of is that Algarotti found the time to have yet another affair with someone else while in London, a young Scot named Andrew Mitcihell, future Ambassador but at that point just a young guy without any influence so presumably Algarotti's choice of the heart and loin.) This is where I wanted scenes between Mary and Hervey to show how they get over this and instead got scenes just between Mary and Algarotti. (Who is basically doing the Rokoko version of "don't be so bourgois, free love is all!")
If you read real life Mary's letters to Algarotti, you feel somewhat like reading Charlotte Bronte's letters to Monsieur Heger, in that in both cases you have women, great female writers, desperately in love and laying themselves bare before non-genius men who simply are not in love with them, down to begging. (A Bronte biographer has compared this to seeing an eagle bowing to a chicken). Lusk plays down just how desperate Mary was and importantly gives her a reason to assume that Algarotti would want her to live in Italy with him (he has Algarotti point blank say "come to Italy, Maria" ), instead of letting her take off on an unfounded assumption. But the results are the same (no Algarotti until a belated reunion in Turin, by which time she has realised he's not that into her). The novel balances this by Mary finding out, once she has left England, that while she doesn't find Algarotti in Italy, she finds her old self again, the independent woman full of joy in discovering the world who had been in the process of getting grinded down with the two decades of attacks in England), and that, again feels right in terms of what I had read before of the woman. Our heroine still has the bizarro adventure with the hostage holding gangster to go through, but otherwise Lusk fills Mary's Italian years with a bit of espionage so more than living the ex pat life happens, until he concludes with her return to England and death, and then the epilogue in which her daughter burns her mother's diaries and some of her letters just before her own death. It leaves you with a vivid picture of the woman and the desire to read her own writings (again), which is probably the best thing a novel about a writer can do.
and lastly, a pictorial postcript to my Born with Teeth review:
