Word: herbert
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...MISS HERBERT...
Feminist novels today tend to present women in two ways: as either prisoners of gender or lately freed to pursue Tom Jones' pleasures and echo Alexander Portnoy's complaints. Christina Stead's Miss Herbert belongs to a less transitory category. It is a novel about an Englishwoman that does not discriminate on the basis...
Love Portraits. Miss Herbert, Stead's newest novel, is less ambitious. It is about a foolish woman, carefully framed and lighted so that the outside world exists only as dim periphery. The focus is entirely on the beautiful Eleanor Herbert, a variation on the Steadian observation that the English are not self-conscious hypocrites. Instead, as the author once wrote, they display "a natural ingrained double face from birth. They're the Western Chinese: old and smooth with deceit...
...Eleanor Herbert is a consummate self-deceiver. In her youth she entertained a succession of university students on the grounds that "there was no harm in making love, if they could first refer to Bertrand Russell." Imagining herself to be a literary talent, she rewrote a story 23 times until it grew "simpler, clearer, more barren each time...
...marriage followed similar lines until her husband, the stuffy director of a spurious religious society, ran off. In her 50s, still attractively statuesque, Miss Herbert takes up with a kinky London publisher whose idea of a good time is to make her strike "love portraits" against his collection of mummy wrappings and poison rings. The activity gives her a calm feminine feeling "that for the first time she was beginning to understand 'mature...