What seems clear is that without Murry prodding her on, without his fantasies of literary greatness for both of them, Mansfield might have produced less sterling work. At the same time their union was founded on a delusion of intimacy that was belied by how much time they spent apart and how erotically arrested they were when together. McDowell believes that Murry truly loved Mansfield and that Mansfield “loved him as much as she was capable of loving anyone.” What they had in common was a devotion to Mansfield’s art, which, in her case, suited her more than not. “It was the needs of the writer that came first,” McDowell notes, “and to those needs, she was ever faithful and true.” Perhaps she would have been happier with a different man—or, if she had followed her bisexual leanings, with a woman—but it is impossible after reading this account to see Mansfield as anyone’s victim.Microsoft Office is my best friend.
In similar fashion, making use of primary texts as well as journals, biographies, and letters, McDowell dissects the emotional mechanics that underlie the other eight couples—mechanics that are traditionally viewed as having been detrimental to the woman. Since McDowell’s interest is less in assigning blame than in bringing to light the symbiotic connection—a fusion of vocation and passion—that linked Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, or Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, she focuses on the vicissitudes of creative ambition and sexual attraction rather than on a simpler psychological pattern (the one dear to critics of a doctrinaire feminist persuasion) of exploiter and exploited. The extraordinary women in these accounts—even the fragile Jean Rhys and the suicidal Sylvia Plath—hold their own, taking as well as giving, writing despite the damage they inflict or have inflicted on them. “The aim of this book,” McDowell observes, “is...to demonstrate that none of the women artists mentioned here were victims at all, but that they chose their own fates knowingly and without the taint of victimization; that they chose such relationships in order to benefit their art and poetic consciousness.”
It is laudatory that McDowell has set herself against the tenor of much of the critical discourse on the price of female talent: even so idiosyncratic a thinker as Elizabeth Hardwick was inclined to look at victimhood as the natural habitat of creative women, especially when they teamed up with creative men. One might wish for a more mellifluous prose style and more bold speculation on the role of the eroticization of intellect, but overall this is a welcome addition to the lives of writers in love and lust—writers who sometimes manage to write peacefully together in the same room, and who are equally dominated by the same demanding master: literature.