Literary Seductions: Compulsive Writers and Diverted Readers

British lecturer Wilson (Reading University) analyzes the creative and erotic extremes of three 20th-century writing couples for whom love for each other and love for each other's writing were one and the same; they were in a state of ""literary seduction""--possessed, consumed or contained by each other's writing. For Henry Miller and Ana s Nin, this meant literary possession--a literary outpouring (explosive in his case, slow and steady in hers) in which ""there was never a point at which they realized they had said it all."" Robert Graves and Laura Riding experienced literary consumption, wherein Graves deified Riding as ""a literal incorporation"" of the Muse and his ""ruling passion,"" to the exclusion of his own children and other relationships. For Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam, it was literary containment, seen in her decades-long crusade to preserve his writing, in hidden manuscripts and in her memory, after his death in Stalin's camps. Beginning with Wilson's ability to unite these seemingly unconnected writers, there's much to admire here. She arranges the essays intelligently, building in intensity for a payoff in the afterword on the Yeatses. Characterizations are apt: Laura Riding is an underappreciated ""intellectual terrorist"" who likened herself to Middlemarch's Casaubon. Despite these qualities, the book is unsatisfying. The seduction construct seems limiting and ephemeral, nor does the book invite continued study of the authors. Wilson's work is original, yet its theory of the confusion ""of sexual with textual desire"" remains unconvincing. (July)