Author Video: Lesley McDowell

We hope that some of you were able to join Scottish author Lesley McDowell in Toronto and New York this past week as she visited bookstores in both cities to promote the paperback release of her latest book, Between the Sheets: Nine 20^th Century Women Writers and their Famous Literary Partnerships, which came out just last week. Before visiting Bluestockings this past Saturday night for a packed reading and Q&A, Lesley dropped by the Overlook office to meet the team and chat about the story behind her book.

As March is women’s history month, there’s no better time to reexamine the gender relations in some of history’s most famous literary partnerships—Rebecca West and H.G. Wells, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Elizabeth Smart and George Barker, as well as many others. As Lesley McDowell explains in the video below, there’s often more to these stories of famous literary liaisons than meets the eye.

Praise for Between the Sheets

“McDowell … has culled incredibly juicy details. With so many affairs and broken hearts, the most surprising things is that anything got written in the last 100 years.” – The New York Times Book Review

“A pleasingly fresh look at some relationships we think we already know about.” – Independent

“McDowell … raises important questions about how sexual choice relates to any writer’s work and how things may have changed for women writers.” – Financial Times

“Suddenly, these feminist-lit figures seem more real and more grand. We feel the love and heartache that drove them to write.” – BUST MAGAZINE

“Laudatory … A welcome addition to the lives of writers in love and lust.” – The New Republic

“A powerful set of literary and biographical sketches perfect for any literary or women’s history holding.” – Midwest Book Review

“The subtle, argumentative slant of the text is laudable for its elevation of women commonly stereotyped as victims who lived passive lives in relation to the men they loved. Anyone interested in some crisp, literary gossip should take a look at this book.” – Feminist Review

“Lesley McDowell's new book, Between the Sheets: Literary Liaisons of Nine 20th-Century Women Writers, ditches some well-worn biographical tropes and sets out to make an interesting point about female authors: that we often think of their love lives as tragic not because they were, but because they're women.” – AOL.com’s Lemondrop

Guest Post: Author Lesley McDowell on Jodi Picoult and "White Male Literary Darlings"

A recent article in The Guardian, "Jodi Picoult Attacks Favouritism to 'White Male Literary Darlings'," has gotten a lot of well-deserved attention in the book world. Lesley McDowell, author of Between the Sheets: The Literary Liasons of Nine 20th Century Women Writers, knows the feeling all to well. She shared her thoughts on the article--and how she thinks demographics can affect the gatekeepers of publicity, book reviewers--below. Thanks, Lesley!

When I stepped out of the world of academia in 1997 and into literary journalism, I had a mortgage and bills to pay. I needed to make money. So I took a look at the literary pages and thought, hmmm. No-one’s going to let me review the latest Martin Amis. Or the latest Salman Rushdie. Or the latest Ian McEwan...I could see I just didn’t have the right equipment for the job, despite a PhD on James Joyce.

Fortunately, though, I did have the right equipment to review the latest Jane Smiley. Or Carol Shields. Or Alice Hoffman. The women writers that the boys won’t touch with their barge poles. But that was fine by me – what they didn’t want, I took gratefully and all those reviews of all those superb women writers paid my mortgage and my bills. They still do. And I still don’t get the big boys to review – the latest Amis or Rushdie or McEwan goes, by and large, to lead male reviewers. I didn’t care, back in 1997. I built my own little ghetto and I was just fine with that. I needed the cash, plus I got to read some of the best literature that the late twentieth century had to offer.

And now? I do occasionally review a book by a man. Just as some male critics do very occasionally review a book by a woman (of the 26 reviews I’ve received for my own book, Between the Sheets, four – yes, 4 - have been by men). But I like pushing for the women writers – I see it as my job to give them attention they might otherwise be denied if a literary editor can’t find another female critic to review them in time. The financial pressure is still there, but I don’t see my reviewing, or the books I review, as part of a ghetto any more.

And yet that sense of a ghetto is still there. I’m guessing that Michiko Kakutani didn’t face quite the same financial pressures I did, when she began building her career as a major literary critic. I’m guessing she could afford to badger for the boys’ books, maybe wait till that important male reviewer was off sick and she could steal the latest Amis for herself. I’m not saying I never reviewed a lead title, but the lead titles are invariably by male authors, so if you want to be a major reviewer, you tend to have to concentrate on the boys. And so, I’m guessing, that’s what Kakutani did. It got her the status she has today.

So why would she take a step down and review the latest Jodi Picoult? Jodi Picoult, for heaven’s sake! What does she know about family drama? Nothing that Jonathan Franzen doesn’t know much, much better, it would appear. Women have been writing about the family for decades, and been castigated for it, marginalised as frivolous, domestic, local. Occasionally a woman writer is accorded proper status – oh, how it pains the literary boys to see Joyce Carol Oates up there with Roth and Updike and Mailer, contesting the title to Great American Author. But mostly, women are in the cheap seats at the back. Everyone knows that more novels are bought and read by women than men. But that volume still isn’t reflected adequately in reviews in the literary pages, or in the status of women writers themselves.

I can’t complain. Like I said, I received 26 reviews of my own book. I’ve hardly been ghetto-ised. And important women writers, like Ruth Padel and Diana Souhami, have reviewed my book. But what would it take for one of the major male critics to review me? A piece of equipment I don’t have? A book that defies my fragile female tendency to focus on the home and steps out instead onto enemy lines on a battlefield, perhaps? And would that make men pick up my book in a book store and buy it? It’s tempting to retort, I don’t care. But all writers care that their books are read.

When a friend of mine was interviewed for a University post fifteen years ago, she recited a list of her favourite authors, all of them women. ‘Don’t you like any men?’ one male academic asked. ‘Men, men,’ she thought furiously, and then brightened as she remembered. ‘Yes, of course. I’m a big fan of Keats.’ ‘Keats!’ the male academic exploded. ‘He’s an honorary woman anyway!’ ‘Ah, macho men,’ she thought, but could only come up with Len Deighton. Perhaps when women don’t have to be honorary men, and men don’t have to be honorary women, we’ll have a bit more equity in the books pages, too.

These are the opinions of Lesley McDowell. Contact her at info at overlookpress dot com, or leave your thoughts in the comments. We'd love to hear from you.

BETWEEN THE SHEETS Featured in Miami Herald

The Miami Herald reviews Leslie McDowell's Between the Sheets, a provocative study of nine women authors and their literary liaisons: "Power that once belonged to male gods alone, they took for themselves. So proclaims Scottish author Lesley McDowell about nine 20th century female writers in her distaff version of the Prometheus myth distilled into a modern and accessible literary study. In McDowell's feminist account, Katherine Mansfield, H.D. (Hilda Doolitle), Rebecca West, Jean Rhys, Anaïs Nin, Simone de Beauvoir, Martha Gellhorn, Elizabeth Smart and Sylvia Plath are heroines who snatch literary fire for themselves and - by extension -- other women writers.

McDowell's approach to her subject is governed by what, in her view, has characterized love relationships between all men and women since the dawn of time: a struggle for power.' Though much has been written about some of the relationships covered here -- Nin and Henry Miller, de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Plath and Ted Hughes -- McDowell offers an original framework through which to view these often unequal partnerships. She believes that the writers under discussion voluntarily decided to endure all manner of hardship with difficult and even abusive men, because the payoff would be apprenticeship to experienced and well-connected authors able and willing to shepherd them to literary greatness. As such, we shouldn't view these women as hapless victims but rather as clear-eyed realists who gave their literary pursuits precedence over all else."

Lesley McDowell's BETWEEN THE SHEETS in The New Republic

Lesley McDowell's Between the Sheets: Literary Liaisons of Nine 20th-Century Women Writers is reviewed by Daphne Merkin in The New Republic: "It is laudatory that McDowell has set herself against the tenor of much of the critical discourse on the price of female talent: even so idiosyncratic a thinker as Elizabeth Hardwick was inclined to look at victimhood as the natural habitat of creative women, especially when they teamed up with creative men. One might wish for a more mellifluous prose style and more bold speculation on the role of the eroticization of intellect, but overall this is a welcome addition to the lives of writers in love and lust—writers who sometimes manage to write peacefully together in the same room, and who are equally dominated by the same demanding master: literature."

Lesley McDowell's BETWEEN THE SHEETS in New York Times Book Review

Lesley's McDowell's new study of the literary liaisons of nine influential 20th women writers, Between the Sheets, is reviewed in the April 4 issue of The New York Times Book Review: "McDowell, a literary journalist in Scotland, has culled incredibly juicy details. With so many affairs and broken hearts, the most suprising thing is that anything got written in the last 100 years."

Featured in Between the Sheets:

Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry
H.D. and Ezra Pound
Rebecca West and H.G. Wells
Jean Rhys and Ford Maddox Ford
Anais Nin and Henry Miller
Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre
Martha Gelhorn and Ernest Hemingway
Elizabeth Smart and George Barker
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

Lesley McDowell's BETWEEN THE SHEETS Reviewed in Kirkus

Critic, novelist, and literary journalist Lesley McDowell has written a fascinating new exploration of the literary liasions of nine 20th century woman writers, Between the Sheets. Here a preview in Kirkus Reviews: "Writers such as Anais Nin, Simone de Beauvoir, Katherine Mansfield, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), Sylvia Plath, Rebecca West and Jean Rhys have long been considered essential to the development of modernist literature and the rise of feminism. In her nonfiction debut, McDowell (The Picnic, 2007) draws another connection—each was paired romantically, with varying degrees of success, to other significant writers of the time. Examples include H.D. and Ezra Pound, West and H.G. Wells, Nin and Ford Madox Ford, and Nin and Henry Miller. Certainly, this is a tradition not limited to the modernist movement. Writers and artists have long been drawn to one another, complicating the concept of the muse versus the creator. McDowell successfully pins down particular parallels in her chosen relationships that are especially significant to their artistic goals. It is notable, for example, that these women are largely known as the victims of their relationships. They were, for the most part, all deserted or rejected by their husbands and lovers, often in a particularly public manner, or forced to participate in humiliating or degrading relationships. Each reacted dramatically to their failed relationships—Plath taking the most drastic road by committing suicide after Ted Hughes' affair. McDowell questions the degree to which these women pined for their respective men, while also espousing the virtues of feminism and independence in their writing, hinting at what was often blatant hypocrisy. But she also speculates on the ways in which the men—ironically mostly less famous in death than their partners—were able to provide the women with professional inroads, and also served as inspiration for some of their most influential works. The information is hardly new, but McDowell contextualizes it well, giving solid insight into a dynamic and influential group."

Early Praise for BETWEEN THE SHEETS by Lesley McDowell

Just releasing is a new book the explores the literary liasons of nine women writers: Between the Sheets. Author and critic Lesley McDowell explores nine famous literary liaisons of the twentieth century and examines the extent to which each woman was prepared to put artistic ambition before personal happiness, and how dependent on their male writing partners these women felt themselves to be. Here's a sampling of early opinion:

"A fresh and revealing look at the mating habits of literary giants. Author Lesley McDowell examines the famously explosive love affairs of great women writers and finds that there was purpose to their passion and method to their madness. Where others see victims, she sees pioneers who were blazing their own literary, emotional, and sexual trails. We feel as if we are meeting Sylvia Plath, Anais Nin, Simone de Beauvoir, and their “sisters” for the very first time." -Deborah Davis, author of Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X and Gilded

"Lesley McDowell's Between the Sheets brings humor as well as empathy to a scrutiny of women writers' love affairs. Her implicit interest is the source of aesthetic passion, and in her study of Katherine Mansfield, Anais Nin, Simone de Beauvoir, Martha Gellhorn, Sylvia Plath and others, she comes to sometimes surprising insights." -Linda Wagner-Martin, author of Sylvia Plath: A Biography and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald: An American Woman's Story

“Critic, novelist and literary journalist McDowell (The Picnic) takes a scholarly but fascinating look at the love lives of women writers, revealing how writers like Anais Nin, Simone de Beauvoir and Sylvia Plath were affected by their romantic liaisons…Would they have become writers without their entanglements with these men? And was success in their art ultimately worth the heartbreak? This stirring account lets their devotees decide.” – Publishers Weekly
“McDowell culls her information from diaries, letters, and journals, which, in all, makes for a thorough but accessible reading. The information being imparted is not revelatory, but the subtle, argumentative slant of the text is laudable for its elevation of women commonly stereotyped as victims who lived passive lives in relation to the men they loved. Anyone interested in some crisp, literary gossip should take a look at this book.” – Feminist Review