Cathy Curtis

Virtually every account of the reception of Edna O'Brien's 1960 novel, The Country Girls—which was outspoken for its era about the sexual lives of young women—includes the information that a priest in the County Clare village where she grew up burned the book. At the time, Edna lived in London; she learned of the burning in a letter from her mother. Helena O'Brien was what a novelist would call an unreliable narrator. (Edna, who had unwittingly dedicated her book to her mother, was horrified to discover years later that Helena had hid her own copy of the book in an outhouse after blacking out the dedication and every offensive passage.)

 

In recent years, some doubt has been cast on the book burning. An article in The Irish Times reported that the book was not burned in Scariff. Edna wrote to say that the burning took place in neighboring Tuamgraney, but another letter writer refuted that assertion. Compare the hearsay account of this burning to a documented event that took place forty years earlier: the seizure and burning by the U.S. Post Office of three issues of The Little Review that contained episodes of James Joyce's novel Ulysses, on the grounds of obscenity.

 

Of course, it is not out of the question that a priest in Ireland burned a copy of the book. Book burnings had taken place in the past. But of much greater importance and influence was the Irish government's ban on sales of the novel, on the grounds of its sexual content. Book banning had been instituted in 1929 with the Censorship of Publication Acts, and it continued for an extraordinary sixty-nine years. Banned along with Edna's first novel and its successors were novels by major, established authors, including John McGahern, Brendan Behan, Aldous Huxley, and even Balzac. (Joyce was not among them, but only because no efforts were made to import and sell Ulysses.)

 

A precedent, established centuries earlier, was the Catholic Index of Forbidden Books—volumes condemned on the grounds of heresy or sexual content, or because their authors were Protestants—which included works by writers in many fields of knowledge; the Index remained in force until 1966.

 

Returning to The Country Girls: while many citizens of this overwhelmingly Catholic country would have thought twice about buying a book burned by a priest, the ban meant that even people whose curiosity overcame their religious scruples were unable to read it. Yet the burning is what is constantly referenced, not the banning.

 

This does make a kind of sense. The denigration of a work of art in a specific public way—a priest consigning The Country Girls to the flames; the rioting of the opening-night audience for J. M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World—creates an indelible image. Whereas a book normally sits quietly on a shelf or in a reader's hands and a play is normally greeted with applause, such unusual events allow us to picture a bonfire with flames licking the pages and theatergoers rising from their seats to protest the play's perceived insults to Ireland, womanhood, and the filial duties of a son.

 

On the other hand, the decision by a committee of men to ban the sale of a book takes place behind the scenes. There is no unique, startling event, no image to latch onto. There is at least one reported public event connected to the banning of Edna's books, however: in 1970, authorities on the border between the Republic and Northern Ireland seized one of Edna's novels, in a traveler's luggage. Also confiscated was a package of condoms; birth control was not legalized until nine years later.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2025

 

When I finished what I believed to be the final draft of my biography of Edna O'Brien, several unforeseen events obliged me to wait several years before the book could be published. At first, I was irritated at the delay, but the additional time proved to be a godsend.

 

Whereas academics generally write biographies of people after a lengthy study of their works, my background is in journalism. I was accustomed to producing a story about a person or event I knew little about in a matter of hours or days. So perhaps it is not surprising that my practice as a biographer is simply to jump in and trust that my years of experience as a researcher and writer will serve me in good stead.

 

I had decided to write about Edna O'Brien because I had enjoyed reading her novels, because a major archive was available, and because there was no previous full-fledged biography. The book I had just completed is about a twentieth-century American woman author, so I felt confident embarking on the life of another twentieth-century woman author who happened to have spent her youth on the west coast of Ireland and her working life in London.

 

I knew that I would need to read all of Edna's works—not only the novels and short stories, but also the plays, film scripts, and nonfiction—and become familiar with their critical reception. I would need to learn about her childhood, her personal life, and her professional struggles and successes. But I hadn't yet realized that writing about the life of someone from a culture whose history was virtually unknown to me would involve another layer of research . . . as well as a great deal more thought about what it meant for Edna to revolt against the deeply entrenched values of that culture.

 

During the years that it took to find the right publisher for what I had thought was my completed manuscript, I began to read more about Irish history, including the reasons for and repercussions of the famine of the mid-nineteenth century. I familiarized myself with Ireland's twentieth-century politics—especially important because Edna was fiercely wedded to the eventual union of the six Northern Irish counties (which are still part of the United Kingdom) with the Republic of Ireland.

 

I had read James Joyce's Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist, and Ulysses decades ago. Now I became more familiar with other examples of modern and contemporary Irish literature. This led me to discover the brilliance of today's young Irish novelists as well as to refresh my memory of books by writers from earlier generations, like John McGahern and Samuel Beckett, who was a friend of Edna's.

 

I subscribed to The Irish Times to keep track of today's news and watched Irish-themed films from decades past, including one of my longtime favorites, Odd Man Out (1947), with James Mason, which I now understood as more than simply a tragic story of love and heroism. I paid more attention to attitudes and turns of phrases that are typically Irish and learned that the perplexing diacritical mark (which looks like the French accent aigu) used on certain vowels is known as a fada.

 

Then I encountered a new problem: how much background information to include for American readers. While biographies published by university presses include copious amounts of such material, as an author who prefers to relate a life in chronological order rather than according to preselected themes, I risked derailing my narrative and thereby losing readers' interest. So I erred on the side of caution, leaving out details that arguably should have been included for a fuller understanding of context. (I do use endnotes for additional information, but I realize that non-specialist readers rarely consult them.)

 

To take a small example, when I wrote about Edna as a teenager in Dublin in the mid-1940s, discovering a book that would become all-important to her writing life—T. S. Eliot's Introduction to James Joyce—I failed to mention that Joyce had recently died (in 1941, nearly thirty years after he had left his native country for good).

 

Another complication arose after I decided to launch my biography of Edna in Dublin with a talk and reading at the Irish Writers Centre. I chose to do this because I would be speaking to people who were already familiar with Edna's writing, rather than facing a tiny audience of Americans who had never heard of her. The complication is that, as an American author published by an American press, I included "translations" of British and Irish terms, currency conversions, and explanations of Catholic practices and Irish customs that an Irish or British writer likely would omit as unnecessary. I shall have to hope for understanding on the part of Irish readers.

 

The months of rethinking and rewriting has resulted in a new way of dealing with the "afterlife" of a biography. When I completed each of my other books, I stopped paying much attention to their subjects. But one of the rewards of having immersed myself in all things Irish for several years is that I remain intensely fascinated with this country, and continue to read its writers, stay abreast of its news, and admire the wit and grit of a people with a tragic history that has left its mark even in times of peace and relative plenty.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2025

 

 

The other day, I received a book I ordered, And That's Not All, a memoir by the English actress Joan Plowright, who was married to Laurence Olivier. I had wanted to read it simply because I admired her and was curious about her life with the celebrated actor and director. But lo and behold, it turned out that she was a good friend of the great Irish novelist who is the subject of my forthcoming (September 9, 2025) biography.

 

Plowright and Edna O'Brien met for dinner in 1977, when Edna published her novel Johnny I Hardly Knew You. Plowright recalled that Edna "was always sensitive to mood and atmosphere and ready to discuss anything with the utmost candour." Her candour was on display when she remarked that the Plowright–Olivier family (all three children were also actors) needed to become more open to conversations about their feelings, rather than only about aspects of the theatre.

 

Plowright wrote that Edna was a valued confidante—she privately counseled Olivier in the early 1980s, when he had threatened divorce because he was furious that his wife had agreed to play Martha in Edwin Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf at the National Theatre. Although he was no longer director of the theatre and too ill to continue working, he insisted that Plowright could appear onstage only in a play he directed. After speaking with Edna, he wrote a deeply apologetic letter to his wife.

 

If only I had been aware of this conversation when I was writing my book! I had known of no other event that so perfectly illuminated Edna's qualities of close listening and persuasive argument.

 

While my biography does portray her love of entertaining, it was still a treat to read about the St. Patrick's Day dinner party she gave in 1986 to celebrate the Plowright–Olivier's twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Among the guests were the playwright Harold Pinter; his wife, Antonia Fraser, the historical novelist; the novelist Philip Roth and his then-wife, the actress Claire Bloom; and the actors Ian McKellen, Jeremy Irons, and Sinead Cusack (married to Irons)—all of whom appear (briefly) in my biography.

 

Another new-to-me source swam into view recently: an interview Edna gave on October 27, 2015, to mark the publication of her novel The Little Red Chairs. She spoke to Sinéad Gleeson in the Library Voices program. Much of this material was familiar to me from Edna's writing and the many other interviews I had watched, listened to, and read. But there were a few quotes I wish I had known earlier:

 

* Edna had been enthralled as a schoolgirl in the 1930s by an excerpt from Henry David Thoreau's Walden. She said, "the first time I read about frost and snow. . . . I could feel the loneliness of the landscape that of course was mirrored in our landscape"—a rural village in the west of Ireland.

 

* She noted that "separation"—in her case, from County Clare (to Dublin), from Ireland (to England), and from her devout, narrow-minded mother (who loved her intensely but was deeply suspicious of writing)—was "a great whetstone for some kind of creativity." It "quickens what is lost and the world you hurtle into."

 

* Edna never stopped being oppressed by her mother's condemnation of her writing and her lifestyle, even after the woman's death. She also had married and divorced a bitter, controlling fellow writer. Her many later love affairs, mostly with married men, never resulted in lasting happiness. What I wish I had been able to quote is Edna's pitiless summation in this interview: "I have a longing for nearness and a terror of domination."

 

© Cathy Curtis 2025

 

All of my five biographies are the first, or first comprehensive accounts of their subjects' lives. Perhaps because reviewers are frequently not biographers themselves, I have found that they—and other readers—fail to understand what's involved when a biographer takes a maiden voyage with her subject.

 

Many biographies published today are about a famous person who has been the subject of multiple previous biographies. Because the authors of those books have established the chronology and the facts (as each writer perceived them), the new biographer is free to look at the life in more experimental ways. She can choose to write only about a certain period of the subject's life, to quarrel with the opinions presented in other books, to present a new theory, to focus on the work at the expense of the life (or vice versa), or to write in a more personal, essayistic style.

 

Conversely, first biographies—generally about people who are not widely known—are obliged to hew more closely to the "cradle to grave" model. A responsible biographer presenting a subject's life to the world for the first time presents the entire stretch of that life with a chronological organization (allowing for some forward-looking leaps when necessary), so that the consequences of early actions and beliefs can be understood in context. This biographer's primary role is to be in service to her subject—presenting her as completely and objectively as possible, with the fullest possible awareness of the standards and mores of her era.

 

Writing a first biography involves restraining the impulse to add fanciful suppositions or strained attempts to be "relevant." It entails avoiding a style intended to imitate or compete with the cleverness of the subject, and (assuming a general, rather than an academic readership) not allowing a theoretical construct to overshadow the narrative of the life.

 

For these reasons, a first biography of an "unknown" person may seem somewhat less exciting or amusing or contentious than the more idiosyncratic Lives that follow. Yet even in a first biography there is plenty of room for nuanced writing, thoughtful conclusions, and the kind of precise descriptions and well-chosen quotations that make the subject come to life for the reader.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2025

I was delighted with the new title my agent suggested for my forthcoming book—Fearless: A biography of Edna O'Brien—and I remain fond of its aptness and brevity. But what I hadn't realized is that during the past few years, most books about the lives of individuals have been published with titles that omit the word "biography." There are still some "Life of X" titles, but most provide only a descriptive word or phrase and the name of the subject, or even just the name.

 

Looking at the lists of newly published books that Biographers International Organization publishes every month, I discovered, for example, that from July 2021 to July 2022, among the hundreds of books listed, only thirty-four have a title that include that word, and fewer than ten were published by leading trade houses.

 

What accounts for the endangered life of "biography"? Most likely, publishers' consensus that readers have come to think of biographies as boring: too long, too fusty, with too many strings of dull facts. The young editors who have replaced retired industry stalwarts also tend to be interested only in books that speak to today's trends.

 

I lay the blame for negative views of the necessarily backward-looking genre of biography on social media, which has not only fostered short attention spans but also an overwhelming attention on what is happening right now. Editors have responded with book titles stuffed with adjectives that practically jump up and down to make the case for the gripping, surprising, relevant, even transgressive lives of their subjects. This strategy seems best suited to pop culture figures and for books that don't pretend to be serious treatments of noteworthy lives.

 

Of course, there are plenty of serious Lives that lack the "biography" title. But the lingering association of that word is with sober, nuanced, investigative, in-depth portraits of a life—for my money, the highest form of the genre.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2025

It seems to me that there is widespread confusion among general readers about what a biography can and cannot do. It is driven by the immense popularity of memoir and amplified by today's social media-driven demand for full disclosure, coupled with the peculiar notion that a person can make her own "truth."

 

The author of a memoir obviously has access to her innermost feelings as well as to every remembered detail of her life. Whether she chooses to recount them all is, of course, up to her. Memoirists also are not obliged to consult any sources beyond their own, often deeply flawed memories. Facts can be ignored. Dates can be omitted. Fantasy versions of the life—whether created deliberately for the book or established so long ago that they have come to seem like the truth—can be offered to readers without apology.

 

The author of a biography, on the other hand, must contend with built-in constraints. Most obviously, we are not supposed to make up anything. We cannot invent dialogue or manufacture (or embellish) an event in our subject's life. If we want to suggest what our subject might have been thinking at any given moment, we have to build a plausible case based on known facts. For every element in the book there must be available documentation.

 

If the subject is deceased and there is no letter, no journal entry, no official document, no media coverage, no remark by someone on the scene that has been preserved on paper or film, or recounted to us, our hands are tied. (A further complication: there actually might be an existing letter or a diary entry, but we have to be able to read it. Letters may be stored in the attic of someone unknown to us—or someone who refuses to give us access. A key journal may have been stolen or destroyed, as was the case with one of my subjects.)

 

In a memoir, no one is looking over the writer's shoulder to point out omissions and errors. No matter how gifted a writer she may be, the memoirist remains inside the solipsistic bubble of her own life, usually not bothering to double-check facts. Biographies are written based on extensive research, with a more nuanced, contextual and (often) judgmental view of the life. A biographer may find some of the subject's remarks about herself and others—Person X, a friend with whom she quarreled; Person Y, a lover; Person Z, a critic who failed to appreciate her work—to be contradictory or too self-serving.

 

The women I have written about made their mark as creative people. I write about them to interest readers in their accomplishments and to discuss some of the ways their lives affected their work. I try to present a coherent and comprehensive narrative that looks honestly at their misapprehensions and errors of judgment as well as at their brilliant perceptions, loving relationships, and lasting importance in the worlds of literature and art.

 

That there is a place for both memoir and biography goes without saying. But I wish more readers understood these genres' different aims and constraints.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2025

In journalism, there is an old saying, "Follow the money." This is a proven method of tracking malfeasance in politics.

 

I have found that in writing biographies of artists and writers, following the money is important in a different way. Keeping track of my subject's income and how much she spent on significant purchases is one way of assessing the relative smoothness or bumpiness of her life at any given time—which in turn often had an influence on the direction of her work and the difficulty of producing it.

 

Few of us are able to conduct our lives without worrying about money, and the people I write about were no different. Financial concerns weighed heavily on them. A biography, as opposed to a literary study or artist's monograph, is about the whole of the person's life, not just The Work. Biographers are concerned with how our subjects lived, which involves researching and writing about virtually every aspect of a personal life and the ancillary aspects of making a living that depend on favorable treatment from publishers, theatre management, film producers,  agents, and art galleries.

 

Writing about money issues, along with my subjects' health, leisure pursuits, relationships, and daily irritations and pleasures, is a way of making the people I write about come alive as human beings. They may be towering figures in their fields, but in other ways they are not so different from us. And it is on that basis that we can best appreciate how they soared above their difficulties to make the work we revere.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2025

Women often have a difficult relationship with their mothers. Writers are no different. I've been thinking about the very different mother-daughter relationships of Elizabeth Hardwick and Edna O'Brien, the subjects of my previous biography and the one that will be published this year.

 

Hardwick's mother was an upbeat, pragmatic, hardworking woman who cared for her large family in a small house in Lexington, Kentucky. She responded to her husband's tall tales and indolent disposition with occasional outbursts that were simply absorbed into everyday life. Her education had stopped early, creating a huge gulf with her brainy, restless daugher who believed she was destined for greater things. Elizabeth left for New York to enter a Ph.D. program at Columbia University, eventually dropping out to pursue her writing.

 

During her twenties, when she came home for holidays and summer vacations, her mother was a thorn in her side. Even the decision of what to buy her for Christmas one year became a pitched battle that Elizabeth "had to win." But the mother-daughter relationship faded into the background after Elizabeth's marriage to the poet Robert Lowell, whose self-entitled mother proved far more difficult to deal with. Elizabeth's mature fiction, set mainly in New York, does not feature characters who appear to be based on her mother.

 

Edna's mother, Helena, also had only a basic education. She was a deeply religious Catholic who harbored a great hatred of books and writing as instruments of evil. Helena was very close to this daughter, her youngest child. In Edna's youth in County Clare, Ireland, the two spent nearly all their time together, sleeping in the same bed and uniting to ward off the worst of her father's drunken rages. This closeness left a legacy of guilt. Living in London, where she threw parties mobbed by drinking, pot-smoking friends and hangers on, and had serial affairs with married men, Edna knew her mother would be grief-stricken with disapproval.

 

Helena wrote a constant stream of letters with unchanging themes: she missed Edna terribly and she hoped Edna was being "good." It was not until after her mother's death in 1977 that Edna discovered a copy of her first novel, The Country Girls, hidden away near the family house, with black marks obliterating passages Helena found repellent; she had even crossed out Edna's dedication to her.

 

Unlike Elizabeth Hardwick, Edna remained haunted by her mother. A mishap—a glass breaking in Edna's hand after someone at a party said that Helena wouldn't like to see her daughter drinking—struck her as a major portent. It can't be coincidental that the mother of Caithleen in Edna's first novel, The Country Girls (1960) is conveniently dead.

 

Helena's alter ego makes an early appearance in a radio play, Which of These Two Ladies Is He Married To? produced by the BBC in 1967 and based on a short story Edna published three years earlier. A mother who brings two freshly killed chickens on a visit to her daughter in London is scandalized by the sexual habits of the bohemian friends she has invited to her dinner party. Edna's short story "Green Georgette," first published in 1978, also has a character clearly modeled on Helena.

 

After her mother's death, Edna's own experience of motherhood—she had two sons—began to inform her writing, especially in the character of Nell in Time and Tide (1992). Yet she once described Nell as "conscious of her mother, in all the actions of her life"—an apt description of her own experience. Edna was seventy-five in 2006, when The Light of Evening was published; in it, a dying farmer's wife muses on events in her past and on her wayward novelist daughter. Steeped in memories of Helena, the novel contains quotations from her letters as well as imagined scenes from her life as a young woman working in Brooklyn.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2025

People who have only a passing acquaintance with the book world hear about the large sums that a few super-famous writers receive as advances and assume this is the norm. But the vast majority of authors of literary fiction and nonfiction know that if they were to divide the modest amount of money they receive from the publisher before publication by the number of hours spent working on the book, the hourly amount would be far less than the minimum wage—maybe as little as a few pennies.

 

So why do we keep writing? Because we must, because our lives seem empty if we are not sitting at a keyboard for at least a few hours a day, trying to make more headway on our book. We tend to be micromanagers of our work, perfectionists who can't resist returning to tinker with sentences and paragraphs that still don't work as well as they should. While we're wriiting we don't think about "making a profit" or "breaking even." Our minds are too wrapped up in the details of what we're doing to worry about the number of hours we're putting in.

 

Publishing companies, on the other hand, are businesses that need to make money to stay afloat and—increasingly, in the age of corporate ownership—to satisfy shareholders. The recent spate of mergers has resulted in leaner staffs populated by younger, less experienced people whose university English classes were heavily theory-based, who tend to lack interest in traditional narrative forms—and who can be hired for much less than the middle-aged people who formerly held these positions.

 

What was once, at best, the undivided attention of an expert editor deeply invested in the author's conception of the book and a skilled production staff patiently working on the cover and interior design has devolved into a much more slapdash enterprise. Editors on their way out bequeath their books to the next hire, a person primarily committed to authors she has chosen herself. Manuscripts can remain in limbo for months. Photographs can be reproduced at a fraction of their original size, rendering them nearly unreadable. A jacket design can be too similar to other books on different topics, in an attempt to capture the attention of readers in a particular demographic.

 

At the same time, increased automation of activities that once took many hours has streamlined the publication process. (Not that this is necessarily a good thing. An ideal index, for example—the kind that contains not only proper names but also entries for subjects like "feminism, opinions about" or "religious beliefs"—can be compiled only by a human being familiar with best practices in this field.)

 

One aspect of trade (commercial) publishing that has not changed is the lack of fact checking. While nonfiction published by university presses is subjected to "peer reviews" by specialists in the field who point out factual errors and faulty generalizations, trade books make their way into the world with their errors serenely unchallenged. The editor is primarily looking for a clear and lively writing style likely to be enjoyed by the largest possible readership. The copyeditor is looking for typos, grammatical errors, agreement with house style, and so forth. If a writer is lucky, the copyeditor may know some useful facts—say, that Cole Porter's song is "Night and Day," not "Day and Night"—and make the necessary correction. But no one is double-checking dates or questioning why the author reports that a person is doing something years after that person has died on an earlier page.

 

While a book is in production, the wheels of promotion begin to turn. Any book that is not judged to be a big seller is likely to receive cursory treatment: a few likely podcasts are proposed; a list of bookstores that host author events is presented; copies of the Advance Readers' Copy (ARC) are sent to media outlets. Biographers with the requisite financial resources try to spin the PR wheels faster by hiring their own publicists, at prices beginning in the low five figures. Some of us apply to be presenters at book festivals, where we wind up sitting in glum solitude behind a stack of our biographies, watching the long lines of readers waiting to have Famous Authors sign their books.

 

I think the only way we can carry on is to care only about being true to our biographical subjects, giving them the most scrupulous and heartfelt treatment possible. Biography is not popular today; fewer people want to read about lives that cannot properly be understood in contemporary terms. As Patrick Joyce writes in his new book, Remembering Peasants, people today consider the past to be "simply a continuation of the present backwards" and "do not recognize its radical otherness." 

 

But for biographers, delving into hitherto unknown lives remains a great challenge and a great joy, and we can only hope that some readers may be interested in what we have written.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2025

 

I am no stranger to published criticism, either as the author or subject of it. (I wrote art reviews for many years, and my books have been widely reviewed.) Hardly a day goes by when I'm not reading reviews in the New York Review of Books, the TLS, the London Review of Books, and other publications. My remarks in this post are the result of a lifetime of thinking about criticism—how it is generally practiced, what causes it to read the way it does, and why fair-mindedness is on the side of the angels.

 

Faced with a work of art or a book, a critic's impulse is generally to compare it—perhaps to the creator's previous work or to the works of others, or more dubiously, to a notion in the critic's mind. (I was often guilty of this in my youthful art reviews.)

 

Whether as a result of editorial pressure, the critic's personality, or both, the tone of reviews is often aggressive. Rather than addressing the value of the creator's actual work, the critic begins by complaining that it doesn't adhere to the critic's notion of the correct way of proceeding. Why did the sculptor work on such a small scale? Why didn't the biographer employ a thematic format?

 

Sadly, reviewing is widely regarded as a form of competitive sport. You don't get points for evenhandedness or effusiveness, or even for clarity. All too often it seems that the goal is to become a prosecuting attorney, to find the holes in the witness's testimony and demonstrate your superior wisdom. As you "prove" the weakness of the creator's "case," you pounce on the smallest error as proof that it indicates wholesale sloppiness.

 

The glory of this approach is that is allows the critic to propound a new theory, ever so much cleverer than the creator's, and thereby to demonstrate the critic's standing as a public intellectual. The creator's work thus becomes merely an elevator, a device that boosts the critic's own career. I find this approach highly objectionable.

 

A fair-minded critic begins by finding an aspect of the work to praise. Surely there is some quality that honestly can be said to be worthy, or at least valid. This critic also attempts to understand what the creator was trying to do, whether or not it appears successful, and grants that there are many ways to achieve meaningful results—not necessarily the one the critic might have chosen.

 

The fair-minded book critic devotes ample space to discussing the contents of the actual work and does not appear to present information gleaned from the text as if it were prior knowledge on the critic's part. Rather than pursuing a "gotcha" vendetta against the author for any factual or interpretive errors, the critic aims to enlarge the knowledge base of readers of the review. By taking the high ground, a critic can write even a largely negative review in such a way that she neither glorifies her own acuity nor disparages the intelligence of the author, while providing readers with information that enlarges their view of the world.

 

© Cathy Curtis 2025