Married to Genius: A Fascinating Insight Into the Married Lives of Nine Modern Writers

Meyers, Jeffrey

ISBN 10: 1904915094 / ISBN 13: 9781904915096

Published by Southbank Publishing (edition First Edition), 2005

About this Item

It's a well-cared-for item that has seen limited use. The item may show minor signs of wear. All the text is legible, with all pages included. It may have slight markings and/or highlighting.

Seller Inventory # 1904915094-11-1

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Married to Genius: A Fascinating Insight Into the Married Lives of Nine Modern Writers
• Publisher: Southbank Publishing (edition First Edition)
• Publication Date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1904915094
• ISBN 13: 9781904915096
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

Married to Genius considers the emotional and artistic commitment in the marriages of nine modern writers: Leo Tolstoy, George Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. These writers believed that marriage provided their most profound relationships, and although their lives reveal the strains of modern marriage, their creativity was directly inspired by their emotional and intellectual conflicts. It is a fascinating study of how these celebrated figures attempted to integrate life and art.

Reviews

Biographer Meyers delves into the married lives of nine novelists-Tolstoy, Shaw, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Mansfield, Lawrence, Hemingway and Fitzgerald-bypassing the daily bric-a-brac of marriage to focus on the artists' intertwined commitments to their spouses and their craft, often drawing parallels between the fiction written and the lives lived. Meyers suggests marriage for his subjects was a "strengthening bond... deeply valuable to an artist engaged in psychic survival and in creating order out of chaos," but it is clear that even the happiest marriages came at a price. Meyers uses the diaries, letters and fiction of his subjects and their peers to cover the legendary aspects of their biographies (Conrad's estrangement, Woolf's mental fragility, Fitzgerald's alcoholism, Hemingway's machismo) in satisfying, psychologically incisive detail without risking caricature, and is able to provide a revealing portrait of what made Tolstoy's marriage "unhappy after its own fashion," and why Woolf wrote in a suicide note to Leonard, "I don't think that two people could be happier than we have been." Readers familiar with the works of these figures will take pleasure in the sometimes subtle links Meyers notes between their life and art. What's more, Meyers takes full advantage of the fascinating intersections between these literary figures' lives-Mansfield's husband Murry's flirtation with Lawrence's wife Freida; Hemingway and Fitzgerald's judgments (sometimes discerning, sometimes clearly blurred with jealousy) of each other's marriages; Woolf's envy of Mansfield's writing; and Mansfield's envy of Woolf's marriage-to enrich the volume.
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