'Know thyself' is a Greek proverb. But what does it mean? Something is missing. But she can't think what it is. Mysterious art dealer, the Countess Rivers, is jailed in Australia for the traumatic murder she cannot remember. In Ruby's adopted artworld high society life in London, acting the part and role-playing replaced authenticity. Ruby, amnesiac, kept up appearances. Then she and her husband Sir Hugo Rivers go to Australia to collect art. She returns to encounter a life forgotten. A triangular love affair, Margarita and Raymond, troubled artist; a disappeared friend, lover, daughter....

The Writer's Fugue is a philosophical musical-literary study of constructions of the subject as author by the state, and authors' constructions of subjectivity and the self in literature of modernity. Ruth Skilbeck surveys writers in exile and statelessness, and how authors adapt musical forms to transform psychological trauma in writing.

In her innovative investigation into fugue adaptations by authors in modernity, she chronicles the relationship of the rise and decline of fugue in music, and its emergence in literature, and the diagnosis of dissociative fugue in...

Ruth Skilbeck, Ph.D., chronicles the morphology of fugue in music, psychology and literature, then offers fine-grained analyses of literary fugues by Thomas de Quincey, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Paul Celan and Sylvia Plath in biographical and cultural contexts. Her fugal analysis shows that each one effects a creative processing of their author's loss and trauma, using a part-intentional part-unconscious waking dream modality that Skilbeck terms the 'fugal modality' of writing. Skilbeck's musico-literary and psychological reading offers a counterpoint to critical readings of modernism as...