Word: venusized
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...shock to the youth, and one of the causes of his later withdrawal into a formal persona from which he would rarely emerge. He reported the lascivious behavior of a governess to his stepmother, causing her dismissal. During a London visit to the British Museum he ignored a voluptuous Venus for a statue of Mercury. At Oxford, he welcomed the cloistered male world...
...TRANSIT OF VENUS by Shirley Hazzard Viking; 337 pages; $11.95 " Venus can blot out the sun," the heroine of The Transit of Venus cries out, racked by her unremitting passion for a man who repeatedly abandons her. Astronomically, the observation is inaccurate. Still, there can be no doubt that Shirley Hazzard's Venus has eclipsed other recent efforts to illuminate the unending agonies of obsessive love. "The tragedy is not that love doesn't last," says another of the novel's sufferers. "The tragedy is the love that lasts...
...Venus has the oddly elusive flavor of a 19th century novel. The two central characters, seemingly so genteel, are an unlikely pair to wash up on the wilder shores of love. Grace and Caro Bell are sisters, beautiful and well-bred, with neither property nor prospects. Orphaned young in their native Australia, they emigrate to England in their early 20s, accompanied by their half-sister Dora, who is both incubus and guardian. To the touch, the girls' surface is all coolness; the heat seems to have been drawn out of them during their struggle against Dora's ravenous...
...York City, she selected Italian backgrounds for her two earlier novels, The Evening of the Holiday and The Bay of Noon, and for several of her short stories. Even more pungent and persuasive, however, are her evocations of Australia and of English middle-class society in The Transit of Venus. Of Grace and Caro's Australia, Hazzard writes: "To appear without gloves, or in other ways suggest the flesh, to so much as show unguarded love, was to be pitchforked into brutish, bottomless Australia, all the way back to primitive man. Refinement was a frail construction continually dashed...
Nearly as big as the U.S., this plateau is literally out of the world-on Venus. Though the perpetual cloud cover of the earth's nearest planetary neighbor has kept its surface tantalizingly hidden, Venus' veil is being lifted by a gifted robot. The Pioneer-Venus Or biter spacecraft has been circling the planet since December 1978, analyzing its atmosphere and scanning and rescanning its surface with radar. Last week NASA released the first renderings of these extraterrestial data, revealing a dramatic and awesome landscape still in the process of formation. Though 60% of the Venusian topography consists...