A reintroduction to the fascinating story and unique poetic vision of Elinor Wylie

Elinor Wylie's body of work--four novels and four volumes of poetry produced between 1921 and 1928--has often been overshadowed by her controversial personal life. In A Private Madness Evelyn Hively explores the points at which her life and her art intersect and demonstrates how Wylie "used language and literary form to transform the chaos of her experiences." This purpose was successfully met, as A Private Madness presents Wylie and her work within the culture of...

A sampling of Elinor Wylie's most representative work

In the 1920s Elinor Wylie's poetry and novels were critically acclaimed and enjoyed popularity in both the United States and England. Her poems were published in the New Yorker, the Century, the New Republic, and the Saturday Review of Literature, and she was described by contemporaries as an icon of the age. Much of the charm of Wylie's work is in her humor as well as in her understanding and mastery of so many poetic forms. Her magazine stories and articles from Vanity Fair,...

The first book-length study of a gifted American writer and her life during the 1920s

The Benet name immediately evokes Stephen Vincent and his older brother William Rose, Pulitzer Prize-winning poets and novelists during the first half of the twentieth century. Less well remembered are the remarkable women related to the Benet brothers, including Rosemary Carr, Stephen's wife; Laura, his sister; Elinor Wylie, William's second wife; and Kathleen Norris, the popular novelist who raised the children of her brother-in-law William.

Darling Ro and the Benet...