 
|
SpleenAuthor: Olive Moore British Literature Series October 1996 133 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 Paperback, 1-56478-148-8 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $8.76 
|
Book Description
Dalkey Archive Press first introduced readers to this "best-kept secret" of British literature with the hardback Collected Writings of Olive Moore in 1992. Spleen, the best of the author's three novels, tells the disturbing story of a woman who goes into self-imposed exile to an island off the coast of Italy after giving birth to a deformed child. Filled with self-reproach and guilt about her son and her life (having yearned to give birth to something "new and rare," she blames herself for her son's deformity), Ruth broods on what it means to be a woman ("nature's oven for nature's bun") and the inequalities between the sexes.
Filled with the colors and beauty of the Italian countryside and in a style similar to Virginia Woolf's, Spleen challenges the assumption that women can't help but be tender and maternal, that their heads are only "ever-enlarging hearts."
About the Author
|
Olive Moore is the pseudonym of English journalist Constance Vaughan who was associated with the Bloomsbury group and published between 1929-1934 before disappearing without a trace. Little is known about Moore's life. She was born in England around 1905 and visited America during the 1920s, where she did some writing. Her poem, "First Poem" was published by Charles Lahr's publishing company Blue Moon Press in 1932. Between 1929 and 1934, she wrote and had published Celestial Seraglio, Spleen, Fugue, and The Apple Is Bitten Again. Moore died circa 1970. |
 |
Praise
"A dramatic page-tuner . . . among this century's most original and provocative novels of ideas."—Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune"[T]he discovery of this missing talent is truly exhilarating . . . The internal life of Moore's characters is so firmly depicted, their spiritual longings so quietly dissected, that her work seems reminiscent of D.H. Lawrence and, at times, E.M. Forster, but the wit and interplay of memories are uniquely her own."—Elaina Richardson, Mirabella
"A writer of resounding eloquence and inspiring audacity . . . one is reminded of Virginia Woolf's dense, circular narratives."—Publishers Weekly
"What serious reader could resist a novel with so endearing a title as Spleen? . . . There's something fascinating about the fiction here—the ghostly, disturbing echo of a youthful voice, a voice at once secretive and exhibitionistic, reckless and self-protective, lyrical and satiric: whispering mixed messages across a divide of more than half-a-century."—Francine Prose, Washington Post Book World
"One of the best, most original British novelists of this century has been ignored for almost 60 years . . . Spleen is a brilliant novel, allusive and impressionistic, the most passionate Moore wrote . . . Moore's satire really hits the mark . . . Her prose is always brilliant, and at times amusing . . . All three [novels] are at least excellent; one, Spleen, is a masterpiece. Moore was an outstanding technician and a brilliant prose-poet; her imagery is original and rich. I don't know of any writer who handled transitions in time as smoothly as Moore. Between past and present events, she employs sentences that are appropriate for both times—when she uses this technique past and present are joined seamlessly, overlapping as though they were happening simultaneously . . . Perhaps the Dalkey Archive collection will restore Olive Moore to her proper place. In any event, I urge readers to get hold of this edition."—Woodward Review
"[Spleen has] an original and vivid narrative. It is created. Spleen is as spontaneous and free as a healthy, natural growth. Its form is the natural play of the mind, about the past, about the future, when provoked by present circumstances. The characters have solidity, and spirit as well; and I was particularly pleased by the scenery. That could gain veracity in a bare aside, a wave of the hand. Some of the comments, too, in the book's long swift play of thought have that deranging candour which might be innocence, and might be diabolic in its cunning; not easy to say which. WELL DONE!"—H. M. Tomlinson
"Nobody since D. H. Lawrence has riled and wooed me so thoroughly as Olive Moore. To invoke her contemporaries is inevitable. Her style is Bloomsbury, landing her somewhere between the inimitable Virginia Woolf and the iniquitous Lawrence. It's a hybrid, exuberant style that was borne out of Victorian mores but leaves them all behind . . . fearless in the face of sexual politics, religion, and social critique . . . Her most disturbing and most difficult novel, Spleen fades in and out of cerebral clarity and hallucinogenic dream states . . . [Moore] spreads the worst of societal assumptions out before her and wrestles them with her words, writing herself out of her own acknowledged traps."—Rain Taxi