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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…

It’s hard to see her prostrating herself like this, in the sort of letter that you can—I have—want to write directly after a breakup. But even with the humiliation there are flashes of insight into the sort of person she is and of her very own brand of bravery, the one that lured Spencer to the coa…

At first, I took my freedom as a seventeen-year-old might: hard and fast and negronied and wild. I was thirty-four and I wanted so much out of this new phase of my life: intense sexual attraction; soulmate-feeling love that would force my life into new shapes; work that felt joyous like play but me…