Toward the end of Jane Austen's novel Persuasion, protagonist Anne Elliot has a short conversation with Captain Harville, an acquaintance. The conversation is about the constancy of love, and is rather playful, all the more so because the man whom Anne loves—Captain Wentworth—is within earshot. Anne does not know whether Captain Wentworth can hear her, but the possibility that he might lends the conversation special significance. The gist of the conversation is the following: Anne laments what she understands to be a peculiar (and often unfortunate) power of women: that they will keep loving even when "existence or when hope is gone."
Read MoreAnna Kavan was born in 1901, but she did not exist until 1940. Now, I am not particularly fond of riddles; I cannot tolerate the position of not knowing for very long. Taking to heart Steinbeck's dictum in The Winter of Our Discontent that (I paraphrase) no one really knows about other human beings, so that the best thing we can do is suppose that they are like us, I will quickly reveal the clue. Anna Kavan was the name of a fictional character in two novels by Helen Emily Wood—Let Me Alone (1930) and A Stranger Still (1935). Wood began to use Anna Kavan as a nom de plume, and then, in a move that—as far as I know—is utterly unique in the history of literature, legally changed her name to that of her fictional character.
Read MorePerhaps it was a tendency to be drawn to literature's heavier side that prompted my girlfriend to give me a copy of Very Good, Jeeves. I had never read anything by Wodehouse before. I confess: I had never even heard of the good man—Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, affectionately called 'Plum'. But my girlfriend knows me well; she knows my taste in literature and my sense of humor. With regard to the latter, she knows especially how incredibly selective I am when it comes to 'practitioners' of humor. She gave me Wodehouse, and trusted that it would turn out well.
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