Virginia Woolf called it "donkeywork" - for who but a domesticated ass would harness herself to what is recoverable of the past and call it A Life?"Īnd for Milford (whose first book, a life of Zelda Fitzgerald, was a bestseller in the early Seventies), the challenge must have been multiplied by both the seductive persona Millay cultivated during her lifetime and the copious amounts of potentially illuminating material that she left behind. It seems to me it requires not only the tact, patience, and thoroughness of the scholar but the stamina of a horse. As Milford herself puts it in her prologue to the 509-page-book: "To be a biographer is a somewhat peculiar endeavor. Vincent Millay, made me really glad not to be a biographer. Reading Nancy Milford's literary biography, Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St.
0 kommentar(er)
