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I used to want desperately to be a “proper” critic, to be taken seriously, to have a full command of history and theory, but I don’t want that anymore. I don’t want to “admire” writing for its erudition, I want to be changed by it. I want to know what it’s like to be someone else. I want to have th…

When Eliot first began to write fiction, she wrote that “art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.” The best thing an artist achieves is “the extension of our sympathies.” And even if …

Returning home and confessing is the path that costs her most. Elopement with Stephen would eventually have conferred respectability; marriage to Philip would have had a Romeo-and-Juliet-like poetic justice to it. As it is, the village places the blame on Maggie. She is a “designing bold girl” who …

Maggie is only made up but she helps her readers see something, change something. In 2001, Joan Didion defended her friend Elizabeth Hardwick’s book of essays about women writers and women characters, Seduction and Betrayal, from the New York Times reviewer’s objection that Hardwick had muddled up …

They had told almost no one in England, and fifteen years later, the “strong woman of the Westminster Review” going off with a “gallant” was still being gossiped about. When not seen as a fool she was thought a homewrecker: her brother Isaac broke with her, and many of her friends would too. Chapma…