Human Relations and Other Difficulties
Essays
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An incisive collection of essays by the editor of the London Review of Books, whom Hilary Mantel has called “a presiding genius”
Mary-Kay Wilmers cofounded the London Review of Books in 1979, and has been its sole editor since 1992. Her editorial life began long before that: she started at Faber and Faber in the time of T. S. Eliot, then worked at the Listener, and then at the Times Literary Supplement. As John Lanchester says in his introduction, she has been extracting literary works from reluctant writers for more than fifty years.
As well as an editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers is, and has been throughout her career, a writer. The deeply considered pieces in Human Relations and Other Difficulties, whether on Jean Rhys, Alice James, a nineteenth-century edition of the Pears’ Cyclopaedia, novel reviewing, Joan Didion, mistresses, seduction, or her own experience of parenthood, are sparkling, funny, and absorbing.
Underlying all these essays is a concern with the relation between the genders: the effect men have on women, and the ways in which men limit and frame women’s lives. Wilmers holds these patterns up to cool scrutiny, and gives a crisp and sometimes cutting insight into the hard work of being a woman.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spanning four decades spent as London Review of Books editor, this eclectic and acidic selection of pieces by Wilmers (The Eitingtons), mostly published in the LRB, captures the evolution of a sharp-eyed literary critic. The book under review is often incidental; instead, Wilmers offers fascinating character studies of the authors and their subjects, both of whom tend to be "difficult" women, including Germaine Greer, Patty Hearst, Marianne Moore, and Jean Rhys. Wilmers has a voice as crisp, clear, and dry as gin, simultaneously amused and wise, as when she notes that "what we see when we look into is that it was never all that stable or all that virtuous." She delights in the absurd for instance, during a rambling through the late Victorian bestseller Pears' Shilling Cyclopaedia, she came across entries under "T" that included "Tea Drinkers, the Greatest," "Tourists Killed in the Alps," and "Trades Injurious to the Teeth." Avowedly not a feminist, Wilmers nonetheless conveys a sharp sense that "it is a man's world that we live in." Given her ear for the perfect quote, irony, and glancing judgment on human foibles none of which "exceed the proper bounds of malice," as she observes of well-written Times of London obituaries fellow critics will appreciate this distillation of Wilmers's legacy and the record of a distinct sensibility that feels bitterly astute, inimitably of its time, and enduringly relevant.
