Elizabeth Bishop on Oscar Wilde

Today also marks the anniversary of the birth of poet, prose writer and translator Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and served as Poet Laureate of the United States.

Elizabeth Bishop

Of Oscar Wilde, she wrote:

‘One of my students lent me Oscar Wilde’s letters – a huge book. I just meant to glance at it but found myself still reading it at 4 A M today.’

Her verdict on the letters?

‘It gets sadder & sadder – but he [Wilde] was so funny – his US trip is marvelous – he drank all the miners in Colorado under the table (he was 25 or so) and they respected him very much in spite of his velvet knee-britches.’

I’m certain she would have been one of Wilde’s Women had she been born half a century earlier.

Source: Letter to Loren Frankenberg, January 8, 1972 referenced in Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil and After: A Poetic Career Transformed By George Monteiro

Me on Joyce & Wilde & At It Again

To tie in with my earlier post, here is my heartfelt speech from this evening’s launch of Romping Through Dubliners:

‘I first encountered At It Again, in the form of Maite and Niall, at the Oscar Wilde Festival in Galway in September 2015, and I was struck by the energy and joy they injected into Romping Through Dorian Gray, their witty guide to Wilde’s lush novel; a dynamism and irreverence that was very much in keeping with the approach taken by Oscar himself. I was also struck at that time by the great enthusiasm with which they – and happily I – were welcomed into the inner circle of those who keep Wilde’s work fresh in the public mind, a generosity of spirit that is common to all true lovers of literature in my experience.

Since the task of finding new angles on Wilde, one of the most closely examined men in the world, second only to Joyce perhaps, was thought to be next to impossible, I realised that I, with my focus on Wilde’s Women, and they, with their delightful romp through Dorian Gray, were kindred spirits who shared a belief that there is always something new to say. Their enticing approach to Wilde, Stoker and Joyce has ensured that I’ve taken a huge interest in their activities ever since.

Irish people can be justifiably proud of the wealth of great literature that our tiny island has produced, yet, sometimes, we make the mistake of being a little too reverential about the whole affair. It’s not uncommon for us to feel intimidated by the towering reputation of a writer as magnificently talented as James Joyce. As a result we may feel that his work is not for the likes of us when, in fact, it was written with precisely us in mind!

Decades, ago, when I was in my twenties and working in London, an English colleague, on learning that I was a Dubliner, rushed to my desk to talk about Ulysses, his favourite book: ‘What  bit had I enjoyed most,’ he wondered? ‘Exactly which of the Martello Towers that punctuate our eastern shoreline featured in the opening chapter?’ On and on he gushed until, finally, I had to stop him and admit that I had never read Ulysses. He turned on his heel in disgust, leaving me wondering why I, a Dubliner through and through, somehow believed that Ulysses was not for me, a book to be endured rather than enjoyed. It was the beginning of a lasting curiosity.

Dubliners, Joyce’s collection of short stories, provides the perfect entry point for anyone keen to read his work. Although published in 1914, Joyce had written the interlinked stories between the years 1904 and 1907. Publishers were wary of the forthright language and fretted about bringing out a book in which so many of Joyce’s contemporaries were immediately recognisable and might take umbrage; Dubliners, of course, were far more likely to take umbrage at being omitted rather than included. The fact that Dubliners was rejected by numerous publishing houses, including London-based Grant Richards, its eventual publisher, provides a lesson in perseverance for us all.

In writing Dubliners, Joyce held up a mirror to Dublin society with the intention of provoking a citywide epiphany. A proponent of individualism, like Wilde before him, he hoped that, once confronted with reality, his compatriots might question their circumstances and crawl out from beneath the twin yoke of church and state. Like everything Joyce wrote, Dubliners was radical and challenging; it was neither pompous nor staid. It was aimed at ordinary, decent, and not so decent, Dubliners as much as it was at scholars and academics, who were welcome to read it too.

By insisting that Dubliners is for everyone and by prompting us to engage with this wonderful city, Romping Through Dubliners, a manual, is a truly fitting companion piece to Joyce’s original. It gives ownership back to the people it was written for. It is very telling that the word ‘fun’ is included on the very first page, a word that some people, although no one present in this room I suspect, forget to apply to Joyce.

With their intriguing maps and tips for dressing up, or ‘cosplay’ as my teenage son would say, Romping Through Dubliners recaptures the immediacy that was always present in Joyce’s work. Its interactivity calls to mind the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books that so captivated children of the 1970s and 1980s, myself included, who were invited to determine the outcome of their own quest; an acknowledged source of inspiration for the At It Again manuals. By suggesting tie-in activities such as ‘sip sherry & talk politely about death’ Romping Through Dubliners pokes gentle fun at the quirky customs and habits of Dubliners that were so brilliantly exposed in the original

The playful illustrations add vitality and capture the essence of the original. The whole ethos of At It Again, and of Joyce too, is exemplified in a quote from ‘An Encounter’ highlighted on page 14:

 ‘Real adventures do not happen to people who remain at home. They must be sought abroad’.

‘Abroad’ in the ‘here, there and everywhere’ sense of the word that is. The scope of the At It Again’ team’s ambition is illuminated by their suggestion on page 31: WHY DON’T YOU: ‘Pursue your dreams’. It gives me great pleasure to introduce Maite, Niall, Jessica and James of At It Again, a dynamic bunch who describe themselves with great accuracy as ‘cultural treasure hunters who bring Irish literature to life’. Long may they continue to do so!’

Sarah’s Menagerie

Fêted for her talent on-stage, Sarah Bernhardt was also an accomplished sculptor and exhibited at the Paris Salon. In London, she used the proceeds of a sale of her work at the William Russell Galleries to add several exotic creatures to her private menagerie. These included a cheetah and a wolfhound, which she bought from the Cross Zoo in Liverpool. She had hoped to purchase two lions and a dwarf elephant but had be content with seven chameleons, which were thrown in for free by proprietor, Mr. Cross; she had a gold chain made for her favorite, Cross-ci Cross–ça, so that he could sit on her shoulder while attached to her lapel.

Yet, Bernhardt was not always kind to her animals. The death of Ali-Gaga, her alligator, was attributed to his diet of milk and champagne, and she shot her boa constrictor after he swallowed one of her sofa cushions. So why did she keep so many exotic animals? Did she see them as an extension of her own untamed and unusual persona – she was often credited with having animal traits, most notably those of a snake.  Did she regard these creatures as beloved pets or living accessories? After all, her tortoise Chrysagére, who died in a fire, had a gilded shell set with brilliant topazes. I’d love to know more about the nature of Bernhardt’s relationship with the animals she owned.

Sarah Bernhardt is just one of the remarkable women in my book Wilde’s Women, read more here.

Wilde about Keats

I’m so proud to be a contributor to the wonderful Romanticism Blog – it’s a really brilliant source of information on the Eighteenth Century and the Romantic poets. My latest post for them is a tie-in with my book Wilde’s Women.

It can be read here or below:

In July 1877, subscribers to the Irish Monthly, a publication subtitled ‘A Magazine of General Literature’, were treated to an entertaining and scholarly article headed ‘The Tomb of John Keats’. The author, a 22-year-old Dubliner, was an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was reading Literae Humaniores, the university’s undergraduate course in Classics. This was his first published prose article and his name was Oscar Wilde.

In this moving tribute to the young poet, which can be read here, Wilde, an avid fan, introduced Keats as ‘one who walks with Spenser, and Shakespeare, and Byron, and Shelley, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the great procession of the sweet singers of England’. While allowing that the resting place of ‘this divine boy’, which he had visited earlier that year, was surrounded by beauty, Wilde insisted that Keats’ brief but extraordinary life was not honoured fittingly by the ‘mean grave’ that held his remains.

Describing the emotions that came over him as he stood by Keats’ graveside, Wilde paid florid homage to his hero: ‘I thought of him as of a Priest of Beauty slain before his time; and the vision of Guido’s St. Sebastian came before my eyes as I saw him at Genoa’. He was moved to compose a poem:

HEU MISERANDE PUER (Later renamed THE GRAVE OF KEATS and included in Poems, 1881)

Rid of the world’s injustice and its pain,
He rests at last beneath God’s veil of blue;
Taken from life while life and love were new
The youngest of the martyrs here is lain,
Fair as Sebastian and as foully slain.
No cypress shades his grave, nor funeral yew,
But red-lipped daisies, violets drenched with dew,
And sleepy poppies, catch the evening rain.

O proudest heart that broke for misery!
O saddest poet that the world hath seen!
O sweetest singer of the English land!
Thy name was writ in water on the sand,
But our tears shall keep thy memory green,
And make it flourish like a Basil-tree.

Ever the self publicist, Wilde sent his poem to the eminent poet, patron and politician Lord Haughton, editor of Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats (1848). Inviting Haughton to comment on his tribute, Wilde also petitioned his support for a campaign to replace an ‘extremely ugly’ bas relief of Keats’ head, which had been erected close to his grave, with something befitting ‘a lovely Sebastian killed by the arrows of a lying and unjust tongue’.

Wilde could be fiercely proprietorial in his devotion; he chose ‘Keats House’ as the name for the Chelsea home he shared with artist Frank Miles and suggested that only those who shared Keats’ genius were worthy of copying his distinctive style. Certainly, his own early work resonates with echoes of his predecessor, a similarity that was apparent to his critics. One anonymous and damning review of Poems, published in The Athenaeum, asserted that Wilde’s derivative style grew ‘out of a misunderstanding worship of Keats’, and concluded ‘in spite of some element of grace and beauty’, his poems had ‘no element of endurance’. This proved to be the case.

Keats was a pioneer of aestheticism: ‘What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth’, he declared in a letter to his great friend Benjamin Bailey, written in November 1817. Little wonder Wilde insisted: ‘It is in Keats that one discerns the beginning of the artistic renaissance of England’. Again and again, he invoked his hero as a touchstone for the admirable or the unworthy.

Wilde was scathing in ‘Two Biographies of Keats’, a review piece he wrote for the Pall Mall Gazette in September 1887. While he favoured Sidney Colvin’s evaluation over William Rossetti’s ‘great failure’, he chastised the former for drawing attention to Bailey’s toned-down characterisation of Keats as a man of ‘commonsense and gentleness’, insisting ‘we prefer the real Keats, with his passionate wilfulness, his fantastic moods and his fine inconsistence’.

Although The Athenaeum derided it, the depth of Wilde’s devotion was recognised by Keats’ niece Emma Speed, daughter of his brother George who had moved to America in 1818 and settled in Louisville in 1819. Mrs. Speed, described by Wilde as ‘a lady of middle age, with a sweet gentle manner and a most musical voice’, sought him out after he cited her uncle’s poem ‘Answer to a sonnet by J.H. Reynolds’ during a lecture he delivered at the Masonic Temple in Louisville on Tuesday, 21 February 1882. Wilde accepted her invitation to call on her the following day in order to examine the Keats manuscripts in her possession; he recalled this experience in ‘Keats’ Sonnet on Blue’, an erudite article he wrote for the July 1886 issue of The Century Guild Hobby Horse:

I spent most of the next day with her, reading the letters of Keats to her father, some of which were at that time unpublished, poring over torn yellow leaves and faded scraps of paper, and wondering at the little Dante in which Keats had written those marvellous notes on Milton.

Shortly afterwards, in an act of overwhelming generosity, Emma Speed sent him the original manuscript of ‘Answer to a sonnet by J.H. Reynolds’, prompting him to write in response:

What you have given me is more golden than gold, more precious than any treasure this great country could yield me, though the land be a network of railways, and each city a harbour for the galleys of the world.

It is a sonnet I have loved always, and indeed who but the supreme and perfect artist could have got from a mere colour a motive so full of marvel: and now I am half enamoured of the paper that touched his hand, and the ink that did his bidding, grown fond of the sweet comeliness of his character, for since my boyhood I have loved none better than your marvellous kinsman, that godlike boy, the real Adonis of our age…. In my heaven he walks eternally with Shakespeare and the Greeks…

Three years later, on 2 March 1885, Wilde attended a contentious auction in London at which thirty-five of Keats’s love letters to Fanny Brawne were being sold by her son Herbert Lindon. He expressed his disquiet in ‘On the sale by auction of Keats’s love letters’.

These are the letters which Endymion wrote
To one he loved in secret, and apart.
And now the brawlers of the auction mart
Bargain and bid for each poor blotted note,
Ay! for each separate pulse of passion quote
The merchant’s price. I think they love not art
Who break the crystal of a poet’s heart
That small and sickly eyes may glare and gloat.

Is it not said that many years ago,
In a far Eastern town, some soldiers ran
With torches through the midnight, and began
To wrangle for mean raiment, and to throw
Dice for the garments of a wretched man,
Not knowing the God’s wonder, or His woe?

Yet, despite his apparent distaste, Wilde reportedly spent eighteen pounds on one of these letters. Perhaps he regarded himself as a worthy keeper of the flame. In truth, he was.

In Search of Wilde’s Women

The window of the brilliant Gutter Bookshop in Dublin, where I’m launching my book

I’m delighted to have a feature article on the wonderful http://www.booksbywomen.org website today. Here’s a link to it or you can read it below:

If you were asked to name a man you would not readily associate with women, Oscar Wilde might spring to mind. Due to the relentless focus on his sexuality and the magnitude of the injustice perpetrated against him, Wilde’s life is often examined in terms of his relationships with men.

Yet, as I discovered when researching my book Wilde’s Women, he had a genuine fondness for women and they in turn were drawn to him. As Vincent O’Sullivan, Wilde’s friend and biographer confirmed in Aspects of Wilde:

I have always found, and find today, his [Wilde’s] warmest admirers among women. He, in his turn, admired women. I never heard him say anything disparaging about any woman, even when some of them required such treatment!

Of course, as the second son of the sharp-witted Lady Jane Wilde, how could Oscar be anything but admiring and supportive of strong women? As Speranza, Oscar’s mother became a celebrity long before her son. A revolutionary poet and essayist, an accomplished translator, and a quixotic campaigner for women’s rights, she also insisted that a loyal wife should accommodate her husband’s indiscretions.

Wilde’s life was not short on tragedy and the first of these was the loss of his beloved sister Isola, probably to meningitis, when he was twelve years old and she was not quite ten. The Wilde family was devastated by this loss. Jane had described her daughter as ‘the radiant angel of our home – and so bright and strong and joyous’ and Oscar treasured a lock of her hair until the day he died.

What of romance? Wilde is a gay icon and appears to have been attracted exclusively to men for much of his life, yet as a young man he was involved with several women. His first girlfriend, the extraordinarily beautiful and vivacious Florence Balcombe, dropped him to marry fellow Dubliner Bram Stoker, author of Dracula. The letters and poems he sent her during their two year courtship demonstrate a depth of feeling that might surprise those who believe his only love was Lord Alfred Douglas.

Aged twenty-nine, Wilde married Constance Lloyd, mother to his beloved sons, Cyril and Vyvyan. Although far less flamboyant than her husband, Constance was highly accomplished, politically active and hugely supportive of him. She was devastated by his infidelity, but did everything she could to help him after his arrest. Wilde loved Constance dearly for a time and he mourned her when she died.

Throughout his life, Wilde promoted progressive women. Most notable perhaps are the two years he spent editingThe Woman’s World, which he transformed into ‘the recognised organ for the expression of women’s opinions on all subjects of literature, art, and modern life’. He commissioned leading thinkers and campaigners on gender and women’s rights to explore topics that included access to education and the professions, and voting rights for women. In his monthly ‘Literary and Other Notes’, he enthused about women writers.

Every play Wilde wrote, from Vera, his very first, to The Importance of Being Earnest, which had the working title Lady Lancing, was named for a woman in early drafts. Most feature iconic women characters: Mrs. Erlynne in Lady Windermere’s Fan, Mrs. Allonby in A Woman of No Importance, Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest.

Through his social comedies, he exposed the deep-rooted hypocrisy that prevailed in patriarchal Victorian society, reserving his most biting commentary for puritanical women who insisted that the strictures imposed on them be applied equally to men. Wilde’s favourite of his plays, according to his friend Ada Leverson, was Salomé. He dreamed of seeing Sarah Bernhardt play the eponymous princess but, sadly, never did.

An ambitious outsider, Wilde understood the importance of befriending society women who presided over the most fashionable and influential drawing rooms in London and beyond. He cultivated friendships with free-thinking, enterprising and intelligent women like Lillie Langtry, one time mistress of the Prince of Wales, and Ellen Terry, one of the most acclaimed actresses of the day, and he delighted aristocratic women with his stories, which he dedicated to them.

Nowhere was the support of powerful women more important than in America, where dozens of wealthy and influential women who delighted in his compelling personality promoted him with enthusiasm.

Wilde provoked extraordinary loyalty in women who are largely forgotten today: witty author and satirist Ada Leverson, and the extraordinarily generous Adela Schuster, who funded him after he was imprisoned. He collaborated on a poem with Polish actress Helena Modjeska, who had fled political persecution, and funded American actress Elizabeth Robbins when she brought the plays of Ibsen to England and staged them herself. He harnessed the epigrammatic language used by women like the extraordinarily popular but largely forgotten novelist Ouida and his work was often compared to hers.

When his popularity was at its height, Wilde was fêted and adored by women from every walk of life. Yet many of them abandoned him during the few years that remained to him after he was released from prison. Many of the warmest and most revealing accounts of him were written by women who remained loyal to the end. Rather than treating Wilde as a brilliant but broken man who paid the highest price for being who he was, we should remember him as feminist and pacifist Helena Swanwick did: ‘His extravaganzas had no end, his invention was inexhaustible, and everything he said was full of joy and energy’.

—

Eleanor Fitzsimons is a researcher, writer and journalist specialising in historical and current feminist issues. She has an MA in Women, Gender and Society from University College Dublin. In 2013, she won the Keats-Shelley Essay Prize with her essay ‘The Shelleys in Ireland’ and she is a contributor to the Romanticism Blog. Her work has been published in a range of newspapers and journals including The Irish Times, the Guardian, History Ireland andHistory Today. She is a regular radio and television contributor. Her first book, Wilde’s Women will be published by Duckworth Overlook on 16 October 2015.

Interview with Sean Moncrieff

Click here for a link to my interview on the Sean Moncrieff Show on Newstalk FM yesterday about Wilde’s Women

HARRIET SHELLEY

Harriet Shelley’s engagement ring

I was delighted to be asked to write a post for the excellent new Romanticism Blog, hosted on the http://www.wordsworth.org.uk site. My contribution concerns the short and tragic life of Harriet Shelley, first wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and is reproduced below. It can also be found on the Wordsworth Trust Blog here:

On Thursday, December 12, 1816, a short but intriguing report was carried on page two of The London Times. It read:
“On Tuesday a respectable female, far advanced in pregnancy, was taken out of the Serpentine River and brought to her residence in Queen Street, Brompton, having been missed for nearly six weeks. She had a valuable ring on her finger. A want of honour in her own conduct is supposed to have led to this fatal catastrophe, her husband being abroad”.

Five days earlier, on the evening of Saturday, December 7, 1816, the day that was almost certainly her last, Harriet Shelley, aged twenty-one, wrote a rambling letter filled with self-recrimination. Sometime later, she walked the short distance to Hyde Park and entered the icy waters of the Serpentine. At the time of her death, Harriet had lived apart from her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley – father to their two young children – for more than two years, and the child she carried was almost certainly not his.

During the inquest that was held the following day in the nearby Fox Alehouse, Harriet’s identity and the grim details of her lonely death were obscured, although coroner, John Gell did attempt to close off speculation that she might have been murdered by releasing a statement confirming: ‘The said Harriet Smith had no marks of violence appearing on her body, but how or by what means she became dead, no evidence thereof does appear to the jurors’. An inconclusive verdict of, ‘Found dead in the Serpentine River’ was returned and no mention was made of her obvious pregnancy. She was buried as ‘Harriett Smith’.

Almost six years earlier, on the bitterly cold January day when she first met eighteen-year-old Percy Bysshe Shelley, Harriet Westbrook had been a strikingly pretty, fifteen-year-old pupil at Mrs. Fenning’s boarding school in Clapham; he was brother to two of her schoolmates, Mary and Hellen. Although the fiery young poet unsettled her with his radical notions of atheism, it was to him she turned, after just six months of friendship, when her father was insisting that she remain on at school even though, at sixteen, she would be older than any other girl there.

Although Shelley was keen to help Harriet, he had absolutely no intention of proposing marriage, and assured his good friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg, ‘if I know anything about love, I am NOT in love’. His rash suggestion that they elope to Edinburgh was prompted by a letter from Harriet containing a credible threat of suicide; later, he confided in his friend Elizabeth Hitchiner that, ‘suicide was with her a favourite theme’. After they were married under Scots Law on August 29, 1811, Harriet and Shelley spent three chaotic years criss-crossing England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland in pursuit of his ill-fated notions of social revolution and communal utopia. As their disapproving families had cut off all funds, they struggled to stay out of reach of their creditors.

On 23 June, 1813, Harriet gave birth to a daughter, Eliza Ianthe, known always by her middle name. Parenthood brought fresh anxieties, and their chaotic finances, compounded by Harriet’s reluctance to breastfeed, fuelled fierce arguments. By Christmas, they were spending long periods of time apart. Ironically, it was during this turbulent period that the couple remarried under English law in an attempt to regularise the legality of their relationship. They must have maintained some degree of cordiality, as Harriet became pregnant with their second child that same month. Nevertheless, the marriage was effectively over, and Shelley told Hogg that he, ‘felt as if a dead and living body had been linked together in loathsome and horrible communion’.

The final blow was delivered when Shelley became besotted with sixteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. He fled abroad with her, and implored his wife to support this new relationship. He even invited her to join them in Switzerland. Harriet was distraught. She returned to her father’s house and gave birth to baby Charles. For two years, she led a life of quiet desperation, pestered for money by her errant husband and deprived of her infant children, who were sent to the countryside for their health. By spring, 1816, although she engaged little with society, Harriet was pregnant for a third time. The names of several candidates have emerged over the years, but the identity of the father has never been established.

In the decades that followed her death, Harriet Shelley was viciously slandered by supporters of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and strenuous attempts were made to erase all trace of her from Shelley’s life. The notion that Shelley had been tricked into marriage gained currency among those who regarded her as an unequal partner for him. Yet her supporters defended her staunchly, and perhaps the most vehement, though least likely of these was Mark Twain in his persuasive essay, In Defense of Harriet Shelley.

By mining the archives, we can uncover a clear sense of Harriet’s character, and her significance. She was beautiful, clever, witty and kind; fluent in French and competent in Latin; fascinated by history and au fait with current affairs. Yet as a woman of her time, she was afforded no outlet for these accomplishments. There are many recorded instances of her laughing with her husband and teasing him playfully. Yet she was prone to debilitating bouts of depression and, in her blackest moods, contemplated suicide.

The stability that Harriet offered Shelley during their short marriage allowed him to push the boundaries and develop the strong political sensibilities that characterise his work. Although life with him was chaotic, she was unwavering in her support: she accompanied him to Ireland to preach revolution; facilitated his attempts to establish a utopian commune; cared for him when he seemed utterly demented; and bore him children, one of whom would continue his line. The novelist and poet Thomas Love Peacock, who was a good friend to both, described how Harriet, ‘accommodated herself in every way to his tastes. If they mixed in society, she adorned it; if they lived in retirement, she was satisfied; if they travelled, she enjoyed the change of scene.’

Harriet inspired Shelley’s early poems and haunted his later work. He dedicated his masterful, Queen Mab to her, writing: ‘Thou wert the inspiration of my song’. He was haunted by the part he played in her dreadful, lonely death, and confessed to Byron, ‘I know not how I have survived’. His friend and fellow writer Leigh Hunt believed that it: ‘tore his being to pieces’. Perhaps the best testament to Harriet’s lasting influence is the fact that Shelley countered enquiries about the frequent low moods that blighted the remainder of his short life with the words, ‘I was thinking of Harriet’.

Eleanor Fitzsimons is a freelance journalist and researcher. Her work has appeared in publications including, The Irish Times,The Sunday Times, History Ireland and The Guardian, and she has researched documentaries for the Irish national broadcaster, RTÉ. She has an MA in Women, Gender and Society from University College Dublin. In 2013, she won the Keats-Shelley Prize and was runner-up for the Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Prize with ‘A Want of Honour’, her proposed biography of Harriet Shelley. She is represented by the Andrew Lownie Literary Agency.

 

Guest Post for Women Writers, Women, Books

I’m delighted to have written a guest blog for the wonderful online literary magazine, Women Writers, Women, Books. Click here to read my post on creativity in pregnancy and all of the other fascinating posts featured in this great magazine.