All Passion Spent!

Our book today is Vita Sackville-West's brilliant, problematic 1931 novel All Passion Spent, which she published in the unexpected critical and financial afterglow of her brilliant, not-at-all-problematic novel The Edwardians. The two books were a formidable announcement of assured powers, the type of shot across the literary bow that customarily changes both the landscape and the shooter (as indeed famously happened with another one-two punch of novels written by a very different author in 1930 and '31). And yet, nobody reads Vita Sackville-West anymore, and any presence she has on college syllabi is more to prove some splinter-studies point than to celebrate her literary worth. Her posthumous fate has been the reverse of her friend Virginia Woolf's, and the explanation has always eluded me. It's simply insufficient to say Woolf is the better writer and leave it at that; Sackville-West wrote a third again more novels than Woolf, but if they're across-the-board lesser quality as a species, it's only by a whisker (especially if we recall that, pace Woolf, it takes more than a recondite style to make a good book) - and I don't even agree to that.

No, I think it boils down to the Edwardians - not the novel, but the 'long' version of the era, and all the artistic types who got their labyrinthine genesis during those years. The 'long' Edwardian era has always seemed to me to be characterized not by action but by an almost craven re-action, in which so many things from Victorian times were not only rejected but inverted - in this case, the prolific-author paradigm associated with Dickens and Trollope. Suddenly, the literary reaction was a conception of author-as-sufferer that tended to convey an aura of extra legitimacy to smaller bodies of work. Anthony Burgess quips somewhere that it was Forster who ruined things for prolific authors by making 'serious author' synonymous with eking out eight novels and then dying. I think Woolf benefits from that new paradigm in ways that have nothing to do with the quality of her work, and if I'm right, that same paradigm has worked against Vita Sackville-West, who, in addition to these two great novels, wrote some obviously tossed-off novels, some utterly delightful gardening-books, and at least one truly great travel-memoir, all while conducting an active and public social life. That clearly goes against the grain of the whole bogus writing-as-agony pose pioneered by those pesky Edwardians and perfected (if that's the right word) in the present day by frauds like Jonathan Franzen, and it may account for the odd eclipse covering authors like Sackville-West (or, for that matter, Burgess). The idea that they somehow weren't serious dies hard.

This novel, All Passion Spent (thought I'd forgotten, didn't you?) should dispense with that idea. It opens with the death of ninety-four-year-old Henry, first Earl of Slane, and it immediately gives Sackville-West occasion to indulge in the character-cutting that was her signature strength as a writer:

It was difficult to get a yes or a no out of the man. The more important a question was, the more flippantly he dealt with it. "Yes," he would write at the bottom of a memorandum setting forth the advantages of two opposite lines of policy; and his myrmidons passed their hands over their brows, distraught. He was destroyed as a statesman, they said, because he always saw both sides of the case; but even as they said it with exasperation, they did not mean it, for they knew that on occasion, when finally pushed into a corner, he would be more incisive, more deadly, than any man seated four-square and full of importance at a government desk. He could cast his eye over a report, and pick out its heart and its weakness before another man had had time to read it through. In his exquisitely courteous way, he would annihilate alike the optimism and the myopia of his correspondent. Courteous always, and civilised, he left his competitors dead.

Once Lord Slane himself is dead at last, a quiet emancipation unfolds inside the heart of his elderly wife Edith, Lady Slane. She finds herself surrounded by her appalling children (themselves all in their sixties) and immediately caught up in their obtuse, stuffy assumptions about her. But she's done every conceivable social duty and finds she has no desire to do more - her courteous defiance hits her children like an affront:

"About the house, Mother," began Carrie. "Would to-morrow suit you to see it? I think I have a free afternoon," and she began to consult a small diary taken from her bag.

"Thank you, Carrie," said Lady Slane, setting the crown upon the surprises she had already given them, "but I have made an appointment to see the house to-morrow. And although it is very nice of you to offer, I think I will go there alone."

She leaves the family home and takes a small house in Hampstead, and there she muses not only on the physical vagaries of old age itself (something our author evokes throughout with extremely thoughtful skill):

This consciousness, this sensation, of age was curious and interesting. The mind was as alert as ever, perhaps more alert, sharpened by the sense of imminent final interruption, spurred by the necessity of making the most of remaining time; only the body was a little shaky, not very certain of its reliability, not quite certain of its sense of direction, afraid of stumbling over a step, of spilling a cup of tea; nervous, tremulous; aware that it must not be jostled, or hurried, for fear of betraying its frail inadequacy.

... but also on the nature of a long life full of memories:

Sitting there in the sun at Hampstead, in the late summer, under the south wall and the ripened peaches, doing nothing with her hands, she remembered the day she had become engaged to Henry. She had plenty of leisure now, day in, day out, to survey her life as a tract of country traversed, and at last become a landscape instead of separate fields or separate years and days, so that it became a unity and she could see the whole view, and could even pick out a particular field and wander round it again in spirit, though seeing it all the while as it were from a height, fallen into its proper place, with the exact pattern drawn round it by the hedge, and the next field into which the gap in the hedge would lead.

For a book with such a deceptively simple premise, there's quite a bit more than this going on in All Passion Spent (indeed, the book's title gets more ironic with every passing page) - there are dramas, and suitors past and present, and the whole thing is so assuredly autumnal that the reader is constantly surprised that Vita Sackville-West was forty, not eighty, when she wrote it. The quirks the author imports to Lady Slane can be irritating at times, but no more so than the quirks of a great many Woolf characters who are much better known to the intelligent reading public. Sic transit gloria mundi, I suppose, but in this case - as in so many cases here at Stevereads - I could wish it weren't so.

 

The Boy at the Hogarth Press!

Our book today is The Boy at the Hogarth Press, the jaunty little squib Richard Kennedy wrote in 1972 about his time working as a sixteen-year-old factotum ('more totum than fact,' as one wag puts it) in 1928 at the famous small publishing operation set up by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, frequented by other luminaries from the Bloomsbury set, and staffed by two much older, harried women and Kennedy himself, who writes up his reminiscences in the form of a contemporaneous diary and fills the slim volume with his own sketches, which have the wavering lines and immediate emotional honesty of pure memories.

Perhaps the whole thing is made of pure memories, but one is allowed to doubt. The joy of reading this volume is almost certainly the joy of writing it: gently skewering the haze of veneration that's settled about Bloomsbury despite near-constant attempts to puncture it – after all, what would a callow 16-year-old know of that? No, Kennedy is having his little joke (and very consciously adding to the long and storied British genre of workplace-memoirs) by letting our hindsight work wonders on the literary legends his younger self comes to know.

He gets a job at Hogarth Press at the very bottom of the publishing ladder – twining packages and running them to the post office, etc. - but he's treated extremely decently by his illustrious bosses: he's frequently invited to take long walks with Leonard, and he's often encouraged to attend the Woolfs' parties (they also introduce the lad to the other two besetting features of Bloomsbury: pretension and non-stop smoking).

But the decency isn't constant – the guilty little thrill of reading this book (it takes 15 minutes to finish the thing) is getting glimpses of the Woolfs as absent-minded, cranky, or downright abusive bosses, as when one of the office women runs afoul of Leonard's weirdly inconsistent and spiky wrath:

Leonard Woolf obviously does not think her [Mrs. Cartwright] at all efficient. In fact he was bloody awful to her in front of Miss Belcher and myself because she tried to cover up some trivial mistake. When he's annoyed, his voice goes up into a sort of exasperated wail, especially when he's saying words like 'Why???' and 'Absurd!!!' which he drags out to show how unreasonable something is. He does have a special way of talking which I think comes of the care he takes to say exactly what he means. It's kind of a drawl.

On the whole, Virginia is a gentler presence (although Kennedy at one point allows that a very sharp 'meanness' might lie just beneath the surface of how she deals with people, a point enlarged most wonderfully in Alison Light's Mrs Woolf and the Servants), although even her calmest moments have their barbs just under the surface:

In the printing room when Mrs W is setting type and I am machining we work in silence, unless, of course, she is in one of her happy moods – if she's going to a party or been talking round London, which she often does.

Today I interrupted her to ask her what Proust was like, as a reviewer had called her the 'English Proust'. At first she did not understand because I had pronounced Proust to rhyme with Faust and not boost. But she laughed and said she couldn't do French cooking, but it was very delicious.

And Kennedy the adult takes great delight at winking in the direction of Kennedy the boy's puckish observations, as on one of the day's most controversial painters (would to God that's all he'd remained):

LW sent me with a letter to a gallery which the police have closed down and I saw some of D. H. Lawrence's paintings. They all seemed to be pictures of himself in the nude, and were done pretty crudely. It looked as if he had taken off his clothes and then sat down and painted himself: working in the nude at the nude. They made me think of a coal miner after his bath.

Despite the fact that the young Kennedy eventually screws up and gets angrily dismissed by Leonard Woolf, this is very much an affectionate snapshot of the slightly seedy side of Parnassus. Certainly there are worse ways to spend your fifteen minutes.

Some Good Open Letters - Part 1!

Our books today comprise a quick tour through that most maligned and rewarding corner of the Kingdom of Good Letters: book criticism.

On one easy level, book criticism has the rare distinction of being one of the only types of writing every single literate person has done at one point or other. We do it first as children - the most honest and most brutal of literary critics - because on its simplest level, book criticism is simply a matter of telling another person whether or not you liked a book in question.

Further refinements accrue. From saying whether or not you liked a book, it's short step to saying why either way. And saying why necessarily entails saying whether or not the stuff the author tries succeeds, and to what extent. And if it doesn't succeed, why doesn't it? Before you know it, you've launched upon that much--vexed subject, the writer's craft. That ultimate refinement might look forbiddingly rarefied, but the best literary critics never forget its incredibly simple origins.

'The best literary critics' covers more territory than this single entry can encompass, of course. I've got no Addison for you this time around, no Johnson, no Coleridge or Arnold or Macaulay, no Lamb - even though they're all great and will all have their entries in due course (we've been on this little literary excursion for roughly 500 entries, so by now I assume you'll all trust me when I say: sooner or later, I'll get around to everything).


No, this time around we'll just dip in quickly to some juicy, delightful passages from some of my personal favorites in the genre - and some of the greatest exponents of the genre that all of us over at Open Letters strive to continue every month. These are writers I return to over and over again - and they're certainly among the literary figures who taught me how to read in the first place, how to think about reading, eventually how to write about books. The furthest back we'll go this time around is Walter Bagehot, who began his 1869 review of the poetry of Henry Crabb Robinson in this irresistible way:

Perhaps I should be ashamed to confess it, but I own I opened the three large volumes of Mr. Robinson's memoirs with much anxiety. Their bulk, in the first place, appalled me; but that was by no means my greatest apprehension. I knew I had a hundred times heard Mr. Robinson say that he hoped something he would leave behind 'would be published and be worth publishing.' I was aware too - for it was no deep secret - that for half a century or more he had kept a diary, and that he had been preserving correspondence besides; and I was dubious what sort of things these would be, and what - to use Carlyle's words - any human editor could make of them. Even when Mr. Robinson used to talk so I used to shudder; for the men who have tried to me memoir-writers and failed, are as numerous, or nearly so, as those who have tried to be poets and failed. A specific talent is as necessary for the one as for the other.

There's a perfect combination there of the pose of humility and the careful seeding of its opposites, and the combination has the effect of placing all your confidence in the reviewer, come what may. Very, very smart writers (and they didn't come much smarter than Bagehot, despite a certain inclination toward tub-thumping) can use this facile admission of fallibility in just this way to attest to their aesthetic purity, although another of my favorite writers on books (also a passably talented writer of books) actually meant his such protestations seriously:

For my part, I have a small idea of the degree of accuracy possible to man, and I feel sure these studies teem with error. One and all were written with genuine interest in the subject; many, however, have been conceived and finished with imperfect knowledge; and all have lain, from beginning to end, under the disadvantages inherent in this style of writing.

That's Robert Louis Stevenson, and those 'disadvantages' he's referring to are a part of the writing school I'm celebrating today: pressing deadlines, deadpan unfamiliarity with your putative subject, obdurate editors - in short, the pitfalls of literary journalism. The best writers who indulge in this kind of writing find ways to get around these pitfalls, ways to turn them into strengths (not to mention how good such writers get at researching their subjects with incredible speed and depth), and Stevenson was one of those writers, half-apologetic, half-defiant of his own results:

Short studies are, or should be, things woven like a carpet, from which it is impossible to detach a strand. What is perverted has its place there for ever, as a part of the technical means by which what is right has been presented. ... But this must not be taken as a propitiatory offering to the gods of shipwreck; I trust my cargo unreservedly to the chances of the sea ...

Those chances can be harsh - most of the best book-writing is resoundingly out of print today. Usually, the occasional essays authors write for cash and recognition (and free review copies) are collected, dolled up with a new Introduction, printed in low numbers, and remaindered almost instantly. We've seen some critics like that, here at Stevereads, and the reverse is also true: famous authors of other kinds of stuff get their book-writings bound and publicized even if those writings are worthless. Luckily, one of the greatest novelists of the last century was also one of the greatest book-critics, so we'll always have the pure, cool pools of Virginia Woolf's Common Reader series to dive into, always sucking in a sharp breath at the clarity of it all, always emerging refreshed:

In her [Jane Austen's] masterpieces, the same gift is brought to perfection. Here is nothing out of the way; it is midday in Northamptonshire; a dull young man is talking to rather a weakly young woman on the stairs as they go up to dress for dinner, with housemaids passing. But, from triviality, from commonplace, their words become suddenly full of meaning, and the moment for both one of the most memorable of their lives. It fills itself; it shines; it glows; it hangs before us, deep, trembling, serene for a second; next, the housemaid passes, and this drop in which all the happiness of life has collected gently subsides again to become part of the ebb and flow of ordinary existence.

That of course is genius writing about genius, a rare and stunning combination - but I submit that it happens more often in book-criticism than any other field of writing, for reasons that are pretty obvious once you start thinking of them. Reading is one of the most personal things anyone, including writers, can do - even on deadline and badly hung over, that's a deep well to tap. There are charlatans aplenty, of course, stupid, mulish faux-readers who scan pages for a living only in order to find the shopworn little collection of literary prejudices they haven't changed since high school (the mind recoils in horror at the prospect of a Collected Michiko Kakutani). But there are also entirely wonderful times where even the bagatelle indisciplines of an inveterate autodidact can be brought to a perfect pitch by the fires of reading passion. The best example of this in the 20th century was Randall Jarrell's Poetry and the Age, in which our singingly honest critic tackles the very question of what it is to be a critic - at times obliquely, as in his shouted exhortations to young critics:

Write so as to be of some use to a reader - a reader, that is, of poems and stories, not of criticism. Vary a little, vary a little! Admit what you can't conceal, that criticism is no more than (and no less than) the helpful remarks and the thoughtful and disinterested judgment of a reader, a loving and experienced and able reader, but only a reader. And remember that works of art are never data, raw material, the crude facts that you critics explain and explain away. Remember that you can never be more than the staircase to the monument, the guide to the gallery, the telescope through which the children see the stars. At your best you make people see what they might never have seen without you; but they must always forget you in what they see.

And at other times directly, seeking classification:

What is a critic, anyway? So far as I can see, he is an extremely good reader - one who has learned to show others what he saw in what he read. He is always many other things too, but these belong to his accident, not his essence. Of course, it is often the accident and not the essence that we read a critic for: pieces of criticism are frequently, though not necessarily, works of art of an odd anomalous kind, and we can sympathize with someone when he says lovingly about a critic, as Empson says about I. A. Richards, that we get more from him when he's wrong than we do from other people when they're right.

In that first duty of the book-critic, the duty to be out there reading and reporting back, Jarrell is always nothing less than superb - reading him on the heart-breakingly few authors he ever bothered to write about always throws a new and blinding light on those authors and on the process of reading itself.




That process gets its most sensitive, probing, intelligent evaluation from a writer we don't fist think of in this metier: in 1961 C. S. Lewis published An Experiment in Criticism, and it's an astonishing, humblingly brilliant prolonged meditation on the nature of both reading and writing about reading. I could fill an entry this long simply by quoting the best of Lewis' virtually limitless store of great lines: "We are so busy doing things with the work that we give it too little chance to work on us. Thus increasingly we meet only ourselves." "Forced to talk incessantly about books, what can they [critics] do but try to make books into the sort of things they can talk about?" "I would say that every book should be entertaining. A good book will be more; it must not be less. Entertainment, in this sense, is like a qualifying examination. If a fiction can't provide even that, we may be excused from inquiry into its higher qualities." "The best safeguard against bad literature is a full experience of good." "The ideally bad book is the one of which a good reading is impossible." "If we have to choose, it is always better to read Chaucer again than to read a new criticism of him." And so on, smiling the whole time.

The 'experiment' in Lewis' book is tongue-in-cheek daring: to read books, to return to a more honest reading of them, to give to each of them that "inner silence" that, Lewis maintains, is the only path to any book's heart. "The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender," Lewis writes, and he's alive to the differences between people who read and people who don't:

In that way, the judgement that someone is unliterary is like the judgement that 'This man is not in love', whereas the judgement that my taste is bad is more like 'This man is in love, but with a frightful woman.'

But his own allegiances couldn't be more clear:

Those of us who have been true readers all of our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated.

And he reserves his closest approximation of scorn not for the unliterary but for bad critics, who would have no place in the world that resulted from his novel 'experiment':

Thus one result of m system would be to silence the type of critic for whom all the great names in English literature - except for the half dozen protected by the momentary critical 'establishment' - are as so many lamp-posts for a dog. And this I consider a good thing. These dethronements are a great waste of energy. Their acrimony produces heat at the expense of light. They do not improve anyone's capacity for good reading. The real way of mending a man's taste is not to denigrate his present favourites but to teach him how to enjoy something better.

Most book-critics - even the best ones (some of whom I've had the privilege to work with) - never achieve this kind of elevation; Lewis did perfectly what they must often do quickly and as best they can. But there's a real art to be found in those fast-honest appraisals and condemnations, especially if they, too adhere to Lewis' call that they be entertaining. And if you get some insight, a good line or two, and maybe a new discovery in the bargain, well then the gods of shipwreck have been kind.

20th Century Greats!

The question was recently raised (prompted, no doubt, by that damn Modern Library list! You know the one I mean, listing the best works of fiction and nonfiction written in the 20th century! The list that gave an unholy second life to Zuleika Dobson!): is by Henry Adams The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams really that good? Does it really deserve its ranking on that list - and many others - as the single greatest work of 20th century nonfiction?

That bagatelle term 'nonfiction' seems at first impossibly vague - surely all of human artistic endeavor apart from the piddling kingdoms of fiction and poetry can be considered nonfiction? But whether or not such infamous lists intend to invoke it, there is a category of nonfiction works in the 20th century that almost have to be called that and nothing else, so passionate are they in blurring the very outlines of what they are. We've talked about some of them here at Stevereads (Rats, Lice, and History, for instance, and Swampwalker's Journal); they're never quite an exact fit with the ostensible category to which they belong, and calling them by that category inevitably reduces them (the way referring to Shakespeare as "an Elizabethan playwright," though technically correct, would feel almost insulting).

A full list of the greatest of such works, if strictly construed, would not be long - and each item on it would be guaranteed to bristle with the ability to alter your reading landscape in the course of two or three afternoons of feverish reading.

That list would include Herbert Muller's 1952 The Uses of the Past, a weirdly detailed and ultimately uplifting quasi-history of the world's great civilizations; it would include Dale Van Every's incandescently angry 1966 indictment of the United States government's treatment of American Indians, Disinherited; it would include Italian Days, Barbara Grizzuti Harison's beautiful, gimlet-eyed 1989 meditation on Italy.

Even a short version of that list would have to include George Kennan's slim but fiercely memorable 1951 book American Diplomacy, 1900-1950; it would include the spry and funny A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958) by Eric Newby; it would include Norman Dixon's scathing 1976 On the Psychology of Military Incompetence; it would include Carlo Ginzburg's powerfully subversive I Benandanti (the only English translation is titled The Night Battles).

There would have to be room on that list for Paul Colinvaux's slim 1979 masterpiece Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare, and Elias Canetti's disarmingly insightful 1960 Crowds and Power, and M.F.K. Fisher's elegant, eloquent 1954 compilation, The Art of Eating.

Our list would have to include all these books and more besides, but we started out today talking about the best, and despite the many and varied strengths of all the books listed above and all the titles that would appear on an unabridged version of that list, they aren't the best. The top slots for the 20th Century go elsewhere.



One of them of course goes to Rebecca West's epic, immensely absorbing 1941 Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, which is billed as a travelogue-history of Yugoslavia and is so in exactly the same way that 'Hamlet' is about a dysfunctional family. All the dark heartaches of the newborn century are shaped into the dark corridors and musty train compartments that make up West's masterpiece - readers will come out of it knowing quite a bit about Yugoslavia (and the entirety of Eastern Europe), yes, but their hearts will have been harrowed too.


A small rung above West's book would be T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his seductive and often overpowering liar's-memoir of the 1916 Arab Revolt against the Ottomans (the book has an impossibly convoluted textual history, but we can say 1922 and the Hell with it). Again, that technical description doesn't begin to convey the power and the epic strangeness of the book, which is brightly incantatory and reads like a cross between Winston Churchill and The Arabian Nights.



Next would come Adams. His initial 1907 private printing of The Education of Henry Adams was distributed to a small 40-something group of his friends and well-wishers, all of whom instantly recognized its strange, neurotic genius and towering literary virtuosity. Larger printings followed, of course, and the work took its place in the canon of indispensable American writings, but I worry sometimes that such an canonization leads inevitably to the kind of wariness Jeff felt. No book could deserve that wariness less: despite being a self-righteous prig and ranting coot, Adams managed to craft one of the single most inviting books ever written by an American. Virtually every page of The Education shimmers with apothegms, as in this passage describing Henry Cabot Lodge's Boston:

No doubt the Bostonian had always been noted for a certain chronic irritability - a sort of Bostonitis - which, in its primitive Puritan forms, seemed due to knowing too much of his neighbors, and thinking too much of himself. Many years earlier William M. Evarts had pointed out to Adams the impossibility of uniting New England behind a New England leader. The trait led to good ends - such as admiration of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington - but the virtue was exacting; for New England standards were various, scarcely reconcilable with each other, and constantly multiplying in number, until balance between them threatened to become impossible.

The Education of Henry Adams is very nearly the best of these odd-sortment 20th Century masterworks, but it isn't the best. That distinction goes to Virginia Woolf, whose 1928 essay A Room of One's Own is the single best piece of nonfiction the century produced. Its conceit is deceptively simple (Woolf milks this for all it's worth): the occasion of giving a talk to the female students of Cambridge on the topic of women and literature. In assessing this topic, Woolf comes quickly to her playfully shocking mundane conclusion: a woman must have money and a room of her own in order to write fiction.

But that's just the lure; the prize, the essay itself, is nothing less than the ur-text of protest against the world's oldest and most entrenched discrimination, against women from the dawn of time onwards. Twenty centuries of this most intimate oppression may have been cracked wide open by Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, but in A Room of One's Own, that oppression is cut to glass shards by as big a brain and as stunning a command of prose as ever rose to the occasion, before or since. This slim book quivers with rage; its words and phrases are honed with rage; and although it transmutes in the end to a kind of torch-passing wisdom, it's likely that quiet, precise rage that readers will remember, as in this passage where Woolf confronts the patristic historical summaries of Professor Trevelyan:

'Yet even so,' Professor Trevelyan concludes, 'neither Shakespeare's women nor those of authentic 17th-century memoirs like the Verneys and the Hutchinsons, seem wanting in personality and character.' Certainly, if we consider it, Cleopatra must have had a way with her; Lady Macbeth, one would suppose, had a will of her own; Rosalind, one might conclude, was an attractive girl. Professor Trevelyan is speaking no more than the truth when he remarks that Shakespeare's women do not seem wanting in personality or character. Not being a historian, one might even go further and say that women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time - Clytemnestra, Antigone, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Phedre, Cressida, Rosalind, Desdemona, the Duchess of Malfi, among the dramatists; then among the prose writers: Millamant, Clarissa, Becky Sharp, Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, Madame de Guermantes - the names flock to mind, nor do they recall women 'lacking in personality and character.' Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out, she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room.

You're all most heartily urged to go out and read a copy of The Education of Henry Adams, make no mistake. But read Woolf first.

Books! Women in History!

An intriguing, maddening boxed-set came our way late in the last year, and it served as a reminder of how much we here at Stevereads do love a good boxed set.

Part of this is practical, naturally - boxed sets are more convenient than loose books: self-contained, independent of bookends, even stackable. But more of our appreciation stems from the wonderful ideological unity boxed sets promise (And sometimes disunity! 20 years ago, for instance, Penguin published 'War and Peace' in a handy two-volume boxed set, with the split happening right before Napoleon's invasion of Russia. Readers encountering Tolstoy's masterpiece for the first time in such a format couldn't help but read a different book from those who slogged all the way through one volume, bailing it together with rubber bands and fetishistically counting both pages read and pages remaining)

On those grounds, the boxed set before us now, "Women in History," isn't a total success. It makes a bunch of dumb mistakes we're itching to correct.

Seven volumes in this squat box: 'The Courtesans' by Joanna Richardson (the most famed dozen courtesans in Second Empire Paris), 'Unnatural Murder' by Anne Somerset (the Earl and Countess of Somerset's involvement in the 17th Century murder of Sir Thomas Overbury), Lesley Branch's edition of the Regency memoirs of Harriette Wilson, H.F.M. Prescott's biography of Mary Tudor, Michael Grant's biography of Cleopatra, Maria Bellonci's biography of Lucrezia Borgia, and Elizabeth Jenkins' biography of Elizabeth I.

Some of our problems with this particular boxed set are obvious even from the recitation of that roster. 'Women in History' is a big, juicy subject, after all - is it really best served by not one but two books on courtesans? (Richardson's book is very nearly worthless, and we'll get to Blanch's book shortly) Or, for that matter, two Tudor queens?

But the problems go deeper than that, naturally. Except on purely commercial grounds (that 'except' will, perhaps, earn us a Lockean 'Ya think?' - but even so!), we here at Stevereads would challenge the right of many of these titles to be in a set called 'Women in History.'

It goes without saying that in a world where three of the four greatest novelists of all frickin time are women, where virtually every nation that's ever existed has at some point been ruled by a woman (a free book to the first of you to tell me one of the times this was true of America!), and where the fight for women's rights contains a roster of some of the bravest people in history ... well, let's just say that in such a world, we probably shouldn't be spending so much time reading about courtesans.

Cleopatra? Yes, probably - not only for iconic name-recognition reasons, but because an argument could be made that Roman resentment of the lavish treatment she received from Julius Caesar helped to precipitate the man's assassination. There's absolutely no historical evidence that she was anything more than a war trophy with moxy (mytho-historiographers jumped on her - so to speak- pretty quick, so our surviving historical record is not to be trusted), but thanks to Shakespeare (and Liz Taylor), she's the most recognizable female name in history, so she probably deserves a place here.

But Mary Tudor? True, she has a popular drink named after her, but she was a boring failure as a queen, and what's worse, she wasn't a very good Tudor. Oh, she had the weird brain-wattage so typical of the breed, and like the rest of the family she was utterly fearless of her own safety. But her reign was a failure in main part because she was too stiffly doctrinaire and too inept at politics - very un-Tudorlike failings for which there's nobody to blame but the lady herself.

Elizabeth I of course (although it's not for any contemporary historian to bestow the sobriquet of 'the great' ... true, there's a long and fascinating thesis to be written on the whys whynots of how that title gets bestowed, but it's history's to give or withhold .... In the history of English monarchs, only Alfred gets it - not Henry VIII, not Victoria, not Edward III, and not Elizabeth) - true, she benefitted more from happenstance than most of her advocates would like to admit (she faced a uniquely weak coalition of potential European foes, and she was smarter than every single one of the men in her realm, and, not incidentally, a massive freak storm scattered the famed Spanish Armada before its soldiers could overrun the island), but her claim to prominence is undisputed.

(undisputed, yes, but nevertheless - we here at Stevereads maintain that the greatest English queen of all time was Queen Elizabeth, the wife of King George VI and mother of the present queen)

But Lucrezia Borgia? If a (totally spurious) reputation as a serial poisoner didn't cling to her name still, would anybody but Renaissance scholars know who she was? And who she was, frankly, doesn't warrant her a place in this set - just another devout Renaissance barter-wife, sold by men to other men in order to make male heirs. No, what we want for this collection are women whose lives are defined by more than bad marriages (or good ones, for that matter). No Catherine of Aragon, no Mary Queen of Scots, and (once you strip away the whole poisoner canard) no Lucrezia Borgia.

That leaves us with two problem cases. The first, 'Unnatural Murder,' is fairly easy to deal with: as interesting as the Overbury mystery is (did the Earl and Countess really poison him? Were there deeper motives involved than simple jockeying among James I's favorites at court?), it nevertheless remains a footnote in history. Anne Somerset's book is wonderful, make no mistake: this is exactly how history should be written. But we've only got seven spots here, so it has to go.

The second is an equally easy call, but it wrenches a good deal more. The scandalous memoirs of Harriette Wilson are divinely fun to read, and Lesley Blanch's edition deserves the widest possible audience. Wilson's memoirs were notorious in her day mainly because she very candidly offered all her former clients - including some of the most prestigious figures of Regency England - a chance to buy themselves OUT of her tell-all before it went to press. For the low, low price of 200 pounds, she would remove the name (and save the reputation) of any of her former paramours, including the Duke of Wellington, who refused and uttered his famous line "publish and be damned!"

The memoirs are hypnotically fantastic reading. Wilson wrote a number of now totally forgotten (unjustly so, in our opinion) novels, but this, no less novelistic in execution, is her masterpiece. Everywhere it glitters with her sly, piercing wit, as in this exchange with Wellington:

"I wonder you do not get married, Harriette!"
(By the by, ignorant people are always wondering).
"Why so?"
Wellington, however, gives no reasons for anything unconnected with fighting, at least since the convention of Cintra; and he, therefore, again became silent. Another burst of attic sentiment blazed forth:
"I was thinking of you last night, after I got into bed," resumed Wellington.
"How very polite to the Duchess," I observed.

Nevertheless, however clever and intelligent our memoirist is, and however much it pains us to set aside so attractive an edition of a book with which the common reader should be more familiar, Harriette Wilson has to go. The competition for her spot is simply too fierce.

And that leaves us where? We're keeping Cleopatra on a long surmise. We're keeping Elizabeth I for state reasons (although I might substitute J.E. Neale's more scholarly and more readable biography of the queen). And we're dumping everybody else - which leaves five open spaces! And this is where one of the most enjoybable aspects of boxed sets comes in: imagining them with different contents (how often have we imagined a 'military history' set, or a 'science fiction' set, and many other themes too nerdy to mention!).

We nominate the following:

Eleanor of Acquitaine and the Four Kings by Mary Kelly - Kelly's writing is a trifle mundane, but oh! Her subject certainly isn't! Instead of merely being a pawn in dynastic intrigues, Eleanor over time became adept and powerful enough to play them herself, at a time when most women in England lived lives indistinguishable from those of the livestock they tended.

Aphra Behn by Vita Sackville-West - Behn is an altogether remarkable figure in history, unprecedently living by her pen as a novelist and playwright in an age and craft thoroughly dominated by men, and Sackville-West's typically gorgeous prose does her full justice.

Jane Austen by Claire Tomalin - Unlike most Austen biographers, Tomalin controls herself admirably ... easy on the petticoats, generous with the textual appreciations. The result is a very readable account of the woman who is the most unlikely of all the world's great novelists.

Empress Maria Theresa by Mary Moffat - How wonderful it would be to see Moffat's long-gone book decked out in the fine colors of this boxed set! And how wonderful it would be if more readers knew the fascinating life of this woman, who lowered taxes, raised literacy rates, put Austria in the front rank of nations, AND went toe-to-toe with Frederick the Great on the battlefield.

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf - Those of you who know us could probably see this coming a mile off, but we can't help ourselves! Not only is Woolf's extended essay one of the finest works of English prose in existence, but it's ABOUT women in history - and so the perfect capstone to our imaginary set!

And there you have it! Wouldn't those seven volumes be a set to conjure with! A good balance of prose, politics, and personalities, with nary a courtesan in sight.