Ellmann, Richard

Oxford. 1973. Oxford University Press. 1st British Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0192118277. 208 pages. hardcover. . keywords: Literary Criticism . FROM THE PUBLISHER - In this book Richard Ellmann, one of the leading literary biographers of our day, makes a series of bold forays into that 'secret or at least tacit life' which, he observes, 'underlies the one we are thought to live.' He has chosen for his subjects a group of writers - the 'golden codgers' of his Yeatsian title - from George Eliot to T. S. Eliot. Posing first the problems of modern biographers in comparison with those of Boswell, he then goes on to investigate such questions as George Eliot and her Ladislaw, Ruskin's Venetian honeymoon, Pater's beloved Renaissance, Wilde scapegrace and scapegoat, AndrE Gide and the devil, Maud Gonne in Yeats's symbology, King Edward's two faces, Joyce's nakedness, T. S. Eliot's first marriage. To illuminate certain aspects of his subjects' inner lives, Professor Ellmann marshalls first drafts, revisions, and final texts of their works as well as letters and journals, testimony of friends and lovers, evidence of vocabularies and themes shared with other writers. Golden Codgers draws on its author's recent criticism, here shaped into anew unity which challenges, by precept and example, any idea of the biographer as a passive chronicler. inventory #3060 ISBN: 0192118277.