Human Relations and Other Difficulties

by Mary-Kay Wilmers

Overview

An incisive collection of essays by the editor of the London Review of Books, whom Hilary Mantel has called “a presiding genius”

Mary-Kay Wilmers cofounded the London Review of Books in 1979, and has been its sole editor since 1992. Her editorial life began long before that: she started at Faber and Faber in the time of T. S. Eliot, then worked at the Listener, and then at the Times Literary Supplement. As John Lanchester says in his introduction, she has been extracting literary works from reluctant writers for more than fifty years.

As well as an editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers is, and has been throughout her career, a writer. The deeply considered pieces in Human Relations and Other Difficulties, whether on Jean Rhys, Alice James, a nineteenth-century edition of the Pears’ Cyclopaedia, novel reviewing, Joan Didion, mistresses, seduction, or her own experience of parenthood, are sparkling, funny, and absorbing.

Underlying all these essays is a concern with the relation between the genders: the effect men have on women, and the ways in which men limit and frame women’s lives. Wilmers holds these patterns up to cool scrutiny, and gives a crisp and sometimes cutting insight into the hard work of being a woman.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374173494
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	08/27/2019
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Mary-Kay Wilmers is the co-founder and longtime editor of the LRB. After a childhood spent in America, Belgium and England, Wilmers went to Oxford to read French and Russian. She is the author of The Eitingons, a book about her family and their cold war deeds and misdeeds, which the Daily Telegraph called “transfixingly readable.

Editorial Reviews

Wilmers is a summa cum laude graduate of the Joan Didion-Elizabeth Hardwick-Janet Malcolm school of dispassionate restraint and psychological acuity. She can do more damage with a raised eyebrow than most critics can do with a mace. Her wit steals in like a cat through an unlatched window…The essays in Human Relations feel sturdy, built to last.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

07/08/2019

Spanning four decades spent as London Review of Books editor, this eclectic and acidic selection of pieces by Wilmers (The Eitingtons), mostly published in the LRB, captures the evolution of a sharp-eyed literary critic. The book under review is often incidental; instead, Wilmers offers fascinating character studies of the authors and their subjects, both of whom tend to be “difficult” women, including Germaine Greer, Patty Hearst, Marianne Moore, and Jean Rhys. Wilmers has a voice as crisp, clear, and dry as gin, simultaneously amused and wise, as when she notes that “what we see when we look into is that it was never all that stable or all that virtuous.” She delights in the absurd—for instance, during a rambling through the late Victorian bestseller Pears’ Shilling Cyclopaedia, she came across entries under “T” that included “Tea Drinkers, the Greatest,” “Tourists Killed in the Alps,” and “Trades Injurious to the Teeth.” Avowedly not a feminist, Wilmers nonetheless conveys a sharp sense that “it is a man’s world that we live in.” Given her ear for the perfect quote, irony, and glancing judgment on human foibles—none of which “exceed the proper bounds of malice,” as she observes of well-written Times of London obituaries—fellow critics will appreciate this distillation of Wilmers’s legacy and the record of a distinct sensibility that feels bitterly astute, inimitably of its time, and enduringly relevant. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Wilmers is a summa cum laude graduate of the Joan Didion-Elizabeth Hardwick-Janet Malcolm school of dispassionate restraint and psychological acuity. She can do more damage with a raised eyebrow than most critics can do with a mace. Her wit steals in like a cat through an unlatched window.”

—Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review

“Wilmers offers fascinating character studies of the authors and their subjects, both of whom tend to be “difficult” women, including Germaine Greer, Patty Hearst, Marianne Moore, and Jean Rhys. Wilmers has a voice as crisp, clear, and dry as gin, simultaneously amused and wise.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Wilmers’s latest book, Human Relations and Other Difficulties, exhibits the habit of mind that has made her paper among the most read of its kind in Europe. It’s a companionable first-person report that tours the writer’s understanding of a subject, alive to the human comedy.”

—Wyatt Mason, The New York Times Magazine

“[These essays] demonstrate Wilmers’ occasionally supercilious yet irresistible seduction with the work at hand, plunging readers into long, involved pieces about writers’ lives, motivations, and peccadilloes ... Wilmers is a ferocious reviewer, as shown in her more general essays on the art of writing obituaries ... Insightful essays for literary-minded readers. ”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Taken collectively, these essays summon up the lives of women, mostly writers, who kicked against the barriers, using whatever means they could — their sharp, stabbing minds, the power of beauty, the surrender and protest of illness, their prickly edges — to shape often unruly lives.” —The Financial Times

“Legendary…each [essay] is a springboard for forensic discussion of the subject in question… Wilmers is highly literate, informed, aphoristic…one is left in no doubt about [her] fearsome intelligence.” —The Herald

“A collection of essays by Mary-Kay Wilmers, whose intelligence I find endlessly opaque and interesting.”— Anne Enright, The Guardian, Best Summer Books of 2018

Praise for Mary-Kay Wilmers:

"A presiding genius." —Hilary Mantel

"She [has] done more for the British essay than anyone in the last 150 years." —Andrew O'Hagan

From the Publisher

2019-06-16
A collection of essays by the London Review of Books co-founder, who has been its sole editor since 1992.

Throughout, Wilmers (The Eitingons: A Twentieth-Century Story, 2010) provides astute characterizations of exceptional women, especially writers like Jean Rhys and Joan Didion. There are few personal essays from the acclaimed editor, who came of age during the feminist movements of the 1960s and '70s, but one example is the brief opening piece, "I Was Dilapidated" (1972), about her struggles with motherhood. "I got depressed," she writes, "because instead of maternal goodness welling up inside me, the situation seemed to open up new areas of badness in my character." Most of her essays since then—the final piece, about poet Marianne Moore and her relationship with her prickly mother, was published in 2015—demonstrate Wilmers' occasionally supercilious yet irresistible seduction with the work at hand, plunging readers into long, involved pieces about writers' lives, motivations, and peccadilloes. As John Lanchester, who first met her as an editorial assistant in 1987, notes in his ginger introduction, Wilmers is a ferocious reviewer, as shown in her more general essays on the art of writing obituaries ("Civis Britannicus Fuit"), Pears, the "venerable English soap" ("Next to Godliness"), or her own writerly craft ("The Language of Novel Reviewing"). Though the daily work of editing the LRB got in the way of the author's own writing (a fate most editors will understand), it is in her coverage of women that she truly shines—e.g., "Death and the Maiden," her look at two books on the life of Alice James, sister to William and Henry ("being a James was a complicated business"). Another notable essay is "Hagiography," Wilmers' disapproving yet generous take on Rhys' last years as delineated by the novelist's friend David Plante. While the author's subjects are mostly British and of a certain age, others dear to her heart include Patty Hearst and Freud, which should broaden her reading audience.

Insightful essays for literary-minded readers.

Kirkus Reviews