Today my review of Lady Byron and Her Daughters, by Julia Markus, appeared at the Los Angeles Review of Books. In it I address what it means to write the biography of a woman overshadowed by a famous man. "Writers of such biographies face the challenge of convincing readers that their subjects deserve biographical treatment for their own sake, not simply because they were the…
I've been reliving my trip to England and Italy to follow in Woolson's footsteps almost exactly 3 years ago. It was late October, early November, and the weather was cold and rainy pretty much nonstop. I had to buy extra layers to stay warm, but I was still freezing and wet most of the time. When I arrived in Florence, I discovered the…
I'm revisiting my trip of three years ago (almost exactly) to the sites in England and Italy where Woolson lived. You can see my first two posts about England here and here. I've been back to England again since, but Italy still haunts me. My first stop was Venice, the city that Woolson thought of as her Xanadu. Once I saw it in person, I…
The manuscript is done—it just needs copy editing and proofing, and then it will be a book. But it seems there is one more major hurdle I hadn't counted on. After spending the last five years writing this book, everything now hangs upon getting permission to quote from the letters of the figures I’m writing about. Chief among them are, of course, Constance…
Perhaps I shouldn’t be shocked, but I was when I read the Washington Post’s review of Karen Abbott’s new book, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy, about four women who participated in the Civil War. Jonathan Yardley compares what he sees as the book’s troubling passages to writing “borrowed from the pages of a women’s magazine.” Apparently, women’s magazines are full of writing that he…
The grading is done, the semester is over, and the manuscript beckons. As my mind tries to find its way back into the book, I have been re-reading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. I have copied down so many passages that have made me reflect on Woolson’s life and work. I wonder if Woolf would have thought any differently about the…
I wrote a couple of months ago about searching for an appropriate way to end Woolson’s biography, so I should be done with the manuscript, right? Not exactly. This summer, I have reached a new stage in my writing that is anything but the end. In some ways it feels like starting over. But really it is all just part of the process,…
As I revisit the beginning of my book and consider what makes the best sort of biographical opening, a friend suggests to me that maybe when you’re writing about a woman’s life, the family part is more important than if you were writing about a man. This has sent me back to Carolyn Heilbrun’s Writing a Woman’s Life, first published in 1988, and…