Mari Ness

As I've alluded from time to time, I have an obsession mild interest in the glorious scandalfilled era of Henry VIII, that monarch with a terminal method of handling relationship problems. (Admit it: we've all had the desire from time to time to execute our exes, which is why we're enthralled by the stories where someone actually goes out and does just that.) So naturally, I had to pick up the new biography of Jane Boleyn, one of the more fascinating and enigmatic characters in that fascinating and enigmatic era, by Julia Fox.

Alas, I'm saddened to report that it did not quite live up to expectations.

Here's what's actually known about Jane Boleyn,Viscountess Rockford: not much. Born into a noble family, she married George Boleyn, brother of Anne Boleyn, sometime late in 1524 or in early 1525. When her husband and sister-in-law were accused of incest and treason in 1536, and executed, Jane Boleyn lived.

That would be dramatic enough. But days later, literally, Jane Boleyn resurfaced as the lady in waiting to Anne Boleyn's rival Jane Seymour (Fox suggests that she may have been there as a spy for Thomas Cromwell), allowing her to later become the lady of waiting to pretty young sexpot Catherine Howard. Where – despite the fact that she had personally witnessed the consequences of merely alleged adultery, Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford, helped arrange clandestine meetings between Catherine Howard and the smoking hot, incredibly sexy Thomas Culpepper,* then told investigators she believed that the queen had slept with Culpepper. Catherine Howard, Thomas Culpepper and Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford, were all executed for treason. Adding insult to injury, Parliament cheerfully called Lady Rochford "that bawd." (Another reason for loving the Tudor period – they had considerably better insults.)

Catherine Howard's motivations – young hot guy versus considerably older man with gout, and possibly a desperate desire to conceive a child so that she could stay on the throne – are clear enough. But what could have possibly possessed Jane Rochford to act so recklessly after she had witnessed – or lived through – her husband and sister-in-law's executions? Revenge? Despair? Insanity? Hubris? Inability to resist the orders of a queen?

Julia Fox's sympathetic biography promised to explain this, and extricate Jane Boleyn from the reputation of "oh, that bitch." Unfortunately, the biography is marred from the outset, by continuous statements such as:

"As she rode away from these familiar surroundings, Jane knew just how important those ties were."

"Even while she enjoyed those brief years of childhood, Jane realized that they were but a preparation for the future…."

"She [Jane] took comfort in the gentle goodness of the Virgin Mary….She was thankful that the Catholic Church stood between herself and the horrors of hell…"

"Jane, who came to relish evenings like that…"

"Jane understood that the family was a team..."

"[Jane] was sure that she would regain the king's favor in the end..."

"Jane could only watch with astonishment…"

And on, and on, and on. Fox has no evidence for these statements. None. True, unlike many women of her time, Jane Boleyn could read and write, but only a few of her thoughts have been preserved: a sniveling letter to Thomas Cromwell begging for financial assistance, and her final confession in the Catherine Howard scandal, which discusses only that, and no more. Neither document gives us a single clue as to Jane Boleyn's childhood thoughts, her religious beliefs, the happiness and contentment of her marriage, or more.

In some cases, these assumptions are critical. Understanding Jane's marriage, for instance, might help to explain her later actions, depending upon how she was affected by its violent end. Instead of considering different possibilities, Fox gives this breathtaking statement regarding Jane's marriage: "there is no reason to believe it anything other than happy. Love matches were rare but they could happen and they could certainly develop." True, they certainly could. True, they certainly could, but what even remote evidence do we have that George and Jane Boleyn enjoyed anything other than an arranged marriage? We may not have documented information about their quarrels – but we do know that Jane Boleyn was welcomed back at court after her husband lost his head, a possible indication that the court and the king were well aware that Jane and her husband were not particularly fond of each other, and that Jane would not be mourning him too hard. And Jane and George had no children. She might well have been infertile – or she and her husband might have had a lousy sex life. Who knows? See? Speculation the other way is easy as well.

Indeed, so little is actually known about Jane's early life that the first half of the biography, almost by necessity, follows the life of various people other than Jane – Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII and so on, with a few sentences about Jane Boleyn thrown in here and there to remind us that yes, she's the supposed subject of the biography. Not until the Rockfords moved into prominence do we have any real details about Jane Boleyn, and even those details are concerned less with her thoughts, and more with her attempts to control her finances, and details about her household items, including pillows.

These unproven statements cast severe doubts on the rest of the book, where Fox attempts to argue that Jane Boleyn really wasn't as awful as her legend suggests. Fox notes that the unknown lady sometimes identified with Jane Boleyn who apparently gave incriminating evidence against Anne Boleyn, thus condemning her own husband to death, was more likely either Lady Wingfield or the Countess of Worcester. Fox also argues that Jane's negative portrayal in history was created not by this deed, but by an urgent political need, a few years later, to turn Anne Boleyn into a quasi saint to legitimize Elizabeth's reign. This seems persuasive enough; rulers have frequently rewritten history for political propaganda.

But Fox is on far shakier ground when she attempts to explain Jane Boleyn's role in Catherine Howard's downfall. She argues that Jane Rochford acted as a go-between largely because she had no choice – disobeying an order of the queen would be treason. But Jane Boleyn, of all people, had to know the penalty for Catherine's acts, and had to know that courtiers, too, could die along the way. She had to know that she was risking her life. Her failure to say at least a single word of warning to Catherine Howard – and no word of warning is given in any of the multiple contemporary witness accounts – was, as it turned out, suicidal. And far worse: Fox is unable to deny that at the end, Lady Rochford delivered the final piece of evidence against pretty Catherine Howard, saying that she – Jane – believed that Catherine and Thomas Culpepper had slept together. That statement damned all three of them. Fox rather weakly claims that Jane believed that since Henry had not executed any of Anne's ladies in waiting, she would not be executed either. But what about Catherine, still fighting for her life as Jane's statement was made? Did Jane think of her – or, as seems more likely, fight only for her sake?

It still might be convincing, had Fox not so confidently thrown out assumption after assumption after assumption in the first half of the book, casting doubt on all of her later arguments and conclusions. Nor is the argument of, "Well, she didn't actually give evidence against her husband" enough to defend her against the more serious charge: having helped arrange clandestine meetings between the queen and her lover, she then betrayed that queen. That bawd, indeed.

* Admittedly, the historical record does not use the terms "smoking hot" or "incredibly sexy" to describe Thomas Culpepper, but the way I look at it, any guy that you're willing to risk getting beheaded for has got to be incredibly hot.)

So I just finished reading a biography of Charles Schultz by David Michaelis. Like many of you, I grew up on Peanuts; I always grabbed for the strip when I could. My parents rarely bothered with a daily paper, but I did read the Sunday funnies, tgregoryt collected Peanuts collections which I more than occasionally stole from him, and I had three small Snoopys, even while I longed for one of those dress up Snoopy dolls, which I never got. I read Peanuts during its more mellow years; it was a bit of a shock to read the collections from the 1950s and realize how genuinely nasty the strip was in its original days, back before it mellowed it.

I assumed that like most artworks, Peanuts had its roots in Schultz's life, a thesis that Michaelis sets out to prove by illustrating Schultz's life and background with various strips. Schultz grew up in what seems to have been a rather repressed Midwestern household before heading off to World War II; he then fell in unrequited love numerous times until he met his first wife, Joyce, who, Michaelis tells us, helped inspire the character of Lucy.

I kinda have to question that one – largely because I cannot imagine living with an actual Lucy, day in, day out, but then again, Schultz did eventually divorce his first wife, and it's possible to see connections between Lucy's demand for attention from the piano obsessed Schroeder to problems in the Schultz's marriage when the withdrawn artist failed to give his wife emotional support. Michaelis seems to be on slightly firmer ground when he connects Snoopy's happiness after meeting an adorable girl beagle with soft paws to Schulz's meeting an adorable girl human with, sigh, soft paws, that he clearly fell into an utter passion for.

The biography occasionally lacks of sense of timing and sequence of events – an aside about Schulz's troubles with union workers in 1978 inexplicably appears in the middle of a narrative about 1971 events, for instance, a narrative flaw that becomes a much larger problem when Michaelis is talking about Schultz's second wife, Jeanne – although the two met while Schultz was legally married, the biography is confused on the timing, making it unclear whether they met before Schultz left his first wife, or afterwards. Given that the biography quite openly describes an earlier affair where Schultz was still living with his first wife, this seems an odd thing to be confused about. (Since many of the people in the biography are still alive, however, it's possible that some of this happened to shield the privacy of living people.) And some of the connections between the strips and events in Schultz's life seem, to put it kindly, to be a bit of a stretch.

But I sensed a deeper problem in the biography, the sense that although Michaelis had done all of the interviews, read all of the documents, studied all of the cartoons, in the end, he hadn't really understood an essential part of Schultz – the cartoonist's clinical depression and severe agoraphobia, which clearly haunted the strip and his relationships with family and friends. It reminded me of the multiple biographers who choose to write about bisexual people (Edna St. Vincent Millay, Queen Christina of Sweden, Lord Byron) while insisting, against all available evidence, that their subjects most certainly couldn't possibly be bisexual, even when they were fantasizing about/falling in love with/actually sleeping with both genders. That fundamental lack of understanding not only made the biographies frustrating, but also kept the biographers from gaining an insight, or an acceptance, into their subjects, and places barriers between the person and the readers. The same thing happens here: at the end, I felt that I knew more about Schultz from just his strip; the book had filled in fascinating background detail, but failed to understand his depression.

I'm not suggesting that writers can only write about what they know – if we did that, we wouldn't be writers. But I'm not sure that anyone who doesn't understand, really understand, clinical depression, should be writing a biography focusing on someone with clinical depression.

Say it with me...bisexual.

Let's repeat that, slowly. Bi...sex...u...al.

Everybody comfy with this now? Good. Because it appears that a number of biographers aren't.

I'm reacting from reading a 1993 biography of Daphne DuMaurier, probably best known for Rebecca, but also one of those people incidentally or directly connected to numerous famous people, including Eisenhower, Mountbatten and Queen Elizabeth. (Her husband enjoyed a mostly distinguished military career and was rewarded with an appointment at Buckingham Palace.) Despite, or maybe because of this, she was largely a recluse who preferred to hide away and write instead of hanging with these sorts of people, which is understandable. Recluse or not, however, she had affairs – with another man while her husband was away during World War II, and with a woman named Gertrude. Based on this, the biographer decides that DuMaurier was not bisexual, but a repressed lesbian – despite DuMaurier's own strong denials of this.

The author's evidence for this? DuMaurier's affair with Gertrude, a few it-didn't-quite-happen crushes on and affairs with women in her teenage years, and statements that with men, she enjoyed foreplay far more than actual intercourse. This is certainly excellent evidence that DuMaurier was attracted to women, but far short of evidence that she was purely a lesbian. In fact, as the biography also shows, she fell hard and deeply in love with her decidedly masculine husband, and if she restricted herself to mostly foreplay with the man she had a later affair with, this may have been partly for reasons of enjoyment, and also because she was trying, in her own way, to not completely cheat on her husband while he was at war. But the overwhelming evidence is that DuMaurier was in fact bisexual, able to fall in love with and be physically attracted to both men and women, not a repressed lesbian who put her lesbian feelings into books – because a repressed lesbian, by definition of the word "lesbian" would not have fallen in love with a man, as DuMaurier did at least twice.

I'm getting beyond tired of biographers writing about women who are clearly, utterly bisexual and arguing either that they had no real attraction towards women at all (Christina of Sweden, Edna St. Vincent Millay) or that they were closest lesbians with no interest in men. It's more than infuriating.

On another mildly irritating note, early in the book the author praises DuMaurier's dedication, focus on, and sacrifices for her writing work, a compliment that makes sense until the author explains that this dedication involved avoiding the distraction of social activities which, the biographer notes, DuMaurier hated anyway. In fact, DuMaurier enjoyed advantages that most beginning writers would die for: her parents supported her, so she did not have to seek other employment; she had plenty of isolation and books, but the ability and opportunity to seek out and talk with other writers and poets. (Her father, a fixture of the theatrical world, also knew several literary figures.) This is not to underscore DuMaurier's genuine dedication to her work, but just to note that as sacrifices go, giving up socializing that you hate doesn't count for much.


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In mildly related news, I also watched Fingersmith, which is a genuine Victorian lesbian movie. The first half of the film, alas, is overly slow, even with the bits of lesbian sex, and filled with bits that made me say, "Oh, come on, give me a break," until with a sudden and mildly unexpected plot twist it turns into pure and much more enjoyable Victorian melodrama. I'm not entirely certain I bought the ending, the explanation, or any of the plot, but the film did have moments in the middle, and let's face it, the supply of lesbian Victorian films is strictly limited.

One thing I find alternatively amusing and frustrating is the assumption made by many that birth control, pornography, and lots of lots of sex is some sort of recent phenomenon caused by declining moral values, Hollywood and the internet. Modern medicine has certainly increased options for birth control, and the internet has certainly transformed the delivery method of porn (although the vast number of porn stores here suggest that many people still prefer their porn to be delivered directly to their beds or TV. But both of them have been with us for a long, long time. Eighteenth century England, for instance, was a very happy and fruitful time for pornographers who happily churned out multiple little books and pamphlets of cheerfully dubious morality and questionable taste but a lot of sex. And right along with the porn has come variously successful attempts to quash it.

Which is why I wish more people would read books like The Sex Side of Life, a biography of Mary Dare Dennett, who fought to increase access to information about birth control and sex education in the early half of the 20th century. Her biographer notes that Dennett's role has been overshadowed by the more famous story of Margaret Sanger, but the role was still important.

The book opens with a brief discussion of the Comstock censorship laws, which criminalized pornography and birth control information; the discussion makes it clear that early Americans loved their porn and were quite happy to read lots of it. Nonetheless, a post-Civil War morality made the Comstock laws more popular, and dispensing information about birth control became a crime. This had a directly negative effect on the life of Dennett. Dennett's marriage was happy until her pregnancies: the first one almost killed her; the second one ended in the tragic death of the child, and the third childbirth ripped her uterus, turning her into an invalid and ending her sex life. Unquestionably Dennett these days would have had the options of some form of birth control after the first pregnancy, and surgery to help out the complications of the third. In 1905, unable to risk another pregnancy and knowing no other option, Dennett stopped sleeping with her husband, and the marriage collapsed. By the time Dennett did find a surgeon capable of helping her uterine problems, it was too late.

It's a horrifying story, and while reading it I was again enraged by pharmacists who refuse to prescribe the pill for moral reasons, falsely believing that it causes abortions, forgetting that childbirth itself is medically risky, although certainly conditions have improved since 1905. Dennett adored her children and never regretted having them, but pondering the positive impact that birth control might have had in her life is heartbreaking. The book, which at times barely controls an underlying fury and indignation, occasionally mentions other horrifying anecdotes.

Incidentally, Dennett's life also reminds us that yes, women did, indeed, have careers before the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Before her marriage Dennett worked as an artist and a teacher creating artistic curriculums, and actually made more money than her husband, and after her marriage collapsed, she continued to work at numerous feminist organizations, continuing to support herself and her children. (Her ex failed to pay child support.) She also wrote a small pamphlet explaining sex to teenagers that makes for moderately hilarious reading now; she was found guilty of pornography for this little tract, although the conviction was later overturned. And she joined several organizations trying to bring birth control information to women, particularly women gripped by poverty. She was not always successful.

The Sex Side of Life has its flaws – the author seems to harbour some inexplicable resentment against Margaret Sanger, and more than occasionally the author's incredibility that anyone would restrict access to birth control slips through, with the more than occasional exclamation point. The second half of the book, which details infighting among feminist and birth control organizations, is considerably more tedious than the first half and much less personal, although it focuses on the author's secondary point, to emphasize Dennett's role in feminist history. Nonetheless, any book that helps to counter the "we were all so much purer then" nostalgia is a helpful one.

Sylvia Plath's poetry has always sparked a visceral, repulsed, response in me: I hate it. A college friend thought my response just proved Plath's greatness – if the poems were genuinely terrible, I wouldn't have had any response to them at all. Fair enough, but that hardly eliminates the hatred. I was also not terribly fond of The Bell Jar, another of those Books Read In College Because Every Woman Ought To Read Them. Only two other poets, Ezra Pound and Emily Dickinson, arouse a similar feeling of ick. I did, however, enjoy some of the work of her husband Ted Hughes.

So I was delighted to find a biography of Plath's rival for Ted Hughes' affections, Assia Wevill, expecting that sympathy for his mistress would just prove that I was right to hate Plath all along. In fact, Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath's Rival and Ted Hughes' Doomed Love, was the first book I have read anywhere that made me feel any sympathy for Plath, while retaining kindly feelings for the severely messed up Assia. Ted Hughes, it seems, had a gift for finding severely troubled women. The rootless Assia fled Nazi Germany in childhood for Palestine, where she lived in Jewish Tel Aviv with her secular Jewish father and Lutheran Christian mother, hardly the best way to nurture roots and self-confidence. She married very young, then divorced, then married again, then divorced, and was happily in her third marriage when she met Hughes. As she had at the end of her second marriage, for awhile she managed an awkward foursome, then an equally awkward ménage after Plath's death, before finally echoing Plath's suicide – but also, horrifically, killing her four year daughter Shura in a murder-suicide.

(The portions of the book dealing with Shura are heartbreaking, as are the parts where friends bitterly wish that they could have seen the signs of despair and at least saved the daughter. The book makes a rather lame attempt to explain why a mother would want to commit a murder-suicide, but perhaps because I'm not a parent, I frankly didn't get it, and I think we're all better off with the theory that Assia just went insane, without looking for further explanations.)

Not surprisingly, the person coming out looking the worst here – despite a careful effort not to pass judgement – is Ted Hughes, not so much because of his marital infidelities and multiple women, but because of his dual shocking insights matched with utter lack of insight. This is a man who can simultaneously utterly understand his lovers while utterly refusing to see that they are in suicidal despair. I wonder how much guilt Hughes held for the remainder of his life, not only about Plath, but also about Assia and his daughter Shura; it cannot be easy to live and work with words while knowing that two separate women have committed suicide for your sake, resulting in the loss of your daughter. The book does not know or speculate, but it does detail Hughes' efforts to keep the story quiet during his lifetime, requesting that friends not give interviews. I'm not sure that Hughes could have changed Plath's fate – she had a strong attachment to death – but it does make take another look at the wrath within his poems.

But Plath, surprisingly enough, is portrayed with restraint and dignity, surprisingly because one of the authors knew Hughes personally but apparently never met Plath. And the book gives a much better understanding of the wrath behind Ariel and other poems, though I am no more eager to reread any of them.

Fair warning: this book should be liberally mixed with other books; Assia's life is utterly fascinating, yes, but the end definitely needs a counterweight. I used tammy212's Beka Cooper (very fun read), the intriguing A Factory of Cunning (a continuation of Dangerous Liasions, set in London, complete with women swinging from the rafters and incidentally losing clothing in the process), the less intriguing Brain Rose (I don't mean to be critical, but did Nancy Kress write anything involving other than Alien Light?) and various articles about dolphins.

So I've been reading Neal Gabler's biography of Walt Disney, which also purports to be a study of Disney's impact on American culture. It completely fails at part two, which is hardly surprising: attempting to retell the biography of a person along with the history of a major U.S. corporation along with retellings of the process of creating animated features doesn't leave a lot of room for analysis of American culture. It's there, sure, but in superficial statements attempting to explain the popularity of Snow White or Mickey Mouse in a few quick, facile paragraphs.

As a pure biography, Gabler's study remains somewhat superficial, in part because Walt Disney was clearly not the easiest man to know, and possibly in part because his daughters are both still living. As Gabler notes, everyone Walt Disney met and worked with formed a different impression of him, and he seems to have kept himself barricaded even from his wife and brother Roy. (At one point, Walt accused his wife of lying to him about euthanizing the family dog, refusing to believe her denials.) Gabler mentions, but does not analyze, the possibility that Walt Disney might have been abused as a child, but clearly, his early family life was not happy. (Two older brothers quarreled with Disney's father and rarely spoke to him afterwards.) The impact of this childhood on the films, and Disney's later demands for absolute control and a recreation of a childhood world, is probably connected to this, but Gabler barely touches on this connection: he's not interested in Walt Disney's childhood, but in how he ran – or in some cases, blundered through – a corporation.

If the book doesn't quite succeed as biography or cultural criticism, however, it succeeds fabulously as a corporate history, providing a dispassionate, readable and fascinating history of the Walt Disney Company, which, whatever Walt might have thought, was not quite the same thing. Gabler claims to have read through nearly the entire Disney archives, which seems plausible enough, and sprinkles the narrative with various fascinating tidbits and discussions of chicanery and cheating. Gabler also refutes several of the Disney myths when he can find no proof of them (which happens frequently) and takes the time to give both sides of a story. This is not the authorized Disney saga, but it's a fascinating read.

One aspect of the book remains troubling: its use of language. Gabler consistently refers to several of the Disney women animators as "girls." (These "girls" actually formed most of the ink and paint department and played essential roles in the cleanup and background crews on the early Disney features.) This might be dismissed as a reflection of Walt Disney's own viewpoints – his main animators, supervisors and executives were all men, and he does not seem to have been particularly interested in women with the possible exception of his wife. Writers do tend to echo what they've been reading, and the book gives the distinct sense that Disney's many women artists were dismissed as "girls" and called so during the 1930s and 40s; in one case, the women are slaving away at painting Pinocchio on Christmas Eve, and Walt Disney hands them "beautifully wrapped" cigarette cases and compacts for Christmas presents. (Not incidentally, at around the same time, Disney animators were creating those atrocious little cupids and demure and girlish centaurs for Fantasia, and creating that masterwork of misogyny, Bambi, one of the most sexist animated features ever created. (And I say this in full awareness of the heavy competition.)

But Gabler later makes it clear that the paternalistic Walt Disney also referred to the male animators in the studio as "boys" – and yet Gabler consistently refers to them as "men" or "animators." In a few other instances, Gabler suddenly and inexplicably identifies certain people (comedians and actors) as black – but gives us no context for this. If their race isn't important – for example, if Gabler isn't trying to say that Disney was, or was not, racist – then why mention their race at all? Again, it's perhaps a reflection of the general lack of power and influence of black people in Hollywood at the time and at Disney specifically: the book's illustrations are dominated by pictures of white men. The sense given is that, like many in the 20th century, Walt Disney was, for the most part, a casual, unthinking racist. He was, in his own words, sexist: Gabler quotes an interview where Walt claimed that women did not become animators because they were lousy cartoonists and lacked a sense of humour.

It's one thing to ignore – or leave out – a serious gender/racial discussion in this biography/corporate history – after all, as it stands, the biography is already quite lengthy. But Gabler is also trying to argue that Disney was the most influential figure in 20th century American culture. And while the term "most influential" is most definitely debatable, Disney unquestionably formed a large influence on American culture, American perceptions of U.S. history, and the development of television in the 20th century, and thus his attitudes towards and depictions of women, blacks and minorities are important. Gabler, as noted, mentions these, and even mentions the occasional critiques Disney faced over his attitudes towards women. But with the unthinking repetition of language used by Walt Disney -- not as quotes, but with the narrative of the biography -- Gabler reinforces this culture. This isn't entirely surprising, since Gabler clearly, despite criticisms, generally approves of the corporate and cultural climate created by Disney, but in a book that claims to examine the creation of this culture, it's problematic.

Since I mentioned it, just to clarify: I adore most of Fantasia, despite the effects the film usually has on the people (or person) around me, especially during the "Rite of Spring" sequence, or occasionally during the "Pastorale" sequence, which probably not incidentally are my least favorite parts of the film. Let's face it, the dinosaurs have some cool effects, sure, but they're not exactly interesting, and the sequence is probably the most depressing one in the film, which given the "Night on Bald Mountain" sequence that follows is saying something. And while I'm aware that the various cupids and centaurs and so on in the "Pastorale" sequence are supposed to be cute, only a very fine line separates "cute" from "faintly nauseating," and much of that sequence crosses the line. To counter this, though, Fantasia has the loveliness of the "Nutcracker Suite," and of course those dancing hippos. Thus the new tool of the fast forward button. (I have not attempted this in the presence of someone else, so I am not sure what effect the fast forward button might have on the other, ahem, affects of Fantasia on those around me.)

Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, a book about lesbianism published in 1928, was forced on me back in college as a work that "every woman should read." So I read it, and hated it, thinking, wow, so this must be where all the clichés about lesbians come from. (I was wrong about this, by the way – some contemporary lesbians critiqued the book in part precisely because it used already present stereotypes.) I also found the book more than vaguely depressing.

Nonetheless, the book made enough of an impression that I found myself picking up Our Three Selves, a biography of Hall, this week, and soon found myself disliking Hall even more. (The title refers to Hall and two of her most long term lovers.) Hall, as it turns out, was not merely a famous lesbian writer: she also cheated on and dragged her lovers through utter emotional hell; strongly supported fascists (she cheered on Mussolini), was strongly anti-Semitic (although she did, in the end, feel that the concentration camps were going too far since Hitler should have been focusing only on the "evil Jews,") and appears to have been a hellish house guest and a client that could bring a literary agent to tears. And this is the sympathetic biography. In her defense, she did love and defend animals and supported a number of deadbeat relatives and friends, and could care tenderly for her lovers when needed. And she spent extensive time trying to contact and prove the existence of ghosts.

The book also tells the stories about her various lovers, primarily Lady Una Troubridge, who lived with Hall as her wife for twenty-nine years. (Hall took the masculine role and called herself John.) These women generally come across as significantly more likeable than Hall; Troubridge, especially, almost comes across as a near saint as she continues to staunchly defend, admire and love Hall despite Hall's painful affair with an extremely sulky, bad tempered nurse. (If you've ever wondered if you're the only person who's ever fallen for somebody utterly, utterly wrong for you, or someone who's just a jerk, read this book. You'll feel much better.)

I'm not sure precisely what type of woman I expected Hall to be, although I certainly came into the biography under the (quickly disproved) assumption that no one could simultaneously support both fascism and lesbian rights. What ultimately makes this biography so intriguing, of course, is just those contradictions. But I am beginning to wonder if I'll end up liking any of the "serious" writers of the early 20th century after reading their biographies. So far, the quest to find any likeable people from that group is not going well, which probably explains my visceral, irritated and unpleasant response to much of the "literary" work of modernists and the first half of the 20th century in general; they just weren't likeable people, which perhaps explains why, for the most part, they didn't write likeable books.

(I do like some writers, like Forster, so it's not all bad. And I'm a diehard fan of much of the popular fiction of the early 20th century, the stuff considered unimportant for literary study. But that's another entry.)