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Between the Sheets: Nine 20th Century Women Writers and Their Famous Literary Partnerships
The literary critic examines the love lives and career ambitions of some of the twentieth century’s greatest female authors—from Sylvia Plath to Anaïs Nin. Why did a gifted writer like Sylvia Plath stumble into a marriage that drove her to suicide? Why did Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) want to marry Ezra Pound when she was far more attracted to women? Why did Simone de Beauvoir pimp for Jean-Paul Sartre? In Between the Sheets, author and feminist scholar Lesley McDowell examines nine famously troubled literary romances to arrive at a provocative insight into the motivations of these and other great female writers. The list of the damages done in each of these sexual relationships is long, but each provokes the same would these women have become the writers they became without these relationships? Delving into their diaries, letters, and journals, McDowell examines the extent to which each woman was prepared to put artistic ambition before personal happiness, and how dependent on their male writing partners they felt themselves to be. “McDowell . . . has culled incredibly juicy details. With so many affairs and broken hearts, the most surprising thing may be that anything got written in the last 100 years.” —The New York Times Book Review
367 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2010
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281 people want to read
About the author
Lesley McDowell
6 books17 followersLesley McDowell is an author and critic living in Scotland. She earned a PhD for work on James Joyce and feminist theory before turning to literary journalism. Her first novel "The Picnic" was published in 2007 and she is the recipient of a Scottish Arts Council award for a second novel, based on the life of a childhood friend of Mary Shelley. She reviews regularly for the Herald, the Scotsman and the Independent on Sunday.
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/profile/le...
Source: http://www.theguardian.com/profile/le...
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
March 25, 2025
So much about this book sat badly with me! A random pick for a few pence from the second-hand bookshop and despite the clunky pun of the title (bedsheets=sheets of the page, doh), the range of female writers and writing partnerships made me overcome my instincts: Katherine Mansfield, H.D., Rebecca West, Jean Rhys, Anais Nin, Simone de Beauvoir, Martha Gelhorn, Elizabeth Smart, Sylvia Plath - this reads like a roll-call of my favourite writers together with a few I wanted to know more about (West, Gelhorn, Smart). Even the cutesy, so-called ironic labels the women are given within the context of their partnerships (the wife, the chaser, the mother) didn't succeed in putting me off completely. But the introduction almost did.
The author describes her own troubled affair with a male writer who was uncommitted and unfaithful, how much she depended on his informed interest in her writing, and how she refused to be a victim so that when he cooled, she broke off the relationship. Then, when reading a memoir about Elizabeth Smart and George Barker, she had flashbacks of her own experience and so came up with a theory that women writers put up with their male partners' bad behaviour because they need their intellectual support which almost always makes them better writers than they would have been alone. This is the frame through which this entire book is written, encompassing a range of different partnerships, set in different historical periodisations - and for which there is no evidence other than a single person's acute identification with a memoir she read.
There are brief biographies of all the people involved (full list is below) and so for a quick-and-dirty overview of writerly partnerships, this has a role. But as soon as the author starts inserting herself with her 'analysis', I balked. She, to be fair, has read the fiction, the letters, the diaries and journals but the arguments are unconvincing, rarely evidenced or tied down, and all related back to the a priori assumptions of her personal experience: that female writers need male writers to reach their potential and are prepared to put up with bad personal behaviour in order to have access to literary help and support otherwise denied them.
Now, there are some points of interest here: women in the earlier part of the twentieth century might indeed not have had access to the kinds of literary networks than men were tapped into - though I was surprised that the Bloomsbury Group, for example, was never discussed even though Mansfield and H.D. were on the outskirts. Similarly, de Beauvoir was absolutely at the heart of intellectual and leftist political networks in Paris, and Gelhorn was a renowned journalist and war correspondent before she ever met Hemingway.
There is also an interesting point to be made here about how another writer involved in an intimate relationship might be attentive to one's writing in the way that no-one else is (and I was reminded here of the close relationship between doctoral student and supervisor where no-one else is ever going to scrutinize, discuss and productively critique your work over a long period so closely ever again) - but to jump from that to this assertion that all these women compromised on unhappy, unfulfilling, painful, exploitative and possibly abusive relationships with male writers just to support their own authorship feels misinformed and reductive. The claim that they would never have been the writers they were without these men and therefore were willing to sublimate their emotional life for their writerly life - with no clear evidence to back this up - is surprising.
These women, these partnerships, the contexts in which they took place are so different that to reduce them all to a single and intentional impetus is not one I found convincing. Too often, it feels like this book is looking to find a unique way of understanding these relationships - not a problematic quality in itself, scholarship is based on questioning what we think we know - but it ends up here being reductive.
The final chapter on Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes was the one where I am most familar with the scholarly literature and the primary sources and the assertion here is a particularly left-field one: that Plath committed suicide because she feared she and Hughes were going to reconcile! There's also the implication, never stated out loud, that she should have been grateful to Hughes for behaving so badly that he released her rage that fed the Ariel poems. Hmm. At which point I threw the book across the room.
Possibly a book I should have DNF, but I ended up hate-reading it instead.
The full contents:
The companion: Katherine Mansfield & John Middleton Murry
The novice: H.D. & Ezra Pound
The mother: Rebecca West & H.G. Wells
The ingénue: Jean Rhys & Ford Madox Ford
The mistress: Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller
The long-termer: Simone de Beauvoir & Jean-Paul Sartre
The survivor: Martha Gellhorn & Ernest Hemingway
The chaser: Elizabeth Smart & George Barker
The wife: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes
The author describes her own troubled affair with a male writer who was uncommitted and unfaithful, how much she depended on his informed interest in her writing, and how she refused to be a victim so that when he cooled, she broke off the relationship. Then, when reading a memoir about Elizabeth Smart and George Barker, she had flashbacks of her own experience and so came up with a theory that women writers put up with their male partners' bad behaviour because they need their intellectual support which almost always makes them better writers than they would have been alone. This is the frame through which this entire book is written, encompassing a range of different partnerships, set in different historical periodisations - and for which there is no evidence other than a single person's acute identification with a memoir she read.
There are brief biographies of all the people involved (full list is below) and so for a quick-and-dirty overview of writerly partnerships, this has a role. But as soon as the author starts inserting herself with her 'analysis', I balked. She, to be fair, has read the fiction, the letters, the diaries and journals but the arguments are unconvincing, rarely evidenced or tied down, and all related back to the a priori assumptions of her personal experience: that female writers need male writers to reach their potential and are prepared to put up with bad personal behaviour in order to have access to literary help and support otherwise denied them.
Now, there are some points of interest here: women in the earlier part of the twentieth century might indeed not have had access to the kinds of literary networks than men were tapped into - though I was surprised that the Bloomsbury Group, for example, was never discussed even though Mansfield and H.D. were on the outskirts. Similarly, de Beauvoir was absolutely at the heart of intellectual and leftist political networks in Paris, and Gelhorn was a renowned journalist and war correspondent before she ever met Hemingway.
There is also an interesting point to be made here about how another writer involved in an intimate relationship might be attentive to one's writing in the way that no-one else is (and I was reminded here of the close relationship between doctoral student and supervisor where no-one else is ever going to scrutinize, discuss and productively critique your work over a long period so closely ever again) - but to jump from that to this assertion that all these women compromised on unhappy, unfulfilling, painful, exploitative and possibly abusive relationships with male writers just to support their own authorship feels misinformed and reductive. The claim that they would never have been the writers they were without these men and therefore were willing to sublimate their emotional life for their writerly life - with no clear evidence to back this up - is surprising.
These women, these partnerships, the contexts in which they took place are so different that to reduce them all to a single and intentional impetus is not one I found convincing. Too often, it feels like this book is looking to find a unique way of understanding these relationships - not a problematic quality in itself, scholarship is based on questioning what we think we know - but it ends up here being reductive.
The final chapter on Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes was the one where I am most familar with the scholarly literature and the primary sources and the assertion here is a particularly left-field one: that Plath committed suicide because she feared she and Hughes were going to reconcile! There's also the implication, never stated out loud, that she should have been grateful to Hughes for behaving so badly that he released her rage that fed the Ariel poems. Hmm. At which point I threw the book across the room.
Possibly a book I should have DNF, but I ended up hate-reading it instead.
The full contents:
The companion: Katherine Mansfield & John Middleton Murry
The novice: H.D. & Ezra Pound
The mother: Rebecca West & H.G. Wells
The ingénue: Jean Rhys & Ford Madox Ford
The mistress: Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller
The long-termer: Simone de Beauvoir & Jean-Paul Sartre
The survivor: Martha Gellhorn & Ernest Hemingway
The chaser: Elizabeth Smart & George Barker
The wife: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes
dnf
October 17, 2025DNF (didnotfinish). İlk 125 sayfayı okudum. Ayakta Kalan ve Erkek Avcısı başlıklı bölümlere şöyle bir göz atacağım.
Leslie Mcdowell 20. yüzyılın dokuz kadın yazarı ve onların yine yazar olan erkeklerle ilişkilerini ele alırken kanıtlamaya çalıştığı tez şu; "Kitaptaki kadınların çoğu birlikte olduğu kişinin iyi yanları, yani kendisinin sanatı için yapabilecekleri uğruna kötü yanlarına katlanmaya hazırdı.". Başka bir deyişle ele alınan yetenekli kadınlar hepsi birbirinden berbat, sorunlu, toksik adamlara sırf edebi çalışmalarına faydası var diye katlanmışlar.
Yazar tüm metin boyunca yazarların kitaplarından, mektuplarından, günlüklerinden devşirdiklerini teorisine uyacak şekilde yorumluyor. O kadar zorlama bir anlatım var ki neresini eleştirsem bilemiyorum. Örneğin Rebecca West'in 10 yıl boyunca H.G. Wells ile beraber olması sırf bu nedenle açıklanabilir mi? Tarafların mental sağlığından, toplumsal koşullardan vs bahsediliyor ama derine inilmemiş.
Beni rahatsız eden başka bir durum da biseksüel olduğu bilinen kadın yazarların çocuk kalmak istedikleri için böyle ilişkilere katlandıkları iddiası oldu. Cinsel yönelim meselesinin kadın yazarların ilişkilerini nasıl etkilediği kesinlikle bir uzman tarafından ele alınmalı. Yapılan açıklamalar inandırıcılıktan uzak hatta kimi yerde saçmaydı.
Ele alınan ilişkileri de yazayım; Katherine Mansfield/John Middleton Murray, Hilda Doolitle/Ezra Pound, Rebecca West/H.G. Wells, Jean Rhys/Ford Maddox Ford, Anaïs Nin/Henry Miller, Simone de Beauvoir/Jean-Paul Sartre, Martha Gellhorn/Ernest Hemingway, Elizabeth Smart/George Baker, Slyvia Plath/Ted Hughes.
Çeviri çok kötüydü. Dizgi hataları vardı kimi yerde.
Leslie Mcdowell 20. yüzyılın dokuz kadın yazarı ve onların yine yazar olan erkeklerle ilişkilerini ele alırken kanıtlamaya çalıştığı tez şu; "Kitaptaki kadınların çoğu birlikte olduğu kişinin iyi yanları, yani kendisinin sanatı için yapabilecekleri uğruna kötü yanlarına katlanmaya hazırdı.". Başka bir deyişle ele alınan yetenekli kadınlar hepsi birbirinden berbat, sorunlu, toksik adamlara sırf edebi çalışmalarına faydası var diye katlanmışlar.
Yazar tüm metin boyunca yazarların kitaplarından, mektuplarından, günlüklerinden devşirdiklerini teorisine uyacak şekilde yorumluyor. O kadar zorlama bir anlatım var ki neresini eleştirsem bilemiyorum. Örneğin Rebecca West'in 10 yıl boyunca H.G. Wells ile beraber olması sırf bu nedenle açıklanabilir mi? Tarafların mental sağlığından, toplumsal koşullardan vs bahsediliyor ama derine inilmemiş.
Beni rahatsız eden başka bir durum da biseksüel olduğu bilinen kadın yazarların çocuk kalmak istedikleri için böyle ilişkilere katlandıkları iddiası oldu. Cinsel yönelim meselesinin kadın yazarların ilişkilerini nasıl etkilediği kesinlikle bir uzman tarafından ele alınmalı. Yapılan açıklamalar inandırıcılıktan uzak hatta kimi yerde saçmaydı.
Ele alınan ilişkileri de yazayım; Katherine Mansfield/John Middleton Murray, Hilda Doolitle/Ezra Pound, Rebecca West/H.G. Wells, Jean Rhys/Ford Maddox Ford, Anaïs Nin/Henry Miller, Simone de Beauvoir/Jean-Paul Sartre, Martha Gellhorn/Ernest Hemingway, Elizabeth Smart/George Baker, Slyvia Plath/Ted Hughes.
Çeviri çok kötüydü. Dizgi hataları vardı kimi yerde.
February 26, 2010
The adage, “Behind every great man is a great woman,” is a backhanded compliment to women, and one that implicitly avers a submissive feminism of codependency. At first glance, it is easy to misjudge Lesley McDowell’s Between the Sheets as a kind of backward-feminist interpretation of women writers’ literary careers, such that the success of these writers was primarily a product of the men who mentored them and who essentially produced their success.
Feminist scholars of the last three decades, of course, have written texts contesting and criticizing relations between prominent male and female literary figures. McDowell’s objective, however, is to prove that these female luminaries should not be cast as victims in these relations: “The aim of this book 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.” This objective is what makes McDowell’s text praiseworthy in the larger scope of feminism: her book is an effort to move away from the culture of victimhood that plagues feminism today. In order to avoid trite notions of female victimization at the hands of men, McDowell attempts, as she explains, “to situate these liaisons at the center of these women’s emotional and literary lives, not to detract from their achievements, but to emphasize them, to show how important these relationships were to them, and why.”
The structure of Between the Sheets splits nine case studies, or literary relationships, into three sections, delimited by historical chronology as well as the geographic locale in which these relationships primarily took place. Part One, set in the 1910s and1920s, explores the relationships of Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murray, H.D. and Ezra Pound, and Rebecca West and H.G. Wells. Part Two, the “Paris Set” of the 1920s and 1930s, considers the relationships of Jean Rhys and Ford Maddox Ford, Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, and Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Satre—the last relationship of which, for me as a former student of philosophy, made me giddy with tales of Beauvoir and Satre pimping out their students to each other (oh, how fantastically perverse!). The third and final section is devoted to transatlantic relationships from the 1930s-1950s: Martha Gelhorn and Ernest Hemingway, Elizabeth Smart and George Barker, and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.
McDowell culls her information from diaries, letters, and journals, which, in all, makes for a thorough but accessible reading. The information being imparted is not revelatory, but the subtle, argumentative slant of the text is laudable for its elevation of women commonly stereotyped as victims who lived passive lives in relation to the men they loved. Anyone interested in some crisp, literary gossip should take a look at this book.
Review by Marcie Bianco
Feminist scholars of the last three decades, of course, have written texts contesting and criticizing relations between prominent male and female literary figures. McDowell’s objective, however, is to prove that these female luminaries should not be cast as victims in these relations: “The aim of this book 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.” This objective is what makes McDowell’s text praiseworthy in the larger scope of feminism: her book is an effort to move away from the culture of victimhood that plagues feminism today. In order to avoid trite notions of female victimization at the hands of men, McDowell attempts, as she explains, “to situate these liaisons at the center of these women’s emotional and literary lives, not to detract from their achievements, but to emphasize them, to show how important these relationships were to them, and why.”
The structure of Between the Sheets splits nine case studies, or literary relationships, into three sections, delimited by historical chronology as well as the geographic locale in which these relationships primarily took place. Part One, set in the 1910s and1920s, explores the relationships of Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murray, H.D. and Ezra Pound, and Rebecca West and H.G. Wells. Part Two, the “Paris Set” of the 1920s and 1930s, considers the relationships of Jean Rhys and Ford Maddox Ford, Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, and Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Satre—the last relationship of which, for me as a former student of philosophy, made me giddy with tales of Beauvoir and Satre pimping out their students to each other (oh, how fantastically perverse!). The third and final section is devoted to transatlantic relationships from the 1930s-1950s: Martha Gelhorn and Ernest Hemingway, Elizabeth Smart and George Barker, and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.
McDowell culls her information from diaries, letters, and journals, which, in all, makes for a thorough but accessible reading. The information being imparted is not revelatory, but the subtle, argumentative slant of the text is laudable for its elevation of women commonly stereotyped as victims who lived passive lives in relation to the men they loved. Anyone interested in some crisp, literary gossip should take a look at this book.
Review by Marcie Bianco
January 11, 2021
This has been lurking on my bookshelves for years, and I'd really been looking forward to reading it.
Unfortunately it's another 'how can an author make such an interesting subject soooo tedious' book. Sadly it's as dry as dust, repetitive and often very boring.
Shame, as there's clearly a lot of research gone into this, and I don't have a problem with McDowell voicing her opinions even though she rarely backs them up.
Unfortunately it's another 'how can an author make such an interesting subject soooo tedious' book. Sadly it's as dry as dust, repetitive and often very boring.
Shame, as there's clearly a lot of research gone into this, and I don't have a problem with McDowell voicing her opinions even though she rarely backs them up.
October 29, 2012
This was a well-researched, fascinating book focusing on some female authors. I had heard of some but not all of them yet I wasn't familiar with their works but am now intrigued enough to want to read the works of each of them. Ms. McDowell has a knack for viewing their lives and potential motives (we'll never truly know though) and I enjoyed the way she summed up each section.
I'd recommend this book to any who are interested in literature, the women who paved the way for female authors these days and a different type of biographical read.
I'd recommend this book to any who are interested in literature, the women who paved the way for female authors these days and a different type of biographical read.
June 12, 2010
Man, the copyeditor for this book needs a talking to, and the author as well. Com,mas in the middle of words,,, random "switch to quotes with no discernible source." Badly written, but the subject matter was incredibly interesting. Terrible title, too. "Ha, ha, get it, sheets? Writers? Sex?"
January 29, 2025
ilham verici
March 17, 2014
I found McDowell's thesis intriguing: women who have been portrayed as victims of their sexual or romantic and artistic lives are not victims.
But each suffered as a result of their various and varied liaisons. Faustian bargains abound.
I like the book's structure: three parts divided in three - nine women and their primary (and secondary and tertiary) partners. "The New London Women" (1910-1920s),"The Paris Set" (1920-1930s)and "Transatlantic Chasers" (1930s-1950s)are the frame for considerations of Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, Hilda Doolittle and Ezra Pound, Rebecca West and H.G.Wells, Jean Rhys and Ford Maddox Ford, Anais Nin and Henry Miller, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Martha Gelhorn and Ernest Hemingway, Elizabeth Smart and George Barker, and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. What a cast. And what a supporting and interlocking cast in many cases.
McDowell doesn't dig deeply in terms of research or editing. She relies on letters and journals and others' work. I wish the book were somehow more compressed and dense. But she does provide much food for thought given her thesis and she offers a very readable and important book. I wish numerous young women would read it.
We live in such an age of "victimhood" and there are countless victims of countless horrors. McDowell intriguingly posits that people choose their lives and partners and phobias and addictions, sometimes knowingly and sometimes not.
I was often amazed at the breadth and depth of the nine writers' devotion to their work. And to the range of people each knew and to how many lives intersected.
But each suffered as a result of their various and varied liaisons. Faustian bargains abound.
I like the book's structure: three parts divided in three - nine women and their primary (and secondary and tertiary) partners. "The New London Women" (1910-1920s),"The Paris Set" (1920-1930s)and "Transatlantic Chasers" (1930s-1950s)are the frame for considerations of Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, Hilda Doolittle and Ezra Pound, Rebecca West and H.G.Wells, Jean Rhys and Ford Maddox Ford, Anais Nin and Henry Miller, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Martha Gelhorn and Ernest Hemingway, Elizabeth Smart and George Barker, and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. What a cast. And what a supporting and interlocking cast in many cases.
McDowell doesn't dig deeply in terms of research or editing. She relies on letters and journals and others' work. I wish the book were somehow more compressed and dense. But she does provide much food for thought given her thesis and she offers a very readable and important book. I wish numerous young women would read it.
We live in such an age of "victimhood" and there are countless victims of countless horrors. McDowell intriguingly posits that people choose their lives and partners and phobias and addictions, sometimes knowingly and sometimes not.
I was often amazed at the breadth and depth of the nine writers' devotion to their work. And to the range of people each knew and to how many lives intersected.
January 16, 2013
Despite the stupid tee-hee title (at least it wasn’t “My Back Pages” or “Everyday I Write the Book”?) this is fascinating. H.D. and Ezra Pound, Rebecca West and H.G. Wells, Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, Jean Rhys and Ford, de Beavoir and Sartre, Martha Gellhorn and Hemingway, Plath and Hughes, Nin and Miller, Elizabeth Smart and George Barker. ALL MY FAVOURITES.
January 2, 2016
Interesting ideas, but really too few pages devoted to each couple.
August 10, 2022
I did learn about famous women authors and their lives, but overall this wasn't the book for me. The author argues that each of the women discussed in the book got something out of the unhealthy relationship(s) they had with famous male authors, which is fair - generally people do get something out of relationships, at least at the beginning. However, the arguments weren't particularly compelling and often seemed speculative - not necessarily in a bad way, but in a sort of literary-dissertation way, which is not what I was looking for.
This part is not on the author, but the book was also very poorly copy-edited/designed. I saw at least one punctuation mark in the middle of a word, and the spacing between words/punctuation was often weird.
This part is not on the author, but the book was also very poorly copy-edited/designed. I saw at least one punctuation mark in the middle of a word, and the spacing between words/punctuation was often weird.
September 27, 2020
I only read two of the essays in this book - Martha Gellhorn and Sylvia Plath. I found both interesting but was not inspired to read others pertaining to authors I was less familiar with. Perhaps at another time.
November 2, 2012
Very interesting book on the literary romantic relationships of nine women writers. Some of the material was familiar to me, but there was lots new as well, and of course the focus was on how those relationships influenced the women's literary career. While I found myself wishing McDowell had gone a little deeper, I understand that these chapters were not meant to be complete biographies. Although there was much speculation ( really we can never know for certain how those romantic entanglements have affected literary output), some of the speculations are a fresh point of view, and often quite plausible. I particularly enjoyed the ideas presented on Sartre and Beauvoir's relationship, as well as the portion on Sylvia Plath. Overall very satisfying, although a bit dry, it sent me to the library looking for more indepth biographies on a few of the authors included in this book.
August 19, 2016
I couldn't read this novel in one sitting. I gave it four stars, and would even give it a 3.5 if I was honest about it. I loved certain parts of it. One part, in particular, was Sylvia Plath's section which pushed the rating up to a four. I had just finished the BellJar, watched a documentary on Plath. I found the novel's take on her interesting. The writer put a lot of effort into the research.
Something missed the mark in this book, and it wasn't necessarily the author's fault. It needed refining from the editor& publishing company end of things. The publishing company is usually responsible for polishing all the small details into the big picture and helping the novel stand out. Didn't stand out for me,Between the Sheets wasn't a page turner. It's an interesting read for anyone who loves literature.
Something missed the mark in this book, and it wasn't necessarily the author's fault. It needed refining from the editor& publishing company end of things. The publishing company is usually responsible for polishing all the small details into the big picture and helping the novel stand out. Didn't stand out for me,Between the Sheets wasn't a page turner. It's an interesting read for anyone who loves literature.
January 30, 2014
McDowell does a remarkable job of putting the literary and romantic partnerships of the listed writers under a fascinating lens of mutual benefit and assured destruction. Her thesis that none of the female writers could be called a victim seems to be proven true by the end of each respective chapter, always pinpointing exactly what was the Faustian deal that each of these women made - sometimes sacrificing some freedom, other times sharing their loves, but always boosting their literary prowess and creativity. The book serves both as a cautionary tale and an amazing study of how artists, particularly writers, may jeopardize their lives (physically and emotionally) for the sake of their art, even without doing so consciously.
February 18, 2015
I am not sure what to think of this book. Part of me loved it because it pays tribute to some amazing women and opened my eyes to writes that I had never heard about before (both men and women), but part of me also found it slightly boring and I had to struggle to finish it. I think the book is very well written, but it tends to jump quickly from one part of the womens lives to the next. Me not being overly excited with this book is probably my own fault, as I had expected a romantic novel that told the stories of the women's lives and not a historic paper that analyzed what exactly was meant by this letter or that diary entry. That being said I thought that Lesley McDowell made some interesting comments and gave an overall picture of their lives.
June 8, 2017
Between the Sheets: Nine 20th Century Women Writers & Their Famous Literary Partnerships (Hardcover)
from the library
Contents:
The "companion" : Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry -- The "novice" : H.D. and Ezra Pound -- The "mother" : Rebecca West and H.G. Wells -- The "ingénue : Jean Rhys and Ford Madox Ford -- The "mistress" : Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller -- The "long-termer" : Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre -- The "survivor" : Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway -- The "chaser" : Elizabeth Smart and George Barker -- The "wife" : Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.
from the library
Contents:
The "companion" : Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry -- The "novice" : H.D. and Ezra Pound -- The "mother" : Rebecca West and H.G. Wells -- The "ingénue : Jean Rhys and Ford Madox Ford -- The "mistress" : Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller -- The "long-termer" : Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre -- The "survivor" : Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway -- The "chaser" : Elizabeth Smart and George Barker -- The "wife" : Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 5, 2010
Although I would recommend this book, I do have caveats. This book is reasonably well-written, but not brilliant. It is too wide and lacks a depth and insight that would have made it a fantastic read. I wish she had worked on it longer, edited it another time or two and really distilled it down.
Those things said, it is a perfectly acceptable read. Might make a good reading group book for those with a more literary or feminist bent.
Those things said, it is a perfectly acceptable read. Might make a good reading group book for those with a more literary or feminist bent.
September 15, 2011
I just have so much respect for all of these women as authors, and I think the portraits painted of them in this book are incredible. Their relationships all clearly had such an effect on their work, but the most interesting thing is that many of them were only recognized because of these relationships, and not because of the work that they produced. The feminist in me was thrilled to encounter this book and then ingest every word of it, as was the writer in me.
October 22, 2010
Interesting take on relationships between famous writers, such as Martha Gellhorn and Hemingway (there they are again on my list!), Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Kind of a stretch to fit the author's thesis about how necessary the relationships were to their work, but good reading.
unfinished
August 20, 2015I'm giving up on this book because, despite my interest in the subject matter, it's just rubbing me up the wrong way. McDowell's style reminds me of a try-too-hard undergraduate essay (and I would know, I wrote many of them). She's trying desperately to twist every piece of evidence to fit her hypothesis and as a result a lot of the points she makes are seriously reaching.
July 13, 2011
It's terribly depressing that so many female authors tied themselves to egotistical, two-timing jerks. The only solace is that several of these female authors were egotistical, two-timing jerks themselves.
September 3, 2013
I don't think McDowell's thesis that these literary partnerships were necessary to the women authors' work quite fits, but "I can see how women lie down for artists," and there certainly is voyeuristic pleasure in reading about it.
May 11, 2010
Helped me understand why smart women stay with male writers who treat them terribly - and was helpful to read at same time as the memoir of Norman Mailer's wife (A Ticket to the Circus).
January 3, 2018
Terrible writing, interjects her own opinion constantly but the stories were interesting. Love Martha Gellhorn and Sylvia Plath.
September 25, 2012
I find the subject matter fascinating but thought the writing was a little dry. Should have been more compelling.
Want to read
August 13, 2015:D
November 21, 2011
Another dry read. She simply doesn't say anything.
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