Literary Seductions: Compulsive Writers and Diverted Readers

(Paperback)

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The readers love of the writing tends to become indistinguishable from his love of the writer.

Beautiful writing has exercised its intoxicating power over readers since time immemorial. And yet, on occasion, this seduction extends beyond the page and sparks an irreversible connection between author and reader. This is a true literary seduction.

In Literary Seductions, Frances Wilson demonstrates how some of historys most renowned writers were themselves ensnared by the writing they consumed, and which in turn consumed them. Through a series of famous literary couples Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning; Anas Nin and Henry Miller; Osip Mandelstam and his wife Nadezhda Wilson evokes the evolution from literary seduction to sexual desire.

With stories of self-sacrifice, self-effacement and even self-immolation, Literary Seductions recounts the powerful, inflammatory and sometimes destructive nature of literature.

Author Bio

Frances Wilson is a critic, journalist and the author of six works of non-fiction, including The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay, which won the Elizabeth Longford Prize for historical biography in 2012, Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas de Quincey, which was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2016, and Burning Man: The Ascent of D.H. Lawrence, which won the Plutarch Award in 2022 and was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize. She lives in North London with her daughter.