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Title details for Shaggy Muses by Maureen Adams - Available

Shaggy Muses

The Dogs Who Inspired Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf

by Maureen Adams
Polly Stone
Audiobook
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In Shaggy Muses, we visit Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Flush, the golden Cocker Spaniel who danced the poet away from death, back to life and human love. We roam the wild Yorkshire moors with Emily Brontë, whose fierce Mastiff mix, Keeper, provided a safe and loving outlet for the writer’s equally fierce spirit. We enter the creative sanctum of Emily Dickinson, which she shared only with Carlo, the gentle, giant Newfoundland who soothed her emotional terrors. We mingle with Edith Wharton, whose ever-faithful Pekes warmed her lonely heart during her restless travels among Europe and America’s social and intellectual elite. We are privileged guests in the fragile universe of Virginia Woolf, who depended for emotional support and sanity not only on her human loved
ones but also on her dogs, especially Pinka–a gift from her lover, Vita Sackville-West–a black Cocker Spaniel who soon became a strong, bright thread in the fabric of Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s life together.
Based on diaries, letters, and other contemporary accounts–and featuring many illustrations of the writers and their dogs–these five miniature biographies allow us unparalleled intimacy with women of genius in their hours of domestic ease and inner vulnerability. Shaggy Muses also enchants us with a pack of new friends: Flush, Keeper, Carlo, Foxy, Linky, Grizzle, Pinka, and all the other devoted canines who loved and served these great writers.
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR Shaggy Muses
“An intimate look at famous women authors whose lives were more difficult than we would ever have imagined. Their dogs helped them to survive and create their great works of classic English literature. Lovers of literature and all those interested in the human-animal bond should read this fascinating book.”
–Temple Grandin, author of Animals in Translation
“I so enjoyed Shaggy Muses. It manages very successfully to bring into focus exactly why these dogs were important to these writers–providing some with confidence, some with love, some with protection, and all of them with a curious sense of identification with another spirit that, sometimes, fueled their writing. No mean feat.”
–Margaret Forster, author of Elizabeth Barrett Browning: A Biography
“Shaggy Muses gives readers an intriguing new approach to these five authors. Writing can be a lonely profession. As a dog lover and writer, it’s wonderful for me to think of how these important authors all seem to have needed the kind of comfort and love that dogs give best.”
–Diana Wells, author of My Therapist’s Dog: Lessons in Unconditional Love

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    August 7, 2007

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781415941805
      • File size: 271248 KB
      • Duration: 09:25:05

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Adams's book examines Emily Brontë, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, and Edith Wharton through their relationships with their dogs. You will meet charming characters such as Flush, the cocker spaniel who drew Browning out of her agoraphobic depression, and Carlo the Newfoundland, who brought security to Dickinson's terror-filled world. Polly Stone does a stellar job narrating these biographical portraits of the relationship between humans, animals, and literature. She has an engaging and serious tone as a narrator and believably voices each author in the first person when her published writing, personal letters, and memoirs are quoted. Adams, a writer and psychologist, demonstrates sympathy and astuteness toward the featured artists as she sheds new light on them. J.T. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 21, 2007
      Coaxed through a depression by her golden retriever, Adams, a psychologist and former English professor, was drawn to five exceptional women writers who relied on their loyal dogs for emotional support. Flush distracted Elizabeth Barrett after her favorite brother's death, and the poet wrote about “the unsettling similarity between lapdogs and women in Victorian England”: both powerless and needing to please others. Formidable, eccentric Emily Brontë, who once savagely beat her fierce mastiff, Keeper, for sleeping on her bed, refused to sentimentalize the human-dog bond in Wuthering Heights,
      which depicts innocent pets being hung. Carlo, a Newfoundland, comforted Emily Dickinson in a dark time—when she may have been in love with a married man—and Edith Wharton mourned the death of one of her pooches more than the death of her mother. And Adams suggests that Virginia Woolf, depicting a dog's trauma in her biography of Flush, who was dognapped for ransom, dealt with her own childhood molestation (a picture of Woolf's dog, Pinka, appeared on the cover of Flush's biography). Although Adams's knowledgeable minibiographies are necessarily skewed toward a specialized subject matter, lovers of both dogs and classic writers will identify with this sweet, quirky book. Illus.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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