Saturday, November 7, 2020

What Passes For Love

 From Lit Hub:

What passes for love, what happens between lovers—isn’t it all dandelion seeds brushed loose by a breeze and smoking a trail to the sun?

And yet—what happens between a writer and the other people in her life will leave its mark on the work itself. There will be more or fewer pages, greater or lesser risks, differing degrees of happiness, variant measures of self-worth. We may write alone, but we don’t live a writer’s life alone. Lovers, friends, workshops, teachers: How do we choose? What are the consequences?

[...]

Historians and biographers will say what they will, but most of what passed between Leonard and Virginia over the course of their long marriage would only ever be known to them. What we do know, from the accounts both left behind, is how supportive Leonard was of Virginia’s writing. He was her first reader, her quasi-agent, her editor, her companion, her champion. His intelligence mattered, his opinions. She believed what he told her. He knew what to say. His commitment to her work—to sharing his impressions, to easing her anxieties, to encouraging her radical departures, to fixing her spelling and adding apostrophes, to putting the Hogarth imprimatur upon the work that she created, to keeping her well—was substratum and substructure, the certain, solid ground to which she’d return after all the time she’d spend feeling dangerous with the thoughts inside her head. (Read more.)


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