Preventive Intercourse

Michael Mason

  • Predicaments of Love by Miriam Benn
    Pluto, 342 pp, £35.00, September 1992, ISBN 0 7453 0528 8
  • Love in the Time of Victoria by Françoise Barret-Ducrocq, translated by John Howe
    Verso, 225 pp, £24.95, August 1992, ISBN 0 86091 325 2

I had been aware of Miriam Benn for some years, because I kept coming across her trail in libraries: her borrower’s slips between the pages of books, her signature as a user of special collections, librarians’ memories of an Australian woman scholar spending her vacations researching in Britain. Unhappily for me, she was obviously investigating that enormously important, mysterious and unexplored Victorian figure: George Drysdale. She was certainly doing this as well as I was – perhaps much better. Worst of all, the spoor was old, the campfire ashes long extinguished. It appeared that any minute the world would hear, if not the whole truth about George Drysdale, then at least a great part of it.

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