Shaggy Muses
The Dogs Who Inspired Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Edith Wharton, and Emily Bronte
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
“You’ll call this sentimental–perhaps–but then a dog somehow represents the private side of life, the play side,” Virginia Woolf confessed to a friend. And it is this private, playful side, the richness and power of the bond between five great women writers and their dogs, that Maureen Adams celebrates in this deeply engaging book.
In Shaggy Muses, we visit Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Flush, the golden Cocker Spaniel who danced the poet away from death, back to life and human love. We roam the wild Yorkshire moors with Emily Brontë, whose fierce Mastiff mix, Keeper, provided a safe and loving outlet for the writer’s equally fierce spirit. We enter the creative sanctum of Emily Dickinson, which she shared only with Carlo, the gentle, giant Newfoundland who soothed her emotional terrors. We mingle with Edith Wharton, whose ever-faithful Pekes warmed her lonely heart during her restless travels among Europe and America’ s social and intellectual elite. We are privileged guests in the fragile universe of Virginia Woolf, who depended for emotional support and sanity not only on her human loved ones but also on her dogs, especially Pinka–a gift from her lover, Vita Sackville-West–a black Cocker Spaniel who became a strong, bright thread in the fabric of Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s life together.
Based on diaries, letters, and other contemporary accounts–and featuring many illustrations of the writers and their dogs– these five miniature biographies allow us unparalleled intimacy with women of genius in their hours of domestic ease and inner vulnerability. Shaggy Muses also enchants us with a pack of new friends: Flush, Keeper, Carlo, Foxy, Linky, Grizzle, Pinka, and all the other devoted canines who loved and served these great writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Coaxed through a depression by her golden retriever, Adams, a psychologist and former English professor, was drawn to five exceptional women writers who relied on their loyal dogs for emotional support. Flush distracted Elizabeth Barrett after her favorite brother's death, and the poet wrote about "the unsettling similarity between lapdogs and women in Victorian England": both powerless and needing to please others. Formidable, eccentric Emily Bront , who once savagely beat her fierce mastiff, Keeper, for sleeping on her bed, refused to sentimentalize the human-dog bond in Wuthering Heights, which depicts innocent pets being hung. Carlo, a Newfoundland, comforted Emily Dickinson in a dark time when she may have been in love with a married man and Edith Wharton mourned the death of one of her pooches more than the death of her mother. And Adams suggests that Virginia Woolf, depicting a dog's trauma in her biography of Flush, who was dognapped for ransom, dealt with her own childhood molestation (a picture of Woolf's dog, Pinka, appeared on the cover of Flush's biography). Although Adams's knowledgeable minibiographies are necessarily skewed toward a specialized subject matter, lovers of both dogs and classic writers will identify with this sweet, quirky book. Illus.
