Synopsis
Gathers the correspondence of the British mathematician, philosopher, social reformer, and peace activist
Reviews
By turns impassioned, acutely analytical, witty and peevish, these 240 candid letters--all but one previously unpublished--provide an unparalleled intimate glimpse of British philosopher Russell's (1872-1970) private life. We see the solitary, morbidly introspective child manipulated by the domineering grandmother who raised him, and the priggish young lover who escaped his family by plunging into a disastrous marriage with Quaker feminist Alys Pearsall Smith. After their bitter divorce, Russell had an obsessive, clinging affair with freewheeling Lady Ottoline Morrell, a politician's wife who liberated his repressed sexuality. Skillfully linked to one another by commentary and notes, the letters reflect Russell's compulsive hunger for affection, his support for women's suffrage, his early jingoist defense of British imperialism and his philosophical forays into ethics, logic and mathematics. Griffin, a Canadian philosophy professor, also edited Russell's Collected Papers.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
An ``epistolary biography'' comprised of a selection of Russell's previously unpublished correspondence--mostly love letters to his wife, Alys, and to Ottoline Morrell, a married Bloomsbury courtesan--discussing his work, education, women's rights, and his own priggish morality. Griffin (Philosophy/McMaster Univ.) clearly appreciates both the cerebral ``logic machine,'' as Russell called himself, and the lonely, confused, passionate lover. Descended from eccentric, politically powerful aristocrats and orphaned at an early age, Russell (1872-1970), over the objections of his grandmother, married an American Quaker five years his senior--the subject of many letters. Fearful of perpetuating the madness that had haunted both of their families, the couple avoided children but feared contraception, which Russell believed had caused his father's epilepsy. Still, the first ten years of his marriage were his most ``fruitful'' as a mathematical philosopher. They were followed by ten years of dutiful devotion to his emotionally fragile wife--whom, impulsively, he had decided he didn't love. Russell did love the elusive Ottoline, however, whom he wooed with long daily letters, over one thousand of them. During a year in America, he found a cure for the gum disease that had made him repugnant to Ottoline--and he fell for another woman, 28- year-old Helen Dudley, who, as this collection concludes, was on her way to England to marry him and to bear the children he longed for. The great names are all here: Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Joseph Conrad, Gilbert Murray, et al., with their brilliant minds, high causes--and dysfunctional lives. And, as these letters so pitifully reveal, Russell's strength as a philosopher--his abstract, unyielding, insular nature--prevented him from achieving the intimacy, children, and romance he craved. A brilliant psychological portrait, annotated and explained with tact and sensitivity. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Russell was one of the foremost philosophers and mathematicians of this century. In this volume, Griffin presents more than 200 previously unpublished letters from the Russell Archives at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, which show various facets of Russell's life between the ages of 12 and 44. The letters illuminate an aspect of Russell that does not come through in his more formal and technical writings, giving him humanity and dimension. Considering that Russell died in 1970 at the age of 97, Griffin has several more volumes of correspondence to edit before his work is done. This, however, is a fine beginning. For academic and large public libraries.
- Terry Skeats, Bishop's Univ. Lib., Lennoxville, Quebec
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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