In this charming fantasy set in the Renaissance, the Archbishop wants a nephew, but a perfect one-so an artisan fashions one for him of Venetian glass. Problems arise when the glass nephew falls in love with a flesh-and-blood woman. A subtle, sensitively written allegory of life and art, with humour.
In this charming fantasy set in the Renaissance, the Archbishop wants a nephew, but a perfect one-so an artisan fashions one for him of Venetian glass. Problems arise when the glass nephew falls in love with a flesh-and-blood woman. A subtle, sensitively written allegory of life and art, with humour.
Elinor Wylie's body of work - four novels and four volumes of poetry produced between 1921 and 1928 - has often been overshadowed by her controversial personal life. In A Private Madness Evelyn Hively explores the points at which her life and her art intersect and demonstrates how Wylie used language and literary form to transform the chaos of her experiences. This purpose was successfully met, as A Private Madness presents Wylie and her work within the culture of the twenties. Described by contemporaries as an icon of the age, Wylie was illustrative of the tone and mores of the notorious decade in which her poems, novels, and Vanity Fair articles were written. Her friendships with such notables as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, and William Rose Benet and the events she endured - her father suffered breakdowns and a brother, a sister, and her first husband fell victim to suicide - colored her life and often mirrored the temper of the twenties. Her independence, unconventional behavior, narcissism, interest in the occult, the frantic pace of her life, and her problem with alcohol are evident in her novels and her poems. Her work embraces the escapism of the era in which
This collection contains 113 of the 161 poems Wylie chose for the volumes published in her lifetime and 100 that appeared in Collected Poems and in Last Poems. Also included are the first chapters of her novels, and short stories, essays, reviews, and articles to define Wylie's place on the 1920s literary scene.