скачать книгу бесплатно
Right but Romantic, TLS 25 June 1993 (#u4d73c92b-6f65-5f84-9d3f-c792696300d5)
Romanticism and Gender by Anne K. Mellor
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
News from the revolution that never was, Independent On Sunday 26 September 1993 (#uc0dc5a04-4330-5160-ad48-c2d7acc4f008)
Sexing the Millennium by Linda Grant
TLS 21 December 1993 (#u7a3cf317-ada4-5e52-a6c8-af60bd348e81)
Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing by Hélène Cixous
Farewell Lady Nicotine, Observer 2 January 1994 (#ufc325719-dd6d-55fb-9f74-c715735e3bd4)
Cigarettes are Sublime by Richard Klein
The women’s camp, TLS 15 July 1994 (#ue26ab8d8-900f-52f1-b1fd-602109861b81)
Article on critical theory
Paean to gaiety, LRB 22 September 1994 (#u37eae064-3b66-5871-ac83-c422ea647131)
The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture by Terry Castle
A record of honourable defeat, THES 17 February 1995 (#uff7adae0-ed26-5120-a8bb-baf49f33a921)
No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 3, Letters from the Front by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar
They lived for their work, Los Angeles Times Book Review, 7 January 1996 (#u25173740-227b-5cab-aab8-b8ec6f7e5ba7)
Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives by Natalie Zemon Davis
The Goddess of More: Parallels between ancient novels and the new womanism, TLS 9 August 1996 (#u80169592-4ac5-5f9c-952b-f73f675864f6)
The True Story of the Novel by Margaret Anne Doody
Learning new titles, TLS 17 March 2000 (#u8597c031-feb0-5399-8c20-6a90355e11f6)
Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century by Susan Gubar
Mother’s back, LRB 18 May 2000 (#u35f9f363-eae0-5b1d-97f2-e9ee17013846)
What Is a Woman? and Other Essays by Toril Moi
IV CLASSICS (#u9e663667-f176-5972-a53a-6f058afcd68a)
Daringly distasteful, TLS 26 April 1974 (#ua6ffbc01-261e-5fa7-9aa0-dca73c852b82)
Keats and Embarrassment by Christopher Ricks
Gay old times in Greece, Observer 1 October 1978 (#uba8107dc-1e42-5007-92f5-c1ac9b82ab86)
Greek Homosexuality by K. J. Dover
Victorian fun and games, Observer 24 December 1978 (#u2dff513b-4c56-5434-856e-f3705ac09e20)
No Name by Wilkie Collins
Observer Magazine 24 June 1979 (#u273730d2-3abc-5bcf-8d1b-3c5d1997aee2)
Villette by Charlotte Brontë
When two melt into one, TLS 22 February 1980 (#u3ac4c4d9-61f4-53e6-aaab-02bccf4100be)
Sexuality and Feminism in Shelley by Nathaniel Brown
A Scribbler comes of age, TLS 23 January 1981 (#u140ae8f9-b956-51a9-b79c-01a041084fba)
Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works Jerome J. McGann (ed.)
Weaving, deceiving and indecision, TLS 5 March 1982 (#ua04c6a99-7ba7-55c1-86fc-bd6f9545f234)
Heroines and Hysterics by Mary R. Lefkowitz
Links in a mystic chain, Observer 23 May 1982 (#udeac17e8-bd69-52c6-bf51-0ba355583892)
Lull and Bruno by Frances Yates
Ravishment related, TLS 24 December 1982 (#u0cb647ce-7ab8-5142-885e-653569859657)
The Rapes of Lucretia by Ian Donaldson
From our spot of time, TLS 9 December 1988 Review of several books on Wordsworth including (#u84855cd5-ffca-5a10-ad9b-38f93d50d1b4)
Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics by Theresa M. Kelley
Dorothy Wordsworth and Romanticism by Susan M. Levin
Peace with a vengeance, Observer 21 November 1993 (#uf06f4dc9-0cea-5f0f-8b16-0ba5d5b5a7b0)
Witness Against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law by E. P. Thompson
V CRITICAL TRADITION (#uc4858e23-a71b-58ad-b016-880c67330007)
The gay protagonist, Observer 20 Apri1 1980 (#u071ac812-1e9a-505a-9f24-0ed7d437dc10)
The Homosexual as Hero in Contemporary Fiction by Stephen Adams
Seminal semantics, Observer 10 January 1982 (#ua7d7d4cd-fa62-5b70-b3dd-0b85f33ca2cb)
Dissemination by Jacques Derrida
Men against women, Observer 19 December 1982 (#u23aec5e3-534b-53c9-806c-49e4b7b3d24c)
The Rape of Clarissa by Terry Eagleton
Cavalier and roundhead, Observer 24 August 1986 (#uffb41cde-e916-5359-932b-5f4cb5269002)
Essays on Shakespeare by William Empson
Valuation in Criticism and Other Essays by F. R. Leavis
TLS 14 April 1989 (#u1cd7c1da-2bc8-51b9-bdf2-45c27d169eb1)
Harold Bloom: Poetics of Influence John Hollander (ed.)
Oops, a lexical leak, Observer 20 March 1994 (#u2a1f7bfc-0de3-5bf8-8993-aca4f103aee9)
In the Reading Gaol by Valentine Cunningham
The First Bacchante, LRB 29 April 1999 (#u4df86899-cf0a-5322-b26b-a5a89095af9e)
The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie
A Simpler, More Physical Kind of Empathy, LRB September 1999 (#u98245571-f54b-5a9e-a928-a8407a406788)
West of the Sun and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
VI ITALY (#u44a10dd1-15a5-509c-baeb-5f677e6d14ce)
Fighting Fascists in bed, Observer Magazine 18 June 1978 (#uaa7b8ae8-de3e-5ac8-b55e-421f5f5fbc3d)
Italian feminists
Displaced persons, Observer 13 July 1980 (#ue8269cf3-5433-521a-b156-5cf329184a81)
Flight From Torregreca: Strangers and Pilgrims by Anne Cornelison
Our Lady of the Accident, Observer Magazine 23 November 1980 (#u09a89547-dda5-50d5-9327-d4fd84e5fa75)
The shrine of the Madonna of Montenero
Unholy ecstasies, Observer 9 February 1986 (#u99396ad3-b38f-546b-8e3a-98f5214400ba)
Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy by Judith C. Brown
Holy Anorexia by Rudolph M. Bell
The vegetable paradiso, TLS 26 September 1986 (#ueaa12e1c-19e5-521e-aca9-d8a53ab86d11)
Sotto il sole giaguaro by ltalo Calvino
Man who put the cult in occultism, Observer 1 October 1989 (#ua17c7a58-e89e-5c74-974a-2c8d790d42e4)
Interview with Umberto Eco
From the mind’s balcony, TLS 5 October 1990 (#u981dbd61-63c9-50e9-9339-333d82b69880)
La strada di San Giovanni by Italo Calvino
Calvino and the Age of Neorealism: Fables of Estrangement by Lucia Re
Freedom fighter, Vogue November 1992 (#u3ebdc297-c9bb-5167-b3b3-aaf26e21472b)
Interview with Oriana Fallaci
On the seas of story, TLS 7 October 1994 (#ucbc76b38-ad8f-50d3-83e0-71995430a989)
‘L’isola del giorno prima by Umberto Eco
Signs of possession, TLS 19 January 2001 (#u07b7c58c-64f1-5233-860c-86400dfd4dfd)
Out of Florence: From the World of San Francesco di Paola by Harry Brewster
About the Author (#ub7356ca0-0aa7-51ec-bc77-e4317b73c628)
Also by the Author (#u18dacbeb-4e30-5281-8a61-11d8d30cfeb8)
Copyright (#u88438aa8-4bd9-5a49-a95d-d84250dd2479)
About the Publisher (#u0ca736da-902a-5ecd-b818-05a313de1562)
Introduction (#ulink_4f85a209-f85d-53b1-a1a9-580f3a43751e)
LIKE CERTAIN PHOTOGRAPHS, WHICH hint at the gap between themselves and their future, posthumous books often have a slightly thin, accidental irony about them. This effect depends on how much they are designed to render their author’s intentions, how narrowly those intentions are inscribed in the book’s form: the stricter the author’s plan, the more the unfinished nature of the text becomes an issue. Here, there are no ghostly plans left on the desk, nothing was left unfinished. Instead, the work itself – perhaps a million and a half words written over thirty years – is just too vivid and alive to be left merely dispersed. What strikes us now, having made our selection, is how intimate a portrait of a mind and personality it provides, and how unexpectedly fresh, how new, that portrait is. As Lorna puts it in ‘Death of the Author’, her unflinching tribute to her friend Angela Carter: ‘Nothing stays, endings are final, which is why they are also beginnings’.
We have selected Lorna’s journalism to display the sheer range and diversity of her writing. During the seventies and eighties, while making her reputation as a contemporary fiction-reviewer, Lorna was also writing in many of the other newspaper and magazine genres. From the days of The New Review in the early 1970s under Ian Hamilton, she continued this diverse practice all her working life: profiles, short notices, interviews, multiple book reviews, essayistic pieces and, more latterly, obituaries. In the late 1970s, she started writing for the TLS, a long-time ‘home’ (branching out briefly into the New Statesman), and settled at the Observer, with Terry Kilmartin, under whose subtle tutelage she learned the tricks of the trade. In the last years, she wrote for the Independent, the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books.
In a late essay called ‘Living on Writing’ from 1998, Lorna rebels against what she calls a ‘conspiracy of reflexiveness’ in literary journalism:
Barthes’s famous saying went: ‘The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’. But the Author’s death has led to the birth of endless lower-case authors. If you want to speak with authority as a reader, in other words, you do it first by saying that you are a writer. I have always preferred to be a hack, it seems less of a mystification.
‘Hack’ is a theatrical double-take: Lorna dressed up in her hack persona to create an outside position for herself, from which she was able to concentrate on the work of other people. She thought of herself as a correspondent, sending in urgent bulletins from the front line of reading, not a ‘lower-case writer’.
The urgency of her dialogue with books is one of the distinctive aspects of her voice as a reviewer. She liked the commitment deadlines forced. She also increasingly wrote for money, needed to work, and was proud of the way her pen could supplement her income. Lorna began as an instinctive reader (voracious, indiscriminate) and this trait never left her throughout her life: during the fine contempt of adolescence, the prentice years of scholarship in the Renaissance and seventeenth century, the later years of teaching and constant reviewing, and even finally the last, hand-over-fist period in which she started to edit and write books herself, the curiosity, the primary thrill of the reader, never left her – that what she had in her hand was new; even Don Quixote felt to her passionately curious eyes like a tract of snow that no one else had walked upon. She was able rapidly to read one book after another, without pauses for assimilation, ritual movements or changes of place. Her attention was absolute. She did not appear to digest books at all. She read like this late into the night and began again early in the morning: she simply picked up the next volume, whether it was the Corpus Hermeticum or Tarzan of the Apes, propped it in front of her, her thin, long-nailed thumb creasing down the top three inches as she turned the page, and sped away in a trance of rapid eye-movement, dog-earing the leaves as she went whenever something was memorable. When laid aside, paperbacks, in particular, always had a subtly pot-bellied aspect, as if somehow they had more in them: the persistent creasing at the top caused their pages to bell out slightly. They looked as if they had been filled with reading.
To write your reading was equally direct. Lorna’s habit of accuracy was like a religious devotion and her unusual memory, into which books sank, apparently whole, not a feather of their print disturbed, combined with a jesuitical kind of mischievousness, meant that she was a formidable opponent indeed in a literary discussion. She positively wielded quotation and was very canny about lines of argument. So: this very ‘directness’ is a paradox. When she was young, one of Lorna’s favourite quotations was Polonius’s ‘by indirections find directions out’. To represent your reading so directly is certainly a craft and a pleasure, to say nothing of the service it performs for your authors and readers. But that directness is the product of much meditation, a labour of indirection. When reviewing a book, Lorna would usually read the rest of the author’s works and whatever she could find (often whatever there was) of biography and criticism. Marina Warner has spoken of what it felt like as a writer to receive a Lorna Sage review. Before starting to stab, hunched and one-fingered, at the old Olivetti, or later, the little Toshiba, whose keyboard was transformed into rows of letterless cups by the furious battering it had taken, she liked to make sure she had an intimate grasp of the text. This meant picking out the one-liners she made emblematic of the whole. She often did this by ear, not eye; reading out loud with the special emphasis she put into even the smallest of phrases. The quality of her attention, witnessed by the letters and cards she used to receive from writers, came from the detailed work she put in, to represent not only that intimate grasp but also its logic, where it was heading, its implications in a wider context. Many reviewers, of course, work in this way, but what is different about Lorna’s writing is precisely what was different about her reading: a rare combination of warmth and sophistication, in which she mimes with strange fidelity the act of reading a text, while tactically holding it at arm’s length at the same time. The details eventually click to make an unexpected drift of argument that was, if you look back, there all along. There is always a lot more going on in a Lorna Sage review than the ostensible, but she is always uncannily faithful to the ostensible.
