Sarah Palin
Going Rogue: An American Life
Harper Collins, 2009
432 Pages
£18.99
ISBN 978-0061997877

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An account of Sarah Palin’s book tour in a recent issue of the Observer characterised Palin’s world as one in which “America is succumbing to the foreign ideology of socialism, and the lifeblood of the free market is being squeezed by Big Government. The threat of ‘death panels’ haunts the elderly. It is a nation of whispered conspiracies that Obama wants to take away people’s guns, and where communist appointees plot secret internment camps and the forced indoctrination of innocent American youth.” The author of that article evidently hadn’t read Going Rogue.

Sarah Palin’s autobiography seeks to portray the life of an everyday American on the Last Frontier. The social conservatism, creationism, and evangelicalism that make Palin disconcerting to so many in the media are marginalised; pernicious views on social policy are omitted altogether. In Going Rogue, Palin’s opposition is largely tacit. But that does not necessarily make it any less potent. “I support the traditional definition of marriage”, Palin demurs, avoiding overt affirmation of her attitude to gay rights. Similarly, she presents pro-life views without saying what she’d do to the abortion laws. Only on the origin of species is she briefly explicit in her disbelief that “thinking, loving [human] beings originated from fish that sprouted legs … Or that human beings began as single-celled organisms that developed into monkeys.” She is “pro-America”, clear that the United States is “the greatest country on Earth” but unclear as to what she’s against, and quiet about communism and radical Islam.

The brilliance of Palin’s autobiography is that it states in straightforward terms why being anything other than a “Commonsense Conservative” is bonkers. This reviewer was seduced. I too enjoy “kicking ass”. I too love cookies. Who doesn’t like corruption-busting, small businesses, and self-parody? And why shouldn’t she and her native Alaskan husband Todd name their children after athletics (Track), a brand of aeroplane (Piper), or an Alaskan bay (Bristol)? Why shouldn’t she bring her fifth child, newborn baby Trig who has Down’s Syndrome, onto the campaign stage as Obama often did with his two daughters? As Palin reasonably argues, it was a catch-22: showing off Trig to the world subjected her to the accusation of exploiting her child; keeping him out of sight would have left her open to the charge of being ashamed of him.

Throughout Going Rogue, Palin harnesses motherhood, that universally-recognised brand, to reclaim Middle America. Painting herself as a maverick (hence the title), Palin takes pains to demonstrate that, as governor of Alaska, she was often more popular with Democrats than Republicans.  She catalogues her efforts to break the monopoly of the “big three” oil companies over Alaskan reserves and to oversee the indictments of the predominantly Republican “Corrupt Bastards Club” in the state government.

Later, Palin finds common ground with Hillary Clinton, offering a mea culpa for her criticism in February 2008 of the Democratic presidential candidate’s whine about her media treatment: “I should have walked a mile in her shoes”, Palin writes, “In fact, I should have applauded her because she was right.” She quotes Martin Luther King. She hijacks Obama’s bandwagon. Of her gubernatorial campaign run by Kris Perry, a fellow “kick-butt, tell-it-like-it-is soccer mom”, Palin jokes, “Hey! We were change when change wasn’t cool!”

Going Rogue offers a corrective to the predominating narrative that Palin became a liability for John McCain, who had failed to vet his vice presidential choice. The book is her opportunity to swat away the blame for the Republicans’ electoral defeat by laying responsibility for her poor image squarely on the shoulders of a paranoid campaign team that gagged her. She names and shames while proclaiming unwavering loyalty to McCain, thereby abnegating responsibility for failure without appearing vindictive. Chief strategist Steve Schmidt, memorably described as a man “who wore sunglasses atop his bald head in the middle of the night”, was “slow to turn the campaign’s ship into the wind”, focusing for too long on the war in Iraq when the country’s attention had shifted to the economy. Nicolle Wallace, the campaign’s communications aide, is found guilty of orchestrating Palin’s disastrous first interview with CBS journalist Katie Couric. Palin claims Wallace said “[Katie] wants you to like her” and that she was hardly briefed on the assumption that this was to be “a pretty mellow interview, short and sweet, about balancing motherhood and my life as a governor.” In the event, Palin admits she bombed when put on the spot about foreign policy and the newspapers she reads.

Members of the McCain campaign have responded angrily to some of the charges made in Going Rogue. Steve Schmidt described Palin’s claims about him as “all fiction”, while Nicolle Wallace called Going Rogue “a book based on fabrications” betraying “a bizarre fixation on things that everyone else has moved on from.” Yet Americans have not moved on from Palin’s performance during the campaign. Nor will they as she revamps her political image, quite possibly for the 2012 election. The revisionist account of the campaign offered by Going Rogue enables Palin to live down some of her gaffes with good humour. The Katie Couric interview was quickly picked up by Tina Fey, who proceeded to satirise Palin on Saturday Night Live. When recalling the campaign’s offer of a voice coach, Palin jokes, “I thought of all the money Tina Fey was making imitating me; I didn’t want to screw up her SNL thing by changing up on her midstream. I’m all about job security for the American worker.”

It is unsurprising that Palin comes off well in Going Rogue, a book that, like so many political memoirs, was ghost-written and sanitised. Most importantly, she whitewashes contemporary America, enabling her to dodge those bullets which otherwise cause her to bleed the Republican red of the religious right. This is the woman who, over a year after Obama’s election, still believes Americans are right to be concerned about the birth of the half-African president and his eligibility to be president; the woman who just two weeks ago described climate change as resulting from “natural, cyclical environmental trends”—a fact which she believes should preclude action in Copenhagen to curb human-generated carbon omissions; the alarmist who sees universal healthcare in the United States as waging an evil war against “my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome [who] will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society’,whether they are worthy of health care.”

While these divisive views are downplayed, the most notable absence is that of the American poor, who are mentioned just once in relation to social programmes that Palin claims have become “unsustainable financial liabilities for all of us.” Race and ethnicity are similarly effaced. Palin’s wholesome, monolithic portrait of America bears little relation to a country where a fifth of children live in poverty, half of whom are African-American.

Going Rogue smoothes the fault lines of society by pretending that misery and identity politics do not exist. Gender, race, and religion are subsumed beneath the banner of patriotism. The book is dedicated to “all Patriots who share my love of the United States of America. And particularly to our women and men in uniform, past and present – God bless the fight for freedom.” Yet foreign policy is also absent. Short of supporting “our allies in Israel”, Palin’s position on policy in the Middle East is unclear. Islam doesn’t merit a mention. Perhaps most worryingly for someone for high office, she admits on Iraq, “I knew the history of the conflict to the extent that most Americans did.”

In the final chapter, Palin occasionally lapses into the more familiar conspiracy mentality. By that time, though, most readers will have been enchanted by this funny, gracious, and self-deprecating account of a woman’s hard work to break through glass ceilings, interjected with fond family anecdotes. Sneering coverage of Palin, such as the inference that she’s never read a newspaper in her life—studiously refuted by a blurred and otherwise unremarkable photograph of Palin reading—only boost Palin’s ability to depict herself as a victim of hostile media. Cheap shots painting her as ignorant and uncosmopolitan enable Palin to position herself as a populist leader of a mythical silent majority.

In its own way Going Rogue is a masterpiece of the autobiographical art: it would appear to have successfully captured in each ghost-written clause the very essence of Sarah Palin. Whilst she chides the media for obsessing over her Alaska “hockey mom” image when she would rather be discussing “free market principles and military strength”, Palin here contradicts herself at book length. There is no substantive policy in Going Rogue, only a beguilingly selective personal narrative and easily digestible homilies designed to further her already remarkable career.

Katie Wake received an MSt in American History from St. Hilda’s College, Oxford. She lives in London and is a civil servant.

For many British bibliophiles, this week is the highlight of the year. In 2008, the Hay Literary Festival in Hay-on-Wye, a small town with a population of 2,000 on the Welsh borders, drew an unprecedented crowd of 160,000. With Carol Ann Duffy, Alan Bennett, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu among the hundreds of speakers engaged this year, the festival’s organisers anticipate another throng.

Aspiring to the giddy heights of Hay, the 13th Oxford Literary Festival convened last month. Over the course of a long week, a range of authors—from locals Ian McEwan and Philip Pullman to the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa and the leading light of the American short story, Wells Tower—ruminated on their work and debated the fate of publishing.

“The Book is Dead: Long Live the Book!” was the battle cry of one five-strong panel at the Oxford Festival. As online copyright infringements destabilise prices, children prefer PlayStations, Richard and Judy homogenise readerships, and WHSmith plugs bad books with big budgets, readers are often left bereft of quality and variety. Yet the 525 authors and thousands of enthusiasts who converged upon Oxford for the festival bucked this trend as they bemoaned it. If literary festivals are any barometer, the book is alive and quite well, coveted by thousands of bibliophiles who pilgrimage in pursuit of its creators.

Literary festivals have proliferated in the last decade. The British Council lists 23 festivals in May alone. Curiously, the British excel at these festivals. The world’s largest takes place in Edinburgh, its most famous is Hay. Last year, 164 literary festivals were held nationwide. Festivals are held abroad too, recently in Jaipur, Dubai, and Sydney. Paris has just announced its first. But per capita—in incidence and attendance—literary festivals are one of the few remaining fields in which Brits are the world champions.

Is this a reflection of our luminous literary pantheon, stretching from Chaucer via Shakespeare to Harry Potter? The national pride we project onto our writers was on show at the Oxford festival’s “Great English Novel Debate” which, dubiously, counted Joyce’s Ulysses as a contender. Novelist Will Self over-egged the pudding when he described literary festivals as “the Nuremberg rallies of the contemporary bourgeoisie”. Self is himself a regular on the festival circuit; few writers would shun the opportunity to promote their latest book to a gaggle of potential punters. But do literary festivals provide anything beyond publicity for writers and an autographed purchasing opportunity for attendees? Do they surpass the self-congratulatory cleverness of their white, middle-class and middle-aged reputation?

The preponderance of grey hair at literary festivals provides a clue to their as yet unchecked expansion. Bill Clinton bestowed upon Hay Festival the marketing gift of the century when he dubbed it “the Woodstock of the mind” at his 2001 appearance. Clinton was spot on with his 60s cultural comparison: for the surfeit of well-educated postwar baby-boomers—too old for music festivals, too young for immobility—literary festivals provide a perfect entertainment outlet. “Take away the sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll of Woodstock,” Clinton might as well have said, “and you’re left with Hay-on-Wye.” Fittingly, Joan Bakewell, the original “thinking man’s crumpet”, now aged 70, has been a stalwart on this year’s circuit with an average audience age to match hers. At the Oxford festival’s debate about e-books, one of the speakers noted that, for a young medium, the subject had attracted an old crowd.

It would be reductive, however, to depict literary festivals as Glastonburys for the Grey Brigade. Many lay on events for children. At Oxford, Michael Morpurgo attracted 500 mostly young people to his talk, one of the festival’s largest congregations. Significantly, the rise of literary festivals has coincided with that of book groups, which count many 20-somethings (as I can personally and shamefacedly attest) among their ranks. The Hay Festival website reports that its clientele are “exceptionally well read and pretty smart. They’re all fairly gorgeous too.”

If you fail to meet these three criteria, fear not; you can bask in reflected glory. The organisers are not merely flogging books, but access to a lifestyle of brilliance and beauty. In a bid to attract “Singletons” to the festival (Bridget Jones baggage in tow, one suspects), Hay’s website pleads, “Give it a go. There are thousands of people here to make friends with.” (I did but evidently failed to exude the charm of my cohorts. The only person who spoke to me was a geriatric, enraged that I’d tripped over her Zimmer Frame.)

Some commentators have discussed the relationship between literary festivals and the urge to reconnect to a grassroots. The popularity of festivals, they say, reflects an effort to avoid alienation in an age of celebrity and cyberspace. Yet this seems an impulse more likely to be shared by authors, whose working habitats tend to be isolated. The financial incentive for most speakers is limited, often to increased royalties from books sold. One Hay author revealed that he receives a case of claret for appearances (which, he was disappointed to discover, contain six rather than the customary 12 bottles). The claret has since been upgraded to cava, still in a six-bottle case.

Global power can raise the stakes; President Clinton received £100,000 for his appearance at Hay with tickets priced at £100, well above the standard £4-7 today. For the majority of authors, though, indulging and developing one’s fan base is infinitely more valuable than the meagre financial remuneration. In return, readers—or fans, as they become at festivals—can converse with those whose voices are ordinarily accessible only through the unresponsive medium of print.

If the sense of belonging to a glittering community is fleeting, devoid of the glamour and lacking the youth and diversity that most British music festivals command, literary festivals do, at least, fan the flames of interest in reading. The Oxford Literary Festival staged a number of fantasy boxing matches between literary greats dreamt up by bibliophiles. The merits of Orwell versus Dickens and Middlemarch versus Emma were discussed with an ardour that only such pointless exercises can ignite. Gushed Jenny Hartley of Dickens, “He was the Jamie Oliver of his day”, and deserves victory over Orwell, if only for the refuge for fallen women he founded with Angela Burdett-Coutts: “a sort of Paris Hilton—longer skirts.”

Potentially more constructive, if less entertaining, were the debates on the issues of the day from Iraq and Afghanistan to the recession and multiculturalism. In “Writing for a Change: Responses to Climate Change” Philip Pullman and Jay Griffiths considered whether writers can be encouraged to incorporate climate change into their fiction. “We need a creative response” in order to mobilise a world mired in denial, argued Peter Gingold of Tipping Point, an organisation that seeks to harness the imagination to ward off climate change.

Alas, literary festivals have yet to save the world. The climate change debate lauded Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, possibly the only example of class-A fiction on environmental catastrophe that isn’t sci-fi. But, as Pullman pointed out, it is often difficult for writers to intentionally channel their convictions into their work if the writing is to be any good. As Jenny Hartley might have retorted, Dickens did. A more cautious Pullman counselled against overt contrivance to tackle climate change through fiction, as “in the short term, art is useless.” Whatever side of the debate one supports, literary festivals appear to be asking the right questions to an audience in search of considered answers.

Among the Oxford Literary Festival’s highlights, Mario Vargas Llosa spoke expansively about the origins of fiction. He identified the power of language to unite: we are “a community of people who think because we can speak.” By contrast, reading and writing are solitary and often hermetic. Those who gather at the literary festivals of Oxford, Hay, Edinburgh, Cheltenham, or indeed Frinton, Throckmorton, and Wells, overcome the seclusion of print by celebrating their shared love of a solitary pursuit.

Whether or not this communitarian spirit can yield tangible results or instigate change is more doubtful, and is hampered by the narrow demographic of festival-goers. The predominantly white, educated, middle class audience at the Oxford Literary Festival, as elsewhere, conspires to consensus. Hay-goers, say the organisers, tend to be “sceptical about monarchy and religion, not much bothered about hunting, very bothered about illegal invasions of other countries…and passionately engaged with the environment.” Literary festivals might be a great way to pass the time with similarly minded souls but they will have to reach a more varied congregation if they are to preach beyond the converted.

Katie Wake is studying the historiography of the United States at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She is the Writers editor of the Oxonian Review.

Catherine Clinton
Mrs. Lincoln: A Life
Harper Collins, 2009
415 pages
£18.66
ISBN 978-0060760403

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“Damned if she did, damned if she didn’t” would have been a fitting epitaph on Mary Todd Lincoln’s grave. In life, she was hounded by a popular press that charged her with treason, adultery and theft. In death, she has become Mad Mary, the crazy harridan wife best remembered for holding séances in the White House. Her portrayal as a “Hellcat” First Lady cameos in many of the 9,000 books about her husband Abraham Lincoln.

Catherine Clinton’s transformative biography consigns this mythologised figure to the ash heap of historiography. In Mrs Lincoln: A Life, Clinton sensitively reconstructs the tragedy of Mary Lincoln’s life, one overwhelmed by the horrors of the American Civil War and shattered by her husband’s assassination and the deaths of her children.

Rehabilitation is no small task, for Mary Todd Lincoln was by all accounts a difficult woman. Born into a patrician Kentucky family in 1818, her courtship with the penurious son of an uneducated frontiersman was an unlikely match. Marrying into debt, for love and against her family’s wishes, Mrs Lincoln carried herself with an imperious hauteur which frequently alienated those around her. As First Lady during the Civil War, she reportedly demanded that Julia Grant, the wife of celebrated Union General and President-to-be Ulysses S. Grant, back out of a room when taking her leave. Mary Lincoln’s notorious shopping mania—characterised by Clinton as “financial bulimia”—was coupled with a reputation for parsimony. Lincoln spent the years after her husband’s death petitioning for a widow’s pension and vigorously appealing for handouts from those her husband had patronised as President.

Such behaviour made Mary Lincoln an early victim of an unforgiving media. In 1861 the Chicago Tribune declared, “No lady of the White House has ever been so maltreated by the public press.” This treatment would only worsen with time. Clinton convincingly claims that the “lava flow of venom” Mrs Lincoln received as First Lady has been unsurpassed by First Ladies before or since.

The scrutiny Mary Lincoln was subjected to during her life is a startling reminder that media hounding existed long before Princess Diana and Britney Spears. Smear tactics, libel and defamation were deployed by Democrats and Republicans alike. Amidst crisis, the foundering nation found an easy target on which to project its anxieties. Split by divided loyalties, the Todd family encapsulated the rupture of the Civil War.

Clinton judiciously confronts the historical mistreatment of Mary Lincoln, from the slanderous editorials during her lifetime to the burgeoning scholarship on her husband. Mrs Lincoln was from a family of 15 children, all brought up in the slave south, and many of her siblings or their husbands fought on the side of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Mrs Lincoln’s consequent estrangement from her Todd relations failed to dispel unfounded charges of treason in the press. Shortly after her husband’s assassination, the press launched an attack upon the grieving First Widow, accusing her of ransacking the White House when she departed with more than 50 trunks. Such vitriolic assaults made a scapegoat of the grieving Mrs Lincoln and ignored the thousands who had traipsed through White House rooms to bid farewell to President Lincoln, some taking souvenirs of the furnishings as they left.

In 1875, having witnessed the deaths of three sons, Mrs Lincoln was committed to psychiatric care for “insanity” by her only surviving child, Robert. Clinton avoids diagnosing Mary Lincoln from beyond the grave as others have done. Instead, she delineates Mrs Lincoln’s mental decline alongside the series of family deaths that increased Mrs Lincoln’s propensity for manic episodes and phobias. The séances that were conducted in the Lincoln White House remain a central feature of Mary Lincoln mythology. Again, Clinton challenges knee-jerk assumptions by questioning whether Mrs Lincoln’s attempts to connect with her deceased children were so risible given the rapid growth of spiritualism among women as thousands of men died in the bloodiest war in American history.

Mrs Lincoln is a humane portrait of a family that imploded due to external forces. Disease took three of the Lincolns’ four sons in their youths. Following the death of the second, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, shortly after the Union victory in the Civil War. Clinton introduces the biography with this event. Mary Lincoln’s trauma upon witnessing her husband being shot in their box as they watched a play was so pronounced that she was forcibly removed from the room in which he lay dying, usurped by her husband’s male inner circle at his deathbed.

The denigration of Mrs Lincoln has continued to eclipse the many admirable facts of her life. Having grown up in a slave-owning household, she became a committed abolitionist. When a doorman escorted an African-American visitor to the kitchen entrance to the White House, the First Lady took pains to accommodate her over tea and pointedly accompanied her guest to the front entrance for a public farewell on her way out. Mary Lincoln bequeathed some of her husband’s personal effects to black friends and employees. Abraham Lincoln’s canes went to Frederick Douglass and the cloak worn the night he died was given to Elizabeth Keckly, the prominent dressmaker and former slave who had become Mrs Lincoln’s close friend and confidante.

Clinton has selected her sources imaginatively. Household bills, architectural blueprints and visual sources are mined to recreate Lincoln’s redecoration of her home in Springfield, Illinois and the White House. This intimate portrait of Mary Lincoln’s daily life exposes some of the remarkable women around her, including Elizabeth Keckly and the successful deaf journalist Laura Redden. Clinton’s methodology illuminates areas of women’s lives in the 19th century which are mostly absent from history books. Mrs Lincoln’s friendships and her quotidian occupations as the household matriarch establish a female culture that operated on the periphery of political life. Contention arose when this female culture encroached on the political realm, a difficult separation to maintain as First Lady.

It is hard to escape the notion that the vilification of Mary Lincoln stemmed from her breaking of convention. Well educated, politically engaged and ambitious, Mary Lincoln did not possess the independent opportunities for advancement that were open to her successors in the 20th century. Yet in the same way that Hillary Clinton (and increasingly, Michelle Obama) has been criticised for political outspokenness as First Lady, Mary Lincoln was castigated for her attachment to politics.

Clinton’s biography explicitly connects Mary Lincoln to other unpopular First Ladies, especially Hillary Rodham Clinton. Both women invited an avalanche of odium for their attempts to carve out independent roles. Political wives in Lincoln’s era were valuable assets in facilitating networking, attending levees and, in the case of First Ladies, opening the White House to visitors. However, direct attempts to exert influence were deemed beyond the pale. Mrs Lincoln was censured for interfering with presidential appointments. Her parlour politics affronted the sensibilities that accompanied her status as a woman.

Mrs Lincoln struggled with the burden of fulfilling the expectations that weighed down First Ladies. Her style became a national preoccupation. The sartorial quagmire that afflicts women today was no less potent in the 19th century; then, as now, clothes became a decoy to diminish women’s political significance. Clinton recounts how “Any meetings with dignitaries were overshadowed by attention paid to Mrs Lincoln’s wardrobe in press reports”. But “damned if she did, damned if she didn’t”, Mrs Lincoln faced the ire of the press, as her bills and shopping habits underwent severe criticism.

There remains something unnerving about our enthusiasm to pick apart the spouses of iconic men, especially where these women are powerful and possess an intellect. Mary Todd Lincoln’s spending predilections and neurotic behaviour have equipped historians with blunt tools with which to assail her. It has taken a century and a half for a biographer to step forward and redress the balance. Catherine Clinton has written a riveting and scholarly biography of an often painful life.

Katie Wake is studying the historiography of the United States at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She is the Writers editor of the Oxonian Review.

Ursula Doyle
Love Letters of Great Men
Pan Macmillan, 2009
176 pages
£6.99
ISBN 978-0330506656

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Among the many perils of the modern age, the demise of the letter and the rise of the text message are the source of much intellectual caterwauling. The text message, we are warned, both feeds on and fuels youthful illiteracy. It is a perfunctory, abbreviated staple of modern communication which has, along with email and the telephone, contributed to the death of the letter. Ursula Doyle acknowledges this in the introduction to her collection of The Love Letters of Great Men: “To claim that a text message saying IN PUB FTBL XTR TIME BACK LATR XX [sic] is more genuine, and therefore romantic, than a declaration such as Byron’s that ‘I more than love you and cannot cease to love you’ is obviously nonsense.”

Although Doyle revives the letter, her literary offering exemplifies another acid of modernity: publishers leaping on bandwagons without any sign of intellectual consideration. The success of the “Sex and the City” television series spawned the summer blockbuster of 2008, “Sex and the City: The Movie”, in which the heroine Carrie Bradshaw reads Mr Big, her on-off lover since season one, a huge musty tome from the New York Public Library containing the love letters of great men. After Mr Big stands Carrie up at the altar, he wins her back by bombarding her with daily emails, each containing a love letter of a famous man far greater than he. In the end, modern technology is victorious; Carrie and Big reunite and marry, demonstrating that the words themselves are more significant than their epistolary format.

In the wake of the film’s popularity, publishing houses sought to cash in. The blurb of Love Letters claims that fans “flocked to bookstores to get a copy of the book showcased in the movie … only to find out that it didn’t exist”. If this seems unlikely (my entirely unscientific survey shows that the staff of Waterstones on Notting Hill Gate claims no recollection of such flocks), the commercial confidence of Pan Macmillan in rapidly reproducing Carrie’s reading material was justified. The credibility of “Sex and the City” as a brand endorser is well-evidenced, the logic being that Carrie Bradshaw loves Manolo Blahniks: girls around the world love Manolo Blahniks; Carrie covets an Hèrmes Birkin bag: the world covets the Birkin; Carrie reads love letters of ‘great men’: the world buys Love Letters of Great Men. “Sex and the City” as the focus of aspirational lifestyles extends to reading lists too and the panegyric on the dust-jacket puffs: “Inspired by ‘Sex and the City’, the most romantic book ever” (Daily Mail). So auspicious a provenance helped catapult the first edition of Love Letters of Great Men to Amazon’s number one spot for Essays, Journals and Letters.

But the flimsiness of Doyle’s book is more closely related to Katie Price’s output than to the “Sex and the City” format, fitting into the publishing trend in which brand transcends content.  Doyle, herself a senior editor with experience at a number of major publishing houses, does not avoid this fate.

Love Letters of Great Men draws together the romantic epistles of a diverse range of so-called Great Men across a chronological expanse of almost two millennia. It begins with Roman writer Pliny the Younger and ends with three unknown British soldiers of the First World War whose inclusion rests entirely upon their having fought, for little else is known about their characters and civilian lives. The most recent letter in the collection dates from the First World War, presumably due to copyright laws that prohibit the publication of work until at least 70 years after an author’s death, without special dispensation and, usually a fee.

Most of the relationships documented in this collection are done so through a single letter and all are from the male perspective, giving the reader little conclusive primary evidence as to the writers’ lives and loves. Doyle hereby fails precisely where “Sex and the City” succeeds.  The television series and film were never consistently feminist, antifeminist or postfeminist but rather they presented a dialogue displaying a range of stances on a range of issues.  Love Letters markets itself at women but declines even to showcase their opinions. Letters these are, correspondence they are not.

Doyle supplements each author with a cursory biography which is frequently inadequate to convey what these men have done to qualify them as great or why their relationships might be thought significant. For example, Byron is introduced in his capacity as a womaniser to which his poetry is secondary: “Byron’s behaviour, and his poetry, scandalized large parts of Europe to the extent that in 1924, a hundred years after his death, a petition for a memorial to him in Westminster Abbey was refused by the dean.” This suggests his lasting fame but not its cause; his influence on Romanticism is ignored. Doyle’s potted biographies, though useful, resemble an absurdly abridged Wikipedia; information is offered in a way that is accessible but can distort significance.

Thus the introduction to Charles Darwin’s letter to Emma Wedgwood shortly before they married fails to sufficiently identify the impact she had on his work. “There is speculation,” says Doyle, “that he delayed publishing his theory of evolution out of respect for her religiosity”. This statement hardly captures the extent to which Darwin’s work was affected by his wife’s attentions. Nor does the word “speculation” successfully indicate how far Emma’s concerns about his agnosticism conclusively influenced his writing. Had Darwin not been so sensitive to his wife’s feelings, On the Origin of Species would have seen the light of day 20 years earlier.

Darwin’s letter to Emma Wedgwood is rare among the collection in that it was sent just days before the couple were married. The majority of missives included were written during the courtship phase of a relationship or amid the throes of an extramarital affair. Interestingly, a number of the letters were written by men in their forties, a fitting tribute to “Sex and the City” in which Carrie does not settle upon “The One” until she is in her forties. A remarkable cross-section of periods and people are showcased, and their letters are not all saccharine. Napoleon rages at Josephine, “What do you do then all day, Madame? What matter of such importance is it that takes up your time from writing to your very good lover?” and proceeds to threaten her, “beware, one fine night the doors will break open and I will be there”. Keats’s letter to Fanny Brawne is laced with jealousy and self-pity:

I have been a Martyr the whole time … You may have altered—if you have not—if you still behave in dancing rooms and other societies as I have seen you—I do not want to live-if you have done so I wish this coming night may be my last.

It seems unlikely that Henry VIII’s letter to Anne Boleyn would have qualified for the collection were it not for the macabre light cast by her eventual execution at the hands of her correspondent and soi-disant “servant and friend”. It is ironically the transience of love displayed in the fate of most of the lovers that unites the otherwise disparate collection.

The diversity of contributors to Love Letters of Great Men—from composers to aristocrats and from lawyers to soldiers, with a quorum of professional writers—demonstrates that literary flair is not a prerequisite for romance. The letters of Mozart, Beethoven and Schumann are noteworthy among the collection, Mozart’s for his toilet humour, Beethoven’s for his anonymous addressee, the “Immortal Beloved”, and Schumann’s for the musical description of his joy upon hearing the postman’s horn: “They are real waltzes of yearning to me, these trumpet-blasts, which remind us of something that we do not possess.”

Doyle states her purpose, “to remind today’s Great Men that literary genius is not a requirement for a heartfelt letter—or text message, or email—of love.” Yet men are unlikely to get the message since this book is explicitly marketed at women. Nor can the reader draw meaningful conclusions as to the nature of love that transcends time and space while the evidence is one-sided.  By excising women from the picture, Doyle commits her collection to myopia. Reflecting on the content of her chosen love letters, Doyle remarks, “And there is a case for calling this book, ‘Great Men: Going On About Themselves Since AD 61—certainly some of those here would have benefitted from being taken aside and gently told: it’s not All About You.” Sadly her own decision to exclude women make this case more succinctly and prevent her collection from shedding any light on correspondence, rendering it instead a haphazard miscellany of male love isolated from a broader narrative or historical context.

Through her connection with “Sex and the City”, Doyle has succeeded in drawing a wide audience to Love Letters, many of whom may be unfamiliar with the work of Laurence Sterne and Denis Diderot. She also brings into focus the human lives of people who are mostly well-known on a more cerebral level. But Love Letters of Great Men is ultimately disappointing for its failure to draw upon the dialogue and analysis of gendered behaviour that made “Sex and the City” popular and groundbreaking. By entirely excluding women from her purview, Doyle denies herself the opportunity to make any statement about relationships between the sexes. Nor is hers an original contribution; the bibliography would suggest that she has compiled her volume entirely from former edited collections of love letters.

Doyle makes a particularly meretricious contribution to that miserable genre which harnesses celebrity in order to dominate the bestsellers list.

Katie Wake, the writers editor for the Oxonian Review, is an MSt student at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, studying the history of the United States.