US Press quotes:

 

 “Congratulations to Lesley McDowell for exploring such a dishy yet deeply serious subject. These unconventional partnerships, a twining of personal need and literary ambition, were messy, often hurtful, and frequently disastrous, yet in the final tally they were deeply beneficial to the women in question.  As McDowell underscores, books were written and literary reputations were made.  Success was achieved in the arena that truly counted.” - Susan Brownmiller, American Feminist and Author of Against Our Will

 

“A fresh and revealing look at the mating habits of literary giants.  Author Lesley McDowell examines the famously explosive love affairs of great women writers and finds that there was purpose to their passion and method to their madness.  Where others see victims, she sees pioneers who were blazing their own literary, emotional, and sexual trails.  We feel as if we are meeting Sylvia Plath, Anais Nin, Simone de Beauvoir, and their “sisters” for the very first time.” – Deborah Davis, author of STRAPLESS: John Singer Sargent and The Fall of Madame X

 

“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.” – Feminist Review

 

Between the Sheets explores the messy intersection of art, lust, fame, and power.
McDowell mines letters and diaries to grant us rare insight into the POV of the female halves of some very celebrated literary couples, from the uberfamous (Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes) to the less well known (Hilda Doolittle and Ezra Pound), and a few in between. McDowell seems genuinely fascinated and impassioned by her subject matter, especially by the sticky places where romantic relationships and careers collide. She focuses a great deal on how the members of each couple used one another for literary advancement, but she also highlights the ways that love helped these creative couples blossom and grow. Of Anais Nin and Henry Miller, McDowell writes, controversially, "It is unlikely, as narcissistic as she was, as aspirational as she was, that she would have become the kind of writer she did without her relationship with Miller. He was necessary, after all."
McDowell excerpts the women's letters and diary entries, which provide an extra dose of emotion. Suddenly, these feminist-lit figures seem more real and grand. We feel the love and the heartache that drove them to write. And like many great romances, especially of the artistic variety, what’s really inside them isn’t pretty (or it’s a blurry mishmash of pretty and heinous). As acclaimed author/war reporter Martha Gellhorn wrote to a friend about her long relationship with Ernest Hemingway: "I weep for the eight years I spent, almost eight (light dawned a little earlier) worshipping his image with him." Sad, yes. But also a prescient reminder not to lose yourself in a relationship, no matter how much fame--or fame potential--the guy's got.

BUST Magazine

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.

Feminist Review (Marcie Bianco)

 

Writers such as Anais Nin, Simone de Beauvoir, Katherine Mansfield, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), Sylvia Plath, Rebecca West and Jean Rhys have long been considered essential to the development of modernist literature and the rise of feminism. In her nonfiction debut, McDowell (The Picnic, 2007) draws another connection—each was paired romantically, with varying degrees of success, to other significant writers of the time. Examples include H.D. and Ezra Pound, West and H.G. Wells, Nin and Ford Madox Ford, and Nin and Henry Miller. Certainly, this is a tradition not limited to the modernist movement. Writers and artists have long been drawn to one another, complicating the concept of the muse versus the creator. McDowell successfully pins down particular parallels in her chosen relationships that are especially significant to their artistic goals. It is notable, for example, that these women are largely known as the victims of their relationships. They were, for the most part, all deserted or rejected by their husbands and lovers, often in a particularly public manner, or forced to participate in humiliating or degrading relationships. Each reacted dramatically to their failed relationships— Plath taking the most drastic road by committing suicide after Ted Hughes' affair.

 

McDowell questions the degree to which these women pined for their respective men, while also espousing the virtues of feminism and independence in their writing, hinting at what was often blatant hypocrisy. But she also speculates on the ways in which the men—ironically mostly less famous in death than their partners—were able to provide the women with professional inroads, and also served as inspiration for some of their most influential works. The information is hardly new, but McDowell contextualizes it well, giving solid insight into a dynamic and influential group.
Kirkus

 

In this engaging text, McDowell studies the intimate physical relationships of nine female writers and their literary partners. The Glasgow-based McDowell is a novelist (Picnic) and critic (e.g., Times Literary Supplement) whose own experience of a literary liaison led her to develop this work. Arranged chronologically, the book begins with Katherine Mansfield's relationship with John Middleton Murry in the 1910s–20s and ends in the 1950s with the most famous of the liaisons, Sylvia Plath's marriage to Ted Hughes. McDowell purposefully tackles the physical details of these relationships, asserting that while this may seem prurient, it is essential to understanding the central theme of desire in these authors' writings. She demonstrates that despite the fraught nature of many of their relationships, these women often subverted the stereotypes of the mistress or wife to the advantage of their own artistic ambitions. In this way, McDowell distinguishes her interpretation from many biographical works that have cast these women as victims of male dominance.

VERDICT This well-researched text will appeal to scholars of literature and feminist theory.
Library Journal

“Between the Sheets” begins with a bold premise. The book “sets out to demonstrate that none of the women artists mentioned here are 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.” O.K., but what about the part where Henry Miller tries to persuade Anais Nin to destroy her diary? Or the chapter in which Ernest Hemingway attempts to sabotage the career of his wife, Martha Gellhorn, by writing for the same publication she does on the same topic (war), then telling her that a plane to the combat zone is for men only, leading her to find her own transportation, on a Norwegian freighter carrying dynamite? (Later she finds out the actress Gertrude Lawrence was on the plane.) McDowell’s theory holds up in some instances but not in others, and she seems unwilling to address this inconsistency. She is at her best when her analysis does not intrude too much on her storytelling. the women’s own words can be powerful, as in this letter from Rebecca West to H.G. Wells: “You can’t conceive a person resenting the humiliation of an emotional failure so much that they twice tried to kill themselves: that seems silly to you. I can’t conceive of a person who runs about lighting bonfires and yet nourishes a dislike of flame: that seems silly to me.” McDowell, a literary journalist in Scotland, 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

The intimate lives of writers have always had a special attraction for readers, perhaps because we imagine that people who can shape ideas and arrange scenes on the page should be able to offer us some special insight into how to order our messy off-the-page lives. This has rarely been proven the case—writers often seem less, rather than more, gifted at the mechanics of everyday existence; all the same it has not stemmed our interest in finding out what Sylvia said to Ted or why Simone pimped for Jean-Paul. This interest speaks, I think, to a dream of coherence—a matching-up of intellect and emotion, of romance and reason—that continues to inspire us even as it eludes our grasp.

Lesley McDowell’s new book is an account of literary partnerships that may look like stories of misogynistic victimhood, but are, in reality, far more complex. The women writers in question are Katherine Mansfield, the poet H.D., Rebecca West, Jean Rhys, Anaïs Nin, Simone de Beauvoir, Martha Gellhorn, Elizabeth Smart, and Sylvia Plath. “In bringing their relationships with male writers to the fore,” McDowell writes in her introduction, “I mean 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.”

McDowell attributes the genesis of her book to her wish to understand her own experience, which included a relationship with an “emotionally shaky” male writer who relied on anti-depressants and drank heavily. This, along with a review she read of a memoir about the writers George Barker and Elizabeth Smart written by their son, left her wondering about the relationship between sexual desire and the desire to write, not to mention the ways and whys of power claimed and power relinquished between men and women. What emerges are nine largely unhappy tales about women who “lie down for artists,” as Plath once put it, in the service of their own writing, and about the men who embolden and protect them (when they are not betraying or abandoning them).

Since most of the relationships examined in this book have been written about before, some quite exhaustively, McDowell is under pressure right off the bat to provide something new in the way of interpretation or perspective. To this end she has provided a typology of feminine roles: Rebecca West is the “mother,” while one or another of the group is the “mistress,” the “companion,” the “chaser,” and so on. These distinctions do not really hold up, of course. West is a “novice” as well as a “mother,” while Jean Rhys might be said to be a “survivor” as well as an “ingénue.” All the same, the device gives the author a means of entry into relationships that are encrusted in anecdote and myth, not to mention pre-existing narratives.

Katherine Mansfield’s relationship with John Middleton Murry was the stuff of gossip and insinuation almost from the moment it began, with some seeing Mansfield as the dominant partner and others, like Leonard Woolf, seeing Murray as inimical to Mansfield in every way imaginable: “…in some abstruse way Murry corrupted and perverted and destroyed Katherine both as a person and as a writer…She got enmeshed in the sticky sentimentalism of Murry and wrote against the grain of her own nature.” McDowell takes something of a middle road here, as she does in her analysis of most of these relationships, refusing to exalt or to vilify one partner at the cost or to the benefit of the other. What interests her more are the ways in which these relationships yielded to the neurotic impulses of both principals at different times, with conscious dependency and unconscious manipulations keeping the couples together. “So perhaps the innocent nature of her sexual life with Murry,” McDowell argues, “actually suited her. Although Murry blamed his own sexual innocence, and subsequent biographers cite Mansfield’s illness, especially later on in the relationship, for their lack of sexual satisfaction, it would seem that she was only prepared to get so close and no closer.”

What seems clear is that without Murry prodding her on, without his fantasies of literary greatness for both of them, Mansfield might have produced less sterling work. At the same time their union was founded on a delusion of intimacy that was belied by how much time they spent apart and how erotically arrested they were when together. McDowell believes that Murry truly loved Mansfield and that Mansfield “loved him as much as she was capable of loving anyone.” What they had in common was a devotion to Mansfield’s art, which, in her case, suited her more than not. “It was the needs of the writer that came first,” McDowell notes, “and to those needs, she was ever faithful and true.” Perhaps she would have been happier with a different man—or, if she had followed her bisexual leanings, with a woman—but it is impossible after reading this account to see Mansfield as anyone’s victim.

In similar fashion, making use of primary texts as well as journals, biographies, and letters, McDowell dissects the emotional mechanics that underlie the other eight couples—mechanics that are traditionally viewed as having been detrimental to the woman. Since McDowell’s interest is less in assigning blame than in bringing to light the symbiotic connection—a fusion of vocation and passion—that linked Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, or Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, she focuses on the vicissitudes of creative ambition and sexual attraction rather than on a simpler psychological pattern (the one dear to critics of a doctrinaire feminist persuasion) of exploiter and exploited. The extraordinary women in these accounts—even the fragile Jean Rhys and the suicidal Sylvia Plath—hold their own, taking as well as giving, writing despite the damage they inflict or have inflicted on them. “The aim of this book,” McDowell observes, “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.”

It is laudatory that McDowell has set herself against the tenor of much of the critical discourse on the price of female talent: even so idiosyncratic a thinker as Elizabeth Hardwick was inclined to look at victimhood as the natural habitat of creative women, especially when they teamed up with creative men. One might wish for a more mellifluous prose style and more bold speculation on the role of the eroticization of intellect, but overall this is a welcome addition to the lives of writers in love and lust—writers who sometimes manage to write peacefully together in the same room, and who are equally dominated by the same demanding master: literature.
The New Republic

 

Critic, novelist and literary journalist McDowell (The Picnic) takes a scholarly but fascinating look at the love lives of women writers, revealing how writers like Anais Nin, Simone de Beauvoir and Sylvia Plath were affected by their romantic liaisons. Using their letters, journals and diaries, McDowell explores the ambitions and desires of nine writers, often uncovering tell-tale signs of dependence on their male counterparts. McDowell reviews some famous, oft-covered romances— including Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway (the celebrity couple of their day), Nin and Henry Miller, Plath and Ted Hughes—but also finds the relationships between figures like Elizabeth Smart and George Barker, or Rebecca West and H.G. Wells, also rich in power struggles regarding art and sex. Almost every union explored had devastating consequences for the women involved, but fueled some of their best work, begging some big questions: Would they have become writers without their entanglements with these men? And was success in their art ultimately worth the heartbreak? This stirring account lets their devotees decide.
Publishers Weekly

 

``Power that once belonged to male gods alone, they took for themselves.''
So proclaims Scottish author Lesley McDowell about nine 20th century female writers in her distaff version of the Prometheus myth distilled into a modern and accessible literary study. In McDowell's feminist account, Katherine Mansfield, H.D. (Hilda Doolitle), Rebecca West, Jean Rhys, Anaïs Nin, Simone de Beauvoir, Martha Gellhorn, Elizabeth Smart and Sylvia Plath are heroines who snatch literary fire for themselves and -- by extension -- other women writers.

McDowell's approach to her subject is governed by what, in her view, ``has characterized love relationships between all men and women since the dawn of time: a struggle for power.'' Though much has been written about some of the relationships covered here -- Nin and Henry Miller, de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Plath and Ted Hughes -- McDowell offers an original framework through which to view these often unequal partnerships. She believes that the writers under discussion voluntarily decided to endure all manner of hardship with difficult and even abusive men, because the payoff would be apprenticeship to experienced and well-connected authors able and willing to shepherd them to literary greatness. As such, we shouldn't view these women as hapless victims but rather as clear-eyed realists who gave their literary pursuits precedence over all else.

Indeed, McDowell argues that: Nin benefited greatly from Henry Miller's authorial advice; de Beauvoir needed Sartre for inspiration but didn't want him too close; and, if not for Ford Madox Ford, Rhys would never have been published. She also points out that ``West, Mansfield, and H.D. were all involved in relationships with writers at a time when not only was the possibility of female creative genius denied, but women's entitlement to vote wasn't even a fact of life.'' Talented as they were, these women needed men to gain admission into the literary world.
McDowell even entertains the notion that a suicidal Plath would have killed herself earlier than she did had she not embarked on a productive literary relationship with Ted Hughes and that her eventual suicide was the result not of Hughes' having abandoned her but of his attempt to reconcile with her after she had moved on.

Yet McDowell's radical reinterpretation of history has unintended ramifications. True, the question of whether female writers generally considered to have been fragile and even exploited were really strong and in control is intriguing. And the idea that they willingly chose to enter into emotionally and even physically abusive relationships in order to become better writers similarly fascinates.

Nonetheless, one of the ironies of this book is that it highlights its author's obsession with power. If, in McDowell's reading of history, these female writers sometimes come off as cynical and even manipulative -- and here's the other irony: in this feminist work, we're back to the stereotype of women as cunning and opportunistic -- that's OK, because they're not weak but actually powerful.
But there is something even more troubling here, for which McDowell cannot be held responsible. Her subjects' apparently pyrrhic approach to life recalls the emphasis on personal sacrifice in romantic political ideology. Enduring an unhappy and even destructive relationship in the hope that such self-abnegation will spawn a great work of literature might be a seductive conception of art, but it certainly isn't a prescription for a healthy life.
Miami Herald

 

WRITING ABOUT WRITERS • Dirty Laundry
Though I am not convinced that most writers’ lives are particularly interesting, there is no dearth of biographies of writers nor is the supply of new offerings dwindling. There is a subset of field of inquiry that examines the lives of a writers identified with a literary clique or cadre—the Bloomsbury set, the Beats, and expatriates in Europe after the great war come to mind. My favorite study of writers in relationship (actually one of my favorite books) is Rachel Cohen’s A Chance Meeting.

Now comes Scottish literary journalist Leslie McDowell’s Between the Sheets: Nine 20th Century Women Writers and Their Famous Literary Partnerships (Overlook), which explores the relationships between Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry; H.D. and Ezra Pound; Rebecca West and H.G. Wells; Jean Rhys and Ford Madox Ford; Anais Nin and Henry Miller; Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre; Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway; Elizabeth Smart and George Barker; and Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.

Of course, what this nonet has in common are they were reputedly damaging to women (e.g., Sylvia Plath). McDowell argues that whatever the personal emotional costs, all these women paid them in pursuit of their artistic goals and ambitions. As McDowell claims, “They made Faustian pacts with their male literary partners that cost them a great deal, but which also contributed to their status as iconic writers.”

Considering the parties involved, this investigation, which limns the journals, diaries, and letters, rises above mere literary gossip to provide some compelling snapshots of creative relationships, or at least relationships between creative people—which to some people is more interesting than TMZ or Access Hollywood, one would hope.
The Morning News

 

 

From websites:
www.lemondrop.com:
Apr 12th 2010 By Julieanne Smolinski
Love & Letters -- 8 Relationship Truths From Famous Women Writers

Lesley McDowell's new book, "Between the Sheets: Literary Liaisons of Nine 20th-Century Women Writers," ditches some well-worn biographical tropes and sets out to make an interesting point about female authors: that we often think of their love lives as tragic not because they were, but because they're women.

If they were men, she posits, we'd only think of their romantic mishaps and risky sexual exploits as crucially formative to their work. McDowell suggests that women, like men, make mistakes "knowingly and without the taint of victimization," and goes as far as suggesting that some of them willingly pursued the wrong men "in order to benefit their art."

We like this theory.

 

Among the nine writers she profiled are Sylvia Plath (whose suicide is often attributed less to her well-documented, lifelong battle with depression than to her crappy marriage); Rebecca West (whom H.G. Wells refused to acknowledge publicly, despite the fact that they had a child together); short-story writer Katherine Mansfield (who married and financed the career of an editor who was Just Not That Into Her); diarist Anais Nin (whose work was often fiercely critiqued by her married boyfriend, Henry Miller); and journalist Martha Gellhorn (whose career husband Ernest Hemingway famously tried to sabotage).

Below, some important love lessons we've learned from women of letters -- including McDowell's subjects, and a few of our favorite ladies who've kept us up late ... reading.

 

 

 

8 Love Lessons From Famous Women Writers
Spin Your Bitter Straw Into Career Gold

 

To paraphrase the seminal dance movie, "Center Stage," Hemingway was a great writer and an awesome guy, but as a husband? Not so much. Example: his third wife, Martha Gelhorn, a brilliant young journalist whose light he was constantly trying to hide under his beardy bushel. McDowell writes that, while he initially respected her professional aspirations, Hemingway may have actively tried to corral Gelhorn's career as a war correspondent (going as far as to tell her that women weren't allowed on his seaplane to Europe. They were. And he brought some.) Luckily, she got there eventually, and is considered one of the foremost war correspondents of the twentieth century.

He Doesn't Like You Like That

Brilliant short story writer Kathleen Mansfield fell for a broke editor named John Middleton Murry who probably Just Wanted to Be Friends. After they struck up a professional friendship in 1912, she offered to rent him a room, and they quickly became inseparable. But hey there, Red Flags: Despite the fact that he wrote her constantly, referred to her as "darling" a whole lot and let her help him financially, he refused her (multiple) sexual advances. When he finally gave in, it was less natural progression of their love than an unnatural escalation that resulted in what McDowell calls a "fairly disastrous" and virtually nonexistent sex life. They married, split, reunited, and then she died of TB.

Know What You're Getting Yourself Into

Sylvia Plath may seem like an unusual choice to fete, but McDowell argues that Plath began her relationship with English poet Ted Hughes with full knowledge of his potential worthlessness as a partner. If anything, Sylvia was just as wacky a wife as he was a wayward husband, and her art was knowingly, willfully informed by their often corrosive relationship. McDowell writes that Sylvia "wouldn't hide her quest for a writing partner," and wrote ecstatically about their unsexy, queasily violent first kiss (he "mashed her face," she bit his cheek.) Ah, romance.

Write a Great Breakup Letter

We're firm believers that writing angry letters to men who snub us is a waste of ink, unless you're going to get in a really, really good dig. When HG Wells never acknowledged the (incredibly prolific) author Rebecca West as his mistress, even after she gave birth to their son, she wrote him, "I was the wrong sort of person for you to have to do with. You want a world of people falling over each other like puppies, people to quarrel and play with, people who rage and ache instead of people who burn ... I can't conceive of a person who runs about lighting bonfires and yet nourishes a dislike of flame: that seems silly to me. " HG Wells, you've just been put on notice ... burn notice.

Oversharing Can Be a Good Thing

Believe it or not, publishing your romantic and sexual exploits was once considered an act of revolutionary feminism, not merely a Facebook update. Despite her friend and sometimes lover Henry Miller's advice, Anais Nin published several decades worth of her journals, which delved pretty graphically into her love life. Nin is now regarded as one of the seminal originators of the erotic confessional -- and as a minor feminist icon.

Hey, It's Okay to Die Alone

True, Emily Dickinson is the archetypical spinster writer. But as a writer who (most likely) died a virgin, she's hardly without company -- it's been rumored that Lewis Carroll, Hans Christian Andersen, JM Barrie, Immanuel Kant, George Bernard Shaw, and William Butler Yeats all died virgins. Moreover, Emily didn't seem too upset about it, assuring a friend in a letter that she was not lonely: "For my companions -- the Hills, Sir, and the Sundown, and a Dog, large as myself, that my Father bought me -- They are better than Beings."

Lying About Your Age Works (To a Degree)

Katherine Anne Porter is kind of the unsung female Hemingway of the 20th century, having amassed a Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, three nominations for the Nobel Prize, and upwards of four spouses. The last (and youngest) of her husbands was Albert Russel Erskine, a 28-year-old grad student who promptly wigged out when he found out that she was not his age, but twenty years older. Whoops! He divorced her and she never remarried, but she was probably pretty worn out by then. All we'd like to know is -- Katherine, what were you washing your face with? Baby blood? We have your love advice but we want your skin secrets.

 

 

UK Press quotes:

 

‘McDowell’s writing is as intelligent as it is engaging and whatever the conclusions, this thought-provoking book is not to be missed by anyone who’s been through one of those interesting, inspiring, fatally flawed relationships.’
Gutter Magazine

 

 

‘Lesley McDowell selects nine women writers from the first half of the 20th century, reviews destructive behaviour in their sexual partnerships with male writers, and argues that humiliation and pain in such relationship was and is intrinsic to their achievement. I wondered at her choice of title. She is formidably well-read and must know of Ian McEwan's short-story collection In Between the Sheets. Perhaps, like him, she could not resist the droll literary pun.

Two events prompted her book: the first was her fraught liaison with an unspecified writer-shyster who drank, took anti-depressants, screwed around, had a wife and two small children. "What made me put up with being denied in public... What made me run round to his flat every time he called, with bags of wine and food"? It wasn't just to cook his dinner. "What I was getting from this relationship was something I had never had before: a constant dialogue about writing".

The second prompt was a review she read of Christopher Barker's memoir of his parents, the novelist Elizabeth Smart and the poet George Barker. Barker, like McDowell's man, was married, alcoholic, depressive and philandering. Smart stayed with him for decades and had four children with him. (He fathered 15 in all.) McDowell sets out to prove that all the women she chooses to write about were in the same emotional boat as herself and Smart.

She groups them into threes, in three sections. In "New London Women" are Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, the poet Hilda Doolittle and Ezra Pound, and Rebecca West and HG Wells. "He was a devil," West wrote when she heard of Wells's death in 1946. "He ruined my life, he starved me, he was an inexhaustible source of love and friendship to me for thirty-four years, we should never have met."

McDowell highlights such contradiction and links it to literary success. In "The Paris Set" she takes Jean Rhys and Ford Madox Ford, Anais Nin and Henry Miller and Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Rhys "would never have become a published writer without Ford", Miller "was sexually demanding", "Sartre liked foreplay; Beauvoir wanted much more".

 

McDowell labels the women in her third section "Transatlantic Chasers". Martha Gellhorn pursued Ernest Hemingway, Smart "went to extraordinary lengths" to meet Barker after reading his poems, Sylvia Plath was "so hungry for a big smashing creative burgeoning burdened love" when she met Ted Hughes. She married him within four months.

 

The author's style is exuberant. She covers a great deal of literary ground. Her reference to biographies, letters, diaries and memoirs is copious. She gives a skirting of selected biographical detail and tells us what's what in an emphatic voice.

But her book is perhaps too hypothetical to succeed. She has not chosen a structure in which her large cast can come alive. The voice that predominates is her own. "It is unpalatable," she tells us, "for many to accept that [these women] needed, sought out, and relied upon their male literary partners to write and publish. But unpalatability doesn't make it any less true." But perhaps these writers would have used whatever life had thrown at them. Their writing was inevitable, their relationships circumstantial.

Nor is it necessarily true that they needed the pain in order to get published. Jean Rhys owed her late success with Wide Sargasso Sea to the kind intervention of Francis Wyndham. HD arguably owed more to the loving patronage of Bryher (Winifred Ellerman) than to Pound. HD wrote that Bryher loved her "so madly it is terrible. No man has ever cared for me like that." Yet McDowell describes their long relationship as "more a close companionship without the trauma of passion".

McDowell is controversial and provocative. It is a paradox that sensible love can dull the heart and fail to inspire and a contradiction that men who are philanderers, drunkards and wife-beaters can still be attractive and necessary to their creative partners.

But it's not very sexy between these particular sheets or magical, or enticing. For such inspiration we turn to By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (written before Smart met George Barker) or After Leaving Mr McKenzie, or Nin's diaries or Plath's poems.’

The Independent (Diana Souhami)

 

 

‘I am a writer first and a woman after,” said Katherine Mansfield in 1920. But one question seems to keep raising its Medusa head: do women write out of their sexuality more than men do? Or do all good writers, of whatever gender, simply use whatever life brings?

Between the Sheets considers nine women writers who worked in the 50 years preceding the feminist revolution of the mid-20th century. It examines their often obsessively destructive relationships with male writers, and argues that what these women gained from them outweighed all the pain and they wrote their best work “out of” it. McDowell is interested in the idea that these women actively chose a cocktail of literary closeness and emotional wounding for writing’s sake.

Her story begins in 1912, when Katherine Mansfield got to know Middleton Murry, Ezra Pound gave Hilda Doolittle her poet’s name HD, and Cicily Fairfield met bestselling author HG Wells, renaming herself Rebecca West. West was 20, Wells 46. Over the years she had his child and each wrote novels portraying the other. He admitted: “We did harm each other as writers.” “He was a devil,” she said. “He ruined my life, he was an inexhaustible source of love and friendship for 34 years, we should never have met.”

 

McDowell groups her writers in threes through these years. West, HD and Mansfield lived and loved around London in the 1910s and 1920s. In 1920s and 1930s Paris we get Jean Rhys with Ford Madox Ford, Anaïs Nin with Henry Miller, Simone de Beauvoir with Jean-Paul Sartre, and then three women in the 1930s-1950s whom McDowell calls “transatlantic chasers”: Martha Gellhorn pursuing Ernest Hemingway, Elizabeth Smart after George Barker, and Sylvia Plath, who married Ted Hughes.

Nine is the number of the muses but McDowell does not ask if these women wanted to be their partner’s muse, nor what it means to be one when you’re a writer yourself. Instead, she assigns each a role (“the novice”, “the ingénue”) and makes each woman fit both it and her overall argument: that they chose the relationship for their art. It made me start counting up literary-sexual partnerships which were not destructive, from the Brownings on, and wonder about women writers who had destructive relationships with non-writing men (did that help their art, too?), or women who had destructive relationships with male writers but were not writers themselves.

McDowell has read the biographies, diaries, letters and discussions deeply and questioningly. She raises important questions about how sexual choice relates to any writer’s work and how things have changed for women writers. The men in each period all knew each other but the women didn’t, for women writers “didn’t hold the same power”. Whatever the mysteries of relationships, then or now, here at least is one great change. Women writers no longer need a man to validate their work.’
Financial Times (Ruth Padel)

 

 

‘When the 34-year-old, married, would-be-novelist Jean Rhys took up with 51-year-old Ford Madox Ford in Paris in 1924 she described him as “stout, gangling, albino-ish”, and said being kissed by him was like being the toast under a poached egg. Ford was living with a woman with whom he had a daughter and his star seemed to be fading. Why, then, did Rhys embark on a two-year affair with a man firmly past his best? Did her nascent alcoholism impair her judgment? Was she the conniving “witch-seductress” so often painted by her critics?

 

Countless words have been written about the affairs of the nine “literary pioneers” chosen by Lesley McDowell for further analysis: Katherine Mansfield, the poet HD, Rebecca West, Rhys, Anaïs Nin, Simone de Beauvoir, Martha Gellhorn, Elizabeth Smart and Sylvia Plath. We are, it seems, so baffled by the often damaging choices they made that we wonder repeatedly why they stuck around. How could they prostrate themselves before such destructive forces? As Angela Carter put it: “Why is a nice girl like Simone [de Beauvoir] wasting her time sucking up to a boring old fart like Jean-Paul [Sartre]?McDowell takes an original tack in her book.

 

Rejecting the old tropes that these women were “victims” and their men “monsters”, she contends that their choices were conscious. All were willing to pay a painful price for the sake of their art, knowingly choosing their “Faustian pacts”. She believes that most of them thought that their lovers would afford them introductions to the male-dominated literary world, hone their work, inspire and criticise them and deliver the success they craved.

Ford certainly got Rhys published. Before she met him she had undergone one abortion and lost a son at three weeks to pneumonia. When Ford fell out of love with the depressive Rhys, he characterised her as a drunken harridan and she portrayed him as a predator. The recriminations flashed through their work; yet his emotional brutality, argues McDowell, galvanised her writing.On the other hand, the 50-year relationship between de Beauvoir and Sartre was constructed as an “essential love” from the outset: one that would exist alongside lesser “contingent loves” — a concept that de Beauvoir admitted caused an initial “flicker of fear”. Sartre may have been the “ugly, squinting, controlling little man who cheated on her relentlessly”, but de Beauvoir colluded in games played on vulnerable young women (often her students), grooming them before passing them on to him.

 

Feeling in control of other people fed the couple’s intellectual intimacy and, while he may have relied on her as a “procuress”, she wanted a man who would let her be solitary without being alone, however much it hurt.Ernest Hemingway womanised, drank and lashed out physically at Gellhorn. George Barker accompanied Smart (his lover) to a cheap hotel prior to the birth of their first child, only to go out for groceries then fail to come back, fleeing instead into a homosexual affair before returning to his wife. He fathered children with several other women, but paid nothing towards the upkeep of his four children with Smart; they both drank and it ended in blows. “He won’t let me leave him,” she wrote, “yet he won’t stay with me.” Bogged down by children, she produced only 14 lines of diary entries over two decades but, once she began to write again in the late 1970s, Barker’s influence ensured that she just couldn’t stop.

The prevailing opinion about Mansfield is that her feckless husband, John Middleton Murry, increasingly deserted her from 1919 onwards as she died from tuberculosis. McDowell maintains, however, that Mansfield fed on Murry, wielding a “passive-aggressive” power particularly suited to an invalid. She believes that Mansfield secured her intellectual (and sexual) freedom by marrying a man content to live out a mutual delusion of their innocent, “childlike” states.Henry Miller let Nin pay his rent and gave in return both a “literary f***fest” (as Nin called it) and “a world of writing”. And HD (Hilda Doolittle)? Why did she flee Philadelphia to follow a conspicuously affected poet to London? Ezra Pound dressed bizarrely, assumed eccentric manners and allowed his mane of red hair to grow wild; over tea at the British Museum, the enfant terrible gave Doolittle the poet’s name HD, followed by the sobriquet imagiste. Shy and anxious, she was captivated. For five years she courted danger and was burnt by lies and repeated infidelities, including his affair with Frances Gregg, a woman with whom Doolittle had already had an intimate friendship. Pound’s betrayals began her lifelong pattern of insecure, triangular relationships, but in return he reinvented the nervous American girl as a successful poet.

By comparison, West was feisty, independent and a journalist of some note when she began her affair with the much older, married HG Wells. Suffering the misery of a secret, destructive affair and the difficulties of single-motherhood (she bore Wells’s illegitimate son when she was 21), she wrote that she couldn’t “conceive of a person who runs about lighting bonfires and yet nourishes a dislike of flame”. Their meeting was initiated by a coruscating review she wrote of his novel Marriage; antagonism, McDowell asserts, lay at the heart of their affair. West was willing to barter Wells’s quick mind for the humiliation of being a mistress. While she flirted with suicide when he dropped her, her literary ambition was undented.

By re-scripting the heartache of these affairs McDowell does partly succeed in her aim to restore some of the women’s self-determination. Strikingly, by arguing that Plath’s suicide was the result of Ted Hughes’s desire for reconciliation rather than his infidelity with Assia Wevill, she rescues the late poet laureate from the charges of many of his critics.

But ultimately, although brave, McDowell’s position is strained. Is it useful to wonder if these women would have achieved their literary successes with or without their men when that slippery truth is evidently lost between the sheets of their public private lives? McDowell wonders “how to disentangle the life from the writing”. That seems to be the wrong way round. How much more engrossing it would be to unpick the effect of these potently tangled lives on the writing itself. A basic question remains: to what extent did the distress inherent in these liaisons play its part in the creation of the century’s finest poetry and prose?
The Sunday Times (Kate Colquhoun)

 

 

‘Teachers take up with teachers, doctors with doctors and, of course, writers with writers. When people move in the same circles and share the same interests, it is inevitable that sexual liaisons and partnerships form. So it isn't remotely surprising that Lesley McDowell has found nine 20th-century examples of pairs of writers, from feisty Katherine Mansfield and feeble John Middleton Murry, to the deeply disturbed Sylvia Plath and the glittering Ted Hughes, and taking in pairs such as the loathsome Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre and interesting examples such as Jean Rhys and Ford Maddox Ford along the way.
But her well-sustained argument attempts to turn received wisdom about these pairings on its head. The nine women she writes about have long been regarded, especially by feminist critics, as victims of the "exploitative" or even "suppressive" men – such as Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller – they had affairs with or married.

Yet McDowell sees sexual attraction and admiration for each other's writing as part of the same generally constructive, not destructive, package. "What they all [nine pairs – 18 people] have in common is sexual desire and the desire to write," she says, asserting that, "Without those liaisons, the work of those extraordinary nine women writers, icons every one, would have been that much poorer."
Rebecca West, for example, had a famous 10-year affair with the older, married, unyielding HG Wells, by whom she had a son. Responsibility for a publicly denied illegitimate son meant, according to West's earlier biographers, that her career was more or less on hold for a decade. McDowell points out that, in fact, Wells encouraged her to complete what became an acclaimed biography of the recently deceased Henry James and to produce her first novel, The Return of the Soldier.

 

She also wrote many reviews for prestigious magazines such as New Republic while she and Wells were lovers – which "doesn't really bear out the idea that Wells was bad for her". McDowell suggests instead that West's time with Wells was a valuable "literary apprenticeship".

The pioneering journalist Martha Gellhorn claimed for the rest of her life that marriage to the world-famous Ernest Hemingway had been a dreadful mistake, but McDowell points to Gellhorn's affectionate portrayal of him in Travels with Myself and Another. Although Gellhorn's career was well advanced before she met Hemingway (they were, effectively, a celebrity couple), it was his writing she fell in love with first. Then he encouraged her to come to Spain in 1938. Unsure about the technicalities of war, Gellhorn was advised by Hemingway to do what she had done previously in North Carolina and write about the effects of it on ordinary people's daily lives, thus giving birth to a new kind of journalism.

There are some misleading asides in McDowell's largely readable and thoughtful book. Why, for example, does she give the teenage learning of Shakespeare sonnets by heart as evidence of the "liberated" Elizabeth Smart's romantic view of sex? Odd too, in a book which spans the whole 20th century, to contrast these women who "believed they needed a writing partner" with modern counterparts who "have the vote and can own property". Most of the women in this book lived long after the enfranchisement of all women and, in the UK at least, the Married Women's Property Act dates back to 1882.

But these are minor quibbles about a book which takes a pleasingly fresh look at some relationships we think we already know all about – but actually, of course, do not. It is entertaining to learn, too, that the idea for it came from McDowell's own short relationship with a writer who fed her writing and boosted her professional self-confidence while exploiting her shamelessly in other ways. "If I didn't see myself as a victim, and I certainly didn't, why then should I see Elizabeth Smart as one?" she asks.
The Independent on Sunday (Susan Elkin)

 

 

‘There are few things in life more impenetrable and mystifying than the relationships of others. They don’t necessarily have to follow what I call the Ben Hur principle – “love Ben, but can’t stand her” – because even with people one likes equally, there are oddities in their life choices, their private rituals and their conversations to perplex the loyal. When the partners are also creative artists, another level of difficulty is added.

How can this imagination coexist with that? There are shelf-loads of books, with or without explicit feminist agenda, but now probably more with the latter, about Robert and Clara Schumann, Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, but surprisingly little smart work on writing couples. The complexities increase exponentially with literary relationships for the simple reason that the materials writers use – words, language – are precisely what constitute the part of a relationship that outsiders observe.

We are mercifully excluded from most of their domestic routines, financial niggles, division of parental responsibilities and sex lives other than by report. But we hear them speak, in private languages and codes almost invariably at odds with what we infer of them from the work. Artist relationships are threatened by one extra element of deception. If showing and sharing work is the ultimate intimacy, withholding it is the sharpest betrayal. In January 1959, Sylvia Plath described concealing her work from Ted Hughes: “Didn’t show him the bull one: a small victory.” But why would that be so, and how does the to-and-fro of mutual reading, editing, encouragement, jealous outmanoeuvring actually function?

This could be a very boring book indeed. More gossip about Plath and Hughes? Another prurient exploration of Anaïs Nin’s and Henry Miller’s transparent relationship? Another enquiry as to whether Martha Gellhorn was tougher in life than her erstwhile husband Ernest Hemingway? (I knew her well in later years, and she was tougher than Mike Tyson). The main title doesn’t promise much, but this is a terrific study and what makes it so is that Lesley McDowell, a fine writer herself, has a sure instinct for how language functions, not just on the page in a lit.crit way, but off the page as well. She accurately nails the telling moments in correspondence, the “deception clues” that give away the underlying dynamic.

She begins with Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry, one of those unevenly distributed pairs – where talent was concerned – where the locus of need is difficult to pin down and there is an unsolvable question about mutual good or harm. Similarly, did Ezra Pound make Hilda Doolittle a poet by ciphering her as HD and signing her off to the world as Imagiste, or did she gravitate to him already formed and simply needing the kind of entrée into the literary life that only a man could provide for a professionally marginal woman in the early 20th century? And how to read the relationship between the adulterous HG Wells and Rebecca West, who chose her own name, canvassed for female suffrage on the streets of Edinburgh and had the self-possession to damn Wells in print as an “old maid” (and lest he miss the point, a “spinster”).

To stumble over the conclusion, it is McDowell’s belief that none of these women were victims, even if Ted Hughes’s first approach to Plath looks remarkably like assault, but that they chose – deliberately or unconsciously – a particular, complex, dangerously mediated route into literature by attaching themselves to their men, shaping an identity through sex somewhat, the leverage of married status somewhat more, and through language very considerably.

The only other woman in the book I knew personally was Elizabeth Smart, though I get unsteady and experience liver pain at the memory. Smart assiduously pursued poet George Barker, as if he was her yang self, and was then stuck to him by some kind of painful magnetism whose poles were personal and professional, loving and hostile. He philandered and taught her, or obliged her, to drink. She colluded, but delivered out of the relationship one of the masterpieces of modern prose, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.

I can accept McDowell’s high estimation of the novella more readily than I can her praise of HD, who succeeds only in flashes, or her patience with Plath who, I’m afraid, has always seemed to me one of the few out-and-out bunny-boilers of modern letters.

Oddly perhaps, McDowell assigns an archetypal role to each of the women she covers: Mansfield the “Companion”; Jean Rhys the “Ingénue” (which is a theatrical role, not a personality type); HD the “Novice” (similarly); Simone de Beauvoir the “Long-Termer” with Jean-Paul Sartre (a perfect Ben Hur situation or a baffling refutation of, “I give it six months”). These labels might seem curiously reductive, but though the book works without them, they’re subtle and assured.’
The Herald (Brian Morton)

 

It has always surprised me that it was a man – Cyril Connolly, the literary critic and belle lettrist – who said the enemy of good art was the pram in the hall. Traditional gender divisions have meant that man was the provider, so the existence of children to support would surely spur him on to be even more productive in his profession. More importantly, the pram in the hall suggests the presence of a woman in the house, and there can be little more valuable to a writer than someone to tell him his writing is wonderful, cook his meals and even type up his manuscript. Between the Sheets, an exciting and provocative new book by Lesley McDowell, examines just what happens when women writers seek similar benefits for themselves.

For the most part it does not end well. McDowell ranges over the lives of such diverse female authors as Katherine Mans-field (died of tuberculosis), Elizabeth Smart (struggled alone with four children, some of whom didn’t even know she wrote), Simone de Beauvoir (pimped her girlfriends to Sartre) and Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide. Most of the liaisons she examines have been regarded as dysfunctional and damaging to the women. Literary life is in any case notoriously bitchy and competitive – as Norman Mailer says in The Spooky Art, “Don’t get involved at too deep a level or it will kill you and...it will kill you for the silliest reasons: for vanity, or because feuds are beginning to etch your liver with the acids of frustration.” So why would such women willingly enter into partnerships with male writers, why drip the acids of frustration onto their personal lives?

McDowell questions the accepted version of these relationships and shows that far from the literary element being negative, it was, she believes, positive and nourishing, allowing the women’s talents to flourish. What is attractive about her thesis is that it moves away from the idea of women as victims and acknowledges that the reasons people enter into relationships are complex. These were adult women who may not have chosen perfect partners, but still gained something profound from the experience. Many chose their men precisely because of the ambitions they shared: Martha Gellhorn, for example, told Ernest Hemingway, “As I love you I love your work and as you are me your work is mine.” Gellhorn admired Hemingway’s writing before she met him and even had his photograph pinned to her college wall. Although she denied it, it may be that she deliberately tracked him down, to Sloppy Joe’s, the bar in Key West where he was known to hang out.

What this demonstrates, of course, is the power differential between them. He was perhaps the most famous writer of his generation, while she, although a much respected journalist, was a lesser star. One (so-called) friend said, “She was more excited by Hem-ingway the writer than Hemingway the man, that ambition rather than passion had inspired her marriage.” In other words, that she was a kind of literary prostitute, a theme that recurs throughout McDowell’s book. It is no coincidence that many of the women she studies became involved with men far more powerful than they were – there was a twenty-six-year age gap between Rebecca West and the literary titan HG Wells, while Jean Rhys might never have gone into print at all were it not for Ford Madox Ford, who published her work, put a roof over her head and actually gave her her pen name. (Her real name was Ella Gwendoline Rees Williams, not the snappiest for a book cover.)

“There is a great deal about many of the relationships in this volume that is due to patriarchal oppression of women,” says McDowell. “(Rebecca) West, (Katherine) Mansfield, and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) were all involved with writers at a time when not only was the possibility of female creative genius denied, but women’s entitlement to vote wasn’t even a fact of life.”

Several of the woman McDowell looks at played the ingénue, not a popular role for young women today. H.D., the imagist poet who was involved with Ezra Pound, retained the idea of herself as a child for the whole of her life, even when she became drawn into a threesome with Pound and his lover Frances Gregg, while Jean Rhys presented herself as a child-woman who needed to be looked after. She was ‘Ford’s girl’, an innocent who charmed men into taking care of her. If that meant taking care of her financially, then so be it: “It seems to me now that the whole business of money and sex is bound up with something very primitive and deep,” she said. “When you take money directly from someone you love, it becomes not money but a symbol. The bond is now there. The bond has been established. I am sure the woman’s deep down feeling is, ‘I belong to this man, I want to belong to him quickly’. It is at once humiliating and exciting.”

Rhys’s presentation of herself as victim was a survival strategy, McDowell argues. In 1920s Paris there were few opportunities for a young woman who felt “fated to write… which is horrible. But I can only do one thing.” It was Ford Madox Ford who had made her think of herself as a professional writer, who taught her how to edit her own work and hone her individual voice. When he eventually cast her aside, she was emotionally destroyed. She already struggled with alcohol and depression and these things came to define her personal life as much as her writing did her public life.

For women later in the century there were more grown-up options than depending on men. In fact Simone de Beauvoir, despite her long relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, promoted Katherine Mansfield’s idea of the ‘solitary woman’, and found romance in sitting in restaurants or taverns on her own: “I would gaze out at the sky, at the passers-by; then I would lower my eyes to the exercise books I was correcting or the volume I was reading. I felt wonderful.”

Beauvoir resisted the whole idea of marriage and instead she and Sartre set themselves up as what McDowell calls “a living alternative to the bourgeois, married, monogamous couple long considered the social norm.” Throughout their fifty-year partnership they had affairs with other people, Beauvoir even forming a relationship with another literary man, the American writer Nelson Algren. He in the end wanted more than she was prepared to give – Beauvoir was the embodiment of Martha Gellhorn’s famous dictum, “A man is no use to me, unless he can live without me.”

Later writers were caught in the crosswinds blowing through the West in the post-war years. After years of independence and autonomy during the war, women were under immense pressure to be wives and mothers, pressure that came not just from the society around them but often from their own mothers. Elizabeth Smart, author of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, was from a wealthy background, attended a posh school, and was expected by her socially conscious mother to behave like a nice girl. Instead she pursued the poet George Barker, eventually having four children by him without ever marrying. Although he constantly abandoned her and went off with other women, she did not regret their liaison. She said he “gave me the courage to break the surface bonds, to dare the murderous act of stepping resolutely into my own life.”

It is this stepping into their own lives that links the writers in McDowell’s book, though inevitably some were more resolute than others. The act of writing by definition requires sensitivity and Sylvia Plath, even as a young woman, was delicately poised between the highs of achievement and the lows of depression. After being turned down for a summer creative writing course at Harvard while still a college student, she overdosed on sleeping pills and ended up being given electric shock treatment.

In Ted Hughes she thought she had found the perfect husband and embraced the idea of being the perfect wife; she wanted to be “anchored to life by laundry and lilacs, daily bread and fried eggs, and a man, the dark-eyed stranger who eats my food and my body and my love.” Their six and a half year marriage was productive for both of them, he calling her “one of the best critics I ever met”, and she writing 224 poems and The Bell Jar during that time.

It is generally considered that Hughes’s infidelity with the beautiful and highly-strung Assia Wevill led to her suicide, but McDow-ell proposes the opposite: the two had been talking of reconciliation and she believes that the thought of Hughes returning to her precipitated Plath’s death. It is a viewpoint that depends on believing Hughes’s version of events and one which many of Plath’s biographers have refused even to countenance, but McDowell makes a convincing case that Plath had suffered once from Hughes’s abandonment and perhaps did not have the strength to risk that happening again. She laid out milk and biscuits for her sleeping children and put her head in the gas oven.

She also achieved literary immortality and it is that which McDowell identifies as the driving force behind her women writers and their pursuit of literary men. Instinctively they seem to have known that the men they chose would help them become the writers they wanted to be. In modern Britain we publish 120,000 books a year and there are vast markets for books written by and for women – chick lit, lesbian biography, romance, historical fiction and misery lit are all primarily female forms. Women writers no longer need the patronage and support of men in quite the same way. But if McDowell is right, they will continue to seek the unique romance and excitement of relationships with literary lovers. One can only hope that, like Elizabeth Smart, they are able eventually to move on from the almost inevitable heartbreak of making your rival your partner. After years of disappointment, infidelity and abandonment, she said of George Barker, “I never cry out in my sleep for him.” It may not have been the most literary thing she ever said but it was surely one of the most sensible.
The Scottish Review of Books (Jean Rafferty)

 

‘Talk about a wild bunch. I'll discuss these women later, but for the moment it is the scandalous behaviour of the literary lotharios they fell for that makes my blood boil.

For example, there's the poet George Barker, financially supported by a series of mistresses and wives, fathering 15 children by four women, flitting between his different families and lovers, and driving unmarried writer Elizabeth Smart, mother of four of his children, to drink and desperation.

There's H.G. Wells, at 46 living with his second wife and sons, with a sexual reputation to rival Warren Beatty's, and busy seducing 22-year-old Rebecca West.
Various of his many illicit liaisons resulted in pregnancies, including his furtive ten-year on/off secret affair with West, who bore him a son.

There's wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am Hemingway with his infidelities, lying, drunken rages and poor personal hygiene, hurling glasses, firing bullets through windows, abusing and slapping his third wife Martha Gellhorn in public - adhering to his theory that 'brutality was all that women understood'.

Incidentally, McDowell refers to this golden couple as 'the literary Posh and Becks'. And there's also poet Ezra Pound, a manipulative, sexed-up Svengali to the poet Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) with his crazy clothes, infidelity, progressive madness and ten-year sojourn in a psychiatric hospital.

And that's just the men. In fact, the questions that McDowell poses in this book are what made her nine women latch on to such reprehensible literary partners and what exactly did they gain from the relationships?

Why did predatory Sylvia Plath, for instance, chase and rush into a marriage with Ted Hughes, who would drive her to breakdown and suicide? Why did Rebecca West endure the stigma of unmarried motherhood and the humiliation of being ignored in public by her long-term married lover, Wells?

 

Why did feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir stay in a sexless relationship with ugly, kinky, promiscuous Jean-Paul Sartre, pimping girls for him and swapping lovers during bi-sexual flings?

 

And why did young married mother Jean Rhys plunge into a doomed affair with smelly 50-year-old novelist and editor Ford Madox Ford - about whom one lover reported that being kissed by him was 'like being a slice of toast under poached egg', moving into an apartment with him and his hostile wife, causing chaos and marital havoc and collapsing into depression and alcoholism when Ford dumped her?

Obviously that mysterious initial blast of white-hot love was the catalyst, combined with ambition, reverence for their lover's literary gifts and fame and a hope that some might rub off on them.
They chose men who would encourage, discuss, applaud, criticise and respect their own literary efforts.

Each one of them experienced the companionable comfort of sitting in a room with their beloved, writing and swapping advice and ideas together.
Here is Plath recalling such an idyll: 'Both of us work and write immeasurably better when with each other,' and Katherine Mansfield: '[We] sat by the fire working together all day...' McDowell believes that the creativity of these women depended upon and benefited from their volatile liaisons.

Each woman accepted the bad in her partner for the sake of the good, for what he could do for her art.
For Smart, all the anguish and rejection caused by Barker inspired her prose-poem masterpiece By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept. For Plath, the passion and intensity of her marriage to Hughes was crucial for her creativity.
So far so interesting. But too often this volume reads more like a Daily Sport exclusive than a work of scholarship. Do we really need details about Mansfield's syphilis, miscarriage, infantilism and avoidance of penetrative sex?

Or de Beauvoir carrying on like one of the evil, sex-crazed characters in Les Liaisons Dangereuses? Or HD's bi-sexual affairs, abortion, threesomes, abandonment of her child and years of unconsummated intimacy with Pound? I don't think so.

McDowell, clearly conscious of straying into the realms of gossip and sordid speculation, acknowledges in her introduction: 'It may seem like a prurient exercise to focus on the private sexual relationships between writers...'
It may indeed. And it may even be specious to claim that there is something unique about the relationships she so pruriently probes and pulls apart.

The unsurprising fact is that writing is a solitary activity — all those hours spent sitting alone, tapping or scribbling away, hoping for inspiration, waiting for words ... it is surely no wonder that lonely, isolated writers will seek each other out for mutual support.

They understand each other, as do artists, politicians, musicians ... a writer's liaisons are as likely to be as good or bad, helpful or harmful, sexually satisfying or disappointing as anyone else's.

McDowell's book has stirred me up into a right old fury. Forget about the sex lives of tormented writers. It is their poetry, prose and ideas that matter and their literary output that should be the focus of our interest, admiration and serious discussion.
The Daily Mail (Val Hennessy)

 

 

‘Abuse, betrayal, alcoholism, suicide and scandal: in Between the Sheets we find nine immortalised women writers and their troubled love lives. In her non-fiction debut, Lesley McDowell aims to challenge the paradigm that these women were victims, by showing how important these relationships were to them, and why and how each writer's work was directly benefitted by writhing, however briefly, in the sexual glow of a powerful male literary figure.

Inspired by her own experience of dating a charming but heavy-drinking author, who treated her shabbily but built her writerly self-confidence, McDowell identified with a depiction of Elizabeth Smart and George Barker in a memoir by their son.

"I could understand, after my own experience, why she'd found him attractive in the first place (although without my own experience I doubt I would have understood that at all)." In not seeing herself as a victim, McDowell was inspired to debunk the stories of victimhood that we have all consumed voraciously. Borne out of an emotional epiphany, her angle owes more to empathy than intellectual rigour, bolting her exploration of her own motives on to existing narratives.

What the book gains in being written from a stance of sisterly fascination, it lacks in conviction and definition. "It seems impossible to imagine what more could be said about this pairing, but hardly ever has it been argued that Hughes actually might have been good for Plath …" One might extend this sentiment to all the protagonists, so it's initially exciting to imagine the new argument McDowell could inspire. She herds them into more manageable groups: "New London Women"; "The Paris Set" and the "Transatlantic Chasers", and further into "ironic designations": Rebecca West, for instance, is "mother", Jean Rhys the "ingénue", a device which intends to "play with the kinds of labels that are attached to women, labels that are only ever one-dimensional". It's doubly ironic, in a book that wants to free these women from the shackles of victimhood, that they're further labelled, corroborating the notion that they've been defined by the men they relied on, destined to be shoehorned into a new label, not shaken free of an old one.

Each chapter takes roughly the same shape, charting the vicissitudes of the relationship and key dates before moving to a brief conclusion. The excitable narrative weaves a merry dance between events and lovers, circling back on itself – "but that was all to come", noting parallel lines along which contemporaries were then moving.

This can be baffling and convoluted. There is repetition: book titles are rehashed in case we missed them the first time round, and anecdotes are wheeled out to diminished effect: Plath bites Hughes on the cheek on three different occasions and we learn of Hilda Doolittle meeting Pound in the British Museum tea rooms more than once. Long sentences are riddled with clauses, parentheses and quotes, which often makes for prose that is indigestible and graceless.

There is no doubt McDowell deploys raw source material brilliantly, cleaving to glistening extracts siphoned from diaries, letters, journals and published work. It's the tone of her authorial voice which confuses: "These women artists may have made a Faustian pact … but it was a pact freely chosen and only occasionally regretted in the dark watches of the night many years later, when they were alone and momentarily doubting themselves."

Why so horribly glib? It was hardly, for any of them, a case of momentary doubt, and it did more than trouble in the "dark watches of the night"! Plath committed suicide, Rhys became a bitter alcoholic and Smart was almost broken by Barker. Such a sentence reads as a flight of melodrama, a fancy for a phrase being valued above its sense.

The Scotsman (Peggy Hughes)

 

 

BORN in Glasgow in 1967, Lesley McDowell has drawn from personal experience to get inside the minds of nine leading female writers from the last century, and to tell the stories of their (largely) doomed relationships with other writers.

In 2005, McDowell, at the time a fledgling fiction writer, began a one-year relationship with a published writer, a man who was just emerging from a marriage with two young kids and with "little interest in committing himself to one person." McDowell’s shoddy treatment in the relationship, which ended with her being dumped for another woman, didn’t dilute her attraction to him. It was the delight she took in their exchanges about literature, and his editing and encouragement of her literary efforts, that compelled her to him.

This is also, she says, what drew so many of her subjects, including Katherine Mansfield, Anaïs Nin and Simone de Beauvoir, to their literary partners. They chose their fates knowingly, in a kind of Faustian pact that would benefit their art. They weren’t victims, she says, though they were treated ghastly, partly explicable (if not excusable) by the fact that they lived in a pre-feminist age.

Henry Miller ‘looted’ Nin’s wealth. HG Wells refused to recognise Rebecca West publicly, despite the fact that she bore him a child. Elizabeth Smart, mother of his four children, put up with George Barker’s serial infidelity. Jean-Paul Sartre, having spent 50 years with Simone de Beauvoir, since their first date in the Luxembourg Gardens, in Paris, in 1929, left his papers to another woman. None of these men was as loutish in their treatment as Ernest Hemingway was of Martha Gellhorn, the famed war correspondent. "Ernest had a theory," she wrote a few years after the end of their eight-year relationship, "that brutality was all women understood; if they seemed recalcitrant (like me) they only needed to be beaten more."

Hemingway would call Gellhorn a "bitch" in public. Sex with him was "short and sharp"; he often used to greet her at the front door with "his drawers down, ready for sexual play." Hemingway suffered from depression and took his own life, as did his brother, sister and father. Suicide stalked Ted Hughes also. Infamously, his wife, the American poet, Sylvia Plath, killed herself within a few months of breaking up with the poet laureate, as did the woman he left her for, Assia Wevill.

Plath was a tormented soul. What we forget, says McDowell, amid the pillorying of Hughes by feminists, is that she tried unsuccessfully to take her own life in 1953, three years before she first met Hughes at a party in Cambridge; she left him that night with a bloody cheek after biting him in a frenzy of sexual arousal.
McDowell’s treatment of these liaisons is cursory, but she delights in the prurient details.
The Irish Examiner

‘BETWEEN THE SHEETS tackles 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 Sheets reads 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.
The Irish Times (Emilie Pine)

 

Between the Sheets
The Famous Literary Liaisons
of Nine 20th-Century Women Writers
By Lesley McDowell
Hardcover, $30.00/$37.50 CAN
ISBN: 978-1-59020-238-8
PUBLICATION DATE: March 11, 2010

WWW.OVERLOOKPRESS.COM

 

 

 

For more information, review copies, or to request an interview with the author, please contact:

Suzannah Rich at Overlook Duckworth Press, London

suzannah@duckworth-publishers.co.uk