BIOGRAPHY: Between the Sheets: The Famous Literary Liaisons of Nine 20th-Century Women WritersBy Lesley McDowell Duckworth, Overlook, 352pp. £16.99
BETWEEN THE SHEETStackles the perennial problem for biographers of writers with difficult private lives, which is how to reconcile the work and the life. The women writers whom Lesley McDowell addresses all had difficult lives, particularly in terms of their relationships. The nine examined here – Katherine Mansfield, HD, Rebecca West, Jean Rhys, Anaïs Nin, Simone de Beauvoir, Martha Gellhorn, Elizabeth Smart and Sylvia Plath – are all notable for their literary achievements. Their associations with men, however, are notoriously less successful, and are often read by critics as destructive at worst, futile at best. McDowell attempts to counter this impression, declaring that these writers made a "Faustian pact" to put up with emotionally destructive relationships because at the same time they were artistically productive liaisons. "In exchange for what benefited their art, they took on board certain behaviours, attitudes, or treatment from their male partners, the kind they very likely wouldn't have stood from anyone else."
Describing Mansfield and her relationship with John Middleton Murry, McDowell draws an attractive picture of the two spending time in the south of France, writing alongside one another. Likewise, the early years of Plath's marriage to Ted Hughes saw them writing in the same study, for both a fruitful period of literary companionship. However, this is not the ground McDowell is most interested in exploring. Most often in her narrative it is the physical and psychosexual that she feels the need to explain. Again, writing of Mansfield and Murry, McDowell says "the question of their sex life may seem a prurient one . . . but it is crucial". This typifies the book's approach to the subject: sex first, writing second. The problem here is that the emphasis on sex (did they, didn't they?) ends up being prurient in the extreme as so little attention is paid to the work. Though the chapter on West and HG Wells imagines their relationship as a "literary apprenticeship", there is only a very brief mention of West's "extraordinary first novel", The Return of the Soldier, while there are pages speculating on the ins and outs of their physical relationship. On the subject of the marriage of Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway, McDowell spells it out: "Sex between them had never been great." What these men added to the women's writing is left vague – though for HD at least Ezra Pound typed out her poems, an apparently "feminine" role as "very few of the men offer to type out their lover's words".
Indeed, the only writing that is given any real assessment by McDowell is the autobiographical fiction, the memoirs and the letters. Instead of an intervention in literary history, Between the Sheetsreads as a series of potted sexual biographies. For instance, McDowell is accurate in refuting the perception of Jean Rhys as an "ingenue" when she met Ford Maddox Ford, but her contention that Rhys was ultimately looking for a "care-giver" undermines the sense of Rhys as a "self-aware woman". McDowell casts Ford, in turn, as a fantasist, stating that "fantasists aren't necessarily lovable Walter Mitty types: they can be dangerous people". McDowell wonders too what the basis for sexual attraction was in this relationship, as Ford was "hardly a 'beast'", while Rhys had "large, wide-set eyes . . . and perfect skin". The conclusion, then, that "one can only wonder if it was worth it for [Rhys], and, most importantly, if she would have become a published writer without him" illustrates the hazy nature of McDowell's argument, which consistently veers towards pop psychology and speculation.
The most successful chapters are those on Plath and de Beauvoir, partly because McDowell can draw on previous scholarship on both these women’s “literary liaisons” and also because there is so much evidence of the relationships, not only in autobiographical fiction, which provides a somewhat shaky form of evidence in other chapters, but in the letters and journals. These two sources provide these chapters with stronger foundations and allow McDowell to reflect on the literary careers of Plath and de Beauvoir rather than solely on their sexual histories. Perhaps most striking is McDowell’s sense that de Beauvoir, rather than being a jealous victim of Sartre’s affairs, was actually constructing a world of her own. McDowell argues that de Beauvoir, like Mansfield before her, longed to be “a solitary woman”; her relationship with Sartre was thus dependent on being able to keep him at arm’s length so that she could maintain a sense of herself and her writing. The image of de Beauvoir sitting alone at a Parisian cafe table is powerful: “I would gaze out at the sky, at the passersby; then I would lower my eyes to . . . the volume I was reading. I felt wonderful.” The power of this image is such that it makes one wonder why these writers cannot now be assessed in terms of their own merits rather than in terms of their relationships with men.
Emilie Pine is a lecturer in modern drama at UCD. Her book The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culturewill be published by Palgrave later this year
