Word: winwar
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OSCAR WILDE AND THE YELLOW 'NINETIES-Frances Winwar-Harper...
...really good Wilde biography-i.e., candid, sensitive, objective-is Frances Winwar's Oscar Wilde and the Yellow 'Nineties. Readers may find something reminiscent of Wildean paradox in the fact that a woman wrote it. To readers of her previous biographies (Farewell the Banner: Coleridge and the Wordsworths; The Romantic Rebels: Byron, Shelley, Keats; Poor Splendid Wings: the Rossettis) it is also a reminder of Biographer Winwar's uncommon skill in portraying the pre-Wilde period. At its best, her book does for the decadent flowering of England's Nineties what Van Wyck Brooks...
...Frances Winwar's newest novel, "Gallows Hill", lovers of American history and died-in-the-wool New Englanders will find a new angle of approach to the bloody tradition of the Salem witchcraft persecutions. Aside from the fact that the subject is a familiar one to most of us, the novel is a gripping story displaying in all its emotional actuality the horrors of those ignorant days. The author's faithful adherence to facts which could have been accumulated only by extensive research into the Archives of Salem and Boston brings to the reading public much that is actually biographical...
Finding her inspiration in the facts behind the witchcraft of Salem, Miss Winwar proceeds to enlighten and embellish their horror as well as their beauty with the result that the spirit of the times is once more captured and the reader can more easily understand the forces at work to create such a reign of terror. The hatred and intolerance of the straight-laced but hypocritical Puritans with their cast iron moral codes and their frigid attitude is set in striking contrast with the loyalty, the courage, and the affection of their brothers. The narrowness and prejudice of the Puritan...
...root of Peter Quennell's analysis is that Byron was bisexual, a theory not developed in Frances Winwar's less minute study. Apparently with careful design, Byron began spreading stories about himself when his fortunes were highest. He even confided in scatter-brained Lady Caroline, after she had become his virulent enemy. Prevented from publicly proclaiming his love for his sister, he married, choosing as his wife a prim, exact intellectual whom he did not love and whose highbrow affectations amused him and his friends. He took his bride to his sister's home, tormenting her with...