For someone who's so good because she understands that the personal in itself isn't worth a damn and that emotional clouding's for amateurs, Joan Didion has inspired a lot of gushing. V.L. Hartmann touches on this in a lovely essay today, acknowledging that while the incisive Didion is not "the most maternal of literary idols", for all that

I am not alone in my generation in thinking of her as a sort of mother figure. In 2006, she had a public conversation with then Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch at Summer Stage in Central Park, and the crowd was filled with over a hundred people in their twenties and thirties, many gazing at her with adoration. She read from The Year of Magical Thinking and tears streamed down the faces of girls who clutched copies of her books.

When I've seen Didion read or talk (I wrote about one such instance here) - and it's something you do, if she's reading, and if you can, because she's a bedroom saint - it's kind of like that. The disconnect between what she's saying and writing and the palpable veneration is always kind of jarring. Ironically, for all her detachment, we all feel we know her. She has transcended her work and become a figure of tragedy and a national treasure. As a keen student of hero-worship, Didion herself must find it fascinating.

Hartmann adds that for many young women, Didion is the spectrum through which we view our mothers' generation as well as the model for female writers. Of course, there are those who would argue that in many ways Didion's voice was heightened and sharpened by the necessity of writing in a man's world, that like many women of her generation her fiction needed to be brittle to avoid sentimentality. Didion lovers might find that a strength, but she of all people would surely want the historical pointed out with due detachment. But, see? I'm falling into it too. Although the most idiosyncratic of voices and frank of literary personalities, a lot of us have made her a figurehead and projected on our own qualities and wishful qualities. The author was prompted to write her tribute when she saw Didion on the street, tiny and fragile-looking, and found reality and mythology colliding. She concludes, "I grew up with her writing, but she wrote none of it for me. It was enough to know on that cold afternoon that I was there and she was there." I'd add, at this point she hardly needs to be, because we all have the idea. (And no, I'm not talking about the erotica...which was, it should be said, for an erotica contest at a Valentine's Day party. Still.)
Joan Didion Crosses The Street [The Morning News]
Related: Joan Didion Is Kind Of A Downer About The Election

PW reviews director Louisa Ermelino wrote that the publication "ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz" when composing its list, and that "it disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male." But Cate Marvin, founder of Women in Letters and Literary Arts (and also a pretty great poet) says,

The absence made me nearly speechless. [...] It continues to surprise me that literary editors are so comfortable with their bias toward male writing, despite the great and obvious contributions that women authors make to our contemporary literary culture.

Salon's Laura Miller sees both sides of the issue. She points out that "what's at issue isn't sales or even access to readers," and it's worth remembering that women buy more books than men these days, and that many of the most commercially successful writers in English are women. But "prestige and critical recognition" still matter, and Miller acknowledges that Publishers' Weekly may be unknowingly buying into prejudices about what deserves to be prestigious. Ermelino seemed to brush off the concerns of Marvin and others by saying the PW list wasn't "the most politically correct," but Miller writes,

[R]eal, long-standing cultural biases [...] live in the heart of every critic to one degree or another, and we'd be shirking our duty if we didn't try to account for them. Writing off such qualms as mere "political correctness" is, in its own way, just as dishonest as exaggerating your admiration for a book simply because its author is female, or dark-skinned, or from a far-off nation. I don't doubt that P.W.'s editors are entirely sincere when they say their list reflects their unvarnished preferences. Still, the fact that those preferences can't encompass one woman author among 10 books (fiction or nonfiction) picked from the 50,000-plus titles they claim to have sifted through suggests that their horizons might need a bit of deliberate widening.

This is a smart point. When a list like this one draws criticism — and they have in the past — the compilers usually defend it with the argument that "this is just what we like." But what we like is subject to deeply held and unconscious biases, and when we think we're being objective, we are often praising what we're most comfortable with, or what we think is most deserving of praise based on whatever stereotypes we grew up with. Miller gets this, but she also understands how difficult it is to make a list that's both wide-ranging and true to a critic's particular tastes:

If you insist on a list that's ideally representative of gender, race, class, nationality (i.e., including at least one translation), publisher size (small as well as large), fame, length (short story collections as well as novels), region, genre and so on, you can easily wind up with, say, a list of nine books you kinda like and maybe one you truly love. That's a tepid dish to serve up to readers, and not likely to inspire much enthusiasm, either.

I'm not completely comfortable with the idea that jettisoning your preconceived notions lead to "tepid" criticism, just as I don't like the argument that approaching literature from a multicultural perspective leads to the canonization of bad literature. I think that the "deliberate widening of horizons" that Miller talks about might actually lead critics to love books they might not even have picked up otherwise, and to examine the ways in which their privilege influences their taste. But I also think that compiling, by committee, a list of the ten best books in any year is a great way to piss people off, and not a particularly great way to inform them.

I've been reviewing books for a long time, and I'm a big fan of the book review as a literary form in itself and a way of introducing readers to new and exciting work. I know that, when I review a book, I bring my own prejudices to it — I can and should try to fight against them, but I'll never completely eliminate them all. The thing is, my reviews run under my byline, and are clearly my opinion and mine alone. I'm also just making judgments about an individual book, not about what constitutes the cream of the crop of an entire year's literature. Getting a bunch of people together to pick a "best-of" list, no matter how open-minded those people are, screws up the process of criticism because it obscures it from view. We don't know who fought for what, who insisted on what inclusion or exclusion, and what those people's reasons and biases were. All we see is a collective entity that calls itself an authority and delivers a verdict not just on one book, but on all the books of an entire year (or, sometimes, decade or century). Even if we got the names of everybody on the PW panel (the entire staff? a select group?), it would be pretty hard to tease out all the different influences that lead to an all-male winner's circle.

So while I think the WILLA Wiki of great 2009 books by women is a good response to PW's dude-fest, I also know that every list excludes somebody. And I'd rather go on judging every book on its own merits than compare it to a whole bunch of other books. But of course, that's just the opinion of Anna North, a young-ish white woman from Los Angeles who's tired because it's Friday and skeptical because it's November and a little embarrassed because she hasn't read any of the books on the PW list — and who, like all critics, could easily be wrong.

No. 1 Omission From Top 10 Book List: Women [NYT ArtsBeat Blog]
A 10-Best Books List Without Women? [Salon]
Best Books Of 2009 [Publishers Weekly]
The WILLA List Wiki [Official Site]

Mueller's first book, a short story collection called Niederungen (Nadirs), was published in Romania in 1982. It depicted the difficulties of life in an ethnically German Romanian village, and was quickly censored by the Communist government of Nicolae Ceausescu. The government eventually barred her from publishing in Romania at all, and Mueller left for Germany in 1987 with her husband (coincidentally named Richard Wagner). Since then she has written a number of essays, short stories, novels, including The Land of Green Plums and The Appointment.

Much of Mueller's work deals with the difficulties inherent in her German-Romanian heritage. According to Larry Wolff, who reviewed The Land of Green Plums in 1996, most of Romania's ethnic Germans returned to Germany either during or after the rule of Ceausescu. Wolff writes that "this marks the end of many communities that had survived from the 18th-century reign of the Empress Maria Theresa," and that Mueller "conveys a certain sadness over the historical implications of emigration, the impending doom of her own native culture and society" (he also notes that Mueller is one of the few female authors to write about life in Communist Eastern Europe). Yet Mueller, whose father was a member of the Waffen SS (like, interestingly, former Nobel winner Gunter Grass), also betrays in her writing a certain ambivalence about her Germanness. The narrator of The Land of Green Plums mentions how embarrassed she feels in the presence of Romanian-Jewish Holocaust survivors:

It was Herr Feyerabend. He was shuffling his feet and pulled a white handkerchief out of his pocket. I withdrew my head, as if the white handkerchief could feel that someone like myself was staring at a Jew.

But any shame Mueller felt at Germany's fascist past did not prevent her from criticizing Romania's Communist regime — or the vestiges of this regime that outlasted the fall of Ceausescu. In a 2007 essay on Romania's entry into the EU, Mueller accused the country of "collective amnesia" and of ignoring the continued influence of the officially disbanded Securitate, Ceausescu's secret service. She wrote,

A former dissident gets a job in the public service and is summoned for a swearing in. And when he opens the door, his former Securitate interrogator is standing there to receive his oath on the democratic constitution. Or a former political prisoner applies for a loan at the savings bank in a town. The bank director who tells him that the loan has not been granted was once his prison director.

In Brussels, they'll say the former prisoner should go to another bank. If there's a bank in the town, the EU criteria are fulfilled. The question is: who's the director?

Mueller's criticism of Ceausescu and his supporters notwithstanding, Pete Ayrton, one of her publishers, says, "she writes extraordinary accounts of being an ethnic minority in a totalitarian regime. But this is not overtly political writing; it's very poetic and elliptical. She's an extraordinary writer." A passage from The Land of Green Plums reveals this poetic quality:

Under the pillows in the beds were six pots of mascara. Six girls spat into the pots and stirred the soot with toothpicks until the black paste grew sticky. Then they opened their eyes wide. The toothpicks scraped against their eyelids, their lashes grew black and thick. But an hour later gray gaps began to crack open in the eyelashes. The saliva dried up and the soot crumbled onto their cheeks.

Wolff points out that "since an important purpose of the novel is to represent cultural survival through the German language, any translation necessarily obscures some of the work's significance." At the same time, Mueller's words, even in English, bear out the Swedish Academy's claim that her work, "with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed." Perhaps now this "wonderful, neglected writer," as Ayrton calls her, will receive more international attention.

Herta Mueller Wins Nobel Prize In Literature [AP, via NYT]
Herta Müller Takes Nobel Prize For Literature [Guardian]
Strangers In A Strange Land [NYT]
Romania's Collective Amnesia [Sightandsign.com]
Novelist Herta Müller Wins Nobel Prize In Literature [Mediabistro]

Sarah Palin's cover is very simple, almost deceptively simple. We've got blue sky, red fleece, and not much else. However, Palin's book jacket clearly comes from a long history of portraiture. It is possible to compare this image to anything from Velasquez's grandiose portraits of Philip IV to August Sander's humble photographs of German citizens. Every great leader has, at one point or another, had a photograph or painting done of them almost exactly like this one, but despite the relatively restrained design, there are a few notable things about Palin's choice. This book shows us exactly how Palin wants to be viewed by the public, so let's see what subliminal messages are hiding in plain sight on the glossy jacket.

The composition of Going Rogue immediately brings to mind photographs of another famous maverick: Amelia Earhart. Earhart is frequently shown framed against a vast expanse of blue sky, hair tousled by the wind. Palin, too, stands against a background of nothing but clouds and sky, staring gamely at something far away, something above the viewer, that only she can see (Russia, perhaps?). Palin is the entire foreground-we see nothing but her brave figure silhouetted against the open Alaska sky. The aviation symbolism is clear: Palin is ready to take flight. Tired of being hemmed in by lame-duck governorship and the twistings and turnings of the liberal media, Palin is ready to fly off on her own, forge her own path into the future.

Palin would no doubt like her audience to think of her as the continuation of a long line of fierce female warriors. Perhaps it is merely a coincidence that her book cover is so reminiscent of WWII recruiting posters. Many of these posters feature a single woman from the waist up, standing against a background of either blue sky or Old Glory. Like Going Rogue, for the most part, these women are not shown straight on, but rather from a slightly lower angle. The viewer is placed below the figure, which adds height and stature to their slight feminine frames. Unlike the images of Amelia Earhart, these women are all dolled-up, lipstick-on and ready for battle. While Palin is not dressed quite as sharply as her predecessors, her hair is flawless (as is, naturally, her lipstick). Luckily, she managed to pose for this photograph on the most windless day in Alaskan history, because nothing short of Photoshop could explain such perfection, and since we all know how much Palin appreciates truth, it is doubtful that she stooped to such low measures to manipulate her image.

In a similar vein, the color scheme of the cover brings to mind another set of propaganda posters. In the 1960s, Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong commissioned a series of posters and "large doses of didactic politicized art" in an attempt to "inoculate" the peasantry. These images show Mao looming large against a red and blue sky. Like Palin, he does not deign to make eye contact with the viewer, but looks out at something in the far distance. However, the most striking similarity between these images appears in the colors. Palin is surrounded by a white and blue, with her jacket as the sole bright spot of red. But notice that this is not one of her fancy, several-thousand dollar jackets: Instead, Palin wears a humble fleece. (Maybe she wants to remind us of her "Real America" roots. Certainly she doesn't want her customer base thinking of her as Designer Barbie Palin. Especially since, as Amazon shows, her biggest fans are currently too busy preparing for the end of the world to worry about fashion. Customers who bought this item also bought: How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It, Catastrophe, and, because everyone needs a little light reading, Glenn Beck's Common Sense.)

And, finally, one of the most important features of any book cover is the font. As typophiles know, the font sends an important message about the quality and type of publication. While we might have expected Palin to choose a bold and unadorned font like Impact (or perhaps Comic Sans), Palin's team went instead with Linotype Didot. According to Typedia, the Didot family of fonts comes from the Didot family, who lived and worked in Paris in the 19th Century. While Pierre Didot published books and prints, Firmin Didot designed the typefaces. Linotype Didot was added much later, drawn by Adrian Frutiger in 1991. Typedia informs us that this font, with its vertical emphasis and bold strokes, is the "right choice for elegant book and magazine designs, as well as advertising with a classic touch." However, as Anna notes, for all its elegance, Didot is only one "i" away from idiot. And you'd think that is one association she'd rather avoid.

Going Rogue [Amazon]
Linotype Didot [Typedia]

With her new novel, Feminista, author Erica Kennedy seeks to use Zamora's story as a springboard to pioneer a brand new genre: "bitch lit." And not a moment too soon. Chick lit, the popular and fluffy genre geared toward women readers, is having a bit of an identity crisis. Even Plum Sykes, of Bergdorf Blondes fame, is ready to throw in the towel on the genre:

[Sykes] was skeptical that a new genre of chick lit could emerge from the recession, partly because she believes we've already seen the last of the "sex and shopping book as a publishing phenomenon". She added: "Chick lit seems so out of date now. Not only because of the economic reality but because it's been done to death."

The recession hit, taking the sugary tales of credit card backed retail therapy with it and leaving authors in a panic. Would people still relate to their characters if they stopped living charmed lives? For some reason, publishers seem to think "recessionista reads" are the next hot trend. I'm fairly skeptical, myself - after all, half the fun of a fluffy novel is the escape from reality.

Lakshmi Chaudhry agrees in a sense, writing for LiveMint.com:

The literary problem with the current economic debacle is that its architects are irremediably inane, self-absorbed and shallow-and, therefore, perfect for chick lit-the first fictional genre to wholeheartedly embrace the recession. Hedge Fund Wives by Tatiana Boncompagni, Social Lives by Wendy Walker, The Penny Pinchers Club by Sarah Strohmeyer and The Summer Kitchen by Karen Weinreb detail the travails of affluent women suddenly burdened with shrinking bank balances and AWOL or, worse, imprisoned banker husbands.

What's a Fifth Avenue socialite to do? Tap into her girl power, of course. "One of the big motifs in these books is a sort of empowerment," says Jonathan Segura, an editor at Publishers Weekly, who told The New York Times, "Swathed in Gucci, Prada and what not, their protagonists realign their priorities and realize, ‘Oh, I don't need that Givenchy gown. I can look great in Eileen Fisher, too'". Sacrifice, it's the American way!

But is that what readers want? Listening to the whine of the formerly privileged whose recent brush with brokeness forced them to reflect on the meaning of life seems more like torture than pleasure. And our current cultural mood seems to go between more serious matters (like politics and the economy) with straight up escapism (werewolves, faeries, and vamps, oh my!)

Perhaps writers and publishers could pay more attention to the lives of the women that create their audience. Many of us are scared for our jobs and cutting back, but that doesn't manifest in maniacal penny pinching or schadenfreude. Some times, tapping into this particular type of economic strain, is as simple as allowing your character's thoughts to roam. A good example of this is a highly relateable passage in Feminista:

Sydney had no desire to be that rich. Every rich kid she'd ever known had been completely fucked in the head. She didn't even aspire to be average rich, but seeing that kind of obscene wealth up close made her life seem so small and insignificant. For the last month, she had been agonizing, agonizing, over whether she should waste three hundred dollars on a pair of fucking shoes! She compulsively saved her pennies, never splurging on herself unless she could write it off, and for what? To buy a tiny apartment that was the size of that spoiled bitch's linen closet?

She used to think that if she just had enough, she'd be happy. Enough money in the bank, a decent apartment, a little disposable income to go on a modest vacation or two a year. After reading a widely e-mailed Times story about $200,000 being the new $100,000, she had to ask herself what exactly constituted enough? Before she had finished grappling with that question, the paper of record ran a chilling piece about millionaires in Silicon Valley who didn't feel rich because they lived among people who had tens of millions. Before clicking to the second page, Sydney had to stop and pop a Xanax. The quest for "enough" was what got her out of bed every morning. It was what kept her going when she wanted to give away all of her worldly possessions and move to a tropical island and sell handmade trinkets on the beach. She didn't want to ponder the idea that "enough" was unattainable, that it was a constantly moving goal she might never reach. Because that would force her to confront the possibility that her entire life's course had been charted with a faulty compass. And why put herself through that when she could just self-medicate?

Whether it's chick lit or bitch lit, romance novels or paranormal smut, the key to any selling any story lies in sympathetic characters and the willingness of an audience to want to walk through the world created between a novel's pages.

So, I suppose, the fate of chick lit rests squarely on one key question: what is the audience looking for?

Feminista [Amazon]
End of a chapter: chick lit takes on the credit crunch [The Independent]
Sex and shopping chick lit makes way for recessionista reads as credit crunch leaves its mark on the book shelves [Daily Mail]
How the recession has fuelled chick lit [Live Mint]
Paranormal Smut Novels [Feministe]

Apparently undeterred by the creepiness and tragedy of Emily Brontë's love story between Catherine Earnshaw and the foundling Heathcliff (who at one point hangs another girl's dog), Twilight author Stephenie Meyer even has Bella quote Brontë at one point to describe her feelings for Edward. Taking Wuthering Heights as a model for your love is a little like walking down the aisle, to, say, "Heart-Shaped Box," but that doesn't seem to bother Twihards. They're gobbling up a new edition of the book, complete with a very Twilighty cover and the tagline "love never dies." However, some readers are annoyed with the content. One reviewer wrote on the publisher's website,

I was really disappointed when reading this book, it's made to believe to be one of the greatest love stories ever told and I found only five pages out of the whole book about there love and the rest filled with bitterness and pain and other peoples stories.

People were such downers in 1847. Also, they talked funny. Another reviewer asked if the book was "in old english or mordern understandable english?" Public service message: people stopped speaking Old English in the 12th century. Still, classics like Wuthering Heights may seem inaccessible to "mordern" readers. What better way to make them new again than to have today's books endorse them? And why stop with Twilight? We thought of a few more glossy bestsellers that could be shilling dusty tomes:

How Not To Look Old: The Picture Of Dorian Grey
Harry Potter: David Copperfield
Eat This, Not That!: Alice in Wonderland
Jim Cramer's Mad Money: The Grapes Of Wrath
Confessions of a Shopaholic: Madame Bovary
Bob Greene's Total Body Makeover: The Metamorphosis
The Berenstein Bears: The Bear
What Not To Wear: The Scarlet Letter
Anything by Rush Limbaugh: Heart of Darkness
Eat, Pray, Love: Titus Andronicus
Lauren Conrad's LA Candy: The Portrait of a Lady

We're sure you can think of more.

Vampire Endorsement Turns Brontë Into Bestseller [Guardian]

Earlier: Heathcliff Didn't Sparkle, Though

I'll confess, I've only read five of the famously prolific Weldon's more than 30 novels, plus of course her ubiquitous journalism, contrarian critiques, and her invariably entertaining appearances on the BBC. I enjoyed them more as portraits of a time, of a psyche, of the position of women writers than I did as works of lit, stringent and often funny though they can be. Weldon, along with Doris Lessing and Germaine Greer, is one of those writers defined as "feminist," and proud of it - and like Lessing or Friedan, she's one of those who lived as adults in the pre-feminist world. But she's also of the generation that, being of the true vanguard, sometimes seems as addicted to contrarianism, to the opposition of doctrine, as to set-in-stone principles. And that's why she's so interesting (and frustrating to many), as an interview in the Guardian , prompted by her latest novel, makes clear.

Weldon was always atypical: the daughter of a writer who left her husband during Weldon's childhood, Fay (born, rather awesomely, "Franklin Birkinshaw") studied psyc and econ in the early 50s, had a child out of wedlock, married and divorced when it was still outre, and carried on a career after her marriage. Her novels - the best-known are surely The Life and Loves of a She-devil and Praxis, dealt with women oppressed by the Patriarchy. But Weldon was always contrary, and at times has seemed as heedless of the opinions of the feminist establishment she helped promote - and who, some would argue, made her iconic - as of the old order she opposed. She's never had a problem changing her mind: After years of avowed atheism, she converted, a few years ago, to Christianity. She makes no secret to her devotion to celebrity gossip on the Daily Mail website, her plastic surgery, or for her unapologetically commercial work for Bulgari.

She's also critical of modern feminism; she, along with Doris Lessing, notoriously declared that "Our duty now is to become masculinist. It is time we looked after the self esteem of the little boys...Feminism was a revolution that happened. It was an amazing movement that worked. Everything is completely different to what it was 25 years ago.But what happens with all revolutions is they become the Establishment.

She has advocated faking orgasms. And in 1998, she made waves when, speaking of her own sexual assault, declared that rape "isn't the worst thing that can happen to a woman...rape is nasty, death is worse."

In the current interview, she declares, among many, many other things (and do read the whole thing),

She recently said the problem with most feminists was that they were so boring. "They're getting a bit better, because at least they are more interested in women in other lands," she says. "In the last five years, it has been so inward-looking – they have been worried about pay gaps, worried about the minutiae of things – that it got up its own arse. Now, [the feminist movement is] looking outside – you see what's happening to women in Afghanistan and you see the necessity of fighting back. You need to work in those areas. It is too easy for women [in the west] to see themselves as victims and oppressed by men. I think one has to be more rational."

It's this sort of remark - a combination of good sense, hyperbole, gratuitous dismissal, condescension, and contrariness - that will, I think, be Weldon's true legacy. Was she a feminist icon? In a way - as she puts it, "It became obvious that you had to be a feminist because it was such a ridiculous state of affairs." She calls herself "the only feminist there is" of her generation, and in a certain sense, nowadays, she's right: she was, and is, a "choose-your-choices" modern feminist before that was kosher. But whether that's regarded as bravery and independence, or merely weakness when the world needed rigor, the truth is that I think it's this very quality that exempts Weldon from the pantheon of feminist icons. In a sense, she is perhaps a "true" feminist - certainly her real respect for a woman's individual choices, her ability to be an individual, are as feminist as it gets, to my way of thinking. But she faught against being defined by ideology, and she wasn't. And as a result, she is distinct from a figure like Germaine Greer who, while perhaps more doctrinaire, provided a strict and recognizable framework when one didn't exist. Weldon was, and is, an individual - that was her choice, and her legacy, but that can make someone a lot harder to fit into history.

'I'm The Only Feminist There Is – The Others Are All Out Of Step' [Guardian]
Fay Weldon Turns From Feminism To Boy Power [Independent]
Fay Weldon: Rape Isn't The Worst Thing That Can Happen [BBC]
Lie back and think of Jesus [Guardian]
'If you want to find true happiness, just fake it' [Guardian]
How The Spice Girls Have Killed Feminism, Subverted Morality And Embarassed Us All [Daily Mail]

Biographer John Carey discovered the memoir among Golding's papers while doing research for his book, The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies, available September 3. In it, Golding says he met the girl when she was 13, and that she was "beginning to burn sexually" at that time. By 14, he wrote, she was "already sexy as an ape." When he saw her again, on a visit home from Oxford, he said he "felt sure she wanted heavy sex, as this was visibly written on her pert, ripe and desirable mouth." This she-wanted-it language is obviously upsetting, as is the admission that he "unhandily tried to rape her." She managed to get away, leaving him calling "I'm not going to hurt you," and thinking he "had made such a bad hand at rape."

Sadly, none of this — from the assumption that physical attractiveness as a sign of sexual desire to the disingenuous claim that "I'm not going to hurt you" — is unusual. What is unusual is the source of the admission — an author who had written elsewhere about the darkness of the human spirit. Golding apparently wrote his memoir, which he called Men and Women Now, to explain his "monstrous" side to his wife Ann. It seems, however that he also wanted to excuse his actions, with claims that the girl was "depraved by nature." Confessing the attempted rape to his wife years after the fact, when it's likely that no restitution could be made, seems more like a selfish unburdening than a generous act of honesty. And Golding's repeated claims about the girl's sexuality suggests he wasn't ready, even at that late date, for true contrition.

Golding's papers also reveal that he pitted boys against each other when he was a schoolteacher, and that as he gave them more autonomy, his "eyes came out like organ stops" to witness their actions. These creepy war games, in which he "divided pupils into gangs, with one attacking a prehistoric camp and the other defending it," may have been an inspiration for the ultimately murderous conflict between boys in Lord of the Flies. Of that novel, Golding said in a publicity questionnaire,

The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable. The whole book is symbolic in nature except the rescue in the end where adult life appears, dignified and capable, but in reality enmeshed in the same evil as the symbolic life of the children on the island.

The author's words on evil and "the defects of human nature," along with his admission of his "monstrous" side, may be telling. If Golding believed that humans were evil at base, that given freedom they would turn against each other, then he might have thought his attempted rape was in some way mitigated. And his depiction of boys corrupted by a mysterious devil that at first appears external but more and more seems to operate within them may be a claim for the lack of free will in the face of the corrupting influence of human nature itself. Whatever the case, we know now that someone who wrote memorably about evil had first-hand experience with it, and saw it within himself, as much as he sought to excuse it.

Author Golding Admitted To Attempted Rape [UPI]
Author William Golding Tried To Rape Teenager, Private Papers Show [Guardian]
William Golding, Author Of Lord of the Flies 'Tried To Rape A 15-Year-Old Girl' [Telegraph]

[London, June 3. Image via Getty]

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM - JUNE 03: Marilynne Robinson, winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2009, poses with her award at the Royal Festival Hall on June 3, 2009 in London, England. (Photo by Frantzesco Kangaris/Getty Images)

Although the terrible-but-somehow-compelling Becoming Jane claimed that the great love of Austen's life was James MacAvoy Tom Lefroy, now a literary historian, Dr Andrew Norman, says the real culprit was a clergyman named Dr Samuel Blackall. As the Telegraph puts it, "Few of Austen's letters between 1801 and 1804 survive, making corroboration of the relationship difficult." But Blackall's correspondence, together with Austen's work from the period and a little sleight-of-geograohgical-timeline, point towards a (possible!) romance.

It's long been thought that this same period saw an estrangement between Jane and her beloved sister Cassandra - and, quite obviously, it was over this clergyman. At any rate, this is what Norman speculates, largely because The Watsons, which Austen wrote around this time, features a love affair doomed by a sister with "no faith, no honour, no scruples, if she can promote her own advantage" and a poem from the period which, read in the right way, supports the theory. Given the hijinx of many of Austen's heroines, it seems taking the biographical approach too far is a slippery slope - but yes! By all means let this be a movie! We recommend Hugh Dancy for the clergyman, and we'd like to direct casting directors' attention to Scarlett and Natalie's unimpeachable record of playing rival sisters who look nothing alike in very poor period pieces.

Mystery Jane Austen Suitor Who Sparked Riff With Sister Named [Telegraph]

Laurie Halse Anderson's Wintergirls is the first-person account of a young girl suffering from anorexia. It's well-researched and true-to-life, and the author names pro-ana websites and other resources that the characters uses as "thinspiration" by name. It's realistic and powerful and disturbing. And, as such, the Times asks, "In writing about eating disorders, are authors, unwittingly, creating an alluring guidebook to the disease?"

The concern, of course, is that the novel's audience is the very group most at risk for eating disorders, and as such, might take suggestion from the book. But, as one doctor quoted says, "Yes, the book is going to trigger people. Turning on the television triggers people - looking at billboards, going to the computer, walking past a magazine rack." In short, people who are ill are going to feed their illness, and the sad truth is that there are far more direct and compelling resources available for those looking for hints or encouragement. An intelligent book that shows one of the most jarring portraits we've seen of the physical and psychological consequences of ED is unlikely to make a healthy young woman sick, and may well prove salutary and sobering to quite a few.

While obviously educators or librarians have a responsibility to acquaint themselves with the materials kids are accessing on their watch, it seems ironic that we should be troubled by the appearance of a smart, uncondescending book for young women. It is not good books, however realistic their subject matter, that are causing problems of image and self-esteem. It is not intelligenced, nuanced discussions that are provoking distortion. I'm guessing Go Ask Alice didn't turn a generation into drug addicts, but did provide a lot of people with comfort and even more with information and cautionary wisdom. E.D. is a very real issue for teens, thankfully one being discussed, and would we prefer that YA authors, in a position to speak to young people, didn't address it? Kids are impressionable, but they also don't need to be patronized, and no one needs to be protected from intelligent, sensitive work. Whatever our concerns, to target a smart book by a proven YA author seems to me disingenuous, and as any of those conscientiously-compiled banned books lists will shows, censorship of any kind is a very slippery slope.

The Troubling Allure of Eating Disorder Books [NY Times]
Wintergirls [Amazon]

Showalter, one of the country's founders of feminist literary criticism, has written a sweeping work on the history of female writers in America, A Jury of Her Peers. Their story is a fraught one and not, as the Economist puts it, "a history of inevitable progress." While female writers have flourished since the country's inception - and, indeed, the 19th century literary marketplace was dominated by them - their success has been at the whim of society. The macho ethos of the Modernists, with it explicit attempt to make American writing "more energetic and masculine" made the early 20th century particularly unfriendly to women writers. (Gertrude Stein, on whom she piles "boring/unreadable" scorn, was apparently an exception - if not a positive one - to this rule. Patronage doesn't count?)

Showalter also makes the point that for the female writer, the private and public are more inexplicably entwined: in prior centuries, this was a practical concern, and more recently and problematically, the romanticism seemed necessary to give women writers viability. In Showalter's view, the female writer of today has moved beyond sexist prejudice. We hope so; certainly there seems to be a baffling tendency to romanticize the glory days of literary culture - be it 20's Paris or 50's New York - and unfortunately this involves a tiresome degree of patronizing misogyny. Any glance at a literary bestseller list, however, shows definitively that female writers are, if anything, in a position of prominence at the moment - and many, like Mary Gaitskill or Anne Patchett, seem free of a prior generation's need to shed all traces of "the feminine" in their writing, while still being accepted as "writers" rather than "women writers." However, the landscape is nothing if not a shifting one. Will a new climate mean a need for comfort? And if so, how will we define it? Hopefully with a desire for good reading, without the labels.

A Paean To The Female Pen[Economist]

After such universally applicable advice as, "go off to college at 16 - if not at first to a prestigious academic institution, then transfer to one on scholarship. Become a research assistant to a dazzling young professor, and within ten days, get engaged, then marry him," Yoder offers seven specific tips for Sontag-style living, backed up by quotes from Sontag herself.

For instance, Yoder advices her readers to "live voraciously," and offers this Sontagian support: "A thought occurred to me today - so obvious, so always obvious! It was absurd to suddenly comprehend it for the first time - I felt rather giddy, a little hysterical: - There is nothing, nothing that stops me from doing anything except myself..."

Another tip:

Be confident, ambitious, and cultivate your ego: "Good writers are roaring egotists, even to the point of fatuity." And: "With a little ego-building - such as the fait accompli this journal provides - I shall win through to the confidence that I (I) have something to say, that should be said."

You might think that with all this ego floating around your head, you might want to get outside yourself occasionally — perhaps through physical contact with another person. But for the Sontag-disciple, such contact is just a means to an end:

Make time for good sex: "The orgasm focuses. I lust to write. The coming of the orgasm is not salvation, but, more, the birth of ego. Yet the only kind of writer [I] could be is the kind who exposes himself... To write is to spend oneself, to gamble oneself. But up to now I have not even liked the sound of my own name. To write, I must love my name. The writer is in love with himself..."

In a world where women are still supposed to be giving and nurturing, Sontag's self-absorption is kind of charming . . . but that's partly because she's Susan Sontag, and egotism is a lot more forgivable in a genius. Should wannabe intellectuals really be using her words as a guide? We know these tips are tongue-in-cheek, but we can't help thinking that anyone who modeled her life on them would turn out pretty annoying. And really, does anyone need tips on how to be an egomaniac? We know plenty of people who figured that one out on their own.

A Girl's Guide To Becoming An Intellectual: Susan Sontag's Journals [The Millions]

Grossen lists some Hall-of-Famers: Darcy, Rochester, Zhivago, Rhett, and, inexplicably, Rebecca's Maxim de Winter. More idiosyncratically, she calls out the heroes of The French Lieutenant's Woman and Bel Canto.

To this, we'd add The Chosen's Reuven Malter (what? I was a nerd); Laurie before he grows up; Captain Wentworth; Fuck Head; Florentino Ariza; the Invisible Man; the Elephant Man; Huck Finn (is that pedophilia?); Natty Bumppo; Newland Archer (hey, Day-Lewis has good taste!); Dickon, and, last but not least, Ishmael.

But we're just getting started!
Fictional Men Worth Loving [Wall Street Journal]

Deprived of parental affection as a child, Gilman sank into postpartum depression after her daughter Katharine was born. The famous "nerve specialist" Weir Mitchell had this prescription: "Live as domestic a life as possible … And never touch pen, brush or pencil as long as you live." She disobeyed, separating from her husband and moving to California with Katharine. Though she embarked on a successful career, she was unhappy, and eventually sent Katharine back to live with her father. She may not have been a model for a joyful feminist life, and she's been accused of racism, but Picardie asks that we remember her "as the writer of The Yellow Wallpaper – and the survivor who unlocked the door of the madwoman in the attic, and lived to tell the tale." [Telegraph]

It's long been known that Papa had threatened to cut his mom off if she ever revealed anything about his childhood, and his sister's revelations about their early years explain why: according to Marcelline, their mother Grace was desperate for twin daughters, and despite the 18-month age difference between the kids, carried out the fantasy, holding her daughter back a year so the siblings would be in the same grade, and dressing the children in matching girl's clothes. Oh yeah — she also addressed her son as "Ernestine." To Have and Have Not, indeed. [MentalFloss]