Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Ruth Bernard Yeazell is Sterling Professor of English at Yale. Her most recent book is Picture Titles: How and Why Western Paintings Acquired Their Names (2016).

Letter

Edith Wharton

19 January 1989

Ruth Bernard Yeazell writes: To anyone who has relied on R. W. B. Lewis’s biography of Wharton, the recent accusations of carelessness to which Christopher Herzig alludes are disturbing, though why Marion Mainwaring has waited more than a decade to make her charges known is far from clear. It is certainly true that too many reviewers rush to praise the scholarship and editing of biographies and letters...

Imagination must take the strain when facts are few. As information about the domestic life of polygamous Oriental households was fragmentary, 17th, 18th and 19th-century European writers and...

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Preceding Backwardness

Margaret Anne Doody, 9 January 1992

Both of these books are on ‘women’s subjects’. That is to say, they deal with the major arrangements of a society in its (usually uneasy) dispositions of property and power,...

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Death and the Maiden

Mary-Kay Wilmers, 6 August 1981

Alice James died, not trembling, but, said Katharine Loring, ‘very happy’ in the knowledge that the Last Trump was at hand.

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