Issue 17 - Great Women, Spring 2005

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The Reader celebrates great women writers past and present and looks at how their lives, as modern day feminists or as wives and mothers, affected their art. This issue is particularly focused on rediscovering the women writers that have been forgotten and neglected in literary study, bringing them back into contemporary focus.

Tom Sperlinger meets Doris Lessing to talk about her writing and her reading life:

Our lives are shaped…by patterns we do not remember, or cannot remember.

Josie Billington reminds readers of the reasons to read and re-appraise Mrs Gaskell:

...she makes the ordinary interesting, makes it matter, by quietly giving status to the kind of nebulous or residual life stuff that is easily ignored or overlooked.

William Drentell remembers and pays tribute to the late Susan Sontag:

She assumed you knew a lot and that you were interested in everything precisely because she was so interested in everything…she wanted every encounter to be one in which she learned something.

ALSO: Doris Lessings Marriages between Zones Three, Four and Five; George Eliot’s letters; recommendations of Eudora Welty, Harriet Martineau, Anne Bronte, and Neil Belton’s life of Helen Bamber.

Contents

the editorial

Jane Davis - Letters from the Hidden Life

new poetry

Stephen Sandy
Joseph Allen
Keith Edwin Colwell
Helen Tookey
Jill Eulalie Dawson
Pauline Rowe
Claire Crowther
Dave Hall

new fiction

Helen Kitson - Charcot and the Saint

essays and interviews

Tom Sperlinger - an interview with Doris Lessing
Josie Billington - Why Read Mrs Gaskell Today?
Henry James - A Minimum of Head
B. F. Nellist - Surviving Change: Doris Lessing, The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five
John Burnside - Mary Austin: Lost in the Desert
David Constantine - Syntax in Practice in a Poem
Sharon Connor - Equal or Different? Marian Evans & George Eliot

learning curve

Simon Palfrey - Othello’s Verse/Prose: Out of Iambic Control
Adam Piette - The Practice of Poetry: Mixed Vocal Tone and War History in Auden’s ‘Fleet Visit’
Literary Problems: Art or Money?

reviews

Mary Weston - David Constantine, Collected Poems & A Living Language
John Scrivener - Gillian Clarke, Making the Beds for the Dead
David Leyland - Robert McCrum, Wodehouse: A Life

recommendations

Ann Stapleton - Eudora Welty: Come Stand in Her Heart
Ede Harter - Anne Bronte, Agnes Grey
Michael Caines - Whatever Happened to Brigid Brophy?
Ede Harter - Leo Tolstoy, The Cossacks
Sian Davis - Neil Belton, The Good Listener
Valerie R. Sanders - Harriet Martineau, Deerbrook
Sue Garner Jones - Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
Helen Tookey - The Wrong Question: Penelope Farmer, Charlotte Sometimes
Frances Macmillan - George Eliot, Daniel Deronda
Kerry Hughes - Almost Intolerably Painful: Charlotte Bronte, Villette

reading lives

William Drenttel - In Remembrance of Susan Sontag
Sue Norton - Wisedom Through the Minutes

the back end

Enid Stubin - Our Spy in NY
Crossword
Buck’s Quiz
Contributors
Quiz and Puzzle Answers
James Bainbridge - Potted Crabbe
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