Spleen - (Dalkey Essentials) by Olive Moore (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Racked with guilt after giving birth to a "deformed" child, a woman exiles herself to a remote Italian village in this recovered masterpiece of feminist modernism.

Olive Moore is the best-kept secret in British literature. Spleen, the most important of her three novels, tells the disturbing story of a woman who goes into self-imposed exile to an island off the coast of Italy after an unplanned pregnancy culminates in the birth of a severely disabled child. Filled with self-reproach and guilt, believing that her antagonistic feelings towards her son in the womb caused his condition, Ruth broods on what it means to be a woman ("nature's oven for nature's bun") and the inequalities between the sexes. In a style reminiscent of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, 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

Very little is known of Olive Moore's life. She was born Miriam Constance Beaumont Vaughan in Hereford, England in 1901. She worked as a reporter for the London Daily SKetch and wrote four brilliant books between 1929 and 1934--Celestial Seraglio (1929), Spleen (1930), Fugue (1932), and The Apple Is Bitten Again (1934)--that earned her a reputation as an enfant terrible of British literature. She was long thought to have disappeared from the literary scene in 1934, but recent research has shown that she wrote for Scope: Magazine for Industry between 1942 and 1959, as well as other publications. She passed away in 1979.