WRB—June 14, 2025

“puritanical aesthete”

There is one thing, Emma, which a man can always do, if he chooses, and that is, manage to edit the Washington Review of Books; not by maneuvering and finessing, but by vigor and resolution.

Links:

• In The Paris Review, an essay adapted from Jennifer Egan’s introduction to a new edition of Emma by Jane Austen:

  This rare instance of praise for Emma from the hypercritical Mr. Knightley is the first in a trail of breadcrumbs Austen lays toward the startling revelation, late in the novel, of their mutual love. Balancing surprise with inevitability is the holy grail of successful fiction, and it’s worth looking closely at how Austen pulls this off—especially since Mr. Knightley is the only man in the novel who meets the dual criteria of belovedness and class equality with Emma. Austen uses literary sleight of hand to obscure this obvious truth: She introduces Mr. Knightley as an elder; a quasi–family member (Emma refers to him once as a brother, which he immediately disavows: another breadcrumb); a confirmed bachelor; and above all, as being nonplussed by nearly every aspect of Emma’s character. At various points he deems her overindulged, thoughtless, headstrong, callous, unfulfilled in her potential, and damaging to Harriet. His cleareyed assessment of Emma’s flaws, and her readiness to hear him out and stand up to him, have the happy effect of making both more sympathetic, as well as strengthening our awareness of their subtle affinity.

  [I had some previous notes on Emma’s surprises in WRB—May 24, 2025 and expressed my affection for that much-disliked heroine in WRB—Dec. 6, 2023. I am working on a theory that Emma and Mansfield Park are engaged in similar projects of seducing the reader into reacting incorrectly to events so that they can later force the reader to think about why they reacted incorrectly. Mansfield Park reveals that the reader is morally deficient; Emma reveals that the reader is bad at reading. (Which, I suppose, could be a kind of moral deficiency.) At some point soon I will reread Emma—more on this then, no doubt. —Steve]

• In The New Statesman, Frances Wilson on Muriel Spark’s attitude towards biography:

  Stannard went about his task as he understood it: interpreting the documents, conducting interviews and putting together a portrait of his subject. Nine years later, in 2002, he delivered his first draft to Spark. It was what she called “a hatchet job; full of insults”, 1,200 pages of “slander” and “defamation” which she was sending to a libel lawyer. She did not recognise the humourless woman described; she had been turned into a fictional figure. Determined to prevent publication, she did what she could to spoil the book and hold up its progress. The biographer and his subject were yoked in a danse macabre of pursuer and pursued, the plight of each resided in the other. Her distress, Spark’s friends say, effectively killed her, and when she died aged 88 in 2006, Stannard, now into the 14th year of his impossible task, was at work on the third draft. Muriel Spark: The Biography, which received stellar reviews when it finally appeared in 2009, is indeed the work of a literary critic and scrupulous scholar.

  “What Spark wanted,” Stannard reflected, was “to write the book herself.” So why didn’t she write the book herself? Even he didn’t know the answer. “Why this intensely private person should have invited someone to write her biography remains mysterious,” Stannard says in his preface. But Spark had written the book herself several times: not as the story of her life, but as the story of her relationship with her biographer.

  • From Joshua Cohen’s review of Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth (written in persona Roth):

    The lesson? I’m not sure. But I’ve been thinking about it. Perhaps it’s something along the lines of: Only a man who’s able to destroy himself is free?

    Bailey’s explanations for why I wanted this biography are the ones I gave him: That I had to have a biography; that somebody was going to write a biography; that many somebodies were going to write many biographies, after ransacking the papers I couldn’t bring myself to burn, and that while I could, I might as well get out ahead of the pack—ahead of the misandrists and identity-politics brats, ahead of the anti-Semites who thought I wasn’t American enough, the Jews who thought I was self-hating, and the anti-American and anti-Semitic illiterates on the Nobel committee who denied me the trip to Stockholm—and try to dictate the terms of the conversation.

Reviews:

• Two in the TLS; first, David Wheatley reviews an anthology of Scottish religious poetry (Scottish Religious Poetry: From the Sixth Century to the Present, edited by Emma Dymock, Linden Bicket, and Alison Jack, 2024):

  With its two dimeter lines and frequent polysyllabic rhymes, the “habbie” stanza gravitates naturally to comedy; Burns’s capture in its nets of the whited sepulchres of the kirk is one of the great moments in Scottish poetry. Yet his legacy was not an unmixed blessing for the century that followed, as the wit and “smeddum” of the bard’s example declined into formula and whimsy, until by the twentieth century MacDiarmid was rallying the troops under the slogan “Not Burns—Dunbar!”

  This decline took its toll on the religious muse. Nineteenth-century Scotland lacks a Scottish Matthew Arnold to elegize wistfully the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the sea of faith—Thomas Carlyle’s loss of faith took a rather different form, represented here by a short squib. The traumas of modernity seem a long way off amid Charles Murray’s kailyard blether and the gentle satire of Charles Neaves’s “Let us all be unhappy on Sunday.” By the time of James Thomson (“B. V.”) and his “City of Dreadful Night,” a shriller note is being sounded, and in the work of John Davidson (“God through the wrong end of a telescope”, as MacDiarmid called him), old certainties finally unravel. “Break—break it open; let the knocker rust: / Consider no ‘shalt not’, and no man’s ‘must,’” as he wrote in “To the Generation Knocking at the Door,” albeit from the safe distance of London and the Rhymers’ Club.

  [If I can—to return to an earlier subject—just barely imagine a naïve reading of Emma, I cannot at all imagine encountering “Dover Beach” as a wistful elegy instead of as a source of material for annoying and tedious jokes. This is probably the source of my affection for Anthony Hecht’s “The Dover Bitch.” —Steve]

[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:

• Brian Wilson and Sly Stone as American artists

• The line of poetry that showed me how meter and rhythm work

• K. T. on a Poem by A. E. Stallings and flowers along the shore

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. I appreciate it. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by telling your friends about us. —Steve]