In Passionate Minds, Claudia Roth Pierpont lifts several artists out of their hagiographical limbo and eases others (even Mae West and Margaret Mitchell) away from cliché and the condescending chortle. Her 11 essays offer a fascinating mix of biography, analysis, and elegant aphorism. Yet Pierpont also lets her women speak for themselves, and they often do so eloquently and unexpectedly. Zora Neale Hurston, for example, writes: "Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry.... It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company?"

Pierpont is interested in both reality and reception: how these writers altered the world, but also how they have been viewed--their lives and visions disseminated and vitiated, ritually patronized, misinterpreted, and reinvented. As she declares, with typical wit, "There is hardly a woman here who would not be scandalized to find herself in company with most of the others. Hannah Arendt and Ayn Rand, Gertrude Stein and Mae West, Doris Lessing and Anaïs Nin, Zora Neale Hurston and Eudora Welty, Marina Tsvetaeva and Mary McCarthy: what could they possibly have in common?" Yet even while she proves that achievement and reputation don't necessarily go hand in hand, Pierpont makes it clear that all her subjects refused to make the easy concessions. (At the same time, these hyperaware individuals often lacked--and sometimes deliberately skirted--self-knowledge.)

It's difficult to elevate a few pieces above the rest, since the standard is so high (all appeared in The New Yorker). But those on Stein, Lessing, Hurston, and, yes, Rand and Mitchell offer continual enlightenment and surprise. Pierpont is unafraid of generalization. In her piece on Anaïs Nin, for instance, she declares: "The real and bottomless subject of Nin's diary is not sex, or the flowering of womanhood, but deceit." Elsewhere, she rescues Lessing from her harsher critics: Despite her theories and her ethics and the range of her literary personae--the African realist, the London scene painter, the anguished psychologist, the social prophet--Lessing is in essence a storyteller, with a rare gift for getting characters on their feet and for setting the wind stirring the curtains with language so apparently simple it betrays no method at all. The classical concision of the story form seems to induce in her an unusually clear-eyed mental energy, an urge to pick the locks of the elaborate cages she constructs in her novels. Pierpont is also fond of the startling detail, the quote that reverses expectation, and even the pun. (After a delightful summary of The Fountainhead, she writes, "It is surely gratuitous to point out that the author suffered from an edifice complex.") In Passionate Minds this author repeatedly shows us the rewards of close reading and historical context. Even her asides are inspiring. At one point, she avers, "The greatest Russian translator of Shakespeare's tragedies, Pasternak played the Hamlet of the Revolution, much as Mayakovsky had been its Mercutio." Wonder how these tragic male figures made it into a book on "women rewriting the world"? Open this collection and read on. --Kerry Fried


From Publishers Weekly
Considering "how ambitious women worked out their destinies in an age of momentous transition," Pierpont scrutinizes 12 well-known 20th-century women in these essays (revised and expanded from their original publication in the New Yorker). In her highly capable hands, these diverse women--writers, philosophers and a movie star--come alive through probing questions about their work and vivid details about their lives. In the first grouping, Pierpont explores "issues of sexual freedom" through the widely varying perspectives of Olive Schreimer, Gertrude Stein, Anais Nin and Mae West. The second part, concerned with race, and the third, with politics, cover figures from Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Mitchell and Eudora Welty to Ayn Rand, Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy. Of course, connections and overlapping concerns emerge through the course of these excellent, astute pieces. The most interesting parallels are those that are least expected and those that occur across the borders of nationality, class and medium--such as coincident views of women's power between Arendt and Mitchell, or similar sexual stances on the part of Nin and Rand. In her arrangement of writings, Pierpont raises questions about women's progress through the century: What do these "women of a transitional age" tell us about our own "internal change"? She also defends her subjects from harsh contemporary judgment, "for they had hardly any models to follow, apart from a handful of suicidal literary heroines." Indeed, perhaps this collection's most noteworthy contribution is its levelheaded, sympathetic and unsentimental nature, especially given that the name alone of many of these figures (such as Rand and Nin) can provoke powerful reactions from both admirers and detractors. (Mar.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Skillfully intermingling biography, social history, and literary criticism, Pierpont--a contributor to The New Yorker, where these essays were previously published--provides amazingly complete portraits of 12 20th-century women writers. All of the women profiled confronted transitions in their lives and times and, through their writings, influenced the attitudes and actions of their contemporaries. The collection is loosely organized around three issues: sexual freedom (Olive Schreiner, Gertrude Stein, Ana?s Nin, Mae West), race (Margaret Mitchell, Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty), and politics, particularly communism (Marina Tsvetaeva, Ayn Rand, Doris Lessing, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy). Pierpont, winner of a Whiting Writer's Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, is an excellent essayist. Her well-wrought selections would serve equally well as a refresher for readers familiar with the authors discussed or as an enticing introduction for those encountering the writers for the first time. Highly recommended for both public and academic libraries.-Carol Ann McAllister, Coll. of William & Mary Lib., Williamsburg, VA Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Morris Dickstein
...a scintillating collection of brief lives of women writers, a book that sparkles with intelligence, wit and human interest.


From Booklist
Adventurous critical writing is a New Yorker mainstay and one of its most valuable offerings. Pierpont's vigorous essays on trailblazing twentieth-century women writers epitomize the magazine's high standards. Models of serious engagement, fine writing, and fearless candor, the 12 portraits collected here intertwine literary and social perspectives to reveal how each writer responded to the conflicts that confront women artists and how her work "changed the way people thought and lived." Pierpont employs three interlocking categories. Under sexual freedom, she places the nearly forgotten South African writer Olive Schreiner, Mae West (yes, West wrote; who else could, or would, create the smart and saucy gals she played?), Anais Nin, and Gertrude Stein. Margaret Mitchell, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty offer distinct perspectives on race, and politics is the theme explored in profiles of Marina Tsvetaeva, Ayn Rand, Doris Lessing, Hannah Arendt, and Mary McCarthy. Donna Seaman


Review
?A book that sparkles with intelligence, wit and human interest?."?The New York Times Book Review


Review
?A book that sparkles with intelligence, wit and human interest?."?The New York Times Book Review


Book Description
With a masterful ability to connect their social contexts to well-chosen and telling details of their personal lives, Claudia Roth Pierpont gives us portraits of twelve amazingly diverse and influential literary women of the twentieth century, women who remade themselves and the world through their art.

Gertrude Stein, Mae West, Margaret Mitchell, Eudora Welty, Ayn Rand, Doris Lessing, Anais Nin, Zora Neale Hurston, Marina Tsvetaeva, Hannah Arendt and Mary Mccarthy, and Olive Schreiner: Pierpont is clear-eyed in her examination of each member of this varied group, connectng her subjects firmly to the issues of sexual freedom, race, and politics that bound them to their times, even as she exposes the roots of their uniqueness.

"Pierpont['s] graceful essays are at once erudite and personal in their focus." ?The Boston Globe

"One of the most ceaselessly interesting books I've read in some time." ?Lorrie Moore, The New York Review of Books


From the Publisher
"Her quiet intelligence is inspiring. At times I felt I was reading the best literary criticism written by a woman since the days of Virginia Woolf. The women writers she discusses are like characters in a great, loony, tragi-comedy."
-- Pauline Kael

"Blithely erudite and witty, these post-feminist portraits of mostly literary women form fascinating narratives of the inner life, and do nicely as social history, too."
-- John Updike

"Excellent, astute...In [Pierpont's] highly capable hands, these diverse women--writers, philosophers and a movie star--come alive through probing questions about their work and vivid details about their lives....Perhaps this collection's most noteworthy contribution is its levelheaded, sympathetic and unsentimental nature, especially given that the name alone of many of these figures (such as Rand and Nin) can provoke powerful reactions from both admirers and detractors."-- Publishers Weekly

"A book that sparkles with intelligence, wit and human interest...A scintillating collection of brief lives of women writers...Each one is exhaustively researched, sharply focused, convincingly opinionated. Her adroit melding of biography and criticism makes most of today's literary scholarship seem lame and ponderous...What connects all these women is a passionate need to transcend the limitations of their lives, to transform themselves through language and storytelling...With their seamless web of biography and interpretation, Pierpont's robust profiles of exceptional women remind us of just how much the life and the art are intertwined." --New York Times Book Review

"Adroit, trenchant...Pierpont's graceful essays are at once erudite and personal in their focus."-- Boston Globe

"Models of serious engagement [and] fearless candor, the twelve portraits intertwine literary and social perspectives to reveal how each writer responded to the conflicts that confront women artists and how her work 'changed the way people thought and lived'."-- Booklist

"Informed compassion is the note Claudia Roth Pierpont strikes (not while but until the iron is hot), producing that Cleopatra effect which makes us hungry where most she satisfies. These worldly revisions -- of her dozen subjects, as theirs of us -- have located what this author calls 'the source of imaginative sympathy by which we think or feel ourselves into the flesh of another'; and her book -- which cannot be totalled, only taken serially to heart -- is therefore the most valuable, the most useful manual of style (inasmuch as life is recognized by style) our critical moment affords."
-- Richard Howard


From the Inside Flap
With a masterful ability to connect their social contexts to well-chosen and telling details of their personal lives, Claudia Roth Pierpont gives us portraits of twelve amazingly diverse and influential literary women of the twentieth century, women who remade themselves and the world through their art.

Gertrude Stein, Mae West, Margaret Mitchell, Eudora Welty, Ayn Rand, Doris Lessing, Anais Nin, Zora Neale Hurston, Marina Tsvetaeva, Hannah Arendt and Mary Mccarthy, and Olive Schreiner: Pierpont is clear-eyed in her examination of each member of this varied group, connectng her subjects firmly to the issues of sexual freedom, race, and politics that bound them to their times, even as she exposes the roots of their uniqueness.

"Pierpont['s] graceful essays are at once erudite and personal in their focus." ?The Boston Globe

"One of the most ceaselessly interesting books I've read in some time." ?Lorrie Moore, The New York Review of Books


From the Back Cover
“One of the most ceaselessly interesting books I’ve read in some time.”–Lorrie Moore, The New York Review of Books


About the Author
Claudia Roth Pierpont, a contributor to The New Yorker since 1990, has received a Whiting Writer's Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She holds a Ph.D. in Italian Renaissance art history from New York University. She lives in New York City.


From the Hardcover edition.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction

T his book was conceived when two writers who seemed to embody entirely different concerns -- the South African "agnostic" novelist Olive Schreiner and the author of America's champion best-seller, Margaret Mitchell -- turned out to have a great deal in common. Born nearly half a century and half a world apart, both wrote about race and its place in the history of a bitterly divided country, about a time of difficult change from one era to the next, and about women who were too strong to fit into established feminine patterns. And both had an extraordinary effect on readers: in the 1880s, Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm was widely perceived as a spiritual bridge between Darwinian science and the need for God; in the mid-1930s and for a long time after, a significant number of Americans viewed the Civil War and Reconstruction -- with all their implications for the contemporary racial order -- as Mitchell had portrayed them in Gone with the Wind. Whatever the merits of their prose or their arguments, these women told stories that changed the way people thought and lived.

Fascinated by this kind of naïve power -- both Schreiner's and Mitchell's books were first novels -- I began to consider other literary women of influence (very different from women of literary influence) whose domain is somewhat off the usual critical path. The resulting group is emphatically diverse; there is hardly a woman here who would not be scandalized to find herself in company with most of the others. Hannah Arendt and Ayn Rand, Gertrude Stein and Mae West, Doris Lessing and Anaïs Nin, Zora Neale Hurston and Eudora Welty, Marina Tsvetaeva and Mary McCarthy: what could they possibly have in common? Part of the excitement of working with such contrary figures lay in comparing their different versions of absolute truth: the individualism of Rand versus the Communism of Lessing, the ideal of sexual liberation in Mae West versus that of Nin or Lessing or McCarthy, the voice of the American South as heard by Hurston and by Welty. And yet, again, similarities began to emerge, not in what these women wrote but in how they contrived to get it written: that is, in how ambitious women worked out their destinies in an age of momentous transition for their sex, when -- to paraphrase Olive Schreiner on religious faith -- the old ways seemed outworn but new ones had not been invented.

This book is organized into three sections within an overall (if elastic) chronological sequence. Broadly speaking, the first section deals with issues of sexual freedom (Schreiner, Stein, Nin, West), the second with race (Mitchell, Hurston, Welty), and the third with politics -- particularly with the idea and reality of Communism (Tsvetaeva, Rand, Lessing, Arendt and McCarthy). There are, however, many overlapping interests and crossings of category. Marina Tsvetaeva, for example, might easily have been placed within the first group -- for her life's lesson about sexual desire as a driving source of creativity -- but her experience under Stalin offers a valuable check against some of the more theoretical responses to the Soviet state that follow. Mae West may not seem to belong in this book at all, but it is precisely the point that she was, by necessity, a writer as well as a performer; if she hadn't made herself up, characters and plays and scripts and jokes and all, no one would have done it for her. And this process of self-creation is only slightly less true -- less obviously, literally true -- for many of the others. (Can there be two grander, braver, more perversely endearing heroines in twentieth-century fiction than Gertrude Stein and Ayn Rand?)

Certain bases of comparison, then, are obvious: this book is constructed around them. Others appeared only as I went along, and these themes will emerge from story to story: the undermining dangers of ro-mantic love, knowingly avoided or helplessly pursued; the vital, unused energies of an earlier generation of mothers who were strong enough to push (or weak enough to drive) their daughters out into the world; physical beauty as a useful weapon and as a mirror-lined trap; the question of a feminine style in writing, aspired to or despised; the opposition between moral and artistic purpose -- or, as it was often defined, between proper womanly sacrifice and disgracefully unfemale selfishness. There were so many possibilities for error and catastrophe, all so eagerly embraced, and all likely to prompt furious exasperation from today's reader -- along with the affectionate gratitude that these women deserve. For they had hardly any models to follow, apart from a handful of suicidal literary heroines; one of the reasons we can judge so harshly now is because we have had them.

It might reasonably be asked whether this book represents a progress. What are the advances made in the lives and attitudes of women over the course of a century, from Olive Schreiner to Doris Lessing? The rights and advantages that Schreiner fought for -- the votes, the jobs -- have been well established. But what of internal change? That has turned out to be the most difficult subject to grapple with, impossible to summarize because so distinct from life to life. These are, after all, women of a transitional age -- as Schreiner defined it, as Lessing also experienced it, as many women still do. These are lives in which success is hard won, retreat and even breakdown are common, love is difficult, and children are nearly impossible, lives in which all that is ever certain is that books and plays and poems are being written.


From the Hardcover edition.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

With a masterful ability to connect their social contexts to well-chosen and telling details of their personal lives, Claudia Roth Pierpont gives us portraits of twelve amazingly diverse and influential literary women of the twentieth century, women who remade themselves and the world through their art.

Gertrude Stein, Mae West, Margaret Mitchell, Eudora Welty, Ayn Rand, Doris Lessing, Anais Nin, Zora Neale Hurston, Marina Tsvetaeva, Hannah Arendt and Mary Mccarthy, and Olive Schreiner: Pierpont is clear-eyed in her examination of each member of this varied group, connectng her subjects firmly to the issues of sexual freedom, race, and politics that bound them to their times, even as she exposes the roots of their uniqueness.

"Pierpont['s] graceful essays are at once erudite and personal in their focus." ?The Boston Globe

"One of the most ceaselessly interesting books I've read in some time." ?Lorrie Moore, The New York Review of Books

SYNOPSIS

Pierpont (an award-winning writer and scholar; no university affiliation) profiles Gertrude Stein, Mae West, Anais Nin, Eudora Welty, Margaret Mitchell, Zora Neale Huston, Marina Tsvetaeva, Hannah Arendt & Mary McCarthy, and Doris Lessing. In particular, she explores these writers in terms of their involvement with issues of sexual freedom, race, and politics. These essays were originally published in during the past eight years but appear here in revised and expanded form. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Considering "how ambitious women worked out their destinies in an age of momentous transition," Pierpont scrutinizes 12 well-known 20th-century women in these essays (revised and expanded from their original publication in the New Yorker). In her highly capable hands, these diverse women--writers, philosophers and a movie star--come alive through probing questions about their work and vivid details about their lives. In the first grouping, Pierpont explores "issues of sexual freedom" through the widely varying perspectives of Olive Schreimer, Gertrude Stein, Anais Nin and Mae West. The second part, concerned with race, and the third, with politics, cover figures from Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Mitchell and Eudora Welty to Ayn Rand, Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy. Of course, connections and overlapping concerns emerge through the course of these excellent, astute pieces. The most interesting parallels are those that are least expected and those that occur across the borders of nationality, class and medium--such as coincident views of women's power between Arendt and Mitchell, or similar sexual stances on the part of Nin and Rand. In her arrangement of writings, Pierpont raises questions about women's progress through the century: What do these "women of a transitional age" tell us about our own "internal change"? She also defends her subjects from harsh contemporary judgment, "for they had hardly any models to follow, apart from a handful of suicidal literary heroines." Indeed, perhaps this collection's most noteworthy contribution is its levelheaded, sympathetic and unsentimental nature, especially given that the name alone of many of these figures (such as Rand and Nin) can provoke powerful reactions from both admirers and detractors. (Mar.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|

KLIATT

Pierpont began writing thoughtful and provocative essays of literary biography/ criticism for The New Yorker in the 1990s. (Her recent essay on Edith Wharton appeared in the April 2, 2001 issue.) Passionate Minds is a collection of essays on women writers; all originally appeared in The New Yorker. Most of the writers are associated with the U.S.: Anais Nin, Mae West, Margaret Mitchell, Zora Neale Hurs-ton, Eudora Welty, Ayn Rand, Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy. Doris Lessing and Olive Schreiner were born in Africa and immigrated to Europe. Marina Tsetaeva was Russian and Gertrude Stein was a country unto herself. Taken together the essays, about women of disparate sensibilities, education, and family and economic backgrounds, point to the societal changes that were taking place in the 20th century. The differences of gender and sex are articulated in Schreiner's novels, West's scripts, the tortured poetry of Tsvetaeva, and in the works of the other nine writers. Pierpont ably ties the individual author's lives and writings to the political, social and cultural history of the times. The book is loaded with interesting and important connections: for example, Zora Neale Hurston died four days before the first sit-in at the Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. Pierpont's literary criticism is insightful and witty. Scarlett O'Hara is described as "suffering from painfully hardened prose implants." Henry Miller sent his unpublished Tropic of Cancer to Anais Nin "...in hopes of a few golden eggs. The following March, he found himself laying the goose." We hope in another few years there will be a Passionate Minds II. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended forsenior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2000, Random House, Vintage, 298p. illus. notes. index. 21cm. 99-33349., $13.00. Ages 16 to adult. Reviewer: Penelope Power; Libn., Garrison Forest Sch., Garrison, MD , July 2001 (Vol. 35, No. 4)

Dickstein - The New York Times Book Review

A scintillating collection of brief lives of women writers, a book that sparkles with intelligence, wit and human interest . . . Pierpont's adroit melding of biography and criticism makes most of today's literary scholarship seem lame and ponderous.

Arturo Sacchetti - The Boston Book Review